The Club Dumas

XVI. A DEVICE WORTHY OF A GOTHIC NOVEL

Leaning his head back against the driver's seat, Lucas Corso looked at the view. He had pulled off onto the shoulder at the final bend of the road before it dipped into the town. Surrounded by ancient walls, the old quarter floated in mist from the river, suspended in the air like a ghostly blue island. It was a hazy world without light or shadow. A cold, hesitant dawn over Castille, with the first glimmer of light showing roofs, chimneys, and bell towers to the east.

He wanted to look at the time, but water had got into his watch during the storm in Meung. The glass was misted and the dial illegible. Corso saw his exhausted eyes in the rearview mirror. Meung-sur-Loire, on the eve of the first Monday in April. They were now far away, and it was Tuesday. It had been a long return journey, and all the characters had faded into the distance: Balkan, the Club Dumas, Rochefort, Milady, La Ponte. Only the echoes of a story after the turning of the last page. The author striking the final key on the QWERTY keyboard, bottom row, second from the right. So with one arbitrary action there was no more than pages of type, strange, inert paper. Lives suddenly alien.

On that dawn so like awakening from a dream, Corso sat, dirty and unshaven, with reddened eyes. By his side, his old canvas bag containing the last extant copy of The Nine Doors. And the girl. That was all that remained on the shore after the tide went out. She moaned softly, and he turned to look at her. She was sleeping in the seat next to him, under her duffel coat, her head on his right shoulder. Breathing gently, her lips parted, occasionally shaken by small shivers that made her start. Then she'd moan again, quietly. A small vertical crease between her eyebrows made her look like an upset little girl. One hand protruded from under her coat. It was turned palm up, the fingers half open, as if she had just let something slip from them, or as if she was waiting.

Corso thought again about Meung, and about the journey. And Boris Balkan two nights earlier, standing next to him on the terrace still wet from the rain. Holding the pages of "The Anjou Wine," Richelieu had smiled like an old opponent, both admiring and sympathetic. "You're unusual, my friend." He had offered these final words as a consolation or farewell; they were the only words with any meaning. The rest—an invitation to join the other guests—were uttered as a formality. Not that Balkan wanted to get rid of him—actually, he had seemed disappointed when Corso left. But Balkan knew that Corso would refuse to come inside. Corso in fact stayed on the terrace for some time, alone, leaning on the balustrade, listening to the echo of his own defeat. He slowly came to and looked around, remembering where he was. He walked away from the brightly lit windows and returned unhurriedly to the hotel, wandering through dark streets. He didn't come across Rochefort again, and at the Auberge Saint-Jacques he was told that Milady too had left. They both departed from his life and returned to the nebulous region from which they had come, fictional characters once more, as cryptic as chess pieces. La Ponte and the girl he found without difficulty. He hadn't worried about La Ponte but felt relief when he saw that she was still there. He'd thought—feared—that he would lose her along with the other characters in the story. He took her quickly by the hand, before she too vanished in the dust of the library of the castle of Meung, and led her to the car as La Ponte watched. Corso saw him receding in the rearview mirror. La Ponte looked lost, shouting, appealing to their long, much-abused friendship, not understanding what was going on. Like a discredited, useless harpooner not to be trusted, abandoned with some bread and three days' supply of water left to drift "Try to reach Batavia, Mr. Bligh." But then, at the end of the street, Corso stopped the car and sat with his hands on the wheel, looking at the road ahead, the girl staring, curious, at his profile. La Ponte wasn't a real character either. With a sigh, Corso put the car in reverse and went back to collect him. For the next day and night, until they left him at a traffic light on a street in Madrid, La Ponte said not one word. He didn't even protest when Corso told him the Dumas manuscript was gone. There wasn't much he could say.

Corso glanced at the canvas bag at the sleeping girl's feet. The defeat was painful, of course, like a knife wound in his memory. He knew he'd played according to the rules—legitime certaverit—but had gone in the wrong direction. At the very moment of victory, however partial and incomplete it was, all pleasure at winning had been snatched from him. The victory had been imaginary. It was like defeating imaginary ghosts, or punching the wind, or shouting at silence. Maybe that's why Corso was now staring suspiciously at the city suspended in the mist, waiting, before entering it, to make sure that its foundations were firmly rooted in the ground.

He could hear the girl's gentle, rhythmic breathing at his shoulder. He stared at her bare neck between the folds of the duffel coat. He moved his hand until he could feel the heat of her warm flesh throbbing in his fingers. As always, her skin smelled of youth and fever. In his imagination and in his memory he could easily follow the long, curving lines of her slender body, down to her bare feet by her sneakers and the bag. Irene Adler. He still didn't know what to call her. But he could remember her naked body in the shadows, the curve of her hips traced by the light, her parted lips. Impossibly beautiful and silent, absorbed in her own youth and at the same time as serene as tranquil waters, with the wisdom of ages. And in the luminous eyes watching him intently from the shadows, the reflection, the dark image of Corso himself amid all the light snatched from the sky.

