Cal resolutely shook his head. “I can’t believe you’d rather bother with a bunch of ancient scratch paper than explore the house.”
“The house will be here when I’m done,” I told him. “Just come up, Cal.”
“No, thank you,” he said quickly. “I’m not keen on being that far off the ground.” I saw him nudge Dean’s shoulder. “Come on, I’ll have Bethina make us lunch. Aoife finds a book, she can have her nose in it for hours.”
“It seems to have done well for her.” Dean looked up and winked at me, but he followed Cal through the hidden servant’s passage to the kitchen. I dialed the trapdoor shut again. At least Cal and Dean had stopped sniping at each other for a moment, united by the common boy’s love of a hot meal.
That left me with at least an hour to search the room. I was sure that Conrad had meant for me to find it, but what he’d wanted me to see, I didn’t know.
I tried the map cabinet first. There were a wealth of charts, all misfolded and crammed together as if their owner had been in a terrible hurry to tidy up. Or hide something.
Yanking the clot of paper free, I was rewarded with nothing but dirt and beetle skeletons. I spread out the maps, finding a star chart like the one we used at the Academy. This one was older, covered in handwritten notations and numbers, and contained far more stars than I remembered from my one course of astronomy. Professor Faroul had been arrested for heresy just after I started my freshman year, for preaching at the class that the Great Old Ones would some day return to earth and attain mastery over human beings. Professor Faroul had been no one’s favorite, but he was a hapless and gentle man. That was the first time I’d seen a Proctor up close, other than at the court where my mother was committed. The rasp of their rough black uniforms and the slam of their steel-toed jackboots against the observatory floor stuck with me, like the imprint of a cold hand on the back of my neck.
The next chart was a map of Massachusetts, the kind of thing you could buy in any cartographer’s boutique for half a dollar. It, too, was scribbled on, with a heavy concentration of nonsensical ink scratching around the borders and township of Arkham, symbols and stars and glyphs that reminded me of nothing so much as the defiant sketching in the margins of my notebooks.
The last and worse-faring chart was hand-drawn on heavy paper that felt more like dry and ancient skin than pulp or linen. It was heavy enough to smooth out its own wrinkles, but some of the ink was irreversibly blurred and erased.
For a moment all I could make out was a mess of lines and engineer’s notations. Then, with a gasp, I realized the shape was familiar, a cross with three radiating wings surrounded by a wall and a garden peppered with outbuildings. The queer paper was a plan of Graystone, and judging by the slapdash nature of the notes on the clockwork schematics, it was the engineer’s original blueprint. The date sitting in the corner, nearly rubbed out from dozens of thumbs rolling and unrolling the sheet, was 1871.
I set the chart down carefully and rooted around in the clutter until I found a leather map tube with a strap for carrying the maps of your trade, whether you were an engineer, a clockmaker or simply a naturalism enthusiast trekking in the woods. Carefully rolling up the blueprint, I put it in the tube and laid it against the writing table. I wasn’t letting something so valuable out of my sight until I discovered what, precisely, Graystone was still hiding.
And diverting as the schematic was, it wasn’t getting me any nearer to finding Conrad. I turned my attention back to the tangle of books and journals, pulling them from their spots at random and dislodging enough dust to choke a ghoul.
The books were largely of the fantastic and heretical variety—potboilers featuring tough-guy detectives on the trail of a treacherous dame, stories of men voyaging to the bottom of the sea inside a living biomechanical submersible, and a fat book with a worn-off spine written entirely in German. All books that had escaped the Proctor’s bonfires during the war and after.
We learned German, because it was pertinent to learn the language of a conquered nation, but we were never allowed to read it out of class, or while in the confines of the Academy. The verbs gave me terrible trouble, but I was able to pick out a few easy headings in the battered book. “Snow White and Rose Red.” “Rapunzel.” “The Robber Bridegroom.”
I set the volume with the map carrier for later study. Now it was simply diverting, and I didn’t need diversion. I needed my brother. Some Grayson, at some point, must have left a clue to the strange happenings in this house, to the reasons Conrad had come and then vanished.
