Ghosts of Infinity: and Nine More Stories of the Supernatural Read Online Free PDF Page B

a little powdered milk for the baby. If it weren’t the Japs come to demand all the meager food we had managed to scrimp, it would be guerillas who carted off the few chickens I had. You couldn’t stop worrying and being afraid. The servants all left and I was alone in that big house, with an infant.”
    “You were alone?” I repeated. “Were you able to protect yourself against the ghosts?”
    This time Lola Concha let out a chuckle. “Those war years were probably the most quiet I’ve had in that house. Not a peep, not a single movement all that time. Suddenly, the house was totally, undeniably empty. My fear changed from being otherworldly to real terror at the thought that my baby and I would not survive.”
    “One day, a truck full of Japanese soldiers drove up and pushed Norman and me out into the streets with nothing, not even giving me time to collect a single baby bottle. Some friends took pity on me and for a while we shuffled from home to home. Things got so bad I had to collect wild yams from the fields, walking miles every day with a baby in my arms, to try to sell them at the market. The house was used as an officers’ quarters and every time I passed by how I wished the ghosts would return and drive those scoundrels clear mad—the only time I ever wanted their presence, and so badly at that.”
    Lola Concha cleared her throat and went on. “The hardship and the suffering seemed to go on forever. My baby, who had been sickly even before the war, was a heartbreaking sight—so thin and covered with sores from malnutrition.”
    Lola Concha’s voice wavered. “I lost him halfway through the war. I wasn’t able to save him; one morning I woke up and beside me he was cold as ice. Oh, my Lord.” She took a deep breath, and on reflex, I reached out to touch her hand.
    A long moment passed, the shadows on the floor grew longer and more sounds tinkled in—dogs barking, vendors rattling their carts on the way home.
    “Lola.” It was now or never. “They say that…”
    “That I killed my husband,” Lola Concha said in a faint voice. She looked up at the altar. “I think I did, hija.”
    I couldn’t speak. I felt her hand on mine; it was dry and light as paper.
    “I did see Nando again, after liberation. The Japanese fled from the city and I ventured inside the house again, spent a whole week scrubbing it of their reek. Then Nando showed up, almost unrecognizable, the skin so tight on his head he looked like a skull. He had shrunk so much that I was able to dress him up in a pair of my pants.”
    “When I saw him I started wailing about Norman, but he pushed past me without a word. I couldn’t even get him to talk about what he had gone through. Eventually, he said that he had gone to the mountains after the surrender, and joined a guerilla unit.”
    Lola Concha gripped my hand. “I hated him so much, child,” she said, shaking her head and shutting her eyes tightly. “I couldn’t understand how he could fight for his country and not for his family. I flung all the blame to him—I believed that had he returned, our son would still be alive.”
    “I resented his long silences, how he sat in a chair all day long and stared into space, when I couldn’t even indulge in my own suffering because still, there was a house to be kept, chores to be done, as if hell hadn’t come and scorched us all raw. All I thought about was that my son was dead. He had died without a father.”
    “He wouldn’t go back to work, so I struggled to live on the small pension they sent to soldiers after the war. What was unbearable to me was that he never mentioned our son, never asked about how he died and where I had buried him.”
    “It’s true what they say,” she whispered, “that I neglected him. Eventually I couldn’t look at him in the face without wanting to spit at him, and I moved to the other wing and left him in the maid’s care. It was as if time stopped in that house. I wasn’t even aware of how