Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Max and I decided that, rather than reading over each other’s shoulders, I would take the book first, while he continued scouring the forum for anything that might help.
He sat with me all night until he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore.
“You should get some sleep, too, Cel,” he said.
“We can take a look at it in the morning.”
I nodded, barely taking notice of him, and continued reading.
The more I studied the book, the more frustrated I grew, but also the more I found to like about it.
The author, S, was unfailingly honest and open in his accounts, spilling his innermost feelings and thoughts.
How it made him feel small and unimportant when another initiate dismissed his findings, how sometimes he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing in the world.
It was refreshing to see someone speak his mind so openly, to bear his soul in an account to be read by a complete stranger thousands of years later. *
That night I had strange dreams. Of strange planetary alignments and moving through an empty house. Floating without speaking, without noise, without light. Symbols marred the walls, but all I could do was feel them with my fingers. Running over them again and again, until I woke up.
I started carrying the Book of Autumn with me all the time. I slept with it on one side and my Greek dictionary on the other. Though no matter how much I set my will against it, parts of S’s text continued to elude me.
The nights started to feel late even after the sun had barely left the sky, and I guzzled espresso after espresso to stay awake.
It seemed as if the translator—whoever they were—hadn’t translated only for the benefit of others, but also for themself.
Specific passages by S were copied over and over again, as if they were trying to understand it, too, the same lines that had given me such trouble.
At each turn, my head ached and vision blurred.
Sleepiness came, and then more coffee. I lost track of how many espressos I had, until I was so jittery I felt like I could’ve leaped off a building and made it to the next roof.
I was determined: I would make sense of at least one of these rambling passages, just take it one sentence at a time, but it was no use.
My eyes kept glazing over, and before I knew it, I’d been reading the same sentence for the last twenty minutes.
At one point, Max caught me dozing off at my desk.
“Cella … how long have you been awake?”
“A couple of days.”
“What? Jesus, get some sleep. You can’t stay up for days reading this book.”
“I’m fine.”
But it was clear to me now that this was, unequivocally, a book of Magic. And among the rambling notes and healing prayers, omens and instructions for gauging the Moon’s patterns, practices for health and well-being that S had learned in his travels, was the spell Dani had undertaken.
And, I hoped, one to bring her back again.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF DANICA STEWART
MARCH 12TH [THREE WEEKS BEFORE THE MURDER]
Nyktipoloi, bacchants, maenads, initiates in the mysteries. A fiery punishment awaits us, my dear, didn’t you know? For, as Heraclitus says, initiation into the mysteries is unholy.
but we’ve always been unholy, you and I, haven’t we?
And what has happened once, happens again.
the chief of charlatans,
our fraudulent art