Paging through the handwritten journals, I tried to scry for any clue. The first few volumes were gibberish, written in code piled onto atrocious handwriting, and I shoved them out of the way, digging deeper into the stack on the bottommost shelf, under the window. Outside, the crows had returned and sat conversing with one another on the sill. “If you’re going to hang about, you might at least give me peace and quiet to work,” I grumbled. It only seemed to make them louder.
Tugging at a recalcitrant volume, I loosed an avalanche of journals that buried me in bound and loose sheafs up to the shin. I said something unladylike and started to restack them, when I noticed that many of the journals held a notation on the cover or the first page. The notation was numerical and, from what I could decipher, organized after a fashion.
I went through at least twenty journals, and found the same variation of three-digit groupings: 45–6–12, 7–77–8. They ranged from cheap cloth-bound ledgers to fine leather volumes overflowing with pages, but the number sets remained. I opened a numbered journal at random, and an ancient collection of loose sheets showed me great, spreading, spindled wings attached to bodies with dog’s heads and lion’s feet. The next page was a sketch of a flying machine with rigid wings and the body of a great bird. The pages were labeled simply Machina, and there were at least a hundred of them, machines that had to have been designed by a fanciful madman. A rolling jitney that belched fire rather than steam. A difference engine small enough to be carried in a knapsack.
I set the volume aside. I loved aerodynamics and calculation science, even though a woman could never spend months aboard a flying fortress, refueling war buggies and chasing storms, or buried beneath the desert at Los Alamos working the difference engine for the Air Corps. It was men’s work. Women kept their feet on the earth and their head above it, no exceptions. Like my life—no matter how much I wanted things to be different, reality remained.
The lamp sputtered, and I reached out to turn up the wick, catching the shadow of Conrad’s note on my hand. It had nearly faded since my frantic escape from Lovecraft, but the numbers were still there. A triple sequence of double digits.
Save yourself
31–10–13
I dove back into the pile as the connection lit up in my mind, flinging books and papers aside as I discarded one journal after another, the pages flapping like bird’s wings as I tossed them over my shoulder one by one.
Until I reached the dozenth journal and finally found what I was looking for. I let out a small breath. I’d found, in this battered little book, what Conrad had called the witch’s alphabet.
The Witch’s Alphabet
CLUTCHING THE LEATHER-BOUND volume marked 31–10–13, I sank cross-legged onto the floor of the hidden library, my spine meeting the spines of the forgotten books.
Fingers trembling, I opened the journal to the first page. Ink blotting and age had mostly obscured the name of the journal’s owner, but not the line below: Set down at Graystone, Arkham Valley, Massachusetts.
I touched the page and the handwriting moved and slithered, alive under my touch.
I gasped and dropped the journal. The rearing snakes and spines of pigment settled immediately. They hissed at me, their two-dimensional mouths flickering against vellum aged to slick and shine.
“Witchcraft.” I echoed Bethina without meaning to. I didn’t believe in such things. Hadn’t believed. I didn’t know anymore.
I lean
ed toward the page, my palm hovering above the ink, and then quickly, like passing my hand through a candle flame before I lost the nerve, I pressed down.
The paper pulsed warmly under my hand, alive as an animal, and though I wanted to bolt down the trapdoor and down the ladder and as far away as I could from this unnatural situation that could not possibly be happening, I stayed seated. I knew it was as real as the shoggoth bite that flared and throbbed when I touched the paper.
The ink continued to hiss and writhe. It lifted from the page, wrapping my hand in midnight ribbons. I flinched, waiting for the blot of infection upon my mind, the sting of madness that would finally swallow me like it had swallowed my mother.
Instead, a curious warmth began in the center of my palm, as the ink pressed itself into my skin. A scratchy tingle, like I’d put my hand too quickly in hot water.
The sensation grew painful and I tried to pull away, but the ink held fast. I was immobilized by the very illusion that I was denying even as I watched it happen.