She was watching him now, her emerald green eyes framed by long lashes. She had woken and was moving sleepily, rubbing against him. Then she sat up, alert. She looked at him.

"Hello, Corso." Her duffel coat slid to her feet. Her white T-shirt clung to her perfect torso, as supple as a beautiful young animal's. "What are we doing here?"

"Waiting." He gestured at the town, which seemed to be floating in the mist from the river. "For it to become real."

She looked, not understanding at first. Then she smiled slowly.

"Maybe it never will," she said.

"Then we'll stay here. It's not such a bad place, up here, with the strange, unreal world at our feet." He turned to the girl. "I'll give you everything, if you prostrate yourself and adore me. Isn't that the kind of offer you're going to make me?"

The girl's smile was full of tenderness. She bowed her head, thoughtful, then looked up and held Corso's gaze.

"No, I'm poor," she said.

"I know." It was true. Corso didn't have to read it in the clarity of her eyes. "Your luggage, and the train compartment ... It's strange. I always thought you all had unlimited wealth, out there, at the end of the rainbow." His smile was as sharp as the knife he still had in his pocket. "Peter Schlemiel's bag of gold."

"Well, you're wrong." Now she was pursing her lips obstinately. "I'm all I have."

This was true too, and Corso had known it from the start. She had never lied. Both innocent and wise, she was faithful and in love, chasing after a shadow.

"I see." He made a gesture in the air, as if wielding an imaginary pen. "Aren't you going to give me a document to sign?"

"A document?"

"Yes. It used to be called a pact. Now it would be a contract with lots of small print, wouldn't it? 'In the event of litigation, the parties are to submit to the jurisdiction of the courts of...' That's a funny thing. I wonder which court covers this."

"Don't be silly."

"Why did you choose me?"

"I'm free," she sighed sadly, as if she'd paid the price for her right to say it. "I can choose. Anyone can."

Corso searched in his coat for his crumpled pack of cigarettes. There was only one left. He took it out and stared, undecided whether to put it in his mouth or not. He put it back in the pack. Maybe he'd need a smoke later. He was sure he would.

"You knew from the beginning," he said, "that there were two completely unrelated stories. That's why you never cared about the Dumas strand. Milady, Rochefort, Richelieu—they were nothing but film extras to you. Now I understand why you were so passive. You must have been horribly bored. You just flicked the pages of your Musketeers, watching me make all the wrong moves...."

She was looking through the windshield at the town veiled in blue mist. She started to raise her hand but let it drop, as if what she was about to say was pointless. "All I could do was go with you," she answered. "Everyone has to walk certain paths alone. Haven't you heard of free will?" She smiled sadly. "Some of us have paid a very high price for it."

"But you didn't always stay on the sidelines. That night, by the Seine ... Why did you help me against Rochefort?"

She touched the canvas bag with her bare foot. "He was after the Dumas manuscript. But The Nine Doors was in there too. I just wanted to avoid any stupid interference." She shrugged. "And I didn't want him to hit you."

"What about Sintra? You warned me about the Fargas business."

"Of course. The book was tied up with it."

"And then the key to the meeting in Meung..."

"I didn't know about it. I just worked it out from the novel."

Corso made a face. "I thought you were all omniscient."

"Well, you were wrong." Now she was annoyed. "And I don't know why you keep talking to me as if I were one of many. I've been alone for a long time."

Centuries, Corso was sure. Centuries of solitude. He didn't doubt that. He had embraced her naked body, drowned in the clarity of her eyes, been inside her, tasted her skin, felt the gentle throbbing of her neck against his lips. He'd heard her moan quietly, like a frightened child or like a lonely fallen angel in search of warmth. He'd watched her sleep with her fists clenched, tormented by nightmares of gleaming, blond archangels, implacable in their armor, as dogmatic as the God who made them march in time.

Now, thanks to her, although too late, he understood Nikon and her ghosts and the desperate way she clung to life. Nikon's fear, her black-and-white photographs, her vain attempt to exorcise memories transmitted through the genes that survived Auschwitz, the number tattooed on her father's skin, the Black Order that had been as old as the spirit and the curse of man. Because God and the devil could be one and the same thing, and everybody understood it in his own way.

But just as with Nikon, Corso was cruel. Love was too heavy a burden for him, and he didn't have Porthos's noble heart. "Was that your mission?" he asked the girl. "Protecting The Nine Doors? I don't think you'll get a medal for it."

"That's unfair, Corso."

Almost the same words. Once again, Nikon left to drift, small and fragile. Who did she cling to now, to escape her nightmares?

He looked at the girl. Maybe Nikon's memory was his penance. But he was no longer prepared to accept it with resignation. He glimpsed his face in the rearview mirror: it was contracted into a lost, bitter expression.

"Is it? We lost two of the three books. And what about the pointless deaths of Fargas and the baroness?" They mattered little to him, but he was bitter. "You could have prevented them."

