“Are you sure they aren’t alive, in the Other Place? They can’t come back?”

“You’re sure, too. There’s nothing left of them. That place was starving.”

At night, when he went out to the beach to smoke, Gaspar thought about the procession he had led. It had been another sacrifice, like Adela’s, but this time he’d known what he was doing. He didn’t regret it. He wasn’t afraid of retaliation. He slept with a peace he had never known before. Stephen, on the other hand, though he had guided Gaspar in the massacre, and had planned it for so long with Juan, was as disconsolate as the last speaker of a dying language. One night, Gaspar had seen him disappear along the path leading to his father’s Place of Power. Hours later he’d heard an explosion. He ran. An underground explosion. The tunnel with the iron door. He asked Stephen why he’d blown up the tunnel and he said because it brought him memories. It was empty, he added. Gaspar didn’t believe him, but once it seemed safe, he would visit the ruins. After the explosion, Stephen left for several days. To meet up with Tali, he said. Maybe he also had a lover. A week of absence. No more than that. In the house he ate little and drank a lot. Maybe one morning Gaspar would find his body on the beach, washed up by the river. Or maybe they were going to be two solitary men sharing a secret in that still house, year after year, who would run into each other in the early-morning hours, unable to sleep, incapable of forgetting how the hanged man swaying in the wind had no shadow.

After smoking every night, Gaspar went back along the catwalk, past the orchid garden, and along the path that led from the lookout tower to the guesthouse. He climbed the stairs to the first floor. The door hadn’t been bricked over, despite Stephen’s insistence. The carved wood was still there, the bronze doorknob, the silent hallway.

He hadn’t opened it again, not yet. He knocked, timidly, as he did every day.

“Adela,” he said.

There was no answer. He closed his eyes. He saw a blonde, naked girl walking under a starless sky. Lost, but not scared. He saw her dancing on a red dirt path, strands of yarn hanging from her arm and her legs, unfettered, frenzied. He saw a black planet above the river. He saw his grandmother without lips or nose. He saw candles in the forest and a young woman on all fours crawling over bones. He saw men and women running, all of them mutilated, some without legs, who dragged themselves or spun in circles. He saw a starving white dog, its spine like metal balls encrusted into its back. He saw a girl in a red dress sitting beside the swamp; something that came from the water was eating her legs, but she didn’t protest. He saw a pale torso in a field of yellow flowers.