Fernando woke the next morning naked and alone. He sat up stiffly from the rock. He pulled on his clothes and shoes which were mostly dry. His grandmother’s nightdress and warstaff were still laying there on the ground nearby him, but the woolen poncho was not. Outside on the bluff, the rain and wind had ceased. A pale sun was shining, a sickly seep of light through the haze.
He found her cowled under the indian poncho, sitting hunched on a flinty precipice nearby. One look at her, and Fernando knew immediately that something was very wrong. He made his way over to her, his stomach sinking as he went.
“Abuela?” he called out to no reply. “Abuela, puedes oírme?”
If she heard him, she gave no answer. Kneeling down beside her, he steered her around to face him. She was flushed, feverish. Her dark eyes were flat and vacant. Idly, she rocked in place where she sat, her crimped lips working in some mute babble of delirium.
Fernando clutched her by her bare brown shoulders, attempted to steady her. “Abuela, look at me.”
She stared past him, unseeing. He tried to reach her again to no avail. Fernando ground his teeth then swore. He scooped her up, poncho and all, and started down the slope with her toward town. He was halfway there when tremors started wracking through her. Fernando thought it was her fever breaking, but when he looked down into her creased and mottled face, he saw that her delirium remained in full swing. She was shaking because of the force of her sobs.
“Carmen…Carmen, where did you go? Come back to me, m’hija…don’t leave me…don’t leave me here alone…”
Light as she was in his arms, Fernando bowed beneath the burden of her fevered ravings. His heart weighed heavy as a stone. The fear and pain in her voice crushed in on him, as she cried out for her long-dead daughter.
* * *
In Cortez, he caught a ride out to Chico’s home.
Emmanuella met him at the door, as though some sixth sense of maternal intuition had alerted her to the crisis at hand. Fernando didn’t need to say anything. She took one look at the swaddled old woman shuddering and moaning in his arms and ushered him in at once. Fernando followed her down the short dingy hall, up the short dingy stair. Chico leapt up from the kitchen table as they passed. His twelve-year-old sister Mercedes froze in her dishwashing at the sink.
“What are you standing there staring for?” Chico barked at her. “Put that stupid dish down and go call the doctor.”
There was the sound of a clinking splash as Fernando stepped onto the landing. He followed Chico’s mother down another grubby corridor into a closet of a room with peeling flowered wallpaper and children’s toys heaped along the walls in varying states of abject disrepair. Well-loved and well-abused.
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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy