The boy was in an animal cage, surely brought there from the neighboring zoo. （“They have toucans, Dad, the toucans are incredible!” Gaspar had shouted with glee.） Juan remembered when Rosario had been forced to care for a different crop of kidnapped children Mercedes had kept at one of her estates in Buenos Aires province, and he had decided to help her. They’d been held in cages then, too. Now, this first child was in a rusty, dirty pen that had possibly once held animals. His left leg was tied to his back in a position that would have required his hip to have been broken. Since he was very young （one year old? Hard to know behind all the grime）， the bone had surely broken easily. His neck was twisted as well because of the position of his foot. When Juan brought the flashlight closer to see him better, he reacted like an animal, his mouth open and growling; his tongue had been sliced in two, and was now forked. Around him in the cage were the remains of his food: cat skeletons and some small human bones.
Juan kept walking. There were more cages. The other boys and girls were older. Many of them stared at him with black eyes: some of them were Guaraní children who probably didn’t speak Spanish. Others might be the children of men and women who were sacrificed to the Darkness. Some of them reacted to his presence by skittering to the back of their cages, while others barely opened their eyes. There were children whose teeth had been filed into sharp rows, like saws; there were children with the obvious marks of torture on their legs, their backs, their genitals; he smelled the rot of children who must already be dead. Did they leave the cadavers there so the others would get used to the smell? Rosario had been forced to bury the caged ones who had died. She’d seen festering wounds, infections, eyes where the bugs of dampness and the river crawled. He stopped after some hundred meters of cages full of destroyed children, living and dead; he could tell they continued for the remaining hundred meters of tunnel. He turned back, ready to confront Mercedes, who was waiting for him at the door beside her imbunche. Juan turned off the flashlight when Mercedes lit a weak lamp, the tunnel’s only illumination.
“So, this is your new collection, Mercedes.”
“It will bring results. Our god says so, his instruction is to do it this way.”
“The god is crazy, like you.”
“I follow the orders of the Darkness.”
Juan laughed, and his laughter bounced back off the tunnel walls in obscene echoes. Some of the moribund and wounded children whimpered. From the depths of the tunnel came a dying moan.
“This is not a search for a medium, Mercedes. This was always just for your own pleasure.”
Mercedes uncrossed her arms and let them fall to her sides.
“It may not be beautiful now, but it will be! When they work together! There are many gods! Ours says so and orders the search for another medium. It’s in the book!”
Juan approached Mercedes until he could see the glint of her eyes behind the dark glasses she always used, even in the semidarkness of the tunnel.
“Where do you get them, Mercedes? Indigenous children? The children of prisoners? Why don’t you ask for a sacrifice, an offering, from the rich Initiates of the Order? Do you steal them in the night, or do their mothers sell them because they’re dying of hunger? Do their fathers know where their children are before they’re thrown to the Darkness? You’ve learned a few things from your friends’ torture chambers.”
“Such compassion. Why don’t you save them, then? You have the power to do it.”
Juan turned his flashlight back on and shone it directly into Mercedes’ dark glasses. He wanted to look her in the eye. He wanted to blind her.
“That would be another cruelty. They’re far beyond any help.”
Juan directed the flashlight on to one of his own hands, and Mercedes started to babble and beg for mercy. She tried to run out the door, but Juan willed it sealed hermetically. She was alone in the tunnel with the golden god, the lord of the gate.
“You know where this tunnel went?” he asked her. “It didn’t go from one house to the other in a straight line. The builders had to skirt round some underground lakes, because it’s very close to the river. And in one stretch, several meters past the beginning of the collapse, it reaches the Place of Power. See?”
His illuminated hand was now surrounded by black light.
“Female mediums are much more powerful,” he went on. “They have the power to summon anywhere, they just have to figure out the particular conditions needed for concentration, or else, the ritual can be performed on them. Men depend on Places of Power. There are many. Some mediums simply run into them, others learn to find them. I know how to find them. I also know the radius of the power they emanate. Far from those places, we are almost normal. Although I have natural talent, it takes a lot of energy to use it. Far from the Place of Power, Mercedes, you and I aren’t so different. Close to it, however . . .”
His hand radiated that dark, sharp light, a blade of shadow. He brought it close to her face.
“Luckily for you, this god is bored and only wants to know if you killed Rosario. If you killed your daughter. I want you to admit it, Mercedes, because this hand won’t leave any skin over your bones. I don’t respect the blood. I don’t know what that means.”
Mercedes was trembling. Juan put his fingers between the bars of the cage next to her and with a slight movement beheaded the imbunche child, who barely moved. His hot blood-soaked Mercedes’ shoes.
The other children, crazed by the salty smell, bellowed.
“What else, let’s see . . . Who carried it out? I went to see the bus driver who hit her. He doesn’t even remember the accident. He was sent. You’re capable of doing that, with help, of course. Why? What did she say to you?”
Mercedes’ sobbing surprised Juan. It was convulsive and sad, somewhat desperate.
“She was planning to kill me. Did you know? Didn’t she tell you? I had to defend myself.”
Juan pictured Rosario and her silver bracelets, the white band in her hair, speaking Guaraní with a fluency that astonished everyone. Rosario with her expensive perfumes and her pen between her teeth when she read, placing the fan behind her so it would blow on her-back instead of her face. Rosario with her lists and her fingers covered in ink, or in chalk.
Delicately, he drew a circle around Mercedes’ mouth, and in his open palm he caught his mother-in-law’s lips and teeth. Then he cauterized the wound. Mercedes’ screams and those of the caged children were deafening, but he went on with his work. He licked each tooth clean and chewed the lips before Mercedes’ bulging eyes. She was no longer suffering, because when the wound was closed the pain disappeared. The scars of the wounds Juan made never had the tenderness of a recent injury; they were hard and old. Then he brought Mercedes’ face to his and used his tongue to clean away all the blood on her chin and neck. When he finished, he threw her to the floor.
“I should cut off the hand you hit my son with. It’s nothing to you, is it? But with this”—and he opened his hand to show her the shining teeth, somewhat spoiled by tobacco stains and lead fillings—“I have enough material to keep you from ever touching him again, or even trying to. I can also use these to control you and hurt you in other ways.”