The boys were murmuring displeasures toward me as we walked, but I was the guest, and they were the perfect hosts. Now that this was the topic at hand, the old wives’ tales and legends started to come out. George said that legend had it that once about thirty or forty years ago, a young bride was abducted from the wedding party and was never seen again. The mansion was abandoned after it became known that the devil had appeared there one night, and nobody ever went there again. I told him it was 1923 specifically, and he was taken aback, asking me how in the world I even knew.
That was when I started relaying the information I had gotten from my father, and I made them swear that we did not come up to the old building. I told them that if they told their father, he would tell mine, and so on and so forth, up until the ass whipping I would get when I got back to Tucson. Plus, I didn’t want to hurt my pops. He was my hero, and disappointing him just wasn’t what I wanted to do. But nothing can ever trump my curiosity; I just had to see for myself.
The old dance hall had been in the latter stages of decay for many years now. For George and Albert, there just wasn’t any interest, and they were just waiting for me to get my fill so we could leave.
I walked about imagining the people consumed in the evening’s festivities, even conjuring up the stranger coming in the front door. It was when I walked into one of the side rooms, which might have served as a restroom facility, that I felt the chill creep up my back. Here I was standing in a room with the sun starting to creep toward the horizon that I became a believer in my dad’s story.
I looked the room over and then approached the window that would have been the escape route for the stranger, and there it was on the wall. The handprint that was very faded and barely recognizable unless you were looking hard for it. I called to my friends, but they were starting down the hill, beckoning me to hurry up. The print was becoming more defined in my mind the longer I stared at it. The fingers were longer than normal, and the palm area was wider than the average man’s hand.
This print was not there when I went out and demanded the boys return and see what I had found. They told me I was crazy and seeing things and that we should start heading back. I felt an uneasiness as we started outside, and I couldn’t explain it.
I told them to go ahead and that I would be along very soon. I had to walk around to the window that my dad had said he was looking into the dance from. There I crouched down, trying to get a feel of what he might have felt that night. Like a gift from the beyond, the evening came to life in my mind, and I saw the young bride and groom swirling around the dance floor.
That was when the man in black appeared in his coach, and he was dressed like my dad described him to me. I was starting to become very frightened even though it was just some type of imagined vision that was transparent.
I soon became convinced that it had to be more than that when the man in black looked my way with the coldest eyes I would ever come to know in my life. I got up and ran toward my friends who were halfway down the hill already. They asked me why I was as white as a sheet and poked fun, saying that I must have seen a ghost. Apparently, I just had.
We got back to George’s house and washed up for dinner, putting on some fresh clothes and sitting down to eat more wonderful food. This food can’t be had in the United States, and I can’t explain why. It is just different; maybe it’s the water. I never got sick down there.
Dinner complete, appreciation expressed, we headed for the streets. The usual suspects and more fun were waiting for us.
Chapter 14
The Wise Woman Lupe
As Albert told the boys what we had done that day, they were shocked to learn that we had visited the old mansion. One boy, in particular, perked up, and he became very interested in the tale.
I said that it was my idea and that I had heard an old wives’ tale. The boy Sergio gave me a look I wouldn’t forget. He told me he wanted to take me to his grandmother’s house so he could introduce me to her. I told George and Albert that I would be back soon and that we would catch up with them at the nearby park. They told Sergio to be real protective of me and to be back soon.
As Sergio and I walked to his grandma’s house, I asked him who his grandma was and why he thought it important that I meet her. He said to wait and everything would be a little clearer. He mentioned that Albert had told him I had a keen interest in the legend of the dance hall. Apparently, Albert and George never spoke to Sergio on this matter, and Sergio never spoke of the legend to anyone. It was just a couple of blocks away in an older station of homes where his grandma’s humble adobe home awaited us. The home was dimly lit, and it was evident that the people were of very modest means.
Grandmother Lupe was about ninety-some years of age, and her eyes were glazed over with advanced cataracts. She came from a mountain town in Sonora that was called Rayon. I had heard of it because my grandmother was from those parts, but her family left there when she was a little girl.
The old woman asked for my hand so she could get a sense of me, because her eyes could only produce a blurry image. Upon our touch, she gasped and squeezed my hand so hard it hurt a bit. She had me sit and then commenced to tell me a story. She came right out and told me that I had seen the man at the old dance hall on the hill.
I was shocked that she would come out with that, but I said that I had and asked how she knew. She continued by telling me that she was there at the wedding party in 1923 and that the young bride was her niece. She told me that she had noticed the man in black grab the hand of her niece and lead her out of the main room into the powder room. Sensing that it was an inappropriate situation, she followed after the two.
As she peered into the room, it was at that very moment the stranger was leaving through the window with the young girl draped over his shoulder. The stranger grabbed the wall on his way out, turning to give Lupe a demonic glance she would never forget. Lupe fainted right there in the doorway; she was so traumatized that it took two days for her to come to, with her memory unclear as to what she had seen.
As the days went by, her memory started to compose itself to the point of telling a story that the townsfolk thought her to be suffering some sort of delirium. As she described to the townsfolk her recollection of the man in black, some characteristics were deemed too insane, too supernatural for them to believe. Thus, she was labeled a loon and was never paid another mind. She went on to tell me that there was one man who had contacted her and believed her story.
Nobody put any faith in this man because he was the town drunk. A year had passed when this drunk sought her out. He had since dried out and had something to tell Grandma Lupe. It just so happened that he was outside the dance hall on the other side of the building from where my father was lurking in the bushes. He was back in the shadows sitting under a wagon, nursing a bottle of tequila. He saw the man with the young girl as they had just exited the window, and what he saw next was the eventual reason for his stopping the booze.
As he talked to Lupe, telling her the story, tears welled up in his eyes, giving Lupe the sense that everything he was saying was the truth. What he swore that he saw was that the man in black and the girl seemed to have penetrated a veil on the road, like crossing a dimension. There one second and gone the next. Lupe was not buying the story and sent him on his way with a few pesos for more liquor or whatever he fancied. As the years passed, she started having second thoughts about the old drunk and the manner in which she discharged him. She began asking around the town as to his whereabouts.
The events of the wedding night plagued her mind, and she started coming around to the old drunk’s story and felt she needed to hear more. As fate would have it, he had been brutally murdered, and the crime was never solved. Now she was the sole keeper of the vision they called the stranger in black.
Sergio and I decided it was time to get back to our friends in the streets. As we stood to leave his grandmother’s house, the old woman reached for my hand and gripped it tightly.