Wachimán
(Halloween Sideshow 2021)
Trevor Ritland
Being a work of fiction, any resemblance to places, people, or local ghosts is solely coincidental. Much of the imagined geography (and some names) are drawn from the cloud forests of Costa Rica, but this in no way implies a haunting of those mountains. This is a work of fiction.
In the milky moonlight, I can see the old man going up the hill in front of me — clothed in blackberry tones that mixed his figure with the night. If the moon were to slip beneath the thin wisps of clouds that drift above, he might disappear forever; not from sight, but from this place entirely. This is not a good road to be on at the witching hour.
The old man is a pig farmer from the other side of San Luis, and why he is going up this hill on this long night I do not know. It may be that he is lost, that he got turned around somewhere on the way into the Quaker colony, and he is now going up into the mountains with no purpose in the deep days of a long October, which even the old rangers would not do. Or it could be that he has some business on the mountain; I have not stopped to ask him, and I won’t for fear of giving him a fright.
It was in this part of the province that I had learned, many years ago, why it is so uncommon to see children from the old town playing in their doorways once the sun goes down; in the long nights of the windy-misty season, in the hills above Santa Helena, the old stories grow fresh legs and begin to wander again.
The earliest accounts come out of the Ochomogo swamp-land, where a collapsing boardwalk runs through miles of uncharted forest. The trails and headings long forgotten, the townsfolk who have lost their way within the twisting paths over the years have emerged with stories of a dark figure hunching among the buttress roots, leaving a deep rut in the thick mud that leads to nothing. There are stories of golden eyes burning in the darkness, sometimes low among the rooty tangles and other times too high above the ground to belong to a man — eyes that do not blink for long hours, thirsty for something that even the great river cannot quench. And of course the stories of the local disappearances, and strange bones found among the chanchos dens.
Some suspect these stories may be the impetus behind the way the early clans abandoned the mountain more than five hundred years ago, leaving the scattered evidence of their inhabitance buried in the red clay like dinosaur bones — speaking to existence, but saying nothing more. In other parts of the country, there are relics of ancient art and monuments, but almost nothing is left anymore in this cordillera; like a great hunger has consumed the heirlooms of local history.
There are different stories, of course, as there are with most things worth discussing. I had heard a few over the light of dimming fires as the cacique bottle made its rounds and the old hands sat up drinking and talking in the early morning. Most are only half-truths, at best, not to be believed any more than stories of gold seams glimmering in caves of the Peñas valley. Many are exaggerations born from alibis, told to hopeful wives by clumsy husbands beguiled at the local bars. But if one were to lay the stories side by side, one might notice a common thread running through the patchwork of tall tales and fables: a character believed to haunt this mountain, that keeps even the oldest Quakers off the roads in the windy midnights of this season.
In the first stories that I heard, they had no name for it — only vague descriptions, conveyed by mostly drunk campesinos that offered little value. The only one to ever get a good look, based on all accounts, was the son of a dairy farmer who had wandered up the hill from his father’s cabin and been lost in the woods — three days later, the fronteras asked the boy to draw what he had seen in the high forest, but his illustrations proved too impressionistic to assess, and he moved down to the coast with his family immediately after (I never heard what happened to the drawings).
Ultimately, the most complete account was a story that I happened to be a part of, through no fault or intention of my own. Though it’s been years now, old women still approach me in the little sodas on warm nights when the Pilsen is flowing and the beetles are humming around the orange lights, asking about what had really happened to the clever poacher in the old days, and why the rangers had closed the danta trail for good. And on some nights, I admit, I will indulge the doñas with my recollections, but when they ask me if I believe the older stories, I always disappoint them; truthfully, the incident with the boy and the wachimán was a strange occurrence on a mountain full of peculiar happenings, and nothing more.
I had come in to the country as the assistant of a butterfly man back in the early 1980s, when the town of Santa Helena was nothing greater than a Catholic church and a few scattered houses, built from the rusted metal sheeting that the miners had left behind when they’d abandoned the dig-sites in the Peñas Blancas valley. I was staying at the house of an old woman while the entomologist lived up the hill below the biological station, close to 1600 meters where the forest thinned and there was little to protect against the driving wind beating against the shoulders of the mountain.
