Blood lines

Blood lines part 3

The goal, he told himself, was not to go crazy. To find something to focus on, and stay focused. It was the only way to endure the ceaseless work, the silent monotony. It was the only path that led to forgetting.

He'd only been here for a few months, but already he felt part of the place, caught up in its numbing sameness. A stone among a field of stones. The sun was going down. There was a slight wind now, and he could feel its welcome touch on his face and arms. He wanted suddenly to stand out there forever, until all the shadows came.

But the dinner bell was ringing. There, at the door of the dining hall, stood the Abbot, his robes rustling in the breeze.

Father Hobart pushed away from the wall reluctantly, carrying his hoe toward the main house. As he did every evening, at this exact time, he'd place it against the shed wall with the other tools. As he did every evening, he'd come in the side entrance to the house and shower in the common facilities.

It was the sameness, the inescapable sameness that was supposed to do it, rub your prickly demons into smooth dead stones. Stones in a field of stones.

He had to trust in that, he knew. It was the only sure path to forgetting. And perhaps, one day, forgiveness.

He left the hoe standing with its brothers on the shed wall, and headed over to the house.

Carlos switched off the radio, then leaned back in his chair, taking a last grateful drag on his cigarette.

That's it, he thought. The final transmission.

He rose, stretched, rubbed his neck. He glanced around the small, cramped radio room and sighed. At least it was cooler after midnight, when he stole down with a bottle of tequila and listened to rock music from the pirate station up north.

On his way back to the house, along the unlit mud path, he decided to wait until morning to give his last report. The old man had gone to sleep soon after dinner, and it didn't seem wise to disturb him.

Carlos lit another cigarette, stood smoking it just beyond the east porch. From this vantage point, he could make out the two guards trudging along the perimeter. When one of them looked in his direction, Carlos waved. The guard moved on.

Carlos shook his head. Such a place. He was glad the old man's ill health forced him to spend so much time in his bed. Ever since the other day on the verandah, their contact had been reduced to curt exchanges of information, orders given and received.

Not that it had been exactly warm and familiar before that. Five years of near-slavish service, five years of the crazy old gringo's insults and threats. Five long years, and now...

He glanced up at the moon, floating like a pearl in oil over the mists of the rain forest. The clouds were heavy and somber, and even the sacred monkeys hid from his eyes and kept their voices still.

Five long years.

It was better not to think about it too much, he told himself. Still...

He let the cigarette drop to the earth, and stepped on it.

He went quietly through the main corridor of the dark house, guiding himself as much by memory as by the pale glow of the lamps in their niches. The faces of martyred saints looked down from their portraits on the high walls, and his careful footsteps on the polished floors sounded to him like the rhythmic throbbing of a sleeping heart.

He paused in a doorway. Though he considered himself to be a modern man, not prone to indigenous superstitions, he also felt that, during the shank of the night when even the macaws outside the window were silent, the house revealed itself to be a living thing, its silence merely the mute echo of its spirit at rest.

Idiot, he thought bitterly. Even now the village Indian boy, frightened by the white man's patriarchal wealth.

In the dimness beyond stood the massive dining table, the four-hundred-year-old centerpiece of the room. Its wide mahogany grain meandered across its surface like dry riverbeds, shining dully in the moonlight. Carlos frowned, uneasy. It was here that they ate dinner every night, the old man and that spooky daughter of his, sitting at either end of the long table and saying practically nothing.

So they're both crazy, he thought, suddenly anxious to get on with his business. By the time he'd reached the end of the hall, and headed down the steps toward the cellar, he was even chuckling dryly to himself, so confident he was that he'd left the last of his foolish indios fears behind.

Besides, he'd had an idea.

I'm
It had been so easy...

The girl, standing at the leaded-glass window, watched the mist outside begin to rise. A pale light filtered the trees. The rain had finally ebbed.

Still, the humidity made the thick robe she'd worn from the lake cling like a shroud. She turned away from the window and shrugged it off.

Roberta crossed the bedroom—she thought of it now as her room—and pulled a simple print dress from the walk-in closet.

So easy...

She tossed her thick brown hair, still wet from her regular morning's swim. Pushing it back from her face, she headed briskly for the door, without a glance at the floor-length mirror.

As always, she walked more slowly once in the common halls, slowly and deliberately, as if encircled by heavy chains that only she could see.

Standing at the door to the library, she caught sight of Carlos, spying on her, as usual. He quickly looked away, made a show of wiping a speck of dust from a brass wall lamp.