The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  Then a hair-­raising creak made Lupo’s fur stand on end. The door flew open. In its opening, silhouetted in the paleness of the sky, which was beginning to be tinged with pink, there appeared a tall, white figure. Something dark oozed from its mouth and its clawlike hands opened and closed like those of an automaton. Ángela squeezed the murderess’s hand in her pocket and gulped. Her fright was giving way to awe. Because she was beginning to realize who the woman was who, for her part, was looking at her with relief.

  ‘Señora . . .’

  ‘None of that señora stuff. I’m calling it a night. Can’t I be left alone in my own house?’

  She sniffed.

  ‘There were people here.’

  ‘Yes, señora. The hanged woman’s relatives stole her from the gallows and brought her here to bury her. They left her in this coffin.’

  ‘And what are you doing here?’

  ‘I came for a hand to cast a spell.’

  ‘Well then, if you’ve finished, get lost.’

  When the vampire returns to her lair, she won’t be happy at finding you there, Ángela remembered from a song from her childhood.

  ‘Good, girl, good. We can make use of this. It’s not too spoiled yet,’ Crisanta said, palpating the pale severed limb and squeezing the horrid wound with expert fingers. Her beady eyes gleamed with satisfaction and willfulness. ‘Someone,’ she remarked, ‘should have given this broad a reading before it was too late. It’s obvious from these lines that she was going to come to a bad end,’ and she traced them with her index finger on the dead flesh. ‘They look like flies’ legs. Now we have to make the brine of glory.’

  ‘How?’ asked Ángela.

  ‘The brine of glory,’ the old woman said slowly and solemnly, as if she were reading, ‘is made with salt, saltpeter and pepper, and a pinch of gunpowder if you have some, all mixed together. You put the hand in it in a clay jar and leave it there fifteen nights. It says so in the book.’

  The witch carried out her schemes in the presence of the girl, who didn’t miss a detail. She absorbed the knowledge with the cold avidity of the disciple who knows she will betray her teacher and neither feels any scruples nor antici­pates any remorse.

  ‘Look how lovely, my dear,’ said Crisanta with giddy enthusiasm when the salting time had passed. ‘Dry and clean, it doesn’t even seem to be from a cadaver. Like the hand of a virgin at the altar.’

  Ángela assented earnestly, although the thing reminded her more of a hen’s foot.

  ‘The nails are broken,’ she pointed out.

  ‘So what?’ replied the other, annoyed. ‘It doesn’t matter. Now I just have to grease it and it’ll be ready to burn for hours.’

  ‘What do you make the grease out of?’

  ‘With fat from a hanged man or a cat, it’s all the same. We’ll use some from a cat. There are women who have qualms about killing cats because they think they’re guardians of the home, but I have no such scruples, nor do I believe in superstitions. Cats are cats, they can’t do anything to us.’

  ‘Which one should we kill? A black one? Or the neutered tabby, which will have more fat than any of them, with that belly of his hanging down to the ground?’

  ‘It can’t be a neutered one,’ the old woman said. ‘Fat from a castrated cat is easy to get, since they let you cut their throats without fighting back, but it has less power than fat from an intact male. Go and see if you can find the striped one with the yellow eyes. He’s probably sleeping on the steps in the sun.’

  Lupo went out with her into the splendor of the blue morning. Soon they found the cat, curled up into a ball between two rocks. He awoke at hearing them, cast a sleepy golden glance and yawned, showing the beautiful teeth of a miniature wild animal.

  ‘Come on, mutt, time to earn your keep.’

  The dog obeyed to the letter. After a brief skirmish full of sound and fury, from which he emerged bleeding, he deposited the soft palpitating prey at his mistress’s feet.

