The Rainy Season (6 page)

“Yeah,” he said. And just then, as he ducked out into the night, he heard the sound of a scream from the direction of the well, muffled by the rain and wind but eerie and loud enough to stop him in his tracks. The half-shut door opened again behind him, and Elizabeth looked out, her face full of instant curiosity. Forgetting about the gasoline and the car, Phil set out at a run across the back lawn, toward the looming shadow of the water tower and the well beyond it. Near the edge of the tower he forced himself to slow down. He moved out away from the wall, keeping to the open to avoid surprises and looking hard into the darkness. He realized then that Elizabeth was only a couple of steps behind him. She had pulled on one of his flannel shirts, one that had been hanging on the service porch coat rack.

“What happened?” she asked, coming up behind him and grabbing his jacket sleeve. “Was that a scream?” Her eyes were wide with excitement. “That sounded like a scream. Maybe it’s the woman I was talking about!”

“Maybe. I don’t know. You really shouldn’t be out here in the rain. You don’t even have shoes on.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she said. She had apparently given up worrying about her dress getting ruined by the rain, which fell harder now, pelting against the clapboards of the tower wall and stirring the surface of the well. The sky was full of tearing clouds, the moon hidden, the night impossibly dark. Phil pointed the flashlight toward the grove, but the light didn’t carry through the falling rain, and the trees were a mass of wavering shadow. He stepped forward again, aware of Elizabeth’s hand on his shoulder as she crept along behind him. He shined the light along the tangle of berry vines that grew up around an old clothesline pole beyond the well, and then played it across the tower door and window, which were both closed tightly.

Elizabeth’s hand tightened on his shoulder, and he jerked to a halt, peering forward through the darkness and the falling rain. “Look!” she whispered, pointing past him. A dark figure crouched in the weeds ahead, working intently at something on the ground. Phil pointed the flashlight, illuminating the figure, a boy, soaking wet in the rain, scooping a handful of dirt into an open cloth bag.

“Over there!” Elizabeth shouted, and Phil saw another figure in the ivory moonlight, silhouetted against the gray bark of a heavy tree. He was hunched over, with his hands on his knees as if he were out of breath. The boy on the ground jumped to his feet then and ran straight toward the grove, and in that instant Elizabeth shouted, “Run!” but in her apparent excitement she held onto him for another moment, before pushing him forward, grabbing the flashlight out of his hand at the same time. Without a thought he ran alone toward the grove, and at that instant the figure at the edge of the trees vanished into the shadows.

Phil shouted, “Wait!” not really expecting them to stop and turn around, and within moments he was in among the trees himself, jogging along silently on the rain-soaked leaves. The two boys ran steadily ahead, making for the arroyo. They vanished into the darkness for the space of five seconds, and then abruptly reappeared on the creekbank and were visible for an instant in a patch of moonlight before dropping out of sight down the far side, down into the arroyo itself.

Phil slowed to a walk at the edge of the grove, stopping for a moment before stepping warily out onto the path. He climbed the few feet to the top of the creekbank and looked out over the flat, rocky expanse of the arroyo, which was empty now, the two boys having made their way into the dense brush that covered the marshy land beyond the creek itself. Stands of wild bamboo and willow rose out of low-lying mud flats, a tangled confusion of dense foliage that stretched for a mile or more east until the creek narrowed again above the regional park. The chase was obviously over.

He felt suddenly like a fool, standing in the wind and rain, his house unlocked behind him, a woman wearing his shirt lurking around the property. He paused for a last moment, looking up and down the path in the dwindling moonlight. Sixty or eighty yards to the west a eucalyptus windbreak grew up along the edge of the path, and near the dense jagged shadows of the night-dark trees there was a sudden furtive movement, as of someone stepping out from among the trees and then immediately back in again.

Recalling the shadowy figure he had seen earlier up ; by the road, Phil backed into the deeper shadow of the grove, where he stood hidden from view, watching the path, which was empty now where it curved around and followed the creekbed downstream. Raindrops rustled | the leaves overhead, and the wind sighed through the tree branches. He was certain this time that it hadn’t been his imagination, that someone was in fact hiding J among the trees …

But he was in no mood for a chat with a lurking | stranger, not on a night like this, not under circumstances like these. He turned and walked back into the grove, suddenly tired and feeling the cold in his wet jacket.