The entomologist was a peculiar man who had wasted away to skin and bones from his long years in the tropics. When I met up with him that October on the mountain, he was commemorating his eighty-second birthday, big white beard tangled into roots. The campesinos might poke fun at him from time to time behind his back, but he had spent enough seasons in town to warrant if not esteem, certainly respect. His reputation on the mountain is the only reason we were not laughed out of the country when we came out of the woods with our story, though I suspect that the whole incident may have soured him on the town, and soured the town on foreign scientists; they never seemed to be so well received after the business on the pantonoso trail.
As best as I can figure it, the whole affair began when an old poacher by the name of Hidalgo-Perez went up and over the continental divide on the trail of a jaguar that had killed one of his nephew’s goats. In those days, you could get a good price for a jaguar’s coat down in Chepe, particularly because they were becoming harder and harder to acquire, and I suppose the poacher thought the whole thing a pretty good business. Apparently, Perez had gone up to the divide the night before to find the tigre’s trail, then come back into town in the morning and hired a local boy out of Cerro Plano to make the run with him. He had given the boy five-hundred colones to carry his big rifle and, if they found the old cat, to carry the skin back into town for him. The boy is the only reason that we knew anything about what happened.
In fact, I had crossed paths with the pair of them the very morning they set out. I was down in town to pick up a box that the entomologist had gotten shipped from the university, and I stopped at the hardware store on my way back up the hill to see about an order that we were waiting on, coming up from Chepe. But the store was dim and quiet when I let myself in, and the old bell cloaked in cobwebs ringing in the dark was the only sound in the whole place. I put the box on the counter and waited for a minute or two, and my eyes adjusted to the dark and I could see that there was a light on in the back room, past the wall of machetes and rubber boots and more spider webs filled with the husks of insects. Not suspecting anything was amiss, I decided I would walk back and see if the clerk was in to ask about the order, and as I drew closer I could hear the sound of voices muffled by distance and the wooden door; I could also see that the cobwebs were growing larger and more expansive, and in the low corner near the doorway, I am almost certain that I observed a rat the size of my boot that had been caught in the web and sucked dry by something I had no intention of ever meeting.
In the back room of the ferretería, I could see the shadows of the old poacher and the clerk moving on the wall, arguing about something in campesino Spanish that was too quick for me to follow. The clerk did not appear to be enjoying the conversation, and he kept repeating “tranquilo, tranquilo…” like he was trying to calm a tiger. The smaller shadow — the shadow of the boy — was motionless on the stone wall, the shape of the poacher’s big rifle leaning on his shoulder.
As I drew closer I could begin to make out pieces of their conversation; in those days my Spanish was not so good, but from what I could follow, the poacher was nearing the end of a story; something about a sight that he had seen on his first excursion over the continental divide, and him wanting something that the gerente had hidden away in the dark basements of the hardware store. As the poacher’s voice rose, the silhouette of the boy began to back away, until his dark twin was lost among the other shadows. The poacher finished whatever argument he was making, and for a long moment there was silence. Finally I saw the clerk disappear into another room and return to hand over a box of rifle shells, and the poacher took them, but he did not look satisfied.
Then the poacher and the boy emerged from the dark room and the clerk pulled the chain on the light, and the poacher did not look at me as he walked past but the boy did, and then they were gone back out into the early morning and I watched them begin to climb the winding trocha leading up into the mountain.
It was not until the next evening that I saw the boy from Cerro Plano again. By the time he found us, the night had grown cold and clear, and if you stepped out onto the porch, you would see your breath rising like a ghost in the sharp evening air. We were eating a late dinner in the kitchen of the biological station up the hill from the entomologist’s house when he came down from the mountain, breathing heavy like he had run the whole way down from the continental divide; if his story is to be believed, I think it is more than likely that he had done exactly that.
