The two friends frightened the youth, who was weak, thin, and had eyes that Thomas described in his journals as “like codfish eyes.” They convinced him to go with them to London. It was a period of rebellion in Scotland and they insisted he would die in the conflict if he stayed because, with his build and sickly constitution, he wasn’t a fighter. They offered to take care of him. It wasn’t hard to take him from the village: his parents trusted the elegant English gentlemen. And the locals, though they appreciated his prophetic ability, also feared him. The most religious among them believed his gift had come from the Devil.

They brought him to Thomas Mathers’ house, and they didn’t have to wait long for the first manifestation. He showed them the black light in a nearby field. In those days the ritual was done differently. The boy had to be lying down on the ground when he summoned the light, which, they say, didn’t wound back then. It was less savage, or it was asleep. “We touch it, and it’s cold and wet to the touch, like rain,” wrote Thomas Mathers in his diary. “The boy is Dee’s black mirror. He’s a medium, like Kelly.”

It’s because of those words that we refer to those who bring the Darkness as mediums, though technically they should be called something else, maybe priests or shamans. That young man, like Juan, experienced a metamorphosis in his hands. Thomas Mathers described claws like a cat’s. The boy spoke in the trance, pronouncing the words of the Darkness. That’s different now too: the Darkness speaks, but not in the medium’s voice.

Once, when Grandfather was telling us the story—he repeated it regularly, so we wouldn’t forget: he would even question us about the details—I asked him what the boy’s name was. I must have been eight years old. Grandfather had to admit they hadn’t recorded his name. The diaries just called him “the Scottish youth.” That is also what it is to be rich: that contempt for the beautiful and the refusal to even offer the dignity of a name.