The Valkyries

seem to want to pass.
    Dark. The darkness grew; it seemed like a gray cloud around him. He felt the dizziness again. Yes, it had to be something he had eaten
—Or maybe an acid flashback,
he thought. But he hadn’t tried LSD in five years. The delayed effects had disappeared after the first six months, and never returned.
    He was frightened, he had to get out.
    He opened the door—the dizziness was coming and going, and he might get worse out in the street. Better to stay home and wait. The note was there on the table—she would be home shortly—he could wait. They could go together to the pharmacy or to a doctor, although he hated
doctors. It couldn’t be anything serious. No one has a heart attack at age twenty-six.
    No one.
    He sat down on the couch. He needed some distraction. He shouldn’t think about her, or the time would pass even more slowly. He tried to read the paper, but the dizziness, the lightheadedness, came and went, stronger each time. Something was pulling him into a black hole that appeared to have formed in the middle of the room. He began to hear noises—laughing, voices, things breaking. That had never happened—never! Whenever he had taken anything he knew he was drugged, knew it was a hallucination and would pass with time. But this—this was terribly real!
    No, no, it couldn’t be real. The reality was the rugs, the curtains, the bookshelves, the coffee table with the leftovers of bread on it. He made an effort to concentrate on the scene surrounding him, but the feeling of a black hole in front of him, the voices, the laughter, all continued.
    None of this was happening. Definitely! He had practiced magic for six years. Performed all the rituals. He knew it was nothing more than suggestion. A psychological effect that was playing on his imagination. Nothing more.
    His panic was increasing, and the dizziness was more pronounced—pulling to the outside of his body,
toward a dark world, toward that laughter, those voices, those noises—real!
    I cannot let myself be afraid. Fear will make it come back.
He tried to control himself, went to the sink and bathed his face. He felt a bit better, the feeling seemed to have passed. He put his sneakers on and tried to forget about it. He toyed with the idea of telling his partner he had entered into a trance, had been in contact with demons.
    But he had only to think about that, and the dizziness returned—more strongly.
    “I’ll be right back,” the note said, and she hadn’t come!
    I never achieved concrete results in the astral plane,
he thought. He had never seen anything. No angels, no devils, no spirits of the dead. The Beast wrote in his diary that he was able to make things materialize, but he was lying, the Beast had never gotten that far. He knew that. The Beast had failed. He liked the Beast’s ideas because they were rebellious, chic. And very few people had ever heard them. And people are always more respectful of those who speak of things no one understands. As for the rest—Hare Krishna, Children of God, the Church of Satan, Maharishi—everyone knew about those. The Beast—the Beast was just for the chosen few! “The law of the powerful,” one of his books talked about.
The Beast was on the cover of
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
one of the Beatles’s best known records—and almost no one knew it. Maybe not even the Beatles knew what they were doing when they placed that photograph there.
    The phone rang. It might be his girlfriend. But if she had written, “I’ll be right back,” why would she be phoning?
    Only if something was happening.
    That’s why she hadn’t come. The intervals between bouts of dizziness were growing shorter and shorter, and everything was turning black again. He knew—something was telling him—that he couldn’t let that feeling take him over. Something terrible might happen—he might enter into that darkness and never return. He had to maintain control at any cost—he needed to occupy his mind, or that thing would dominate him.
    The phone. He concentrated on the phone. Speak, converse, think of other things, take his mind off that darkness, the phone was a miracle, a solution. He knew it. He knew that somehow he couldn’t surrender. He had to answer the phone.
    “Hello?”
    It was a woman’s voice. But it wasn’t his girlfriend—it was Argelia.
    “Paulo?”
    He didn’t answer.
    “Paulo, can you hear me? I need you to come over to my house! Something strange is