The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [84]
My hands burned from deadened nerve endings in the cold, and it reminded me of the ink’s toothsome grasp, which only made things worse. I glanced at my palm. It was still bare. “Just because I can’t prove to Cal I saw an … an enchantment on the book doesn’t make me a liar. Cal should have trusted me.” That was the real pain of it—I trusted Cal, faithful and absolute. And all he could do in return was wring his hands over my maybe madness.
Dean came to stand next to me and slid his hand over mine. “You ain’t crazy, Aoife. I don’t care if you said you saw the Great Old Ones themselves returning from the stars, no one has the right to sling that at you.”
I looked down over the spires of Arkham, silent. Dean hadn’t heard what Cal had. He hadn’t read the book and learned about what the Graysons carried. What had my father called it? His Weird. His writings had casually unfolded a world utterly alien from my own, a world where a heretical legend pulsed through my blood surely as his.
Could he be right? I was his daughter, after all.
The village lay silent as a tomb in the night, the moon above a broach on a velvet brocade of stars. Ground fog spun over the valley, the top of Arkham’s church steeple and the twin towers of Miskatonic University thrusting upward like a desperate, drowning hand. Rooftops and chimney pots within Arkham’s outer wall vanished and reappeared, a ghostly town revealed only by moonlight’s gleam.
As I watched, a flame sprang to life at the outskirts of the village, and another. A great clanking borne on the wind echoed off the mountain, back to our ears.
The borderlands of Arkham blossomed with flame, one after the other. Green as a forest, the fire wasn’t oil or tar, but something else that sent acrid smoke up the valley toward my nose.
“What is that?” I said, waving it away. Dean flicked his cigarette end off the roof. It joined the constellation of fire for just a moment before winking out.
“Ghoul traps,” he said. “Keeping the beasties out at moonrise. That two-faced ghoul goddess of theirs hunts with the tide. Least, that’s what I heard around the Nightfall Market.”
I shuddered. I’d seen the low humps of ambulance jitneys rumbling through the streets the morning after a full moon, when even the Proctors’ nightly lockdown and extra patrols couldn’t keep the creatures from slipping in through the underground. Cal said if you turned the right way, you could hear the screams from Old Town as the disused sewer system opened and spewed forth its bloodthirsty citizens.
Cal. Cal and his look of pity when I’d shown him my palm. My heart tightened again, painful against my ribs.
“Burning aether tainted with sulfur,” Dean explained. “What I hear, the stench and the green light keeps them underground.”
“Cal called me crazy because I told him I found an enchantment on that book,” I said. Dean opened his mouth, but I held up my finger. “I need you to listen.”
“Right. Consider my trap shut,” Dean said, settling himself against the rail.
“I know I should say that magic isn’t real,” I said. That was what everyone I was supposed to trust in my life had told me.
Except Conrad. And I trusted him more than anyone. I swallowed the lump in my throat and continued. “But the ink in the book—it marked me, like a living thing leaves its tooth mark behind. And an enchantment let me see my father’s memories. I’m a rational person. I believe in science and I abjure heresy.” I sucked in a breath, the faint taste of sulfur parching my tongue. “But to hear my father tell it in his writings, it’s not heresy—nothing born of the necrovirus. Nor are all of the inhuman things in the world, the shandy-men and nightjars and the abominations … they don’t come from a person being infected. They aren’t people at all … they came from the … the Land of Thorn. Wherever that is.