The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (27 page)

But what had the Chandler book said? Toppling of the sieve signified an answer in the affirmative. That meant yes.

If something was not done soon, Sam would die.

Connie swallowed thickly, bending to retrieve the sieve. Arlo watched from the corner of the kitchen, half-hidden behind the icebox.

“Okay, okay, okay,” she whispered to herself, balancing the sieve once again on the outstretched open scissors blades. Grace had said that it was a kind of hubris to expect to be able to explain everything. Connie tried to shove aside her wonder at the mechanism underlying what was happening and concentrate on the effect. She extended her arm, focusing her vision on the colander, and bringing her free hand down to her side. She cleared her throat, packing her fear into a small, lockable chest in her mind.

“Will the doctors be able to help him?” she asked, her voice filling the small room. Again the tingling spread through the nerves in her hand and lower arm, again the blue sparks gathered in the colander and shot forth, zapping against the nearby surfaces in the kitchen. But this time the colander did not move. The sparks started to simmer down, their trails growing shorter, and the glow began to recede back into the belly of the vegetable strainer. Connie’s eyebrows shot up.

“No, no, no!” she muttered, and she jostled the scissors, rattling and shaking them, willing the answer to be different. The sieve stayed on the blade, unbudged. It felt thoroughly a part of the scissors blade, as if it had been glued there.

Hot tears welled in the red rims of Connie’s eyes, and she rubbed at her tired face with one arm. “What…what…what do I do?” she whispered, on the edge of panic, panting, mind rushing through possible yes or no questions that she could ask to clarify Sam’s situation. She swallowed again, breath coming shallow in her lungs. “Okay,” she assured herself, “it’s okay,
it’s okay, I’ve got it.” She took a deep breath, straightening again, and wiped the clammy palm of her free hand on her cutoffs.

“Can
anyone
help him?” she asked.

The tingling was stronger now, more painful, and Connie clenched her teeth against the unpleasant, crawling, sizzling sensation that spread far enough up her arm to reach her shoulder. The blue jolts shot out farther from the colander, rocketing off several of the glass bottles, the ceiling, and Connie’s sweating forehead. As she squinted against the blue shock so near her eyes, the colander spun off the end of the open shears, smashing against one of the unlabeled glass jars, which rained broken shards and rotted fruit in a great splatter across the kitchen shelf, ricocheting to the edge of the kitchen counter, and pitching to the floor.
Yes!
Connie exulted.
That means yes! And I’m getting better at it. It’s just like the plants. The result becomes more unambiguous the more I practice.

“But it won’t tell me
who
can help him,” she reasoned aloud, picking up the colander again. It had a fresh chip where the paint had been smacked off by the sharp edge of the counter, and Connie rubbed the naked metal with her thumb. “Because it only answers yes or no.” She ruminated for a moment, sorting through her options. She extended the scissors again, placing the sieve gingerly in place and withdrawing her hand. With each trial the pain grew appreciably worse. She had better choose her questions carefully. Soon enough the pain might be too much for her to continue.

Suddenly, the question that she must ask appeared fully formed from deep within her, and she knew.

“Am
I
the one who can help him?” she asked, summoning extra reserves of strength to fill the room with her voice. She squinched her face tight, eyes open only a slit, holding her head back, away from her outstretched arm as a fresh rain of blue sparks began to cascade forth from the inside of the bowl. The hurting, snapping feeling reached all the way up her arm to shoot tendrils of pain through the muscles in her chest and around her upper back. She became aware that she was emitting a high-pitched whining sound
through her molars and nose as the colander flew off of the scissors blade, hurling itself against the uppermost kitchen shelf and plummeting straight to the floor, where it clapped without a bounce.

The instant it reached the floor the pain vanished, and Connie panted, puffing air out through her pursed lips. She transferred the scissors to her free hand, shaking out the pain and knots from the hand that had been holding the shears, bending and flexing the finger joints. Connie guessed that she could handle one more question before the pain grew excruciating. She had to be strategic. After a moment’s reflection, she knew precisely what she must ask.

With a hand only just trembling, she extended the open pruning shears until they were stretched out level with her shoulder. She brought the colander down, placing it softly between the sharp blades of the scissors, and bringing her free hand back so that it was clenched behind her back. She dug her nails into her palm, hoping that the sharp digging sensation would distract her from the coming pain. She heard a small whimper from well behind the icebox. “Almost done, Arlo,” she whispered. “We can take it, right?” She took a breath, let it out, and then said, “Right.”

