The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [75]
The next chart was a map of Massachusetts, the kind of thing you could buy in any cartographer’s boutique for half a dollar. It, too, was scribbled on, with a heavy concentration of nonsensical ink scratching around the borders and township of Arkham, symbols and stars and glyphs that reminded me of nothing so much as the defiant sketching in the margins of my notebooks.
The last and worse-faring chart was hand-drawn on heavy paper that felt more like dry and ancient skin than pulp or linen. It was heavy enough to smooth out its own wrinkles, but some of the ink was irreversibly blurred and erased.
For a moment all I could make out was a mess of lines and engineer’s notations. Then, with a gasp, I realized the shape was familiar, a cross with three radiating wings surrounded by a wall and a garden peppered with outbuildings. The queer paper was a plan of Graystone, and judging by the slapdash nature of the notes on the clockwork schematics, it was the engineer’s original blueprint. The date sitting in the corner, nearly rubbed out from dozens of thumbs rolling and unrolling the sheet, was 1871.
I set the chart down carefully and rooted around in the clutter until I found a leather map tube with a strap for carrying the maps of your trade, whether you were an engineer, a clockmaker or simply a naturalism enthusiast trekking in the woods. Carefully rolling up the blueprint, I put it in the tube and laid it against the writing table. I wasn’t letting something so valuable out of my sight until I discovered what, precisely, Graystone was still hiding.
And diverting as the schematic was, it wasn’t getting me any nearer to finding Conrad. I turned my attention back to the tangle of books and journals, pulling them from their spots at random and dislodging enough dust to choke a ghoul.
The books were largely of the fantastic and heretical variety—potboilers featuring tough-guy detectives on the trail of a treacherous dame, stories of men voyaging to the bottom of the sea inside a living biomechanical submersible, and a fat book with a worn-off spine written entirely in German. All books that had escaped the Proctor’s bonfires during the war and after.
We learned German, because it was pertinent to learn the language of a conquered nation, but we were never allowed to read it out of class, or while in the confines of the Academy. The verbs gave me terrible trouble, but I was able to pick out a few easy headings in the battered book. “Snow White and Rose Red.” “Rapunzel.” “The Robber Bridegroom.”
I set the volume with the map carrier for later study. Now it was simply diverting, and I didn’t need diversion. I needed my brother. Some Grayson, at some point, must have left a clue to the strange happenings in this house, to the reasons Conrad had come and then vanished.
Paging through the handwritten journals, I tried to scry for any clue. The first few volumes were gibberish, written in code piled onto atrocious handwriting, and I shoved them out of the way, digging deeper into the stack on the bottommost shelf, under the window. Outside, the crows had returned and sat conversing with one another on the sill. “If you’re going to hang about, you might at least give me peace and quiet to work,” I grumbled. It only seemed to make them louder.
Tugging at a recalcitrant volume, I loosed an avalanche of journals that buried me in bound and loose sheafs up to the shin. I said something unladylike and started to restack them, when I noticed that many of the journals held a notation on the cover or the first page. The notation was numerical and, from what I could decipher, organized