She put her drawings on the table, the progression of how she had deciphered them, her mistakes in search of a more complicated meaning.
HUNGRY, the ornaments said.
Juan leaned against the doorway of the kitchen and motioned for me to give him a cigarette.
It’s hungry? What’s the number?
It’s a 4, said Laura. I don’t understand, unless it refers to the house next door, where the bodyguards and your doctor live.
I looked at Juan, who had closed his eyes.
I know how to recognize a Place of Power. Mine is back in Misiones.
It doesn’t have to be like that, insisted Laura. The dogma doesn’t say that the Place of Power is always obvious to the medium. Sometimes he has to look for it. Women carry it with them and can invoke it. Men must find it.
And I wouldn’t have noticed it already?
Not necessarily. Have you ever been to the house next door?
Never, admitted Juan. The doctor, or her assistant, always comes here.
We could pay it a visit.
The house at number four was extraordinary, more spacious than ours and more outmoded: Graciela hadn’t changed the furniture; plus, she was no hippie. and her only interest was in being Jorge Bradford’s best possible disciple. Juan didn’t want to hurt Graciela, so he decided to explore while she was out taking classes or working a shift at the hospital—I never really knew what her activities in London were, she didn’t talk to me. So the only people at 4 Cheyne Walk were the bodyguards and Graciela’s assistant, a very young medical student who always greeted us with a sincere smile. He offered us something to drink and apologized because Graciela wasn’t there. Juan asked his permission to tour the house, then: I’ve never seen it, he explained. The assistant, whose name I don’t remember, said it was a very pretty house. Juan nodded and went in, determined. The bodyguards stayed outside.
The discovery happened so incredibly fast that even today I can’t explain it, I just can’t understand how he didn’t find it sooner, how it could go unnoticed for so many days. When Juan reached the middle of the living room, we heard him take a deep breath and start to speak in a very low, fast voice, words of recognition and relief. His back was to us. When he turned around, he was almost unrecognizable. He reached out his arms in a clear gesture: we should not come any closer. I saw the transformation before the others did, in his hands. I screamed, I couldn’t help it, and my scream was so shrill and hysterical that one of the bodyguards opened the door. Stephen acted fast. He asked the guard to come in, and to bring his partner with him. I understood. Juan was going to open the Darkness, and the Darkness would come and eat. Graciela’s assistant was asking what was going on, but everyone ignored him.
Juan took his clothes off. He always had to be naked before the Darkness. It was necessary, it was part of the ritual. Rituals must not be questioned because rituals protect. The bodyguards surely thought, in those seconds before the Darkness invaded the house, that we were in the middle of an orgy and that they had been invited to take part. I don’t think they had time to imagine much more. Juan moved to stand in the requisite place and touched the floor with his animal hands. Something responded, and we could all feel it. When he stood up, there was a dark line all around his body and it was widening, as if it emanated from him. The Darkness is different when it’s unleashed inside, in a closed space. Enclosed, it bellows. It’s a continuous thunder of low vibrations. I backed up as far as I could, but it would take more than that to escape.
In the Darkness, Juan’s body rose just a few inches: there wasn’t enough room, but he hung suspended in a black stain that grew. Laura took a few steps forward and Stephen ran to stop her, throwing her to the floor. I heard the thud as she fell.
The Darkness became so large and pulsating that we could no longer see the walls or the stairs, nothing. It was hungry, I could feel it in my body. Stephen was the one who guided the bodyguards. Dumbfounded, they stopped very close to Juan, and Stephen told them c’mon, go, and they did, of course, because they no longer belonged to this world and they never thought to escape. They accepted the blow. The Darkness stretched out like a whip to take what it wanted. They didn’t even have time to scream. In an instant they were no more, swallowed in one bite. The assistant walked on his own toward the embrace of the blackness, attracted by a force he would have been unable to explain. Juan’s face showed no change. I prayed that the assistant would be the last, because if the Darkness wanted more, nothing would be able to stop it and we couldn’t escape. We couldn’t see the front door anymore. But the Darkness was content with the bait. It wavered for a few seconds, then slowly returned to form an outline around Juan and set him back on the floor, standing up but still surrounded by the black halo. Stephen approached him before I did and laid him on the floor, gently and assuredly. There was a reason Juan had given him his mark of trust all those years ago. With his own shirt he gently dried the sweat from Juan’s chest and neck. Then he sat beside him. If he didn’t wake up soon, we’d have to go and find Graciela. I took his pulse and was surprised: it was very fast, but regular; his breathing was anxious, but not desperate. By the time Laura finally dared approach, Juan was almost quiet, though still unconscious. He didn’t have a fever, either. It wasn’t necessary to take him to the hospital or summon the doctor. Between the three of us, we got him outside and back into our own house.
Later, Laura told us she had heard the voice of the Darkness. She opened a bottle of whiskey and drank straight from it before adding that she hadn’t understood anything, not in any language, that it had seemed like a completely unknown language. No one understands it, my friend, said Juan, who was resting with his eyes closed but was completely lucid. The question is not whether it’s impossible to understand it. The question is whether it’s talking to us or just speaking inside its abyss, whether what speaks is merely hunger in the void. Whether it has anything more than the intelligence of the storm or the earth when it shakes. Whether it’s anything more than another blindness, and it only seems illuminated because we don’t know it.
That same day we got a call from Florence to tell us that Eddie had escaped. She wanted to know if he was with us. Eddie’s disappearance and the appearance of the Place of Power were related, no doubt about it, but we didn’t dare speculate as to how.
I woke up alone in bed and found Juan sitting on a sofa, looking out the window. Outside, the sky was very blue and there were birds in the trees across the street. I went and sat on his lap: he’d been crying, and that unnerved me, because Juan almost never cried. I took off his shirt and leaned naked against him: I needed him to feel my body.
“I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I wanted this place to be different for you. You have no idea all the things I pictured us doing. Taking the train, going to Brighton, you can’t imagine how good the fried fish is there, though the seagulls are really bold and they’ll snatch it right out of your hands. People eat fish at the beach here the way we eat churros. I thought about asking Dad to buy us a house by the ocean. I also thought we could throw parties in this house, invite all the kids, no one complains about the loud music. I imagined filling this room with books and records, taking care of you, putting off the return; I imagined them letting us. And then this happened, first the door and the Other Place. At first I liked it. We’re like explorers, I thought, and you know how I get a kick out of expeditions, how jealous I am of the women who opened the Pyramids. But every time we’ve come back from the Other Place, I’ve thought how unfair it is. It won’t leave you in peace. I wanted a different life for us, a break. A respite. And now this. A Place of Power right next door. I brought you into a trap.”