Mission San Juan Capistrano
1884

COLIN STOOD IN
the shade of an arched corridor in the Mission San Juan Capistrano, leaning against adobe brick plastered with coarse white mortar, waiting for Father Santos to return. Through the sparse foliage of the pomegranate and apricot trees in the gardens he could see the ruins of the old mission, which had fallen to an earthquake in 1812. There had never been more r than two priests at the mission, which by now, in 1884, was a place of faded grandeur. Seventy-five years earlier the mission had been home to over a thousand people, most of them Juañeno Indians, but in the second half of the century it had begun to fall asleep, and now the grounds were quiet, nearly deserted. Colin could quite easily imagine himself tending these gardens, rising early for matins, living out his days in this quiet sanctuary.

But it was no longer possible for him to live alone. He had fallen in love with Jeanette almost without realizing it over the past six months. Alejandro Solas had loved Jeanette, too, if it were possible for him to love anyone, and his failure to impress her had been a blow to his vanity. To Colin’s mind, Alejandro’s hitting Jeanette had partly been a response to that failure.

The priest appeared in the doorway now, and gestured for him to follow, and Colin entered the chapel, descending stairs into a dim cellar. Heavy candles burned in wall niches, and the still air smelled of wax and dust. In the cellar wall stood an arched door built of heavy boards cleated with iron bars, and the priest unlocked this door and continued through. There was the sound of water gurgling somewhere below, the smell of water on stone, and a growing brightness. At the base of the stairs they entered a room that was roughly circular, its walls apparently cut out of natural stone, as if this were a natural cavern, atop which the chapel itself had been built. There were narrow shafts of sunlight through deep skylights, one of which fell on a pool in the stone floor of the room. Water bubbled up into the center of the pool, and ripples perpetually lapped across the slightly angled floor, but the level of the water remained constant, and most of the floor was dry. Moss grew on the sunlit stones, and the empty room was cool and musty.

There was a strange mosaic on the wall, made up of a clutter of what appeared to be cast-off objects—odd trinkets laid into the heavy mortar that covered the adobe brick. The mosaic was assembled in the shape of a man, his head bowed, and the entire mosaic glowed a cold, moonlight-on-snow radiance. There were no lamps visible to explain the light. Beneath the mosaic stood a dark wooden chest on legs, heavily built, with a single shallow drawer.

“Because of what you’ve told me of the creation and theft of the crystal object,” the priest said, ‘Tm going to show you something that few people see. The ceremony that Alejandro described was indeed intended to capture the
memory
of the dying girl, although that’s not the usual purpose of such a ceremony. And I’m speaking quite literally when I refer to her memory.”

He unlocked the drawer in the cabinet and pulled it open, revealing a heavy plate of yellow isinglass, which he lifted out. The mosaic on the wall glowed doubly bright, as if enlivened by the objects in the drawer—four elongated chunks of smooth crystal, two of them a filmy red, like blood in water, and the other two a pale green. Just as Jeanette had described, each of them had a vague animalistic semblance, as if they were carved figures worn to obscurity by centuries of weather. The objects emitted the glowworm light, and it seemed to Colin that the light of the mosaic on the wall was actually reflected light, like the light of the moon, and that these four objects were its sun.

Colin realized abruptly that his teeth felt rubbery, and he was filled with an overwhelming fatigue, as if at any moment he would be crushed to the stones by the force of gravity. His ears rang with a high, tinny shriek, and he pressed his hands against them, which did nothing to diminish the sound. The priest returned the isinglass panel and slid the drawer closed, and with that the pressure and sound dimmed as did the glow of the mosaic on the wall.

