When Juan fell asleep, I went out to find Laura. I found her sitting looking at the river. It was hot, and she had unbuttoned her shirt. Her tattoos looked like insects on her skin.
If it were nighttime, I told her, we’d have to get naked and look at the stars here. We can do that whenever you want, she replied. She had taken off her patch, and her eyelid, sunken and loose, trembled. It’s better in winter. The wind off the river hurts. Every time she spoke, the air filled with the smell of alcohol. If he’s right about there being something in the house, if it’s like he describes, it’s a passage, she said. He wants me to help him cross the threshold and not report anything to the Order. He’s asking a lot. I don’t know why he was so mean to you, I said. I do, she replied. He wants to know how broken I am. I’m going to do it, but I’m scared, because if they find out, they will be merciless. Also, he scares me. I told her there was nothing to fear from Juan and she laughed, she split her sides laughing until I thought she was going to fall into the river: the lights came on in some nearby houses, in protest.
In a low voice, I asked her what was going to be required of us in exchange for moving our consciousnesses into another body. She thought about it, her legs crossed, and asked for a cigarette. The sun, shining down on us just before the blue hour, didn’t bother us. I don’t know, she finally told me, but it will be something obscene. I’ve decided I don’t want it. Her reply surprised me. Who doesn’t want to keep their consciousness alive? Who would refuse being practically immortal? I asked her if she knew that before the Chinese figured out what gunpowder was for, they’d thought it could be used in an immortality elixir. How did they find out they were wrong? she asked me. The most logical way possible: it blew up in their faces, and ever since then they’ve used it in fireworks. And the truth is that when I see particularly beautiful fireworks, I really do feel immortal. You and I are different, she replied.
She put out her cigarette and we went back together.
We waited for Stephen before going through the door. He thought no one else should know, not Tara, not Sandy, not any of our other friends. At least not for now. Juan asked Stephen, as he’d done with me, to open the door. He did, and we saw a normal room, with its bed, its turquoise curtains, its paintings. A sink by the window and then a small bathroom. The English are so absurd, said Stephen. What kind of riffraff puts carpet in a bathroom—it’s clearly not meant to be used, am I right? Juan almost smiled. We left, and Juan closed the door behind us. When he was the one who opened it, there was no longer a bedroom on the other side. No bed or paintings or sink. There was a dark tunnel, like an underpass, the kind you see in train stations. Something lit it, but it didn’t look like electric light. I immediately thought about Arnold van Gennep and Turner and liminal spaces, thresholds, internal or external. Crossroads, bridges, shores. I said nothing. Laura squatted down on her heels.
Through the door, the air ran out quickly. I stopped Juan when I started to feel suffocated. I was afraid for him, and I put my hand on his chest: his heart was beating fast and too hard, but it was regular. Laura was panting, breathless. This feels just like altitude sickness, she said. I nodded. It reminded me of La Paz. When Dad and I went there, I hadn’t been able to walk and I got scared. I’d thought: this is how Juan feels all the time, and I cried in a corner that reeked of urine while Dad yelled at me because we were late to a meeting with the ambassador.
The duct or underground passageway led to a very narrow mountain path. There was running water nearby. A river, but not rapids. It was nighttime through the door, though it wasn’t dark. We didn’t need the flashlight we’d brought with us. Laura and I were exhausted after three hundred meters, but not Juan. He approached what looked like the end of the path. We followed and saw it was not a precipice, but that the path continued down through trees. It wasn’t so steep and you could descend fairly easily. Below, we saw the silvery flashes of a river.
The silence was powerful and horrible. A place like that, a forest with a river, cannot be so still. Where were the animals, the birds, the rustling leaves? Maybe our ears were clogged by the height. Nor was it cold or hot. The place was still in every sense. Laura said it reminded her of the mountains in Wales, but it was like an imprecise copy. A sketch. It’s cold in the mountains, there’s fog, she said, and the colors here are wrong.
It’s all wrong, said Juan. It’s a stage set. He kept walking. After the curve, the path straightened out again and opened on to a footbridge flanked by trees. Laura pointed to the branches, and Juan went closer. There were bones in the trees, bones littering the ground. Eaten away, most of them, very clean and old. The ones in the branches formed strange decorations, adornments of interlaced phalanges and femurs, fastened with slender twigs into delicate shapes, carnivorous geometries. Juan touched some of them, like he was trying to memorize them. They look like writing, Laura said. On the ground, the bones were scattered with no clear goal. Would someone come, later on, and assemble them into pendants? When Juan touched another of the decorations, it came off and dropped into his open hand like a ripe fruit. We studied it. It was a sign, a seal. Juan kept his hand open and three more fell. He gave thanks and put them into his pocket.
The path was covered with bones as far as we could see. They were from all parts of the body and of all sizes. Were they the remains of centuries of banquets? Were people brought here to die? Or had the bones been carried here in order to make this mortuary path? There was no smell. They were old bones, or they’d been savored until there was nothing left on them, no trace of flesh.
Getting down to the river was easier than I expected. The air was still dry despite the nearby water. I reached down to touch it but Juan stopped me, roughly, as if waking me from a hypnotized state. He’s right—we all know what happens if you steal something from faery. True, this is no fairyland, but there’s no reason the rules would be different. The rules almost never are. The forms can vary, but not the rules.
Someone sleeps in the Other Place. That’s what Juan calls it. That’s why there is silence. So that presence can sleep. And the bones are a temple. He took a deep breath. There is absolutely nothing here, he said. The river has no fish. There are no insects. How much farther are we going to have to go before we find something?
Laura asked him to be patient. It’s our first time.
He looked at his hands and spoke. We listened, and from his tone we knew he was confiding a secret. When I summon the Darkness, or when the Darkness takes me—you choose the term—I can’t see what’s happening. I’m blind in my trance. I know that the Darkness cuts and takes the Initiates because I’m told. Once, Florence showed me a recording of the Ceremonial, which she burned later. I don’t know what has happened until I return and cauterize the wounds and mark those who must be marked with scars. But I’m not unconscious in the trance. I go to a place, or rather, I see scenes. I thought they were hallucinations, like the ones people see in a coma or during a heart attack.
They’re like this place? asked Laura.
Yes and no. I see a hallway I don’t dare walk down. There are people, or beings, hanging from lamps. I saw a piano. And there’s a window, and through it there’s a forest. That forest does look like this one.