Home > All the Crooked Saints(12)

All the Crooked Saints(12)
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

The house Pete was to stay in had originally housed Daniel Lupe Soria’s family, although it would have been difficult to identify it as a family home now, because it had since been divided into tiny apartments. Inside it was dark and cool, smelling of unfamiliar foods and years of woodsmoke.

“Kitchen,” Antonia said, by way of tour. “Clean up after yourself.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Water closet,” Antonia said, opening a door. “Clean up after yourself.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“These rooms have pilgrims in them, so obviously don’t enter without an invitation,” Antonia said, gesturing to the four doors along the hall that stretched the length of the home.

“Yes, ma’am.”

To prevent stuffiness in the house, all of these doors were open, and so in this way, Pete met the pilgrims who shared the house with him.

In the first room was Jennie Fitzgerald, a slight young brunette woman who waved at him as they passed.

“Hello,” said Pete.

“Hello,” said Jennie.

He didn’t know it, but he’d just heard the result of her first miracle. It had left her with the inability to say anything but what other people had already said. She was the most obviously determined of the pilgrims to remove the darkness from herself. Since her first miracle, she had spent her days actively seeking conversation with others. Her conversation partner would speak first and then Jennie would try to reply in her own words, executing invisible techniques in an attempt to do more than simply echo. So far, the only success she’d had was in making the other pilgrims dread conversation with her, which was too bad, because she really was a nice young lady.

Pete nearly did not see the pilgrim in the second room they passed, as he blended in with the shadows of his room so well. This was Theldon Bunch. The first miracle had left him with moss furring his entire body, and now he spent his days either in the rocker in the corner of his room or under the shaded patio beside the house, reading fat paperback novels that the postman brought from Alamosa. He had the same amount of moss covering his skin as he’d had the day the miracle had created it, and he did not appear to be doing anything to combat it.

“Hello,” Pete said to him, but Theldon Bunch did not look up from his book until after Pete and Antonia had already passed.

The third room contained the glamorous California twins, Robbie and Betsy, who, after the miracle, were corded together by an enormous black snake with a head at both ends. It tangled their feet if they took too many steps away from each other, but it also snapped at them if they sat too close for too long. If one side of it was attacked, the other side came to the rescue. If it was fed constantly and kept at a continuously acceptable tension, they could carry on without noticing it. The twins had arrived at Bicho Raro alternately fighting and clinging, and remained thus. It had occurred to Beatriz, at the very least, that the solution was for a twin to hold one of the snake’s heads while the other twin killed the second head, but of course she could not suggest such a thing. So they continued to complain that the snake was too strong for them to battle on their own, and lived with it wrapped around them both.

“Hello,” Pete said to them.

He was turned slightly more toward Robbie, so the snake head nearest Betsy jealously snapped at him. Pete’s heart leaped first, and then his body leaped second. His back hit the hallway wall and his hand slapped his dangerously shocked heart. Betsy drew the snake up short.

“So sorry,” she said, but she was looking at Robbie as if it were Robbie’s fault.

“Sure, that’s okay, miss,” Pete said, although he wasn’t sure if it really was. “I’m Pete.”

“Pete,” Betsy repeated, but she was looking at Robbie as if this, too, were Robbie’s fault. Robbie refused to look at her; they were fighting.

“Wyatt,” Antonia said, farther down the hall.

“So long,” Pete told the twins, and caught up.

Antonia had not spoken to any of the pilgrims they had passed. Pete was remembering how the Sorias had ignored him as he’d knocked on their doors and he was thinking about how now she was ignoring these people, and he was thinking it was pretty rude. He was too polite to say anything about it, though; he just kept looking over his shoulder at the three rooms they’d passed.

Antonia was no fool, so she stopped before the final room and put a hand on Pete’s shoulder.

“You are thinking I’m a pig.”

“No, ma’am.”

“You are. I can see it on your face.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Now you’re being a liar and thinking I’m a pig, but that’s all right. I understand. We have rules here, Pete, but they don’t have to do with you. We Sorias must be careful with pilgrims; if we interfere with them after the first miracle, our own darkness will come down on us, and that is a terrible thing that no one would like to see, worse than any of their darkness. So that is the first rule: only room and board for the pilgrims, no other conversation, because you don’t know what will help them. Rule two, if you want a wife or you want a husband, you go outside Bicho Raro. Love is a dangerous thing already, without a pilgrim in it. Rule three, only a saint performs the miracle, and no one else around, because you don’t know when the darkness will bite like that snake you just saw. These are the rules.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Pete said. He wasn’t sure what he was expected to say, as he was not a Soria and the rules didn’t apply to him, but he also could see that it was a grave issue and wanted Antonia to see that he realized this.

“That’s why I’m not talking to the pilgrims,” Antonia said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s not because I’m a pig.”

“No, ma’am.”

“That’s why no one came to talk to you, because we thought you were a pilgrim.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m telling you because all of the pilgrims know, and you should, too, so that you know what a Soria will or won’t do, and you know we’re not being rude.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Here’s your room,” Antonia said, closing the distance to the final doorway. “Clean up after yourself.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Pete said.

Antonia leaned toward the room but did not look inside it. “Padre, this boy will be your roommate. He can have the floor.” She was walking away before she even finished speaking. “Come find Michael or myself when you’re ready to work, Wyatt.”

The final room in the hall belonged to Padre Jiminez, a priest from northern Colorado. He was as benevolent and friendly and holy as you’d hope for a priest to be, so long as your skirt didn’t blow up in the wind. The first miracle had left him with the head of a coyote but the hands of a man. He used the first to gobble up rabbits and the second to fasten on his white collar each morning. He did try to vanquish the darkness, but he could not stop his coyote’s ears from pricking when a pretty girl came to Bicho Raro.

When Pete stepped into the doorway, Padre Jiminez was sitting at the end of a narrow mattress. The bed was made up as tidily as a business envelope, and there was nothing else in the room but a small table with a lamp on it and a cross hanging on the wall. At this sight—the spare decor, the coyote-headed man, the grimly made bed—Pete suddenly felt a second shock through him. This one was not surprise but homesickness, an understanding of how far he was from Oklahoma in every way, a fear that his plan was nothing but smoke tricks to fool himself into feeling better. The ferocity of this emotion sent an additional wave through his heart, and for the first time, Pete really believed that Pete the doctor may have been onto something, and that was a leash that felt shorter.

And so it was a somewhat more feeble version of Pete that Padre first saw—some might argue a truer version, if they are one of those who believes we are only as strong as our weakest moments. Luckily for Pete and for many people, Padre Jiminez was not one of them.

The priest leaped up and loped across the room to Pete. “Welcome, young man,” he said. He had a very crisp enunciation, because he had to work hard to get the words out around his sharp canines and lolling tongue. “Welcome, welcome, welcome!”

   
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