The House of Bonmati

by Claudio Hernández

  He could hear his parents’ distant voices. They sounded vague and almost absent. That night the rats weren’t making any noise, and the cows were sleeping, which was very unusual. The same applied to sheep and goats, which were under the window to his right.

  But there was a voice in the midst of this silence that stood out above the cries of the wind when rubbing the corners of the house on a moonless night.

  Enter. You just have to push, the voice was saying inside his head. Or did it come from behind the door? Was his father using again those funny things on a round table? What about the voices? He would hear those voices unintentionally, without wanting to do it. Now the voice was telling him to do the exact opposite of what he had been told before. How many voices were speaking inside his head? He thought it was just one. Come in. But he had heard before, “don’t enter”. There was just one explanation. The voice was not of this world. Not from the world we touch every day, Juan thought. What did that mean? Were those faces from this world?

  Juan stood up. His knees did not make any cracking sound at all. But he was standing when he opened his bedroom door. He felt dazed, and then he saw a mist coming out from the locked door. It surrounded his feet like smoke, coming up from his ankles up to his waist. It wasn’t cold like the draft that was coming down from the attic stairs, which were to his left, leading into the dark, impressive. Juan did not look that way. His eyes were fixed on the door, and then he saw it.

  Look at the door. It is open. Enter the room. It was the same voice that he was hearing inside his head. The white mist wrapped his body and it caressed his trembling hands.

  It was warm. His eyes were still fixed on the door. He looked at the lock then, and his heart raced when he saw something moving inside the lock. The locking gears were rotating clockwise. An invisible key was opening it. Was it opening from the inside? Or maybe it was opening from the outside? The mist reached his neck and surrounded him like a stole. And it was soft to the touch.

  Push the door. I am waiting for you. It was a soft female voice. It talked slowly and deliberately, like a dream. And he kept hearing it over and over again. He extended his right hand all the way up to his lips and he caressed his fingers. They were not numb. He did not feel any tingling. Then he extended again his hand and touched the grey door.

  Come in. The voice urged him.

  Juan’s eyes opened as wide as the door, slowly and gradually. The first thing he saw was the delicate back of a naked woman, shrouded in mist. Her long mahogany hair covered his shoulders partially. There was light in there. The light was incredibly white and it was shining on the bed, which was on the left side of the room.

  Juan’s heart flew out of his chest, like a vomit. But he liked it. He liked that back, with its smooth rosy skin bent to one side of the bed, underscoring her dizzying hips. Her arms were long and thin. She had a comb in her hand and she kept combing her long wavy hair. The mist shrouded her and it revealed a glimpse of a perfect chin and a snub nose. Her lips seemed to be full. Juan felt that his fears allayed and he started having a spontaneous erection.

  Juan felt shame and desire at the same time. It was a sequence of emotions far from fear and panic. It gave him a sense of peace that had nothing to do with that awful being he had seen at his window, with those empty eye sockets. This was different. And he wondered, within that difficult situation, if he was be dreaming.

  Come in, the voice said again.

  Then she made a slight movement to the right, revealing a glimpse of her breast, erect and almost perfect, with a hard nipple pointing up.

  His penis was now as tough as an iron bar and his testicles were as hard as two stones. He started sweating, while the stairs curtain skimmed his head like a gadfly.

  You can come in now. I am waiting for you. I have something to tell you. His voice echoed inside his head, but not too loud, quite the contrary, it was an exciting voice. Yes, definitely that was the proper description. Her voice excited him and he felt some sort of liquid flowing inside his penis. He had never felt something like that before. His testicles were now inside his body, like two ovaries.

  Then she got up showing her long legs and an awesome smooth butt, he could tell. The comb fell on the red bed cover which looked soft like velvet. He could see it through the mist, which, quite frankly, was not too dense.

  Come in.

  And then she turned around.

  39

  “That’s because I’m fed up with your constant yelling and your insults!” Pedro ranted, looking at her and the Bible, alternatively.