Connie straightened again, and in a voice summoned from the deepest part of her lungs, she spoke.

“Does the solution lie in Deliverance Dane’s shadow book?” she said, and as the words escaped her lips blue sparks immediately began to spew forth from within the colander. The cool glow mushroomed out of the center of the metal sieve, boiling over like bread left too long to rise, and sparks showered down on all sides of Connie, drumming and cracking against every surface of the kitchen, beating on her face and chest and arms and legs. Her arm felt shot all through with molten metal, flowing from her fingertips all the way up her neck, down her left side, into her leg and ankle and toes. She pressed her lips together, breathing quickly through her nose, digging the fingernails of her free hand into the flesh of her palm so hard that she felt blood begin to pool in her knuckles.

The colander began to rattle in place, and the scissors swung open with
such force that they went spinning out of her grip, cartwheeling across the tiny room and hitting the wooden jamb of the screen door with a dull thwack, the blade sinking two inches into the wood. The colander hovered in place for an instant before hurtling against the corner of the overhead cabinet, a great dent sinking into the metal from where it struck, then ricocheted across the room to strike the opposite wall, where it rebounded against another of the preserves on the shelf, shattering them, before it flung itself to the floor, sinking half an inch into the linoleum.

Connie leaned over, placing her hands on her knees, face drenched with sweat, gasping as the last of the blue sparks withdrew into the broken belly of the colander on the floor, surrounded by a spray of paint chips and broken glass. The flame in the oil lamp flickered, and the shadows in the kitchen jumped and slanted, dancing behind the objects that cast them. Connie squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them, slowly pulling herself back into a standing position. A brown eye appeared from the impossibly small space behind the icebox, and blinked once.

“It’s okay, Arlo,” she said to his emerging face. “Now I know what I have to do.”

Cambridge, Massachusetts
Late August
1991

T
HE GUARD BARELY LOOKED UP AS
C
ONNIE FLASHED HER LAMINATED
identification card. His feet were propped on the counter by the metal turnstiles, and the ornate marble cavern of the entrance to Widener Library was filled with the somnolent hush of late summer. He nodded, buzzing her through the turnstile with disinterest, never lifting his eyes from the crossword puzzle in his lap. Connie strode toward the reference room, stuffing her identification back into her cutoff pocket. The sound of her flip-flops smacking against her heels echoed, making her feel small and self-conscious as she headed for the computer terminals.

A row of dismal green computer screens waited for her, yellow cursors blinking at the ready. Connie did a few quick keyword searches, looking for “almanac,” for “Deliverance Dane,” for “recipes for physick.” All digital catalogue results stopped at 1972. She frowned, turning to the imposing oak edifice that contained the reference librarians.

Connie drummed her fingertips on the scarred top of the desk, waiting for the spectacled young man seated behind it to notice her. He was bent over an open workbook, clutching a pencil, and held up one long index finger to signal that he would be with her in a moment. She blew an impatient breath out of her nose, and he slapped the pencil down as he stood. The workbook was filled with Chinese characters.

“Sorry,” he said. “Translating. Can I help you?” he asked, voice brusque but not unhelpful.

“Yes, I was just using the Unix system to look up a rare book, but all of the catalogue entries seem to stop in 1972?” she asked, leaning her elbows on the top of the reference desk.

He rolled his eyes with barely concealed exasperation. “Well, yes. The database is only complete back to 1972, because those are the records that have been scanned. The library started with current materials and is working its way backward. If you want complete records of books that were published earlier, you’ll have to use the card catalogue.” He pointed with his pencil eraser at the wall of small wooden drawers.

Connie sighed. Another day in a card catalogue.

“What year was your book published?” he asked, turning to his terminal.

“I’m not entirely sure,” she said, “but certainly before the 1680s.” She craned her neck a little to see what he was typing.

The librarian emitted a low whistle through his teeth, fingers tacking over the keyboard. He hit the return key with a final, authoritative peck. “Yeah, those call numbers are all stored in the special collections library,” he said. “I’ll need to give you a special pass. ID?”

She passed him her identification and watched as he scribbled her name on a small green card. Judging from the typeface the same form must have been in use since at least the 1920s.

As he wrote down a complex series of codes, the young man said, “They pretty much only let faculty in there, but you’re advanced to candidacy, so it shouldn’t be a problem.” He slid the form across the desk to her, indicating
with his pencil eraser a line for her to sign. “Show this when you get to the entrance, along with a list of the call numbers you plan to look up. They might make you sign the register, but as it’s summer, you’ll probably be okay.”

