In an attempt to soothe me, Stephen suggested a trip. We could get Tara and the others and all go to Spain, Italy, Greece. We’d have to travel with the bodyguards, Graciela, and the whole crew, but we wouldn’t be all that different from other young millionaires. Didn’t the Getty heirs and the Rolling Stones travel the same way? And we could get away from the Darkness, from this island and the obsession with finding Eddie, which was making Florence crazy. There were private detectives all over Great Britain looking for clues about her younger son, and, of course, the police were looking for him too. I pictured the sun on the ocean and the white houses of Cadaqués and I said yes immediately, and I was so happy I almost started packing right then. I had to buy a bikini, nicer sunglasses, sandals for walking around Rome. I would take my books, too. I was going to be the first Argentine woman with a doctorate from Cambridge, and it made me ridiculously proud. Someone had to be happy about it, because aside from Juan, no one else cared. I needed to review Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas, and Les structures by Lévi-Strauss. That could take me a month. Laura agreed to come too: she had hardly ever left England. It took some work to convince Juan, but not too much. He was worried about Eddie. He thought Eddie was a loose end, and he was convinced that as long as he was missing, we wouldn’t be safe.
Eddie’s escape had been extremely violent. He’d done it in the morning, and no one heard the attack on his guards, though there’s no doubt that they screamed, because Eddie ate their eyes with his sharpened teeth, the teeth that had been filed into a saw when he was a child. He had managed to paralyze them or put them to sleep, no one really knew; the men didn’t remember what had happened, they woke up from their trance blind and mad with pain. Eddie had taken clothes and money, clear signs that he wasn’t as crazy as people thought. I was sorry I had never spoken to him. Florence would have let me. Stephen said that a relationship with Eddie always ended the same way, and he listed all the animals he had abused, the classmates he’d driven to suicide, the various caretakers who’d ended up dead or mutilated. Juan listened. They have to find him, he said over and over. Why did they let him live?
They let you live, too, Stephen answered once.
And maybe that’s a mistake, Juan said in a low voice.
The night before our planned trip, Tara and Sandy came to visit. They brought other friends, all of them members of the Order, children of high Initiates. Navid, who was Sandy’s lover; Lucian, one of Anne’s sons and Laura’s step-brother—her other son was a true old Etonian, with his suits and shiny shoes: he wanted to be the youngest Member of Parliament. Susie, who lived in Scotland and always invited us to her house near the sea, in Portobello. Lucie, with her camera. The twins Crimson and Genesis. With all of us there, we could almost reproduce life at Cheyne Walk before Juan arrived. We put on Blonde on Blonde and Otis Redding and the Velvet Underground, we took acid and danced until our bodies disintegrated into shining particles and we couldn’t see them anymore. Laura shouted that no one should leave the house, that we couldn’t disconnect the trip, the group must stay united. It’s true that it’s strange when someone abandons a trip: something is disturbed. Juan didn’t dance, but Sandy sat on his knees and kissed him. I let her do it. I remember she was wearing a bright red feather boa, and it looked like a stream of fake blood. Suddenly I had a horrible sense of foreboding, and to get rid of my fear I put on David’s new album and lay down beside the speaker. The first song made me cry and laugh because it talked about being far above the moon, and only then did I realize we had missed the moon landing, months before. Even worse, we’d forgotten! We hadn’t seen it, we’d never even turned on the TV. Where had we been that evening? Gazing at torsos? At hands? Walking over bones?
I think I slept for a while, and when I woke up, everyone was in a circle. I thought they were looking at the pictures of the Other Place and I almost screamed to high heaven, those idiots, Laura and Stephen, getting high and showing the secret to our friends—we couldn’t trust them with something like that. When I saw Juan was listening very attentively, I realized he would never allow that, and it had to be something else.
Tara was reading a letter. Sandy told me it had been slid under the door, but they didn’t know when. Time, on acid, was impossible to measure. They’d seen it when I’d separated from them, but they didn’t know how long it had been there waiting for someone to open it.
It was a letter from Eddie.
“Are you sure?” I cried, and Stephen said yes, he recognized his brother’s handwriting.
I remembered the headstone Eddie had drawn over his bed, the images of hanged men on his walls, and I looked at Stephen and Laura: they were pale from fear. I listened closely to Tara’s voice. Never locked up again, there are hands in the darkness and they won’t leave me alone. You don’t care if it hurts me, mother, and neither does the old lady, she’s the one who sharpened my teeth, she wants me to bite her. No one helps.
The old lady. Mercedes, I said. The children in cages all had sharpened teeth. I had to make sure they didn’t bite me, because she had warned me they could give me rabies and I would die convulsing and they’d have to shoot me in the head like the country dogs. Did he leave a letter for Florence, too? I don’t know, said Stephen. My mother isn’t in England. She left yesterday to go and visit my father.
No one helps. I want to go to the mountains, I can fall and the rocks will pound my whole body, and then I’ll have bruises I can touch and feel the pain. I’m in darkness and pain. Is the usurper, too? He is not the medium. The pregnant one told me. You all think I don’t know him, but I do. He looks like a lion. I’m like a fox and I move better than him.
The paranoid lucidity of the acid, which was no longer a tranquillity of colors but rather a state of alertness in my whole body, my hair standing on end as if it were wired, forced me to break the circle and take Stephen by the shoulders. Your brother is looking for him. We have to leave right now.
The one-eyed girl is also a usurper, like the lion. They deserve nothing, they are not of blood. Mother, you pulled out her eye with your teeth. Or else it was the old lady. Was she in the Darkness, too? It’s never clear who is real and who isn’t, everyone is real, there’s no point in trying to distinguish. I don’t know if the hands are real. They won’t let me sleep. Mother, you wouldn’t let me sleep, either. We have to keep him awake, you’d say, and I heard you, I was standing up. You all always think I can’t hear because I don’t speak. You all are smart, because it is smart to hurt with simplicity. I am smart, too.
Stephen asked Juan if Eddie had ever seen him. I don’t know, said Juan. I recovered at your mother’s house, and he lived there. I spent the nights with Rosario, but she went out during the day and I was alone. I don’t remember having sensed someone’s presence in the room, but that pain medication is pretty strong and I spent a lot of hours asleep.
You understand why I ask. Ever since he was little, my brother has played this very simple game. He sneaks into houses, into bedrooms, at night, and moves things around. Or he does other nonsense, leaves some kind of mark on a wall, a drawing. If there’s a garden, he tramples a flower bed. In the morning, the owner of the house sees the changes and the little acts of vandalism, but can’t understand why someone would do them. Eddie calls them “creepy crawlers.” Before my mother locked him up, he would do it with some friends he’d managed to make in Mayfair, some really demented people. They’ve all gone to California now. I think he’s seen you. He knows you, somehow.