The night the first trace appeared on the sanatorium’s tile, Matthew was returning from checking that the infirmary wing was closed. At first glance, the tile was nothing special: a simple continuation of the floor that the nurses, the Prior, and the various patients disdained underfoot. However, for Matthew, it became the object of an absurd and ominous vigil. The most important of his tasks, besides keeping watch over the sanatorium at night.
The Prior, whose breath was like incense, swore it was a work of miracles. He claimed that, from time to time, draws not traced by any human hand appeared on its surface, becoming divine warnings for the sanatorium itself or the rest of the town. Of the previous watchmen, only one lasted three months. They all disappeared.
But Matthew didn’t even believe in his mother, who had given birth to him in a stable, and when he was ten years old and fever enveloped him like a shroud, she sold him as a servant to the first gentleman she came across. Too many mouths, she explained, when in reality, there was only hers. Matthew remembered the fever, the stench that seemed to seep from within, as if death had nested in his lungs. Or perhaps it was his mother’s rotten teeth.
He escaped slavery at eighteen, and for the next few years, he wandered until he ended up in the sanatorium, with the ridiculous mission of staring at a blank tile every day, at any hour. In exchange, he was given a bed and food. For this task, he had been assigned an oil lamp. He could never extinguish it. The Prior told him it was the only way to return to the sanatorium if he got lost at night while returning from the village with supplies, and to avoid the lake. He was to stay away from the lake. May he be like a mouse, silent, in the corners, so as not to disturb the sick. And may he be attentive to the blessed tile.
Therefore, when the first trace appeared, Matthew stared at it in disbelief. At first, he thought someone had scratched it. He bent down and, lifting the lamp, discovered a design executed with the beauty of a craftsman. Matthew, for the first time in his life, felt a lurch in his stomach. He moved the lamp away. The tile shone distantly, polished, like its sisters. Matthew rubbed his eyes and illuminated the stone again. The design had acquired more nuances.
A horse with a long mane, ridden by a beautiful woman, splashed along the shores of the lake. The woman held aloft a lamp. Identical to his lamp. Matthew moved away and sat on the ground, not touching the flowers surrounding the tile. He breathed heavily. The lake did not have a good reputation. There, lovers, children, the elderly, and those in debt drowned. The woman riding would die of cold. She would die of grief, of misery. She would die of love. And she was carrying Matthew’s lantern.
The man jumped up and, with beads of sweat tracing erratic paths on his body, left the sanatorium. He made sure to lock the door and ran off the grounds. He had to warn the maiden that the lake wasn’t worth the effort. He would guide her safely home with his lantern. Matthew ran cross-country as fast as he could. Soon he felt the pang in his right side. His legs gave way, he tripped, and fell face first onto the ground. The lantern slipped from his hands, and he heard the sound of breaking glass.
“No, no!” he moaned as he dragged himself along. If he picked it up in time, he could save the flame. “Shit, no!”
However, the fire died with a sigh against the damp earth. Matthew knelt in the middle of nowhere. He looked this way. Trees, undergrowth. He couldn’t see the town or the sanatorium. The Prior told him his lamp couldn’t be extinguished or he wouldn’t return. However, a shimmering light caught his attention. A bright spot against the blackness of a moonless night. Matthew stood and, like moths drawn to their deaths, followed the glow until his feet were soaked up to his ankles in water.
He looked down. He could see the ripples of the liquid. He was on the lake’s shore. A light illuminated him on his right. Matthew raised his head and saw a white horse with its braided greenish mane, reed-like. The maiden was on the beast’s back. She wasn’t frozen to death. She didn’t seem to be dying of love. She looked down at the man and smiled. She leaned forward, her flowing clothes fluttering in the breeze. She offered her lantern to Matthew. Identical to the one that had died in the grass a few steps back.
“Are ye right, miss?” he asked, recoiling from the outstretched light. “You ain’t from these parts, are you? The lake’s no place safe. You ride a noble beast, aye, too fine for these shores. Turn back, I beg you. Maidens such as yourself ought not wander over here.”