  With no small difficulty, Ángela was reading her way through the Elucidarium during the old woman’s absences, sneaking a peek whenever she was alone in the tower, feigning fatigue or menstrual pains, which had come to her for the first time on the day when Lupo killed the cat so they could extract its fat. She learned from the book that the hand of glory was a tool used by robbers in their exploits, since it had the virtue of making all the inhabitants of a house, masters and servants, fall into a profound sleep, and opening all the doors and locks for as long as the fingers of the hand were lit like candles. She fantasized about what she could get for herself with the help of the hand Crisanta was preparing, and she dreamed of getting hold of the book. It contained many other invaluable secrets and it would help her make her way in life and go from being a scavenger to someone with real power. But before she had the chance to carry out the plans she was concocting in her imagination to make off with those treasures, the people who had ordered the talisman showed up.

  They came enveloped in a cloud of dust, two men and a woman. The men entered the house, but the lady remained in her saddle, her head covered in a wide-­brimmed black hat that permitted only the gleam of two eyes like embers and the tip of a haughty nose to be seen. She wore a dirty but elegant black and green dress that brought out her good looks. She must have been very young and arrogant.

  Crisanta took the dead woman’s stiff hand from a fine crystal cheese dish where she kept it and, setting it atop a cloth on the table, showed it to her clients, exaggerating its virtues and the efforts it had cost her to acquire it.

  But with a sweep of his hand, the younger and more quarrelsome of the two men threw both cheese dish and carrion to the ground, where they smashed with the sound of broken glass.

  ‘It cost you a great deal to get hold of this rubbish, old woman? And you had us come here for that?’

  ‘What’s the idea? You know more than I do about how these things have to be made!’

  ‘I won’t say anything about making it, but you’re not going to deny that this is a female hand. You’re a lazy good-­for-­nothing.’

  And to show that no one made fools of them, and also as a warning to incompetent witches, they cut off Crisanta’s left pinky and took it with them, saying it was a good talisman against senile old women who tried to con them. The girl and the dog trembled when they heard the young lady in the black hat laughing.

  ‘I told you so,’ mumbled Ángela again and again while the old woman, howling in pain, applied a poultice to the wound.

  After chewing some henbane leaves, she fell into a doze. She appeared greatly relieved. Before losing consciousness, she said to the girl:

  ‘Get out of here. Since you started hanging around this house I’ve had nothing but hassles. I want to be alone.’

  Ángela set out walking and, followed by Lupo, headed towards the nearest cemetery, Santa Rufina, in search of a night’s lodging in the mausoleum of the Mira Valdesúa family, which could be opened easily, but then she thought better of it and hurried her pace towards Los Cigarrales. She felt an irrepressible desire to see the inhabitant of the crypt again. What’s more, since the vampire wouldn’t return until dawn, she had time to sleep for a while.

  There, hidden between two old caskets, she overheard an entertaining and instructive conversation between the two women, who had become friends. The vampire was dripping with blood, the other was a melancholy, one-­handed ghost. When the monsters had set off on their nocturnal errands, she threw herself into the infanticide’s coffin, which being new was the most comfortable, and she slept divinely until dawn.

  That night Ángela conceived the idea of getting hold of a hanged man’s hand and using it to escape from poverty.

  The storm raged, surrounding the turret in lightning and thunder. The smoke from the fireplace seemed possessed: it came in instead of going out. Shadows not justified by the candles’ light dance
d on the walls. Ángela had stopped what she was doing and watched them with furrowed brow as though she found some flaw in their movements. The skull she was polishing with a piece of agate rested forgotten in her lap. Now and then Lupo sniffed at it apathetically.

  Suddenly Crisanta leaned against the kitchen sink, raising her hands to her chest. She was turning blue. When she fell to the floor emitting terrible spluttering sounds, Ángela was on the verge of running away. She had to get out of there because if that old hag died, the devil would surely come for her soul and she didn’t want to be around when that happened.

  ‘Help me,’ panted the old woman. ‘Help me or I’ll curse you with my dying breath!’