  “And I’m sick of you and your absurdities!” Antonia barked, with a trembling glass on her hands. She was sitting cross-legged on the couch, her back bent.

  Pedro caressed again the hammer handle. And he felt the rough touch of wood. He squinted down at her and there was certain craziness in his eyes that it had only been there before when he had got involved with all that shit that his wife was reproaching him for. Maybe now he had a more somber look.

  “I am a servant of the Lord Almighty now” He said whispering. That always was the anteroom of a series of shouts and insults. It was the beginning of a foretold madness.

  “What a fucking bloody evangelist!”

  The light on the television screen was cast over their faces, drawing capricious forms. His eyes were glowing in the dark, like hers. They looked like two wild cats about to start a fight. The atmosphere was heated, both literally and figuratively. The sound of the crackling fire could be heard, and the flames traced out red patterns behind them. They even drew the silhouette of the devil himself.

  “What a fucking nasty bitch! I hope you choke with your wine, bloody drunk. You think you are good in bed, but you are not. Fucking you makes me feel sick. You are a greasy motherfucker meatball dog shit.” Those words were really unbecoming of him, but he had said them, and he had bloodshot eyes now.

  A wide-eyed Antonia started trembling on the sofa. She had never ever heard him speak like that. And that glare. That was the trigger. Her heart started racing for the first time in her marriage. She loosened her grip and the glass of wine, which was half empty, fell down, smashing on the floor and making the loud harsh sound of glass shattering.

  Pedro’s right hand clamped around the hammer handle.

  40

  Her silky skin was now reddish-purple, and her body was bloated, full of sores that oozed some greenish fluids. Her eyes where kind of milky and she had wet hair; her lips were swollen and brownish-green. Her fingers looked like claws with broken nails scrabbling onto the air. Her blackened tits were like two huge figs and were hanging down to her belly button. She showed a tight lipped smile from which many worms were striving to get out. Her body had gained more than 100 kilos. He could see her hairless sex with her bladder sagging, and then she raised her hand and started speaking with a deep voice.

  “You have to go away. You are not alone.” She was speaking, but her lips weren’t moving.

  Juan’s penis deflated like a balloon, turning into a wet rag full of boogers or something like that. It was wet. He had ejaculated before she had turned around, but now all that desire had become a feeling of sickness and crumps.

  “Bloody hell! No! I don’t want to!” Juan gasped, but his voice was not heard anywhere. It was like a nightmare. The white light was still above her. He wanted to scream, his eyes open wide, but he couldn’t. His testicles were out of his body now, they weren’t hard any longer.

  “Your father is going to kill you if you stay here. Here is the thing. Take it or leave it. They are here, and they are not going to let you come, they will go for your jugular. They live in this house. And believe me, they are uglier than me. I have been dead for a long time, that’s all. I am Valenti and Angels’ sister.

  His heart was now beating with terror, and he felt an acid taste in his mouth. He had started feeling faint and now the cold coming from the stairs was more intense. The mist lifted.

  “This cannot be happening. This is a bad
dream.” Juan babbled, touching his temple.

  “No, this is not a dream. I am real. Come here. Touch me and you will check it out for yourself. I exist. Come here. Come closer, my dear boy.”

  Suddenly Juan’s feet forced him to enter the room, even though he was trying to resist. His eyes were wide open and his forehead was sweaty. He went hot and cold. He wanted to scream. He wanted to bark like a dog. But everything was quiet, except for that woman’s throaty voice, a woman who was naked and had very pungent body odor.

  The dog was quiet, sleeping in its doghouse next to the henhouse, and the cat was at Pili’s bedroom that night. The cows were farting while sleeping and the sheep were quiet too. But that awful putrefying woman was still there and his feet were carrying him towards her. She was getting closer. The smell was increasing more and more.

  “Oh, no; this is not happening to me. No, no, no...”