The woman bowed her head and held out her hand with the lantern. Matthew held it and understood that she wished him to guide her to the village. Inside the glass, next to the flame, was a gold coin.
“There’s no need for coin, m’lady, I . . . I ask for naught but your safe return . . . ”
Matthew’s last words disappeared in a sigh. The lady and the steed were gone. He didn’t even hear the clatter of the animal’s hooves on the shore. He looked at the waters. Anyone could mistake the stars reflected in the pond. Silence. Matthew sighed. He raised the lantern and, in the distance, glimpsed the sanatorium tower, where before he couldn’t even see her hands. He resigned himself to the fact that the lady had died of love. He approached to some wildflowers, plucked them, and threw them into the lake. He watched them float for a moment. He didn’t believe in anything, but he offered a prayer that her soul would travel safely to heaven, because a beautiful lady didn’t deserve such a cruel death.
Matthew returned safely to the sanatorium thanks to the new lantern. In his room, where there was a soft bed, water, and a bowl of fresh bread, he removed the coin from inside the lantern. It was cold. He put it back where it was. The flame didn’t go out.
Three days later, the boy appeared. He caused a stir in the village. Matthew, who had been gazing at the blank tile that morning, saw them enter the sanatorium with the little boy in their arms, wrapped in burlap blankets. He saw only his brown hair and a tiny arm that dangled lifelessly. One of the nurses stopped beside him to hurriedly inform him:
“Matt, hasten to the kitchens and bid them prepare boiling water, swiftly now! They found the little one upon the shore of the lake . . . His lips are blue like the dead, and his eyes are blank, staring into nothing, barely breathing. Wounds mark his arms, as though he had clawed his way from the depths. Poor thing! He must have been playing nearby and fell in.”
“And none can say whence the poor wretch came?” Matthew inquired.
“Do not ask! None who enter that lake emerge alive. That alone should suffice. Now, to the kitchens, quickly!”
Matthew obeyed. He helped the cook carry rags and hot water to the sick wing. He never liked the place. Most of them stank worse than his mother’s mouth; there was the stench of urine, feces, and the same dead smell he had at ten years old when his mother had sold him. The sick was wrapped in bandages. They complained with sighs and stifled cries. The leprous patients were separated by curtains.
They had placed the boy in one of the new beds. As soon as the water arrived, the nurses removed his soaked, reed-strewn clothes to begin washing him. The little boy half-opened his large, dark eyes and looked at Matthew. Not at the Prior praying beside him, not at the women struggling to keep him alive. At Matthew. He didn’t like their long-lashed gaze. Matthew excused himself to the staff and returned to his rounds.
In three days, the boy was already standing. He didn’t speak. The nurses said it was because of the trauma. They estimated he was about five years old. The Prior decided to leave him in Matthew’s care.
“Let him accompany you on the rounds, show him how to read the tile, and understand its design. He may lend his efforts in the fields, and in the kitchens as well. By daylight, he shall also assist in the infirmary. It is a miracle he yet lives, having emerged from that cursed lake,” the Prior said, and solemnly tracing the sign of the cross. “Who can say whether some dark intent sought to cast away that poor soul, a child who has offered the world no harm, and yet bears the mark of its cruelty?”
Matthew didn’t say that he doesn’t like the presence of his new assistant. They had set up a bed, almost a straw nest, in his room, with extra water and bread. The boy, with eyes as large and fixed as a fish’s, would sit there staring at Matthew’s bed. He would spend hours in that position. The man had trouble sleeping if someone watched him like that, unblinking, completely silent, motionless.
However, afterward, the warden had no complaints about the boy’s performance: in the mornings, he went to the fields. He helped in the kitchens peeling tubers. He carried clean clothes and bandages to the sick wing. At night, he wandered beside Matthew until they finished their shift by the blank tile, which hadn’t drawn anything. They returned to the room. The man lay down on his bed. The boy looked at him.
