The sounds from downstairs faded or stopped entirely, and again Pablo debated leaving. The men should have been able to hear his breathing—he couldn’t control it and it was fast and noisy like after running. Gaspar’s father was kneeling with his head twisted to one side, a strange, slack position, as if he were listening to something, music coming in through the window or from the roof. The gray-haired man pulled away from his embrace and stood up; he walked alone toward the room they’d come out of, but then he stopped, and Pablo knew it was because he’d sensed his presence. The gray-haired man turned around and looked him straight in the eyes: his own were sunken and had heavy lids. Pablo could see those details in the light from the moon and the candles, while Gaspar’s father sat unmoving in the center of the circle, distant and tense, his enormous hands fully extended; the shadows made them look longer than normal. The gray-haired man didn’t speak out loud, but his lips very clearly mouthed “Get out.” Pablo nodded, and the gray-haired man kept watching him until he reached the stairs. Pablo ran down them and tried to ignore the voices that had risen up again, a woman talking about a church in ruins, another who said we need smoke and earth, a man repeating a phrase in a language Pablo didn’t know, and something that was dragging, he could hear it, it was the sound of shoes walking through dry leaves. Were there people in the other rooms? Was it some kind of club? Pablo was exhausted when he reached the door, as if he’d had to cover several blocks to get there and not just a few yards, and he ran to his house thinking about Gaspar’s father’s blond hair, about the way he’d wet his fingers with his saliva, about the strength of his arms when he’d kissed the gray-haired man. Now, as he ran toward his house, what he had witnessed seemed unreal. The voices and the suffocating heat and the circle drawn on the floor, it all made him think of something dark and deathly, of spiders and abandoned cemeteries, or the cold floor of the bathroom at night and the blood that came from between his mother’s legs and smelled like metal and meat, of the chains that the wind banged at night on the empty factory down the street and on the abandoned bricked-up house on Calle Villarreal, of the silence that came after a blackout, of dreams about cold hands that caressed his stomach until he woke up, and of the mildew stain on the ceiling that some nights looked like a fat cat and other nights like a horned animal.