by J B Cantwell
I thought about running back downstairs and sounding the alarm with Grandma, but she wouldn’t be able to make it up this ladder. She’d probably have to call the cops or animal control or something. What if there was nothing there? Or, worse, what if there was no one left this far out in the country to help?
I got up from the floor and carefully picked my way over to the corner of the room. I held my hands out in front of me in the darkness, ready to defend myself if the hidden beast decided to jump out and attack.
Just a few steps in I felt a tug on my pant leg and practically leapt out of my skin. I looked down and saw a floorboard jutting up through the mess, catching the fabric near my ankle. As I stooped to untangle myself, I noticed the variety of other hazards around me. Rusty nails stuck out from forgotten scraps of wood. Huge piles of books were stacked precariously on all sides. A broken lamp lay two more steps ahead. I righted myself again and continued, creeping as silently as possible towards the box.
My breathing had started up again, but the air just barely made it in and out through my clenched chest as I got closer. Since my surgery, my chest always got this way when I was nervous. My heart would cramp up when I felt threatened, or scared, or even excited. This, of course, is the last thing you want if you’re facing something that could actually be dangerous. I wondered if anyone would miss me after I was eaten alive by what was now a bear-sized rat in my mind. I reached the far edge of the room and stopped.
No sound. I stood motionless except for my eyes, which darted from side to side, up the walls, along the floor, seeking the hiding menace. I peered around the backside of the broken box. Nothing. I knelt down to look inside. Empty.
I slowly let my breath out with a long sigh of relief. All I had heard was the old place, already in the midst of decay, falling apart just a little bit more. Bolted to the wall was a long shelf piled with cardboard boxes and books. Broken on the floor was another, matching shelf. It must have finally given way under the weight of decades, sending the heavy wooden box tumbling down.
Next to the box a pile of yellowed papers littered the floor. As my breathing steadied, I cleared them away to make a spot to sit and compose myself. I slumped down on the hardwood planks, and a plume of dust flew up around me.
As I looked again at the box’s interior I realized that, scared as I was, I had been hoping that something interesting might be inside. Hidden monsters, while terrifying, were more appealing than going back downstairs to stare at the wall some more.
I crossed my legs and put my chin in my hands. Well, that had been fun. For, like, a minute. A film of dust lay over everything in the room, and I stretched out a single finger, drawing circles on the floorboard. My nail brushed across a groove in the wood, and I cleared away the dust with the palm of my hand. There in the floorboard, carved deeply into the plank, was a marking.
I got onto my hands and knees and blew into the crevices of the carving, pushing away the cardboard box on the floor next to it that was blocking the light from the window. As the dust in the air cleared, a strange design appeared.
Two long ovals crossed over each other, and a tall, deep diamond carved out the space in the center. Completing the shape at the top and bottom were two stars, mirroring each other.
I stared at it and ran my fingers along the ovals. I had never seen anything like it before. It didn’t match with any of the symbols I had learned about at school. It wasn’t a Roman numeral or a symbol of the Greek gods. What other ancient types of writing were there? Maybe it was some sort of hieroglyph. But that was ridiculous. Grandma’s attic was not the sort of place that a hieroglyph made any sort of sense in. Yet still, here it was.
I couldn’t shake the chills that were crawling down my spine as I looked around the room. Maybe this place wasn’t everything it seemed to be. Was there something here, in the attic, in the house, on the farm, that I was missing?
“How long have you lived in this house, Grandma?” I asked an hour later, between mouthfuls of sticky spaghetti. She looked up at me and then her eyes focused on a point beyond me as she thought of the answer.
“Hmmm, let’s see,” she said, “I moved here with your grandfather right after we were married. We moved in with his parents, which is what most young couples did back then. So that’s about sixty-five, no, sixty-seven years.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s a long time. When was this place built?”
“Oh,” she said, “your grandfather’s grandparents built it, so you do the math.”
I twirled my spaghetti around and around my fork. That had to be almost two hundred years back. And it sounded like the place had been in the family that whole time. I eyed her, trying to decide if I should ask my next question.
“Did anyone in the family ever do anything… strange?” I asked.
She snorted and said, “What do you mean strange? We’re just farmers, Aster, not magicians. At least, we used to be farmers.” She smiled at me lovingly. “Though you with that blond hair, you might have a little magic in your blood.”
I snorted. It was true: everyone in my family had brown hair except for me. In the old baby pictures I had seen, most people on my dad’s side had white blond hair as kids that then darkened as they got older, and Mom’s side of the family was almost entirely brunette. But I had always had a light blond mop on my head, a “toe-head” as some people called it, and it had barely darkened at all since I was little.
“Hair aside,” I said, “was anybody in the family not a farmer? You know, before? Like did anybody travel a lot or disappear or do anything strange?”
“Disappear?” she asked. She thought for a moment. “Well, your grandfather once traveled to New York City,” she said, “but that’s not that unusual, is it? I really wanted to go on that trip with him. I was so excited about seeing the Empire State Building. But your father was just a baby and I couldn’t leave him alone here with my parents; they were getting on in their years and wouldn’t have been able to manage an infant on their own.” She paused. Finally she said, “I’ve barely made it out of this town.”