“Great,” Connie said, voice devoid of any enthusiasm. “Thanks.” The young man mock-saluted her with his pencil and sat down to his translations again as Connie dragged her feet to the card catalogue. When she reached it she paused, enumerating to herself the sum total of details that she had gathered about the book.

Junius Lawrence had left Deliverance’s shadow book, together with the rest of the Salem Athenaeum collection, to Harvard when he died in 1925, that much she knew. Connie stood, arms crossed over her chest, confronting the wall of tiny wooden drawers. Mystery number one: how would the author be listed? It seemed unlikely that Deliverance would appear as the author, particularly on the off chance that the book was older than about the 1650s. It probably had been authored by several people, perhaps dozens, depending on how long the book had been in use. Even authorship of known occult texts was often obscured through layers of translation and myth; the few extant European examples were variously attributed to biblical figures or prophets, many of them apocryphal.

Mystery number two: the book’s title. So far it had been described, at different points in time and from different points of view, as a receipt book, a book of recipes for physick, an almanac, and—Manning Chilton’s term—a shadow book or grimoire. The very parameters of the book seemed to shift, changing contour depending on who was describing it. None of the sources had referenced a concrete title of any kind. It seemed likely that the book had none.

So she had no title, no specific publication year, and no author’s name by which to search. What she did have was the book’s approximate age, and the exact year in which it was donated to Harvard. But libraries, unlike museums, do not often keep track of the acquisition date for a given volume. Do they? As a test, Connie looked under the listing for
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, just
to observe how the different editions were catalogued. As she had suspected: the entries offered no acquisition information. Publication dates and edition details only. Connie swore under her breath. For completeness’s sake, she looked to see if there was a subject or keyword heading for “Salem Athenaeum collection,” but there was not.

She passed a few minutes rifling through different drawers under different subject headings, noting down the locations of a few tentative candidates, frustrated and aware that her method was scattershot at best. A privately published almanac, listed as dating from the 1670s, in the special collections library, with no author listed. A book on medicinal herbs and vegetables, also with no author, with an estimated date at about 1660. An early medical textbook, published in England in the 1680s, authored by an Oxford professor. She contemplated looking under alchemical guides and textbooks but rejected the idea: if Chilton had not found it in all his years stomping through that intellectual turf, it would not be shelved there. Connie found a few other possibilities, but as she jotted down the call numbers, she reflected that she was about as likely to find the book this way as she was to trip over a gold ingot lying in the middle of the Yard.

Her mood blackening, Connie made her way through a series of vaulted marble hallways until she reached the special collections desk. She submitted her list of call numbers, her special pass, and her university identification card to the bored librarian, who didn’t even bother to hide his computer solitaire game before waving her through the door that led to the stacks.

Though she was accustomed to the unique physical sensations of archival work, of dust coating the inside of her nose, or the neck crick that results from reading book spines sideways, Connie was not fully prepared for the feeling she got when she walked in the special collections stacks. Most older books have a distinctive smell of silverfish, mildew, and dissolving leather. Even Harvard, with its vast wells of funding and its reasonably consistent climate control, could not insulate these books from the pressure of time on their fragile bindings. The library had begun a campaign to place the most delicate volumes on microfilm, locking the original objects away from the
oily fingers of prying students, but the task was Sisyphean. Now she padded through stacks that were disturbed barely half a dozen times a year, and the books around her seemed to fill the air with a tangible aura, as if they had each absorbed some fraction of the essence of the vanished generations who had handled them. Connie pushed through the close atmosphere, nudging aside shreds of personality—readers, writers, possessors, annotators—that drifted in invisible tendrils from each spine. Connie suppressed the urge to shiver.

She reached the first aisle on her list, and peered down its shadowy depths with not a little trepidation.

“Ridiculous,” she said aloud, trying to dispel the distinct feeling that she was not alone among the books. She twisted the timer at the end of the shelving, flooding the aisle with electric light and inaugurating a loud ticking, which counted down fifteen minutes. She hurried down the aisle, running her fingertip over the passing spines, reading the call numbers aloud in a whisper. The first possibility on her list emerged under her fingers, and she gingerly withdrew the book. It was a text on medicinal herbs, written in about 1660, and a pasted frontispiece on the inside of the cover mentioned in thin, watery script that it had been given to the library by one Richard Saltonstall in 1705. If the textbook had been in the Harvard library since 1705, it could not be part of the Athenaeum collection. Connie sighed, replacing the book on the shelf. She drew a line through its call number on her list and moved deeper into the stacks, wiping the red leather residue on the seat of her cutoffs.