She shook her head, very serious, her eyes fixed on his. "Some things can't be avoided, Corso. Some castles have to burn, and some men must hang. There are dogs destined to tear each other to pieces, virtuous people destined to be beheaded, doors destined to be opened for others to enter." She frowned and bowed her head. "My mission, as you call it, was to make sure you reached the end of the journey safely."

"Well, it's been a long journey, only to end back at the starting point." Corso indicated the town suspended in the mist. "And now I have to go down there."

"You don't have to. Nobody's forcing you. You could just forget about it and leave."

"Without finding out the answer?"

"Without undergoing the test. You have the answer within you."

"That's a pretty sentence. Put it on my headstone when I'm burning in hell."

She gave him a gentle, friendly tap on the knee. "Don't be an idiot, Corso. Things are as one wants them to be more often than people think. Even the devil can adopt different guises. Or qualities."

"Remorse, for instance."

"Yes. But also knowledge and beauty." She again looked anxiously at the town. "Or power and wealth."

"But the end result is the same: damnation." He repeated his gesture of signing an imaginary contract. "You have to pay with the innocence of your soul."

She sighed again. "You paid long ago, Corso. You're still paying. It's a strange habit, postponing it all till the end. Like the final act of a tragedy ... Everyone drags his own damnation with him from the beginning. As for the devil, he is no more than God's pain; the wrath of a dictator caught in his own trap. The story told by the winners."

"When did it happen?"

"A longer time ago than you can conceive. It was very hard. I fought for a hundred days and a hundred nights without hope or refuge." An almost imperceptible smile played on her lips. "That's the only thing I'm proud of—having fought to the end. I retreated but didn't turn my back, surrounded by others also fallen from on high. I was hoarse with shouting out my fury, my fear and exhaustion. After the battle, I walked across a plain as desolate and lonely as eternity is cold.... I still sometimes come across a trace of the battle, or an old comrade who passes by without daring to look up."

"Why me, then? Why didn't you look for someone on the side of the winners? I win battles only on a scale of five thousand to one."

The girl turned to look into the distance. The sun was rising, and the first horizontal ray of light cut the morning air with a fine, reddish line that directly intersected her gaze. When she looked back at Corso, he felt vertigo as he peered into all the light reflected in her green eyes.

"Because lucidity never wins. And seducing an idiot has never been worth the trouble."

Then she leaned over and kissed him very slowly, with infinite tenderness. As if she had had to wait an eternity to do so.

THE MIST SLOWLY BEGAN to clear. It was as if the town, suspended in midair, had decided to sink its foundations back into the earth. The dawn shone on the gray-and-ochre mass of the Alcazar palace, the cathedral bell tower, and the stone bridge with its pillars in the dark waters of the river, resembling a sinister hand stretched between the two banks.

Corso started the engine. He let the car slide gently down the deserted road. As they descended, the light of the rising sun was left behind, held above them. The town gradually moved closer, and they slowly entered the world of cold hues and immense solitude that persisted in the remnants of blue mist.

He hesitated before he crossed the bridge, stopping the car beneath the stone arch that led onto it; hands on the steering wheel, head slightly bowed, and chin jutting out—the profile of an alert hunter. He took off his glasses and cleaned them, though they didn't need it. He took his time, looking intently at the bridge, which without his glasses was a vague path with disturbingly imprecise outlines. He didn't look at the girl but knew that she was watching him. He put on his glasses, adjusting them on the bridge of his nose, and the landscape recovered its sharp lines but was no more reassuring for that. The far bank looked dark. The current flowing between the pillars resembled the black waters of time, of Lethe. In the last patches of the night that refused to die, his sense of danger was tangible, acute, like a steel needle. Corso could feel the pulse beating in his wrist when he grasped the stick shift. You can still turn back, he told himself. In that way, none of what happened has ever happened, and none of what will take place will ever take place. As for the practical value of Nunc scio, "Now I know," coined by God or by the devil that was highly dubious. He frowned. They were nothing but words. He knew that in a few minutes he would be on the other side of the bridge and river. Verbum dimissum custodial arcanum. He gazed up at the sky, looking for an archer with or without arrows in his quiver, before putting the car into gear and slowly moving on.

IT WAS COLD OUTSIDE the car, so he turned up his collar. He could feel the girl's intent gaze upon him as he crossed the street without looking back, holding The Nine Doors under his arm. She hadn't offered to go with him, and for some obscure reason he knew that it was better this way. The house occupied almost an entire block, and its gray stone bulk presided over a narrow square, among medieval buildings whose closed windows and doors made them look like motionless film extras, blind and mute. The gray facade had four gargoyles on the eaves: a billy goat, a crocodile, a gorgon, and a serpent. There was a star of David on the Moorish arch above the wrought-iron gate that led to the interior courtyard with two Venetian marble lions and a well. It was all familiar to Corso, but he had never been so apprehensive on entering the house. He remembered an old quotation: "Perhaps men who have been caressed by many women cross the valley of shadows with less remorse, or less fear...." It went something like that. Maybe he hadn't been caressed enough, because his mouth was dry, and he would have sold his soul for half a bottle of Bols. And The Nine Doors felt as if it contained nine lead plates instead of prints.