There were four of us eating in the kitchen at the station the night the boy came down the hill: the entomologist, the ranger, the farmer who owned the land beside the station, and me. The white florescent light from the kitchen called moths and beetles in from the October night, and the cooks had gone home an hour ago leaving us to lock up when we were finished. The ranger was the one who saw him — a skinny kid of nine or ten wandering in a daze into the light of the porch, swaying for a moment as he peered in through the window (or looked straight into his own reflection), and then collapsing in a heap on the cold rug of the wet grass. We all went out to see him (except for the entomologist, who sat finishing his dinner and watched the whole affair with quiet interest) and the farmer gave him a cup of water and began to clean his face; he was covered in mud, except for two long streaks running down beneath each eye.
“Está muerto,” was all he said at first, looking up to where the mountain rose in a murky silhouette against the deep black sky, scattered with stars. “Está muerto.”
With a cup of tea and a bite of chocolate, the boy was able to slow his breathing, and his right hand, which had been clenched around the pant-leg of the ranger, began to relax. We took him inside and gave him a blanket, and his dark eyes began to focus on the shapes and shadows moving in the room before him. With another bite of chocolate, he began to tell his story.
He had gone up with the poacher to the continental divide along the old Ochomogo trail — an out-of-use but fairly well-remembered sendero that snakes its way up this side of the mountain, not too far from the biological station and the entomologist’s old cabina. It was still early in the day when they reached the top of the divide, where they had stopped to eat some of the salchichón that the poacher had carried in his pack and watch the mist sweep over the crooked spine of the cordillera. From there, they had taken a lesser-known path: the pantonoso trail that cuts down to the river in a steep drop from the divide, into the wilds of the Atlantic slope. By early evening, the ceiling of understory made the forest dark, and the heavy spotlight that the poacher had tasked the boy to shoulder was the only illumination they carried with them. Somewhere in the unmapped Atlantic forest, they found a tapir trail winding off into the dark wet woods and left the pantonoso, as the poacher had determined that the long ruts in the mud indicated that the jaguar had been this way the day before — they were closing the distance.
Their first night in the forest, they made camp and lit a fire near the river, close enough to hear the water singing in the dark, and they encountered nothing out of the ordinary aside from an unusual howling that echoed through the forest at irregular intervals in the night.
The poacher disappeared on the second day, when they had gone another five kilometers down the danta trail in pursuit of the big cat. Their search came to an end when they discovered the carcass of the jaguar tangled in the roots of a walking palm, with no evidence to betray how it had encountered its demise. The poacher spat on the dead cat and knelt down to begin to skin it, and that was when the low howling returned, creeping up from the canyon like a mist.
According to the boy’s account, the old man had left the trail and descended down into the valley with his rifle on his shoulder, leaving the boy to finish the work on the jaguar’s coat. But the boy had not proceeded, and the poacher had not returned — not that morning, nor the evening, nor the next day after the boy had spent another night in the forest waiting for him; a night in which rifle reports had occasionally echoed from the canyon, sending sleeping birds off into the black sky, never to return. In the early evening of the second day, when the boy had run through his stores of salchichón, he worked up enough courage to begin to follow the cut-trail down into the canyon in search of the poacher. Eventually he did find him, and determined that he would have to find his way back to Cerro Plano on his own.
Here, the boy paused in his story, the four of use gathered around him like children at the foot of the priest for communion. He took a long drink of his warm tea and looked out into the night, seeing something in the past that was visible only to him.
“No vi que lo mató,” he murmured.
And that was when I saw the boy’s left hand clearly for the first time, and observed that three of his five fingers were missing; they had been bitten off below the knuckles.
We waited until he had finished his account, and then the ranger took the boy to the washroom to bandage his hand, and the farmer and the entomologist and I went out to the porch to smoke and talk over the situation.
For a long time, nobody seemed to want to speak. We smoked and watched the bugs fly into the lights and the trees blow in the silent wind under the light of a drinking moon. Finally, the entomologist snorted and rolled his eyes.
“The account of an eight-year-old boy from Cerro Plano is not grounds enough for a death certificate from San Jose,” he said. “Someone will have to confirm his story.”
“There is a jaguar’s coat in it for the volunteer,” I said.
