creatures of the dark. The gauekoak are the shadowy spirits that wander through the streets and the mountains. They’re made of night, death, and loneliness, and they’re always seeking some unguarded access to creep into a human body. According to the legend, they can go anywhere they please until the sun rises. Then they have to scramble to find caves or rocks where they can hide from the new day. Many people in my region decorate their outside doors with a thistle—the eguzki-lore. That means ‘the flower of the sun.’ The goddess Mari gave it to human beings to ward off gauekoak. Gauekoak avoid those houses because the flower looks like a sun. My aunt always keeps one by our front door. Just in case.”
“I know what you’re talking about,” came his voice from the darkness. “Voodoo has an evil spirit called Kalfou who climbs on the chest of his sleeping victim and paralyzes him. The victim’s aware of his plight, but he can’t escape. My aunt Nana wouldn’t let me open the bedroom windows at night, even when it was over a hundred degrees, for fear that I would let Kalfou in.”
“I thought you said you were Catholic.”
“My mother was. Nana brought me up after my parents died. She took me to Sunday school and confirmation classes. We went to mass every Sunday. But she practiced voodoo as well. Maybe you find that strange?”
“Not at all. My aunt Engrasi has a psychology degree from the Sorbonne, but she consults tarot cards. Not so different.”
“And you?”
“I don’t believe in any of it. I respect people’s faith and their beliefs, of course. An investigator has to. But that’s it.”
“I suspect you weren’t always like that.”
“Like you said, you always carry with you the influence of the place where you were born. When you come from a place like Baztán, you accept the people’s beliefs. Like accepting Cajun culture out here in the swamp. I remembered the Gaueko story last night, when we were looking out at the darkness in New Orleans. I had an intuition then, a superstitious feeling that night creatures would own the city even after the sun rose. What I saw later on just confirmed that feeling. We were lost in the night of Samedi. He’d cursed New Orleans forever.”
“But you denied your folklore when we were standing out in the Allens’ field in front of that destroyed roof. Claimed you didn’t know the legends, said you couldn’t remember.”
“That was partly true. Those tales belong to a place and time that are no longer part of my life. They’re irrelevant, mostly forgotten. It’s just that lately, with the Composer’s murders and Samedi’s return, the old myths keep coming to mind, as if they are connected somehow. It’s absurd, I know. Myths from the back country of Spain come from an entirely different world than that of the Composer. But I can’t shake the feeling that some malevolent force in my past is haunting me.”
Dupree remained silent for a time. “There’s a positive side to myth. Legends caution us of danger, but they also suggest ways to protect ourselves and forestall the threat. You might say there’s always a ‘flower of the sun’ to fend off the gauekoak. Evil spirits may be powerful, but they’re not invulnerable.”
She made no comment, for she knew that no eguzki-lore in the world could stand up to the evil they were tracking now. After a long pause, she responded with apparent indifference, “They’re just made-up stories.”
“The other day, after Johnson asked about the region you come from, I got him to tell me more. He described a fertility goddess and the guardian of the woods. Even some kind of enchanted women with webbed feet who dwell in the rivers.”
Amaia sniffed. “Sure, and I’ll bet he forgot to mention that the fertility goddess is the queen of the witches. In the time of the Inquisition, the poor women who sacrificed to her in hopes of getting pregnant or gathering good harvests were denounced, arrested, and tortured. Any deviation from normal behavior, any absurd little quirk, was used as evidence against them. Most often, they were midwives, they’d decided not to marry, or they spoke to animals.”
Dupree clicked his tongue in the darkness. “The Pyrenees had no monopoly there. In all of Europe, in the whole world, including the New World, there was hysteria about witchcraft. The Salem witch trials, for instance. What did the folks back there in Elizondo do to you, anyhow? Why