“Okay, tell me what’s happened,” she grunted, drying her hands on the grubby cloth. “The whole story, please.”
I might as well,he thought to himself.I don’t see what harm can come of it.
Roberto told her everything that had happened since the moment he had been confronted with the rabbit’s head on the doorstep. The woman interrupted from time to time to ask him to expand on some detail, in a manner that struck him as surprisingly methodical andprofessional. When he had finished, he squared his shoulders and looked expectantly at the woman.
“So?” he said. “Do you have any explanation for all this?”
“I most certainly do,” she replied with a bitter laugh that sounded like a truck unloading gravel. “But you aren’t going to like it. They’ve cast ameigalloon you.”
“A what?”
“Ameigallo. A curse,” she said, as if talking to a child. “The dead man’s kiss.”
Roberto raised his eyebrows. “You can’t be serious.”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“The dead man’s kiss.” He swallowed, incredulous. “What’s that?”
“A powerful spell,” the woman muttered. “It will dry your life out, bit by bit. You’ll gradually become weaker and weaker. First, you’ll stop eating; then you won’t be able to sleep; and finally ... you’ll die.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”
Roberto was a rational person. During his lifetime, he had seen evil incarnate more than once, but on each and every occasion, there had been a common denominator: the darkness of the human soul—fratricidal hatred, a thirst for vengeance, mindless pillage. He’d seen suckling infants murdered, women raped by guerrilla fighters, ditches piled with corpses. The horror always arose from the blackness of somebody’s heart, but it took forms you could recognize. What the old woman had told him sounded more like a tale to scare children. It couldn’t be true, even if Elvira Couto’s expression was utterly somber.
“I don’t believe in all that stuff. A rabbit’s head is just that ... a head. It can’t harm me.”
“Ah, but whether you believe or not makes no difference,” she replied. “Evil doesn’t need your consent to exist.”
“Well, that’s one thing we agree on,” he said. “And I don’t suppose you have any idea who could be responsible for this ... dead man’s kiss?”
“There are dark forces at work on this island,” she muttered, rubbing her hands. “Something arrived on Ons many years ago, and it stayed among us.”
He had hoped the woman might give him a clear answer:This is a trick we play on tourists.OrIt’s a gory local custom. We’re on an island in the middle of nowhere, and we do strange things to pass the time.He certainly hadn’t expected to be dealing with some kind of voodoo.
“Okay. So what do I have to do to get rid of the curse?” he asked impatiently. “Dance in the rain? Throw salt over my shoulder? Walk under a ladder?”
“You shouldn’t joke about these things.”
Roberto raised his hands placatingly. This was a waste of time.
“Okay, I didn’t mean to upset you. What do I have to do?”
But Elvira had turned away and was rummaging through a pile of junk in the corner. Finally, she let out a victorious yelp and held up a bundle of dried twigs, held together with some elaborately knotted red thread.
“What’s that?” Roberto asked. “What are you—” The woman had struck him across the face with the bundle of twigs as she muttered something unintelligible. “Ouch! What the hell are you doing?” Before Roberto could stop her, she whipped him three more times in quick succession, mumbling as she did so.
“The graves of the dead, from near and far, from sea and land, from streams and mountains ...”
The rest was incomprehensible gibberish that Roberto couldn’t decipher. He patiently allowed the woman to hit him nine more times, hoping that the ridiculous ritual would eventually come to an end.
“And now you have to jump over the fire.” The woman pointed at the hearth. The flames had almost consumed the log that was burning in it, leaving just a few embers. “Three times.”
“How am I meant to jump there?” Roberto answered, losing his patience. “Do you want me to get into the fireplace?”
Her only response was to walk over to the hearth and kick the embers, scattering them across the stone floor of the hovel. One of the embers rolled into a corner and almost set light to the cloth hanging down from an old side table, but Elvira stamped it out.
“Jump,” she ordered in a voice that brooked no dissent. “Jump if you want to save yourself. Three times, neither one more nor one less.”