“One of these curios came to us very recently,” the priest said, gesturing at the now-closed drawer. “In a magical rite, a child was buried in a seaman’s chest alongside a spring near the ocean, probably in October of fifteen forty-two when Cabrillo made a landing off what is now Dana Point. Their ostensible task was to find game and water, but in fact there were men on board who were more interested in magic than provisions, and it was these men who seeded the
fuentes
, the springs, with drowned children. The objects in this drawer contain the memories that those children gave up at the moment of death. Mr. Appleton had the knowledge to fabricate one of these
fuentes
himself, using his own dying daughter as a sacrifice. He desired to save his daughter’s memory as a memento. It was necessary to sacrifice her in order to save her, I suppose you could say.”

“I find that appalling,” Colin said.

The priest shrugged. “Neither of us has a dying daughter, so perhaps it’s impossible for us to see such things clearly. If the girl were in fact dying, then the crime was a matter of misplaced fatherly love. You can sympathize with Mr. Appleton’s sentiment … ?”

“I understand it, certainly.”

“I hope so. Because it seems to me that a man who is desperate enough to drown his own daughter in this manner might easily become insane upon discovering that he had drowned her for nothing. Mr. Appleton will be a very dangerous man. Perhaps he already has learned of the theft. If he were to discover that you had recovered the object and given it to us …” The priest shrugged again.

But there was no reason to think that either Appleton or Alejandro would discover any such thing. Colin knew that his own motives for wanting to steal the crystal away from Alejandro were mixed—guilt for his own attraction to the thing, penance, revenge for what Alejandro had done to Jeanette. Still, the result would be that the object would be safe once it was within the mission walls.

“These other crystals,” Colin said, gesturing at the drawer, “were they bought and sold?”

“There’s certainly been some trafficking in them over the years,” the priest told him, “but the men who accompanied Cabrillo had no real interest in the crystals themselves. The seeding of the
fuentes
allows for a sort of magical travel.” The priest regarded him for a moment. “Suffice it to say that seeding the
fuentes
was a form of witchcraft, which the church has suppressed since the middle ages.”

There was a silence now, just the quiet sound of bubbling water. Colin regarded the objects in the mosaic. Although they were different than the crystals in the drawer, they were of the same
type
, somehow, or so it seemed to Colin now. They had a quality that he could
feel
as well as see, as if they were charged with something like the unnaturally profound power of dreams. One bit of porcelain appeared to be a tiny human face, but there was something gargoylish about it when Colin looked more closely, something misshapen, something painful and corrupt. Abruptly he had the uncanny certainty that the objects in the mosaic were moving, as if each of them was a swarm of tiny beetles and worms, the entire mosaic slowly shifting and crawling. He stepped away in sudden horrified surprise.

“Avoid paying careful attention to them,” the priest said. “Taken altogether like this, they can have a certain morbid effect on the mind.”

“What are they?”

“As clearly as I can state it, like the crystals, these trinkets contain a living memory, a fragment of memory. I told you that the
fuentes
were used for magical travel, for witchcraft. These are simply the
cost
of engaging in this travel, which diminishes one in some small but significant way. It’s enough, perhaps, to say that there is a cost to everything, especially for engaging in pursuits which are better left alone.”

He took a cloth glove from his pocket then, and with a pocket knife pried one of the trinkets out of the mosaic, holding it out in the palm of his hand. It appeared to be a small cowry seashell, porcelain white with brown swirls of color. The swirl of brown wreathed like smoke across the arched back of the shell, and in the shape of it Colin saw a human figure, and he was struck with the certainty that the figure was bound somehow, that it was a soul being drawn into the earth.

“Take it,” the priest said, slipping the glove over his hand and at the same time enclosing the seashell in it. “Avoid touching it, even out of curiosity. It will glow in the presence of a crystal.” He gestured toward the stairs now, and Colin went on ahead of him, pocketing the glove and seashell and mounting into the comparative darkness of the room above. The priest locked the doors behind them, continuing into the chapel again and then out into the sunlit afternoon. “Certainly we’ll thank you for recovering the crystal and bringing it here. Its very existence is blasphemous, as is all of Alejandro’s talk of ransom. I’m concerned, though, with what Mr. Appleton might do with the crystal if he were to recover it. I suspect he wouldn’t be content to sit and gaze at the visions the crystal might conjure for him. There is some evidence that the memory might be … transferred to living flesh.”