“Nonsense,” said the entomologist. “I won’t hear of it.”
“Hay historias extrañas de esos bosques,” the farmer murmured, “pero yo conocía Don Jose. Entonces…” he shrugged, essentially saying “I am not happy about it, but I will go.”
The ranger came out onto the porch, telling us that the boy was sleeping. “El no nos esta diciendo todo,” she said. “Pero, who knows? Nos vamos?”
“Luis is going,” the entomologist replied. “In the morning.”
“Bueno, voy a ir también,” the ranger said; she would have to make a full report to the Reserve. The silence returned, settling over the four of us like we were ghosts beneath a sheet. The entomologist smacked his lips, clearly thinking something over. “Bueno, if you’re going…” he began, “there is claimed to be a species of Heliconius on that slope that has never been documented. If you were to go, I should like for you to keep a look out for it, and retrieve a holotype if you can.”
The old farmer shook his head, considering. “No conozco las Heliconias,” he said. The entomologist frowned, chewing on his beard.
The ranger said, “If you want to look for the butterfly, you have to come with.”
The fire had died in his pipe, so the entomologist re-lit it and shook his head. “I don’t believe it is there,” he said. “But I will go to prove that it is not.” Of course, as his assistant, I understood that I had also been volunteered to join the expedition.
We spent that night at the biological station, and when the sun rose, set off up the Ochomogo trail in search of the poacher. It took some convincing for the boy to agree to lead us back; at first, he had tried to draw us a map, but the ranger said that the trails and landmarks he described were not accurate for the area, and the map was no good to us. In retrospect, I wish now that one of us had kept the drawing, but my guess is that it was taken away in the waste basket at the biological station, as I was unable to recover it upon our return; I should like to look back at it now to determine if it might have anticipated any of the strange occurrences we would encounter on the mountain.
I knew some sections of the trail leading up to the continental divide, as the entomologist would often send me up along the elevational gradients to find a blaze that he had left on one tree or another years ago, but that morning the path seemed unfamiliar, and on more than one occasion we were forced to double-back while the boy found the trail again or the ranger set us on the proper path. The old rope bridge that spanned the little canyon had been washed out by the last year’s rains, a cabeza de agua coming down from the steep slopes like muddy reckoning, pulling down the monuments of the past. So we scrambled down the scar of landslide and back up onto the other slope, and the bootprints in the mud confirmed at least this much of the boy’s account: he and the old poacher had come this way within the last few days, and we were correctly following their trail.
Well enough supplied from the stores of the biological station, we had a quick lunch a little bit below the continental divide, at a place where cold stone from beneath the earth rose up through the soil to form an eerie staircase winding up into the understory. It was no surprise that we were moving more slowly than the poacher and the boy had on gone their ascent — both the entomologist and the farmer were getting on in years — which meant that it would be evening by the time we reached the unknown forest of the boy’s account. In the early afternoon, we reached the continental divide and dropped down into the claustrophobic forest of the Atlantic slope.
Walking behind the boy as the day grew late, I began to observe that his pace was growing more beleaguered and his steps less purposeful. From time to time, he would pause for long periods at a forking trail and consider the alternatives, and when his choice was made, proceed uncertainly as if he was not sure of the way. But I suspect now that he knew the path quite well.
He stopped shortly after the sun went down, explaining that we would not be able to see the tapir trail in the dark; it was recommended that we make camp where we were and take up the search again in daylight. I was certainly willing to take the boy’s word for it — he was the expert, after all — but the others appeared uncertain.
“Chicillo, un poquito mas,” the ranger murmured crossly. “Lo encontraste antes.”
At this challenge, the boy dropped all theatrics. He looked off into the murky trail and shook his head. “Ese bosque no es bueno,” he replied.
“Un poquito mas,” the ranger said, and the gavel of adulthood brought the conversation to a close. We set off again into the dark, spider webs glimmering in the white beams of our spotlights and mist creeping down from the continental divide.
