The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [80]
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 virtue and their life as one, consuming the raw magic energy for its own ends. Dies in fire. My Weird was well used this night. One girl is safe. For two, I came too late.
I had lost track of the hours I’d been sitting on the attic floor, the dozens of snapshots of my father that appeared and disappeared as the geas on his journal took hold of my eyes. Him aging, my legs cramping. I should stir myself and let Cal and Dean know I was still alive, but the book continued to give up secrets, and I hadn’t found the one I needed yet.
1 May, 1939.
My father died this morning.
No new dusty, jostling reel of memory accompanied the entry, oddly. Only words marked the death of my grandfather.
I set that line down and watched the ink dry on it.
Tomorrow, I will stand with the grave digger and the undertaker while they measure my father for his coffin and the ground for his grave.
Tonight, I am kept by my vigil.
I did not understand when I began this record, why every Gateminder bears witness to the horrors of their calling and the toll of their Weird in these strange, grim little books. I found recounting the heat of battle and laboring on drawings of glaistig, kelpie and bean sidhe onerous. I yearned to escape the duty of my blood and go east to Lovecraft or west to San Francisco, to forge a life under the iron bridges of a city. To pretend the preaching of the Proctors is the rational truth.
Much as I despise their methods, I see the appeal of the Rationalists. Reason over madness. Visible over invisible. Truth over heartbreak.
I understand now why we keep these accounts. I understand that Minders expect to die in the field, brought low by the creatures that move in the shadow of the Weird.
Or like my father, they drop in their tracks returning from a walk to the post office. They leave nothing behind but children or merely an empty house. The next in the line has no recourse.
Yes. I understand now.
Tomorrow, I bury my father. Tonight, I await the Kindly Folk. For it is still the first of May, the ancient rite of the goat gods and their minions. A night when mortal flesh tastes sweet and mortal blood calls the Wild Hunt. The Folk and I have work to do, and when I leave this world the only way my son will understand why his father was silent, distant and hard is this volume.
No mention of a daughter. I did the math. Nerissa wasn’t even pregnant with me yet.
We fight and we bleed for this hidden world, and the world eats us alive.
The Folk say this is the way of generations past: loneliness and hate. Witch trials, Rationalists and now the Bureau of Heresy.
So I put pen to paper, voraciously. My life is this Weird, this unnatural duty to this unnatural world,