The door was stopped halfway and pushed back and one of the monsters forced us back. More ceiling fell on the other side. The entire prison had collapsed. I heard another great crash, this one much closer, as I stumbled backward and fell to my butt. The doctor swung his staff at the invader, which we could only see in flashes. But it hurt my eyes, and the more I tried to concentrate, the more confused I became. I gripped my forehead. Through the fog, an alarm: there were more behind it waiting to come through. We needed to seal the door. There was a large rock on the floor next to me—heavy, but able to be gripped in one hand. It rested inside a chalk circle, as if someone had meant for it to be exactly there. I grabbed it and launched myself forward as the beast attacked my friends. Cerise had found a shovel leaning against a wall—also marked in chalk—and she hammered the monster with it, over and over, trying to force it back. Her face was contorted in anger.
“Mother-fucker!” she screamed.
The creature turned hard and knocked Cerise to her back. The shovel clattered free. She had momentarily rebuffed it by kicking her feet, but it was about to tear her open even as another tried to force its way through.
There was a blast from behind. The creature squealed like a bat and threw up its arms. A short, round woman with brown skin and long dark hair was holding a shotgun almost as tall as she. I don’t think she could see the beast any clearer than we. But at that range, she didn’t need to. She pumped the stock and fired again. And again. And again. The buckshot hit the monster in the chest and threw up red-black blood. The doctor jammed it back with his staff as I shut the door, hefted the rock, and brought it down hard on the hind end of the key, which I had inserted into the lock. The brass snapped and the shard bounced away.
The door was permanently sealed.
The young woman with the shotgun, barefoot and wearing nothing but a T-shirt and poorly made jeans, just stared, eyes wide.
“Dios mío . . .” she breathed.
“What is that?” Cerise whispered. “Italian?”
“Spanish.” Doctor Alexander turned to me in query.
I shook my head. It was not a language I had learned.
He scowled. “¿Dónde esta . . . esta . . . estamas?”
“Estamos,” she corrected. “I speak some English.” Her voice was heavily accented. “I was there a little. As a girl.”
I think she meant the United States.
The doctor gently removed the empty shotgun from her hands. “Lucky you had this,” he said, mostly to himself.
“No luck . . .” she said, shaking her head. She didn’t take her eyes from the creature, which was now dead and visible to us all. “No luck.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Where are we?” Cerise asked, getting to her feet.
“Isla Natividad,” the young woman said. By the looks of her, she wasn’t much out of her teens—perhaps 21 or 22. “México.”
“Mexico?” Cerise asked, looking to me. “Were we supposed to go to Mexico?”
“I just turned until it opened,” I said.
I looked round at the building. The single main story appeared to be a tile-floored residence. It was surrounded outside and in the courtyard by an arched portico. Its prickly coating, like an albino cactus, was badly chipped and scuffed dark near the bottom, where I could see the hint of wood. A squat lighthouse rose no more than 30 feet from the roof. It didn’t need height. The entire structure had been built on a wide, curving bluff, the highest point in any direction. The ocean curved around us. We were on a bare, barely inhabited island. It seemed such an odd place for a magical door.
“Oh my God . . .”
I turned toward the ocean, which spread out to the horizon. I started walking.
“Where are you going?” Cerise called.
I practically ran down the dirt-and-scrub slope to the edge, where erosion took the rock-studded land steeply to the sea. Waves lapped a sandy red-gray shore. Beyond was the full expanse of the Pacific Ocean. I turned about for a way down.
“There has to be . . .”
I found it after several moments of pacing. There was a narrow foot path—a tan scuff in the red-brown dirt no more than ten centimeters wide—that cut sharply along the slope of the cliff. At its steeper points, stones had been laid like steps. I saw my destination as soon as I reached the sand. Half in the surf, water swirled around its base and drained back into the sea, only to be pushed forward again by the next wave—a mortared stone ruin, the last remnants of the Mexico City watchtower.
We were not in Mexico City. We were hundreds of miles away, in fact. The watchtower had been moved for safekeeping during the war for independence. I think they had meant to move it back, but after independence came new troubles. If I remembered correctly, the island in question was just off the coast of the Baja peninsula, but if you had asked me an hour before, I couldn’t have told you the name.