In fact we did not make camp that night, but went on in hopes of finding the old man before morning; I suppose the ranger and the farmer, who had known him, were still hopeful that we might find him only injured, which would soothe the farmer’s worry about his own life and death and preclude the ranger from a lengthy inquiry with the officials in Chepe. As we drew deeper into the strange forest, the boy ceased any commentary on the endeavor; he seemed resigned to point the direction at questionable impasses, then drift back to walk among us as the ranger led the way with her big spotlight. Sporadically, we would flush a prowling mammal from the underbrush or scare up a den of vampire bats that fluttered off into the distant sky to be lost among the black, and once we paused to let a long snake cross our trail, and it felt as though we were waiting for an hour as its twisting body slithered past. Now it is impossible to remember everything, but I am certain there were other strange occurrences that we encountered that night, wandering through the tangled thickets of the unknown jungles.
If the entomologist’s pocket watch held true to its gear train, it was around two o’clock in the morning when we found the danta trail creeping off into the darker forest through a curtain of enclosing lianas — as if it were trying to hide from us. I had never been out this time of night in the tropics, and I found that I did not much care for the atmosphere of the jungle. As we descended down the tapir trail and into the steep canyon, unfamiliar sounds echoed in the dark. Perhaps to combat these uncanny songs, the entomologist began to unspool long stories of his adventures in the tropics, which were mostly embellishments of less-than-interesting events. Still, his voice was somehow comforting in the dark; if not for that, I am afraid that we might have lost our way in the eternal forest; I do not mean to say that we would have wandered from the trail, but perhaps from our world entirely.
The entomologist’s voice stopped when the forest narrowed, closing in around us like great bony hands catching a moth. In the tunnel of the overhanging branches of dwarf trees, I began to see water glimmering in the dim pockets, and I realized that the spider webs had grown to span the empty spaces — the threads were the size of my arm, weaving around thick trees, and from time to time they would shudder with the weight of something large and heavy moving across them somewhere in the shadows. On odd occasions, the entomologist would pause to observe something in the leaf litter, and it wasn’t long before he had only to shine a light on the path to see a parade of insects — millipedes, army ants, tarantulas — moving in the direction that we were headed, drawn to something beyond their power to refuse. Finally we reached the lip of a dark abyss — the canyon that the boy had painted in his tale — and the insects disappeared, winding down into the dark.
It was there that we discovered the carcass of the old jaguar that the poacher had pursued into the ancient forest; its body was folded and contorted in the hollow of a tree, as if something had begun to pull it down into the clutch of roots or whatever else resided in the heart of the old earth. We stood for a short while on the precipice, listening to the sound of water and strange echoes in the dark.
As the others descended down the trail, I stayed with the boy by the warbling creek, and for a long time we sat in silence, listening to the fading monologue of the entomologist and the sound of the wind high in the canopy. After several minutes, I could hear that the boy was crying.
As best I could, I tried to soothe him, though I am afraid I did not succeed; although he was still somewhat high on the slope, in his mind he was in the canyon once more, much too close to the memory than he had ever planned to be again.
I do not know why he told me what he did then; perhaps he felt the need to clear his conscience, young and simple as he was; or perhaps he thought that by telling me, it might compel me to take him back the way we had come — out of the haunted forest and back to the warm glow of his mother’s town. In any case, as the others descended down into the dark and the two of us sat like blind men beside the silvery creek, the boy told a different version of the story than the tale that we had heard the night before.
The way he told it then, he most definitely did see what had happened to the old man, and he had seen what had done it to him — he had seen it very well. But he would tell me only fragments of the memory: a hollow tree where bright eyes glowed like coals; a crumbled graveyard discovered in the tangles of the forest floor; a hunching shadow-shape slouching in the dark.
“Nos esta viendo,” the boy confided. “Como un wachimán.”
He spoke of a deception that had lured the old poacher off the path, of losing the old man in the night, and of finding him again as the criatura moved off into the forest.