  “Just run your fingers on my skin. I am waiting for you. You are the only one who can see me now. I did not choose your sister. She sees them, only them. Your mother can’t see anything. She doesn’t have the capacity for seeing them. Your father, instead, will go crazy because of them. And he will try to take you to them. They want you to stay with them inside the house forever. Come closer and touch my bosom. You will see I am real.”

  Juan looked at her breast once again. Her tits were like two big hanging figs. They were purple. And her nipples were as big as a coin, like a round postmark. A slippery stuff oozed from them, like a greenish blood. As if she had been under the water for a long time. She looked wrinkled and fluffy.

  And her voice had been broken in the hereafter.

  “I don’t want to” Juan didn’t have much of an argument before that woman, and he wasn’t even sure whether he was dreaming or not. Everything had felt very surreal. However, the memory of that image he had seen in the window came to his mind.

  The woman moved around the bed with slow steps. A sort of splash could be heard, like liquid and mass sinking among the floor tiles. Or was it carpet floor? Juan looked at the floor. There was a red carpet and his feet were not better than the rest of her body. They were greenish and every time she took a step a purple liquid oozed from them. It was like walking on a wet carpet while watching water blisters surfacing.

  “Come here. Fondle me. That is the only way I can give you all the protection you need. Bang me. Here, right now. I have seen it, you have had a hard-on. After just one kiss from me you will be freed of the evil that lives in this house. That’s how it works. You take it or you leave it.”

  Juan’s forehead was as wrinkled as the armpit of an old woman. His heart was racing now. He could almost see it, right there. His hands started going numb, therefore, all this was real. He tried to scream again, but he almost choked on his own saliva.

  This was much worse than that what he had seen in his window. It was even worse than the scene from the vampire film that had left a permanent impression on him. That yellow eyes and those sharp fangs floating in the air, behind the window. Come here; let me in, that boy said.

  But she was saying come in, come closer, kiss me. Her tongue was dark and sticky, and a white mass was flowing out from her swollen lips, and it ran down her chin slowly, as if it was a sort of pus.

  There was an oval mirror on her right, above a dresser drawer full of perfumes and combs. There was also a red upholstered chair, and a three-branched ceiling lamp, like a chandelier, that looked like a spider. The light bulbs were on, but they emitted a really white light, he had never seen such a white light in his life. Behind her there was an open chest, and many dresses in different colors were sticking out from it.

  Now he was hardly three feet away from her. The smell was getting more and more intense, it was nauseating. Juan could see her big belly now, cracked and reddish-purple; something as green as the skin of a toad was coming out from her pussy and her boobs. Her lips opened and she showed a dark tongue full of boogers. She bent her head and extended her fat and flabby arms, which were full of veins that made them look like a blue spider web.

  Juan was praying for him to wake up from this terrible nightmare, because his face was tingly; but it wasn’t a dream. It was real. He touched his face and could not feel anything except the tingling sensation. His vision went blurry, which made him feel better because he thought that it meant he was going to wake up at the drop of a hat.

  But he didn’t.

  The woman’s fingers, that woman from room six, the locked room, run through his cheeks like two big slimy worms. He felt his own heart pulsing inside his eyes. And then his vision stopped being blurry, he could see her clearly now. Damn it, he thought. He saw her swollen lips opening, her dark tongue and all that pus. Juan felt wet again, but this time it was not sperm, but urine. He actually peed his pants, and there was a big dark spot on the front of his trousers. She wrapped her arms around his neck. Juan felt a slug walking on his foot and the smell was unbearable. He wanted to throw up, but he only retch. Her breasts were now rubbing his cheeks. They were flabby and he could feel a viscous liquid going out from some holes in her skin when she clasped him against them. She was chilly; as cold as ice. Then she took her breasts away from his face and they detached like suction cups, leaving behind thin lines of rotten skin on Juan’s face. It was like chewing gum. Now the woman’s hand touched again his face and his sweaty forehead. She was slippery and sticky at the same time, leaving traces of blood clots and pus.

