Then, for a second, she felt unmoored, as if the ground beneath her was shifting. Perhaps it was. The fog was a rolling carpet of black, the light dimmer, and his eyes flashed bright, with the glow of silver.
There was so much power in this place, in him, and as Ewers had said, he was only growing stronger. She understood why he wanted so badly for her to agree to obey him. It was as José had told them: he fed off them. He was fueled by whatever unnatural reaction they had started, his power, meshed in silver nitrate, boiling up on its own but also augmented by the loving adoration of his acolytes, of Clarimonde and the others. Unwittingly, too, amplified by Tristán and Montserrat, like at the studio when they had cracked the glass. Together, they could do more. And this, now…Ewers was not even alive. What could he accomplish if he was resurrected, what spells might he conjure, what horrors? She did not doubt his threats.
It was stupid to attempt to defy him. All she was doing was stoking his anger. It was a pointless strategy. How had José attacked him? How did Alma kill him?
“If you continue like this, I’ll ask Clarimonde to cut each finger on your Tristán’s hand and feed it to you. Tell me, afterward, how much I need you,” he said.
The world around them had become a slab of blackness, compressed, so that they rested in a small halo of light. An iris shot signaling the end of a scene.
“One way or another, Montserrat,” he said, “you will bow your head to me.”
How? How to get rid of him? She recalled: José and Alma had worked together. Her eyes widened. He looked at her, curious, a question on his tongue.
Montserrat stumbled forward and extended a hand, gripping Ewers’s arm before he could ask it.
“I’ll follow you into the night,” she said.
He looked pleased with this answer. “I knew you would.”
27
Before Tristán could object, Clarimonde had shoved Montserrat forward, pulling her in front of a projector. Tristán attempted to follow them, but the moment he took two paces a man stepped in front of him, blocking his path, with his ugly-looking dog showing its teeth at him in warning. Tristán desisted. He stared at Montserrat. She was not moving. She stood there, looking down at her feet, bathed in the light of the projector. Her expression was dazed, her eyes half-lidded.
“She’s not in danger,” Clarimonde told him. “Everything will be fine as long as you do his bidding.”
“You should let us go. You can talk to Abel without me, you can bring Ewers back without our help. We’re not going to tell anyone about you. We pose no danger. Please!”
“Wilhelm needs you,” Clarimonde said simply.
The minutes ticked by. At last Montserrat stepped back and shook her head, fixing her eyes on Tristán. She stumbled, dazed, as if she were about to fall.
“Momo,” he said. This time, even with the dog growling at him, he sprang forward and reached her, putting his arms around her. “Momo, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Her lips sought his ear. “Tristán, you need to summon Abel.”
“We’re going to go through with this?”
“Summon him and tell him to help us. It’s going to take all three of us to stop Ewers. I’ll begin drawing the runes, but I’ll pause and cause a distraction. You and Abel finish drawing them and order the spell to cease. The three of us awoke Ewers, the three of us can get rid of him.”
“I don’t know how to do that. I’m not a sorcerer.”
“Abel knows.”
“Did you speak to Wilhelm?” Clarimonde asked as she reached their side. Behind her Tristán saw people busy with the projector, prepping it for the grand screening.
“We agreed on our terms,” Montserrat said. “Tristán will summon Abel, and I’ll draw your runes.”
“Good. Then we should begin.”
The chandeliers above their heads grew dim, plunging them into darkness. The only sources of light now were the projectors in the middle of the room.
Tristán looked at Montserrat helplessly and nodded. He walked toward the bowl with water and the low table with Abel’s corpse. Yeah, fine, he could do this. He’d done it before. Not with a dead man next to him, but he supposed it couldn’t make much difference. Maybe it would even be easier.
Tristán dipped his hand in the water. He wasn’t sure that was strictly necessary, but when he’d called Karina he’d run his hands under the tap. He pulled his hand out of the water and licked his lips, trying to remember the words López had told him to use, trying to reproduce the elements of the séance while the projectors hummed. He wondered how much it had cost Clarimonde to organize this gathering, with projectionists and complicated equipment including speakers so the audio could be blasted around the room.
Then he glanced at Abel’s corpse and felt like gagging. He’d been a bit sick every time he had conjured a ghost, but this time his queasiness was augmented by the presence of a dead body. He tried not to look at Abel and wrapped a hand around the man’s wrist, closing his eyes and whispering the words he’d learned from José López. There came that sharp pain, like a needle sliding into his head, and Tristán shivered.
The light from one of the projectors seemed to grow stronger; it even changed hue. For a moment it was yellow, the shade of wilted marigolds.
“Have you come to us, old friend?” Clarimonde asked Tristán. “Is that you, Abel?”
He let go of Abel’s hand, his fingers twitching nervously. “I have,” he said. The words seemed to emerge from someone else. The voice was different, even though it was him speaking. A murmur went through the crowd.
“Thread the projector,” Clarimonde said excitedly. “He has come.”
Tristán couldn’t tell if that was the case or not. Nothing else had changed inside the ballroom, except that he now had a blazing headache. He heard people whispering. Montserrat was handed a long stick with a silver tip. For the runes, he supposed.
Frame lines jumped on screen, and before Tristán could ask for any further clarification, before he could beg for a moment to sit down and close his eyes, twin images popped up on screen, side by side, partially overlapping.
It was Ewers’s reel on the right, the glorious nitrate print popping and shimmering even against a crude portable screen, and Montserrat’s duplicate on the left. Not half as beautiful, it had not quite captured the shape of shadows and the starkness of the light, but that print had sound. That print spoke.
On the screen, a young Clarimonde and Abel opened their mouths, but it was the voices of the older Abel and of Montserrat who read the script. The dubbing, making it all come to life.
“I greet you upon this most sacred of hours.”
“I greet you as the moon bares her face to the sky.”
The crowd repeated the lines. He could almost feel the tumultuous adoration of his followers, their admiration was a kiss, brushing the screen. Their voices bounced off the tall ceilings, created echoes, while the people on film shimmered with the stark beauty of the monochrome palette. Black and white, white and black. The images dizzied him.
He turned and looked at Montserrat, who was dipping the stick with the silver tip into the bowl with blood. He turned to look again at the screen in time to see a hooded figure step forward from behind a curtain. When Ewers removed his cape and showed his face, his voice was provided by Tristán in the duplicate print. He watched himself granting life to Ewers, making those lips emit sounds, every word fanning an unseen power that was nevertheless palpable.