My imagination was starting to run away with me, until reality inevitably seeped back in. Families like that didn’t have hidden rooms full of books, talking about magic as if it truly existed, lived and breathed in their bloodline.
I turned a page and the gray figure returned in a dazzle of light. I didn’t drop the book this time. My hand twitched where the ink had marked me, but I stayed resolute and watched the memories born from my father’s journal play out.
I watched as the boy, who had to be Archibald, scribbled, pausing only to push his half-glasses up his nose.
“Archie!” A voice, equally phantom, from the library below. “It’s time now. Get your coat and boots and bring your nerves!”
I watched as my father sighed, licked his pen, wrote faster.
I will take my oaths on the full moon, the blood oaths that Ian is so eager to engage in and that I dread so very deeply.
No one but myself will bend the spine of this codex until I am long dead, and therefore I may set down my true and honest feelings: I abhor the blood rites, the meeting with the Kindly Folk, the trappings of the Weird. I dread the Folk’s all-seeing eyes and their touch on my innermost secrets. I do not fear the pain that comes with the initiation, but I do fear the stripping bare of my mind, the opening of a vast well within, the free flow of the Weird through my veins.
I fear it may burn me up from the inside, and that I may become ash, nothing, borne on the wind.
I flipped the page and was surprised to see that the next entry was dated nearly two months later.
28 February, 1933.
I am the 14th Gateminder now. I bear the wisdom of the Iron Codex and my blood has spilled on the Winnowing Stone.
My father hadn’t been writing this for me, that much was clear. I had only the vaguest idea about what he was up to, and none of it sounded like it would keep him or anyone who knew what he was doing out of the Catacombs back home.
The full moon rises tomorrow and it brings the Folk under its withering gaze. I must, for the first time, accept their aid as Gateminder.
The gray figure of my father stood in the library above, much tidier than it was now, where I sat. He rubbed his glasses up and down on his vest, checking his pocket watch. He was wearing a suit instead of a rumpled shirt and trousers. It didn’t fit him well, and he kept fidgeting with his tie as if he were about to meet a girl for a date.
The great clock in the library below chimed midnight, and my father went to the garret window. I followed his flickering, transparent form, watched the shadow of the garden discharge three pale figures with faces cloaked by white robes. They looked like members of the Druid cults we’d studied in Professor Swan’s class. The thought of the Academy and my professors was startlingly foreign. They’d told me my entire life none of this could be real, but I was seeing my father conjured out of a book clear as day. How could what he was writing about then not be at least partially real?
A girl has disappeared from Arkham,
my father continued on the page.
She is the third, as two more have vanished over the span of months before the year turned. They vanished from locked bedrooms, their windowpanes covered with soot and sulfur. All of the wisdom of the Codex has failed me and I must consult the Folk. I must pay the sacrifice for their wisdom if I am to save the women. The girls, rather, for they are but children.
The scene flickered and I saw a slice of the gardens behind Graystone. My father bowed to the pale figures, and they stared implacably. He held out a photograph, and a pale hand reached from under a cloak to accept it.
As I confess to the page, more and more often, I do not know what I face when I make these bargains. I have seen the terror that lurks in the Land of Thorn. It has teeth that grind bones and voices that knife dreams. It pads on velvet paws tipped with iron claws, and it hungers. I fear, in my dark hours, that it hungers for me and that it is only a matter of time before it eats its fill of my sanity.
The next page contained a drawing as precise and painstaking as the diary entries. My father and I might not share looks, but we did share a meticulous eye for detail. That cheered me a bit. The thing made of ink was familiar, a shandy-man, straw hair and burlap skin, the impossible mouth stitched shut with coarse thread so the shandy-man could only drink down life force as one slept. However, the precise lettering below the thing’s clawed feet contained actual information, as opposed to a brightly lettered slogan alleging the horrors of the necrovirus and how a person could become one of these eldritch things.