  Lupo had taken shelter trembling in a corner. A hissing wind crept through the chimney, which besides smoke also scattered ashes from the hearth across the room. The pale lightning flashes lit and then extinguished the light of the world. Each time it thundered it seemed the turret would come tumbling down. Ángela dragged the old woman’s body to the bedroom, pulling her by the feet. It cost her a painful effort to lift her up and put her in the bed. When she had managed it, she remained seated on the floor for a moment without moving, recovering her breath, while the old woman wheezed in a pure death rattle.

  ‘The pact! The pact must be undone!’ she exclaimed all of a sudden with a voice that didn’t seem to be hers, stretching one hand towards the girl. Ángela got to her feet and approached her. Both were terrified. ‘In the dresser drawer . . . the parchment . . . take it out and burn it, and help me to make the act of contrition.’

  In that wobbly and dilapidated piece of furniture, enormous as a mausoleum, there were all kinds of rubbish, mixed with the very finest linen, silverware, and objects of value. Ángela rummaged frantically until coming upon a roll tied with a black ribbon. Her excitement was such that she didn’t realize she had poked herself with the tine of a fork. A drop of blood stained the parchment.

  The heaviest thing, she told herself, was going to be the Elucidarium, because as for the rest of it, she only planned to grab the highest-­priced objects, which were small. At first she intended to put it all in a sack, but then she considered that if she used a very fine damask pillowcase she had seen in the depths of the dresser to pack the things in, she would kill two birds with one stone, so she took it out of the drawer and laid it out on the floor.

  ‘What are you doing, my child?’ asked the old woman, sitting up again, with a firm and clear voice little in keeping with her deathbed condition.

  The girl did not answer. She put half her body under the bed and dragged forth a little coffer, which she placed in the center of the pillowcase.

  ‘No way, not that,’ shouted Crisanta angrily. ‘It’s taken me a lifetime to acquire it!’

  ‘Shut up, grandma, you’re going to make yourself worse. What does it matter to you anymore? It won’t do you any good now . . . It’s better if I take it, since after all I’ve been the one who’s taken care of you . . .’

  ‘You’ll bury me at least? Look, if you leave me here, I’ll rot, and my soul will be furious, and I’ll bring harm to you and . . .’

  ‘Yes, woman. Calm down.’

  But when the old woman breathed her last breath, resembling a belch, and remained quiet for good, Ángela no longer thought of anything but getting out of there as quickly as possible. She finished making a bundle with the pillowcase, put the book in it, and left the turret dragging it like the ant drags its booty against wind and tide.

  Although she no longer needed to yank molars out of corpses to earn small change, wealth didn’t go to Ángela’s head nor cause her to abandon her habits or her work. She studied the Elucidarium with eagerness day and night, until her head was bursting and her eyes were filled with grit. There were things she didn’t understand, but she made great progress. And when they condemned Pedro Madruga, who was said to be her own father, she saw the perfect opportunity to get hold of a good hand with which to make a powerful talisman. This time she wasn’t going to sell it cheap to some young gentlemen like Cristina did with her work. She would use it herself to her own benefit. Thus she used all her astuteness, patience, and ability to slip through the cracks like lizards do, until she managed to get hold of that magnificent member, strong from having come from a son of the village and at the same time with skin soft like silk from not having worked in the rough and vile jobs that destroy body and soul. And she started marinating it in the brine of glory.

  At the same time, she learned from the Elucidarium that leaving a sorceress’s corpse uninterred brings bad luck. Remembering that Crisanta was rotting unburied in the turret, she felt a great cold rise up from her belly to her throat while sweat pearled on her forehead.

  ‘That’s just stuff and nonsense, right, mutt?’ but this time the dog didn’t agree with her. The book didn’t lie.

  ‘Fine, even if that’s how it is,’ she said, reading his thoughts, which she could do because she was the one who made them up, ‘I burned the pact the old woman had with Old Nick, and thus she was off the list of sorceresses. So it’s all the same whether she’s buried or not.’

