Our Share of Night

by Mariana Enriquez

WHO IS THE THIRD WHO WALKS ALWAYS BESIDE YOU? T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness. Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

I cried, “Come out of the shadow, king of the nails of gold!” W. B. Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin

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.

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.

“Now you have to think about what’s between my two hands, like when your head hurts and you tell me it feels like there’s something in it. Okay, think about what’s in here.” Gaspar squeezed his eyes shut and bit his lower lip. “Got it.” “Okay, now tell the lady to go away. Don’t tell her out loud. You can say it in a quiet voice if you want, but tell her as if this part of you that’s between my hands could speak. Understand? It’s important.”

He’d said it in English, “haunt me,” because there were no words in Spanish for that verb, not embrujar, not aparecer, it was haunt.

Simonetti had poured all his artistic zeal into the sacristy wall. That was where he had mounted his masterpiece, which incited the locals’ fear and was possibly the reason the church had not been accepted by the curia. The carvings were well preserved despite the passage of time and their somewhat faded colors. They depicted a vision of hell, a tableau of warning: children with disproportionately large heads and twisted legs performed ritual dances around bonfires, frolicking with dragons and snakes. Naked women’s waists were chained by serpents. There were shocked faces, round eyes ever open, and more reptiles, especially frogs—there was a true obsession with frogs, in reference to the second plague of Egypt. This scene of the Last Judgment was finished off with the figure of a man sitting with a book, observing the horrible scenes of suffering with an impassive face.

Once he had finished, Simonetti tried to donate the church to the curia, but after two priests came to visit it, his gift was rejected. There were more negotiations, and more rejections, supposedly for bureaucratic reasons, but everyone refused to believe that explanation. It was said that the tableau represented the Salamanca, the meeting between wizards and the Devil, the criollo Witches’ Sabbath, and people claimed that Simonetti had participated in those ceremonies. He died trying to convince the priests that his work was sacred. Perhaps honoring a promise, he made the sacrifice—although he wasn’t old, he was ill—of walking from Colonia Camila to Goya, where he met with a church authority. When he returned, he lay down to rest, and by the next morning he was dead.

“Nyx is the name of the Greek goddess of night. She is the night.” “Is that in my book?” “I don’t think so, she’s a forgotten god. I told you about the forgotten gods. They had very few worshippers and over time they all died out, until finally people stopped telling stories about them.”

“Oh, but falling in love has nothing to do with beauty.”

I don’t trust anyone. I don’t trust myself. Gaspar is trapped. They want him to be my heir. Either he inherited my ability to summon the Darkness or I’m going to transport my consciousness into his body when the moment comes. And then, I’ll still be trapped.

I’m sure they killed Rosario. She had a fight with her mother and Florence. It was when I was in the hospital. Rosario asked them to leave us alone. She told them they couldn’t keep using me, that I didn’t want to summon anymore and that I would never hand over Gaspar and let them use his body.

Mercedes is always looking for other mediums. She is the priestess of a god who ignores her, just as all clerics of any denomination are ignored by their gods, and always have been. But her god speaks to me. For her, it was always a kind of curse to have such an untrustworthy oracle. I believe in the Darkness. How could I not, when it’s my body? When it’s my body that it enters? But to believe is not always to obey. The things the Darkness tells them cannot be interpreted on this plane. The Darkness is demented, it’s a savage god, a mad god.

What I want to know is if you could refuse. If you wanted. Of course not, I’m a slave. I am the mouth. The Darkness can find me, it’s a lost battle.

They already took Rosario, and they did it for many reasons, but above all to weaken me. “We will take your companion so she can’t help you abandon us, so she can’t help you quit and betray us.” I’ll never be able to stop.

“If I look at the sun, my head hurts. I see those weird flowers in the sky.” “Don’t look, then.” Juan also saw black flowers in the sky before a migraine. He and his son were oddly and exactly alike in that respect. What other things did they share? That was the question.

“I swear to you they can’t do anything. They’re not men and women, they’re echoes. You know how when you shout in the garage at home your voice comes back to you? But it’s not your voice anymore, the second time. This is the same. They were people once, there was a time when they were the woman from the hotel and the man from the river, but not anymore.