The shandy-man: a creature from the Land of Thorn, drawn to the life force of young maidens. It steals their virtue and their life as one, consuming the raw magic energy for its own ends. Dies in fire. My Weird was well used this night. One girl is safe. For two, I came too late.
I had lost track of the hours I’d been sitting on the attic floor, the dozens of snapshots of my father that appeared and disappeared as the geas on his journal took hold of my eyes. Him aging, my legs cramping. I should stir myself and let Cal and Dean know I was still alive, but the book continued to give up secrets, and I hadn’t found the one I needed yet.
1 May, 1939.
My father died this morning.
No new dusty, jostling reel of memory accompanied the entry, oddly. Only words marked the death of my grandfather.
I set that line down and watched the ink dry on it.
Tomorrow, I will stand with the grave digger and the undertaker while they measure my father for his coffin and the ground for his grave.
Tonight, I am kept by my vigil.
I did not understand when I began this record, why every Gateminder bears witness to the horrors of their calling and the toll of their Weird in these strange, grim little books. I found recounting the heat of battle and laboring on drawings of glaistig, kelpie and bean sidhe onerous. I yearned to escape the duty of my blood and go east to Lovecraft or west to San Francisco, to forge a life under the iron bridges of a city. To pretend the preaching of the Proctors is the rational truth.
Much as I despise their methods, I see the appeal of the Rationalists. Reason over madness. Visible over invisible. Truth over heartbreak.
I understand now why we keep these accounts. I understand that Minders expect to die in the field, brought low by the creatures that move in the shadow of the Weird.
Or like my father, they drop in their tracks returning from a walk to the post office. They leave nothing behind but children or merely an empty house. The next in the line has no recourse.
Yes. I understand now.
Tomorrow, I bury my father. Tonight, I await the Kindly Folk. For it is still the first of May, the ancient rite of the goat gods and their minions. A night when mortal flesh tastes sweet and mortal blood calls the Wild Hunt. The Folk and I have work to do, and when I leave this world the only way my son will understand why his father was silent, distant and hard is this volume.
No mention of a daughter. I did the math. Nerissa wasn’t even pregnant with me yet.
We fight and we bleed for this hidden world, and the world eats us alive.
The Folk say this is the way of generations past: loneliness and hate. Witch trials, Rationalists and now the Bureau of Heresy.
So I put pen to paper, voraciously. My life is this Weird, this unnatural duty to this unnatural world, and this alchemy of words. My witch’s alphabet, as they call these volumes in the Iron Codex.
I pray to any of the old gods with ears still turned to a mortal man that it is enough.
The Fiery Stars
I CLIMBED DOWN from the attic with the dusk, exhausted. The library was dim, but aether light gleamed from the back parlor and I heard laughter.
Dean, Cal and Bethina sat around a low coal fire, Bethina’s round face alight.
“You’re a card, Dean!” she exclaimed. “The way you tell those stories I’d take them for true.”
“They are true.” Dean spun the poker between his palms. “Every word.”
Bethina hoote
d again, but I’d spent enough days with Dean now to know his face when he wasn’t teasing.
“We have aether. And light,” I said, to announce my presence. It was surprising to see Graystone in the real light of the aether lamps. Cal got up and hobbled over to me.
“We thought you’d died in that dusty attic.”
“Well, the kid thought so,” Dean drawled. “Bethina and I thought that was a tad dramatic.”
“Aether pump had a loose valve,” Cal babbled. “But I fixed it up. Routes into the house and runs a real nice little generation globe for heat and light.” He jerked his thumb at the hi-fi in the corner. “And I guess Dean got that antique working, not that we get any reception up here.”
“I’d die for some dance music,” Bethina cried. “The aether hasn’t been working since … well, since the unpleasantness with your da.”
“Cal,” I said, ignoring her. She hadn’t spent the afternoon seeing what I’d seen. “Cal, I have something to tell you.”
He cocked his head. “Spill.”
“Alone,” I elaborated. Cal was my confidant and he should be first to know what I’d found. I didn’t think Dean would call me crazy, but I didn’t know him as anything except a criminal guide who wanted me to tell him secrets. With Cal, I knew, there would be no price attached.
