The Iron Thorn (25 page)

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.

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.

My breath stopped. This was what I’d hoped for. The book that would tell me how to find Conrad. I read on.

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.

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 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.

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 flipped the page and was surprised to see that the next entry was dated nearly two months later.

28 February, 1933
.

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 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?

my father continued on the page.

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.

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.

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.

No new dusty, jostling reel of memory accompanied the entry, oddly. Only words marked the death of my grandfather.

No mention of a daughter. I did the math. Nerissa wasn’t even pregnant with me yet.