“Morning,” the old poacher is reported to have repeated like a mantra through that long night, his voice the husk of a whisper, disappearing into mist. “I only need to wait til morning…”
And that is the way our party found the old man in the early morning light; with his back against the buttress roots of the grandfather tree, empty eyes holding out a broken hope for the light of early dawn. When they called up that they had found him, I descended to see it for myself. His skin was like paper and his body was light, like there was nothing left inside of him. Scattered about were the bullet casings from his rifle — twenty, maybe thirty of them. The boy from Cerro Plano had stayed back, not wanting to lose sight of the trail, because he said that he already knew what we would find and that he had already seen it, and could contribute nothing to the affair beyond what he had already contributed. Over the next day and night, we carried the body back into Santa Helena and entombed it in the mausoleum, brick by brick walling up whatever fragments of the spirit there remained. The boy, we sent home to his mother, for he knew the way, and the last I ever saw of him, he was disappearing in the dark beyond the halo of the streetlight, one more phantom in a windy, misty night.
And that is how I tell the story to the old women at the restaurants, and generally by this time the meseros are turning out the electric lights and pushing brooms across the dusty floors, and so the women are satisfied or maybe a little disappointed, and they say ‘tenkius’ and shuffle off toward home to perform their ablution rituals, leaving me to finish my drink in the warm spring night. And I do not mind that they are disappointed, because there are portions of the story that I do not tell. Most specifically, when I recount the history these days, I do not mention the way that I was lost from the party for a few hours in the midst of our return, stumbling down into the dark but finding nothing, as if I had fallen through into a different forest. I had followed the lecturing voice of the entomologist for a few miles, but each time that I thought I had regained the party, I was lost again among the winding path, and the cut branches from the ranger’s machete soon disappeared and the way was overgrown, though a path still wound like a low snake through the forest. When I did discover the group again, at the edge of the forest not far from town beneath the distant glow of yellow lamplights, they were surprised to find me missing — but it was dark and cold, and they were moving quickly, and I feel no bitterness at their omission.
I do not say that the old entomologist discovered the Heliconius butterfly that he was searching for on the morning of our return, shortly after encountering the body of the poacher in the hollow of the canyon. The way the old man’s face lit up in a holy glow when he laid eyes on the bright colors, the way he tucked it into a wrinkled envelope and tucked the envelope into his pocket, snuffing out the flame of life in the thing he most desired.
And I do not mention that we could find no record of the boy from Cerro Plano in the school or church or municipality, and that even the old gerente from the hardware store would not vouch for the companion of the old poacher that morning he had gone over the lonely mountain.
I do not tell these details to the old women when they ask about the strange occurrences because they contribute little to the story and only offer more uncertainty in an already uncertain tale. To be honest, the memory has grown foggy over the years, and the parts of the story that I do not tell routinely have become difficult to recollect with certainty. They are little more than images now — strange lights in the dark forest, a shadow moving through tangled roots, white bones among the understory glimmering with dew.
The night that we returned to Santa Helena, I walked alone up the winding mountain trail to meet the entomologist for a drink and to go over the particulars of the week’s events. He would be required to make a full report to the Royal Society regarding his fieldwork for the season, and already the accounts were beginning to differ; the ranger had sent a letter up to contest any recollection of the howling that we all had heard the night we found the old man’s body, and the farmer was now insisting that he had seen a black shape moving among the tree ferns beyond the riverbed when we had regained the old danta trail toward town; “Algo siguiendo,” he kept repeating when I had met him at the lechería — something following us, he claimed.
When I arrived at the little bungalow, the entomologist was busy sifting through a warren of boxes that he had pulled out from the old cupboard, some of them almost as old as he was. Outside, rain and heavy beetles flew into the kitchen window and sounded like fingers tapping on the glass, but the warm den of the cabina was dry and golden from the blessings of the chattering fire.
As I helped myself to a drink from the bottle of flor de caña that I knew the entomologist kept beneath the cupboard, I could hear his mutterings as he searched for something in the mess of boxes, and I made my way along the bookcase in an absent-minded recollection of the week’s events. I did not notice right away when the old man’s mutterings had stopped, and it wasn’t until I felt the photograph being placed into my hand that I realized he must have found what he was looking for.
I studied the polaroid — a desaturated image of old church going up in Santa Helena square — without grasping its significance. Behind me, the entomologists was pouring himself a drink to rival mine.