“All right,” Cal said, his grin vanishing.
“The hallway,” I told him, stepping out beyond the door, where we’d be out of earshot.
Behind me, music filled up the parlor, scratchy and antique across the tenuous connection of the aether.
Cal folded his arms. “I don’t like the way you just let him act as familiar as he pleases, Aoife. He’s basically a member of the help, you know.”
I slid the pocket doors shut on Dean and Bethina dancing awkwardly. Dean was liquid-graceful. Bethina was stumpy, her face red and her curls loose. I hoped I’d never looked like that in dance class.
Cal sighed. “Aoife, I’m serious. It’s not right to let someone like that run away at the reins.”
“Cal, I’m not one of those spoiled Uptown girls,” I said. “And even if I was, it doesn’t mean people who work for their living are less than human. You sound like Marcos.” I mimicked his stern gesture.
“You’re better than Dean Harrison,” Cal grumbled. “At least I know that.”
“This is emphatically not what I wanted to say to you,” I said, trying to steer the conversation back on track. “Cal, listen … I found something in the attic.”
Cal’s face lit like a lucifer match. “Bootlegger’s stash? A secret chamber, like for a blood cult? I read about one in Black Mask once—”
“I found a … a book,” I said, trying to pluck up the courage to tell him the exact nature of said book. Cal sighed.
“Oh. Just like school, then.”
“Not exactly,” I said, my voice going soft and shivery of its own accord. Cal was my friend, but I was about to ask him to believe a whole lot. “Cal, I found it. I found the book Conrad wanted me to use. It’s a … journal, I guess you’d call it.” Journal was a poor descriptor of the grimoire I’d found, but it was the one that would placate Cal. “My father kept it since he was eighteen or so.”
Cal spread his hands. “So?” I’d never noticed how pale his hands were. They were long and knobby and soft—gentleman’s hands. By comparison, my scar-traced knuckles and callused fingers were rough and unwieldy. But Cal had always excelled at being delicate and careful during classes, while I nicked and cut myself on metal and hot soldering lead every time we did shop.
“So.” I stepped closer, going up on tiptoe to get close to his ear. “The ink in the book, I touched it and it … marked me. It touched me like it was alive.” I extended my palm. “Look.”
Cal’s eyes dipped, then came back to mine. A frown made a black line between his eyebrows. “Oh, Aoife. It’s started, hasn’t it?”
I glanced at my own palm. Bare, it stared back at me. The mark had vanished.
“N-no …,” I stuttered, confusion making my voice hitch. “The ink … it tattooed me. An enchantment, and my father did a geas on the journal, so I could see memories that he’d wrapped up in the words.…” I trailed off, my hand dropping as I realized what—who—I sounded like.
“I don’t know what you think you saw.” Cal put his hand on my cheek. “But there’s nothing on your hand, and no enchanted book in the attic.” His skin was cold against my flushed cheek, and damp like the fog that surrounded Graystone. “Magic isn’t real, Aoife. It’s placebo for fools.”
I should believe the same thing, but I couldn’t explain away the diary that easily.
Cal swiped a hand through his unruly nest of hair. “I knew reading all of those books wouldn’t lead you anywhere but fancy. Aoife, you have to stay rational. You saw what happened to your mother. You know that believing in magic opens the door for the necrovirus.”
My fingers curled, nails cutting my palms, and tears I’d been holding down stung the corners of my eyes. Cal was supposed to believe me. Out of everyone from my old life, he was supposed to trust me. “It was there, Cal. It was.”
“It wasn’t, Aoife,” he returned. “This is a dusty old house full of dusty old things, and with your father gone it’s making you a little hysterical.”
I slapped Cal’s hand away. “Hysterical? That’s what you think of me?”