“Isla Natividad,” I said. The birth of the savior.
There was nothing left of the watchtower but a cluster of broken stone walls hanging onto each other like refugees in the water. As I got closer, I could see the central chamber on the far side, or what was left of it. The nearest wall was topped in a broken, three-quarter stone circle which was empty but which I guessed had once held stained glass of some magnificence. I walked across mounds of sand, which gave way underneath me. The water came in and my feet were doused. I smelled salt and seaweed as the sound of the swirling waves echoed off the block-stone walls. A mural had been carved into it in the opulent Mayan style, full of open mouths and crouching figures in elaborate headdresses. It was very different than the murals in New York and London, which were the only other towers I had seen. But the story it told was the same. Once the earth was covered in darkness. Then came a great battle, whence our planet was rocked and turned on its axis. And there it remains, waiting for us to pull ourselves up. Or to fall back down.
I heard a sound behind me and saw the young woman, our savior, on the beach.
“Do you know what this is?” I called, excited to be standing inside a piece of history. The Mexico City tower was the last to be used, back when the Spanish were in possession of the dagger.
She shook her head. She was clearly afraid of it and wouldn’t come near. But I was enchanted. I looked up at it again. Then I started back. The tide was on its twice-daily pilgrimage to the shore. Soon the entire base of the tower would be flooded.
“She want to see you,” the woman said. “She is very sick. Maybe now is better.”
“Who?”
“My grandmother.” She pointed up the bluff, but we couldn’t see the lighthouse from where we stood. “She is very old. Very sick. She want to see you.”
“Of course.”
The cliff took considerably more effort to ascend. I was winded when we reached the top and needed to catch my breath. But the view was spectacular. It was just then evening on the shores of the Pacific. The sun had yet to set.
“You said earlier that it wasn’t luck,” I panted. “What did you mean?”
“Abuelita said to keep the gun there. And the stone and the shovel. For when the demon came.”
“Abuelita?”
“It means grandmother. Really she is my grandmother’s sister. But everyone calls her Abuelita.”
Cerise and the doctor were waiting for me outside a dark room—a bedroom, it seemed, whose aquamarine walls were chipped and faded. An old woman wrapped tightly in knitted blankets sagged into a wrought-iron bed older than her. She beckoned us forward with an open hand. She was apparently unable to lift her head from the pillow. She had stout but withered shoulders, a large nose, and a square jaw, like a man’s, from which faint white hairs grew.
“My grandmother,” the young woman said. “Clara Maria Hipólita Yáñez.”
“Nice to meet you.” The doctor bowed slightly.
Cerise hesitantly did the same. She still had black blood splatter on her shirt.
The room was cramped. There was barely room for all of us to stand, and we shuffled. Next to the door was a chest of drawers. Behind me was a curio cabinet. A tiny black-and-white television with V-shaped aerial stood on a stool at the end of the bed. Framed photos were propped on every flat surface. A lifetime’s worth. There were even some on the blanket, as if they’d been recently admired. They were all of women. The few boys I saw seemed to be their children.
The old woman tried to speak, but she was too weak, so she just muttered a few words in Spanish and smiled at us as serenely as the saints on the shelf-altar above her, where three candles in painted glass burned. The three of us stood there in awkward silence. We shared no language, but there were smiles and gestures. The old woman brought shaking fingers to her mouth, as if to indicate food, and we declined. Then she pushed out a word.
“Rosalía.”
That seemed to be the young woman’s name. She pushed forward as politely as she could in the cramped space and stuck her ear right over her grand-aunt’s mouth. Whispers were exchanged at the end of which we were politely directed to the door, which Rosalía shut carefully behind her.
“She is very sick,” she said. “But she wants you to eat.”
People had come. A trio of old trucks were parked on the bare earth a good hundred meters from the lighthouse. They had carted some two dozen people from the village, many of which were still crammed into the back, including infants and children. Their elders sat on the hoods or bumpers or else stood and watched. I could see more walking up the dirt road that swooped down the bluff to the distant town, well over a kilometer away at the low shore.
