Idly she ran a hand down the spiral of her notebook until Regina finally spoke again and indicated the titles of two books. Before she hung up, they made a brief exchange of goodbyes and promises to meet for coffee that Montserrat did not intend to keep. She’d have to make a trek to the used bookstores at Donceles and see if anyone carried them. Otherwise, she could try Gandhi, but that might be more expensive. She grabbed the Yellow Pages, made a few phone calls, and found a store that said they had the two history books she was looking for. She asked the woman on the phone to put them aside for her.
The trip downtown was quick, and she sprinted up the stairs to the second floor of the bookshop. It was a stuffy, small business that was packed with books from top to bottom. Books in piles, books on shelves, books occupying chairs. The cash register looked ancient, but the girl behind the counter was in her twenties, with a Walkman clipped to her jeans and her hair painted a glossy black. Her eyes were lined with kohl.
“I called about a few books, Golden Dawn and all that stuff,” Montserrat said.
“Yes, right. Let’s see: Aleister Crowley. Wow, that dude was nuts.”
“You know much about these magician types?”
“A little, I guess. I read this one,” the girl said, looking at the back of one of the books and looking for a sticker. “It was creepy. Do you like scary stories?”
“Depends. You have more stuff like that?”
“More Crowley? We have a special section at the back for antique books. We had a copy of The Diary of a Drug Fiend a while back, it was pretty old.”
“I’m not looking for collector’s items. You wouldn’t have a…I don’t know, anything else on magic?”
“We have an esoteric and spiritual section. We got a book about how to talk to guardian angels. It’s down there,” the girl said.
Montserrat found the bookcase labeled “Esoteric and Spiritual,” and discovered that nearly half of it was dedicated to astrology. She ended up picking a couple of other books at that store, then went next door, to another bookstore that smelled musty and looked like an exact replica of the previous one except that this one had an old dude behind the counter. She repeated this process two more times before heading home.
Back at her apartment, she cleared her desk, took out a notebook, pens, Post-its, and began reading. She learned about Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, and Thelemea, and even found out more about Marjorie Cameron Parsons. It turned out she had lived in Mexico and had performed blood rituals, hoping to communicate with her dead husband by slashing her arm.
Over the next few days, she alternated between the books she’d bought and Ewers’s book. Crowley’s main idea seemed to be that theoretically anyone could take old systems of magic and strip them to their symbolic core, using them in a modern age. Ewers seemed to replicate this idea with his emphasis on cinema as a technology that might permit an optimal kind of spell casting.
She thought back to her idea of nitrate film as a burnt offering, ritual sacrifice upon a tabernacle of silver.
At work, she kept quiet; she read during breaks and scribbled in a notebook. She was jotting a question she wanted to ask Urueta the next time they met when Samuel walked into the lunchroom.
“Are you studying for something?” Samuel asked, pushing aside her book.
Montserrat clapped The House of Infinite Wisdom shut and stuffed it back in her purse. She glared at Samuel. “Are you spying on me?”
“No. I saw you hunched over, looking like you’re cramming for a final.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Wow, you’re tense. Here, Mario prepped next week’s schedule.”
Montserrat snatched the piece of paper from Samuel’s hands and gave it a quick look. “I’m not on for anything. He’s got you in six days in a row.”
“I know, but—”
“Oh, shut up, you boot-licking pig,” she said, shoving away the sandwich she’d been eating and pushing Samuel aside as she went toward the door.
“Hey! You can’t call me that!”
“Go tell Mario about it,” she replied, relishing his anguished face.
Samuel, predictably, did tell Mario, and Montserrat had a second yelling match with her boss. She called Tristán after work, intent on complaining about her job, about the lousy shift system and her co-workers, but Tristán quickly told her he was heading out.
“I have a meeting,” Tristán said.
She twisted the corner of an index card that she’d used to jot notes. “I thought you were locked at home, terrified of ghosts.”
“I bought three vases, which are currently crammed with flowers. I’m burning candles at every hour of the day. I haven’t seen or heard anything strange since we spoke to Abel last week,” he informed her.
“Nothing, then? Not a single thing?”
“No. Thank God.”
“Hmm,” she said, tapping a nail against the card.
“You sound disappointed.”
“No…well, I was hoping to talk to you for a bit, but you’re going out.”
“I can call you later.”
“Not in the middle of the night, please.”
“I’ll call you at a decent time. How about eight a.m.?”
“That would be nice.”
When he hung up, she looked at the index card and the words she’d copied from Ewers’s book. Seize the world, squeeze it for every drop of power, smite your enemies.
“Some days I could do a little smiting,” she muttered, thinking of her job, and she reclined in her chair, contemplating the pile of notes and scribbles she was assembling.
Tristán didn’t call. Not later that night, not in the morning. Although it irritated her, it also meant he had not seen Karina again. She was sure he would have phoned if he’d been frightened. Maybe November was not a month for ghosts, after all. Maybe Ewers was a phony and had never cast spells.
She had the nagging feeling, despite this, that she had missed something when she’d gone through Ewers’s book the first time, that there really was a secret to be pried from those pages. So she started back at the beginning, opening it to the first chapter, then thumbing to the second. Which is when she noticed the word penciled in at the top of the page.
Find, it said in small, flowing letters. She had not paid attention to this marginalia the first time she’d read it, but now she stared at that single word, which seemed to her like the discovery of a fingerprint at a crime scene.
She went through every page and found words in pencil at the top of three other chapters. My words showed up in chapter three. Beneath made its appearance along chapter seven, while the skin was the last annotation.
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.