  But, unable to deceive herself with that argument, she finally decided to return to the fortress and take care of the corpse. And one night she went out from the river mill with Lupo, took the rough road along the walls and circumvented the ditch on the western side, climbing the embankment covered in nettles, which cruelly punished her audacity by breaking the crystalline capsules of their poison on her skin like Bolognese tears breaking at Carnival. The old mutt was no longer up for adventures. He gasped for breath on the way up, but followed his mistress indefatigably. The cancer of love had grown until it completely took over his heart, turning him into a gooey emblem of fidelity.

  Ángela was scared. She had learned from the book that a dead person’s hatred was a poison worse than a viper’s venom. She had supplied herself with a crucifix and some branches from a white hawthorn, a good remedy against bloodthirsty spirits. Around her neck she wore a silver choker with a sapphire stolen from Crisanta, and a jet amulet a pilgrim had given her in exchange for letting him touch the budding firmness of her breasts. But the terror of the serene night was so great that it flooded her spirit, opening ulcers in it for which there was no cure.

  The turret rose in the middle of an ocean of silence, enveloped in the scent of the wild fig that grew in the ditch, fed by the putrefaction of the corpse of a large animal that had fallen to its death. Ángela was surprised there was no smoke coming from the heights of the fortress like before, when the old woman kept the hearth fire lit. The door was neither closed nor open: it was now no more than a dried-­out piece of wood, the wind’s plaything. She fumbled for the table in search of the candle, but her hand found only dust and some small dry objects. Finally she came upon a stub of a candle. She lit it and stuck it to the dirty table with wax drippings. In the doorway leading to the old woman’s­­­ bedroom she thought she saw eyes like coals watching her malevolently.

  ‘It doesn’t smell of death here,’ she said aloud, and Lupo appreciated the information, since he no longer had a sense of smell.

  In the bedroom there was nothing. No bed, no corpse, no dresser, no trunk. Only the bare walls, which were beginning to crumble from dampness and neglect.

  The heat of the night was beginning to give way to the coolness of dawn. The girl shivered as she leaned against the door jamb, staring like a madwoman at the empty bedroom, inhabited only by uneasy echoes.

  One day the hand of glory was ready. Large, well cured, shiny with grease, its fingers seemed candles capable of burning for a long time. She made a little base for it so she could stand it on its wrist like a five-­armed candelabra. She felt that the hand loved her, could imagine it caressing her hair or giving her pats on the shoulder. It kept her company. She remembered that she had met Madruga once at a crossroads and the bandit had given her a handful of nuts and spoken to her kindl
y, calling her daughter. But she didn’t know if that had happened in her dreams or in reality.

  She chose as her victim a usurer named Catuja who was as rich as a queen. She was said to have great treasures, guarded with the help of three very ferocious mastiffs. No one went near her house without being invited. When a peddler tried to, they ate him up on the front steps.

  The day recommended by the stars arrived. The girl had gotten a sack for the plunder and carried the hand of glory in a pocket of her cloak. She had thought about leaving Lupo locked up so he wouldn’t bother her, but the mutt was obstinate. He stuck by her, assumed the bearing of a greyhound to hide the fact that his lungs were destroyed, that he could hardly see, that he stayed alive only through force of will. She brought him with her, not out of pity but out of habit.

  There wasn’t the slightest breath of wind. She could light the talisman outdoors in front of the garden gate. It was like Madruga’s hand was impatient to go into action. The fingernails caught fire with a cheerful crackling, five perfect, serene little flames arising from them, whose light, at first bluish-­gold and then orange, filled her soul with confidence. Scarcely had the light started to shine when Catuja’s garden gate opened without a sound, as if it had recently been oiled. The garden was a tangled mess of confused plants, whose life seemed to be in their center, like animals, and not spread out through cells and fibers. Rose bushes and nettles embraced. In a bed of lilies a poisonous oleander bush grew. In the back the house rose up, silent and unlit, like a mausoleum.