The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [78]
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 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 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