The Iron Thorn (24 page)

The eaves hung lower than I’d first imagined, and the space was so crammed with books and oddities I couldn’t take more than six small steps in any direction.

There were not just books—although books were most plentiful. In the watchful eye of the sun I spotted specimen boxes, a map cabinet for charts and blueprints, and a naturalist’s kit sitting atop it, complete with forgotten specimens in jars of formaldehyde. A globe dotted with the shapes of uncharted countries sat high on a shelf, along with a scattering of empty ink pots. Something crunched under my boot and I looked down to find a massacre of broken pen nibs littering the floor.

I saw on closer examination of the sagging shelves that
none of the books had a title on the spine. Many were just diaries stitched together with heavy thread, even the covers filled up with the same square and precise handwriting that had labeled the clockwork that controlled Graystone.

“Aoife, are you coming down?” Cal shouted. “What did you find up there?”

I opened the trapdoor and leaned my head out, still holding the closest handwritten tome. “I’m looking around. I think I’ll stay up here for a little while.”

Cal waved his hand in front of his face to direct away the cloud of grit that opening the door had dislodged. “You can’t be serious.”

“You should come up,” I said. “There’s all sorts of specimens and gadgets in here.”

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

C
LUTCHING 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 leaned 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.