The Serpent Papers (32 page)

* * *

On my return the retired inspector squints at me. I will not touch the pages again. He leans in on his elbows. Smiles. The ghost girl has gone.

‘Don’t worry, we won’t be here long. Why don’t you tell us what you think so we can get this over with quickly?’

‘Yes.’ I choke. Attempt to gather myself. ‘Of course.’

‘Guifré told you that these diagrams –’ I point to the charts on the facing page of the first parchment letter – ‘represented the attributes of a famous ‘truth machine’ created by Ramon Llull. This was not true. In actuality your letters reference the lesser-known work of a medieval alchemist called Rex Illuminatus.’

‘OK,’ Fabregat says quietly.

Control yourself. Don’t look too deep. Don’t be sick. Don’t let the fear show.

‘There’s the serpent on the left hand, the cross on the right. The circle round the belly button and the crescent between each nipple drawn over her chest. These markings are replicated on the subsequent two victims.’

‘Correct.’

‘Guifré said the symbols were alchemical. The circle represents Gold, the crescent, Silver.’

‘Yes.’

‘We can agree that this is accurate.’

Fabregat nods. Focusing on something invisible in the distance.

‘But there are other meanings as well. Rex Illuminatus saw the world through the lens of his own esoteric codes. For him, Gold would immediately be affiliated with the sun god Apollo, Silver with the moon goddess Artemis. So your victims are branded with symbols associated with alchemy and the mystery cults of Apollo and Artemis . . . That should help us understand the nine letters . . .’ I lead him on. ‘Which are meant to be read as a specific language of divination. A language of the birds, no less. That’s what is meant by the line
Find me in the Utterance of Birds
.’

My eyes hover over the letter B cut into Rosario’s shoulder.
A serpent on her palm.
Serpent-bearing. Avian Speaker. The Alphabet of Birds.
Gold round her belly, but also a play on words. Count the grains of Sand and measure the Sea: again, a reference to the Sibyl – see also ‘displacement’. Witch. The moon on her breast representing Silver – and the occult, a horned goddess, the domain of an ancient earth mother.
Each letter of the Alchemist considered a pagan heresy.
An interloping language of divination.
But the marks on the right hand? Those are different. The fear resonates. If I listen long enough I might just grasp them, follow them. Locate them.

Fabregat wants to know who
he
is. ‘He’?
There are many. Many hands in this.
This is one thing I am certain of, though I do not have the vocabulary to explain it . . . I
know
intimately. I return to the bloody markings on the victims –
a serpent and a cross. On the right hand for conversion, on the left hand for transgression.
Breathe in. Begin again.

‘Fourth verse,’ I tell him. Avoiding the photographs, the cuts on bodies, taking strength in the letters.
Academic grounding.
‘There’s a direct reference to a famous proclamation spoken by the Oracle at Delphi. Recorded in the fifth century
bce
by the historian Herodotus. Herodotus informs us that when Croesus, King of Lydia, decided to test each oracle’s power before selecting a favoured seer, he sent messengers to all the oracle centres of the ancient world bearing an unusual question.

“Tell me precisely what King Croesus is doing now,” the representatives asked. The Oracle of Delphi responded correctly, winning the game.
King Croesus is boiling a tortoise and a lamb in a bronze pot
, she said. But she also admonished the King, declaring her omnipotence boldly:
I count the number of grains of sand on the beach and measure the sea, I understand the speech of the dumb and hear the voiceless.
’

An uncomfortable doubt invades my throat: Natalia Hernández – was she hunter or hunted? And if she was hunted . . . who would come after you? I think of Ruthven and Sitwell alone in that house in the Gothic—

No. Now focus on the Sibyl.

I recall a legend of Rex Illuminatus, one that claims he woke to birdsong and emerged from his cave. Philomela sat with her back towards him, overlooking the plains to the sea. She held in her left hand a bowl of food, and to Illuminatus’s great astonishment a serpent was eating from the bowl. The Doctor rushed forward.

‘The Serpent is an evil creature!’ he chastised the girl. ‘The Serpent is a messenger of the Devil.’

No.
The snake is a creature of the earth. It has no ears to hear with, no voice to speak with. It is a deaf-mute. We are brethren. Kin. You have called me Philomela the Nightingale, but I was born the daughter of Asclepius and named Hygieia. I am Serpentarius, the Serpent Bearer. My silence knows a divine language – when I teach you this you will raise the dead. You will make gold from lead and live a thousand years. Then you too will count the grains of sand and measure the sea, you will know the secrets of the maker and shall read the deaf-mute and hear the voiceless.

In the story Philomela put the snake down on the ground and stood up to face the Doctor.
I have been thinking of your Alef Bet.
You say it began with a flame in the great dark, the flame in the infinite, the spark of an idea
, she said with her brown hands.
I am of accord that the Great Mystery resides in silence. In the unknown beyond the known, in the Being beyond appearance, it is the generative thought stronger than words. Silence is the root of language – it is the thought before speaking. Look
 – she signed with her hands,
and picked the snake up.
A snake’s tongue forks. One side holds healing powers, the other teaches a prophetic language.
When a seer has been kissed at night by a snake, she is granted both the language of the Birds and the magical ability to heal
.

