L was greedy, that I immediately understood. I also understood if I did not make myself useful to him, I’d end up on the side of the road with a bullet in my gut, thus it’s no surprise that I steered our conversation toward the topic of finding hidden valuables. I managed to convince L of my special abilities, and he agreed that we would journey to Berlin.
Soon I found myself in trouble once more, since L demanded a demonstration of my powers before we reached the city. My abilities with the pendulum were meager, but I had no choice, and I sat in a cold room with my arm extended, as I’d done before, and assumed I would be killed by a bullet to the head.
Yet in that moment when I should have resigned myself to death, I felt the fiercest desire to live. It was that same flame that had burnt in my chest the night I left my father behind and made my escape, and as I clasped the chain from which the pendulum hung, I vowed I would not perish there. There was an itching of my palms and a sharp spark of pain in my head. Then, as if possessed, I uttered coordinates for a nearby building that was abandoned and where L promptly uninterred a box filled with coins.
From then on, my gift did not fail me—though I developed a propensity for migraines after calling upon it—and I did not need a pendulum to locate objects, either, although I liked to use it for show whenever L was around. Weapons, food, money, art objects. I retrieved them for my companion like a dog sniffing for truffles.
L was rapacious and had no allegiances, two qualities I learned to admire. He lacked my father’s sophistication and intelligence, and I despised his crudeness, but I admired his tenacity.
After the war ended, we found ourselves in trouble once more. L’s past, before he became a deserter and a thief, included certain crimes that would earn him the noose, should the authorities catch wind of him. He knew a forger who could provide him with papers that would allow him to change his identity and secure passage to South America.
L’s plan was to leave me behind and steal our share of the loot we had amassed, which is how I arrived at the second crucial moment of my life. In a fit of rage, I sliced his neck open. Panicked, I utilized the forged documents L had secured and assumed a false identity, boarding a ship from Italy to Argentina.
At first, I thought myself quite clever. For a while, I focused on my runes and filled pages with them, and found my quiet studies as rewarding as they had been in my childhood, but soon a bitter melancholy overwhelmed me. I hated South America and longed for home. I cursed my stupidity, because, I must admit, my departure had been made thoughtlessly.
One afternoon, walking through the streets of Bueno Aires, I chanced upon a beggar, sitting on the side of the street and performing a small type of divination magic using pebbles. At first, I paid him little heed, but then I felt a distinctive tug similar to the sensation I had when I used my pendulum; not quite pain in this case, but almost like feeling the snapping of a branch.
I stood in disbelief looking at the brown-skinned man and realized I was feeling magic. This man was performing an actual spell.
My studies of von List, as well as knowledge acquired from my father and other learned men, had taught me that magic was the divine right of my kind. Here, however, was this leathery little man stirring pebbles and telling fortunes.
This marked the third crucial point of change in my life. I began to prod for answers, intent on understanding what I had witnessed. I thought back to Ernst Sch?fer and Hans F. K. Günther, both of whom had theorized that Nordic tribes had at one point escaped into Asia after a great catastrophe. Walther Wüst spoke of an empire of Aryans that had declined due to miscegenation, giving birth to the high castes of ancient India and Persia. Eventually, my thoughts solidified. Had Edmund Kiss not told my own father that after the fall of Atlantis the ancient Aryans had fled to the Andes? Had I not heard chatter about geomantic lines across continents? I had derided those around me as untermenschen capable of only inspiring pity, yet I began to rethink my ideas.
I had, in many ways, stumbled in the dark, ignoring the ultimate truth of my abilities. For I had tapped into a web of power birthed by the ancient magic of my Aryan ancestors. There was no doubt that these ancestors, who had once ruled over mankind, had left their marks on the world and on certain people. I therefore determined to meet with as many priests, shamans, and sorcerers as I could throughout South America, attempting to seize the remnants of knowledge they preserved from the ancient times.
Montserrat checked another note that she’d pinned to her corkboard. Walther Wüst had been a high-ranking official in the Ahnenerbe, and Edmund Kiss believed the ruins of Tiwanaku were built by an ancient Nordic race who had migrated from the Lost City of Atlantis. Ewers had apparently been familiar with a large body of Nazi pseudo-scientific theories and racist rants. He’d held on tightly to them, so that by 1961 he was probably muttering many of the things he’d babbled in 1941.
My progress was at first slow, but my natural ease with languages and my determination allowed me mastery not only of Spanish, but an understanding of Quechua and Aymara. Thus, I met with and acquired the knowledge of many talented soothsayers and sorcerers.
Some of these people turned me away, but this did not deter me. Yet there was one encounter that affected me. I had sought audience with an old woman who practiced a certain type of magic I was interested in, but the woman refused to converse with me, saying that she did not trade in blood magic. When I asked for clarification, she said that I carried two deaths and again reiterated that, although powerful, blood magic was not something she would abide, nor would she abide me.
That meeting rattled me. I realized that the woman was referring to my father’s death and L’s death, indicating that these deaths had been used as an ingredient in my spell casting, all of which at first disturbed me. But then, it made sense. My powers with the pendulum had only manifested after I had left my father behind; presumably he had been killed due to my actions, or perhaps the blow I had given him had felled the old man. And it was after I disposed of L and went to South America that my powers seemed to increase even more. Of course, I had done plenty of learning in that time, but now I considered that perhaps it had been these deaths in combination with my rudimentary magic knowledge that had kindled my latent abilities.
The thought of blood magic, of sacrifices and perhaps greater powers, drew me to Central America, where I explored ancient Mayan ruins, felt the dim magic left in old stones, and spoke to elders who had safeguarded bits of knowledge from the Spanish conquistadores. In Mexico, I hoped to find traces of the mighty Aztec people, but Mexico City proved to be a disappointment. The inhabitants of the metropolis were mixed to a great extreme. While the purest form of magic is Aryan, and Indigenous magic is diluted and deformed, the mestizo possess no great reservoirs of knowledge. I had nothing to gain from these people. I was amongst untermenschen, once more.
Having exhausted most of my funds, I had to survive by writing horoscopes or performing parlor tricks. In my spare time, I tried to perfect my spells, drawing runes and scrying. By chance I met a few people in the film business and was invited to the screening of an old silent film, which I did reluctantly, hoping merely to drum business for myself at the party after the show.
I did not realize that this screening would mark the fourth and most important moment of my life. As I sat in the third row of a small theater, bored and brooding, I felt once again that electric tug that heralded magic. I gazed in wonder at Alma Montero, whose shimmering image upon the darkened screen oozed a power unlike my own and yet of a similar nature.