Act Two - Lux Aeterna — Chapter 3

Returning home, David finds Inspector Víctor Grandes waiting on his doorstep. Grandes reports that Escobillas has died in hospital and explains the fire’s cause: someone poured petrol on Barrido and set him alight, the blaze trapping others. He adds that David’s personal contract with the publishers becomes void with their deaths, though existing rights remain with the heirs.

Grandes departs after a guarded warning, leaving David unsettled by the implication of deliberate murder and its benefits to him. That night David is jolted awake by a nightmare in which Barrido and Escobillas burn alive while he watches himself extinguish a match, hinting at guilt and fear of complicity.

Unable to sleep, David opens the manuscript he took from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books: Lux Aeterna, signed “D. M.” At first opaque, its chants gather a hypnotic rhythm, presenting a single deity whose dual face unites creation and destruction. The pages teem with apocalyptic visions and suggest the author’s descent into madness, ending abruptly mid-supplication.

As David rereads, he notices a typographical quirk: a capital S tilted to the right, recurring every few lines. Testing his Underwood, he reproduces the same flaw and concludes Lux Aeterna was typed on his own machine—likely at his very desk—binding the ominous text directly to his home and deepening the mystery.