The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [76]
I went through at least twenty journals, and found the same variation of three-digit groupings: 45–6–12, 7–77–8. They ranged from cheap cloth-bound ledgers to fine leather volumes overflowing with pages, but the number sets remained. I opened a numbered journal at random, and an ancient collection of loose sheets showed me great, spreading, spindled wings attached to bodies with dog’s heads and lion’s feet. The next page was a sketch of a flying machine with rigid wings and the body of a great bird. The pages were labeled simply Machina, and there were at least a hundred of them, machines that had to have been designed by a fanciful madman. A rolling jitney that belched fire rather than steam. A difference engine small enough to be carried in a knapsack.
I set the volume aside. I loved aerodynamics and calculation science, even though a woman could never spend months aboard a flying fortress, refueling war buggies and chasing storms, or buried beneath the desert at Los Alamos working the difference engine for the Air Corps. It was men’s work. Women kept their feet on the earth and their head above it, no exceptions. Like my life—no matter how much I wanted things to be different, reality remained.
The lamp sputtered, and I reached out to turn up the wick, catching the shadow of Conrad’s note on my hand. It had nearly faded since my frantic escape from Lovecraft, but the numbers were still there. A triple sequence of double digits.
Save yourself
31–10–13
I dove back into the pile as the connection lit up in my mind, flinging books and papers aside as I discarded one journal after another, the pages flapping like bird’s wings as I tossed them over my shoulder one by one.
Until I reached the dozenth journal and finally found what I was looking for. I let out a small breath. I’d found, in this battered little book, what Conrad had called the witch’s alphabet.
The Witch’s Alphabet
CLUTCHING THE LEATHER-BOUND volume marked 31–10–13, I sank cross-legged onto the floor of the hidden library, my spine meeting the spines of the forgotten books.
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: Set down at Graystone, Arkham Valley, Massachusetts.
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