Noemí went back to her room. She thought about all the times Catalina had narrated fairy tales. Once upon a time there was a princess in a tower, once upon a time a prince saved the girl from the tower. Noemí sat on the bed and contemplated the notion of enchantments that are never broken.
11
Noemí heard a heart beating, as loud as a drum, calling for her. It woke her up.
Carefully she ventured outside her room to find the place where it was hiding. She felt it beneath her palm, when she pressed her hand against the walls; felt the wallpaper grow slippery, like a strained muscle, and the floor beneath her was wet and soft. It was a sore. A great sore she walked upon, and the walls were sores too. The wallpaper was peeling, revealing underneath sickly organs instead of brick or wooden boards. Veins and arteries clogged with secret excesses.
She followed the beating of the heart and a thread of red on the carpet. Like a gash. A line of crimson. A line of blood. Until she stopped in the middle of the hallway and saw the woman staring back at her.
Ruth, the girl from the photograph. Ruth, in a white dressing gown, her hair like a golden halo, her face bloodless. A slim, alabaster pillar in the darkness of the house. Ruth held a rifle between her hands and she stared at Noemí.
They began walking together, side by side. Their movements were perfectly synchronized; even their breathing was identical. Ruth brushed a lock of hair away from her face and Noemí brushed her hair too.
The walls around them were glowing, a dim phosphorescence that nevertheless guided their steps, and the carpet underneath their feet was squishy. She noticed, too, markings on the walls—walls that were made of flesh. Traceries of fuzzy mold, as if the house were an overripe fruit.
The heart kept beating faster.
The heart pumped blood and groaned and shivered, and it beat so loudly Noemí thought she’d go deaf.
Ruth opened a door. Noemí grit her teeth because this was the source of the noise, the beating heart lay inside.
The door swung open, and Noemí saw a man on a bed. Only it wasn’t truly a man. It was a bloated vision of a man, as if he’d drowned and floated to the surface, his pale body lined with blue veins, tumors flowering on his legs, his hands, his belly. A pustule, not a man, a living, breathing, pustule. His chest rising and falling.
The man could not possibly be alive but he was, and when Ruth opened the door he sat up in bed and extended his arms toward her, as if demanding an embrace. Noemí remained by the doorway, but Ruth approached the bed.
The man extended his hands, his greedy fingers quivering, while the girl stood at the foot of the bed and stared at him.
Ruth raised her rifle, and Noemí turned her head away. She did not want to see. But even as she turned she heard the horrid noise of the rifle, the muffled scream of the man followed by a throaty moan.
He must be dead, she thought.He has to be.
She looked at Ruth, who had walked past Noemí and was now standing in the hallway, and the young woman looked back at Noemí.
“I’m not sorry,” Ruth said, and she pressed the rifle against her chin and pulled the trigger.
There was blood, the dark splatter marking the wall. Noemí watched Ruth fall, her body bending like the stem of a flower. The suicide, however, did not unnerve Noemí. She felt that this was the way things should be; she felt soothed, she even thought to smile.
But the smile froze on Noemí’s face when she saw the figure standing at the end of the hallway, watching her. It was a golden blur, it was the woman with the blur of a face, her whole body rippling, liquid, rushing toward Noemí with a huge open mouth—although she had no mouth—ready to unleash a terrible scream. Ready to eat her alive.
And now Noemí was afraid, now she knew terror, and she raised her palms to desperately ward off—
A firm hand on her arm made Noemí jump back.
“Noemí,” Virgil said. She looked quickly behind her, then back at him, trying to make sense of what had happened.
She was standing in the middle of a hallway, and he stood in front of her, holding an oil lamp in his right hand. It was long and ornate, and its glass was milky green.
Noemí stared at him, speechless. The golden creature had been there a second before, but now it was gone! Gone, and in its stead it was him, wearing a plush velvet robe with a pattern of golden vines running up the fabric.
She was in her nightgown. It was supposed to be part of a gown-peignoir set, but she was not wearing the cover-up. Her arms were bare. She felt exposed and she was cold. She rubbed her arms.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Noemí,” he repeated, her name so smooth on his lips, like a piece of silk. “You were sleepwalking. One is not supposed to wake a sleepwalker. They say it can cause the sleeping person a great shock. But I was worried you’d hurt yourself. Did I frighten you?”
She did not understand his question. It took her a minute to comprehend what he was saying.
She shook her head. “No. That’s quite impossible. I haven’t done that in years. Not since I was a child.”
