Page 52 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
“It doesn’t say anywhere on this that it’s only to be read after he’s dead,” Henrietta said, as she turned the envelope in her hand. Then in one quick motion she tore it open. She lifted her eyes to Magda, stretching her mouth downwards in an affected expression of guilt. “Oops,” she said. “My hand slipped. Well, it’s open now. You might as well...”
Magda scowled, but Henry grinned back at her, entirely unrepentant. She reached towards Magda, offering her the torn envelope.
Dear Magda
Magda dropped down onto the couch next to James and slipped the letter out of the envelope.
“Read it out loud,” Henry said. Magda looked at the other woman as she folded herself back into the armchair. “If you want,” Henry added. “It’s your letter.”
Magda unfolded the pages and saw Frank’s neat penmanship. She slumped back on the couch and started to read.
Hello Sparks!
If you are reading this then I expect I must be dead. Either that or you have come across this by accident when searching for some chocolate. If the former, read on, if the latter, put this back where you found it and take the chocolate instead.
***
If I am dead, don’t waste time being sad about it. I’ve had a very long and healthy life, and I’ve been happy for the most part. Statistically speaking, most people who have ever lived have had worse lives than me, so there is no reason to be sad. You can miss me, but don’t grieve fortoo long. You are not pretty when you cry, so do everyone a favour and get over it as quick as you can.
***
Right, so the point of this letter is to tell you things you need to know. I am going to be matter-of-fact about it all because I just need to get it down, and I am not very good with language anyway. All my life I’ve been surrounded by books. You would think I would have learned a thing or two about beautiful language, but I haven’t. I tried to be a writer once—I’ve never told anyone, that’s the first secret I’m revealing—but my prose was so embarrassingly bad I burned the pages and promised myself I would never lift up a pen again. I think you need a gift, really, to be a writer. You can’t just learn it. I was always so proud of you, Magda, with your gift and your hard work. You don’t know this, but I tell everyone who comes into the shop that I know the real Miranda Hepworth, I know the woman behind the books. I am sure I bore people to tears with it. But it’s true!
Anyway, I am already rambling. The point is, some people are readers, and others, like you, are writers. I am definitely a reader so don’t expect any poetry here.
***
There are three main things I need to tell you. Firstly, I need to tell you about the Society—the real story, not the one I told you when you first learned about magic. Secondly, I need to tell you about a book that I possess and what it really is. And thirdly, I need to tell you about what happened to your mother, Imelda. There are lots of secrets here, but I promise I have only kept things from you because it had to be that way. My whole life has been spent trying to protect the world from magical items, and from what might happen if they fallinto the wrong hands. The world doesn’t need to give awful people any more power than they already have. I have taken that job very seriously, even when I have found myself doing things that made me unhappy. I hope, once you have finished reading this, you will understand why I’ve done the things I’ve done. And I hope you won’t think too unkindly of me. I confess I was too much of a coward to admit any of this to you when I was alive. I am dead now, and so your disappointment won’t get me.
***
So, the first thing. The Society. In reality the Society didn’t exist until I created it, but the story I told you has a similar shape to what really happened: a group of men in England after the war discovered that magic existed and they began to gather ordinary, everyday items that could do wonderful things. Unknowable objects, as my grandfather did indeed christen them (that did happen, I didn’t make that up). But unlike the story I told you when you first joined the Society, these four men all those years ago did not keep magical items safe from those who might misuse them. No. These four men were guilty of the sorts of acts we now try to prevent. These men—our predecessors—misused the items for their own pleasure and benefit. They made themselves rich. They gambled and raced cars and, at least on one occasion that I have been told of, they killed a man and got away with it. They took care only when it came to not being found out. They were always able to explain away their fortune and their riches as gambling winnings or inheritance, and they kept their circle of friends limited to those who knew the secret, to the four of them. Some of their spouses did not even know the truth.
My father—Baxter Simpson—grew up in this world. He was born in an ordinary working-class terracedhouse in London, but he reached adulthood in a grand country house in Northamptonshire. Over the period of his childhood his father, my grandfather, accumulated a fortune through misusing the magic. My grandfather’s three friends had their own children too, and each of them was the father to at least one boy. Boys were always the favoured ones, and they were groomed to inherit the shared secret, keeping it within the four families. I know this because my father told me when I became a man the same secrets my grandfather had told him. My father told me the secrets in the few years between my twentieth birthday and him, my father, jumping in front of a tube train in 1976. My father told me other things as well. He told me exactly what the members of the group had done a few years earlier. He told me what Joseph Rudge—your grandfather, Magda—had forced and cajoled them to do. I won’t tell you the details of that. Essentially they misused magic in the most awful way, but the specifics don’t matter now, so much time has passed. But it destroyed my father—it was why he killed himself. And it left a mark on your grandfather, on Joseph Rudge, too.