One morning, Matthew woke up because of the screams. He tossed and turned, searching for a club he always kept under his mattress, skimmed the surroundings, but the boy wasn’t there. He left the room without bothering to remove his nightgown and followed the hysterical cacophony: he led him to the infirmary wing.
Gathered around a curtained bed were the nurses and the Prior. They were crying with joy; he was saying a prayer. Matthew peered into the crowd. The sick man, a leper they hadn’t counted on, was sitting up in bed. The boils were dry; there was no pus on the sheets. And, sitting at the foot of the bed, was the boy.
“He’s a saint, Matt,” one the nurse sobbed. “The boy is a holy healer!”
Matthew looked at the boy with reservations. The boy returned a languid look. A mirror of onyx at night. His expression, tinged with melancholy, was the same as always. His enormous eyes reminded him of something, but he couldn’t say what. The boy got out of bed and, amid the praise of others, left the infirmary wing. Matthew followed him to the field. There he saw him tending the crops. Nothing seemed abnormal about him. Except for his gaze, that he had survived the lake and had miraculously healed a leper.
In the following days, the boy continued to work miracles. In the morning. In the afternoon. The boy would abruptly change activities, going to the sickroom, walking among the beds amid the reverent silence of each of its occupants and nurses. He would choose a bed and sit at its foot. The next day, the sick man was cured and kissed the boy’s hands.
The sanatorium became a place of worship. In the village, anyone with the slightest illness would come there to ask for the child’s touch. But him avoided them and took refuge in Matthew, in his tasks. He didn’t perform miracles on request, Matthew realized.
One night, after his rounds, Matthew woke up with his mouth dry. The oil lamp that never went out was covered by a cloth. He uncovered it and lit the room. The child wasn’t there. He couldn’t go back to sleep. He looked for the cudgel, left his room, and went to the tile floor. It was blank.
Then, he heard footsteps. Slow. Ominous. He managed to see a fragment of a distorted shadow against a wall. He raised the oil lamp and went in search of the intruder. Until he heard the scream from the infirmary. Matthew ran with the oil lamp in his hand, but lowered it when he saw the three nurses standing in front of a bed, each carrying a candle.
Matthew peeked between them. The child was sitting at the head of the bed. There was no sick person, even though he remembered him. It was a young boy with green eyes. The Prior said that if he continued to improve, he would be able to leave soon. But at that moment, no one was there. Only the water-soaked bed, a gold coin on the mattress, and the boy sitting at the head of the bed with his blank expression.
“Where is he?” the nurse implored to the boy, who was staring at the coin. Matthew leaned a little closer among the women. His mouth grew drier. “Speak, blessed child, tell us: where is Julien? Has he come through the fever? Did he break the final sweat? Where is he?”
The boy didn’t speak. He looked at Matthew, as if he were his accomplice. And, in a way, he was: the gold coin on the mattress was identical to the one he kept in the lantern the lady at the lake had given him.
“Maybe he didn’t want to cause a fuss,” another nurse opined. “Julien was very quiet, but, look, he even paid! Blessed, blessed! This will help us with the other sicks.”
Matthew wanted to touch the coin. To see if it was as cold as his. A nurse went ahead and put the money in her apron. The boy continued with his constant gaze, a presence of omens.
“Gather the sheets,” one of the women instructed Matthew. The sick people nearby had woken up with the commotion. They murmured. They wondered where the gold coin had come from. “Throw them on the floor. Don’t worry about the straw on the mattress. We’ll fix it in the morning. Let’s go tell the Prior.”
Matthew nodded. However, he remained at the foot of the bed, while the boy remained at the head. Matthew raised the lamp from the lake. And the shadow the boy cast over the wall was that of a huge, high-withered horse with a mane that seemed to dance in an invisible breeze.
