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.
17
The Fiery Stars
I CLIMBED DOWN from the attic with the dusk, exhausted. The library was dim, but aether light gleamed from the back parlor and I heard laughter.
Dean, Cal and Bethina sat around a low coal fire, Bethina’s round face alight.