He pushed open the gate, but the silence remained unbroken. Not even his shoes caused the slightest echo as he crossed the courtyard, its paving stones worn down by ancient footsteps and centuries of rain. An archway led to the steep, narrow staircase. At the top he could see the dark, heavy door decorated with thick nails. It was closed: the last door. For an instant Corso winked sarcastically at empty space, to himself, baring his teeth. He was both involuntary author and butt of his own joke, or of his own error. An error carefully planned by an unscrupulous hand, and full of serpentine, illusory invitations to participate that had led him to certain conclusions, only for them to be refuted. In the end he'd had his conclusions confirmed by the text itself, as if it had been a damned novel, which it wasn't. Or what if it was? The fact is, the last thing he saw in the polished metal plate nailed to the door was his own, very real face. A distorted image that combined the name on the plate with his own shape, the light behind him in the archway over the stairs that led down to the courtyard and the street. His last stop on a strange journey to the other side of the shadows.

He rang. Once, twice, three times. No answer. The brass button was dead; there had been no sound inside when he pressed it. In his pocket he felt the crumpled pack containing his last cigarette. Again he decided against lighting it. He rang the bell a fourth time. And a fifth. He clenched his fist and knocked hard, twice. Then the door opened. Not with a sinister creak, but smoothly, on greased hinges. And without any dramatic effects, quite casually, Varo Borja stood in the doorway.

"Hello, Corso."

Borja didn't seem surprised to see him. There were beads of sweat all over his bald head, and he was unshaven. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his vest undone. He looked tired, with dark rings under his eyes from a sleepless night. But his eyes shone feverishly. He didn't ask what Corso was doing there at such an hour, and he seemed barely to notice the book under Corso's arm. He stood there without moving, as if he had just been interrupted during some meticulous job, or dream, and just wanted to get back to it.

Here was the man responsible. Corso knew it, seeing his own stupidity materialize before him. Of course. Varo Borja—millionaire, international book dealer, famous collector, and methodical murderer. With an almost scientific curiosity, Corso scrutinized the face before him. He tried now to isolate the features, the clues that should have alerted him so much earlier. Signs overlooked; angles of madness, horror, or shadow in those familiar, vulgar features. But he couldn't see anything. Only a feverish, distant expression devoid of curiosity or passion, lost in images far removed from the man now at his door. Though Corso was holding the cursed book. It had been he, Varo Borja, in the shadow of that same book, following Corso's footsteps like an evil snake, who had killed Victor Fargas and Baroness Ungern. Not only to reunite the twenty-seven engravings and combine the nine correct ones but also to cover all traces and make sure that nobody else would solve the riddle set by Torchia, the printer. For the entire plot, Corso had been a tool to confirm a theory that proved correct—that the real book was distributed over three copies. He was also the victim of any repercussions involving the police. Now, paying twisted homage to his own instincts, Corso remembered how he felt looking up at the paintings on the ceiling of the Quinta da Soledade. Abraham's sacrifice with no alternative victim: he was the scapegoat. And Borja, of course was the dealer who went to see Victor Fargas to purchase one of his treasures every six months. That day, while Corso was visiting Fargas, Borja was in Sintra finalizing the details of his plan, waiting for confirmation of his theory that all three copies were needed to solve Torchia's riddle. Fargas's half-written receipt was intended for him That's why Corso hadn't been able to get hold of Borja when he phoned his house in Toledo. Then later that same evening, before going to his final appointment with Fargas, Borja had called Corso at the hotel, pretending he was making an international call. Corso had not only confirmed Borja's suspicions about the book but also given him the key to the mystery, thus condemning Fargas and the baroness. With bitter certainty Corso could see the pieces of the puzzle falling into place. When you set aside all the false clues that pointed to the Club Dumas, Varo Borja was the key to every inexplicable event in that other, diabolic, strand of the plot. It was enough to make you laugh out loud. If the whole damn business had been at all funny, that is.

"I've brought the book," Corso said, showing Borja The Nine Doors.

Borja nodded vaguely and took the book, barely glancing at it. He had his head slightly turned to the side, as if listening for a sound behind him, inside the house. After a moment he noticed Corso again and blinked, surprised that he was still there.

"You've given me the book. What else do you want?"

"To be paid for the job."

Borja stared at him uncomprehendingly. It was obvious that his thoughts were miles away. At last he shrugged, as if to say that it had nothing to do with him. He went back into the house, leaving it up to Corso whether to shut the door, stay where he was, or leave the way he'd come.

Corso followed him through another door into a room off the corridor and vestibule. The shutters were closed so no light could enter, and the furniture had been pushed to the far end, leaving the black marble floor empty. Some of the glass bookcases were open. The room was lit by dozens of candles that had almost burned down. Wax was dripping everywhere: on the mantelpiece above the empty fireplace, on the floor, on the furniture and objects in the room. The candles gave off a tremulous, reddish light that danced at the least draft or movement. The room smelled like a church, or a crypt.

