Hope . . . Ferreira looked at Frenchie’s shattered leg. A bullet had done the damage, of course. Bullet wounds were a far-too-familiar sight to the doctor by now and this one looked terrible. Luckily the old man couldn’t see the damage. Old? Ferreira mocked himself. Frenchie was probably his age.
“‘Under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower . . .’”
Frenchie gasped the moment Ferreira touched his leg. “Is it as bad as I think?”
“Look, Frenchie . . .” Ferreira’s voice was soft with compassion. He took off his glasses in a vain attempt to see things less clearly for a moment. “There is no way to save this leg.”
The cave filled with silence. And the wounded man’s fear.
The others surrounded Frenchie as Ferreira opened his bag. At least he had his tools thanks to the fact he also treated the soldiers who’d done this. But he had no anesthetic.
Mercedes made Frenchie drink half the bottle of Vidal’s liquor; not much comfort for a man who was about to have his leg sawed off.
“I’ll do this as quickly as I can with as few cuts as possible.” Ferreira wished he could’ve have made a less pathetic promise.
Frenchie nodded and grabbed Mercedes’s hand. Though not a mother, she played the role for the second time tonight—first for Ofelia, now for a man she barely knew. Mother, sister, wife . . . Mercedes was the only woman the men in the woods had seen in a long time and for some she played all these parts. Like most of the men, she shut her eyes when Ferreira pressed his bone saw against Frenchie’s swollen leg.
“Wait a second, Doctor! Just a second.”
Frenchie gazed one more time at his leg. His choice to fight the marching boots would make him a cripple. Ferreira wondered how that made him feel about his decision. Frenchie inhaled deeply, pressing his lips firmly together, as if that would keep the screams inside, the screams, the despair, the fear . . . then he nodded again.
This time it was Ferreira who had to catch his breath, to pull himself together for the butchery he was about to perform. Sometimes even the healers are turned into butchers by the darkness of this world.
20
The Pale Man
In Ofelia’s attic room, there was no need to hide the Faun’s book. She kept it on her nightstand where only its size made it stand out among the other books. The maids pitied her for being banished to the attic—Ofelia saw it in their faces when they brought her meals. But Ofelia actually didn’t mind. It had gotten harder and harder to sleep next to her mother, whose labored breathing and distress made her so angry at her unborn brother that at times when she tried to imagine what he’d look like she gave him his father’s face.
She first could barely make her fingers open the book. The memory of the blood dripping off its pages haunted her, but her wish to know about her next task was stronger than her fear. The Faun had taught her his first lesson: she knew about her courage since she’d crawled through the Toad’s endless tunnels. And this time she’d put on the coat to make sure for the next task she wore something that kept her warm and wouldn’t be ruined in case it got dirty.
The book revealed its secrets more quickly than before. The left-hand page filled first, fine lines revealing the skeletal figure of a pale man, noseless and bald, with holes instead of eyes above a gaping mouth. The brown ink drew a Fairy, then a door. The image took shape in more and more detail while Ofelia read the words appearing on the right-hand page:
Use the chalk to trace a door anywhere in your room.
Chalk. Ofelia reached into her coat pocket for the piece of chalk the Faun had given her. For a moment she was afraid she’d lost it, but finally her fingers found it. The image in the book was still unfolding. The girl in the green dress and white apron appeared beneath the Pale Man, in clothes as clean as if Ofelia had never ruined them in the woods. The three Fairies were by her side. The girl smiled out at Ofelia. Then she knelt with the chalk in her hand and drew the outline of a door onto the wall. And more words appeared:
Once the door is open, start the hourglass and let the Fairy guide you. . . .
The open door now framed by a stone arch was held by two columns that took shape beneath the Pale Man’s right arm.
Don’t eat or drink anything during your stay,
the words on the right page warned,
and come back before the last grain of sand falls.
More images were forming, but Ofelia found it by now all far too much to remember, so she closed the book and knelt with the chalk as the girl in the illustration had done. The attic wall was covered in spiderwebs and quite uneven, but the chalk left a clear line on the plaster. It turned into white foam and, hissing softly, etched a door into the wall that gave way like the gate to an ancient tomb, when Ofelia pressed her hand against it. The opening behind it was so narrow that she had to bend her back to gaze through. She looked down into a wide corridor, its ceiling high above her head and the floor at least seven feet below her. Columns lined it with walls as dark red as dried blood. Shafts of light fell through small windows onto the white-and-brownish-red-checkered tile floor.
As it was too far down to jump, Ofelia got a chair from the attic and lowered it through the opening. Then she slung the Faun’s satchel over her shoulder and placed the hourglass on the floor next to her bed. As soon as Ofelia turned it over, a small amount of pale red sand began to fill worryingly fast into the lower glass.
The chair served her well as a ladder. When Ofelia jumped from it onto the checkered floor she heard a wheezing sound in the distance . . . as if someone were breathing heavily in sleep. The sound mingled with the echoing of her footsteps as she followed the corridor, which seemed to wind on and on like a river, the columns casting shadows onto the tiles like an endless row of petrified trees. Ofelia felt as if she had been walking for hours when the corridor suddenly opened up into a dark, windowless room.
For a moment Ofelia wondered whether she’d been lost in time and was back in a long-forgotten past. The room looked so ancient under its painted ceiling, but Ofelia didn’t look at the faded images above her head. All she saw was the long table at the center of the room. It was covered with golden bowls and plates filled to the brim with fruits, cakes, and roasted meats, but only the chair at the very end of the table was taken. The Pale Man sat on it, illuminated by the flames dancing in the fireplace behind him.
He didn’t move when Ofelia approached the table. In fact, he looked as if he hadn’t moved for centuries, whereas the food looked as fresh as if it had just been prepared. Ofelia couldn’t take her eyes off all the cakes, puddings, and roasts decorated with fruit and edible flowers, the golden plates reflecting in crystal goblets filled with red wine. Red and gold . . . the whole room was filled with those colors, even the flames echoed them. And the heavenly aromas! They made Ofelia forget everything, even the frightening creature sitting so silently just a few feet away from her in front of his plate.
Only when she reached his end of the table did she remember him. Seeing him up close made her gasp. He was naked, just as the book had shown, his pale skin loosely covering his bones like an ill-fitting shroud. It was a horrible sight, but the worst was his face. Or the lack of one.
The creature’s face was an obscene blank, marred only by two nostrils and a razor-thin mouth—a bloodstained slit framed by heavy folds of sagging skin—and his clawed hands, lying motionless beside his golden plate, ended in pointed black fingertips, the flesh above them reddened by blood.