Rosalía saw me looking. “They came to see,” she said.
“I suppose it’s big news, people coming from nowhere.”
“Not to see you,” she scolded me. “They came to see Abuelita. Because she said you would come. And because she is dying.”
The little crowd was as red and silent as their island, a beautiful but bleak scrub desert in the midst of a deep, sky-blue sea. The village below was an uneven cluster of a hundred or so dwellings made of stucco or simple concrete whose windows had no glass. There was one general store, no larger than a gas station convenience shop, and one restaurant. Most people fished or worked in the small fish processing plant near the dock, where all work was done by hand. Other than the seasonal surfers who came for the waves off the southeast shore, or the scientists who came to study the seabirds that nested among the cliffs, fishing was the tiny island’s only industry. The bright, white-walled lighthouse stood by itself above the rest.
“You are tired maybe and want to rest,” Rosalía said. “There is a bathroom through there. I will make some food.”
We were led around the corner to a long room that had no wall on the courtyard-facing side. I counted six metal bunks, all empty. At one end was an open-doored toilet with shower and two stalls. We each took turns. The water smelled of rust, but it was good to wipe the sweat and dirt of Everthorn off our hands and faces.
“I could sleep for ages,” Cerise said as she unrolled an ancient cloth mattress no more than one inch thick. “Why do you think they’re being so nice to us?”
“You stay here and rest,” I said. “I’ll find out.”
Rosalía was in the kitchen. The narrow pantry had no door. It was not well-stocked. And there didn’t seem to be a refrigerator. Our host was stirring a pot on an electric stove over which dried chiles had been hung. There was a single picture of St. Francis on the wall. I smelled fish and spices.
“Thank you,” I said. “Your hospitality is . . . well, it’s unexpected.”
Rosalía kept stirring. She didn’t even turn.
I stepped into the kitchen. “If we’re intruding, please just say. I know your grandmother is sick. If there’s a boat or something to the mainland, we’d be—”
“I should have believed her,” she said.
“Believed?” I sat at the four-seat kitchen table. When nothing more came, I told her that her English was very good.
“Thank you.” She glanced back and smiled ashamedly, as if just remembering her manners. “I don’t get to practice so much. But I watch American TV sometimes. We have a TV,” she said. She looked out the window over the sink to her left. From there, you could see the water. “We used to come here when I was young.” She motioned around the scrub land.
“Oh?”
“I didn’t like it. My mother took us. She said ‘Abuelita won’t leave the lighthouse, so we will go to her.’ I thought it was stupid. I wanted to go back to America, not use my vacation to play in the dirt.” She smiled ruefully at her younger self. “But Abuelita was right. All this time.” She turned to me. “You are here.”
“She said someone would come? Through the door?”
Rosalía looked out at the ocean again. The sun had disappeared over the horizon, which glowed with the last light of the day. There was very little light pollution there, which meant the night would be dark, as it used to be all across the world.
“My mother told me the story,” Rosalía said “She said Abuelita was not a very pretty girl. When she was young, one of the boys in the village asked to marry her. My grandmother told my mother that he was a very mean boy and no one liked him and he thought Abuelita would be the only girl to have sex with him. But she was very excited to be married. So were my great-grandparents. My great-grandfather had always wanted to be an artist, so to celebrate the news, he painted a . . .” She scowled and tried to think of the word. She traced a square in the air. “A cabinet for clothes.”
“Dresser,” I said.
“Yes. A dresser. They were very poor, so furniture was a nice wedding gift. It was an old furniture with many damages and he covered it with many colors, including the face of his daughter on the front. He was very proud and showed everyone from the back of his truck. My mother said many people made jokes and when the boy heard them and saw the painting of his bride, he changed his mind and left the village. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know Abuelita was very sad and ran away.”
“How old was she?”
Rosalía thought for a moment. “Maybe 15 or 16. This was in Coahuila. My grandparents were from there.”
“What happened?”
“My mother said Abuelita ran into the desert and found a big scorpion and tried to get it to sting her so she would die.”