I stared down at my plate. My father. His mother had cared so much for him and the people around her to not leave them when they needed her most, a trait he apparently did not inherit.
“Do you ever see him?” I asked, eyes still on my marinara.
“Who, Jack? No, not for a few years now,” she said quietly. “He sent me a letter a while back. Said he was getting married. Don’t expect I’ll ever meet her.”
We both sat in silence, the weight of the conversation hanging around us.
“Your ma doesn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see why I would need to burden her with something like that. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything to you, either.”
So he really had moved on for good. I stayed silent, fuming with anger at the man I hadn’t seen in seven long years.
“Aster,” she finally said, “I’m so sorry…about everything.”
When I looked up from my plate she had tears in her eyes. My eyes fell back to the faded tablecloth. I had set down my fork, and now my fingernails were tearing the woven fabric to shreds on the edge of where my plate sat. After a couple minutes I raised my head. She was watching me, and quickly wiped a tear from her cheek.
“You know, your ma…you know she had to go, right?” she asked.
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“I know this place isn’t where most kids your age would want to be for the summer, but you know she’s trying as hard as she can. You know that.”
I nodded. I picked up my fork and poked at what was left of my dinner. We ate in silence for a while but with much less gusto than before. Finally, I pushed back from the table.
“Maybe you should take a trip somewhere,” I said, standing. “Somewhere you’ve always wanted to go.”
“What, you mean like New York?” She smiled at me, shaking her head. “Hon, all I really want to do these days is nap and enjoy what time I have left. Besides, I doubt th
at the New York I wanted to see is still there.” Her eyes became serious. “Things are a lot different now, you know.” She shook her head slowly from side to side. “I don’t need to travel all around creation at this stage of life. Not to see that. I’ve done my living.”
In spite of myself, I felt sorry for her. She’d spent her whole life working here on the farm, never going anywhere, and then had watched her home slowly being ripped apart by the elements as the planet’s systems had become unpredictable. And what did she have to show for her efforts? An embarrassment of a son and a falling-down house.
I looked around the old-fashioned kitchen, at the family heirlooms hung on the walls, and thought about what her life must be like now. She was all alone out here, scraping by, surrounded on all sides by ruined earth. City life was a bit drab, but it was reliable. We knew we would eat. We knew we were safe. A framed photograph of a young family sitting outdoors at a family gathering, surrounded by brilliant green grass, caught my eye. The people around the table smiled as if they were laughing at a joke somebody just told. It was a type of life I had never known.
The photo brought me up short, and the pity I felt for her swirled uncomfortably in my chest with a different emotion. The eyes in the photo shined with something I had rarely seen in my life in the city. Maybe I had it wrong. Maybe Grandma’s reasons for staying so far out were more inspired than I realized. The people at the table, they looked so…happy. But it was more than that. They looked like they knew where they belonged.
“What were you doing up there in the attic all day anyhow?” she asked, snapping me back from my thoughts. I turned and brought my plate to the sink.
“Oh,” I said, over my shoulder, “I’m just digging around. There’s a lot of interesting stuff up there.”
“Yes,” she said. “Some strange treasures are up there if memory serves. Just about anything from hundreds of years ago can look so foreign to people now. You know, your great great grandfather was a cartographer. Do you know what that is?”
I shook my head as I turned on the tap.
“A cartographer,” she went on, “is somebody who makes maps. Brendan Wood was his name. He used to travel all around this area, come to think of it. People would hire him to map out their plots of land for them. Most of Adams County is probably up there in that attic.”
I kept quiet and scrubbed my plate with the gray, ragged sponge. I wondered if Brendan had carved that symbol into the attic floor himself, or if, in the long years that had passed since he had built this place, it had been one of his descendants to take the knife to the wood.
The rain continued, so I spent my days exploring the attic. With each new search I found more to keep me wanting to return, and I soon forgot my irritation at having been dumped on the farm. The place was full of a century’s worth of discarded treasures, and I soon realized that I could have spent a year up there digging and still not have discovered everything worth discovering. This realization came on unconsciously, but within a short space of days I started burrowing like a madman, trying to solve a riddle that didn’t exist. I had a strange, tight sensation in the center of my chest, one that was unrelated to my medical condition. My brain buzzed furiously all day, and thoughts of treasure teased me all night. Something needed finding in that attic, I was sure of it.
To say the attic was a magical place would not be quite the right description. The grimy collection of prizes did not seem to go together. Curious things were mixed right in with the ordinary. A broken compass folded in with a box of old clothes. A tiny, and curiously bright, white stuffed bird perched on top of a stack of books. A perfectly round, smooth ball of some kind of stone I had never seen. An old jewelry box with an assortment of broken gold necklaces snarled into an impossible knot the size of my fist. The place was on my mind twenty-four hours a day, and I always wanted to be up there. As the days passed I forgot about the possibility of leaving the house at all. Mom would have been downright proud of my lack of adventure.