‘And?’ Fabregat nods at the letters on the table. ‘Whoever sent me these wanted me to translate the poetry?’

‘Yes and no. They were not necessarily writing
for
you. They wanted you to become a messenger.
A Serpent Bearer.
To deliver these to someone who would understand.’

‘To
One-who-is-arriving
,’ Fabregat adds.

Someone like me.

‘And the
Nine books of Leaves
? The
rage of man
?’

There are things I see, but do not want to share. Not yet. Not until I am certain. I pause, uneasy. Then jerk ahead. This time I will not look at the dead.
Golden serpent curling. Mouth biting.
Meaning clicks into place.

‘I don’t think your victims died because of who they were as individuals. I believe they were selected because of what they represented as symbols.’

‘Now you’re speaking in riddles.’

‘What do these three women have in common? A virgin, a nurse, and a midwife?’

‘They shared a very unfortunate death,’ Fabregat says darkly.

I tell him that in 1297 Philomela was burnt in Barcelona. Her tongue was cut out and her body was carved with the letters of her master’s alphabet. In 1851, Captain Ruthven and Llewellyn Sitwell witness the aftermath of an identical crime. The 2003 murders of Rosa, Rosario and Roseanne repeat a tradition of dismemberment associated with the mortification of pagans, specifically clairvoyants and mediums, given the broad title
Witch.

A lump settles in the base of my throat. Come now. Push harder. Do not be afraid.

What mark? What mark is his? I feel the nausea rise again. Everything here is about controlling the victim. Defining who she became. First he took her tongue. Then he defiled her. He labelled her body with letters and symbols. He made her into something he wanted to destroy; writing meaning into her skin, he reshaped his victim to make the act of cutting out her tongue more potent. To imbue it with significance. Her body became a manuscript. What else did he wish to rewrite? To erase? To stamp out? What message was he choosing to send? And to whom?

And what of the palimpsest?
You are looking for a mirror
. Distorted reflection. Equal and opposite. Book slayer. Tongue killer. Following the same threads, he found her first. Made his mark, as she made hers. I begin to feel delirious.
Violence uncomfortably close. Letters left in cloisters, hidden in confessionals. Allusions to prophets, Serpent Bearers and Whores of Babylon. Llewellyn Sitwell’s letters and Ruthven’s palimpsest interred in stone. Things don’t just die overnight. Books can be burnt. Faith can be outlawed. But language is carried underground. Beneath the surface. On the tip of your tongue. So how do you kill something carried orally? Something like the Song of the Serpent? The Language of the Birds? You make the carrier mute.

I blink and look again.

There will be a
sign on their bodies that belongs exclusively to him.
Harder. Look harder.
When he was finished with the first three victims, he marked them with the judgement of the cross on the right hand. And yet he did not take the time to do that to Natalia Hernández. Because she didn’t need to be rewritten. She was already the symbol.
The object of the hunt.

Go through the steps. The original
Alchemical History of Things
was made in the early fourteenth century. It comprised forty-eight numbered leaves, measuring 32
×
24 cm. There are seventy-two leaves of text and twenty-two lustrous miniatures in full body colour. In this manuscript, Rex Illuminatus describes his encounter with the Sibyl Philomela, and later the parchment book she gave him. The provenance of that manuscript (known to Renaissance scholars as the
Tabulae Serpentis
 – the Serpent Tablet) is of the highest order. At some point in the early sixteenth century, the immortal Rex Illuminatus bound pages of the Sibyl’s
Tabulae Serpentis
into a medieval Book of Hours which he gave to his allies on Mallorca for safe keeping in their monastery. Captain Ruthven found this Book of Hours in the early nineteenth century and cut out a single page, which he returned to London. His laboratory notes record the incident in 1829: ‘
There is a wondrous revelation called the Process of the Philosophers most unusually contained in a simple Book of Hours. I have seen the Alchemist’s Great Elixir, represented in diverse & incomparable miniatures & certain of this discourse eclipse a Greek hand perpendicular on the page, ranging beneath the gold in two divine columns.
’
Then the Book of Hours disappears. Only to be rediscovered in a lightning storm on Mallorca, with the crucial pages violently removed. A woman by the name of Cristina Rossinyol duplicates the colophon sign of a Philomela, and replicates the Alchemist’s illuminations. Her daughter quotes the words of the hidden palimpsest text in the final letters of her life and hints at access to more.

All signs point to Natalia Hernández’s ownership of a secret – a secret that her assassin presumably recognized and knew.
What if her death was instigated by this secret?
The curiosity in me pushes: why? What revelation could be so powerful? Did it truly contain a magic?

I shudder and think of the cloven feet pointing into smoke-filled air.
Someone cared enough to set fire to our chapel on Mallorca. Someone cared enough to mutilate women in Barcelona in 1851 and 2003 – all whittling down and down and down into the most unlikely place. A place Picatrix would never have thought to look.