would erupt up, from her body, up through the soil, weaving itself into the walls, extending itself into the foundations of the building. And the gloom needed a mind. It needed her. The gloom was alive. It was alive in more than one way; at its rotten core there was the corpse of a woman, her limbs twisted, her hair brittle against the skull. And the corpse stretched its jaws open, screaming inside the earth, and from her dried lips emerged the pale mushroom.
The priest would have sacrificed himself: part of the body devoured, the rest buried. Life erupting from those remains, and the congregation tied to him. Tied ultimately to their god. But Doyle was no fool who would offer himself in sacrifice.
Doyle could be a god without having to obey their arcane, foolish rules.
Doyle was a god.
Doyle existed, persisted.
Doyle always is.
Monsters. Monstrum, ah, is that what you think of me, Noemí?
“Have you seen enough, curious girl?” Doyle asked.
He was playing cards in a corner of her room. She watched his wrinkled hands, the amber ring upon his index finger flashing bright under the light of the candles as he shuffled the cards. He raised his head to look at her. She stared at him. It was the Doyle of now. Howard Doyle, his spine bent, his breath labored. He placed three cards down, carefully turning each one. A knight with a sword and a page holding a coin. She could see, through the thin shirt he wore, the black boils dotting his back.
“Why do you show me this?” she asked.
“The house shows you. The house loves you. Are you enjoying our hospitality? Would you like to play with me?” he asked.
“No.”
“A pity,” he said, revealing the third card: a single, empty cup. “You’ll still renounce yourself in the end. You’re already like us, you’re family. You don’t know it.”
“You don’t scare me, you piece of shit monster, with your dreams and your tricks. This isn’t real, and you’ll never keep me here.”
“You really think that?” he asked, and the boils rippled down his back. A trickle of black liquid, as black as ink, dripped onto the floor beneath him. “I can make you do anything I want.”
He sliced one of the pustules in his hands with a long nail, pressing it against a silver cup—it looked like the goblet in the card he’d been holding—and it broke, filling the cup with a foul liquid. “Have a drink,” he said, and for a second she felt compelled to step forward and take a sip, before revulsion and alarm froze her limbs.
He smiled. He was trying to show her his power; even in dreams he was the master.
“I’ll kill you when I wake up. Give me a chance, I’ll kill you,” she swore.
She threw herself at him, sinking her fingers into his flesh, wringing the thin neck. It was like parchment, it tore beneath her hands, muscle and blood vessels showing. He grinned at her, with Virgil’s brutish smile. He was Virgil. She squeezed harder, and then he was pushing her back, his thumb pressing against her lips, against her teeth.
Francis looked at her, his eyes wide with pain, his hand sliding down. She let go of him and stepped back. Francis opened his mouth, to plead with her, and a hundred maggots crawled out of his maw.
Worms, stems, the snake in the grass rose and wrapped itself around Noemí’s neck.
You’re ours, like it or not. You’re ours and you’re us.
She tried to peel the snake off her, but it knotted itself tight, digging into her flesh, and it opened its jaws, ready to devour her whole. Noemí dug her nails into the snake, and it whispered “Et Verbum caro factum est.”
But a woman’s voice also spoke, and she said, “Open your eyes.”
I must remember that, she thought. I must remember to open my eyes.
21
Daylight. She’d never been more thankful for such an ordinary sight, the beams of light filtering under the curtains making her heart soar. Noemí flung the curtain aside and pressed her palms against the window. She tried the door. It was, predictably, locked.
They had left a tray with food for her. The tea had gone cold, and she didn’t dare drink it, wondering what might be in it. Even the toast gave her pause. She ended up nibbling at the edges of the slice of bread and drinking water from the bathroom’s faucet.
If the fungus was in the air, though, did it matter? She