Jenny stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. “She’s better. That’s God’s grace, Jamie, no matter what Mr. Jacobs may think now that he’s fallen away. Without it—without him—she would have been dead in six weeks.”
• • •
Astrid rode down the handicapped ramp in her wheelchair, but got into Jenny’s Subaru on her own. Jacobs closed her door. She reached through the open window, grasped one of his hands in both of her own, and thanked him again.
“It was my pleasure,” he said. “Just remember your promise.” He pulled his hand free so he could put a finger to her lips. “Mum’s the word.”
I bent down and kissed her forehead. “Eat,” I said. “Rest. Do therapy. And enjoy your life.”
“Roger, Captain,” she said. She looked past me, saw Jacobs slowly climbing the steps to the porch, then met my eyes and repeated what she’d said earlier. “Be careful.”
“Don’t worry.”
“But I will.” Her eyes on mine, full of grave concern. She was getting old now, as I was, but with the disease banished from her body, I could see the girl who had stood in front of the stage with Hattie, Carol, and Suzanne, the four of them shaking their moneymakers while Chrome Roses played “Knock on Wood” or “Nutbush City Limits.” The girl I had kissed under the fire escape. “I will worry.”
I rejoined Charlie Jacobs on the porch, and we watched Jenny Knowlton’s trim little Outback roll down the road that led to the gate. It had been a fine melt-day, and the snow had pulled back, revealing grass that was already turning green. Poor man’s fertilizer, I thought. That’s what we used to call it.
“Will those women keep their mouths shut?” Jacobs asked.
“Yes.” Maybe not forever, but until his work was done, if he was as close to finished as he claimed. “They promised.”
“And you, Jamie? Will you keep your promise?”
“Yes.”
That seemed to satisfy him. “Stay the night, why don’t you?”
I shook my head. “I booked a room at Embassy Suites. I’ve got an early flight.”
And I can’t wait to get away from this place, just as I couldn’t wait to get away from The Latches.
I didn’t say this, but I’m sure he knew it.
“Fine. Just be ready when I call.”
“What do you need, Charlie? A written statement? I said I’ll come, and I will.”
“Good. We’ve been bouncing off each other like a couple of billiard balls for most of our lives, but that’s almost over. By the end of July—mid-August at the latest—we’ll be finished with each other.”
He was right about that. God help him, he was.
Always assuming He’s there, of course.
• • •
Even with a change of planes in Cincinnati, I was back in Denver the next day before 1 PM—when it comes to time travel, nothing beats flying west in a jet plane. I woke up my phone and saw I had two messages. The first was from Jenny. She said that she had locked the door of Astrid’s bedroom last night before turning in herself, but there hadn’t been a peep from the baby monitor, and when she got up at six-thirty, Astrid was still conked out.
“When she got up, she ate a soft-boiled egg and two pieces of toast. And the way she looks . . . I have to keep telling myself it’s not some kind of illusion.”
That was the good message. The bad one was from Brianna Donlin—now Brianna Donlin-Hughes. She’d left it only minutes before my United flight touched down. “Robert Rivard is dead, Jamie. I don’t know the details.” But by that evening, she’d gotten them.
A nurse had told Bree that most people who went into Gad’s Ridge never came out, and that was certainly true of the boy Pastor Danny had healed of his muscular dystrophy. They found him in his room, dangling from a noose he’d made from a pair of bluejeans. He left a note that said, I can’t stop seeing the damned. The line stretches forever.
XII
Forbidden Books. My Maine Vacation. The Sad Story of Mary Fay. The Coming of the Storm.
About six weeks later I got an email from my old research partner.
To: Jamie
From: Bree
Subject: FYI
After you were at Jacobs’s place in upstate New York, you said in an email that he mentioned a book called
De Vermis Mysteriis
. The name stuck in my head, probably because I took just enough Latin in high school to know that’s
The Mysteries of the Worm
in plain English. I guess research into All Things Jacobs is a hard habit to break, because I looked into it. Without telling my husband, I should add, as he believes I have put All Things Jacobs behind me.
Anyway, this is pretty heavy stuff. According to the Catholic Church,
De Vermis Mysteriis
is one of half a dozen so-called Forbidden Books. Taken as a group, they are known as “grimoires.” The other five are
The Book of Apollonius
(he was a doctor at the time of Christ),
The Book of Albertus Magnus
(spells, talismans, speaking to the dead),
Lemegeton
and
Clavicula Salomonis
(supposedly written by King Solomon), and
The Grimoire of Picatrix
. That last one, along with
De Vermis Mysteriis
, was supposedly the basis of H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire, called
The Necronomicon
.
Editions are available of all the Forbidden Books EXCEPT FOR
De Vermis Mysteriis
. According to Wikipedia, secret emissaries of the Catholic Church (paging Dan Brown) had burned all but six or seven copies of
De Vermis
by the turn of the 20th century. (BTW, the Pope’s army now refuses to acknowledge such a book ever existed.) The others have dropped out of sight, and are presumed to be destroyed or held by private collectors.
Jamie, all the Forbidden Books deal with POWER, and how to obtain it by means that combine alchemy (which we now call “science”), mathematics, and certain nasty occult rituals. All of it is probably bullshit, but it makes me uneasy—you told me Jacobs has spent his life studying electrical phenomena, and based on his healing successes, I have to think he may have gotten hold of a power that’s pretty awesome. Which makes me think of the old proverb: “He who takes a tiger by the tail dare not let go.”
A couple of other things for you to think about.
One: Up until the mid-seventeenth century, Catholics known to be studying
potestas magnum universum
(the force that powers the universe) were liable to excommunication.
Two: Wikipedia claims—although without verifying references, I must add—that the couplet most people remember from Lovecraft’s fictional
Necronomicon
was stolen from a copy of
De Vermis
which Lovecraft had access to (he certainly never owned one, he was too poor to purchase such a rarity). This is the couplet: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die.” That gave me nightmares. I’m not kidding.
Sometimes you called Charles Daniel Jacobs “my old fifth business.” I hope you are done with him at last, Jamie. Once upon a time I would have laughed at all this, but once upon a time I thought miracle cures at revival meetings were bullshit.
Give me a call someday, would you? Let me know All Things Jacobs are behind you.
Affectionately, as always,
Bree
I printed this out and read it over twice. Then I googled De Vermis Mysteriis and found everything Bree had told me in her email, along with one thing she hadn’t. In an antiquarian book-blog called Dark Tomes of Magick & Spells, someone called Ludvig Prinn’s suppressed grimoire “the most dangerous book ever written.”