“You told me I was summoning my dead girlfriend, but have you thought that maybe the reason why you’ve seen Ewers is because you’re calling out to him?”
“He could write a decent turn of phrase, okay? And he could figure out the components of a spell, and neither of those things means—”
“Do you want to be a sorceress, like old Willie? Cast hexes instead of mixing audio? Fess up.”
She stood up. “Get the runes on your hands.”
Tristán felt tempted to be contrarian, but in the end he submitted to the process and listened patiently to López as he explained what he had to do in order to summon a ghost.
By ten p.m. López had placed a white tablecloth atop the table and removed the Hawaiian dancer from its center, relegating it to the sideboard. The box with the salt took the doll’s place. López placed two candlesticks on the table and struck a match. Between the candlesticks there was a glass of water.
“Water is a good conduit, and the candles, like the box of salt, should protect you while also providing a welcoming space for the ghost. Now you understand the instructions,” López said as he handed Tristán a large notepad and a pen. “Do you need to go over the words again?”
“I’m an actor. I can memorize lines,” Tristán replied. He wanted to get this done with before he thought it over and backed out.
“You simply ask him to join us and then you write down whatever he says.”
“In the movies people hold hands, you know.”
“And they probably have a Ouija board manufactured by Juguetes Mi Alegría. Will you simply sit down?”
Tristán muttered a curse word but obeyed. López turned off the light and sat to his right. Montserrat had already taken his left.
The room was rather dark with only the two candles. He wrapped his hands around the glass of water and asked the water to bless him and protect him before he embarked on this journey. He placed the notepad and the pen on the table, resting his hands lightly next to them. Then he recited the words López had told him to memorize, which were easy enough.
López handed him Abel’s photograph, and Tristán held it up. In the dim light it was hard to make out the features, but he tried his best to keep his eyes on the photo and listen to his own breathing. The minutes stretched by. His hand was beginning to ache from holding the photograph up.
“Concentrate,” López said.
“I am concentrating,” Tristán said, switching hands.
“Repeat the incantation again, from the beginning.”
Tristán said the words. Nothing happened. After many more minutes López pushed his chair back. “Perhaps we might try something else. I have incense in the sideboard,” he said, as he moved toward a lumpy shape that must be said sideboard, hidden as it was in the dark.
Tristán set the photograph down next to the notepad with a sigh. It was cold that night. Tristán hadn’t noticed before, but suddenly the chill of the evening overtook him, making him shiver. His hands brushed against the pen, restless, as López grumbled and opened a drawer, rummaging among what sounded like cutlery.
“Where is it? Why, you stupid…”
López kept muttering, and Tristán shivered again, his fingers wrapping around the pen. He felt nauseated and pressed one hand against his belly. He closed his eyes.
“Tristán?” Montserrat said.
He blinked a couple of times. The nausea was dying down, but there was a sharp pain in the back of his skull, as if someone was inserting a needle there. His hand twitched. He wrote down a word and glanced down at the letters. He clutched the edge of the table with his free hand.
“Momo,” he said, quickly looking up and staring at her. She stared back at him in confusion.
“What?”
“That’s not my handwriting.”
Montserrat looked at the pad where he had written “Abel” with clean, neat strokes, the letters in cursive in a style that was very much unlike his own. López looked down at the paper and sat down, nodding.
“Keep at it,” López said.
“How? You said he’d speak to me, but this isn’t speaking. I’m not hearing anything.”
“It’s fine. Give it a try.”
“Okay, sure…ah…Abel, is that you?”
He wrote down the word “yes.” López nodded and motioned for him to continue. López had been right: this was different from the times he had seen Karina. The sharp stabbing pain in his skull was new. Tristán wetted his lips.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you. We are trying to end Ewers’s spell, but we need your help. There were runes he wanted to project during the credits, do you remember that?”
Yes.
“I need the runes and the sequence in which they were going to be projected. Can you help me?”
I’ll try.
“Go ahead,” Tristán said, not knowing what else to say.
His hand moved across the page as if of its own volition. He traced a triangle and two lines, adding smaller strokes to the sides.
“The first one. This is the first one,” Tristán said.
“Air,” Montserrat said.
Earth and water came next. Then there was a rune López identified as life. “The opener” was the fifth. Neither Montserrat nor López had to identify the last rune for him: he recognized it as the vegvísir. Funnily enough the symbol for fire had not been called. He’d expected it to be part of the sequence, seeing as they’d started with an element. He felt something was subtly wrong but could not pinpoint what, exactly. His fingers trembled.
“Is there something else?”
Yes.
His fingers trembled even more. Even if Abel couldn’t speak to him Tristán felt something had gone askew. A cloud of anxiety wrapped around his brain.
Yes.
“What is it?” he asked, the sensation that Abel was trying to warn him was thick and almost tangible.
His hand twitched against the page again.
You are afraid, Tristán.
The words bloomed before his eyes; the pen was harsh against the page. Those letters…that handwriting…it was different than what he’d been writing moments before. This was very compact, the letters pressed against each other, tiny.
Every day of your life you are afraid, Tristán.
“It’s Ewers’s handwriting,” Montserrat said.
Tristán watched as his hand descended upon the page, almost slashing it apart with one violent stroke. He swallowed.
“Yes, it’s Ewers,” López said. “Crafty bastard, what do you want?”
Fear me.
The candles wavered, and Tristán felt a wave of terrible cold. It was as if the cold pressed against him, and he tried to slam the notebook shut, he tried to lift his hand away, but instead his fingers closed around the pen with an iron grip as his stomach churned.
Follow me into the night, Mont—
Tristán knocked the notebook off the table with his free hand, but the pen dug into the white tablecloth, staining it, drawing the rest of the letters.
—serrat.
“Make it stop,” Tristán told López.