This time, there were more bones on the path. More in quantity, I mean. The number of ornaments hanging from the branches had also grown. Juan took off his shirt, knelt down on the bones, and plunged his arms into the remains. His bare back grew broad, and we heard the sound of his knees breaking ancient skeletons. The river sounded like it had more rapids. It grows because it eats. Juan is its mouth, and the gods are always hungry.

Being on the other side of the door for too long is like spending hours looking through a telescope. From so much looking at the stars you feel lost, outside the world. In space, human life has no meaning. Not in this place, either. Juan crumbled the bones with his fingers. He was bleeding, and he left his blood as an offering. Laura shaved part of Juan’s scalp, above his left ear. I tried not to look, because I thought bringing a razor into the Other Place was a mistake; I said as much, but they didn’t listen. Juan used the sharp edge of a bone to draw a design on his scalp. He barely bit his lip from the pain. I don’t know how he could do it without a mirror, but the sign came out perfectly.

That communion was dangerous but necessary. We needed Laura to decipher the drawings on the ornaments. We needed to keep those incursions, that place, a secret. And in order to do that, a gift from Juan was necessary. When he finished drawing the design on his skull and set the bone down atop the others, an ornament, a small one, dropped from a long tree branch in front of him. He looked around, and I think his eyes held gratitude.

There was a new path now, besides the path of bones; it was the gray color of night and the very dark green of a strange vegetation, mosses and lichens on the trees. The floor was like that of a pine forest. I sensed that the silence was going to be broken long before I heard a distant sound. I can’t call it music; it was like a wind instrument, but disjointed and clumsy, sporadic, as if the flautist was out of breath. It lasted less than a minute. Someone was there, but very far away from us.

I don’t know if it’s an instrument, said Juan. Maybe it’s an animal. Something or someone’s mouth. A chant. I leaned against his shoulder and he ran his bloody thumb over my lips. His blood is delicious. What would happen if we had sex here, under the moonless sky? What kind of child could we conceive?