The man started and almost dropped the lamp. The boy slowly raised both hands in an innocent gesture, as if trying to play peekaboo. He covered his face with them, palms facing Matthew. And, in the lantern light, in the folds of the child’s flesh barely marked as traces without paths, Julien’s green eyes opened, crystallized. Dead. A black fly landed on his right pupil, inert as a dot of ink drawn on a parchment.
Matthew could barely breathe. He didn’t believe in nothing, but now trembled. He couldn’t ignore the living shadow of the horse against the wall; Julien’s eyes in the palms of the boy healer’s hands. He stepped back, terrified. He let out a stifled groan and left the infirmary, the lamp swinging precariously in his hand. No oil spilled. The gold coin rattled inside the glass.
He said nothing to the Prior, or to the nurses, because no one would believe him. He began to obsess over the sanatorium tile, but no matter how much he begged for an explanation, it showed nothing. It was blank. And every time he stopped to look at it, the boy appeared beside him, silent, with his mirror-like eyes. Once, Matthew saw him smile a little as he looked at the tile. Also, sometimes, when they were going to sleep, the kid would smile eerily whenever he watched him lie in his bed. From time to time, Matthew would shine the lamp on the lake behind him. The boy walked along, and glued to his feet was the shadow of a horse with a rush mane.
From that moment on, the boy changed his routine. Because the holy child didn’t just sit at the foot of the sick people’s beds to give them a chance. He also sat and at the bedheads. And it was with that action that the bodies disappeared. All that remained were soaked sheets and a gold coin the Prior had saved for the sanatorium’s needs. Everyone continued talking about the miracle child and lined up to touch his fingers. Because rumor had spread that some sick people walked out on their own, and others were healed, became rich, and paid before leaving.
And every time the child signaled a disappearance by sitting at the head of someone’s bed and was left alone with Matthew, he covered his face with his hands to invite him to look in the light of the lake candlelight. Matthew obeyed. He couldn’t escape it. The eyes of the dead no longer opened only in the little boy’s palms, but began to cover him in his arms, with the spectral shadow of the horse on the wall.
Matthew always returned to the tile, the one that had started it all. It was still blank. It hadn’t shown anything else since the lady in the lake with the lantern and her rush-maned horse. The same one who now wandered around the sanatorium in the form of a child who deciding over life and death.
That night, Matthew finished his rounds wanting to sleep. It had taken him a while because, ever since he’d discovered Julien’s dead eyes in the boy’s hands, he’d been on guard to make sure the kid didn’t return to the infirmary, at least at night. Unfortunately, he’d discovered too late that, even if he locked the door, the boy still managed to get in. He killed. He healed. He killed. He healed.
And that night, when Matthew entered his room, he froze with the lantern raised. The boy was sitting at the foot of his bed. Many dead eyes covered his entire body. They stared into space, lost, putrid. A swarm of flies orbited him, as though crowning a monarch of decay. The horse’s shadow loomed in the wall.
“Begone,” Matthew whispered, his voice quivering as the coin clinked within the lantern. “Begone . . . begone, foul spirit, begone back to the depths with thee!”
The boy smiled. The horse’s shadow shook its rush mane, scraped the air with a hoof, let out a silent whinny, and bared its fangs.
Matthew left the room and slammed the door shut. He ran to the holy tile, placed the lamp near it, and lay down at the edge of the flowers.
“Why did you let him stay?” he cried unto the stone. “What are him? What does it want from me? Etch the truth, reveal it! Draw it, draw what that wretched child truly is!”
He punched the tile, but only managed to injure his hand. Matthew curled up at the edge of the flowers. He was trembling. The lamp on the lake flickered beside him. He fell into a deep sleep, as if he had arrived to a sacred space. Matthew was awakened by the sound of shoes against the floor, the murmurs. He stretched, his body aching, and watched the nurses hurrying to the healing ward. He knew what had happened. It was dawn, but the darkness hadn’t cleared. He picked up the lantern from the lake and followed the women’s. As usual, even though he had locked it, the infirmary door was open. He hurried to join the rest of the women, who were huddled together sleepily, holding candles.
