“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
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
Flipping the pages back to the beginning, I began to read.
My father’s voice floated out of the past.
This time, I let them come.
I endeavor to set down in the pages of this book a true and accurate account of my tenure as Gateminder, my father wrote.
My forerunner and father, Robert Randall Grayson, gifted me with this book on the turning of the New Year. It is my duty now, sworn and sealed, as I have reached the age. My Weird has presented itself and I can no longer shirk my duties, among them a true record of the same. I have placed a geas on this volume so that future Minders might withdraw my memories, revisit the events leading to the end of my tenure as speaker and learn from them, but no others may read or see my writings.
My geas is still elementary and the recorded memories pale, anemic things, but I suppose it will have to do. I confess that, in the advanced year of eighteen, I had doubted that any Weird had passed to me from the Minder before. My brother, Ian, with his skill over the air, and our father with his mastery of stone, had caused me to question my place in the brotherhood more than once.
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.
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.
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