Her next candidate was shelved three aisles down, and the ticking behind her receded under the muffling influence of shelf upon shelf of books, retreating to a faint
tack-tack-tack
just under the level of her awareness. She twisted the timer on the next aisle, this time finding her quarry on the bottom shelf. Connie dropped her shoulder bag and settled herself on the floor, sliding the book into her lap. It was covered in a thick patina of grime, and she sneezed into the hollow under her arm. The cover had been nibbled into a latticework by decades of worms, and Connie reflected that she must be
doubly careful or the book might fall apart in her hands. Using a fingernail, she smoothed the book open, paging through the blank front leaves. As she did so, her ears pricked up—she thought she heard a rustling.

Connie sat, listening, breath stoppered in the top of her lungs. Under the timer of her aisle she heard a faint ticking, followed by one loud click. She let her breath out. It was just the timer shutting itself off in the first aisle. No one else could possibly want to come into this archive, especially not in the middle of the summer. She nosed past the remaining front matter of the book to find herself faced with an engraving of a dead body, sliced open in front, with different organs removed and labeled in Latin.
This must be the British medical textbook
, she thought, disappointed. She ran her fingertips over the raised etching, slightly appalled at the flayed, dead face of the cadaver in the illustration, his lips pulled back in a silent grimace. Dissection was hardly a mainstream practice in the 1680s, when the book was written. She shuddered, paging further into the book. It was entirely in Latin, and without Liz to translate she had no way of really understanding what she was reading, but it certainly did not seem to be a vernacular book. Also, she could not detect more than one hand at work; the text was all printed, and seemed to be organized in a scholarly way.

As this thought passed through her mind she heard another click, louder, and in the same instant that she registered the sound, the aisle was plunged into total darkness.

“Dammit,” she muttered. The timer must have run out. She closed the book, groping in the blackness for the gap on the shelf that signaled the book’s proper location, and struggled to her feet. She felt along the shelves until her hand plunged into blank space, indicating that she was back in the main central walkway. Her next possibility, the anonymous almanac, was only one aisle over, and Connie pawed through the darkness until her fingers landed on the timer for the next aisle. She twisted the little knob, and when the ticking timer burst into light she started to find the smiling figure of Manning Chilton.

“Oh!” Connie gasped, bringing an involuntary hand to her chest.

“Connie, my girl,” he said, folding his arms and leaning, jovial, against one of the shelves. “What a pleasant surprise. Researching, are we?”

He arched a wiry eyebrow at her, and Connie reflected that only her advisor would wear a silk club bow tie and loafers to do research in an archive as filthy as this one. He was standing near enough to her that she could see that the tie was covered in tiny snarling boars’ heads: the Porcellian, one of Harvard’s more select men’s societies. The club was known to serve as a clearinghouse for Brahmin Boston men, to ensure that those not already connected by blood or marriage would nevertheless be assured the right professional and political contacts. It was a world in which wealth was assumed, class prerogatives unapologetically reinforced, and women…well, there were rumors about how the men of the “Porc” regarded women.

Connie swallowed and blinked. “I didn’t realize anyone else was here,” she said.

He smiled, bloodless and taut, in response.

“I’ve only just arrived,” Chilton said. “Come to work on a few more sources for that conference presentation that we discussed,” he said after a moment. She tried to smile back at him, but it came out looking more like a cringe. “Which reminds me,” he said, edging nearer to her, “where do we stand on that research that you were going to show me? I am most eager to see that book.”

Connie suddenly saw that she was trapped. Perhaps it was a coincidence, his appearing when she was so near to finding Deliverance’s book, but she realized that there was the possibility, however slim, that it was not. As she gazed at her advisor’s patrician face, his eyes a watery blue and bloodshot, his teeth yellowed by pipe tobacco, she suspected her fear was true. He must have searched for the book himself and been unable to find it—that was what he had meant when he said he was doing some checking of his own. Now he had followed her here so that she could not conceal her discovery from him. But there was no escape. She had reached the last possibility on the list, and he was here, waiting.

Connie still had not explained to herself why she wished to protect her
research from him; she knew that he was relying on the success of her work to bolster his own reputation. And she had overheard him promise results—results for what, she did not know—at the Colonial Association conference. At their last meeting, Chilton had even dangled prestige before her, as a carrot to make her work faster. But if he was here, poised to swoop down upon her primary source, then his desperation must be even more acute than Janine had implied.