Gaspar had inherited the crippling headaches from him. They were impossible to explain to the fortunate people who only suffered from regular headaches: the hammering blows beneath the skull, eyes like two stones embedded in the face, the light like a knife, every noise amplified. And the nausea.

Juan turned around and began to draw in the earth with the knives to make the fifth seal, the one he’d seen with his eyes closed when he was with Andrés. A circle and the letters of the name of the Fifth Spirit, clockwise. Another circle around the name, and inside that, the seal: it was simple, four circles joined by lines in an almost childish design, and three inverted triangles. He could draw it quickly, from memory, without making any mistakes.

He looked at the seal and knew it was going to work, even though he was not wearing white clothes or a cape, there was no incense, and the drawing was only a furrow in the earth, without the blood or golden paint that was called for—though, strictly speaking, this seal should be drawn with mercury. Where on earth was he supposed to get mercury, though? Juan had contempt for what he called the occultist cookbook. One of the candles was giving off a singular smell, it wasn’t regular wax. He closed his eyes and let his body be filled by the energy summoned in the double current he’d acquired with Andrés. It was much more effective than any blade or spell.

Juan and the Fifth had met several times before. The Fifth, if it so desired, gave and cured illnesses. It had never wanted to grant health to Juan, though. It also responded truthfully about what was secret and hidden, and it was obligated to do that: it didn’t know how to lie.

Juan fell asleep naked on top of the sheets, and, possibly influenced by the air conditioner that cooled the room, he dreamed the Darkness was cold and wet, he dreamed of chattering teeth and twisted beings and fields of bodies and forests of hands and the hanged man strung up by his feet and the forest and then he couldn’t walk anymore, walking in the Darkness was very difficult, it was like climbing and there wasn’t enough air and things took on shapes his eyes recognized but then went back to being broken and inexplicable images; the forest, however, was clear, though so far away and colorless, and in among the trees there was a clear presence, waiting, and piles of skulls, a black river that made no sound.

She sensed him coming when they all did, but she didn’t dare turn around. This was not the man she knew, the one who slept in her bed. This being who took firm steps and could sense each blade of grass as it touched his bare feet was no longer exactly a man.

The Darkness grew first around Juan as if it were steam coming off his body, and suddenly—this moment always caught Tali by surprise—it shot off in all directions and became enormous and liquid—or, rather, lustrous. It was hard to look at it: darker than the night, compact, it hid the trees, the light from the candles, and as it grew, it lifted Juan up and he floated, suspended in the blackness of wings.

They disappeared, leaving only a trail of blood, the spatters that the carotid artery had sprayed over devotees in the first rows who now moved back a little, because the Darkness was coming down, down like a black sky or a bottomless throat, and it seemed to have eyes and to be able to choose.

They all pretended not to feel terror; those who trembled would claim it was from ecstasy, from emotion, from the glory of witnessing the visitation of a living god.

Juan was now kneeling on one leg and they could hear his erratic, painful breathing. He was still surrounded by a very fine black halo that, they all knew, was extremely dangerous: it cut like a scythe.

The Initiates brought him those among them who had been wounded by the Darkness. The medium—Tali couldn’t call him Juan now, she didn’t recognize him—moved his black hands over the body parts and burned them. The Initiates screamed in pain as he cauterized their wounds, but only for an instant, because the loss of a member, they believed, designated them as chosen favorites.

She had asked the saint once who the Darkness was; she’d asked at night, years ago, amid wine and candles, and the saint had replied in the cards: again and again the answer appeared in the center of the spread. The Moon. It was the card Juan had drawn for her and the one Tali understood the least, the one she always interpreted as meaning an important change, a voluntary one. But it was also about deception, confusion, reverie. Madness, even.

She said the dog had attacked her when she was two years old. She also claimed to remember it: the pain, the growling, the sound of chewing jaws, the blood spraying over the grass. She had been at her grandparents’ summer house, and it was her grandfather who had murdered the dog: his aim had been excellent, because when the bullet hit the animal, it was still gripping little Adela in its teeth.

All three of them watched as Adela opened a door that must lead to a bedroom. Before entering, she turned around and waved at them with her only hand. No one stopped her, because they planned to follow. They couldn’t have imagined that after waving, she would close the door behind her. Or that someone would close the door. And then, when he saw her yellow hair disappear into the darkness—there was no light in the room she had entered—Gaspar knew that this was one door he wasn’t going to be able to open. It was out of his reach. He felt it in his body and his mind with a luminous clarity.

