Free The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels Page A

would be strengthened against the onset of the fever.
    Barron dressed, putting on a coat and a wide-brimmed hat to protect against the rain outside.
    There were few people on the streets, just a few Indios wrapped up in ponchos and wearing pointed straw hats, driving small carts pulled by donkeys. The rain had dampened down the dusty roads, and dirty rivulets ran beneath the elevated pavements and their series of worn steps. The wind was fierce, gusting through the streets as if angry at its enforced confinement. Many shops had their shutters closed, and so Barron made his way to the central plaza, which was the one place he felt certain he could obtain a meal. The piñatas lined the way, and the rain had soaked them through, so that they were wet and dripping, their papery limbs flopping in the wind, and looking even more like the rotten starfish thrown up from watery depths that Barron had fancifully imagined them to be.
    He found a restaurant, Los Companeros, hidden away at the back of the plaza, and he ate a breakfast of refrijoles and huevos con chorizo that was served by an ancient mestizo dressed all in black, save for the splash of his white shirt. Barron consumed his meal inside, but then took hot coffee on a sheltered balcony overlooking the main square. He watched the dark grey clouds scudding across the high mountains all around, hissing as they unburdened themselves of rain on the open spaces of Xapalpa. It seemed as if the sky had come down to the village and was blasting it with its cold watery breath.
    On the way back from the restaurant, from which he had also taken away a couple of tortas filled with ham, cheese and jalapenos, so that he would not have to venture out for a meal later in the day, he got lost.
    Somehow, he had been deceived by the layout of Xapalpa, and taken the wrong exit from a deserted, cryptic plaza of claustrophobic dimensions. He found himself on a back road, named Quintero, that skirted the village and which took him alongside the huge white entrance to the town cemetery. It was an imposing gateway, with four pillars supporting an Italianate lintel with carved twin wings and a sacred heart bas-relief.
    Barron peered in through the closed and padlocked gates, sheltering for a time from the elements. He saw several decayed tombs surrounded by railings and a host of wooden crosses tottering at acute angles. Wreaths of brown flowers littered the area, looking as if they had grown from the dirty soil itself, rather than simply having been left by mourners to die there. He seemed to recall a folk legend about this place that he had come across in one of his anthropological textbooks, and he resolved to look it up later that evening. Although the memory was vague, he recalled that it had an unusually fanciful and sinister cast, but it had been of little significance to him at the time. He had not then known that he would be visiting Xapalpa, and it was nothing more than another village name and simply one superstitious Mexican legend amongst a great multitude. As he struggled to recall which of the textbooks contained the reference, Barron caught sight of something the size of a large cat moving amidst the undergrowth of weeds between two tombs. The thing was curiously shapeless, and a mottled grey colour. Perhaps it was just Barron’s fever playing tricks, but he could have sworn the thing had been crawling with more than four limbs.
    When he got back to the bungalow house, he was soaked through. The brim of his hat drooped with the weight of the rainwater it had absorbed. His clothes clung to his skin with clammy dampness, and he shivered violently as he removed them from his body. Naturally, his fever had got worse. He felt dizzy as he struggled to get a blaze going in the fireplace, and he fumbled with the matches, dropping several of them between the logs of wood. The logs had been treated with a tarry substance, doubtless to aid their combustion, but they had lain for so long in the