Tali and Stephen were waiting for him at the old gazebo surrounded by bronze statues that Adolfo Reyes had had brought over from France. Stephen was sitting on the gazebo steps and Tali, standing beside him, was smoking a cigarette. Juan kissed her on the mouth before leading her to the center of the structure. There, near the Place of Power, he could talk to both of them out loud by creating a circle of silence with little effort: he was already feeding on the Darkness, could already feel how a new strength throbbed in his arteries, how his ears and skin perceived each movement with the intuition of a nocturnal animal.
“We had to do a double job,” said Tali. “Good grief, your kid is powerful. You didn’t leave me enough hair, but luckily you forgot some clothes.”
Juan smiled. He took her hand and raised her fingers to his mouth. They stank of dry, salty blood.
“How old-fashioned, Tali,” he said.
“Old-fashioned works,” Stephen said.
“Sometimes it’s the only thing that works,” said Juan.
He couldn’t see the Place of Power from the bedroom. Through the open window, however, wafted the smell of the candles that would mark the path in the night, though he could find it with his eyes closed. He wasn’t nervous, or afraid: he barely felt anything. He was ready for the crown of shadows. Soon he would enter that dark zone where he was present yet existed no more. He was capable of leaving it easily, though it hadn’t always been so. Now, he was like an invited guest who is given the key so he can come and go as he pleases.
The tunic was made of black tulle; Juan let it fall over his naked body and put his hands through the armholes. His arms had to be free. Someone, possibly Florence, had ordered the two small horns of a young deer to be set into the mask. Juan looked into the mirror before going down. The attire was unnecessary, but the Order preferred such ceremonial details and Juan accepted them resignedly. He understood their effect.
He went down the stairs and saw the first candles in the yard, a path of two winding, parallel lines. The silence was total except for nocturnal birds, the lapping of the river, a dog barking in the distance. As he left the perimeter of Puerto Reyes and started down the path wrested back from the jungle, he looked down at his hands: they were no longer his. Now they were black, as if he had dunked them in a tar pit. Totally black up past his wrists. Their shape was also changing. Gradually and painlessly, his fingers were lengthening: at first, they seemed hit by sudden rheumatism, and in the blink of an eye the nails grew long and hard: curved golden daggers. That was his medium’s mark, the physical metamorphosis that distinguished and condemned him. The god of the golden claws.
He took another step and saw the first line of Initiates. He passed among them. The Place of Power attracted him, pulled at his skin. He stepped into it and turned around, and before opening his arms he scanned the Initiates, the old ones in the first rows, the younger ones behind, some of them expectant and others filled with fear, the scribes prepared, the waiting sacrifices with their eyes blindfolded and their hands tied.
And then he saw no more.
Tali waited among the Initiates. She could see her father in the first row with Mercedes, beside the scribes, but she never would have dared to take a place there. She preferred to stay in the background.
She always attended the Ceremonial. She went for Juan’s sake, but also because the thing that came with the night was divine, though she was sure it wasn’t sacred. Stephen, the only one in the whole Order for whom Tali felt real affection, had listened to her attentively over the previous days as they were working together to protect Gaspar, and also to give magical strength to Juan. He wants to stop summoning, but he says he can’t, Tali had said. How can he not be able to stop?
Stephen, who was strangely aged and thin, had replied that that was a lie. He doesn’t want to stop, he’d said. He could quit if he wanted to. He has the power to hide, and he has people who would help him disappear if he wanted to. Or, he’s not lying when he gives his excuses, but they are excuses. I don’t know what it’s like to be in contact with that power and I never will, but I do know it’s not possible to reject it. No one could. Not even him. I don’t understand, and I never will, how he’s lasted so long without going crazy.
Stephen soaked Gaspar’s clothing in blood and cut it into strips. He had drawn chalk symbols on the floor. His hands were filthy, as were Tali’s.
I’d say he’s pretty disturbed, my friend, she replied, and Stephen smiled. A little, yes. It’s going to get worse as his power diminishes. Tali wanted to know if his power was waning because his health was worsening. I don’t think so, said Stephen. I think there’s a cycle of power, and that cycle is reaching its end. Or extinguishing. No medium has ever lasted as long as him, so really, we don’t know what’s happening to him, or why.
Still, Tali couldn’t feel the end of that cycle now, as she stood among the candles in the unbearable jungle heat, alongside Initiates who at times collapsed to the ground, crying, shaking. She sensed him coming when they all did, but she didn’t dare turn around. This was not the man she knew, the one who slept in her bed. This being who took firm steps and could sense each blade of grass as it touched his bare feet was no longer exactly a man.
Tali kept her head down until the cries, the moaning and the ecstasy of the others forced her to look.
Juan had reached the Place of Power. He was wearing a mask this time. He opened his arms and turned his head to one side: the mask had the horns of a forest animal stuck to it. He looked like an indifferent demon.
His hands: Tali saw them when he reached out. Bird claws, completely black, burned, but sticky-looking. His golden nails shone like knives in the candlelight. How many candles? Hundreds. And then the noise of the open Darkness.
It was a panting sound, Tali thought this time, like dogs being choked by leashes, or when they are thirsty, hungry, a pack of hounds invading. The Darkness grew first around Juan as if it were steam coming off his body, and suddenly—this moment always caught Tali by surprise—it shot off in all directions and became enormous and liquid—or, rather, lustrous. It was hard to look at it: darker than the night, compact, it hid the trees, the light from the candles, and as it grew, it lifted Juan up and he floated, suspended in the blackness of wings. The scribes were writing, Tali saw them, but she didn’t hear anything, nothing but panting and that flapping of wings. What did they hear, those who heard the voice of the Darkness? Juan had told her once that they didn’t hear anything, it was all in their heads, that what they wrote was a kind of automatic dictation from their own minds. And if they do hear something, he’d said, it can’t be anything good. Tali tried to find Stephen among the congregants, but by now it was impossible: the ranks had been broken, some people were trying to run toward the trees, but the more steadfast Initiates stopped them, and from the Darkness wafted a freezing and foul-smelling breath.
It was time for the sacrifice. Mercedes presided over it. Those who were given to the Darkness had their eyes blindfolded and their hands tied, and they stumbled. Drugged and blind, they had no idea what was before them. Maybe they expected pain. Tali saw a young, very thin man who was completely naked. He was crying, more awake than the others, and his lips trembled. Where are you taking us? he shouted, but his cries were drowned out by the panting of the Darkness and the murmuring of the others.