The night before our planned trip, Tara and Sandy came to visit. They brought other friends, all of them members of the Order, children of high Initiates. Navid, who was Sandy’s lover; Lucian, one of Anne’s sons and Laura’s step-brother—her other son was a true old Etonian, with his suits and shiny shoes: he wanted to be the youngest Member of Parliament. Susie, who lived in Scotland and always invited us to her house near the sea, in Portobello. Lucie, with her camera. The twins Crimson and Genesis. With all of us there, we could almost reproduce life at Cheyne Walk before Juan arrived. We put on Blonde on Blonde and Otis Redding and the Velvet Underground, we took acid and danced until our bodies disintegrated into shining particles and we couldn’t see them anymore. Laura shouted that no one should leave the house, that we couldn’t disconnect the trip, the group must stay united. It’s true that it’s strange when someone abandons a trip: something is disturbed. Juan didn’t dance, but Sandy sat on his knees and kissed him. I let her do it. I remember she was wearing a bright red feather boa, and it looked like a stream of fake blood. Suddenly I had a horrible sense of foreboding, and to get rid of my fear I put on David’s new album and lay down beside the speaker. The first song made me cry and laugh because it talked about being far above the moon, and only then did I realize we had missed the moon landing, months before. Even worse, we’d forgotten! We hadn’t seen it, we’d never even turned on the TV. Where had we been that evening? Gazing at torsos? At hands? Walking over bones?

I think I slept for a while, and when I woke up, everyone was in a circle. I thought they were looking at the pictures of the Other Place and I almost screamed to high heaven, those idiots, Laura and Stephen, getting high and showing the secret to our friends—we couldn’t trust them with something like that. When I saw Juan was listening very attentively, I realized he would never allow that, and it had to be something else.

Tara was reading a letter. Sandy told me it had been slid under the door, but they didn’t know when. Time, on acid, was impossible to measure. They’d seen it when I’d separated from them, but they didn’t know how long it had been there waiting for someone to open it.

It was a letter from Eddie.

“Are you sure?” I cried, and Stephen said yes, he recognized his brother’s handwriting.

I remembered the headstone Eddie had drawn over his bed, the images of hanged men on his walls, and I looked at Stephen and Laura: they were pale from fear. I listened closely to Tara’s voice. Never locked up again, there are hands in the darkness and they won’t leave me alone. You don’t care if it hurts me, mother, and neither does the old lady, she’s the one who sharpened my teeth, she wants me to bite her. No one helps.