“The boy, beside the church bell,” the old man said calmly, and I squinted at the blurry figure on the left side of the photograph. I nearly dropped by drink before recovering; for a moment, I would have sworn on my good soul that it was the very same child who had led us deep into the forest to discover the old poacher the night before. The resemblance truly was uncanny — but an experience such as ours will bend the eyes to jump at shadows.
“It is Perez — the poacher — when he was a child,” the old man said.
That night, the entomologist informed me that he would be leaving the country for good at daybreak the next morning, returning to the university to display the bright fruits of his labors to the academic world. Before saying my farewells, I assisted him in loading the colorful butterflies into the traveling trunk in the back of the old jeep, river frogs chirping their lullabies and ghost stories in the chilly night. I half-wished that I might keep one of the Lepidoptera secretly for myself, after all the hours I had spent assisting the old man in the wild valley, but they say that curses are imbued for such dishonesty, and I had no desire to add to the weight of what I already carried on my back. I stayed behind in the town after the old man left, like a moth in a spider’s web.
For many years, the little bungalow sat empty, and the local children liked to say that it was haunted; I heard of little bandits going up there in the spring nights to peer in through the curtains to see what the entomologist might have left behind, but I never heard of anything like that occurring in the windy-misty season — in those months, they all steered clear of the mountain. In the dry March of this year, I bought the land and moved in to the old man’s house, and I have not seen anything to prove the stories true — but then again it is only just October and the slow mist is just beginning to spill over the Atlantic slope. In any case, I keep the windows shut at night to discourage curious developments. On the anniversary of his birthday, I have a drink in the old man’s honor. I do not have the photograph any longer; I do not know what became of it.
By the time the old pig farmer had made it to the top of the long hill, the moon had slipped beneath its sheet of cloud. The glass frogs that had been chirping in the chocolate night were silent, waiting for the beacon to re-emerge and wash them in its silver glow. Lost in the turning thoughts of my own reverie, I had scarcely noticed that I had nearly wandered beyond the trail that led down to the bungalow, following the old road as it twisted higher and deeper into the windy jungle. The dark figure up ahead of me had paused in the yawning mouth of forest, looking a long sight taller and thinner than it had before.
And for a moment, when the moon drew partially beyond its cloudy shroud, I saw the deep brown face of the pig farmer transform into the old entomologist who had claimed to leave this hillside more than twenty years ago, his expression frozen in the imitation of a person at once trapped and lost and afflicted by a terrible fear. But soon, the strange illusion vanished, and the old pig farmer lit his pipe and walked on into the darkness, throwing back a windward glance at my dark form in silhouette against the purple sky. Now alone, I turned and descended down the path to the shelter of the bungalow.
When I reached the little clearing and stopped to take my boots off on the porch, I touched the heavy stone beneath which I had discovered, on the 1st of October, a letter from the embassy informing me that the entomologist had died in the crisp embrace of an Oxford autumn, and that he had bequeathed his vast collections to the museums of the Royal Society. I didn’t feel too much at the old man’s passing — not as much as I would have thought, in any case. It had been years since we had spoken, after all, and he had never come back to the mountain after the odd affairs of that last season.
Inside, I lit the lantern and closed the window, settling in for a long night by the fire. Such a peculiar encounter had muddied my perceptions, and I thought it best to end the night before my imagination could solicit any further strange occurrences. Strange indeed; for a moment I was certain that I could see through the hazy glass a pair of amber eyes cutting through the darkness, and could feel on my neck the cold breath of an uninvited visitor that chilled my soft flesh to the bone.
And at once I was struck with an uncertainty as to the particulars of my solitary walk up the mountain on that evening, unsure of which direction I had wandered when I left the valley and cut my way through the darker corners of the old-growth forest. Surely, it had been along the urban path, and up through Cerro Plano beneath the balmy glow of the yellow streetlights, and not on the old tapir trail, among the gravestones of the past in the dominion of the wachimán.
Tranquilo, I murmured to myself, tranquilo; surely, morning would offer all the answers.