“Did it?” I asked.
“She said so. But she did not die. My great-grandfather found her two days later. She was not awake. She was hot and sick. But my grandmother nursed her. When she woke, she . . .” Rosalía stopped. She turned to me. “This part is very silly. Old people sometimes believe silly things.”
I smiled.
“Something wonderful happened, didn’t it?”
She nodded. “Abuelita said the scorpion spoke to her. She said he was not a scorpion. He was Huehuecóyotl, the coyote, in disguise. He said he had angered the Moon with his tricks and was hiding in the rocks until morning. He told her that he would give her what she wanted, but since it was wrong to do suicide, she had to do one good thing first. And then death could take her. She said he stung her then, in the neck, but the doctors, they never found a mark.”
“They thought she was delirious.”
“Yes. But she believed it. She believed it very much. She told everybody who would listen about what Huehuecóyotl had showed her. My mother said the other kids thought she was saying lies to make herself seem special and not to be the ugly girl no one wanted. Life in the village was hard for Abuelita then. My grandmother married and my great-grandfather died and there was nothing for her, so she left. I’m not sure when she found this lighthouse. But I know they wouldn’t give her the job. The government didn’t give jobs to women in those days. She camped out on this land for many days. She cleaned fish and did small work in the town for money. The old man who lived here tried to chase her away, but she wouldn’t leave. My father said she was a prostitute also, but I don’t think so. My father never liked Abuelita. He thought she was strange.”
“But she got the job.”
“She had to work very hard. And it took a long time. My mother tells many stories about how she would not give up. She was the lighthouse keeper’s assistant first. Abuelita says she was just a housekeeper and cook. The old man convinced the Baja government that he needed her, and they paid a little money, but he kept it for himself. That is why she was allowed to stay. So he could get money. She did all the work and he did nothing but sit on the veranda and drink beer. When he finally died, times had changed and a woman could have a job. I only knew her then, when she was keeper of this lighthouse.”
“I noticed all the beds,” I said.
Rosalía nodded. “Many womans came. One time, when Abuelita worked for the old man, there was a girl in the town who was beaten very badly by her father. She had nowhere to go, so Abuelita let her hide in the storage room. When the old man of the lighthouse found her, he was very angry. ‘This girl cannot stay here,’ he yelled. ‘She cannot eat our food.’ But Abuelita was not afraid. She knew she would live to do her one good thing. Huehuecóyotl had told her—only then could death take her. So she pushed the old man and yelled back. My mother said she waved a broomstick. Always she was cleaning, so she had the broomstick. The old man was angry but he was too lazy to do anything. When the girl was better, Abuelita took money from the old man, money she had earned, and put the girl on a boat to Baja. Wherever she went, the girl told everyone about the fearless woman of the lighthouse.”
“And other women came,” I said.
Rosalía nodded. “Some to escape their men, who could not sneak onto this island without all the fishermen knowing. Some were pregnant or had small children. Abuelita was very strict to them. They had to pray to Mary. No drugs or alcohol. I got into big trouble one time because I brought beer.” She paused. “It was very stupid. It made Abuelita very mad.”
“But she forgave you.”
“She never stopped believing. All these years.” She shook her head. She sniffed and stirred the pot of fish stew.
“How long has she been here?”
“Almost sixty years. And she told everyone, ‘I have to stay. I have to be ready when the demon comes.’ When she got sick, she begged my mother to send me. ‘Someone has to watch the door,’ she said. Since I am the youngest, and I have no job and no family, I had to go. I think my mother always felt sorry for Abuelita—that she had no family.”
“But she did have a family,” I said. “I saw the pictures.”
Rosalía nodded again. She was still in shock, I could tell. Not just because three strangers and a monster had appeared from nowhere. Not just because her great-aunt had predicted it decades before. But because of what it meant for that old woman in the bed. Huehuecóyotl’s bargain was done.
“I should be with her,” she said suddenly. She turned to leave and dropped the wooden spoon she had been using.
“I’ll get it.” I jumped up.
Reddish broth had splattered, and I got a towel. I heard the young woman scamper across the gravel of the courtyard. I picked up the spoon and washed it. I turned the burner down to a simmer and covered the pot. There were vegetables to cut, and I cut them. Fresh tortillas were wrapped in a damp towel, and I put them under a pot lid. I thought about all the pictures in the bedroom, all the old woman’s grand-nieces—some by blood, some by faith. Huehuecóyotl the trickster, whose name means “old, old coyote,” had pulled another trick. A great many women were saved by the girl who tried to kill herself in the desert. If he had told the teenager that such a life waited, it wouldn’t have deterred her from her aim. So he burdened her with purpose. He told her she had to wait and do one good thing first. It was a lie. But it was the truth. And in doing one good thing, she did many.
Clara Maria Hipólita Yáñez, known to everyone on the island as Abuelita, died that very night, within hours of our arrival. We had eaten and were sleeping when I heard a car door slam shut. Men had come. The body was examined in private. Preparations were made. We felt guilty and out of place and made up for it as best we could by staying out of the way. No one could sleep, even though we were all tired. The doctor offered his help with the medical formalities, and Cerise and I walked along the bluff to watch the dawn rise over the peninsula to the east.
“I can’t believe it,” she said, kicking a rock over the edge. I had told her the dead woman’s story. “I can’t believe she spent her entire life waiting for us.”
“No, no. Not for us. She was waiting to play her role in the story of which we are all part. It didn’t much matter to her who came through that door, just that whoever it was desperately needed her help.”
“Her whole life, though. I mean . . .”
I nodded. “I suppose. But is it really all that different from what you did? You gave your life. You can’t tell me that you truly believed Etude could bring you back.”
She paused. “I guess not.”
“But you let yourself be sacrificed all the same. To stop evil. It’s not any different.”
“Yeah . . .” Cerise turned and looked west across the Pacific.
“We can’t stay here,” I said. “We have to assume the enemy saw what those things saw. They will know we didn’t die in Everthorn. They know we used a door. They may not know which one, but there are only so many near an ocean. The longer we stay here, the more we put these people’s lives in danger.”
“How long?” she asked.
“We should leave as soon as possible. Immediately.”
“We can’t leave before the funeral. Those women saved us. We can’t just bail.”
“Fine,” I said. “We pay our respects. But we leave first thing in the morning.”
“And go where?” she asked.
“Doctor?” I said, turning to look at him as he approached.
“They’re finishing up now.” He nodded back to the lighthouse.
“Cerise was just asking where we’re going.”
He stepped to the cliff and looked over. “Before Granny’s goons got to me, I was trying to find the location of the book.”
“How?” she asked him.
“Paper, basically. Everything leaves a trail. At first, it was a food service license. Which got me thinking. What do financial firms always have a lot of, but there’s always one at the top?”
Cerise and I looked at each other. We were stumped.
“Bookkeepers,” he said. “By law, the bookkeeper of any company has to make certain filings. His identity is a matter of public record.”
“Thank heaven for financial regulation,” I breathed.
“I was digging through shell companies. It’s a lot of paper. They know how to cover their tracks. But the book has to be somewhere. A building or a piece of land has taxes owed. If they have guards on it—”
“Those guys have to be paid,” Cerise said.
“Exactly. And the greedy bastards who employ them will want their tax write-off. Follow the money, right?”
“So where is it?”
“Well . . .” He sighed. “It’s tricky. I think I narrowed it down to three locations, if only by process of elimination: an island in the Azores, an abandoned uranium mine in Utah, and a warehouse district in British Columbia. All of them have unusual activity for what are, on paper at least, empty or nonproductive properties.”
“And you got all that from tax filings?” Cerise asked.
“No, actually. Most of the information about these entities is private. I tracked the warehouses through land sale records with the help of the local BC government. They’re quite nice up there.”
“So I hear.”
“A mine?” I asked.
My friends waited for an explanation.
“The medical examiner’s report suggested that Benjamin’s remains had been exposed to uranium. And the Handred Keep, the warlock’s living fortress, was built to hold and amplify the book—underground, away from the sun.”
The doctor scowled. “In his history, Massius Crane says the Keep was destroyed.”
“Killed is a better word. It was alive when they found it. It fought back. It bled.”
Cerise looked confused.
“The Masters inherited their fortress from the Knights Templar,” I explained, “and while they kept it perpetually shrouded in the Mediterranean, it at least had the fortune of remaining in one place. The Handred Keep moved. It didn’t rise from the earth like the Templar’s tower. It sunk into it, which is why it was always found in swamps and bog tundra, where it burrowed like a parasitic worm. Death always surrounded it. After sucking the life from a place, like juice, it would move on, leaving a pustulous sore in its wake, a great gangrenous wound that wept for decades.”
“You’d expect strict secrecy around the nuclear supply chain,” the doctor suggested. “No one would be the least bit surprised by redacted documents or high security. Wouldn’t raise any alarms.”
“Wait,” Cerise said. “Just wait. That’s just a guess, right? I mean, there’s no telling if the fortress is actually there. Or if the book is inside. Or am I missing something?”
“True.” I nodded. “And if we go and are wrong, we’ll have tipped our hand. They’ll move it again, and we’ll be lost. And out of time.”
We were all silent.
“So this is it,” Cerise said. “This is all we got?”
“Looks like it,” the doctor added, rubbing his beard.
“It’s not much,” I admitted.
“And how are we even gonna get there?” Cerise asked. “There’s a big, fat border between us and Utah.”
“Also true,” I said.
“I can get you across.”
We turned. Rosalía was a dozen yards away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was not trying to listen. I came to tell you food is ready.”
“What do you mean you can get us across?”
“There are people who will take you across the border,” she said. “I go sometimes. To bring money back from my uncle.”
“Is that safe?” the doctor asked.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Cerise said.
“When are they going?” I asked.
“They are always going,” she said. “You pay the first people, who take you out of Baja. They pay the second people, who get you to the border. To the desert. But you need to keep money for the third people, who take you across. They will always ask for extra and if you don’t have it, they leave you behind.”
“Nice,” Cerise snorted.
“They are the dangerous ones.”
“Can we leave in the morning?” I asked.
“I can call,” she said.
We spent the day resting and preparing. When I stepped out of the shower, I saw Cerise using the old wall-mounted telephone. She hung up as soon as she saw me. I was furious, but she walked away. A priest came shortly after and said prayers. A simple plywood casket was brought from the back of a truck. People lined the dirt road to town. The whole island, it seemed. There was a line of torches and flashlights all the way from the lighthouse to the dock. A silent, motionless procession.
“I didn’t realize they loved her so much,” Rosalía said softly as we lit candles.
The open-topped casket was draped in flowers. A candle burned at each corner. The old woman looked peaceful, dressed in her finest. The priest led the way, reading from a Bible. He had been brought from a church on the mainland that morning and had stayed at the lighthouse the whole day as visitors came and went. He was followed by a pair of young boys, one carrying a plaster statue of Mary on a stick and the other swing-ing a chafing dish. Rosalía was Abuelita’s only family on the island, so she followed the casket. Cerise, the doctor, and I were given the next position of honor since we were the old woman’s guests, long foretold. The sun set, and as we passed each candle-bearer on the long road to the town, they turned and followed in a long train to the sea. It was beautiful.
The dirt field before the docks served as the town square. Tables had been set up and draped with colorful streamers. On top was a cornucopia of food. There was a maypole holding Christmas lights aloft and a kind of altar to the dead woman with flowers encircling a 30-year-old photo. At the top, a pair of antlers. Candles burned everywhere. A recording of mournful music played, although I could not see from where. It stopped once the crowd had gathered and the priest spoke and offered prayers. We bowed our heads when everyone bowed their heads. We knelt when they knelt. The moment the priest finished, a man at the back howled a raucous cheer, and the band appeared, three guitars and an accordion. The crowd broke, some for food, others for dancing, and in a moment, mourning for the old woman’s death turned into a celebration of her life.
I wandered the crowd. Being unable to communicate, I was limited to polite smiles and nods. But I wanted to see the faces. Wrinkled faces. Tired faces. Fat faces. Bored faces. Drunk faces. People, in all their serenity and wickedness. After a time, I spotted the doctor in the circle that bordered the dancers. He had a plate of food and was tapping his feet.
“I see you have foregone the staff tonight,” I said.
“And the robe,” he added. “Although I admit, I’m getting kinda partial to both. You should try the mole.” He pointed to his plate with a plastic fork. “It’s amazing.”
“I just might.”
I made my way toward the buffet, which seemed to be no less full than when it first appeared. I passed the old woman’s altar and bowed respectfully. I examined her sepia-hued photo. She was certainly comely, with a block jaw and big nose. Her unstyled hair poked out from a simple head covering. But there was the hint of a smile on her face, and deep serenity in her eyes. I was jealous. It was a beautiful commemorative, even the antlers, which, when I looked at them, were not antlers at all. They were the silver-white branch of a tree.
It took me fifteen minutes to find Rosalía and drag her to the altar.
I pointed. “Where did that come from?”
She was annoyed but seemed to understand the question was important. She turned to her neighbors and asked many questions in Spanish. Heads were shaken. Quizzed looks were given. It took another twenty minutes of passed messages before a boy of about twelve was summoned to our presence. He clearly though he was in trouble. His mother practically dragged him. He was asked where he found the branch, and he answered that he had dug it out of the sand about a kilometer from the ruin.
By then, Cerise and the doctor had come.
“This is it,” I told them excitedly. “This is why we’re here!”
The fishermen told us the tide would return soon and we’d have to take a boat around the point to reach the watchtower in time. None of them seemed eager to go. In fact, they seemed as afraid as Rosalía had been. It wasn’t a place any of them visited. They believed it was cursed and that it was bad luck even to mention it. I thought we’d have to haggle, perhaps even pledge some sum we couldn’t pay, but our arrival was viewed with some portent. We had appeared from nowhere, just as Abuelita said we would, and if we wanted to take the white branch to the ruin in the dark of night, then they would see it through, if only to honor the dead woman in whose memory we had gathered. A fisherman was found, a skinny man whose skin was weathered to wood from a long life at sea. His rowboat was moored to a jagged rock, which he clambered over barefoot as if it were upholstered in velvet.
The wind off the water was noisy and insistent, and together with the drone of the outboard engine, it marooned us with our thoughts. We traveled around the point to the stretch of red-gray beach just south of the ruin where we slowed and floated in dark. The only sign of water was the undulating reflection of stars and the tinkling of waves over pebbles. I heard the bottom of the boat scrape against rocky sand before I saw the beach, which hung in the dark like an inverse Milky Way. The doctor hopped out and held the bow. The tide was already coming. In my haste, I fell and was drenched. But I held the branch dry. Once on the shore, we tried lighting candles with matches, but the wind played tricks and we had to retire to the lee of the ruin. Still, the matches failed us. We were set to give up when we saw an orange glow in the night. The fisherman had lit a cigarette on the beach. He had a lighter.
Each of us turned the candles we had carried so that melted wax fell onto the branch at several points, making a nest into which the candles could be pressed. Once they were sturdily perched, I carried the branch—very carefully—through advancing knee-high water into the remnant of the old stone chamber, whose fell wall faced the beach, forcing the waves to curl in from the back. The tide spun about and pulled and pushed with the arrival and retreat of every surge.
“What’s supposed to happen?” the doctor asked when we had it aloft. The flickering light barely illuminated the carved mural.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He waited a moment before saying it. “The branch is broken. Maybe it doesn’t work anymore.”
“It has to,” I said.
We stood under the ruin for as long as we could. Two of the candles were snuffed by the breeze, which breached the broken ramparts around us, but the last few fluttered mightily on. When the water reached my chest, the doctor demanded we return, and I consented. We strode through the surf back to shore, where the wind finally snuffed the candles. My companions were unsure what we had accomplished, but I was elated. I felt as though I had leapt from a tower and landed unharmed. We had lit the watchtower.
We had signaled for help.