Still taking no notice of Corso, Borja stopped in the middle of the room. There, at his feet, a circle approximately three feet in diameter was marked out in chalk, containing a square divided into nine boxes. The circle was surrounded by Roman numerals and strange objects: a piece of string, a water clock, a rusty knife, a dragon-shaped silver bracelet, a gold ring, a metal brazier full of burning charcoal, a glass vial, a small mound of earth, a stone. But Corso winced when he saw the other things strewn on the floor. Many of the books he'd admired, books lined up on shelves a few days earlier, now lay ruined, dirty, with pages torn out. The pages were covered with drawings and underlinings and full of strange marks. Candles burned on top of several of the books, and thick drops of wax dripped onto their covers or open pages. Some candles, guttering, had signed the paper. Among this wreckage Corso recognized the engravings from the copies of The Nine Doors belonging to Victor Fargas and Baroness Ungern. They were mixed up with the others on the floor and also covered with wax drips and mysterious annotations.

He bent to look more closely at the remains, not quite able to believe the magnitude of the disaster. One engraving from The Nine Doors, number VI, the man hanging by his right foot instead of his left, had been half burned away by the flickering flame of a candle. Two copies of engraving VII, one with a white chessboard and the other with a black one, lay beside a 1512 Theatrum diabolicum torn from its binding. Another engraving, I, protruded from the pages of a De imperfectaque opera by Valerio Lorena, an extremely rare incunabulum that Borja had shown Corso not long ago, barely allowing him to touch it. It was now on the floor, battered and torn.

"Don't touch anything," he heard Varo Borja say. Borja was standing before the circle, leafing through his copy of The Nine Doors, engrossed. He seemed to see not the pages themselves but something beyond them, something inside the square and circle on the floor, or even farther away: in the depths of the earth.

Corso looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. He stood up slowly. As he did so, the flames around him flickered.

"It makes no difference if I touch anything," he said, gesturing at the books and papers that lay scattered over the floor. "After what you've done."

"You don't know anything, Corso. You think you do, but you don't. You're ignorant and very stupid. The kind who believes chaos is random and ignores the existence of a hidden order."

"Don't talk rubbish. You've destroyed everything, and you had no right to. Nobody has."

"You're wrong. In the first place they're my books. And what's more important, their purpose is to be used. They had practical rather than artistic or aesthetic value. As one travels along the path, one must make sure that no one else can follow. These books have now served their purpose."

"Madman. You deceived me from the start."

Borja didn't seem to be listening. He stood motionless, holding the remaining copy of The Nine Doors, scrutinizing engraving I.

"Deceived?" He kept his eyes fixed on the book as he spoke, which underlined his contempt for Corso. "You do yourself too much honor. I hired you without telling you my reasons or my intentions. A servant does not participate in the decisions of whoever is paying him. You were to steal the items I wanted and at the same time incur the technical consequences of certain unavoidable actions. I should imagine that as we speak, the police in both Portugal and France are closing in on you."

"What about you?"

"I'm far removed from all of that, and quite safe. In a little while nothing will matter."

Then, to Corso's horror, he tore the page with the engraving from The Nine Doors.

"What are you doing?"

Varo Borja was calmly tearing out more pages.

"I'm burning my boats, my bridges behind me. And moving into terra incognita." One by one, he tore the engravings from the book, until he had all nine. He looked at them closely. "It's a pity you can't follow me where I'm going. As the fourth engraving states, fate is not the same for all."

"Where do you believe you're going?"

Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange correspondences between them.

"To meet someone" was his enigmatic answer. "To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso. From Faust's black dog to the false angel of light who tried to break down Saint Anthony's resistance. But most of all, stupidity bores him, and he hates monotony.... If I had the time and inclination, I'd invite you to take a look at some of the books at your feet. Several of them mention an ancient tradition: the advent of the Antichrist will occur in the Iberian peninsula, in a city with three superimposed cultures, on the banks of a river as deep as an ax cut, the Tagus."

"Is that what you're trying to do?"

"It's what I'm about to achieve. Brother Torchia showed me the way: Tenebris Lux."

He was bending over the circle on the floor, laying some of the engravings on it and removing others, which he threw away from him, crumpled or torn. The candles illuminated his face from below, making him look ghostly, with deep shadows for eyes.

"I hope it all fits together," he muttered. His mouth was a line of shadow. "The ancient masters of the black art who taught the printer Torchia the most terrible and valuable mysteries knew the path leading to the kingdom of night. 'It is the animal with its tail in its mouth that encircles the place.' Do you understand? The ourobouros of the Greek alchemists: the serpent on the frontispiece, the magic circle, the source of wisdom. The circle in which everything is written."

"I want my money."