The madness had spared Conrad. Perhaps this wasn’t the necrovirus, this pain traveling steadily up my arm like fingernails raking over my skin. I was the prisoner of this strange bewitched ink from a strange bewitched book, and its enchantment held me fast, surely as the thorn maze held the sleeping princess in Nerissa’s tale.
I cried out as the ice-hot pain of a burn imprinted itself on my hand. In that moment, I couldn’t even struggle. I simply froze, whorls of vertigo overwhelming my vision, and willed my body not to faint from the sensation.
This was not the necrovirus. It was not the dreams that stalked me through all my nights in the School. Not the looming ghost of my mother, not the bite of the shoggoth.
The feeling causing my vision to black and my body to throb was nothing I had ever known, and nothing I could explain with any of the Proctor’s laws or the Master Builder’s tenets of rational science.
The closest word I could use was, after all, witchcraft.
I didn’t care that it made me a heretic. I didn’t even care that in the eyes of everyone I knew, it confirmed my madness. Sorcery was the only explanation for what was happening to me, for the pain that was chewing through me from the inside out.
Then, as abruptly as it had stolen my senses from me, the ink’s enchantment released. The serpents on the page curled, tongues tasting the air, hissing with satisfaction. I fell back against the books, cradling my palm against my stomach and fighting both tears and panic. My hands were my fortune. I could never be an engineer with a crippled hand. I couldn’t even be a stenographer. I’d be less than useless, a ward of the city until I died.
When at last I had the courage to examine my burn, I saw a stigma on the spot where heretic palmists would tell me that my life and heart lines intersected. The mark sat in the shape of a wheel with pointed spokes and sharpened treads—not a wheel, I saw, but a gear, a gear which shimmered just under my skin—not a brand like the Proctors’ stigmas, but inky, like a navy boy’s tattoo. The spot was rimmed with pink and slightly warm, but I was otherwise whole, with no hint of the agony I’d just endured. My mind, however, was still telling me that my palm was on fire, that I was going to lose my hand, the one thing I couldn’t lose and still be an engineer.…
“Breathe, Aoife,” I ordered myself in a whisper. “Breathe.”
I stared at my palm for a long time, feeling the crow wings of my heartbeat flutter and finally still as my panic faded. My hand was still there. It wasn’t lost, along with any future hope.
Something had touched me. I could fall back on what they taught us at the School all I wanted, but there was no denying that the ink—the entire journey since Lovecraft—was inexplicable with pure science.
I sat for a long time, turning my hand over, waiting for the stigma to vanish. It didn’t. At last, I remembered that the journal was still lying at my feet.
Gingerly, I picked it up. It was only paper once again, good paper bound in good leather, innocuous as my own notebooks from the School. On the page, the ink was no longer twisting and obscured with age. Handwriting clear and sharp as a razor blade stared back at me.
Property of Archibald Robert Grayson
14th Gateminder
Arkham, Massachusetts
My father’s hand sat square and precise on the page, and the book was no longer the least aged and mouse-eaten, but whole as any of the volumes in the library below.
There was ghost ink, simple chemicals and trickery. There was Conrad, making a half-dollar appear from under his tongue and disappear again behind my ear.
This book was something different.
I was faithful to the science that gave us the Engine and protected our cities from the necrovirus, but in the small attic room I was beginning to feel the enchantment sending slow, hot pinpricks from my palm to my heart.
I was a rational girl, but in that second I admitted this might be magic.
The belief only lasted for a moment. There could be a dozen explanations for what I’d seen.
It didn’t have to be magic. Magic was an obfuscation used by the Crimson Guard to frighten their citizens.
But I couldn’t change what my father’s handwriting had set down, and as far as I knew Archibald was as rational as I. I read.
Witch’s Alphabet
My breath stopped. This was what I’d hoped for. The book that would tell me how to find Conrad. I read on.
Set down according to the wisdom of the Iron Codex and those who came before.
