Ofelia lifted her hand and watched the blood drip off her fingers. Her knees gave way and she fell by the side of the well, her hand pressed against the wound the bullet had torn, but there was too much blood to hold it back. It painted red patterns on her nightgown and ran down her arm, stretched helplessly over the well. The air rising from its depth cooled her skin, while the blood kept dripping from her fingers, deep down into the womb of the earth.
None of her fairy tales had ever ended like this. Her mother had been right: there was no magic. And she hadn’t been able to save her brother. All was lost. Her breath grew shallow. She shivered: the ground was so cold. . . .
38
His Father’s Name
Vidal found his way back easily. The labyrinth didn’t try to keep him in. He had done what had been foretold, but he was not supposed to meet his fate inside its endless circles. The world outside would take care of him.
They were waiting for him—Mercedes; her brother, Pedro; and the men from the forest. They were marking the end of Vidal’s path with their bodies, standing side by side outside the labyrinth in a half circle that mirrored the stone arch. The moment had finally arrived—Vidal felt as if he’d lived it a thousand times in his dreams. The moment to prove he was his father’s son and to show his own son what a man’s life was all about.
Stepping out from under the arch, Vidal returned the rebels’ hostile glances one by one, until his eyes found Mercedes. She didn’t move as he walked toward her with his son. Pedro was standing by her side. Vidal never knew he’d fought both sister and brother. He held his son out to the woman who had cut—but not killed—him.
“My son.” The world needed to hear it one more time. And the child had to live, for he would live through him, as his father had in him, with every breath he took.
Mercedes accepted the baby. Of course. She was a woman, she wouldn’t harm a child, not even his.
Slowly—as had been the ritual of his life—Vidal took the watch from his pocket and cradled it in his hands. This is it, he thought. The glorious ending. He was ready to step over the edge. Despite his dead soldiers and the burning mill reddening the sky, he felt no fear.
The spirit of his father filled him. Made him whole.
Mercedes stepped back to her brother’s side, the baby in her arms while Vidal stared at the watch’s shattered face, its hands counting away his last moments as meticulously, as it had counted away all the years since his father’s death. He could still hear the ticking, even after he closed his fingers around the silver.
Vidal cleared his throat, eating the fear when it tried to rise, swallowing it. They would see no trace of it on his stiffening face.
“Tell my son—” He took a deep breath. It was not as easy as he’d imagined it, yearning for this moment in front of a mirror, playing with Death, the razor in his hand. “Tell my son what time his father died. Tell him that I—”
“No!” Mercedes interrupted, pressing his son to her chest. “He won’t know your name.”
Blood drained from Vidal’s face. For the first time in his life he felt terror. This was the moment he’d always dreamt—the one he’d rehearsed in the mirror every morning. Honor in death. This couldn’t be going so wrong, it just couldn’t. His mind was racing.
Pedro raised his pistol and shot him in the face. The bullet shattered Vidal’s cheekbone and severed his optic nerve on the way to his brain. There it lodged in the back of his cranium. The entry wound cried a single tear of blood. Such an insignificant wound, but Death was nesting in it.
With a regretful groan, Vidal collapsed at the feet of the men he had come to hunt. And like that, he was gone.
His son began to cry in Mercedes’s arms.
The Boy Who Escaped
Once upon a time, but not long ago, there lived a Child Eater in an ancient forest. The villagers who picked up the deadwood under the trees to get through the winter called him the Pale Man. His victims were so numerous their names covered many walls in the halls he’d built underground, below the forest. He made their bones into furniture as delicate as their limbs, and their screams were the music that accompanied his feasting at the very table on which he’d killed so many of them.
The winding corridors of the Child Eater’s lair had been designed to make the chase more enjoyable. Children could be surprisingly fast, as the Pale Man knew. After all he’d been human himself once, but his murders of children had turned him into something else, faceless and ageless, one of his kind.
Cruelty had been his craft since he was a boy. Even then people called him Pálido, for he didn’t like to be in the sun, so his skin was always as pale as a watery moon. He first practiced on insects, then birds, then his mother’s cats.
He killed the first child when he was only thirteen—his younger brother, who he had both loved and envied.
Shortly after that, he went to work for a priest of the Spanish Inquisition, the terrible tool the Catholic Church used to persecute and kill all those who questioned its dogmas. The priest taught Pálido the most intriguing things about torture and numerous methods to kill, and after three years, Pálido’s skills had surpassed his master’s, so he practiced his skills on him. He consumed the priest’s heart while it was still beating, as he’d read that cruelty could be multiplied by devouring it. And indeed, Pálido felt an even more devious darkness after that meal, his own cruelty enhanced by the priest’s righteousness and missionary zeal.
One night when he’d outdone himself with a victim, Pálido’s own eyes couldn’t bear to watch his deeds any longer. They dropped out of their sockets like overripe fruit and the Pale Man carved holes in his own hands so from then on he could wear his eyes in his palms. At times they could prove to be a great hindrance when he was hunting. Three children managed to escape because his eyes failed him. The Pale Man kept two of their names on his walls nevertheless. But the third he erased. It was the name of a scrawny boy, barely six years old, who he’d stolen from a village south of the forest. Serafín Avendaño. . . . Although the Pale Man chiseled the name off his walls, he could never forget it.
The Child Eater always used a silver dagger with a gold handle for his murders, an instrument of extraordinary beauty and sharpness that he’d owned for more than three hundred years. It had been a gift from the Grand Inquisitor and he kept it, wrapped in velvet the color of blood, in a locked compartment in the wall of his dining room. The Pale Man had never kept where he stored it a secret from his victims. What for? In the end they were all doomed to die.
Serafín Avendaño had six older brothers who enjoyed to chase him and beat him as their father did them, so the boy had learned from a very young age how to run fast to escape. Serafín had slipped out of the Pale Man’s grip as smoothly and swiftly as an eel and, while his captor was reaching for his eyes, the boy had grabbed not only a golden plate filled with food from the bloodstained table, but also the golden key to the compartment in which the Pale Man kept the dagger. It was all Serafín could do for the other captive children who were crying and sobbing in their cages underneath the monster’s dining hall.
The corridor Serafín chose to escape seemed endless and soon he heard his captor screaming behind him. At that moment the boy blessed his brothers, whom he had always thought to be the curse of his life, as he streaked past pillars made from bones that lined the corridor. The Pale Man’s servants cleaned the tile floors every morning, but they had overlooked a trace of blood. Serafín jumped over it—six years weigh so much less than the 353 years the Child Eater had seen—but the Pale Man slipped in it, and while he was on his knees searching for his eyes, Serafín reached the end of the corridor—and one of the many doors through which the Child Eater made his way in and out of the forest.