"Have you never been curious about these things?" Borja went on, not hearing, peering out from shadowed eyes. "To investigate, for instance, the devil-serpent-dragon constant which has reappeared suspiciously in all the texts on the subject since antiquity."

He picked up a glass object next to the circle, a goblet with handles in the shape of two linked serpents, and he raised it to his mouth and took a few sips. It held a dark liquid, Corso noticed, almost black, like very strong tea.

"Serpens aut draco qui caudam devoravit." Varo Borja smiled into empty space, wiping his mouth. The drink left a dark smear on the back of his hand and his left cheek. "They guard the treasures: the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, the apples of the Hesperides, the golden fleece..." As he talked, he looked absent, insane, a man describing a dream from the inside. "They're the serpents or dragons that the ancient Egyptians painted in a circle, with their tail in their mouth to indicate that they came from a single thing and were self-sufficient. Sleepless guardians, proud and wise. Hermetic dragons that kill the unworthy and allow themselves to be seduced only by one who has fought according to the rules. Guardians of the lost word: the magic formula that opens eyes and makes one the equal of God."

Corso stuck out his jaw. He was standing, still and thin in his coat. The shadows of the candles danced between his half-closed eyelids and made his unshaven cheeks look sunken. He had his hands in his pockets, one touching the pack with its remaining cigarette, the other around the closed switchblade, next to his flask of gin.

"I said, give me my money. I want to get out of here."

There was a threat in his voice, but Corso couldn't tell if Borja had heard it. He saw him come to unwillingly, slowly.

"Money?" Borja regarded him with renewed contempt. "What are you talking about, Corso? Don't you understand what's about to happen? You have before you the mystery that men throughout the centuries have dreamed of. Do you know now many have been burned, tortured, and torn to pieces just for a glimpse of what you are about to witness? You can't come with me, of course. You will just stay still and watch. But even the most vile mercenary can share in his master's triumph."

"Pay me. Then you can go to the devil."

Borja didn't even look at him. He was moving around the circle and touching some of the objects that had been laid next to the numbers.

"How appropriate that you should send me to the devil. So typical of your down-to-earth style. I'd even honor you with a smile if I wasn't so busy. Although your remark was ignorant and imprecise: it will be the devil who comes to me." He paused and turned his head, as if he could already hear distant footsteps. "And I feel him coming."

He muttered, his speech interspersed with strange guttural exclamations, or with words that at times seemed addressed to Corso and at times to a third dark presence near them, in the shadows.

"'You will go through eight doors before the dragon....' Do you see? Eight doors come before the beast who guards the word, number nine, possessing the final secret.... The dragon sleeps with its eye open, and it is the Mirror of Knowledge. Eight engravings plus one. Or one plus eight. Which coincides with the number that Saint John of Patmos attributed to the Beast: 666."

Corso saw him kneel and write out numbers in chalk on the marble floor:

Then Borja stood, triumphant. For a moment the candles lit up his eyes. He must have swallowed some kind of drug with the dark liquid. His pupils were so dilated that almost none of the iris was visible, and the whites had taken on a reddish tinge from the light in the room.

"Nine engravings, or nine doors." Shadow once again covered his face like a mask. "They can't be opened by just anyone.... 'Each door has two keys.' Each engraving provides a number, a magic element, and a key word, if it's all studied in the light of reason, the cabbala, the occult, the true philosophy.... Of Latin and its combination with Greek and Hebrew." He showed Corso a piece of paper covered with signs and strange links. "You can take a look, if you like. You'll never understand it."

Aleph

Eis

I

ONMA

Air

Beth

Duo

II

CIS

Earth

Gimel

Treis

III

EM

Water

Daleth

Tessares

IIII

EM

Gold

He

Pente

V

OEXE

String

Vau

Es

VI

CIS

Silver

Zayin

Epta

VII

CIS

Stone

Cheth

Octo

VIII

EM

Iron

Teth

Ennea

VIIII

ODED

Fire

There were beads of sweat on his forehead and around his mouth, as if the flame of the candles were also burning inside his body. He began to walk around the circle slowly and carefully. He stopped a couple of times and bent over to adjust the position of an object: the rusty knife, the silver bracelet.

"You will place the elements on the serpent's skin," he recited without looking at Corso. He was following the circle with his finger but not quite touching it. "The nine elements are to be placed around it 'in the direction of the rising sun': from right to left."

Corso took a step toward him. "Once more. Give me my money."

Borja took no notice. He had his back to Corso and was pointing at the square drawn inside the circle.

"'The serpent will swallow the seal of Saturn....' The seal of Saturn is the most ancient and simple of the magic squares: the first nine numbers placed inside nine boxes, set out so that each row, whether down, across, or diagonally, adds up to the same number."

He bent and wrote nine numbers inside the box in chalk:

Corso took another step. As he did so he trod on a piece of paper covered with numbers:

A candle went out with a hiss, having burned down on the charred frontispiece of De occulta philosophia by Cornelius Agripa. Borja's attention was still on the circle and the square. He stared at them intently, his arms folded on his chest, his head bowed. He looked like a player before a strange board, pondering his next move.

