The old lady. Mercedes, I said. The children in cages all had sharpened teeth. I had to make sure they didn’t bite me, because she had warned me they could give me rabies and I would die convulsing and they’d have to shoot me in the head like the country dogs. Did he leave a letter for Florence, too? I don’t know, said Stephen. My mother isn’t in England. She left yesterday to go and visit my father.

No one helps. I want to go to the mountains, I can fall and the rocks will pound my whole body, and then I’ll have bruises I can touch and feel the pain. I’m in darkness and pain. Is the usurper, too? He is not the medium. The pregnant one told me. You all think I don’t know him, but I do. He looks like a lion. I’m like a fox and I move better than him.

The paranoid lucidity of the acid, which was no longer a tranquillity of colors but rather a state of alertness in my whole body, my hair standing on end as if it were wired, forced me to break the circle and take Stephen by the shoulders. Your brother is looking for him. We have to leave right now.

The one-eyed girl is also a usurper, like the lion. They deserve nothing, they are not of blood. Mother, you pulled out her eye with your teeth. Or else it was the old lady. Was she in the Darkness, too? It’s never clear who is real and who isn’t, everyone is real, there’s no point in trying to distinguish. I don’t know if the hands are real. They won’t let me sleep. Mother, you wouldn’t let me sleep, either. We have to keep him awake, you’d say, and I heard you, I was standing up. You all always think I can’t hear because I don’t speak. You all are smart, because it is smart to hurt with simplicity. I am smart, too.

Stephen asked Juan if Eddie had ever seen him. I don’t know, said Juan. I recovered at your mother’s house, and he lived there. I spent the nights with Rosario, but she went out during the day and I was alone. I don’t remember having sensed someone’s presence in the room, but that pain medication is pretty strong and I spent a lot of hours asleep.

You understand why I ask. Ever since he was little, my brother has played this very simple game. He sneaks into houses, into bedrooms, at night, and moves things around. Or he does other nonsense, leaves some kind of mark on a wall, a drawing. If there’s a garden, he tramples a flower bed. In the morning, the owner of the house sees the changes and the little acts of vandalism, but can’t understand why someone would do them. Eddie calls them “creepy crawlers.” Before my mother locked him up, he would do it with some friends he’d managed to make in Mayfair, some really demented people. They’ve all gone to California now. I think he’s seen you. He knows you, somehow.