“Why don’t we talk to Abel?” Montserrat asked, as she began stuffing the contents back inside the envelope.
“And ask him what, if he’s signed up for the hex-a-lot club of the month?”
“Don’t be a dick. We need to hand him his mail anyway.”
“Great. We can hire an exorcist after that.”
“Yeah, I’m sure there’re a few in the Yellow Pages.”
“You think I was drunk and made this all up, don’t you?”
Tristán stared at her, and Montserrat stared back until finally she let out a sigh and shook her head. “I don’t know what you saw, and maybe this funny envelope is a coincidence. But in the unlikely event that it’s not, I’m guessing you can’t afford to move to a hotel permanently, so we need to figure out what’s going on.”
“Promise you don’t think I made it up.”
“I don’t think you did.”
“And swear you think I’m clean.”
Montserrat wished she could reply with an enthusiastic yes, but all she was able to do was press her lips together and slowly nod. Tristán had been a very active addict, to put it mildly, and his behavior during the lowest days of that addiction had been erratic; there had been moments when he said he could feel bugs under his skin, and one time when he saw flashing lights. He’d kicked the habit, but there had been one relapse a few years ago.
“Okay, look, come with me,” Tristán said, grabbing Montserrat by the arm and pulling her with him.
They stood next to the bathroom’s doorway and looked inside. Folded towels were stacked on a shelf, and there was a wicker hamper for the dirty laundry and a fluffy bathroom mat by the sliding shower door.
“What?” Montserrat asked, unable to discern an oddity. If anything, Tristán could be accused of being a little too neat.
“When I left my house the taps were closed. But look now.”
Montserrat starred at the thin trickle of water going down the sink’s drain.
“You probably left the tap open when you left.”
“I did not. Someone was in this apartment.”
Montserrat stepped into the bathroom, taking one more look around, then reached for the tap and closed it. She glanced at the mirror and saw Tristán’s troubled face reflected there.
“I’m not lying, Momo,” he said.
“I know,” she said, turning around and clutching his hand between hers.
10
“Have a drink,” Urueta told them, his hands flying toward the bottle and the glass. But Tristán shook his head.
“You need to tell us what this is about,” he said, brandishing the envelope, which the director had simply tossed aside on one of the couches and Tristán had snatched up immediately.
“It’s nothing bad. A protective spell.”
“You order them from a catalogue or what?”
Urueta laughed. One of the feathers from the envelope had adhered to his shirt, and he carefully removed it. “I became uninterested in magic practices after Ewers’s death, but others continued their studies. My friend José López was one of them. I mentioned we cast a spell, and he sent this as a gift. It’s no different than buying a bracelet against the evil eye.”
“Why would you want a bracelet against the evil eye? You didn’t say that would be necessary,” he said and extended his hand, holding out the envelope.
Urueta took it, peering into its interior. He set it down on the bar cart and continued mixing his drink, his brow furrowed.
“It’s not. What’s wrong?” Urueta asked.
“Tristán saw something,” Montserrat said.
“Can you be more specific?”
Tristán was a bit of a coward, always had been, and he was not ashamed to admit it. That was why, when they were kids, he’d depended on Montserrat. Even with her limp and her small stature she’d had no qualms about standing up to the other kids or engaging in mischief. She was the one who invited him to run past the train tracks and break into the grain storage facilities. Therefore, it was hardly surprising that he merely stared at Abel, not wishing to say it out loud.
“Tell him,” Montserrat whispered.
Tristán licked his lips. “I saw my girlfriend standing in my apartment. She passed away ten years ago. And now that thing came in an envelope for you. Abel, what’s happening?”
“Your girlfriend?”
“Yeah. She was in my apartment.”
Rather than laughing at them or calling Tristán crazy, Abel put his bottle and glass down. “The permutation of water and the water bearer,” the old man muttered.
“That’s something from The House of Infinite Wisdom,” Montserrat said. “What does it mean?”
“It’s the levels of magic Ewers talked about.”
“Could you explain it to us?” Montserrat asked.
“Well, yes, but I’m sorry, it’s nothing to worry about, to be a necromancer you’d need years of—”
“Please explain,” Montserrat said, cutting him off, her voice cold and sharp.
Abel looked like he was going to protest, but it was Tristán’s turn to glare at him. The director sat down on the couch across from them and clasped his hands together.
“I don’t know where to start. Ewers left Germany and originally went to South America looking for extinct magic. He believed, like others did, including Himmler, that there had been an ancient Aryan civilization that preceded all other civilizations. While men evolved from monkeys, the Aryan people were part of this superhuman race.
“Ewers knew an author and amateur archeologist named Edmund Kiss who made a trip to the Andes, where he claimed to have found a sculpture with Aryan features. He also claimed the ruins at Tiwanaku were of Aryan origin. Ewers ran with this idea. He thought the Aryan superhumans had founded great cities, but needing workers, they had created the perfect vassals themselves. This explained the Aztec, the Inca, the Maya empires, even the legend of Atlantis. All these people were made by the Aryans, but then they revolted and overthrew their masters. Eventually they forgot most of the magical practices of their ancestors, although they retained snatches of rudimentary knowledge. Ewers went to South America and made his way up to Mexico because he was trying to gather those fragments of knowledge.”
Tristán had heard similar bullshit in shows like Enigma. It was always aliens who had built the pyramids. Nobody could conceive of any Indigenous group erecting anything more complex than a hut.
“When Ewers began organizing his magic circle, he said people like him, people of Aryan descent, were naturally suited for magic practices, seeing as it was they who had essentially come up with this technology millennia before. Then there were Indigenous people who had preserved their culture and bloodline, the Mayas for example. And then you had everyone who had basically evolved from monkeys. Therefore hierophants needed to have some of that pure Aryan or Indigenous strain to wield the higher forms of magic. Other people could cleanse themselves of the harmful Christian ideology that had stamped out Aryan magic practices and handle the lower forms of magic. They could be adepts, but not hierophants.”