Silver Nitrate(61)

“How’d you do it?” she asked his photo. “How do you make magic real and not just words on paper?”

She set the photo down and retrieved Ewers’s letter. The apartment was quiet, but it was not the quiet of the other night. It was merely the usual silence laced with the humming of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the barking of a dog on the floor below. Blocks away, a siren wailed. She took more sips of tea.

The warmth of the beverage and the lovely, comforting sight of all her possessions had a soothing effect, and she found herself yawning. She scribbled on a napkin—Ewers, Wilhelm, magic, spell—then crumpled the napkin, smudging the words.

The phone rang, and she picked it up.

“I told you to call me when you got home,” Tristán said.

“I got here five minutes ago.”

“You left my apartment over an hour ago.”

“I lost track of time,” she said, glancing at the clock on the wall and setting the cup on the coffee table. She rubbed the back of her neck with her free hand.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for information,” she said, flipping the pages of the book on her lap and turning to the chapter titled “The Cipher of Fire.” It was conveniently illustrated with the image of a flame within a circle.

“Did you find anything interesting?”

“Nothing yet. I need to give his book another look, with more care. I skipped through a lot of bits the first time I looked at it. I should give his letter a lengthy reread, too. And the film in the vault…I need to retrieve that.”

“Don’t tell me you plan to put it in your freezer?”

“No. I want to see that scene we dubbed again. I have a copy of the pages we used for the dubbing. I should check that,” she said, sliding the book aside so she could take another sip of tea.

“Why?”

“?‘Give me your hands, dearest brother and sister, for now we call upon the Lords of Air, the Princes in Yellow, to witness our rites,’?” she recited carefully, setting the cup down. “I’m pretty sure those were the words.”

The black-and-white clock of Felix the Cat moved its eyes and its tail to a steady, hypnotic rhythm.

“What did you say?”

“It’s Ewers’s line, in the scene we dubbed. Remember? And then he crowns himself king. ‘Witness our rites.’ Ewers’s magic relies on being heard and seen. His spells don’t exist without a spectator.”

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

“Exactly. He needed a coven so they would observe him. It was part of the magic.”

“It sounds nuts.”

“No. Look, when Valentino died, what happened? Thousands of people lined the streets of Manhattan to see his coffin go by. Women were hysterical. Some of them even threatened to kill themselves when they heard he had passed away. A riot broke out because so many people wanted to view his corpse. We remember Valentino even if we’ve forgotten actors who were equally as famous as he was, perhaps even more famous.”

“I don’t get your point.”

“Ewers’s plan was to kill himself, remember? He was going to die and be resurrected by his coven. I bet it would have been a grand spectacle, a super performance. And then he expected to spring back to life. Only it didn’t happen that way because he was mugged. I wonder what happened to the body? I doubt his lover paid for a nice funeral.”

“So you’re saying that, what, if Ewers had had a big funeral celebration he would have come back from the dead?”

“Well, no. The film was never completed, and Abel said that caused a short circuit. But he did expect to be reborn, after his film was done and he killed himself by his own hand. I think I’m missing a clue—”

“Momo—”

“When we dubbed the film, when we completed that part of the circuit, maybe it changed something. Like putting a new pair of batteries into a remote control.”

“We’re not sorcerers. We can’t have started anything.”

“What if it was a piece of code he had already written, and all you had to do was press a key? Or a VCR that you’ve set to record something? All you need is someone to pop in the tape,” she said. “I know this goes against Ewers’s ideas of hierophants having to be special people with a precious lineage, but maybe he had no idea what he was talking about. Even if he knew, he might not have admitted it, because he was incredibly racist and obsessed with all that Aryan bullshit.”

She was breathless. It was because she was nervous and excited by her line of thought, though, as Tristán liked to point out, she did tend to run on a bit. Before she could continue Tristán spoke up.

“This sounds fucking creepy, and I’m alone in an apartment surrounded by candles, so please stop.”

She could picture his hand shaking as he lit a cigarette, the smoke rings coming out of his mouth.

“You were the one who wanted to prove to me you were not imagining Karina not so long ago.”

“Yes, and exorcising her, if needed. You are going on about weird and frankly scary theories. I want to forget the whole thing,” he said. His voice had an edge. His eyes would be very bright right now, his hands clenching like they did when he was truly upset.