My father and your grandfather died almost ten years apart, but I’m convinced that the same thing killed them both: guilt. I think Joseph Rudge killed himself too, but he just took a slower route, drinking himself to oblivion over a decade. I was a member of the club over those ten years. I had replaced my father and entered this crazy, unbelievable world of old men doing whatever they wanted. Colin Wiseman was a member then, Henrietta’s father, and so too was Ellery Pinn, Will’s father. Joseph was the dominant figure, though. He was frequently drunk, usually aggressive, and sometimes violent. I don’t know if Imelda ever told you any of this, but her father was awful to her too. It is why she changed her name to Sparks,disowning the Rudge legacy (if not the large inheritance!). And it was why she was such a fine mother to you. She refused to be the sort of parent her father was.
Joseph Rudge cowed his friends. I know this is your grandfather I am talking about, but it is true. I don’t know if he was always like this or if he got worse with age and alcohol. But he was overbearing and violent and they all did what he wanted, sooner or later. I could see that in action even in the last few years of his life. Eventually, thankfully, the alcohol killed him. By that time I knew enough. By that time I knew I had to act.
When Joseph died, I changed things. Colin and Ellery were both tired and getting old. I think they were so relieved to be rid of Joseph they were happy for things to be quiet and peaceful. So I took control of the group. I was only in my twenties but I could see what was needed. I introduced structure and rules and a moral backbone—and I made it clear that we would now protect the world from magical items, not misuse them. This was a dangerous time, you understand. We were well into the cold war. There was the threat of nuclear weapons, and it just felt as if the world was teetering on the brink of disaster. It was not a time to be messing about with magic. We would ensure that we protected mankind from its worst urges. We would ensure mankind didn’t fall into a long dark winter of destruction and despair. This truth was woven into the story I told you all those years ago... but I made out that it was my grandfather who came up with this idea, not me. Ideas have more stature the older they are, I think. If they’ve stood the test of time, they are a more solid thing.
We became the Society for Unknowable Objects, and I shaped our purpose to make sure the mistakes of the past wouldn’t be repeated. I forced Colin and Ellery to go along with this, and I forced upon them a differenthistory, a story of the Impossible Box being handed down to one of our ancestors and that leading to the creation of the Society by four concerned, conscientious men. They went along with it. They just wanted a quiet life. And I think they liked the idea of pretending to be better men than they had been.
When your mother, the only child of Joseph Rudge, joined the Society later that year, she became the first true member of the Society. She believed she was joining a much older group, with its purpose passed down over two generations, when in fact she was joining something brand new. Then Colin Wiseman died, and Henrietta joined in his place, the second person to hear the Society version of history. And then, lastly, in 2012, Ellery Pinn died, the last person who had known the truth of the birth of the Society. Will Pinn joined the Society, and my work was complete. The Society existed to protect magical items from mankind. The Clockwork Cabinet—which had been commissioned in the 1960s as a safe for the men to keep their magical items—was now a repository and a hiding place. History was rewritten.
***
So that is the true story of the Society, this thing I created out of a mess. But there is one part of the history that I have not touched upon yet: where the magical items come from. I know the answer to that. It is the first secret, the truth that started all of this. One of the four men, one of our grandfathers, came back to Britain after the war, after time spent in North Africa, and he brought with him a remarkable item—not the Impossible Box. It was a book that he had stolen from a local. I don’t know which of the four men it was, and I don’t know exactly where the book came from. But the book was not an ordinary book. This book was a magicalbook, an artefact in itself. The story was that this was a book of dreams, of wishes, of desires. It was described as many things, but in short it is a book than can create magical items. The book—which you should now have, if you are reading this—looks just like a small pocket notebook with a soft cover. If you flick through the pages, you will see descriptions of items and artefacts and what they can do. This is not a catalogue of what we possess—it is a directory of all the magical items in the world that were created by the book.
It works like this: You hold the book in your hands, and you describe what you want, what item and what remarkable thing it can do. When you open the book there will be a new drawing, a new description on a previously blank page. And then, over the course of the next few hours or next few days, this item will come into your life. It doesn’t pop into existence in front of your very eyes. If you ask for a ring, you might find it in a drawer, like a long-lost item. If you ask for a knife, you will stumble across it when looking for something else. You know what it is as soon as you see it. And when you hold these items, you can feel that they are different. They are conjured out of a different place, and they do amazing things.
The book doesn’t work for everyone—I don’t know why, it seems some people can make it work, but not others. Your grandfather, Joseph Rudge, could use it, but I cannot (I have tried, once, I confess).
All of the artefacts that the Society holds were created by the book. But the book details other items too, things created by my father and his generation and that were sold for vast sums or given away for favours. And there are items that were created by whoever possessed the book before it came to us. We do not hold everything you see on the book’s pages. Some ofthese items are lost, out in the world, just waiting to be found. Sometimes I worry myself to sleep over what might happen if such an item ends up in the wrong hands.
Of course I realise I have just moved the ultimate question back one step. Where did the magical items come from? They came from the book. Where did the magical book come from...? I don’t know. But I have heard stories of other magical books over the years, and rumours of a library in Scotland full of such books. Who knows what other secrets and wonders exist out there in the dark crevices of the world?
But you understand, I hope, that this book is the most valuable thing we hold. The artefacts themselves are important and dangerous... but the book could create endless numbers of artefacts that could do all manner of wonderful or dreadful things. If it fell into the wrong hands, think of what could be done with it. Think about what things could be wished for by the worst of mankind.
