The Iron Thorn

16 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 in Nerissa’s tale.

I cried out as the ice-hot pain of a burn imprinted itself on my hand. In that moment, I couldn’t even struggle. I simply froze, whorls of vertigo overwhelming my vision, and willed my body not to faint from the sensation.

This was not the necrovirus. It was not the dreams that stalked me through all my nights in the School. Not the looming ghost of my mother, not the bite of the shoggoth.

The feeling causing my vision to black and my body to throb was nothing I had ever known, and nothing I could explain with any of the Proctor’s laws or the Master Builder’s tenets of rational science.

The closest word I could use was, after all, witchcraft.

I didn’t care that it made me a heretic. I didn’t even care that in the eyes of everyone I knew, it confirmed my madness. Sorcery was the only explanation for what was happening to me, for the pain that was chewing through me from the inside out.

Then, as abruptly as it had stolen my senses from me, the ink’s enchantment released. The serpents on the page curled, tongues tasting the air, hissing with satisfaction. I fell back against the books, cradling my palm against my stomach and fighting both tears and panic. My hands were my fortune. I could never be an engineer with a crippled hand. I couldn’t even be a stenographer. I’d be less than useless, a ward of the city until I died.

When at last I had the courage to examine my burn, I saw a stigma on the spot where heretic palmists would tell me that my life and heart lines intersected. The mark sat in the shape of a wheel with pointed spokes and sharpened treads—not a wheel, I saw, but a gear, a gear which shimmered just under my skin—not a brand like the Proctors’ stigmas, but inky, like a navy boy’s tattoo. The spot was rimmed with pink and slightly warm, but I was otherwise whole, with no hint of the agony I’d just endured. My mind, however, was still telling me that my palm was on fire, that I was going to lose my hand, the one thing I couldn’t lose and still be an engineer.…

“Breathe, Aoife,” I ordered myself in a whisper. “Breathe.”

I stared at my palm for a long time, feeling the crow wings of my heartbeat flutter and finally still as my panic faded. My hand was still there. It wasn’t lost, along with any future hope.

Something had touched me. I could fall back on what they taught us at the School all I wanted, but there was no denying that the ink—the entire journey since Lovecraft—was inexplicable with pure science.

I sat for a long time, turning my hand over, waiting for the stigma to vanish. It didn’t. At last, I remembered that the journal was still lying at my feet.

Gingerly, I picked it up. It was only paper once again, good paper bound in good leather, innocuous as my own notebooks from the School. On the page, the ink was no longer twisting and obscured with age. Handwriting clear and sharp as a razor blade stared back at me.

Property of Archibald Robert Grayson

14th Gateminder

Arkham, Massachusetts

My father’s hand sat square and precise on the page, and the book was no longer the least aged and mouse-eaten, but whole as any of the volumes in the library below.

There was ghost ink, simple chemicals and trickery. There was Conrad, making a half-dollar appear from under his tongue and disappear again behind my ear.

This book was something different.

I was faithful to the science that gave us the Engine and protected our cities from the necrovirus, but in the small attic room I was beginning to feel the enchantment sending slow, hot pinpricks from my palm to my heart.

I was a rational girl, but in that second I admitted this might be magic.

The belief only lasted for a moment. There could be a dozen explanations for what I’d seen.

It didn’t have to be magic. Magic was an obfuscation used by the Crimson Guard to frighten their citizens.

But I couldn’t change what my father’s handwriting had set down, and as far as I knew Archibald was as rational as I. I read.

Witch’s Alphabet

My breath stopped. This was what I’d hoped for. The book that would tell me how to find Conrad. I read on.

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 my tenure as speaker and learn from them, but no others may read or see my writings.

My geas is still elementary and the recorded memories pale, anemic things, but I suppose it will have to do. I confess that, in the advanced year of eighteen, I had doubted that any Weird had passed to me from the Minder before. My brother, Ian, with his skill over the air, and our father with his mastery of stone, had caused me to question my place in the brotherhood more than once.

I had an uncle, somewhere, I realized with a swell of excitement. First a father, now a family. Every orphan’s dream—the bosom of a family, with money and influence, to take her in, buy her pretty dresses and make life easy.

My imagination was starting to run away with me, until reality inevitably seeped back in. Families like that didn’t have hidden rooms full of books, talking about magic as if it truly existed, lived and breathed in their bloodline.

I turned a page and the gray figure returned in a dazzle of light. I didn’t drop the book this time. My hand twitched where the ink had marked me, but I stayed resolute and watched the memories born from my father’s journal play out.

I watched as the boy, who had to be Archibald, scribbled, pausing only to push his half-glasses up his nose.

“Archie!” A voice, equally phantom, from the library below. “It’s time now. Get your coat and boots and bring your nerves!”

I watched as my father sighed, licked his pen, wrote faster.

I will take my oaths on the full moon, the blood oaths that Ian is so eager to engage in and that I dread so very deeply.

No one but myself will bend the spine of this codex until I am long dead, and therefore I may set down my true and honest feelings: I abhor the blood rites, the meeting with the Kindly Folk, the trappings of the Weird. I dread the Folk’s all-seeing eyes and their touch on my innermost secrets. I do not fear the pain that comes with the initiation, but I do fear the stripping bare of my mind, the opening of a vast well within, the free flow of the Weird through my veins.

I fear it may burn me up from the inside, and that I may become ash, nothing, borne on the wind.

I flipped the page and was surprised to see that the next entry was dated nearly two months later.

28 February, 1933.

I am the 14th Gateminder now. I bear the wisdom of the Iron Codex and my blood has spilled on the Winnowing Stone.

My father hadn’t been writing this for me, that much was clear. I had only the vaguest idea about what he was up to, and none of it sounded like it would keep him or anyone who knew what he was doing out of the Catacombs back home.

The full moon rises tomorrow and it brings the Folk under its withering gaze. I must, for the first time, accept their aid as Gateminder.

The gray figure of my father stood in the library above, much tidier than it was now, where I sat. He rubbed his glasses up and down on his vest, checking his pocket watch. He was wearing a suit instead of a rumpled shirt and trousers. It didn’t fit him well, and he kept fidgeting with his tie as if he were about to meet a girl for a date.

The great clock in the library below chimed midnight, and my father went to the garret window. I followed his flickering, transparent form, watched the shadow of the garden discharge three pale figures with faces cloaked by white robes. They looked like members of the Druid cults we’d studied in Professor Swan’s class. The thought of the Academy and my professors was startlingly foreign. They’d told me my entire life none of this could be real, but I was seeing my father conjured out of a book clear as day. How could what he was writing about then not be at least partially real?

A girl has disappeared from Arkham,

my father continued on the page.

She is the third, as two more have vanished over the span of months before the year turned. They vanished from locked bedrooms, their windowpanes covered with soot and sulfur. All of the wisdom of the Codex has failed me and I must consult the Folk. I must pay the sacrifice for their wisdom if I am to save the women. The girls, rather, for they are but children.

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, and this alchemy of words. My witch’s alphabet, as they call these volumes in the Iron Codex.

I pray to any of the old gods with ears still turned to a mortal man that it is enough.