Page 54 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
“But how?” she asked the room. “We don’t even know where he is.”
James picked up the book from the coffee table. “You could use this,” he suggested. “It can make a magical item. Maybe one of us can make it work. We could make a map to show you where the box is. It will lead you right to it.”
“Quite right,” Henry exclaimed, clapping her hands together. “Let’s actually use the things to do some good for once, just like Imelda did. What do you say, Magda?”
But Magda stared at the book, unsure of what to do.
Interlude
A Stranger at River House (2020)
Owen Maddox was at River House, but he was planning to leave for the first time in many weeks.
The house was a large, modern cabin that Owen had bought three years earlier. It sat in acres of forest next to the White River, only a few miles from Mount Rainier, in Washington State. It was hidden away off the highway, down a turning that diverged from a track that was closed for six months over winter and which in the other months led to mountain passes and hikes and campgrounds. River House had been built in the late nineties, designed by an architect from Seattle. It was a long, narrow property with a flat roof, built of wood that had been stained black and with more windows than walls to afford impressive views of the surrounding forest and glimpses of the undulating White River. Owen had chosen River House because it was remote and isolated yet only an hour’s drive from the Seattle airport, and because the weather of Washington reminded him of the rainy, windy days of his youth in Wales. The rain and the wind had made him who he was, and he was comfortable in them.
It was the turning point of the year, too late to be called summerand not yet cold enough for winter, but Owen knew that dark days were coming. He had taken a job to get out into the sunshine for a while. Somebody had requested his services to kill the owner of a casino in Las Vegas. Owen didn’t know the reason why—undoubtedly some sort of organised crime turf war—and he didn’t care. He had been given the name and half the fee—the rest would come when he had delivered. Over the previous two or three weeks he had started gathering the intelligence he needed—architectural plans, and places to source weapons and hire cars, rooms and houses to rent in the Las Vegas area. It was about preparing for every eventuality, and about protecting himself from any investigation that might follow the job. Owen enjoyed this part of the work, the planning and the preparing. Sometimes he lingered over it, taking longer than required. Plan first, act second. That was his mantra.
That day he had been reviewing architectural drawings of the casino, trying to understand where his target spent most of his time. Owen expected that any offices would be deep inside the casino complex, and probably underground, and therefore not a realistic place for a sniper hit. A close-contact hit was too risky, given the prevalence of security and cameras in casinos, so Owen had started to think about doing the job elsewhere, either at a domestic property or somewhere else if the man could be lured away from Las Vegas.
He was working in the sitting room, papers spread out on a coffee table and his laptop open, a cold cup of coffee sitting off to the side. It was a rainy day; rivulets of water ran down the glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows on the eastern side of the house. Beyond the windows was a thirty-foot strip of forest and then the broad, flat White River, tumbling endlessly over itself. Owen stretched and realised he was hungry. Wandering to the kitchen he opened the fridge and found some eggs, bacon, and mushrooms to make an omelette. He stood at the kitchen counter, chopping the mushrooms and listening to the rain on the windows, thinking about a research trip to Las Vegas. He was debating whether to drive or fly down when the hairs on the back of his neck prickled, his senses detecting something and sending up a warning flare for his conscious mind to respond to.
Owen lifted his eyes from the chopping board and saw a figure pressed up against the window at the other end of the sitting room. It was a man; a baseball cap was pulled down on his head and a long, waxed coat covered most of his body. The strap of a bag cut a diagonal line across his chest and rain was bouncing off him and soaking his jeans. The man turned his head slowly, as if scanning the interior of River House, until he was facing Owen directly, watching him.
Owen’s mind scrolled methodically through possible explanations—lost hiker or a breakdown on the highway—and dismissed each in turn. He wondered briefly whether this was someone like him, someone who had been given a job to take him out, but even that didn’t seem to fit. Owen knew the sort of people who would be sent, and they wouldn’t stand at a window staring at him, announcing their presence and making a target of themselves.
Owen put down his knife, keeping his eyes on the figure at the window, and pulled the silver flask from beneath his jumper, rattling the chain. The flask would tell him the truth, he knew. He unscrewed the lid and took a sip, swallowing down the silky liquid. As he tucked the flask back inside his clothes his mind and his senses opened. He stared at the figure, waiting to see his colours, his wings, to read the hidden truth that the flask would reveal.
Colours swelled everywhere else in Owen’s vision: from the trees and plant life and the living, crawling things in the ground of the forest, even the colours of his own butterfly wings creeping in around his peripheral vision. He saw all of this, but the figure at the window had no aura, no colours; he was a black rock in a fast-flowing stream, solid and inert.
Cold fingers crawled up Owen’s spine.
Everyone had wings, everyone Owen had ever seen any time he had sipped from the flask. Young people had the brightest wings and old people the dimmest. Owen’s own wings were dark and multicoloured, stained by the souls of those people he had killed. But there were always wings because everyone had a soul. But this man, this intruder at the window, had no colours, no soul, and Owen didn’t know what that meant.
Owen turned away from the window, pretending that he was reaching for a towel hanging on the wall. Under cover of that movement he pulled a clean knife out of the block on the counter and slipped it into his belt at the small of his back as he turned around again, keeping the knife out of sight. Then he walked through the sitting room to the bookcase to retrieve one of his Glock 19s. He didn’t need to check it was loaded; the weapons he kept around the house were always ready for use. He was always prepared.
He held the weapon behind his back and approached the sliding door. Pulling it open the taps and patter of a thousand drops of rain were pushed into the house by a cold wind.
He waited, but the figure didn’t move.
“What do you want?” Owen shouted, but his voice was drowned out by the drumming of the rain. He stepped out into the downpour and took a few steps along the side of the house closer to the stranger. He could see the face beneath the baseball cap now: ordinary, tanned and lined, dark eyes that were wide open as Owen approached. That face made Owen uncomfortable, but he couldn’t say why. It was a sensation, a feeling he couldn’t shrug off, like indigestion after a bad meal. The whole forest, the whole world was alive with beautiful colours, but this man was not, this man was colourless, a black hole surrounded by rainbows.
“What do you want?” Owen demanded again, anger putting a sharp edge in his voice.
The man took a nervous step backwards, and then another, as if intimidated by Owen’s approach. Then he moved an arm, reaching into his coat with one hand.
“Don’t!” Owen barked, swinging his Glock around to point it at the stranger, narrowing his eyes against the rain.
The stranger stopped moving briefly, staring at the weapon, but then he withdrew his hand from the coat to reveal only a folded piece of paper. Owen watched and the man unfolded the paper and held it out towards him.
“What’s this?” Owen demanded, revealing none of the confusion he felt. It rippled and striated through the colours of his wings at the edge of his vision.
The man took a hesitant step forward and flicked the paper, as if gesturing for Owen to take it. It was a map, Owen saw, a hand-drawn sketch of River House and its surroundings.
“Who gave you that?” Owen asked, unsettled by the idea of someone drawing maps of his house.
“It’s my friend’s,” the man replied, speaking so quietly that the rain almost drowned out his words. “It led me to you.”
Owen snatched the map from the man’s hand and studied it briefly, keeping the gun trained on the stranger. It was impossible to make sense of the drawing in the rain.
