After the ritual, his father had told him about mediums. About the lack of mediums. About the existence of many Cults of the Shadow with different interpretations and practices, some of them hostile to each other, others allied. That day in the country, while some men and women were still wandering like sleepwalkers around the estate and its fields, clutching at the air and crying, startling dogs and horses, Jorge Bradford understood that this was no club. That Florence was a priestess. Jorge Bradford had seen things he couldn’t explain. Things that kept him awake many nights and made him return to his father’s books, which he had never scorned, but had studied with a certain disinterest. Now they were as important to him as his seminars, his medical books, his exhausting residency. He decided to spend a few months in London to hone his abilities as a surgeon and to visit the Order’s large library there. Florence, the Englishwoman, who was spending time in Britain between trips, let him read the Book, with its annotations and interpretations contributed by experts. Bradford believed. He had his doubts, but they would soon be dispelled.
Now, with Bradford on his knees, a cry rings out and the Darkness takes a high Initiate. Still far away, some thirty meters away. It would come for him tonight, but he still had time. He remembered his first encounter with the Darkness, unexpected and unpleasant, like accidentally stepping into sewer water.
The second operation on the child Juan Peterson was performed five months after the palliative shunt. Hypothermia, Bradford remembered: the blue boy again packed in ice, as beautiful as the dead. He remembered the pleasure of saw against sternum, and the stupidly woeful expression on the face of the technician wielding it—he’d had to tell her we’re saving his life, quit the theatrics, and she’d murmured something about compassion that had almost made his hands start to shake, the worst possible thing for a surgeon. That surgery had never before been performed in the country—actually three procedures: close the intraventricular communication with a patch, open the pulmonary valve to pull back the thickened muscle, and place a patch on the right ventricle and the pulmonary artery to improve circulation in the lungs. And, if he had time, he would also close the interatrial communication. He did have time: Bradford managed to finish everything in six hours, with only a few minutes of rest; he hadn’t wanted to let anyone else make even the simplest sutures.
He remembered the moments before the revelation with unbearable clarity. Just when he was about to announce he had finished and they would proceed to close up, the boy’s heart, which had held up for so long, barely speeding up in certain stretches, began to beat uncontrollably, arrhythmically, and Bradford recognized the ventricular fibrillation, the muscle’s frantic shaking, that harbinger of death. He carefully started manual reanimation; decisiveness and delicacy would be key, and he gave the order to prepare the external defibrillator, a novel apparatus that the cardiovascular surgical team had used with discretion and success.
But before they could use it, the electricity cut out. It was a wet blackout—that’s how Bradford remembered it, as a cold wetness. The boy had undergone several minutes of manual reanimation, but he was going to need a shock. “Lantern flashlights candles generator anything!” he yelled, and then he felt, with horrible certainty, that another hand was pulling him out of the boy’s body. Bradford cried out, shouting accusations at the surgical team, what were they doing, and in the dark, no less!—it was early morning—and he heard, “nothing, Doctor, we aren’t doing anything, the rest of the hospital has electricity, the outage is only here in the operating room,” and when someone brought a lantern to the table they all clearly saw that over the boy’s open chest, above the metal keeping his sternum separated, above his stilled heart, there floated what could only be described as a piece of night, but transparent, like soot, perhaps, or thick smoke, and when the assistant surgeon tried to touch it, put his hand through it, murmuring what the holy hell is happening here, no sooner did his fingers brush the black dust than he screamed and pulled back his hand and it was no longer his hand, now he was missing half of his three longest fingers, the middle, ring, and index, and he was screaming and screaming, and the electricity didn’t come back and Bradford wasn’t about to take the same risk as his assistant, because although he didn’t understand what was happening and he couldn’t believe it, he knew that this slowly receding darkness was dangerous. More than dangerous. It was the Darkness his father had told him about, the one the Order’s mediums summoned, the one the Englishwoman desperately sought. The boy had been in cardiac arrest for fifteen minutes and the nurses were blathering nonsense, tending to the assistant, someone was saying it had been an accident, he must have inadvertently bumped into a scalpel, which was impossible, but people would rather justify, invent, refute, and not see when they have to believe. Bradford held out through the stampede of people—nurses, the anaesthesiologist, scrubs—who said they’d seen the boy wrapped in darkness like a cocoon, he stayed until the darkness withdrew, and then he touched the boy’s motionless heart again and whispered come on, you’re here for a reason, if you are the voice of the gods then beat, and the heart started beating between his fingers as though it had never stopped. Bradford closed up the boy’s chest alone and in silence, not listening to the explanations, the complaints and grievances from the others—he didn’t even know who they were, whether they were other doctors or directors or what. When he had finished suturing, he accidentally moved the green sheet covering the boy’s arms, and then he saw the proof. The mark. A hand on the boy’s arm, the mark of a hand, like a burn scar. It wasn’t strange, he even told himself then: sometimes the cold of the ice used to bring on hypothermia in surgeries left burns; it was even less strange after the disaster that had occurred in the operating room. A nurse could have rested her hand there and left a mark in the cold. He studied it. It was deep and looked old. It was a scar. A left hand on the left arm, the Left Hand of Darkness. He had read about that sign. He knew what it meant.
He waited for the boy to wake up in intensive care. Ten hours. He was sure there would be cerebral lesions—he’d explained to the parents, who didn’t seem to understand, just as they didn’t understand anything else; oh, but the older brother did understand, where did these little gringos get that intelligence?—he expected a coma, he expected another arrhythmia that would kill the boy once and for all. But Juan woke up around noon, and the encephalogram was normal and Bradford ordered that he not be allowed to suffer for a second, and then, since he couldn’t sleep and he had to talk to someone, he almost crashed his car driving home, and in that spirit he knocked on the door of his sister’s apartment, his somber sister who occupied two floors of the same building where he lived, one of the family’s Buenos Aires buildings—the most spacious, the most beautiful. Mercedes ruled over that apartment where her husband almost always left her alone—she’d married a man who was rich, fun, and unfaithful. And her daughter, Rosario, spent almost all her time at school and then in her room or with friends. Bradford loved his niece: she had the irrepressible joy of intellect. Bradford talked and Mercedes listened in a silence interrupted only by a spoon in a teacup and the enormous clock that presided over the room. Don’t rush it, she said. And that was why he’d turned to Mercedes: she was cold-blooded. He must be yours if what you say happened is true. He must be ours. But there can’t be any suspicious behavior. I can’t leave him with those brutes, Mercedes, those peasants. Of course not, but we need to be careful.