6
THE SOCIETAS FRATERNIA, a spiritualist cult that thrived in late-nineteenth-century rural Orange County, was lodged in a three-story wooden mansion in the small town of Placentia, which bordered the north bank of the Santa Ana River. The mansion had an octagonal room at its southeast edge, and this room as well as the long dining room had curved walls to discourage spirits from hiding in corners. In lean years, malnutrition plagued the vegetarian cult—known to skeptical neighbors as “the grass eaters”—and the malnourished dead were buried in shallow graves in the gardens and groves in the dark of night. The cult disbelieved in coffins, but preferred that the decaying corpses return to the earth as hastily as possible, enriching the fruits and vegetables, especially the avocados, which the cult considered its meat.
In 1884, a year of particularly heavy rains, the spiritual leader of the cult, Hale Appleton, ordered an artesian well to be dug in the gardens. The work was done by hand with a three-inch carpenter’s auger, and the gush of spring water that poured forth cascaded twelve feet into the air for weeks following the drilling, flooding the rain-saturated gardens and the neighboring farms with a torrent of mud and unearthed human bones. It was in the winter of that year that Appleton’s own daughter lay near death in the octagon room. …
THROUGH THE SKELETAL branches of leafless trees, the mansion was dim and ghostly despite candles in the windows and oil lamps on the front porch and carriage drive. The late-evening air was chilly, with wind from the northeast, and the night was starry and moonless. Alejandro Solas stood next to his horse, waiting for an escort. He was fortunate to be here at all, at the “baptism” of Appleton’s dying daughter, and so he had to be patient. And there was little doubt but that his stay would be brief. He had an acquaintance in the Societas, who had vouched for him—for a sum of fifty dollars. Shortly, if things went well, Solas would pay him two hundred more. …
Solas knew a little bit about this sort of baptism, but what he knew he had picked up from stories told to him by the vaqueros who worked his father’s ranch in Vieja Canyon—how in the early days drowned children had been buried in seasonal springs during magical rites. The idea of ritual infanticide had intrigued him rather than frightened him, and now, all these years later, he was going to see the ritual first-hand, especially because he had found a way to profit from it. …
The practice had long been suppressed by the church, but several of the magical springs were rumored to exist even now, coming to life in the rare seasons of heavy rain, perhaps once every score of years. It was said that the dying child cast off its memory in the form of a crystal stone, a potent magical object. Solas had seen such a stone himself, in the house of a brujo where his grandmother had taken him as a boy. There had been something about it that had fascinated him immediately, perhaps its murky, animalistic shape like an ancient totem or idol, or the almost greasy feel of the thing, or the faintly garlicky smell of it.
He had found a way to be alone with the object on that strange afternoon, had handled it, even licked it. And while he was there, in the dim evening light, holding the object in his hands, he had seen something hovering like a ghost in the air before him—a vague and glimmering reflection that he could still picture in his mind these fifteen years later. He had seen, cast against the whitewashed adobe of the wall, a broad beach, with the ocean beyond and a ship standing out to sea. He had heard the echoing cry of shore birds, the sound of the breakers, and on the air of the room he had smelled salt spray and the sea wrack drying in the sun of that phantom seashore. …
He was distracted from the memory when a man stepped out of the shadows of the porch and approached him. Solas recognized him, read the uneasy look on his face, and handed him the agreed-upon fifty dollars, then followed him silently around the side of the mansion, past a scattering of wood-and-glass rain gauges and into the yard behind, where two dozen people stood in a circle around a well ringed by a cut granite wall some four feet high. Water bubbled up in the center of the dark pool, agitating a reflected moon and stars and spilling through a rectangular notch cut into one of the granite slabs in the top row of stones. The overflowing water cascaded down into a rock-lined culvert. Irrigation ditches with wooden dams angled off from the culvert, in order to carry water into the gardens and groves when the dams were opened.
A rough wooden box lay on the granite wall next to where Appleton stood intoning Latin phrases, and it dawned on Solas that the box was a small casket. Its lid, hinged like the lid of a trunk, stood open. A man with a burning stick lit an oil lamp that hung from the eaves overhead, and the sudden light fell on Appleton’s dark-bearded face. Solas saw that the man had his eyes shut, as if he couldn’t quite stand what he would see if he opened them. Solas moved closer to the well, past the backs of onlookers dressed in the flour-sack clothing of the cult. In the casket lay the body of the child, emaciated, pale in the lamplight. A rosary had been draped like a wreath across her chest, and within the circle of beads lay several gold coins, which glinted in the moonlight. Another coin was caught in the crook of the child’s elbow.
Solas studied the child’s face, which was composed and natural. Then he saw the child’s eyelids flutter, and he saw that her chest rose and fell with her rapid breathing. The sudden certainty that the girl was alive sent a thrill through him, and it occurred to him that he would be more solidly comfortable if his horse were closer. The necessity for rapid and immediate flight seemed entirely likely. …
Appleton fell suddenly quiet, and Solas became aware of the chirruping of crickets. There was another sound, too, a low moaning noise that he couldn’t at first identify. Then he knew that it was the sound of weeping, and that it issued from Appleton’s own throat. The man was crying now with his mouth closed and his head bowed, as if he were ashamed of his own emotion. He bent over and kissed the nearly lifeless lips, gave a signal with his hand, and two men set the lid of the casket, quickly driving home screws already started in the four corners of the lid. One of the two men now slipped a rope through a pair of iron rings in the end of the box, and Appleton himself tipped the casket over the side of the well, letting it carefully down into the water by the rope. It sank slowly out of sight, inching downward until it came to rest, the rope going slack. Appleton muttered something, and lifted the box off again, working it farther out into the well until it moved past whatever had obstructed it and descended again. He played out what looked to be ten feet of rope before the casket stopped again and he tied the rope to a stake driven into the ground.
He bowed his head as if in prayer, and the rest of the onlookers followed suit. Solas watched their earnest faces, caught the eye of his friend, who nodded at him implacably, as if to affirm that Solas had gotten his money’s worth, which in fact he had not. Very soon he would know that the girl was dead—if Appleton had enough courage to let her drown—but it wasn’t the girl’s death that interested him particularly. As was true of Appleton himself, Solas was interested in the crystalline memory that would live on after her death.
Moments passed while the crowd stood mute and the ripples died away on the surface of the well, leaving the still reflection of starlight on the black water. The night was silent except for the sound of water overflowing the stones, as if even the crickets were waiting. And then the water was suddenly agitated again, and a pale, white light issued from deep within the well, as if someone had unhooded a lantern beneath the water, and Solas heard Appleton gasp. The glow faded slowly, until there was nothing but the dark, calm water again, and Solas thought briefly of the now-dead girl, the shock and fear of drowning in a cold, enclosed space, and he wondered if even that memory, the drawing near of death itself, would find its way into the crystal, and what Appleton really wanted with such a thing, how he thought he could bring those memories to life once again.
With any luck, Solas’s two hundred dollars would very soon deprive Appleton of the chance. Of course, Solas would give him the opportunity to buy it back at a slightly elevated price—an opportunity which, given the circumstances of Appleton’s crime, the man could hardly refuse.