'It's nearly eight,' Debbie said. 'I think it's legal to go out to dinner now.'
Glenda felt herself drifting as they sat at dinner, and blamed it on the wine when Debbie commented on her inattentiveness. Things were slipping away from her. Everything seemed unnaturally bright and unreal as if she watched it on a screen in a dark, muffled room.
Once back, Glenda went straight to bed while Debbie wrote a letter to her parents.
'Sure the light won't bother you?'
'I'm sure.' It was an effort to say the words. The room went spinning away from her, telescoping into another world, and Glenda slept.
She woke, her mouth dry. Debbie was a dark lump in the next bed. The shutters were open and moonlight sliced into the room. Glenda felt ragingly hot. With part of her mind she noted that fact and it registered that perhaps she was sick, with a fever. Her own body began to seem as remote to her as everything else around her.
There was someone on the balcony. Now he blocked the light, now he moved and it illuminated him. There was the tightness of terror in her throat, but her mind clicked observations into her consciousness as unemotionally as a typewriter.
He wore a cloak, and some sort of slouch-brimmed hat. Polished boots gleamed in the moonlight, and was that a sword hung at his side? Don Juan? noted a coolly amused voice within her. Come to seduce this Andalusian cutie?
Oh, really?
He made no move to enter the room and she gained some measure of courage from that, enough to raise herself on her elbows and stare at him. If he noticed her movement he made no sign. She sat up then and swung her legs over the side of the bed. The room receded and advanced dizzyingly before it settled into its detached and unreal, but at least stable, form.
He was waiting for her on the balcony. She opened her mouth to speak, to end the joke, to let him know she was awake and that, perhaps, he had come to the wrong window. But to speak seemed a desecration, a monumental undertaking of which she was not capable. He opened his arms to her, that cloaked figure, his face masked by shadow, and waited for her to step into them. She saw herself as if from a distance, a somnambulant figure in a long white gown, long hair flowing, face pale and innocent from sleep, and she watched this figure move into the waiting arms.
She looked up, he moved his head and the moonlight spilled fully across his features. She realized then that it was not Don Juan at all, but another legend entirely: the pasty face, the oddly peaked eyebrows, the parted red lips over which pointed teeth gleamed Her head fell back against his arm, her eyes closed and her sacrificial neck gleamed white and pure.
'Glenda?'
A rush of nausea hit her, she opened her eyes, stumbled, and caught herself at the railing.
'Glen, are you all right?'
Glenda turned her head and saw Debbie — no one else, only Debbie, solid and comforting in pink nylon.
'I was hot,' she said, and had to clear her throat and say it again. She was hot, and very thirsty. 'Is there anything to drink?'
'Part of that litre of Coke from the train. Are you sure you're okay?'
'Yes, yes only thirsty.' She gulped the Coke desperately but it burned her throat. She choked and felt sick. 'G'night.' She crawled back into bed and would say nothing more to Debbie, who finally sighed and went back to sleep herself.
'I hate to leave you alone,' Debbie said, hovering uncertainly at the door. 'How do you feel?'
Glenda lay in bed. 'Really, it's nothing. I just don't feel up to anything today.. But I'm not so sick that I can't make it down three flights to get the manager or his wife if I need something. You go out sightseeing with that nice Canadian and don't worry about me. I'll get some sleep. Best thing.'
'You're sure? You wouldn't rather move to a bigger hotel? So we'd have our own bathroom?'
'Of course not. I like it here.'
'Well Shall I bring you anything?'
'Something to drink. A bottle of wine. I'm so thirsty.'
'I don't think wine well, I'll get you something.'
And finally Debbie was gone. Glenda relaxed her stranglehold on a reality that had become more strange and tenuous with every passing second. She fell.
She was on the street called Death, one of the narrow, cobbled streets bound on each side by houses painted a blinding white. The name of the street was painted in blue on a tile set into one of the houses: Muerte .
The girl had been crying. She was dirty and her face was sticky with tears and dirt. It was siesta and she was alone on the quiet street but she knew that she would not be alone for long. And they must not find her. She knew that she must leave the city for safety, but the thought of wandering alone through the countryside frightened her as much as did the thought of remaining, and so she was at an impasse, incapable of action.
If they found her, they would take their vengeance on her although she had done nothing, was innocently involved. She thought of the past month, of the widespread sickness throughout the town, of the deaths — bodies found in the street, pale and dead with the unmistakable marks upon their necks — and of the fear, the growing terror.
Her mother had taken to staying out all night, returning pale and exhausted at dawn to fall into a heavy sleep. But as she slept she smiled, and the girl, standing by the pillow and smoothing her mother's tangled hair, found the words of the townspeople creeping, unwanted, into her mind. Was it true, what they said, that she consorted with the devil? That her mother with her lover swooped through the night in the form of bats, seeking out unwary night