Betty had fainted at the news of Adela’s disappearance: she’d wanted to go into the house, she’d pounded against the walls and the door, she’d clawed at the bricks in the windows. Someone told Gaspar that the door was locked again. Also that Betty had blamed him, that she’d shouted, it’s Juan’s son’s fault, he brought her, he handed her over.

On one of those breaks from the clinic he found out that Betty was gone, no one knew where she was, and how was it possible that she left right when her daughter had disappeared? Gaspar closed his eyes. Maybe Betty had gone looking for Adela.

Gaspar felt sick and tired because sleeping meant dreaming of Adela, Adela who slipped from his hands like a little fish; they’d been in a fish tank where giant eyes had seen everything. Whose eyes, only his father knew, and he was so far away, his own eyes black and impenetrable.

Dreams where Gaspar got up from the mattress, his father already dead, already ashes on the bed, and went to the kitchen and slit his own throat with a knife, blood pouring out, drenching the walls, his pants, his face, his hands, until everything he saw was red and he could let himself die once and for all. He, too, could have black eyes.

Gods always behave like the people who make them. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse

My grandfather, Santiago Bradford, sat us down—me and my cousin Betty, his two granddaughters—in

They found the Darkness, and the first medium, in Scotland. They didn’t just come across it; they weren’t searching blindly. They had read oblique references to a spirit that manifested as a black light, and that had capacities of prophecy and divination.

liked the name of the method and the way my grandfather pronounced it: silinnenath.

That is also what it is to be rich: that contempt for beauty and the refusal to offer even the dignity of a name.

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

They called her She Who Brings the Night. Also, the Serpent of the Moon.

She told George about a forest where thousands of demons lived, but there was one that reigned; it would hang from the trees and its feet were on backward, so its footprints never gave away where it was going. She told him about the wood carvings her uncle made and about her father’s riches and honor. She missed her jewels. She told him about forests of bones, about skulls that rolled between the trees. One night, while the ship swayed gently, she told him that certain beings were content with wine and flowers, but real gods demanded blood.

My father always believed that the Order and its rituals aid in maintaining riches, but that one must help them along with inheritance or good business. He’s right. I’ve read Ramon Llull, and he says exactly the same thing about alchemy: to make gold, you must first have gold. You can’t make something from nothing.

They wanted to evade death, and they thought the Darkness was going to grant them that gift. It’s the same thing we believe now, of course. Christopher Mathers knew that in order to build a faith, an incalculable promise was required.

Do you hear her? shouted Christopher Mathers, the leader. Do you hear? Many people nodded, and Mathers broke all the rules and protocol and left the protective circle. He went to get paper and pens and gave them to those who could hear. The Serpent was speaking, and they transcribed those words that were murmured in the spaces between the stars, between life and death.

The transcriptions, like now, turned out very different from each other, and some were impossible to comprehend. No matter, said Christopher Mathers, euphoric: the Black Serpent speaks to us and says more than we can understand, but the little we are capable of learning will suffice.

The night of the final ritual was almost no different, except that the Darkness surrounding Olanna lunged—there was no other way to describe it, George said in his diary—and when it touched one of the Initiates, a young woman with her face covered, it opened a deep cut in her left arm. She was rapt in ecstasy and didn’t feel the pain, but later she almost lost her arm, which required several operations. After the Darkness leaped, Olanna was motionless as always, silvery and red, but now frighteningly thin, her teeth protruding, her skull perfect under her skin, her eyes sunken. She no longer stuck out her tongue.

In her final delirium, Olanna wept. Lily dried her tears: her father-in-law had ordered her to collect them in small vials, but she had only done it once before telling her husband that she would not obey that cruel man. Couldn’t he see the ribs that seemed to want to rip through Olanna’s skin, or how her beautiful color was turning gray, how the scars on her face looked white? Olanna, you don’t have to do this, Lily had told her, naked except for her flapper’s headband that crossed her forehead and kept her short hair in place. In less than an hour, the Princess of Nri and medium of the Darkness stopped breathing. Lily cried with her hands submerged in a bowl of ice.