The people the hands grabbed and pulled underwater wore smiles of ecstasy as they were dragged away. They didn’t scream. They disappeared in seconds. Your father said they are only food, but they don’t know that. And if they do know, they don’t care, they want to feed their god. Gaspar ignored Stephen. The hands couldn’t touch him. With him they were stupid and slow. Stephen had learned to stand near Gaspar to avoid them.

Once the swamp was behind them, Gaspar turned around to look at the landscape. It was beautiful though muted, probably from the lack of light. It ended in an open field, small and empty, the solitude of a wasteland in a hollow world. There in the wasteland, things were left for them, the visitors. Small things placed right in the center of the field, very visible. Gifts. They had to go and get them. The Initiates who volunteered to collect the gifts looked small and frightened. The gifts were all different. They looked like jewelry—earrings, sometimes, or bracelets. After the first excursion they’d realized the objects were made of bone. Gaspar didn’t know what happened once they were back from the excursions, because everyone withdrew to rest, and so did he. He pretended to be exhausted, though he wasn’t tired.

My mother says the bones form letters. She thinks she’s getting messages again, Stephen explained. And what do they say? I’m not allowed in those meetings, Stephen answered. It was easier for them to see each other now: the members of the Order were so worn out after the excursions that no one monitored them except the guards, and they were annoyed at not being invited behind the door, so were less inclined to worry about that contact Florence preferred to avoid.

They still hadn’t seen, and Gaspar hadn’t pointed it out, that on the other side of the small valley where the forest began, a man hung from a tree. He was motionless. There was no wind behind the door. Gaspar began to dream about the man. In his dreams, the hanged man took the rope from around his neck and plucked bone fruits from the trees.

One night, Gaspar woke up and found his grandfather in the room: he had rolled his wheelchair in and was very drunk. The old man didn’t say anything, just tossed one of the objects on to the sheets—small bones tied together with a kind of vegetable twine. Gaspar inspected it in the moonlight. Its shape was identical to the scar on his arm. The guards didn’t do anything. They were unsure what to do when the person who entered was Adolfo Reyes. And they didn’t know what it was he had thrown on to the bed.

“They shouldn’t take those out,” said the old man. “You don’t take things from places like that.”