Mercedes didn’t have to do much. The Darkness was hungry, and it never refused what it was offered. Those who were given to the Darkness disappeared in one mouthful. They’d been lucky, thought Tali. She had questioned the practice, and had asked her father about it. Rosario had too. Contemptuously, he had told them those people were going to die anyway. What had gotten into them, defending those nobodies like that? They are marked for death, girls. We’re doing them a favor.
Many members of the Order thought that, in reality, they were bestowing an honor on the sacrifices. Like the young man dressed in a black suit, despite the heat, who voluntarily approached the Darkness. He was the first. Tali saw him reach out his fingers to touch that compact light beside Juan, at the height of his hip.
And she watched as the Darkness first sliced off his fingers, then his hand, and then, with a gluttonous and satisfied sound, took him all. The blood of the first bites spattered Juan, but he didn’t move now. He wasn’t going to move for a while, not until the Darkness closed.
Next came two women, hand in hand. One young, the other old. Mother and daughter? The Darkness took the old woman’s head, and for a moment her decapitated body kept walking. The young woman didn’t even look at her, or if she did, she wasn’t shocked. She entered the Darkness resolutely and with a smile, dragging the headless body behind her, clutching its arm. They disappeared leaving only a trail of blood, the spatters that the carotid artery had sprayed over devotees in the first rows who now moved back a little, because the Darkness was coming down, down like a black sky or a bottomless throat, and it seemed to have eyes and to be able to choose.
Tali watched as it took, in one piece, a naked man who was on his knees. Then she saw how the Initiates couldn’t help but raise their arms and touch the Darkness, which devoured fingers and hands. For a split second she caught sight of Stephen in the blood-spattered crowd. The candles were still lit, but they could do little to fight the black enclosure of the Darkness that descended like a mantle.
And then the withdrawal began. First, that ceiling, dark as if made of bats, started to rise, moving far away, and then it became small and surrounded Juan, who slowly lowered his arms and turned his head forward again. The Darkness didn’t vanish: it receded like storm clouds, but it stayed encircling the medium and returned him gently to the ground. The Initiates—the frightened and the stunned, the calm ones and the scribes—all obeyed those with more character or experience, and they forced themselves to form back into rows. Some relit the candles that had been extinguished by the looming Darkness. They all pretended not to feel terror; those who trembled would claim it was from ecstasy, from emotion, from the glory of witnessing the visitation of a living god.
Juan was now kneeling on one leg and they could hear his agitated, painful breathing. He was still surrounded by a very fine black halo that, they all knew, was extremely dangerous: it cut like a scythe.
The medium rose. He walked straight, focused, his eyes very open and damp. Tali got closer. She could smell his sweat—his body was drenched under the tunic; he smelled of sea and salt and something acidic. Then she withdrew. She didn’t want him to mark her. The medium raised his head and seemed to sniff the night. The fine halo around him twisted and wound and followed him vaguely, as if his body were steaming. The Initiates brought him those among them who had been wounded by the Darkness. The medium—Tali couldn’t call him Juan now, she didn’t recognize him—moved his black hands over the wounds and burned them. The Initiates screamed in pain as he cauterized their wounds, but only for an instant, because the loss of a member, they believed, marked them as chosen favorites. After they were healed, they cried with joy. Hands and arms lost to the Darkness were new extremities now, torn and bitten stumps. The Darkness grew smaller and smaller and more Initiates threw themselves at the medium’s feet—like hungry dogs, thought Tali—offering him their naked bodies. There were many of them this time: many who were begging for a bread crumb, jostling, some of them scratching each other. Finally, the medium acceded. In general, he marked very few people. This time he chose a thin girl with a flat chest and narrow hips who was far from the front row of howling Initiates, a girl who stood and pleaded please, moving her lips, a girl who was not a wolf or a submissive dog: a girl who was like a snake, with her small eyes and flat nose. The medium approached her, circled her with his slow steps, and used three of his golden nails to scratch her back with one swipe. The blood streamed down her bare legs, drew a dark belt around her: the Initiates watched open-mouthed. Later, they would say the wounds were so deep they could see her spine and ribs. The girl stumbled but the medium steadied her, and with his other hand, which was gradually returning to normal—his nails were no longer yellow claws, now they were only deformed and black, rheumatic—he caressed her wounded back. And it stopped bleeding. And the wounds transformed into dark scars, as if the hand were laden with time. Then he dropped the girl to the ground and walked away, slowly, toward the house. The black halo was gone. The last thing the Initiates saw was that, when he turned along the path of candles, he still had black hands. It was forbidden for them to follow him. Only Stephen and a select group were authorized to go with him. Tali was among the chosen few, because the medium had demanded it and he was granted certain whims.
The Initiates didn’t know what happened afterward, the toll the Ceremonial took on the medium’s body. They had to remain beside the altar and follow Florence in the closing rites, when the mutilated ones were anointed in the circles, the blood was collected, the texts read, the dead removed. Dawn, still far away, marked the end of the Ceremonial.
Tali didn’t participate in the final rituals. She ran, her dark hair loose and her white dress spattered with blood, toward the candlelit path and toward Juan. She missed Rosario more than ever, missed her fortitude and clear thinking.
He was taking so long to regain consciousness that Tali didn’t dare get her hopes up at a tremor in his fingers or a change in his breathing. They had no choice but to wait. Bradford sounded optimistic. Dr. Biedma, his disciple, seemed worried. Juan had blacked out, but his heart hadn’t stopped. It had been years since that hadn’t happened, thought Tali.
After ten hours, Stephen left the room. I need to sleep, he said. Tali put a hand on his back; she knew he was exhausted, and she understood why he didn’t want to sleep in that sad room, with its bright light, the noisy monitor recording Juan’s erratic heartbeat, his labored breathing. Even Rosario had avoided it while Juan lay unconscious.
Tali wasn’t tired. Bradford treated her with contempt, as always. To him, she was just the product of Adolfo’s indiscretion with a village witch. Tali had mentally prepared a potent combination that would at least disturb Dr. Bradford’s sleep for a few weeks. As soon as she went home she’d do a little work on him, something brief but effective. Juan and Stephen couldn’t know about it because they both always warned her about performing magic out of mere anger or annoyance. But who were they to judge her? It took some nerve, given the things they had done—and still did!
Tali looked sideways at her reflection in the windowpane. She had turned thirty years old. When people told her she was beautiful, they were referring to her heavy hair, her body that was no stranger to long walks, and the shine in her dark eyes. But she never wore makeup, didn’t worry about her skin, didn’t go in for rings or bracelets; when people praised her, there were always ellipses: “but you’d be so much prettier if . . .” She felt she was getting old, that she needed to do something about the expression lines around her mouth and the stretch marks on her hips—the result of summers spent biking that had slimmed her legs. She approached the bed where Juan was still unconscious. She caressed his left hand, the wound that wouldn’t scar over, but received no response. He’d been like that for a full day. Even so, this couldn’t compare with the desperate hours of the year before, which she hadn’t been able to stand: she’d ended up locked in a hospital bathroom, praying crazily to the saint, but above all terrified. It was Rosario who had found her and asked that she replace her beside Juan, because she needed to be with Gaspar: the boy, in a not-so-strange coincidence, was burning up with fever and they couldn’t get his temperature down. She remembered her exhausted sister, her hair pulled back in a bun, her enviable determination. Looking at her, Tali had known Rosario was destined to be the leader of the Order. What if she been killed because of that? Juan couldn’t and didn’t want to understand the politics of the Order, nor the extent of Rosario’s ambitions. That was what he had Stephen for.