Our Share of Night

by Mariana Enriquez

She didn’t believe until the evidence drove them all half-mad in Puerto Reyes, and Juan elevated them—but especially her, because she was a Bradford—to unthinkable levels in the Order hierarchy. That was when the eyes of the Cult of the Shadow turned, suddenly and definitively, toward a mansion in the jungle surrounded by blood-red earth.

I hope he dies, he thought. I hope Dad dies once and for all and puts an end to all this and I can live with my uncle or with Vicky or alone in the house and I don’t ever have to think again about locked rooms, voices in my head, dreams of hallways and dead people, ghost families, boxes full of eyelids, blood on the floor, where he goes when he leaves, where he’s coming from when he returns, I wish I could stop loving him, forget him, I wish he’d die.

You have something of mine, I passed on something of me to you, and hopefully it isn’t cursed, I don’t know if I can leave you something that isn’t dirty, that isn’t dark, our share of night.

All fortunes are built on the suffering of others, and ours, though it has unique and astonishing characteristics, is no exception.

What the Darkness dictates to the Order are instructions about how to achieve the survival of consciousness. To call them “instructions” is imprecise, but it’s the simplest term to help explain what happens. Every time it speaks and communicates through the medium, it dictates the steps necessary for that transition. Those steps are what the Darkness dictated when it came to Olanna, and also during the trances of the Scottish youth, though in those first sessions they couldn’t decipher the meaning of the words. The method is transmitted in a very slow, spaced-out, and enigmatic way. Everything is written down in a sacred book. What we believe, and what the Darkness—and therefore the Order—offers, is the possibility of maintaining existence on this plane forever. But the Darkness is fickle. Sometimes it speaks and there’s no way to find meaning in what it says. Sometimes it utters only isolated words. Sometimes it dictates methods for other ends, generally hurtful ones, because such a god can only be cruel. Often it tells brief stories about its solitary existence in an empty wasteland: it invites us to visit but it doesn’t say how, because its nature is fickle.

There is no greater disappointment than to believe oneself the chosen one and to not be chosen.