Oh, the plan, thinks Bradford, on his knees as he listens to more muffled moans and feels his belly burn, senses that he’s out of time. I let your parents take you home. I hired people to report to me and tell me all about your sobbing mother, your drunk father, your always decent brother, the only decent one in that pathetic tin shack. About that sad school they sent you to when what you deserved was a private institute. The cardiologists told me you were improving, but they couldn’t control the arrhythmias and I guessed, oh, I guessed, even before the night that joined us forever, that it was fear, that it was a panic you couldn’t endure. That was the name of the nymphs’ collective terror when the great god Pan appeared: panic, and that’s what you felt, that horror. They brought you back to the hospital, thin but still strong, your father spouting nonsense about how he couldn’t take care of you, my joy at his alcoholism and misery and at your mother’s surrender, and then that first night everything was confirmed, because all those things you saw, they were worse in a hospital, of course, and I let you suffer, I needed to be sure, it was a test you had to pass, I let you reach the edge and I brought you back once—how many times, Juan, when you were older, did you joke that I was your own personal resurrector—and that night, when I knew and everyone knew that you weren’t going to survive if the ventricular arrhythmias continued, we talked. What’s wrong, I asked you, and you told me about men and women no one else saw and who talked to you, but also about a forest through a window and about feet that floated and about someone eating a woman’s neck, and you said you didn’t know who they were but they wouldn’t leave. There are more of them here, you told me; here, they scream. Your eyes had lost their shine. And I taught you the simplest method of blocking what was happening to you, the one I’d never needed but that the Englishwoman taught all the Order’s members. I put a hand on your stomach in just the way I’d heard her explain, and you recoiled a little, your body sick of being handled and hurt. Still, you endured it, and you learned the technique in seconds. There’d been no trick or illusion, you were the one we were waiting for, you were the medium, and when you stopped seeing what you’d been seeing you fell back on to the pillow, and gradually your breathing and your heart calmed down and you asked me, what do I do if they come back? and I said, for now, you repeat that same exercise. Oh, Juan, the trust of that first time. If only I could see your eyes one last time, before I enter the Darkness.