I couldn’t go to the part of the house where Eddie lived either that night or the following days, but I spent the time studying the movements of the guards. I finally managed to get into his room when his custodians took him out to walk in the garden. There were always two who went with him, and Eddie raised his face up to the sun. When he went downstairs, the guards in the left wing relaxed; they were only there to keep him from escaping, so I was able to get into his room. I stood for a minute taking it in. They kept the place neat, but it was impossible not to see the dried bloodstains on the sheets, the bars over the window, and Eddie’s drawings on the walls. Markers and paints were scattered over the floor. Above the headboard of the bed, like a mural on the wall, he had painted an enormous black headstone with no name. And in other places he’d drawn Tarot arcana—especially, overwhelmingly, the Hanged Man. It “seemed like the bedroom not of a madman, but of a mystic. A monk at war against Satan. I went over to the pillow and collected several bristly hairs, nearly a handful: his hair was falling out, I’d noticed it months ago, the last time I saw him close-up. Or maybe he pulled it out. I took it back to Juan without encountering anyone on my way, but constantly startled by the creaking and groaning of that house.
I put the hair in Juan’s hands and he stood up. The room seemed bigger and I grew dizzy. Juan held me up, gripping me hard by the arms, and then he spilled out: I don’t know how to explain it well, though he would do it several more times in the future. Maybe spilled isn’t the word: maybe transfused is better. An intravenous invasion of images: I saw amputated limbs, coagulated blood on golden claws, a black lake with a hand rising from it like a buoy in the Paraná, cliffs on the horizon, naked men hanging from a lamp with a gigantic fringe, a withered, beautiful dead body caressed by a thin woman with a dark cloth covering her face, a pond surrounded by reeds, a lagoon, a swamp from which hands emerged, desperate to catch hold of something, clutching at the air, and a man hanging from a branch, very still. And then I felt a violent lurch that laid me out on the ground, and I heard a voice, extremely clear:
another son, she said, and the branch burned in the desert. The rest was coldness and the darkness in the sky. The fire hid the stars from view. Right now, let the demons of dust come. A son who can open the doors for us. The smell of hash and smoke, and Pedro removed Florence’s clothes on the sand while she intoned the necessary words and someone in the shadows traced the protection circle with a burning branch. It wasn’t enough protection. She cried out that it didn’t matter, let her be rid of the blood of the moon, it didn’t matter, nothing mattered except the desert son who would have hair like fire and colorless eyes.
If the chalk circle was closed around the house, they couldn’t leave until the ritual was complete. They would be locked in as long as the ritual lasted, and some lasted for months. The book clearly said that a child could not be used, nor could his writings or words be trusted. But Florence believed that this child was special, she had seen him outside, his eyes closed and his hands extended, playing, laughing. The boy learned and repeated the indicated words as if they were his own. They’re of his language, Florence said. He was conceived at the necessary time in the necessary way. Pedro closed up the house. They had provisions for months. The boy was bathed a quarter hour before dawn, dressed in a very loose white nightshirt. His freckled face looked toward the window where the sun would rise. They would give him little to eat in the coming days, and every dawn he would be in this room. They would give him drops of the experimental hallucinogen that would take him further than they could go. It was reckless to use it on a child, but they had to be reckless, the left-handed path was of recklessness. The women drew the symbol on the floor, in chalk. Eddie repeated the words along with Pedro in front of the altar. Six moons. The father covered the child’s hair in ash. Six moons.
If a word was pronounced incorrectly, the spirits would turn against the speaker. Or if the person said the words mockingly or with evil intentions. Eddie had pronounced them well, and yet they had all seen how the shadows pulled him by the hand and out of the room. Slammed doors and running feet. A locked door and behind it Eddie’s voice calling to his mother, and then his feet running upstairs, the footsteps of his little feet so clear. Florence behind a locked door, her knees wounded from crawling under the furniture because she saw Eddie’s eyes there, the son lost in the house, taken by the Darkness, and it did no good for his aunt to shout that they had to return to the chapel, protect the lamp, that the boy would return if they went on with the ritual. Pedro returned to the chapel. So did Anne. The two of them continued. Florence was loath to abandon her son to the shadows. She loves him too much, Anne said as she lit the lamp, and love is impure.
Florence returned and asked to be washed. Anne took off her clothes and used cold water. The boy didn’t return until dawn. He said he was blind, and he was crying. His eyes were white.
The boy chose the form the spirits would take at the Invocation. He chose mouths. He prayed looking to the East and he invoked looking to the West, without needing to be told.
Days of hunger and cold were necessary before they were able to banish the spirits. Eddie wouldn’t let them leave. The battle of wills made Pedro ill, and he was in bed for months, his body consumed by a rash that wouldn’t let him sleep. Sucked at by hundreds of tiny mouths. His whole body burning, gnawed at.
The boy couldn’t retain the symbols, he couldn’t remember them and thus could not place them under pillows and beds, in thresholds and doorways, in the necessary places. Let him feel only night, Florence heard. Then he will think only of the symbols. She put Eddie in the small basement. First, she traced the symbols in the air and ordered him to remember them. She left him a basin of water. She let him scream day and night, not from fear, but from hunger and rage. The boy wasn’t afraid, he hadn’t been afraid when he’d walked blind with his hands tied, hadn’t been afraid when he’d been offered to men and to the dead for them to take pleasure in. He had cried later, but because he’d been wounded in the Offering, he had cried from the pain. Nor was he afraid when he was brought close to death. Florence, however, did feel fear. Love is impure, said her sister, but Florence believed that love was inevitable and could also be set aside. That was the sign of true strength. To put love aside. When he came out of the darkness, dirty and hungry, the boy would remember the symbols and she could ignore how, when he was alone, he clawed at his arms with his own nails and woke up with his lips bloodied from clenching his teeth and chewing his cheeks. She started to speak to him, to explain that he would be the doorway, he would be the blood that brought the night, he would be the medium and people would bow before him, and that it hurt now but when he was touched it would all be worth it, and no one would ever replace him, she had chosen him, he would be the only one, he couldn’t doubt that. He would be like a god. The final Offering.
I tried to move. I didn’t want to see anymore. Juan let go of my hands and I opened my eyes, though they were already open. I reopened them, I opened them to this reality.
I can’t take anymore, I told him. I had to process what I had seen and heard.