Silver Nitrate(49)
She wrote all of them down.
“?‘Find my words beneath the skin,’?” she said, reading the sentence out loud.
The phrase was elusive. It told her nothing, just as she felt all those chapters on magic practices had revealed little. There were two chapters dedicated to runes and sigils, and another one about how performances could be used for spell casting, but it was all couched in cryptic language and florid imagery that made it difficult to discern Ewers’s meaning. The thing she had understood most clearly, having now sampled much of Ewers’s magic system as well as books about other occultists, was that the man was a dedicated collage artist who could mention Icelandic runes one second, then talk about Peruvian shamans in his next breath. It was cheap romantic exotification, but she could also glimpse what Abel Urueta had seen: Ewers had a sense of grandeur, and he knew saying something plainly would not be as effective as going full-on rococo.
Montserrat turned the volume between her hands, when suddenly she remembered what she’d told Tristán the other day: that she thought this book had been rebound.
“You crafty bastard,” she whispered.
Montserrat went to the kitchen and opened a drawer, shoving forks and spoons aside until she found a sharp knife.
She sat back in the office and opened the book flat, plunging the knife along the interior fold of the cover. It was a harder task than she had anticipated, but she managed to take off the cover and remove the pages, revealing two pieces of paper, as thin and delicate as the skin of an onion, which had been neatly hidden in the binding.
She unfolded the pages and saw that they were written with ink, and in the same tight, small letters she’d seen penciled along the margins. Smaller, still. Had he written this with a magnifying glass? She turned on the green desk lamp and adjusted the angle.
The following is a brief but accurate account of my life, written this April 4 of 1961, at the age of 38. I was a sickly infant. A bout of rheumatic fever left me with a weak heart and I spent the bulk of my childhood cloistered at home, for my delicate constitution could not abide the outside world. My parents heaped praise upon my older brother and left me to spend lonely afternoons in my room, anticipating my early demise. But I did not die then and proved to be a precocious and brilliant child.
It was my intellectual father’s personality which bestowed upon me the gift of culture and wit. From my mother I inherited a certain melancholy and inquisitiveness, as well as an ease for languages. I found solace and companionship in books, paying special interest to the works of Guido von List and other thinkers of that ilk.
When I was eight years of age my older brother drowned in a terrible accident. My mother, distraught, asked my father to consult with mediums and magic practitioners in a quest to contact her dead child. Years before his marriage, my father had been engaged in such explorations, and now he returned to them.
Thus, I became accustomed to perusing the same books my parents read and listened to the conversations they maintained with learned practitioners of the magic arts.
My father was acquainted with members of the Thule Society, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and other similar organizations. I was introduced to the many spiritualists, dowsers, astrologers, chirologists, and clairvoyants who assembled in Munich, which, in those days, numbered quite a few, and who visited my father, whose vast library contained valuable tomes. We maintained a salon, and I enjoyed this motley group of guests.
My mother, at first keen to organize elaborate reunions and séances, drifted into a pit of melancholy after a few years. The one reason why those activities interested her had been the possibility of regaining her dead son, and once this goal proved unachievable, she plunged into a mixture of drug addiction and depression, neglecting me and my father.
My mother killed herself on the fourth anniversary of my brother’s death. After my mother’s suicide our salons seemed to take place more often, although I noticed my father, rather than conducting the serious studies he had followed before, now seemed to organize any reunions as excuses for drinking and socialization. I began to correspond directly with several of our guests, amassing whatever knowledge I could. I was especially interested in the idea of rune magic and was inspired by Kummer, Wiligut, and others of their ilk to develop my own runic system.
My father’s connections were at first a boon for me and then a liability, for the month of June of 1941 saw the arrest of numerous astrologers and occultists, including people like Krafft, who had been widely considered a favorite of Goebbels. We’d thought him and ourselves untouchable. We were wrong.
My father was not among those arrested. He had learned that a team of pendulum users was being put together by the Navy High Command to help them sink British boats, and he convinced a man in charge of these experiments to let us join the dozens of men and women who spent hours with their arms stretched out across the nautical charts, attempting to discern the smallest motion of their pendulums. Therefore, although many astrologers and occultists faced imprisonment, we were spared.
The year 1941. Montserrat opened a book, then another. She plucked a note from her desk. That was the year Reinhard Heydrich ordered the Gestapo to take action against “fringe” sciences. The Krafft in the letter must be Karl Ernst Krafft, who had been recruited by Goebbels into the Propaganda Ministry so he could produce a new edition of Nostradamus’s prophecies; an edition that would pinpoint a German victory. Krafft had eventually fallen out of favor. This part of Ewers’s story had the ring of truth.