"There's one thing," he said, now no longer addressing Corso but talking to himself. Hearing his own voice apparently helped him to think. "Something that the ancients didn't foresee, at least not expressly ... Added together in any direction, from up to down, down to up, left to right, or right to left, you get fifteen. But applying the codes of the cabbalists, fifteen also becomes a one and a five, which, added together, make six.... Six surrounds each side of the magical square with the serpent, the dragon, or the Beast, whatever you want to call it."

Corso didn't have to work it out for himself. It was on another piece of paper on the floor:

Borja knelt before the circle, his head bowed. The sweat on his face gleamed in the candlelight. He was holding another piece of paper and reading out the strange words written on it.

'"You will open the seal nine times,' says Torchia's text. That means the key words obtained must be placed in the box that corresponds to its number. In that way we get the following sequence."

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

ONMAD

CIS

EM

EM

OEXE

CIS

CIS

EM

ODED

"Written on the serpent, or the dragon." He rubbed out the numbers in the boxes and inserted the corresponding words in their place. "This is how it looks, to God's shame."

"It has all been carried out," muttered Borja as he wrote the final letters. His hand was trembling, and a drop of sweat slid from his forehead down his nose and onto the chalk-covered floor. "According to Torchia's text, it is sufficient for 'the mirror to reflect the path' to pronounce the lost word that brings light from the darkness.... These phrases are in Latin. They mean nothing on their own. But inside they contain the exact essence of the Verbum dimissum, the formula that makes Satan, our forebear, our mirror, and our accomplice, appear."

He was kneeling in the center of the circle now, surrounded by all the signs, objects, and words written in the square. His hands were shaking so violently that he clasped them together, clawlike, his fingers covered with chalk, ink, and wax. Proud and sure of himself, he started to laugh under his breath, a mad chuckle. But Corso was sure Borja wasn't insane. He looked around, aware that he was running out of time, and started to cross the distance between him and the book dealer. But he couldn't make up his mind to cross the line and stand with him inside the circle.

Borja looked at him malevolently, guessing his fear.

"Come, Corso. Don't you want to read it with me? Are you scared, or have you forgotten your Latin?" Light and shadow alternated with increasing speed on his face, as if the room were starting to spin. But the room was still. "Don't you want to know what these words contain? On the back of that engraving that pokes from between the pages of the Valerio Lorena you'll find the translation in Spanish. Place them before the mirror, as the masters of the art ordered. At least then you will know what Fargas and Baroness Ungern died for."

Corso looked at the book, an incunabulum with a very old and worn parchment binding. Then he bent over cautiously, as if the pages contained a dangerous trap, and pulled out the engraving from between them. It was engraving I of book number three, Baroness Ungern's copy, with three towers instead of four. On the reverse Varo Borja had written nine words:

OGERTNE

EM

ISA

OREBIL

EM

ISA

OREDNOC

EM

ISA

"Courage, Corso," said the book dealer, his voice sour and disagreeable. "You have nothing to lose.... Hold the words to the mirror."

There was, indeed, a mirror close at hand on the floor, amid the melted wax from the guttering candles. It was silver, old, and stained, with a baroque worked handle. It lay faceup, and Corso's image appeared in it, tiny and distorted, as if at the end of a long tunnel of trembling red light. The image and its double, the hero and his infinite weariness, Bonaparte chained in agony to his rock on Saint Helena. Nothing to lose, Borja had said. A cold, desolate world, where the solitary skeletons of Waterloo grenadiers stood guard along dark, forgotten paths. He saw himself before the final door, holding the key like the hermit in engraving II, the letter Teth coiled around his shoulder like a serpent.

He stepped on the mirror and crushed it with his heel, slowly, without violence. The mirror shattered with a cracking sound. The fragments now multiplied Corso's image in countless tunnels of shadow at the end of which countless replicas of himself stood motionless, too small and indistinct to concern him.

"Black is the school of the night," he heard Borja say. Borja was still kneeling at the center of the circle, his back to Corso, leaving him to his fate. Corso leaned over one of the candles and held a corner of engraving I, with the nine inverted words on the reverse, to the flame. He watched the castle towers, the horse, the horseman turned to the viewer advising silence, burn between his fingers. At last he dropped what was left of it, which turned to ash a second later and floated on the hot air of the candles lit around the room. Then he entered the circle and moved toward Borja.

"I want my money. Now."

Lost ever deeper in darkness, Borja took no notice. Anxiously, as if the position of the objects on the floor suddenly appeared incorrect, he crouched and altered the position of some of them. After a brief hesitation, he began intoning a sinister prayer:

"Admai, Aday, Eloy, Agla..."

Corso grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him. Borja showed no emotion or fear. Nor did he try to defend himself. He continued to recite, as if he was in a trance, a martyr praying unaware of the roar of the lions or the executioner's sword.

"For the last time. Give me my money."

