Florence’s scream revealed the objective of the march through the forest. Stephen, behind him, grabbed his arm.

There were many trees with people hanging from them. The first man, the mummy, hung by his neck. And very high up. He was missing a hand. But the position of all these men and women was the same. Gaspar recognized it: they had been hung in the position of the Tarot’s Hanged Man, head down.

“That’s my brother’s body,” said Stephen.

Florence had stopped screaming. Now she was on the ground, her face against a cadaver’s face, a young man with very white skin. She was verifying that it was, in fact, her son, and she was talking to that dead head. It didn’t seem decomposed, but the eyes were fixed and the neck was bent, broken. There was dried blood on its face and its long hair was red and strawlike. Gaspar felt some pity, in spite of everything. Florence was no longer panting, she seemed rejuvenated as she kissed her son on the mouth. Why hadn’t he rotted? How old was he? A teenager, Gaspar realized. His arms were very thin and his neck black, as if time had not been able to hide the bruises of hanging. His father had done that. Stephen would tell him how.

Florence spoke in English to the dead teenager, cooing to him. My magic boy, she repeated, how much you must have learned in this place, in the realm of the gods.

She asked the others to help her get him down, but there was no response. No one moved. Mercedes indicated the other hanged people: they went as far as the horizon, like in a cemetery of soldiers, a valley of the fallen.

Florence insisted, with all the sternness she could muster in her exhaustion and desperation. No one was paying attention to what was happening around them, nor did they notice Gaspar start slowly backing up, and Stephen with him.

Mercedes was the only alert one. Her beastlike face sniffed at the air. She had noticed the change that the others were unable to perceive, bewildered as they were by that field of hanged bodies, and above all by the reappearance of Eddie, the vanished heir. The place behind the door had never had a smell on the previous excursions Gaspar had led. Now, however, there was a swelter in the air, a stench of old meat and sun-warmed crypt, of rotten milk, of menstrual blood and hungry breath, of dirty teeth. The breathing of a filthy mouth.

We need to leave, Mercedes said, but they didn’t hear her. They ignored her. But she had realized. The place was a mouth.