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.”
• • •
I left my apartment, walked down the block, and bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time since a brief flirtation with tobacco in college. There was no smoking in my building, so I sat on my steps to light up. I coughed out the first drag, my head swimming, and I thought, These things would have killed Astrid, if not for Charlie’s intervention.
Yes. Charlie and his miracle cures. Charlie who had a tiger by the tail and didn’t want to let go.
Something happened, Astrid had said in my dream,