Documenting the days of the 14th Gateminder and his encounters with the Land of Thorn herewith.
I’d followed Conrad’s cryptic words and I’d found the thing he’d begged me to find. My elation was muted by the fact that the book seemed in no way useful to the cause of helping Conrad. More witches, more magic. More things that would only get me into more trouble. Clearly my father had no such worries, which surprised me a little. He’d seemed like such an upstanding sort from my mother’s few stories.
His journal was certainly a treasure in my search for clues about him, but for another time, when I had the leisure to peruse it.
“Conrad, why?” I demanded. “Why did you send me to find this dusty old book?”
I’d seen things since Cal and I had fled Lovecraft that made believing Conrad to be insane impossible. I may not have believed in magic spells, but there had been a time when aether and steam power were myths, as well. Before the spread of the virus, and before the Great War. The burning in my palm alone overturned the notion that I could explain away everything in Graystone. But Conrad hadn’t ceased to be cryptic, and I could have smacked him on the head for it.
I gripped the book between my two hands and pressed it against my forehead. “Why?” I whispered. “What do you need to tell me, Conrad?”
I flipped open the journal and let it fall to the first full page. The heading read 7 January, 1933.
“I’m listening,” I said quietly, staring at the plain line of text.
As if something in the library above had heard my exhortation, my vision slid sideways all at once. It was much like the plunge we’d taken in the belly of the Berkshire Belle—more and more pressure on my head until I simply couldn’t see or sense anything.
This sensation was familiar, though—the hot tickle of the enchanted ink rushed over me again, and when nothing burned or otherwise injured me, I cautiously cracked my eyes open. I wanted to see—the fear was gone, and a slow-churning excitement had replaced it.
Across the room, a gray figure, a bit out of focus, sat at the writing desk, scribbling feverishly in a journal identical to the one I held.
I let out a soft shriek and dropped the volume I held. Immediately, the figure vanished and I saw nothing except the familiar dusty attic.
The chair at the writing table was empty. It had always been empty. I was skittish and excitable from the events of the afternoon, and I was behaving irrationally. I had not just seen a translucent man sitting in the attic with me.
&nbs
p; But I didn’t leave the attic and go fetch Dean and Cal as my panic dictated. More than I wanted to run, I wanted what I was seeing to be real. I wanted such a thing to be possible because it might mean that I could escape my family’s viral fate. I knew I was still sane, and if I was seeing a vision—there had to be another explanation.
Hesitantly, I picked up the diary again, riffling the pages. Each one was choked with script, margins rife with notes in different colored ink. There were drawings, too—diagrams of bones, of bird wings, a symbol like the one on my palm, which I compared side by side. Gears and workings of machines that dizzied me with their complexity, even more so than the portfolio of Machina.
Flipping the pages back to the beginning, I began to read.
My father’s voice floated out of the past. 7 January, 1933. The corners of the room flickered again, lanternreel memories wrought in silver and gray.
This time, I let them come.
I endeavor to set down in the pages of this book a true and accurate account of my tenure as Gateminder, my father wrote.
My forerunner and father, Robert Randall Grayson, gifted me with this book on the turning of the New Year. It is my duty now, sworn and sealed, as I have reached the age. My Weird has presented itself and I can no longer shirk my duties, among them a true record of the same. I have placed a geas on this volume so that future Minders might withdraw my memories, revisit the events leading to the end of my tenure as speaker and learn from them, but no others may read or see my writings.
My geas is still elementary and the recorded memories pale, anemic things, but I suppose it will have to do. I confess that, in the advanced year of eighteen, I had doubted that any Weird had passed to me from the Minder before. My brother, Ian, with his skill over the air, and our father with his mastery of stone, had caused me to question my place in the brotherhood more than once.
I had an uncle, somewhere, I realized with a swell of excitement. First a father, now a family. Every orphan’s dream—the bosom of a family, with money and influence, to take her in, buy her pretty dresses and make life easy.
The Iron Thorn Page 18