It was the first time his son had had a perception, at least in his presence. He’d been waiting for this moment; Rosario had insisted it was going to happen soon, and she was usually right about these things. But discovering that Gaspar really had inherited his ability took his breath away, and he felt his throat closing off. He hadn’t held out much hope that his son would be normal, but there in that hallway the little hope he’d held on to had vanished entirely, and Juan felt the dismay constrict him like a chain around his neck. An inherited condemnation. He tried to feign calm.

“Gaspar,” he said without raising his voice, “it’s this way. Down the stairs.”

The boy turned around in the hallway and looked at him with a confused expression, as if just waking up in a strange room after sleeping for days. The look only lasted a second, but Juan recognized it. He knew he had to teach the boy how to close himself off to that floating world, to those sticky wells, how to avoid falling into them. And he had to start soon, because he remembered the terrors of his own childhood, and there was no reason Gaspar should go through the same thing.

My son will be born blind, the presence at the end of the hall intoned over and over; it had no hair and wore a blue dress. It didn’t seem like Gaspar could hear it, though perhaps he had seen it. That’s what he had been talking about in the bathroom earlier: a woman sitting in the plaza across from the hotel who stared at his window with her mouth open. Juan hadn’t paid attention because the boy wasn’t afraid as he told the story, and that was good. Gaspar was intuitively right: there was nothing to fear, that woman was nothing but an echo. There were a lot of echoes now. It was always like that in a massacre, the effect like screams in a cave—they remained for a while until time put an end to them. There was a long way to go until that end, and the restless dead were moving quickly, they wanted to be seen. “The dead travel fast,” he thought.

They went down the stairs in silence to keep from waking other guests. A woman who was surely the owner of the hotel was leafing through a magazine at reception. She looked up when she they came in, and then she stood; with a single quick movement she smoothed her blouse and her hair, which was dark and somewhat tousled.

“Hello there,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”

Juan walked over to the counter and rested one hand on the phone book that was open beside the lamp.

“Good evening, ma’am. Is there by chance anything open where we could get something to eat?”

The woman cocked her head.