With the five of them working together on it, Fernando and his friends got the goat pen built in what seemed like no time—fencing, lean-to, water troughs and all. Fernando hadn’t recruited Chico and the others to the task, just as he hadn’t recruited them to scrounge materials for him. When he’d said what he was doing, they’d just followed along.

Fernando didn’t doubt his friends’ curiosity about his old witch of a grandmother had something to do with it. As their work wound down and the day wore on, they sat in the dense shadow of the trees eating the gamey arepas she’d served them on a bed of plantain leaves. They washed down this rustic meal with cups of fermented goat’s milk that made their heads spin in the balmy heat of the day.

Though Fernando had grown used to the wildness, he caught his friends shifting around at each jungle sound. Their eyes darted over their shoulders at every whoop and snap and creak. Even the wind rustling through the leaves seemed to rattle them.

“This place gives me the fucking creeps,” Chico muttered, spitting out a bit of gristle into the weeds. “Always has.”

“You should see it at night,” Fernando said, smiling. “That’s when the jungle really comes alive.”

Chico shook his head. “You’re crazy, primo. I couldn’t sleep a wink in this hellhole.”

“Hey,” Tito spat suddenly, “what is she doing?”

Fernando glanced from Tito’s pinched face to where his finger was pointing, toward the side yard of the shack. In a crude ring of sand and stones, the old woman knelt, wearing painted sackcloth and flinging water on herself from a wooden bowl. She swayed and wailed with her arms raised toward the sky, before falling flat to the earth in abject prostration.

Fernando knew this ritual of hers. She was purging her soul, exorcizing the spirits of doubt and fear that threatened to cloud her inner sight. But seeing how disturbed his friends were by her pagan antics, he didn’t feel the need to ascribe any more mysticism to them.

With a crook of mouth Fernando said, “She’s getting ready to go into the jungle.”

As his friends glanced to him dubiously, his grandmother cracked open a small earthen jar. Still chanting and swaying, she dipped her fingers into the jar and smeared what was clearly congealed animal blood in waving lines just beneath her eyes. Tiny gobbets of gore trailed like tears down her crinkled brown cheeks. From the front of her sackcloth shift, she withdrew a corded crucifix and kissed it, then cried ululating toward the heavens once again.

Pepe grimaced. Chico swore. Tito cringed at the sheer heresy.

Lalo paled, mumbling as he crossed himself, “Brujería. Blasfemia.”

The old witch-woman rose humming. She strapped a big woven basket onto her hunched, bony back. Turtlelike she tottered into the trees.

Only once she was well out of sight did Chico and the others relax. The wind died down about this time. An eerie silence descended in its wake, as though the jungle was sleepily content now that it had swallowed up Fernando’s grandmother into its dark, seedy depths.

“This is a godforsaken place.”

One and all turned to Pepe as he said this. His pronouncement was made more chilling by the fact that he hardly ever spoke. Fernando was the first one to look away. He peered off toward the dilapidated, vine-choked shack. Fingers of lengthening shadow crawled over it, sinuous and intent.

Musing aloud, he asked his friends, “Have you heard of the monster who haunts this jungle? The snake-woman. La gorgona.”

Lalo frowned blankly. Pepe shook his head.

Chico’s dark brow furrowed. “La gorgona? What bullshit is that?”

“It’s from a Greek myth,” Tito said, as if Chico cared and Fernando didn’t know.

Ignoring Tito, Fernando said, “Abuela claims this fiend took her husband, and my mother’s first love as well. That she lured them into the jungle and devoured them there.”

Chico snorted. “Your abuelita isn’t right in the head.”

Fernando’s eyes cut to him. Chico put up his hands.

“I mean, c’mon, primo—you can’t really believe something as batshit as that? Old timers around here are just superstitious, that’s all. They’re always saying ‘the jungle this’ and ‘the jungle that.’ They just want something to blame for their troubles.”

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy