Petra's Ghost Read online

  “Thanks,” he mutters, holding his breath as he steps over the mess.

  They both breathe a little easier once they exit the city into the expansive tract of parkland built at its limits. The moon provides just enough light in the grey-streaked dawn to lace the ripples of the artificial lake they walk beside. It has been built as a centrepiece for the green space, and the trail looks dusty and dark next to its gleaming edge. Later, when the sun comes fully up, Daniel will see the path they walk on is stained red, a mineral idiosyncrasy of the soil that clings to the grapes and impregnates the wine of the region. This is what gives it that otherworldly taste, the seeds of mercurial dirt.

  Daniel and Ginny tread softly along the Way while everyone else sleeps, letting the sun rise up on their backs and tint them with the shades of a new day. Daniel tries to relax into the Zen school of silence and steps. But he finds he is too tense to let go. He is ashamed of the thoughts he had last night. The ones he still has. Whenever he glances over at his walking companion he can’t help but admire the swell of her lower lip as she bites down gently on it, or follow her eyes so he can steal a glimpse at what she is seeing. Ginny appears oblivious to his study of her. She yawns widely without covering her mouth, wrinkling her nose unattractively afterward. She is like a woman watched unknowingly through a lit window at night, unaware she has left her blinds up.

  Maybe she had sensed his thoughts, and that’s why she couldn’t sleep. But he doesn’t fully believe that. Not after the way she reacted to the fountain. Ginny has her own reasons for being kept awake at night.

  Once they make it to a high ridge that looks back out over the city, they stop for breakfast, packed cheese and crackers bought from a vending machine earlier. Daniel still has an orange he bought the day before at one of the roadside stands. The juice leaks over his hands as he peels it. He offers a dripping wedge to Ginny, but she declines. They make polite conversation, suffering from their new-found awkwardness. After eating, they continue along the trail, remaining quiet and reserved. He feels like a kid in high school — or what he imagines high school would have been like had there been girls. He’d been sent at twelve to an all-boys boarding school run by priests. He’d joined the stamp-collecting club just for the opportunity to meet the opposite sex at off-site exhibitions. To this day, the smell of self-adhesive stamp glue can make him uncomfortably aroused.

  The Camino leads down and along a wire fence that separates them from the highway. They walk parallel to it, expecting cars, but there are very few. Into the wire fence pilgrims have woven hundreds of crosses made of strips of bark from the scraps of a nearby sawmill. Ginny stops and fixes in her own cross from what she finds on the ground.

  “Do you want to make one, Daniel?” she asks, holding up some extra pieces of bark.

  “I don’t,” he says. “I mean, thanks, but I’m fine.”

  “Not a religious guy?”

  He shrugs. “I am, I suppose,” he says, still standing back. “I just don’t feel in a state of grace at the moment.”

  When they start walking again, crossing the autopista, she puts on a pair of earphones, and a faint overspill of music leaks out. She seems fully recovered from her fright the evening before, content to walk and listen to her playlist. He recognizes Alanis Morissette. Later, Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. He is puzzled when he hears the Beastie Boys come on. She sees him looking and turns down the volume self-consciously. He wishes she hadn’t. The tinny seepage of the song had been just annoying enough to distract him from his deeper thoughts. Like a radio tuned a bit off-station. He prays they bump into Rob so the Dutchman can carry the conversation. Then Daniel could just walk and listen to the sound of their voices, crowding out the ones inside his head. Those voices remind him he is here to make amends, to forget, to finally bury his wife. Not to get laid, for Christ’s sake. What the hell is wrong with him?

  As they sit over lunch in Najera, he still has his guard up, trying not to give anything away while still observing Ginny for clues. She talks about her work at the prison library and the eccentricity of her cat. He counters with his own shallow conversation. The business he helped build with his partner. The motorcycle he had thought of buying once but never did. Safe topics that skirt around his life with Petra and her death, like pieces of a puzzle purposely left out of the box. Harbouring his own missing pieces, watching for hints of hers.

  “Is everything okay, Daniel?” she asks when they are waiting for the bill. This is the most perplexing of questions for a man from a woman. Men never ask it of one another. Just as they do not ask what each other is thinking. However, he has enough experience with her gender to know the standard answer.

  “Sure,” he says, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. He crumples it up and leaves it on the table next to his half-eaten lunch. “Everything’s grand.”

  It is just past noon on the last part of the day’s journey. Most of the landscape out of Najera has been treed, a nature reserve saved from agriculture. Lofty pines provide some shade from the sun that hangs directly overhead, but not enough. It is unseasonably hot again today, and Daniel forgot to change his socks midway as he usually does on warm days. He thinks he may have developed his first blister as a result. He’ll have to tend to it when they get to the albergue.

  “It’s only a few more miles to Azofra,” Ginny pipes up, noticing his discomfort. He hadn’t thought it was that obvious.

  “It’s not a big place, is it?” Daniel asks. After Logroño, he is hoping for a sleepy little town with a little less excitement, or at least less vomit.

  “Only three hundred people,” Ginny says, consulting the guidebook she keeps in her waist bag. “Wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the Camino.”

  Many of the towns and villages they pass through wouldn’t have survived without the trade brought from the Way. In some, the population had dwindled to single digits, the pilgrims outnumbering the locals like invaders outfitted by the Outdoor Store.

  “But look,” she exclaims, pointing halfway down the page of the guide. “The albergue there is awesome. You only have to share your room with one other person.”

  Daniel nods. He reckons that one person better not be Ginny in his case. He doesn’t know if he could trust himself for another night. It would be like stamp club all over again.

  “Oh my God!” Ginny cries out, looking up from the book.

  “What?” Daniel asks, startled.

  She tucks the guidebook into the side pocket of her backpack. “They have a swimming pool.”

  “You’re full of shite.”

  “No, I’m not,” she says. They quicken their steps in anticipation, despite the increasing incline.

  It is not until they reach the top of the rise that he sees her. The figure from the corn. By the light of the full day, he can make out her features more clearly, her head slumped down chin to chest, her long hair hanging over her face, tangled with what appears to be hardened dirt. He can also see the slight strain of the hiking pants along the hips, the faint curves underneath her red Columbia sweater. A woman for sure. He hadn’t been certain until now. She stands in a graveyard nestled among mature trees where the trail levels off at the bottom of the rise. A faint wind mixes with the heat rising off the ground, making the outline of her body waver. He stops and turns to Ginny.

  “Do you see her?” he asks. He needs to know.

  “Yes,” Ginny says. She has stopped as well.

  Daniel starts walking again, moving quickly down the rise.

  “Daniel, wait.”

  He can hear Ginny but keeps on regardless. Her hesitant footsteps follow behind him. She must be wondering what he is going to do. He has only one task in his mind. To reach the woman at the graveside and lift her hair up in order to confirm for himself what lies beneath. Something easily explained. A trick, instead of a nightmare. He is furious that anyone or anything might try to make him live through another one of those.

  “Hey!” he shouts, as he nears the graveyard entrance, a simple five-bar farm gate. The tombstones behind it are decrepit, the crypts crumbling with age and neglect.

  “Hey,” he shouts again as the woman lifts her head but doesn’t answer. She walks purposefully toward the back of the cemetery, moving over stones and grave mounds with a surprising grace and speed in her heavy hiking boots. Daniel quickens his pace.

  When he gets to the entrance, he discovers the gate has a sturdy piece of wire looped onto a post to keep it closed. He’ll have to pry it off where it has bitten into the wood. Reaching underneath, he pulls, and when that doesn’t work, he begins to claw with his short fingernails. Little flecks of rust flake off onto his hand when it finally breaks free. As he slips the wire off the post, Daniel sees that the woman has disappeared into the woods at the back of the cemetery. Or so he assumes. It is the only way out other than the gate. He doesn’t think she could have hopped the fence.

  “What are you doing, Daniel?” Ginny asks from behind him. She stands well back, watching. He hadn’t noticed her there when he struggled with the gate. Just as she hadn’t noticed him watching her earlier.

  “You saw her,” he says. “I’m going to ask what her feckin’ problem is.”

  “She’s just visiting a grave, Daniel.”

  “The hell she is. She’s the same one who was messing with us at the cornfields in Azqueta.” He’s not about to let this go.

  The graves, on closer inspection, are even more poorly kept than he thought. Many of the markers have fallen over, lying in pieces in the sparse faded grass. Some of the grave mounds have begun to collapse, the ground sinking around the monuments and leaving holes for things to scurry in and out. He thinks he sees something mangy and earth coloured rush along the forest floor, where it disappears under a dank patch of leaves. The woman peeks out from behind the thick cover of an old pine tree where she appears to have been waiting for him. Then she turns around and disappears into the glut of needles and branches. They swallow her up like a pine-scented black hole.

  Daniel marches toward the woods, not wanting to lose her again. When he reaches the forest, he goes to push a collection of prickly limbs out of the way and they snap back and hit him in the face. He swats at them like a man attacked by bees. It would be funny if he weren’t so angry. He has spent the last few days thinking he is losing his mind because of this woman. He wants to unmask her and get on with his damn Camino.

  The dense branches obscure his view of the ground as he finds a small overgrown path through the trees. He sees too late that the woods have overrun the oldest part of the cemetery. Low grave markers and mounds of disturbed earth litter the forest floor. When the tip of his boot catches on a broken gravestone, he falls and smashes the side of his head on a rock half buried in the dirt. He can feel the tickly heat of blood running down his scalp and behind his ear as he lies on his side, winded. Dry pine needles stick him when he tries to move, and mouldy leaves get stuck to his cheek. He curses out loud and a metallic taste in his mouth tells him he has also bitten his tongue. When he licks the blood off his lips and opens his eyes he spots it, a rat — only a few inches away in a sunken hole at the base of an old tombstone. He makes the painful effort to roll over onto his back in a weak attempt to get up.

  The smell of her reaches him before he can look up and focus. The stench is worse than the slaughterhouse where he used to drive the cattle in the truck with his father. She is standing over him, waiting, like the furry rat skulking in the hole. Her body appears in negative against the bright light of the sun through the trees behind her, like a poorly planned photo taken inside against a daylit window. She sighs with an open maw of a mouth, and the vileness of her breath hits his stomach like a vicious sucker punch. He turns to the side and retches, unable to lift his head and shoulders to vomit properly. The sick dribbles out of his mouth onto the pine needles. When he’s finished, he turns to look up at her again, involuntarily swallowing the foulness that burns the back of his throat.

  He sees now that her hair is caked not with dirt, but with the dried remnants of blood and brain matter. She raises one hand to lift the strands away, as if she anticipated his earlier wish to see what lies underneath. Reddish-brown clots flake off her chin as she reaches up, falling at his feet like the rust that fell from the wire at the gate.

  “No,” he pleads. He can’t look anymore, but can’t turn away either. It is like rubbernecking at a car accident or watching a too-young girl walk away in a short skirt. He just can’t stop himself.

  As she lifts her hand, he sees it. The sleeve of her jacket pulls away at the wrist and the little silver shells there catch the sun, winking at him. They set off the green and purple bruise of her skin the same way they had set off the tan of Ginny’s arms. The colourful beads of the bracelet dig into her where she has swollen with bloat, like stained pearls embedded in spoiled bread dough.

  His peripheral vision is already beginning to go as she draws back one half of the curtain of hair. His sight is a dwindling circle that only serves to highlight the unveiling of her face, as if he is trained on her display with a telescope. He sees the long gash weeping down from her temple, exposing the bone of her cheek, the gristle glistening where the jaw was broken off. Her earlobe is torn completely; the jagged remains make it look as if she’s been viciously bitten.

  He reaches up with his own hand now, as if to touch her, to see if she’s real. But all he wants is to stop her before she raises the last of her hair. She has no mercy for him as she lifts the final strands to expose the deep socket, dark and empty, its former contents hanging down from a stringy piece of meat onto what’s left of her cheek. He groans, and the tunnel of his vision fades to black.

  In the darkness of his mind, his body and his consciousness morph and fold in upon themselves. He is falling, down deep into one of the holes between graves, where he shrinks and grows fur. He crawls feebly underground in the dirt, searching for a way out.

  But every time he thinks he has found an escape route, a light shining from the surface, his way is blocked. The woman with the hair twists in front of the sun, from a tree branch above, the beaded bracelet with the little silver shells hanging brightly from the deadness of her arm.

  He cannot move anymore down below, under the ground. Cannot even call out. He looks up to the light above and hears a scraping sound before he feels something soft and cool hit him in the chest to run down the sides of his paralyzed body. The same sound, and another soft splash of coldness across his torso, then his legs, and finally into his open mouth which fills up, choking him even as he is just beginning to realize the taste.

  Dirt.

  Each shovelful punctuates a new sentence of terror, as he watches the light and his life disappear above.

  “So, are you saying I’m mad?” Daniel holds a dressing to the side of his head. When he takes it away, it has fresh blood on it, but less than the last time. The wound is finally starting to clot.

  “I am saying no such thing,” Ginny says. “What I am trying to tell you is that you are most probably concussed. Even the nurse thought so.”

  The nurse had cleaned up the wound a few minutes ago then doused him with antiseptic. His hair smells like someone spilled paint thinner on it. He and Ginny are in one of two treatment rooms of a small clinic in Azofra, waiting for the doctor. It is cramped, but the floors and the walls are spotless. The waiting area outside doubles as a bakery. They had sat out there earlier with pilgrims sporting various complaints, shin splints and infected blisters being the most common. Others just wanted to buy churros. The proprietress had taken down Daniel’s medical insurance details at the counter, getting flour on her pen.

  “Sure, even you saw her, Ginny,” Daniel says, sitting up on the examination table, the ridiculous paper beneath him crackling as he shifts his weight. He hates sitting up on the table like an invalid or a child, but Ginny has taken the only chair in the corner. His backpack sits beside him, taking up its own spot on the paper like a second patient.

  “Of course, I saw her,” she tells him. “But she was just standing by a grave, Daniel. You can’t fault her for that.”

  “It was the same woman as before,” Daniel says. “She’s after following us.”

  “Seems to me you were the one following her,” Ginny says. “And you probably frightened the hell out of her barrelling into the cemetery like that.”

  They have been over this before, in the waiting room. Daniel turns away from her, getting tired of the cyclical nature of their discussion.

  They hear the sound of shuffling paperwork just outside the door before it opens. The doctor walks in with a clipboard tucked under his arm. He has a white lab coat on, but other than that he looks the same as the hospitaleiro at their last albergue. Daniel notices he wears dirty work boots with hay stuck to them, like his dad’s. In a town this small, people hold multiple roles. This guy is probably the mayor as well.

  “Buenos dias,” the doctor says. He moves immediately to examine Daniel’s head. No preliminaries. He’s a busy man, judging by the number of pilgrims waiting to see him out in the bakery, and he doesn’t even turn around to acknowledge Ginny.

  “Buenos dias,” Daniel says, wincing as the doctor palpates with one latex-gloved finger the impressive goose egg on the right side of his head. When he’s finished, he takes the same finger and moves it back and forth in front of Daniel’s eyes. He follows it without being asked to do so, having been knocked around enough playing sports as a kid to know the drill for checking out head injuries. Once in middle school he got hit so hard playing rugby that he lined up with the wrong team after the scrum.

  “How did this happen?” the doctor asks, snapping his gloves off and throwing them skillfully into the trash bin in the far corner.

  “I fell,” Daniel says. “Sure, am I all right to go now?”

  Ginny had made him go to the clinic. If it had been up to him, he would have just cleaned himself up with a washcloth and taken a few Aspirin.