“My blood pressure must be through the roof,” the man said, reaching into a pocket and uncapping a bottle. “At least Clarimonde Bauer has style, I suppose. A neat trick, the dogs.”
“That was Clarimonde, then?” Tristán said.
“Clarimonde’s people, at any rate. Can you hand me that can of soda there?”
Tristán grabbed a can of Pepsi that had been left by the aquarium and gave it to the man, who promptly swallowed a pill and took a sip. “They were also inside my apartment. They painted one of Ewers’s runes on the wall.”
“It wouldn’t have been Clarimonde in your apartment,” López said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Now, I’m going to need food, and then I’ll have a nap.”
“What? Why?” Tristán asked.
“Because I’m seventy-three years old. And I’m not what I used to be,” López said, shuffling in the direction of a hallway.
“No, I mean why are you sure it wasn’t Clarimonde?”
“Because if it had been her, they would have ambushed us while we were inside,” Montserrat said. “Therefore, the person who broke into your apartment must have been Alma.”
“Good! She gets it. Basic deduction skills,” López said and continued walking into a kitchen that had barely enough space for two people to stand in it. Instead of a door, there was a curtain with beads, which Montserrat supposed served to make moving around easier.
López opened the refrigerator, took out a milk bottle, and poured himself a glass. He also took out a bar of cheese and began slicing it.
“Oh, so both of them want a piece of us,” Tristán said. “That’s awesome.”
“A piece of the film, too,” López said. He pointed at Montserrat’s purse and the book poking out of it. “I’m assuming that is Abel’s copy of The House of Infinite Wisdom?”
“You assume correctly,” she said, placing a hand on the strap of her purse. “How did you know we’d be at Tristán’s apartment, and how did you know they were coming?”
“Alma called, wanting to know if you’d spoken to me. That’s when I realized Abel was dead.”
“You had no idea?”
“My house has multiple safeguards. I keep to myself and live a quiet life. I also prefer to know little of what my former friends are up to.”
“But Abel wasn’t your former friend. You sent him a box filled with feathers and nails.”
“I did. Because he asked for a protective charm but did not specify why. Later, he phoned to say he had tried his hand at a spell, and not any spell, but he had used Ewers’s old nitrate film and was having unexpected side effects. That is when I learned of your little experiment. I told him to come over and we’d try to straighten the matter out, but he never did.”
“What do you mean by straighten the matter out?”
López grabbed two slices of bread and began spreading mayo on them. “We’d have to undo the spell, of course. There was no other way. Only he was afraid that would undo his good luck. He said he needed to consider things and left it at that.”
“And you didn’t get curious about the situation until Alma contacted you?”
“I was curious. I simply decided not to get involved until today.”
“What made you change your mind?” Tristán asked. He was hovering by the doorway. Montserrat had wedged herself next to the refrigerator.
“I had a premonition.”
“Then you’re like Abel. You can see the future. Like in ‘The Whispers of the Earth,’？” she said, reaching for Ewers’s book, wanting to clap it open and stilling her hand.
“I don’t slavishly rely on Ewers’s runic system and elemental divisions for my spells.”
“The tattoos on your forearms—”
“Defensive symbols, but not duplicates of Ewers’s runes,” López said, pulling up a sleeve and showing them his arm. “They’re altered; refined designs of my own making, if you will.” Indeed, those were not clones of Ewers’s runes. Montserrat recognized certain elements, but López had put his touch on them. She supposed it was like fingerprints: no two were identical. López pulled his sleeve down and continued building his sandwich.
“A premonition doesn’t explain why you saved our lives.”
“Those dogs outside your building: I had never seen that. Theoretically, Ewers talked about such spells. Practically? We didn’t have that. Yet in the past few days I have felt a thread of magic weaving around me unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. You’ve caused a nuclear explosion,” López said as he took a big bite of his sandwich.
The white cat picked that moment to wander into the kitchen and rub itself against Montserrat’s leg.
“In 1961 Ewers died and his spell was ruined. Afterward, most people associated with the film had bad luck, I understand that. But I don’t see how we ended up with a nuclear explosion,” she said.
“I’m not entirely sure, either, because I didn’t design the spell: Ewers did. I wasn’t aware of all its components; he kept certain details hidden. But magic is energy. It has to go somewhere. You can picture what happened in 1961 as an accident at a power plant. An amount of radiation leaked when Ewers died. It affected us. Then imagine if a damaged reactor was powered up again. You’d end up with a big explosion, and anyone in the control room drenched in radiation. Only instead of dying a horrible death you became Spider-Man.”
It made Montserrat think of frequency-shifted keying, one of the easiest ways to synchronize electronic instruments. Easy, yes, but you could also mess it up. If you recorded your FSK tone too loudly it would leak onto adjacent tracks. That’s what Ewers had done. His magic was leaking onto others, distorting not sound, but lives.
López took a sip of milk. “What, you don’t read comic books? Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider.”
“Maybe it’s more like The Fly,” Tristán suggested.
“Pick your metaphor, kid. Anyway, it needs to be shut down for good, before Clarimonde and her army of crazies try to bring Ewers back to life. Or Alma keeps taking advantage of the situation.”
“But she wants Ewers destroyed,” Tristán said.
“Don’t be silly, of course she doesn’t. Alma is the only person who has benefited from this whole thing. All these years she’s been using the magic Ewers originally invoked in those nitrate reels to keep herself young.”
Montserrat shook her head. “That didn’t happen. The spell was supposed to give her back her youth, but Ewers was working behind her back, and the spell was never intended for Alma.”
The old man scoffed and looked at her as if he were talking to a student who had failed a quiz. “She didn’t get her youth back: she has not aged since the day Ewers died.”
Montserrat remembered the remarkable similarities between Marisa and her aunt. Her nose was different, yes, but that could be a simple prosthetic. Alma had worked in movies, after all. She might know all kinds of makeup tricks to change her appearance. With a different haircut, different clothes, she might not be immediately recognized as Alma.