by Jeannette Ng
“I still think it looks like the hand in Roche’s journal.”
Laon disagreed but he nonetheless plucked the journal from the shelf at my urging and leafed through it.
“Could you find it?”
Brows knotted, he was frowning at the page when he said, “Do you remember this?”
He passed it to me, and it was indeed that crowded, cramped hand that I remembered. A very studied, tidy script. It wrote out most of a little verse:
He … the word … spoke it;
He took … bread and broke it;
And what that word did make it…
… believe…
I mouthed the verse to myself. It tugged at my memory. The woman in black had said it to me and I heard it before whispered to me. It could not be a coincidence.
“This was complete last I read it,” said Laon. “I didn’t think ink could fade so quickly.”
I stared at the page, touching my fingertips against where the words were, trying to see any trace of their shape. I knew what they were meant to be.
“Laon,” I said. “You remember about semiotic moths, don’t you?”
“Book moths?”
“Yes, those. Scourge of the libraries and such.”
“We used to set traps for them,” he said, a fond smile playing on his lips. “Even though you said there weren’t secrets enough in our library to sustain them.”
“You were very stubborn,” I said. “Especially since Tessie did not like us playing with dead things. We had to steal bay leaves from her herb stores for the killing jars.”
“Hiding it all under the floorboards with the blocks was a brilliant idea.” He caught my hand and gave each of my fingers a light, punctuating kiss. His eyes flashed dark and desirous. “Quite. Quite. Brilliant.”
“No, but this poem,” I said, trying not to be distracted. I snatched my hand from him and began drumming my fingers as I thought. I remembered the woman in black and I remembered the moths from the dusty book that Laon had brought me. “I’ve heard it before.”
“Everyone has. It’s by John Donne about the mysteries of the Eucharist.”
“No, I mean, I’ve heard it before. Whispered.” I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. They felt foolish the moment I wanted to speak them. “I mean to say, I heard them here and I think… I think there might be semiotic moths in this castle. They might have swallowed some of these secrets.”
“Book moths don’t actually eat secrets, you know.”
“Ink doesn’t fade that quickly.”
“Two impossibilities doesn’t make a new reality.” His hair fell into his eyes, and he raked his fingers through it. “Book moths aren’t real.”
“What if they do?” I said. “The lacuna in these papers, the journal, the missing pages… I think we should try. Penemue said Those who don’t understand should ask those who can’t understand. Sometimes the mute make the best teachers.”
“That doesn’t actually mean anything. He was just saying it to unnerve you.”
“True, but… I want to try.”
Laon nodded. “Then we try.”
Chapter 37
The Moths in the Library
If they were to know that we knew, our beds would no longer be safe for us. The night would crawl and slither with a thousand, thousand unnatural shapes with creeping tendrils of blackest malevolence. All the old places would be barred to us, for fear of what lay within. What despicable cruelties the eyes in the well would plot upon us, how the many limbs of the monster would tense in anticipation of the tortuous vengeance it is about to inflict. What hope do we have but the feigning of ignorance against the boundless ferocity which waits to play like children with our still-beating hearts?
Extract from the speech of Dr Immanuel Campbell to the Edinburgh
Society for the Study of the Fae
There were days it seemed that Gethsemane was full of moths, white and ghostly, fluttering at the edges of my vision. Diogenes would chase them, come back with worrying mouthfuls of insect, and I would brush them from my closet.
But now, they were nowhere to be found.
We searched through each of the guest rooms, which had been abandoned since Mab’s court had last made use of them. We wandered, through room after room draped over in white dust sheets.
By midnight, we were scouring the attics, flinging open trunks and musty drawers. We shook out dress after dress, robe after robe, until my eyes watered and my lungs ached from all the dust. Light shone through each of the gossamer garments that had been feasts for moths.
“What are you looking for?” enquired a confused Mr Benjamin. He was scrubbing his eyes of sleep. “It’s the Salamander’s hour.”
Laon explained to him about the moths we were trying to find.
“Why aren’t you trying the library?”
“There’s a library?” I said.
The gnome nodded slowly. “Has always been there. Unless it wasn’t, of course.”
“What does that even mean, Mr Benjamin?” I said. I had somewhat given up on the grand shambles of Gethsemane making any sense, but I had not thought there would be a whole library that I had previously missed.
“Door might be locked. And the Salamander has the keys,” he said. “Isn’t much point in doors you can’t open.”
I touched a hand to the moth brooch at my chest. “Not all locks need keys.”
“Maybe?” He gave a slow shrug. “It’s down the silver corridor. You understand?”
I shook my head. “None of the corridors are silver.”
“Only sometimes silver.”
“Sometimes?”
“When the moon makes it so.”
“No, that’s non–” I stopped myself. I remembered how the mysterious corridor I had walked down that first night had been flooded with moonlight. I had discovered the notes on Enochian that night. “So we just wait for the moon?”
As Mr Benjamin led us through the castle, he explained that the moon was a fickle sort and could not really be commanded. However, the moon, being a fish, could sometimes be lured over, given sufficient bait.
