The Rainy Season Read online

  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

  10

  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.”

&n
bsp; 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.”

  “I’m not sure …” Colin began. “Transferred?”

  “I mean to say that Mr. Appleton wants a living daughter, not a block of crystal. He’s quite likely been thwarted in a way that our friend Alejandro doesn’t begin to understand.”

  The priest pressed his shoulder momentarily before turning and reentering the chapel. Colin stood for another few moments thinking about this. He glanced around him to make sure he was alone, and then he removed the glove from his pocket and pushed the sea-shell out of it until he could see it in the sunlight. He was surprised to see that the seashell was apparently chipped and deformed. What had looked like a human figure now appeared as a mere superficial streak, like dried blood.

  He returned it to his pocket, took one last look at the quiet mission grounds, and stepped into the garden to pick a pomegranate. He broke it open, idly eating the seeds as he walked into town, lost in the unsettling notion that a lifetime of memory, through an alchemy of water and death, might be transmuted into a misshapen curio small enough to be locked away in a drawer, or held in the palm of one’s hand.

  11

  THE CIRCULAR GLOW of the flashlight hovered like a firefly in the rainy night. Phil watched it for a moment from the edge of the grove. Elizabeth stood at the well, her back to the tower. She was bent forward at the waist, and although in the darkness her movements were indefinite, she held the flashlight in the air with one hand and seemed to be reaching for something in the water with the other.

  He walked out from among the trees, his footfalls nearly silent on the wet ground. When he drew nearer, he saw that aside from the flashlight Elizabeth held what appeared to be barbecue tongs, which she dipped into the dark water within the circle of yellow light. She was intent on what she was doing, on something she saw beneath the surface, and she didn’t look up even when he reached the opposite side of the well and stood in silence watching her. The rain was a heavy mist, and the wind rustled in the shrubbery, but the surface of the water, protected from the wind by the stone wall, was calm. Phil watched the steel tongs, which shined in the beam of the flashlight as she worked them slowly toward an outcropping of rock, careful not to disturb the surface and lose sight of whatever she was after.

  Something glinted there—something small that lay on the smooth granite stone. The wind gusted, lifting dead winter leaves and scattering them across the surface of the well, which was illuminated by the moon again, the clouds overhead torn and scattered, the night sky suddenly full of stars between the parted clouds. The reflected moonlight hid the depths of the pool, and Elizabeth paused for a moment, tilting her head as if she might see more clearly on the periphery of her vision. She plunged her hand into the water, reaching downward until her elbow was submerged, keeping the flashlight near the surface, straining to see past the reflected moon and stars, which danced on the disturbed surface of the water now. After a moment she drew the tongs out, moving them slowly, as if they held some desperately fragile thing, and she held the object up in the glow of the flashlight.

  It appeared to Phil to be a piece of silver, perhaps a tiny spoon, small and delicate like a child might use, or like one of the souvenir spoons in the rack on the kitchen wall. Elizabeth brought it closer to her face, staring at it, still holding it with the tongs. Phil stepped toward her, and she looked up, apparently startled at the sudden movement, jerking the tongs upward as if in surprised fear that he would take them from her. In that moment the spoon slipped out of the grasp of the tongs and fell back into the well with a tiny splash. Elizabeth gasped aloud, leaned forward, and plunged the tongs into the water, making a wild, futile effort to retrieve the spoon. Phil watched as it sank away into the depths, still glinting in the moonlight and somehow magnified by the clear, moonlit water.

  Ripples spread across the well, casting a hundred shifting shadows, the lines of light and shadow swirling together, crisscrossing in geometric confusion. Phil impulsively stepped back away from the edge, struck with an uncanny and indefinable premonition. He shivered, feeling a mournful presence on the wind, hearing a voice that whispered through the dead winter grass. He glanced at Elizabeth, who stared intently into the depths, her mouth partly open, as if she wanted to speak but couldn’t quite.

  And then there was a sudden and inexplicable shift in the motion of the well water, an instant in which the wind died and the water itself stood still. He looked into the moonlit depths, and there came into his mind the idea that for the past few moments he had been watching something in a mirror, but that now he could see through the mirror, and the moonlight shone from out of a starry sky that lay somewhere beneath the water itself. Just then the moon became one with the silver oval of the still-sinking spoon, and until it sank away utterly and disappeared, he was certain that what he saw was not the reflection of the moon at all, but the pale face of a child, its eyes closed in sleep or in death.

  Vieja Canyon

  1884

  12

  THE WIND GUSTED through the oaks along the narrow road into Vieja Canyon. At two in the morning, the night was dark and cold, the sky cloudy. Colin had begun to regret confiding in Father Santos at the mission. Offering to recover the crystal obligated him to recover it, and right now he felt the weight of that obligation, mainly as fear. But, as the saying went, it was too late to turn back, and he walked along toward the Solas ranch house at a quick, careful pace. His borrowed horse and buggy were tied up at
the crossroads a mile below, and it was a mile more to the ranch, which would be I deserted, the Solas family having gone out visiting. If his source of information was correct, they wouldn’t return until the day after tomorrow, and by that time the crystal—if in fact he would find it in the house at all—would be safe at the mission. If he couldn’t find the crystal, then perhaps he would have to live with the failure.

  He had been to the Solas ranch twice before, when he had first met Alejandro, and he had spent the night there both times. He could easily picture the interior of the main house—the rooms on both floors, the broad stairs, the French windows letting out onto the sleeping porches.

  The roadside oaks dwindled, and the land opened up. There was a pasture to the right, the winter grass blowing in waves like a black ocean, and on the left, the ranch house itself, sheltered by sycamores on the west and south sides. There were no lamps lit, no sign of movement. The bunkhouse and barn lay several hundred yards beyond the main house, but they were also dark. Colin walked straight up the graveled path to the wooden porch, where he took off his boots and set them together by the stairs. The house wouldn’t be empty; there would be servants inside, long asleep. He walked up onto the porch, slipping past uncurtained windows, listening to the silence.

  Alejandro’s rooms lay on the west side of the house, isolated, open to the porch through a half-dozen long windows. He tried the windows one by one, but all were latched, probably against the winter weather. There was a single door, though, that led, as he recalled, into a long hallway. He stood listening outside this door for a moment, then grasped the knob and turned. The door whispered open, revealing a deep darkness. He stepped inside and shut the door behind him, and then stood still for a moment, listening. A clock ticked somewhere within, and almost as soon as he became aware of the ticking, the clock chimed the half hour. Two-thirty now: nearly three hours of darkness left to him, but only an hour or so of safety before men would be stirring, looking after the stock. And he would have to be back down the road out of the canyon before the first light. He couldn’t afford to be seen by anyone.