THE BATS: A NOVEL CHAPTER

(For previous chapters, go to writingunchained.substack.com and click on Archive)

6.

Fumbling for the stairwell light switch, Liana retracted a handful of cobwebs. The stairs were thick with dust and cockroach shells, as if Beatriz had drawn a line when her father decamped to the stables and resolved to clean no further. Reaching the landing, she saw the yellow cat from the garden scramble to the end of the moonlit corridor and vault through a missing window pane.

Halfway down the hall, she came to the door of her father’s studio. The bolts and combination locks she recalled he’d used, as if to bar the host of imaginary intruders and demons he contended with, were gone. It opened easily.

A bare bulb lit the long, musty room. Shelves cluttered with canisters of expired 16mm and 35mm stock emitted their vinegary smell. Dusty piles of VCR cassettes. A strew of light meters, lens caps, viewfinders. His old black 16mm Bolex, a silver Nagra tape recorder. Propped in a corner, a tangle of tripods and kliegs.

Hunkered against a wall like an abandoned sculpture, the massive optical printer on which he’d animated the murals and glyphs of Yaxchilan, Bonampak, Palenque. The hand-cranked Steenbeck flatbed editing bay he’d hunch over, months on end, weaving fragments of the epic drama that had tantalized his dwindling band of devotees.

Lumbering tonnage of outdated equipment. Tools and machines for films nobody makes any more. A museum of loss. She walked over and put her hand on the cold steel of the optical printer. What will happen to this stuff? Will Tío Benito sell it for scrap?

In a corner, a worn colored serape draped the cot where he’d sleep off his manias, or where she and Nico would find him at daylight snoring beside some vagabond youth. Painted cane, battered flak jacket, eye patch. Leather-bound volumes of Cervantes, Hugo, Shakespeare. The bamboo rocker, now unstrung, in which he’d sit and read or doze, a shotgun propped beside him.

A crinkled blowup hung on the wall above the cot. Taken somewhere in the Pyrenees, it portrayed the young family before a dented VW van, six-year-old Liana wearing a pout and a soiled shift she recalled was infested with bugs. Her mother, one hand on her hip, brandished a kitten as if it were a spear. Beside her, a tall young man with hair to his shoulders, an empty gaze, and a thin white cane looked dreamily skyward.

She saw, next to the editing bay, the fat wooden baul, the trunk where her father kept his journals, black Moleskines in which he’d jot his ravings with Rapidograph pens, sketch glyphs and stelae from his field trips. My life, he’d say, is an open book, but the journals are for me alone.

She walked over and tried to lift the lid but it was locked. She looked around for a key - on the editing table, hung from the wall, in the drawer with the splicing equipment.

Closing her eyes, she tried to summon her father’s movements, his fitful habits. She rummaged along the shelf above his cot until she came to a painted Mayan wood bowl in the shape of a coiled snake. Among a miscellany of blades, batteries, and old stamps, she found a silver chain with a pair of keys, one thick and silver, the other small and black and made of iron.

She fitted the iron one to the lock in the baul and turned. Lifting the lid, she saw his journals, dozens of them, lying loosely stacked there.

She shut the trunk and locked it. Returning the key chain back to the bowl, she tried to imagine or recall what the other key, the silver one, might be for.

Backing out of the room, she turned and walked to the end of the corridor where an arched window overlooked the lake. To her left was the door to the former salon of Paola Churchill, the artist and collector who had restored what remained of the old nunnery forty-five years before her parents bought it. The salon had become her brother’s nursery, then his room.

She opened the door. The floor was cluttered with crumpled suitcases and twisted backpacks, deflated air mattresses and torn mosquito nets, empty art frames and broken-legged furniture. Closing the door, she heard the cat scuttle across the roof tiles above her.

She turned back down the hallway and paused before the door of her old room, across from her father’s studio. Opening it, she saw, by the hall light, the painting, still over the bed where she had hung it.

A girl with large eyes sails in an iron chariot over water, holding a cage with a black crow inside, her silver hair braided with whitefish and charales. Gown of fishnet, halo of barbed wire. Below her, a procession of candlelit boats to the island’s grave site.

Crossing the bed on her knees, she lifted the acrylic on board off its nail, scattering a family of crickets.

Why do I feel like a thief?

Then she was certain she heard her father padding down the hallway. His rumbling cough, his hairy legs. She wheeled and waited, staring into the dark, the silence of the night closing around her.

She’d heard him. She swore she had.