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.”