Cal’s jaw jumped, and then he grabbed my shoulders tight, his fingers like wire. “This is for you, Aoife,” he whispered. “If you go back to the city saying these things, you’ll be all done. But if you say your head’s a little light and you got overexcited, no Proctor will lock you up as a madwoman.” He ducked his chin. “Your birthday is in two weeks, Aoife. The infection—”
“You think I forgot?” My voice echoed off the scarred oak paneling around us, and I wriggled free of Cal again.
“That’s not …” Cal pressed his hands together, drew in a shaky breath as anger warred with calm on his face. “Talking to you is like tap-dancing on claymore mines, I swear.”
“I don’t care,” I said, hot prickles of anger overriding my natural inclination to hold my tongue. “I don’t care what you meant. It was an awful thing to say. Stay far away from me, Cal Daulton, because if I do go mad, you’ll be the first person I turn on.”
The heels of my borrowed boots echoed like a rifle shot as I left Cal and ran to my room, where I locked the door and let myself cry. Half because I wanted Cal to believe me, and half because I didn’t know if I believed myself.
After I’d spent an hour by the mantel clock alternately sniffling and silently cursing Cal and his fumbling, ill-thought comments, a knock came at the door.
“You in there, Aoife?” Dean’s low voice was welcome. If Cal had come and tried to apologize, I probably would have socked him in the mouth.
“I suppose,” I sighed, crumpling my handkerchief and throwing it in the general direction of my school clothes, which still occupied the floor by the wardrobe.
“Let me in?” he cajoled.
I snapped. “Don’t you and Bethina have more dancing to do?” Passed over for a servant girl. It really was a fairy tale.
“Aoife …” The name held sweet resonance through the oak of the door. Then Dean sighed. “I can take a hint. Sweet dreams, princess.”
After a few ticks of the clock I realized I didn’t want Dean to go away. I jumped off the bed and unlocked the door, opening it just an inch.
Dean was still there. His smile crept to the surface, and I felt marginally less wretched. “That’s more like it. What’s got those teardrops of yours flowing, kiddo?”
“I wasn’t crying.” The words were my reflex against teasing. Engineers didn’t cry. Especially girl engineers.
“Then I take your word for it.” Dean winked at me and offered his bandanna. “For your complexion.”
“Thank you,” I said softly, taking the kerchief and scrubbing at my eyes. They were gritty, as if I’d looked into the maw of a sandstorm.
“You want to talk about it?” Dean moved closer, so that he filled up my slice of doorway, not as a shadow would but solidly, something I could grab hold of.
“Not here,” I said, glancing back at my room, contained by the iron nerves of the house. Dean cocked his head in confusion. “The walls have ears,” I explained. Bethina could be around any corner, and I didn’t believe that the house itself wasn’t echoing my words down into its bones, storing them for its own eldritch uses.
Dean lifted himself away from the jamb. “Grab yourself a wrap and come with me.”
“I … all right.” I shrugged into a wool cape I’d discovered with the dress and wrapped my school scarf around my neck. As Dean led us away from the landing, into the warren of hallways that made up the north wing of Graystone, I finally had to ask, “Where are we going?”
“I’m still your guide, I’ll have you know,” Dean said. “Trust me.” He stopped at a thin door at the very end of the corridor, too small to be anything but a closet. “You weren’t the only one who found a hidden surprise today, princess.” He popped open the door and gestured toward the open space. “After you.”
It was indeed a closet, the only contents a ship’s ladder leading up into darkness. A draft caught me and prickled my exposed skin. “Up?” I said, peering into the darkness. The way was black and fathomless, cold as space.
“Up,” Dean agreed. “I’ll catch you.”
I mounted the first rung and looked back at him. “I’m not afraid of falling.”
His mouth curled. “That’s my Aoife.”
I jostled as Dean put his hands on my waist and gave me a boost. Cal had told me to reprimand him for being familiar, but if I was honest I enjoyed that Dean didn’t treat me like I was something that might break. And I wanted to see what was up there.
I climbed, and even with Dean’s added weight the ladder was solid under my grasp, wood polished by decades of hands and feet. Gradually the cold grew sharper, a blade rather than a pinprick.
The Iron Thorn Page 19
