16
CLUTCHING THE LEATHER-BOUND volume marked
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:
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,
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