It was no good. All Corso saw before him were Borja's empty eyes looking through him, wells of darkness, blank, intent on the chasms of the kingdom of shadows.

"Zatel, Gebel, Elimi..."

He was summoning devils, Corso realized in disbelief. Standing inside the circle, aware of nothing, aware of neither Corso's presence nor his threats, the man was invoking devils by their first names.

"Gamael, Bilet..."

Borja stopped only when Corso struck him for the first time, a blow with the back of the hand that knocked his head to one side. His eyes rolled and then fixed on a point in space.

"Zaquel, Astarot..."

By the time Borja received the second blow, blood was already trickling from a corner of his mouth. With revulsion Corso pulled his hand away, stained with red. He'd felt he was striking something damp, viscous. He took a couple of breaths and counted ten beats of his heart before clenching his teeth, then his fists, and striking again. Blood now flowed from the book dealer's twisted mouth. He was still muttering his prayer, a disturbing, delirious smile of absurd joy on his swollen lips. Corso grabbed him by his collar and dragged him brutally outside the circle before hitting him again. Only then did Borja cry out like an animal, in pain and anguish, struggling free with unexpected energy and dragging himself back into the circle. Corso pushed him from it three times and three times Borja returned to it obstinately. By then blood was smeared all over the signs and letters written on the seal of Saturn.

"Sic dedo me..."

Something was wrong. In the trembling candlelight, Corso saw him hesitate, perplexed, and check the arrangement of the objects in the magic circle. The last few drops were draining from the water clock. Borja had little time left. He repeated his last words with greater emphasis, touching three of the nine boxes:

"Sic dedo me..."

An acrid taste in his mouth, Corso looked around hopelessly, wiping his bloodstained hands on his coat. Yet more candles had burned down and went out with a hiss. Spirals of smoke rose from their charred wicks in the reddish gloom. Like serpents, he thought bitterly. He went to the desk that had been pushed into a corner with the rest of the furniture, and searched through the drawers. There was no money. Not even a checkbook. Nothing.

"Sic exeo me..."

The book dealer continued to intone his litany. Corso glanced at him, at the magic circle one last time. Kneeling within it, bowing his distorted, fervent face toward the floor, Varo Borja was opening the last of the nine doors with a smile of insane joy; his bleeding mouth, a black, demonic line across his face, like a cut from a knife made of night and shadow.

"Son of a bitch," said Corso. And with that he took his contract to be terminated.

HE MADE FOR THE gray light at the foot of the steps, beneath the arch leading to the courtyard. There, by the well and the marble lions, before the gate that led to the street, he stopped and breathed deeply, savoring the fresh, clean morning air. He searched in his coat for the crumpled pack with one remaining cigarette. He put it in his mouth but didn't light it. He stood there a moment while the first ray of the sun, which he'd left behind on entering the city, reached him, red and slanting. It slipped between the gray stone facades of the square, projecting the shadow of the wrought-iron gate on his face, and making him half-close his sleepless, weary eyes. Then the light grew, spreading slowly to fill the entire patio. The Venetian lions bowed their marble manes as if receiving a caress. The same glow, first red, then luminous as a suspension of gold dust, enveloped Corso. And at that instant, at the top of the stairs, beyond the last door of the kingdom of the shadows, where the calm light of dawn would never reach, there was a cry. A piercing, inhuman scream, full of horror and despair, in which he could barely recognize the voice of Varo Borja.

Not turning around, Corso pushed the gate and went out into the street. With each step he seemed to move a great distance away from what he was leaving behind, as if, in only a few seconds, he had retraced his steps on a journey that had taken him too long.

He stopped in the middle of the square, dazzled, enveloped in blinding sunlight. The girl was still in the car, and Corso shivered with deep, selfish delight when he saw that she hadn't disappeared with the remnants of the night. She smiled tenderly, looking impossibly young and beautiful, with her hair cut short like a boy's, her tanned skin, her tranquil eyes fixed on him, waiting. And all the golden, perfect light reflected in the liquid green of her eyes—the light driving back the dark angles of the ancient city, the shadow of the bell towers, and the pointed arches of the square—seemed to radiate from her smile as Corso went to meet her. He looked down at the ground as he walked, resigned, ready to bid his own shadow farewell. But there was no shadow at his feet.

Behind him, in the house guarded by four gargoyles beneath the eaves, Borja was no longer screaming. Or perhaps he was screaming from a dark place too far away to be heard from the street. Nunc sew: now I know. Corso wondered if the Ceniza brothers had used resin or wood to forge the illustration, lost through the whim of a child or the barbarity of a collector, in book number one. Although, as he thought of their pale, skilled hands, he inclined to think that they had carved it in wood, basing it on Mateu's Bibliography. That's why things didn't tally for Varo Borja: in the three copies, the final engraving was a forgery. Ceniza sculpsit For love of their art.

He was laughing under his breath, like a cruel wolf, as he leaned over to light his last cigarette. Books play that kind of trick, he thought. And everyone gets the devil he deserves.