Getting down to the river was easier than I expected. The air was still dry despite the nearby water. I reached down to touch it but Juan stopped me, roughly, as if waking me from a hypnotized state. He’s right—we all know what happens if you steal something from faery. True, this is no fairyland, but there’s no reason the rules would be different. The rules almost never are. The forms can vary, but not the rules.

Someone sleeps in the Other Place. That’s what Juan calls it. That’s why there is silence. So that presence can sleep. And the bones are a temple. He took a deep breath. There is absolutely nothing here, he said. The river has no fish. There are no insects. How much farther are we going to have to go before we find something?

Laura asked him to be patient. It’s our first time.

He looked at his hands and spoke. We listened, and from his tone we knew he was confiding a secret. When I summon the Darkness, or when the Darkness takes me—you choose the term—I can’t see what’s happening. I’m blind in my trance. I know that the Darkness cuts and takes the Initiates because I’m told. Once, Florence showed me a recording of the Ceremonial, which she burned later. I don’t know what has happened until I return and cauterize the wounds and mark those who must be marked with scars. But I’m not unconscious in the trance. I go to a place, or rather, I see scenes. I thought they were hallucinations, like the ones people see in a coma or during a heart attack.

They’re like this place? asked Laura.

Yes and no. I see a hallway I don’t dare walk down. There are people, or beings, hanging from lamps. I saw a piano. And there’s a window, and through it there’s a forest. That forest does look like this one.

All forests are similar, I interrupted him.

I know, but these are identical. I’ve seen that window many times, at every Ceremonial. Sometimes it’s closer than others. And it’s this place, I could distinguish it from among thousands of similar images.

Laura gave him her hand and he took it, interlaced his fingers with hers. Let’s keep going, he said.

On the other side of the river there was more forest and a gentle hill that we could barely see in the darkness. We went back to the path of bones and to the ornaments: the femurs arranged in intricate shapes, the skulls hanging as though on door knockers, very still, the little bones of hands and feet mounted like delicate jewels, and on the ground, trampled bones. How many meters of them? How long until the bones turned to dirt? Some of them edged the path like sentinels, complete ribcages upright, and there were delicate tracks of vertebrae, some of them whole, with the little tail of aquatic animals.