Page 1 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
Prologue
The Atlas of Lost Things (2015)
Imelda Sparks was alone and exhausted in the wilderness of Nevada, and she had never been happier.
She perched on a rock at the edge of the hiking trail, dropped her shoulder bag to her feet, and pulled out a bottle of water. The evening sun was a rich orange smear just above the horizon, and the sky over the Great Basin Desert was slowly turning the colour of candy floss and peaches. Thunderclouds towered up from the flat brown ground in the distance like smoke from campfires and Imelda thought the view was one of the most beautiful she had ever seen.
She glanced down past her feet to where the hillside dropped away steeply. The bottom of the gully was a pool of shadows that was slowly rising up towards her. Soon it would be too dark to have any chance of finding what she had come looking for, maybe even so dark that the hour-long hike back to the car would become treacherous.
“Stupid,” she muttered. She slid her water bottle back into her bag and her hand brushed the flower that Magda had cross-stitched into the canvas flap all those years ago. Imelda wondered how Magda had spenther day back in London. Probably work, and then an evening writing. Magda wanted to be a novelist and that seemed to demand all of her time and attention. Imelda worried sometimes that Magda wasn’t leaving room in her life for friends or for love, but her daughter had always known her own mind, even as a toddler. Imelda smiled as she remembered Magda at a much younger age, stomping around the house and pretending to be a dinosaur long after she’d been told to go to bed. That happy memory faded as Imelda turned her eyes to the distance and saw the sun flattening at the bottom as it touched the horizon.
“Come on, get on with it,” she muttered to herself.
She removed a square of paper from her back pocket and unfolded it to study in the golden-pink light. It was a hand-drawn map, with sketched lines in black ink that detailed Imelda’s surroundings, and a scribbled star in the centre of the page indicating the location of the lost thing—like anXmarking the spot in some movie-prop treasure map. The sketch had changed since Imelda had last looked at it fifteen minutes earlier; the image on the paper shifted constantly, in fact, because this was not an ordinary map. This wasTheAtlas of Lost Things,a guide to lost magical artefacts.
TheAtlashad already taken Imelda on a journey across Europe. She had found the worn gold coin in a small museum in Bavaria, the crucifix in a cluttered antique shop in the Trastevere neighbourhood of Rome, and the blue carnation, which Imelda had retrieved only a couple of days earlier, in the lapel of a wizened bulb-grower working in the tulip fields east of Amsterdam. After Imelda had obtained the flower—which had taken some gentle persuasion and a generous financial donation to the old man—theAtlashad shown her that another lost thing could be found in the Nevada desert, in the United States. She had jumped on a flight at Schiphol, rented a car at the airport in Las Vegas when she had arrived earlier that day, and then she had driven for four hours out into the wilderness, north along Highway 93, before turning west onto the mountain trail.
As Imelda peered at theAtlasnow in the low light at the end of the day, her vision blurred with fatigue. Her neck was stiff from the hoursbehind the wheel, and the throbbing in her knees and lower back made them grumpy companions, spoiling the hike with incessant complaints.
She shook her head to clear her vision and focussed on theAtlas. The lost thing was near, perhaps only a few feet away from where she was perched. If she could find it quickly, she could be on her way back to the car before all the light drained from the day. She closed her eyes, anticipating a couple of nights of luxury in an expensive hotel back in Vegas, a big bath of bubbles and a tray of room service food.
“That would be lovely,” she murmured.
She was tired, she knew, not just from an hour of walking on sixty-year-old legs, but from three months of travelling and adventure. Imelda had always had an easy life, the child of wealthy (if absent and occasionally problematic) parents and an adulthood spent working as an artist, living comfortably off her inheritance while painting landscapes and portraits with some modest success. When Magda had come along—unexpectedly, when Imelda had been in her mid-thirties—Imelda had focused her energy on being the sort of parent that Imelda herself had never had: present, attentive, and loving. But Magda was an adult now, and increasingly Imelda had found that she had more time to herself than she knew what to do with. That was why three months earlier she had relished the idea of going off on a big adventure by herself in search of lost things.
And ithadbeen an adventure, and a successful one too. For she would be going back to Frank with items to add to the Society collection. Including, she hoped, whatever she might find on the hiking trail.
“If you get on with it,” she murmured, “instead of standing here daydreaming.”
She studied theAtlasonce more and it showed her that she was now standing directly on top of the lost thing.
“But that makes no sense,” she muttered in confusion, rotating the paper in case she was misreading it (easily done with a map that changed constantly). She stood up and pivoted on her heel, running her eyes over the hillside and the boulders, the bare ground that surrounded her, all of it now washed in a thin, colourless light. “It was right here.”
The coming darkness was a threat that Imelda was trying to ignore, but thick shadows were crouching in corners like animals, waiting to pounce as soon as the sun was gone. She was running out of time.
She exhaled in frustration, ignoring the sinking sun, and tried to make sense of theAtlas,but the lost thing had moved again and now appeared slightly behind her and to the right. Was it in a stream maybe? Or floating in the air on thermals? How could it be moving? She sighed in frustration and kicked a small rock, sending it flying out into space before it dropped and bounced its way down the hillside into the gully.
“I don’t have time for this,” she exclaimed to the sky.
She glanced up to the hillside, scanning back and forth for answers or inspiration but seeing only more rocks and scrub and boulders. And...
Someone is watching you!
Imelda gasped in surprise, a hand going up to her chest as her heart performed an impromptu drum fill. There was a stranger on the hillside, a man, only three or four strides up from the trail. And he was watching her.
What on earth?
The man was entirely motionless, squatting down with his arms around his knees, but he was facing Imelda and she could tell—sheknew—that he was watching her.
That he had, in fact, been watching her the whole time she had been perched on the rock.
Imelda’s scalp prickled, warnings and worries running through her mind.
Why wouldn’t he let me know he was there? Who does that?
When it became obvious that Imelda had spotted him the man stood up in one quick movement. He was wearing old blue jeans and a brown waxed overcoat over a checked flannel shirt and a T-shirt, a faded blue baseball cap on his head. He stood motionless for a moment, the breeze flicking the collar of his shirt, his arms out slightly from his body as if he was deciding what to do.
Watching him, Imelda felt uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t identify. It wasn’t just her unease that this man had been observing her, it was something else, something she couldn’t put her finger on, somethingabout the way her eyes and her brain felt when she was looking at him. The only thing she could think to compare it to was seasickness, but that made no sense at all.