This time, the boy was sitting between two beds. The sheets were soaked. A gold coin lay on each mattress. He watched the nurses with his empty, glassy gaze. Matthew, trembling, raised the lantern. The boy was plagued by eyes that were beginning to rot. More flies buzzed around him. He smelled like that wasn’t the usual one felt by lepers. The horse’s shadow seemed to be looking at him. Matthew waited for some reaction from the women. But no one seemed to see what he was seeing.
“Sister . . . ” he murmured, drawing near, voice hushed and hollow. “Thy candle is fading . . . Would you rather carry my lantern? Its flame burns stronger.”
“You’re very kind, Matt,” the woman said, flattered.
Matthew handed her the lantern. The nurse raised it. The place became clearer. The man gazed at the boy as always: covered him, the eyes of the lives he’d taken, his smile sly, the shadow of the horse sewn onto him. The women saw nothing. Matthew retrieved his lantern, stepped back, and ran into the hall. Dawn was slow to arrive. He stopped before the tile.
“Why you don´t speak?” he demanded of the stone. “Why offer no omen of this . . . this abomination? Weren’t you made to warn us? Then warn, damn you! Do something!”
On impulse, he stepped hard on the tile and crushed the flowers. The petals shed their colored juice and stained the floor, but nothing happened. Matthew put a hand to his face and told himself he needed more sleep, now that everyone was occupied with the boy and the double death. He went to his room. He didn’t go in. The boy was there. Sitting now in the middle of his bed. The horse was stirring impatiently behind him.
Slowly, the little boy made the same gesture as always: he brought his hands to his face, palms facing Matthew. Eyelids were born as small bulbs of flesh, bulged, grew to house a hidden eyeball. Eyelashes, trembling, emerged from within the child’s flesh. A new pair of eyes began to open. Matthew didn’t stay to see the rest. He closed the door, returned to the tile, and shone the lantern on it.
There was a drawing. The exact image he had just seen: the boy sitting in the middle of his bed, his hands over his face, and eyes open where they shouldn’t be. Matthew let out a hysterical scream, raised the lantern, and brought it down hard on the tile. Once, twice, three times, four times, five times.
He shattered his fingers, and blood mingled with the cracks that destroyed the image. He hit the tile so hard that it cracked into several pieces. The glass of the lantern shattered. Oil sprayed everywhere like the flames. The gold coin leaped right into the center of the holy tile.
Matthew staggered to his feet and threw the deformed remains of the lantern of the lake to the side. He fell to his knees as the fire began to devour the sanatorium. He sobbed. He felt the gentle touch on his shoulder and looked back. The boy covered in dead eyes was there. The shadow of the horse cast by the flames was gigantic, dancing among the flames. The kid bent down to pick up the gold coin and place it in Matthew’s hand, who regarded it with a sway of denial.
The fire spread, fierce, even where there was no cloth or wood to devour. Matthew grabbed one of the boy’s hands. It was cold, swollen. He felt like a corpse, one of the many he had helped bury in the sanatorium cemetery. They both left the burning building and they walked through the grass. Then, ran without guidance, without light. They passed through the undergrowth. The boy’s skin was slippery. It fell off in pieces until it touched the very bone. Matthew felt something explode in his grasp. An eyeball. Pus oozed between the man’s fingers. The two reached the lake, and Matthew stood there for a moment, the silent boy at his side. He looked back. The sanatorium was a pyre drawn on the night sky.
The boy led Matthew until the water reached his waist and floated him. Matthew looked one last time at the hell that was the sanatorium. The sun was awakening. There was no fire. The stench that tormented Matthew at age ten, when he was sold by his mother, was upon him again. A halo of flies buzzed around his face. He felt his eyes feverish.
The boy hugged him, and they both sank into a tangle of reeds that welcomed them like a warm, damp bed. Matthew felt the gold coin turn to slime in his hand. His last thought was that, perhaps, when the Prior opened the savings bank, he would find the donations filled with mud instead of gold.
