Page 24 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
“I did that!” the man exclaimed, like a child showing off a painting to a parent. “And with the gold coin I can feel things in the ground.” He bent to swap the flower for the coin. “The rocks and the stones and the...” He seemed to struggle for a moment, as if he couldn’t find a word he wanted. “The minerals. I can move them just by thinking about it.” He pointed to his head with one forefinger as he said this, as if he believed Imelda weren’t sure where the thinking was done. He closed his eyes and almost immediately the ground shuddered like a beast waking up. Imelda saw the grass and flowers off to her left tilt sideways, a mouth opening, a canyon-like trench running away along the shore. Rocks emerged from within, dropping dirt and dust behind them as they seemed to float up and then fall into the bed of flowers. Then the canyon sealed up again, like a zipper pulled, leaving a bare line along the rainbow-coloured shore, a scar of the great wound in the earth.
Imelda trembled at this display of raw power. She looked at the man’s face and she saw his gaze hypnotised by his own work.
“And I brought you back from the dead,” he said. “I used the cross and I thought of you because I wanted to show you what I can do and you came from nothing, right here at the lake, right now!”
Imelda closed her eyes, swaying where she stood, reeling from what she was being told. This was a nightmare. She was alone and lost with this strange, awful man.
“How long has it been?” she asked, opening her eyes again. “How long have I been dead?”
The man studied the gold coin in his hand, not answering.
“Do you have a phone?” Imelda tried instead. “Can I speak to Magda?”
The man seemed to be ignoring her now.
“My daughter,” Imelda continued. “She will be worried about me. Please, just to let her know I’m okay.”
The man was quiet for a few moments, and the world was quiet with him, waiting.
“My name is Lukas,” he said. “Just Lukas. What’s your name? If we’re friends, we need to know each other’s names.”
“We’re not friends,” she said.
“It’s Imelda,” he said, giving her a quick, dark look. “I know your name.”
“Because you read my journal,” Imelda concluded. “Even though you said you didn’t.”
The man shook his head, eyes scrunching up, denying her words. He bent down to pick up the folded piece of paper,TheAtlas of Lost Things,the map that Imelda had been following when she had died. He held it out to her.
“What does this one do?”
Imelda turned her eyes to the flowers at her feet. She wanted to look upon something beautiful, something happy, but she saw that the flowers were wilting now, their colours draining away, as if they could not survive in this place without the help of the magic of the blue carnation. “Nothing,” she lied to the man. “It does nothing.”
“Itchanges,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper, like he was speaking a terrible secret that someone might overhear.
Imelda looked at the embroidered flower on the bag on the man’s hip. Magda had stitched that flower onto the bag as a child. It had been a rainy Saturday afternoon in winter, Imelda remembered, and they had been stuck in the house all day. So Imelda had sat Magda at the table and told her to put something pretty on her bag with the needles and thread. The flower had been the result, a slightly clumsy but stunningly beautiful bloom in yellow and red thread. Looking at the flower made Imelda both happy and dreadfully sad.
“I’m going to follow the map,” the man said, and it sounded as if he were trying to provoke her to reveal something, to admit her lie. “If you won’t tell me I’ll find out. I am good at working things out.”
Imelda tried not to react to this, tried not to reveal anything unintentionally.
“Go,” she said, focussing on Magda’s flower. “Do what you want, I don’t care.”
The man returned the map to the bag. He stared at her sullenlyfor a few moments, eyes dark beneath his brows. “Okay, I will go,” he said. Imelda watched him turn on his heel and walk off. He crossed the pebbles and disappeared into the trees.
“Hey,” she called after him. “Hey, wait, where am I?”
She waited a few seconds, unease tickling her stomach, but there was no answer. She tried to follow the man, crossing the shore, but the sharp edges of the pebbles bit into her soft feet and she stumbled and fell.
“Hey Lukas!” she shouted at the top of her voice. “Come back!”
But he did not come back.
Imelda was naked and alone in the wilderness.
The shivering came first, and then the darkness, a darkness like Imelda had never known, stars blazing high above her. In the darkness the noises came, animals in the woods on all sides, fighting and calling and eating, and in the midst of all that terrifying noise Imelda had never felt so alone, never so despairing.
She tried to dig herself a hole in the pebbles for warmth, covering herself with leaves from the edge of the forest, but it was no good. The temperature dropped below freezing and Imelda couldn’t stop shaking.