“I have kept one for the moon flowers,” he said, showing us a rusty bell that he held very carefully so that it would make no sound. “So that I could coax them open out of season, see?”
“Does the sound attract the fish?”
“Yes, yes,” said the gnome. “On the Pale Queen’s orders.”
I remembered the time I saw the moon fish at my window, but said nothing. I took the bell from the gnome, wrapping my fingers around the clapper to keep it silent.
“So where best to use it?” asked Laon.
“Near my room, I think. There are some big windows there.”
“I know where,” said Mr Benjamin. “I lead.”
We were indeed not far from my room. I knew the place well enough now to recognise the shape of the windows, and the dark flutter of the tapestries. I could not quite suppress the sense of familiarity.
Laon and Mr Benjamin opened the windows, and I waited, bell in hand. My fingers felt cold and stiff.
“Ready?” I asked, though I did not need to as I heard the last creak of the shutters. It was still dark, and the corridor before me was a midnight blue but for the orange glow of our lanterns.
“Done,” came Laon’s voice.
“We might need to blow out the candles,” I said, remembering that night. “So the moonlight shines stronger.”
“I’ll throw my coat over them,” said Laon.
And it was darker, and as my eyes adjusted I could see now the barest glimmer of starlight behind the endless banks of clouds.
I pried my stiff, aching fingers from around the clapper of the bell and, taking a deep breath, I rang it.
An ethereal tinkling, nothing like a hand bell’s sonorous tolling, filled my ears. The hairs at the back of my neck stood on end. I could feel fear well up inside me. My other hand reached for Laon’s and I found it. I imagined the brave smile he was giving
me, for I could not see it in the dark.
We waited.
At first, it was but a pale grey shadow behind one of the coal-black clouds. And then, it slid into view.
The light was almost blinding. I blinked hard, trying to focus, but I did not want to avert my eyes. The moon fish leered down at us with empty eyes and long, curved teeth, yellow as ivory. I could see the bleeding, exposed gums at the roots of its teeth. It was swimming far too close.
The corridor was indeed gilded silver by the moonlight.
Laon and I walked down it, hand in hand. Fear was clouding my memory and I could barely say which door was here before and which wasn’t.
“This one,” whispered Mr Benjamin.
It felt only right to whisper in this moonlight.
I unpinned the moth brooch, peered into the keyhole and made quick work of the lock. It was very old, and the mechanism was crude to say the least.
“I told you it was a good present,” said Laon proudly.
The double doors opened into a tiny room crowded in by shelves full of leaning books. The windows were blocked by stacks upon stacks of books, slivering the light from outside.
“Now found, Reverend Helstone,” said Mr Benjamin, tugging at Laon’s sleeve. “I was thinking. Perhaps, maybe, I was thinking…”
“You can ask,” said Laon.
“I was reading the Bible and I came across the passage about how there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring…”
I stepped into the library, leaving Laon to Mr Benjamin’s questions.
The room had little of the grandiosity I expected from its vast ironbound doors. The sloping roof and the row upon row of books carelessly heaped upon each other made it seem all the smaller.
A writing slope lay on the floor. A scatter of half-written letters riddled with lacunae were spilling from its open drawer.
I plucked a book at random from the shelves. It fell open at an empty page. There was not even the shadow of the words that used to mar the pages.
These books had been picked clean.
A shadow flickered over the thin rays of light. I turned but I couldn’t see what it was. My heart was racing.
There were whispers at the edge of my hearing. A thousand voices murmuring, mumbling, muttering. Indistinct.
I put aside the volume and chose another, attracted to its heavy gilt spine. I opened the book, revealing a white moth between its cover. It flew at me, brushing past my cheek. I felt the dusty brush of its wings against my ear.
Startled, I dropped the crumbling book. It thudded to floor, the heavy spine loud against the flagstones, sending its fragments up in a cloud.
The sound echoed.
And then, there was a rustling as a thousand, thousand moths were roused.
They must have been resting on every shadowed surface, hiding in every gap between leaning books, perched on every inch of the ceiling.
The air was thick with the dust from their mottled wings. I could taste it as I breathed in.
It was old books and biting, acidic ink. It was that dust of ancient libraries and fresh, shiny leather covers. It was new paper and the sweet glue of the spines.
The moths swarmed me. They filled my sight with their white wings and my ears with their rustling.
And then all at once, whispered into my ears were things I never thought I could know.
I could list all three hundred names of the fourth Arcadian Summer Lord and the whims that brought about each change. I knew intimately every leaf wept by the second laurel tree by the lake during the autumn of year ten-fifty-one, but nothing of those who shared its shadow, star-gazed through its branches or remarked upon its colour. I knew the fluctuations of a single border in Spain, shifting as it was drawn again and again throughout the centuries, but nothing of the reasons why or what new countries it outlined.
It poured senselessly into my mind. So many words, memories, fragments.
