The Valkyries

lantern. The darkness was total.
    “Put the cord around your neck,” she said to Paulo. “And hold the medallion with both hands joined, in prayer.”
    Paulo did as he was told. He was fearful of a darkness so complete, and he was remembering things he would rather not think about.
    He felt Valhalla approaching him from behind. Her hands touched his head.
    The darkness seemed almost solid. Nothing, not a scintilla of light, entered there.
    Valhalla began to pray in a strange language. At first, he tried to identify the words she was saying. Then, as her fingers moved across his head, Paulo felt the medallion growing hot. He concentrated on the heat in his hands.
    The darkness was changing. Various scenes from his life began to pass before him. Light and shadow, light and shadow, and—suddenly, he was once again in darkness.
    “I don’t want to remember that…” he pleaded with the Valkyrie.
    “Remember! Whatever it is, try to remember every minute of it.”
    The darkness brought terror to him, the terror he had experienced fourteen years earlier.
    When he woke up, he found a note on the coffee table: “I love you. I’ll be right back.” At the bottom, she had written the date: “25 May 1974.”
    Funny. To put the date on a love note.
    He had awakened a bit dizzy, still startled by the dream. In it, the director of the recording studio was offering him a job. He didn’t need a job: The director actually functioned more like his employee—his and his partner’s. Their records were at the top of the charts, selling thousands of copies, and letters were arriving from all corners of Brazil, from people wanting to know what the Alternative Society was.
    All you have to do is listen to the words of the song,
he thought to himself. It wasn’t really a song—it was a mantra from a magic ritual, with the words of the Beast of the Apocalypse being read in the background in a low voice. Whoever sang the song would be invoking the forces of darkness. And everyone was singing it.
    He and his partner had done the whole thing. The royalties they earned were being used to buy a lot near Rio de Janeiro. There they would recreate what, almost one hundred years earlier, the Beast had tried to establish in Cefalu, Sicily. But the Beast was expelled by the Italian authorities. The Beast had erred on many points—he had not gathered a sufficient number of disciples, and he did not know how to earn money. The Beast told everyone
that his number was 666, and that he had come to create a world where the strong would be served by the weak, and the only law was that everyone do as they desired. But the Beast didn’t know how to spread the ideas—few people had taken the Beast’s words seriously.
    He and his partner, Raul Seixas, well, they were completely different! Raul sang, and the entire country listened. They were young, and they were earning money. Yes, it was true that Brazil was in the hands of a military dictatorship, but the government was concerned about guerrillas. They couldn’t waste their time with a rock singer. Just the opposite: The authorities felt that rock music kept the country’s youth away from communism.
    He drank his coffee standing at the window. He was going to take a walk, and meet later with his partner. It didn’t bother him at all that nobody knew who he was, while his friend was famous. What mattered was that they were earning money, and this would allow them to put their ideas into practice. People from the world of music, and the world of magic—ah, they knew! His anonymity with regard to the general public was even rather funny—more than once, he had had the pleasure of hearing someone comment on his work—without knowing that the author was listening nearby.
    He donned his sneakers. As he was tying the laces, he felt dizzy.
    He raised his head. The apartment seemed darker than it should have been. The sun was shining outside, and he had just left the window. Something was burning—an electrical appliance, maybe, because the stove was disconnected. He looked throughout the apartment. Nothing.
    The air was heavy. He decided to go out right away—without tying his sneakers, he started to leave, but realized that he really wasn’t feeling well.
    Could be something I ate,
he said to himself. But when he ate something that was off, his entire body usually gave him a signal, and he knew that. He wasn’t nauseated, didn’t feel like vomiting. Just a kind of dizziness that didn’t