The Rainy Season by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page B

walk at the edge of the grove, stopping for a moment before stepping warily out onto the path. He climbed the few feet to the top of the creekbank and looked out over the flat, rocky expanse of the arroyo, which was empty now, the two boys having made their way into the dense brush that covered the marshy land beyond the creek itself. Stands of wild bamboo and willow rose out of low-lying mud flats, a tangled confusion of dense foliage that stretched for a mile or more east until the creek narrowed again above the regional park. The chase was obviously over.
    He felt suddenly like a fool, standing in the wind and rain, his house unlocked behind him, a woman wearing his shirt lurking around the property. He paused for a last moment, looking up and down the path in the dwindling moonlight. Sixty or eighty yards to the west a eucalyptus windbreak grew up along the edge of the path, and near the dense jagged shadows of the night-dark trees there was a sudden furtive movement, as of someone stepping out from among the trees and then immediately back in again.
    Recalling the shadowy figure he had seen earlier up ; by the road, Phil backed into the deeper shadow of the grove, where he stood hidden from view, watching the path, which was empty now where it curved around and followed the creekbed downstream. Raindrops rustled | the leaves overhead, and the wind sighed through the tree branches. He was certain this time that it hadn’t been his imagination, that someone was in fact hiding J among the trees …
    But he was in no mood for a chat with a lurking | stranger, not on a night like this, not under circumstances like these. He turned and walked back into the grove, suddenly tired and feeling the cold in his wet jacket.

Mission San Juan Capistrano
1884

10
    COLIN STOOD IN the shade of an arched corridor in the Mission San Juan Capistrano, leaning against adobe brick plastered with coarse white mortar, waiting for Father Santos to return. Through the sparse foliage of the pomegranate and apricot trees in the gardens he could see the ruins of the old mission, which had fallen to an earthquake in 1812. There had never been more r than two priests at the mission, which by now, in 1884, was a place of faded grandeur. Seventy-five years earlier the mission had been home to over a thousand people, most of them Juañeno Indians, but in the second half of the century it had begun to fall asleep, and now the grounds were quiet, nearly deserted. Colin could quite easily imagine himself tending these gardens, rising early for matins, living out his days in this quiet sanctuary.
    But it was no longer possible for him to live alone. He had fallen in love with Jeanette almost without realizing it over the past six months. Alejandro Solas had loved Jeanette, too, if it were possible for him to love anyone, and his failure to impress her had been a blow to his vanity. To Colin’s mind, Alejandro’s hitting Jeanette had partly been a response to that failure.
    The priest appeared in the doorway now, and gestured for him to follow, and Colin entered the chapel, descending stairs into a dim cellar. Heavy candles burned in wall niches, and the still air smelled of wax and dust. In the cellar wall stood an arched door built of heavy boards cleated with iron bars, and the priest unlocked this door and continued through. There was the sound of water gurgling somewhere below, the smell of water on stone, and a growing brightness. At the base of the stairs they entered a room that was roughly circular, its walls apparently cut out of natural stone, as if this were a natural cavern, atop which the chapel itself had been built. There were narrow shafts of sunlight through deep skylights, one of which fell on a pool in the stone floor of the room. Water bubbled up into the center of the pool, and ripples perpetually lapped across the slightly angled floor, but the level of the water remained constant, and most of the floor was dry. Moss grew on the sunlit