The Rainy Season by James P. Blaylock

stones, and the empty room was cool and musty.
    There was a strange mosaic on the wall, made up of a clutter of what appeared to be cast-off objects—odd trinkets laid into the heavy mortar that covered the adobe brick. The mosaic was assembled in the shape of a man, his head bowed, and the entire mosaic glowed a cold, moonlight-on-snow radiance. There were no lamps visible to explain the light. Beneath the mosaic stood a dark wooden chest on legs, heavily built, with a single shallow drawer.
    “Because of what you’ve told me of the creation and theft of the crystal object,” the priest said, ‘Tm going to show you something that few people see. The ceremony that Alejandro described was indeed intended to capture the
memory
of the dying girl, although that’s not the usual purpose of such a ceremony. And I’m speaking quite literally when I refer to her memory.”
    He unlocked the drawer in the cabinet and pulled it open, revealing a heavy plate of yellow isinglass, which he lifted out. The mosaic on the wall glowed doubly bright, as if enlivened by the objects in the drawer—four elongated chunks of smooth crystal, two of them a filmy red, like blood in water, and the other two a pale green. Just as Jeanette had described, each of them had a vague animalistic semblance, as if they were carved figures worn to obscurity by centuries of weather. The objects emitted the glowworm light, and it seemed to Colin that the light of the mosaic on the wall was actually reflected light, like the light of the moon, and that these four objects were its sun.
    Colin realized abruptly that his teeth felt rubbery, and he was filled with an overwhelming fatigue, as if at any moment he would be crushed to the stones by the force of gravity. His ears rang with a high, tinny shriek, and he pressed his hands against them, which did nothing to diminish the sound. The priest returned the isinglass panel and slid the drawer closed, and with that the pressure and sound dimmed as did the glow of the mosaic on the wall.
    “One of these curios came to us very recently,” the priest said, gesturing at the now-closed drawer. “In a magical rite, a child was buried in a seaman’s chest alongside a spring near the ocean, probably in October of fifteen forty-two when Cabrillo made a landing off what is now Dana Point. Their ostensible task was to find game and water, but in fact there were men on board who were more interested in magic than provisions, and it was these men who seeded the
fuentes
, the springs, with drowned children. The objects in this drawer contain the memories that those children gave up at the moment of death. Mr. Appleton had the knowledge to fabricate one of these
fuentes
himself, using his own dying daughter as a sacrifice. He desired to save his daughter’s memory as a memento. It was necessary to sacrifice her in order to save her, I suppose you could say.”
    “I find that appalling,” Colin said.
    The priest shrugged. “Neither of us has a dying daughter, so perhaps it’s impossible for us to see such things clearly. If the girl were in fact dying, then the crime was a matter of misplaced fatherly love. You can sympathize with Mr. Appleton’s sentiment … ?”
    “I understand it, certainly.”
    “I hope so. Because it seems to me that a man who is desperate enough to drown his own daughter in this manner might easily become insane upon discovering that he had drowned her for nothing. Mr. Appleton will be a very dangerous man. Perhaps he already has learned of the theft. If he were to discover that you had recovered the object and given it to us …” The priest shrugged again.
    But there was no reason to think that either Appleton or Alejandro would discover any such thing. Colin knew that his own motives for wanting to steal the crystal away from Alejandro were mixed—guilt for his own attraction to the thing, penance, revenge for what Alejandro had done to Jeanette. Still, the result would be that the object