She was barely twelve when her mother died.

As the only child without any other parent or siblings, she was acting as the shomeret for her mother, sitting watch in the funeral home. Relatives and friends remained with her that night as she sat near her mother’s wooden coffin. Her mother had died only that afternoon: a suicide bombing in Shuk HaCarmel Market in Tel Aviv. The funeral would take place the next day.

The rabbi had come and intoned the ritual words: “Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha’olam dayan ha’emet” and torn the Kria, ripping the left side of her blouse.

“Such a terrible loss, a terrible day. How are you holding up, my child?” the rabbi had asked her, his eyes sad and kind. She could only shake her head.

“I don’t understand,” Barbara answered, and her voice broke with the sobs that had wracked her on and off ever since the news had come. “The police … they said that Mom told them before she died that she saw this young man walking into the market looking like he was sick or frightened, all sweating and pale, that she called out to him to ask him if he needed help. He only shouted back to her in Arabic and waved his hands at her, but Mom doesn’t speak Arabic and she didn’t know what he was saying. He ran deeper into the market, and she followed him, and that’s…” She swallowed hard. The grief in her mouth tasted like ashes and tears. “That’s when the boy, or someone else, set off the vest. Rabbi, maybe he was telling Mom to stay away. Maybe he was warning her, but she couldn’t understand…”

“None of us can understand a tragedy like this,” the rabbi told her, but his words and the arm he put around her shoulders were little comfort to her. She kept replaying the scene in her mind: her mother following the boy, wanting to help him, the light and heat and shattering concussion of the explosion, her mother falling amid the debris and screams …

In the nightmare memory of that night, she approached the coffin. She would be suddenly alone: the rabbi gone, her relatives and family friends all vanished. There was only the room and the coffin. She saw the lid lifting, her mother’s blood-streaked hand and arm shoving it upward. Barbara could only stare, frozen, unable to move. As the lid was pushed back with a hollow thud, her mother’s corpse slowly sat up. Her face turned toward Barbara: a visage of raw horror, strips of flesh falling away from a shattered skull, an eye dangling from its socket, half of her jaw gone and her tongue lolling down like a fat grey worm …

But this night, in Machu Picchu, the nightmare shifted and changed. It wasn’t her mother’s arm that lifted the coffin lid, nor her mother’s body that appeared. The arm was Klaus’s, clad in ghost armor that looked to have been cracked and broken. It was Klaus’s shattered and ruined corpse rising up in the coffin, turning slowly to stare at her with its moldering, one-eyed face.