I thanked him by tucking the lighter into the top of my boot for easy reach when I needed it. Then I grabbed the slender ladder and climbed higher.
15
The Forsaken Tomes
I CLIMBED INTO the dark, passing the trapdoor and feeling along on my hands and knees, across boards covered in a half-inch of dust and grime. This attic space was warm and close, cobwebbed by time and neglect, and I tried to touch as little as possible.
Fumbling the lighter from my boot, I clicked the spark wheel once, twice, and a flame shot into the shadow, warning the dark back with a hiss.
The hidden room at the top of the library was small and A-shaped, tucked where the gables of Graystone met the roof. A four-pane leaded window blacked out with oiled paper cast weak light into the space, which showed me the silhouette of an oil lamp. I removed the sooty globe and touched Dean’s lighter to the wick. The flame guttered for a moment and then caught, and I lifted the lamp to more carefully examine the room.
Books surrounded me, crowded in, piled on shelves, on the floor, on the single scarred table in the center of the space like miniature ruins. The volumes were nothing like the pristine texts in the library below—these were older, in disrepair, spines cracked where there were still spines to break, water stained and page-rumpled. Books with miles of use. Mrs. Fortune would call them “well loved.”
I’d completed one circular survey of the tiny room when the trapdoor snapped closed again and a pair of locks engaged.
“Aoife!” Cal’s shout penetrated the floor as I scrambled over to the door, nearly smashing the lamp and setting the entire room ablaze. I scrabbled at the edges of the door, but the seal was tight and the locks were brass, with only a smooth face on my side.
My heart started to pound, and the close warmth of the room became oppressive as I started throwing books onto the floor searching for a release amid the shelves and the thousands of battered tomes. Nothing. I was locked in. I stood and flashed the light frantically along the walls.
Finally the lamp’s flame caught a shine and I saw a dial set into the wall at chest height, behind a stack of almanacs from the previous century.
“Aoife!” The ladder clanked as someone heavy—Dean—mounted it and rattled the door. “Aoife, we can’t get it open!”
“It’s all right!” I shouted. “There’s a switch up here!” The switch was a simple two-position job, but to my immense relief, one of them was Door Open. The thought of being trapped up here made me light-headed. I undid the collar button of my dress and fanned myself with a battered copy of an almanac until my heart ceased to pound.
Retrieving the lamp, I moved it away from the piles of books on the floor and set it back on the writing table. This surface was crackle-varnished and scarred, covered in ink stains and crumpled vellum scraps, as different from the ornate desk in the library as the School of Engines was from the Lovecraft Conservatory. It was clear to my eyes that my father—or some bygone Grayson—had spent hours here, high in the house’s aerie. And judging from the papered window and the frozen lock, they had spent their hours locked away in secrecy, with no one from the house or the outside world able to see in or gain entry.
They may have been content to stay in the dark, but I didn’t like the secrets that the long shadows implied. I tore down the oil paper from the window, letting in the weak autumn sunlight and illuminating decades of untidiness.
The eaves hung lower than I’d first imagined, and the space was so crammed with books and oddities I couldn’t take more than six small steps in any direction.
There were not just books—although books were most plentiful. In the watchful eye of the sun I spotted specimen boxes, a map cabinet for charts and blueprints, and a naturalist’s kit sitting atop it, complete with forgotten specimens in jars of formaldehyde. A globe dotted with the shapes of uncharted countries sat high on a shelf, along with a scattering of empty ink pots. Something crunched under my boot and I looked down to find a massacre of broken pen nibs littering the floor.
I saw on closer examination of the sagging shelves that none of the books had a title on the spine. Many were just diaries stitched together with heavy thread, even the covers filled up with the same square and precise handwriting that had labeled the clockwork that controlled Graystone.
“Aoife, are you coming down?” Cal shouted. “What did you find up there?”
I opened the trapdoor and leaned my head out, still holding the closest handwritten tome. “I’m looking around. I think I’ll stay up here for a little while.”
Cal waved his hand in front of his face to direct away the cloud of grit that opening the door had dislodged. “You can’t be serious.”
“You should come up,” I said. “There’s all sorts of specimens and gadgets in here.”
Cal resolutely shook his head. “I can’t believe you’d rather bother with a bunch of ancient scratch paper than explore the house.”
“The house will be here when I’m done,” I told him. “Just come up, Cal.”
“No, thank you,” he said quickly. “I’m not keen on being that far off the ground.” I saw him nudge Dean’s shoulder. “Come on, I’ll have Bethina make us lunch. Aoife finds a book, she can have her nose in it for hours.”
“It seems to have done well for her.” Dean looked up and winked at me, but he followed Cal through the hidden servant’s passage to the kitchen. I dialed the trapdoor shut again. At least Cal and Dean had stopped sniping at each other for a moment, united by the common boy’s love of a hot meal.
That left me with at least an hour to search the room. I was sure that Conrad had meant for me to find it, but what he’d wanted me to see, I didn’t know.
I tried the map cabinet first. There were a wealth of charts, all misfolded and crammed together as if their owner had been in a terrible hurry to tidy up. Or hide something.
Yanking the clot of paper free, I was rewarded with nothing but dirt and beetle skeletons. I spread out the maps, finding a star chart like the one we used at the Academy. This one was older, covered in handwritten notations and numbers, and contained far more stars than I remembered from my one course of astronomy. Professor Faroul had been arrested for heresy just after I started my freshman year, for preaching at the class that the Great Old Ones would some day return to earth and attain mastery over human beings. Professor Faroul had been no one’s favorite, but he was a hapless and gentle man. That was the first time I’d seen a Proctor up close, other than at the court where my mother was committed. The rasp of their rough black uniforms and the slam of their steel-toed jackboots against the observatory floor stuck with me, like the imprint of a cold hand on the back of my neck.
The next chart was a map of Massachusetts, the kind of thing you could buy in any cartographer’s boutique for half a dollar. It, too, was scribbled on, with a heavy concentration of nonsensical ink scratching around the borders and township of Arkham, symbols and stars and glyphs that reminded me of nothing so much as the defiant sketching in the margins of my notebooks.
The last and worse-faring chart was hand-drawn on heavy paper that felt more like dry and ancient skin than pulp or linen. It was heavy enough to smooth out its own wrinkles, but some of the ink was irreversibly blurred and erased.
For a moment all I could make out was a mess of lines and engineer’s notations. Then, with a gasp, I realized the shape was familiar, a cross with three radiating wings surrounded by a wall and a garden peppered with outbuildings. The queer paper was a plan of Graystone, and judging by the slapdash nature of the notes on the clockwork schematics, it was the engineer’s original blueprint. The date sitting in the corner, nearly rubbed out from dozens of thumbs rolling and unrolling the sheet, was 1871.