  “Open your mouth. Kiss me. That will be enough to be protected from them.”

  Juan moved back but she held him with her hands. Her mouth came closer and Juan saw those off-white eyes that once were blue. There was no hate in them. Then she rubbed her swollen lips against the boy’s, and she stuck her tongue into his mouth, like a dying slug that had been crushed by a human foot. Juan was kissing a big mass of jelly, he could not breathe, and then everything went black.

  41

  The day broke bright, with a splendid sun on a corner of the sky projecting its first rays on this side of Earth. Juan woke up suddenly. He opened his eyes all of a sudden and saw a big ray of light coming through the open window.

  “When had he opened the window?”

  He could not remember. He tried to think about it, but it was useless, his brain did not react at all. One thing was clear. He had decided before he would never open the window again, and he felt scared. It was that funny feeling you have when you find yourself in front of a snake.

  He had told his sister about the window, and then he had seen a sparkle in her eyes that had scared him. He saw such a strange confidence in her that it turned his blood cold, and they never spoke again about it.

  They could understand each other without talking, simply with gestures. They always took the school bus quietly, their lips sealed, even though they had to walk more than two kilometers to reach the bus stop. They knew that some things are better left alone. They felt the haze coming and disappearing, they looked at each other but they said nothing.

  Juan did not remember, at least for the moment, that rotten woman’s kiss; for the moment. He felt something on his tongue. He slipped his finger inside his mouth and he dragged it out to see what was bothering him. It was a long hair.

  42

  Pili was responsible for opening the door facing the barn while Juan had a pellet gun pointed at the rats that were running energetically on the roof beams. Then he would shoot the gun. The dry sound of the shot frightened them so much that they ran against themselves, the pellets banged the wall sometimes or maybe, with luck, they lodged in the body of any of them.

  When that happened the rat suddenly stopped and it writhed in pain, showing its ugly teeth, its tiny mouth hanging open like a cat’s, curling its tail, its whiskers full of blood.

  Juan then used to reload the gun chamber with a slight movement, and he started pulling the trigger again. There wasn’t any smell of gunpowder. It only smelled like shit. There was a smell of cow shit and sheep and rabbits pee, as they l
ived there. All of them looked at Juan as if they were going to say something, but instead of words, they made sounds, as saying “well done”.

  Then Juan’s eyes sparkled like two small diamonds and he pulled the trigger once again. The dry crack indicated that the pellet had gone out, and then, a second later, another rat squeaked and fell down from the beam, as a human being would do.

  That was every night routine. The bloody rats were everywhere, not only inside the barn, but all around the house. Juan saw one of them drinking water from his glass once; it was such a big rat that it was larger than his cat, which was always hiding somewhere.

  Pili, behind his brother, looked at it with wide eyes and did not feel disgusted. She didn’t mind their almost human squeaks. But then this house past came back. There was a shadow hiding behind the roof beams, with long arms that ended in claws. Apparently Pili had more encounters with the inhabitants of the house than anyone else.

  Juan had said something about the room, but she did not remember exactly what. He had told her that he only remembered the mist and a beautiful woman. But he could not remember anything else. He might remember it later on. That was weird, though. Because he was not afraid of room six any longer, with its silver lock. He would just look at it with his eyes partly closed and would go to his room.

  And he always found his bedroom window open, with a cold air blast. He never looked at it. And the noises continued every night. And Dad kept talking aloud with the Bible on his hands, while Mom boozing it up, until she was passed out drunk.

  Pili pointed at the silhouette.

  “It is there” She whispered to his brother, who was focusing his efforts on watching through the gun peephole.

  “Who is there?” He asked, although he knew who she meant.

  “One of them” She said, pointing again towards the end of the barn, to a shadow that stood still against the wall amongst the roof beams.