I knew every breakfast eaten and described by a nameless diarist for fifty-three years of her life. I knew the letters of poetry in foreign languages and the mellifluous sounds they would make but had no way of understanding what they meant. I knew how many times the letter S appeared on each page of Shakespeare’s lost manuscripts; the marginalia and corrections of a lost manuscript of Bede’s but none of the work itself; and half the genealogy of Emperor Julian the Apostate of the Byzantine Empire.
And then, the secrets we were looking for.
Chapter 38
The Madwoman in the Attic
There is a hollowness to his eyes (there are those who will tell you He has no eyes, which is only sometimes true) that sometimes makes me think He is a survivor, that our beginnings were the end of something greater and more vast than we could ever be.
Perhaps that is why He sculpted a world out of the emptiness, like a child tearing apart the ordered monotony of its room.
When one is alone, there is no need for words. Perhaps that is why I always thought of Him as lonely. One who is one, one alone, could only be waiting for a pair.
From the emptiness that was, He sculpted a world. Later they would say He made it for Mankind. Others would ask why.
Some would hail Him Creator and He would be forever defined by this act, his six days of restlessness. Six of his days. But after that He would put away his colours and brushes and never paint again.
And this is a question no one had asked – why had He not painted again? Out of fear that He’d have to recycle this canvas? Though it seems an odd accusation to the all powerful that He would, of all things, run out of space. But no, I would say He never painted again because He ran out of ideas. Perhaps, like the best of us, He knew He had only one story in Him. One story. And He had written it all in every aspect of the world, from each pillar-like mountain to vaulting sky.
I would not say that story was me (Some would say He had some sixty books in Him, but if you would believe He wrote all that with mortal pens, I could not weary you with any other tale. Nor would you accept all that He wears many faces.)
But I say this, this one is true.
Translated from Enochian by Rev Laon Helstone and Catherine Helstone
Laon once told me that I shouldn’t seek to solve this place, that it wasn’t a puzzle.
Perhaps what he should have said was that I wouldn’t like the solutions.
It made sense now, all the pieces.
I knew why Roche chose the wife he did, why he was so haunted by a plan, constantly asking himself if his course was worth that price. I knew why there were Enochian texts and half-finished translations. I knew why there was a second hand in that journal, what it wrote of something that was like poison, that had to be consumed every day.
I knew who the woman in black was.
“Laon.”
My own voice sounded distant, as though it came from another’s throat. I wondered why my mind hadn’t shattered. Perhaps it was the cogs of flesh that worked in my skull. The moths ate knowledge that could scour a mortal mind, bring it to the brink of madness. They escaped because they lack comprehension. Secrets were but words to them.
“Are you alright?” came Laon’s voice. It was solid, anchoring. It cut through the crowding whispers.
I nodded, not quite trusting my own mouth and tongue. I swallowed.
Blackness.
My eyes weren’t open.
How curious.
It was only then that I realised Laon’s arms were around me, cradling me.
We were on the floor. Even through my skirts I felt the chill of the stone against my legs. I must have collapsed. That realisation brought a searing pain through the back of my head, down my spine. It sent fissures through my thoughts. I grimaced.
I opened my eyes. I tried to focus on Laon’s beautiful face. The wavering candlelight was shadowing his eyes and the towers of books enclosing us reminded me of the many times we hid from Tessie in
the far corners of the library.
“Are you hurt?” He was frowning, worry braiding his brow.
His hair was in his eyes and it was beautiful. I smiled and pushed it from his forehead.
“No,” I said, trying to ignore the headache. “Not really.”
“Can you get up?”
“Not quite.” I tried to sit up, and he helped me. I leaned against Laon, my breathing strangely ragged. My lungs ached, a heavy knot in my chest tugging at each breath. “But, I think… I think I know.”
“What do you know?”
“I know what happened to Roche.”
His eyes widened.
“Roche…” I swallowed, trying to make sense of my fractured mind, pushing aside thoughts of the sixth city and the lens of black glass and Egypt. I had to focus. “Roche figured something out about the fae. He thought… he thought the first explorers were wrong. That thing people believe about them always lying. He thought it was the opposite.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“He thought they would always tell the truth, if they could. He knew that nothing would hurt more than the truth and the fae would do anything to hurt him.” My tongue felt swollen and thick, like it couldn’t form real words. I needed to wet my tongue, but I pressed on. “Or rather, truth was their weapon. He thought he could trick them into telling the truth.”
“Cathy…”
“Roche had a wife.”
“Elizabeth?”
“Her scissors. Those were her scissors in Mab’s bed. The sign of the cross.”
“You aren’t making much sense, Cathy.”
I shook my head. Closing my eyes, I tried to focus. I felt the whispers press in again on my mind. Something about the Mottled King and the Watchers. Something about how milk spoilt near fae and their constructs. Something about Bede and poetry and a book about lost time.
Laon offered me his hip flask and I took it. Oaken brandy filled my senses. I had thought he had given up drinking quite as heavily but I was too grateful to ask any questions. It burned down my throat, with a clarifying pain.