On my fourth day in the attic, I was looking through the items on the shelf next to the one that had fallen down. A pile of old papers was stacked up along one side, and propped up behind them like a plate on a wall was a large framed picture of a ship. When I moved it down from the shelf to take a closer look, a squiggly painted line emerged on the wall behind it. It was the width of my finger and ran up and down right behind where the painting had been.
The old papers, a box of used clothing and several poster tubes came down and made a pile at my feet. The more I unloaded, the more of the drawing I could see. After half an hour of relocating stacks and stacks of ancient junk, I could see the entire wall.
It was a map.
But it was a map of no place I had ever seen. It looked vaguely like a squashed combination of North America and Australia, but there were no words to clue me in about what location it showed, only lines. I knew my geography pretty well; all those hours after school and lunches on my own in the library had resulted in brainiac grades in all my subjects. But this was an outline I had never studied before.
In several places on the map, golden rings were painted within the black borders. The paint the mapmaker used was some sort of metallic, because the rings had a strange flicker to them. They reminded me of sun reflecting on water. I looked around the room, trying to figure out if maybe something shiny was reflecting a sunbeam onto the wall. But then I realized it was still raining outside.
“Ouch!”
As I backed away from the wall, my hand struck the corner of a sharp piece of wood. I cradled it to my chest and spun around, looking for the offending piece of junk I had knocked into. It was the big wooden box that had fallen on my first day up here, still in the place it had landed when the old shelf had given way. I bent over, grabbed the sides of the box and heaved it upright.
I slapped my hands together and a cloud of dust filled the stale air. Poking out from between two slats of wood in the back of the box was a small corner of parchment. I hadn’t seen this before; after the box fell I hadn’t bothered to investigate it further.
I knelt down and gently tugged on the paper. It took a little bit of back and forth, but after a minute it gave way and I was holding an old, crumpled envelope. There was no writing, but on the backside it had a deep red wax seal, like the kinds I’d seen illustrated in history books about the middle ages. Pressed into the wax was a design, and I gulped as I recognized the now familiar oval and diamond shape, the same one that was carved into the wood beneath my feet. The seal on this envelope had never been broken. Could that be right? If so, then that meant that nobody but the person who wrote this letter had ever seen what was inside of it. Nobody.
I looked around the attic. I was a little nervous about being the first person to open it; it didn’t belong to me, after all. But curiosity got the better of me, and I carefully slid my thumb under the seal. It gave way with a surprising little pop. I opened the flap of the envelope, and read the writing on its underside:
Dare free what lies within
And see where we have been
Huh, I thought. The writing was mysterious enough, but the ink had a strange flickery glow about it. Just like the golden rings on the wall behind me, the words on the page shimmered brightly, though this part of the attic was quite dark. What did it mean? Was some ill fate awaiting me if I opened what was inside?
I decided that I would simply have to open it. It was just an old letter, anyhow, I told myself. My heart did not hear my brain’s logic, and it pounded in my chest with excitement. I slipped the parchment from the envelope and unfolded it, taking care not to tear the ancient document. I opened it along each crease, spreading it out on the floor in front of me.
It was blank.
I stared, feeling a little cheated. What was the point of going to all the trouble of saving a blank piece of paper for what looked like hundreds of years? I smoothed the parchment and knelt closely over it, looking for clues to its secret. Old and discolored, its edges ripped, it mat
ched the paper that made the envelope. I pressed my nose close to every inch of the page, looking for any marking or indentation. Nothing. I sat back on my heels and blew out a long sigh of frustration.
Then I saw it. Writing was appearing on the page, as if from an invisible hand. I watched, my jaw dropping open, as the same gold ink traced the outline of the first oval.
I grabbed the paper off the floor and raced across the room, holding it up in the hazy, overcast daylight coming through the high window.
My chest slowly unclenched beneath my shirt as my shock turned to wonder. The second oval and the diamond were completed now, and the invisible pen drew the tiny stars on the top and bottom of the symbol. I stared, unblinking, at the paper, as the next set of lines appeared, letters in ornate script.
GO
The writing stopped.
“Go,” I began, “What on Earth does…”
But I was cut short.
A light as bright as the sun burst from the page, and I put one hand up to shield my eyes. Around me the contents of the attic moved inward. And then with a deafening BOOM they exploded away from me.
All was brightness. All was light. I spun in space. Where had the floor gone? My insides were stretched and then squashed and then stretched again. I closed my eyes to keep from getting sick.
And then, blackness. Under my cheek I felt cool, wet earth.
I was lying, face down, on grass.
Chapter 3
My chest felt tight.
I opened my eyes.
My left cheek was pressed into damp ground. Little bits of silver and white twinkled in front of my face in the dim moonlight; water droplets hung off each strand of grass. I put my hands next to my shoulders and pushed myself upright, the parchment still clutched in my fist. Sitting back, I gaped at my surroundings, wiping the water vigorously from my cheek with the back of my sleeve.