The witch-hunter, Heinrich Kramer, who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum meets a midwife, a floating iron pot, and nine cats - and discovers, to his considerable inconvenience, that the universe has a sense of humor he had not authorized.
Heinrich Kramer - Dominican inquisitor, bestselling author, and a man with a forty-year grudge against cats that he has very sensibly reclassified as theology - has built his career on a single bad night in a meat locker. Expelled from Innsbruck by a bishop who had the gall to ask for proof, Kramer writes a book that makes the question unaskable, then rides its fame south to the Rhine, where the universe has prepared a surprise for him. In the autumn of 1486 he arrives in Oberwesel trailing a notary named Peter of Ingelheim who believes every word of the book to the letter, and there, at the Lower Gate, he finds Walburga - a midwife, a healer, a keeper of an herb garden and nine cats, and a woman whom the evening light, for once, refuses to cast as a witch. One night, watching from behind a rain-cask, Kramer sees her cast-iron soup pot rise three inches off the hearth and hang in the air while she feeds her cats. It is the first genuinely impossible, completely harmless thing he has ever seen - and it breaks his entire filing system.
What follows is a witch-hunt run entirely backwards. A papal legate, Von Spee, arrives demanding a fire, and Kramer - who has never actually wanted to burn a woman - weaponizes the contradictions of his own book to keep Walburga out of it. A cup of chamomile tea cures a lifetime of heartburn. A twenty-pound cat falls asleep in the lap of the man who wrote that all cats are the Devil's vehicle. In the moonlit garden, Kramer confesses the whole fraud, and Walburga corrects his prose.
Across one foggy night they load nine cats into six baskets - the cats are not consulted about the basket arrangements - and row for the far bank of the Rhine: Kramer, the Hammer of Witches, now smuggling contraband felines over an international river. At dawn she offers him a life without the book, the fire, or the name: a small house, a garden, the cats. He cannot take it. He walks back to Speyer, to the second edition, to the centuries of fires - unable to pass a haystack without wondering whether a black cat is watching him.
Eighteen years later, in the winter of 1505, in a borrowed room at Kromeríz, a scratching comes at the door. An old, one-eared, black cat stands in the lamplight and lays a bundle of dried chamomile at the knees of the old man who refused the only true thing. Heinrich Kramer blows out his lamp, and, for the first time in eighteen years, lets the cat stay inside. It purrs. He does not, on balance, seem to mind.
