Page 71 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
All of this was alarming to Will, all of these awful magical things out in the world, so many, but he was distracted by something more interesting that he noticed. Before the entry for the map that Imelda had created, the pages seemed to fall in a strange way. Will frowned and brought the book closer to his face to inspect. He laid the book flat and ran his finger along the inner spine, feeling the rough edge where a page had once been. He nodded to himself as he drew the only conclusion: a page had been cut out of the book. It had been done neatly, as if someone had run a craft knife along a ruler.
“So there’s a page missing,” he murmured to himself. He felt his interest piqued, like sitting down to an empty crossword puzzle, or receiving a watch to repair that he had never worked with before.
The missing page was easily overlooked. Someone flicking casually through the pages wouldn’t have felt the gap, and Will didn’t doubt that neither Magda nor Henrietta would have noticed. After all, they did not have his eye for detail.
Will thought about this discovery for a few moments, sipping his espresso. The missing page was immediately before the atlas, which had been created by Imelda Sparks with Frank’s knowledge. Will wondered if Frank had removed the page. He was, after all, a man who liked to keep secrets.
But why?
What magical item had been created that Frank—or whoever it had been—didn’t want anyone to know about? Or did cutting a page out of the book do something magical itself? Did it unmake the item that had been made?
It was then that something else occurred to Will, something significant. The artefacts collected by the Society—the items that it nowseemed had all been created by the book Will held—couldnotbe destroyed or damaged. Everyone in the Society knew this: it was why the items were kept safe. Because they couldn’t be burned or broken or bent. They were indestructible. But if a page could be cut from the book, that meant the book was not so robust. The bookcouldbe damaged, and itcouldbe destroyed. To Will, that told him that the book was a different sort of object entirely from the items it created, but he did not know what that meant.
Will methodically worked his way back through the pages of the book, looking for any other places where a page might have been cut out. He got all the way to the front of the book before he found another place where a page had been similarly removed: the very first page inside the front cover was also missing.
“Two pages,” he murmured to himself.
Will got up from the dining table and made himself a second espresso, this time deciding to pour a little double cream into it just to make it a little more indulgent. On the radio the Beatles were playing one of their earlier songs, a simple song about love and boys and girls. Will let the tune play through and then carried his cup back to the dining table.
He recalled what Magda had told him that morning:You just hold it and say what it is you want. He held the book in two hands and stared at it for a long time.
Will still hated magic. He hated it on principle because it didn’t follow the rules of the world. He hated it because his father had always been more interested in magical items than he had ever been in Will. And he hated it because it kept intruding into his life no matter how hard he tried to push it out. But there was one thing Will hated more than magic: he hated a mystery. He hated a puzzle he couldn’t solve. His whole life he had enjoyed taking things apart, studying them, understanding them, and putting them back together. He loved watches because of the intricacy of their engineering—they were complex, but explicable with study and dedication. For the opposite reasons, he hated not knowing why Frank had cut the pages from the book: he could never work it out by study, by taking it apart. There was no way to find the answer.
That is, no way that didn’t involve magic.
Will wanted an answer to the mystery. He wanted to know why Frank had removed the page near the end, and why the page at the front had been similarly excised.
“I want replacement pages for the ones that have been cut out,” Will said to the room. “I want pages that show me what was written upon them.”
Will waited, glancing around as if he expected a puff of smoke or a magical bang, but there was nothing, just the background noise from the radio.
Then he looked at the book in his hands and he saw that it wasglowing.
He dropped it in shock and pushed his chair back from the table. The book had a cloud around it, a golden haze that seemed to sparkle and pulse.
Will stood up and backed away. “What have I done?”
Then the glowing faded and diminished, and the book was just a book again. Will approached cautiously, heart thumping in his chest. The book didn’t move, didn’t leap up at him, didn’t glow. It was just a book. He picked it up, standing at the table, and leafed through it, but the two pages were still missing; they hadn’t reappeared in place. He checked through each of the pages he had already studied, but nothing had changed. On the page after the one describing the map that Magda had created there was a new entry, words in black ink that repeated what he had just said moments earlier, and a sketch of two rectangular shapes that Will realised were supposed to be book pages. The words—thehandwriting,if that was what it was—was in the same script as on the other pages in the book.
“Huh,” he grunted in surprise. The ink was dry on this new entry, as if it had been there for years, not seconds.
Will exhaled, releasing frustration and unhappiness in a long breath. He hated it all. The glowing and the ink magically appearing on pages. How could you trust something if you couldn’t tell if it was minutes old or decades old? What sort of world would it be if you couldn’t trust anything? It eroded the foundations of every part of life.
Will flicked through the rest of the book, cover to cover. Folded in half between the last page and the back cover he found something that he was sure hadn’t been there earlier. He extracted the piece of paper and unfolded it to reveal that it was in fact two pieces of paper, folded together, two pages the same size as the pages of the book. The backs of the pages were blank, but when he turned them over, he saw that the first page had text on it.
“‘This isTheBook of Wonders,” Will read aloud. “‘Hold it in your hand and create wonderful things.’”
Will studied the words, trying to work out why someone—Frank?—had removed that page. Was it because it revealed what the book really was? Without that front page, you wouldn’t know that the book could do anything. You would just think it was a sketchbook of items. Someone was trying to keep the secrets of the book’s power hidden, and Will found he approved of whoever had done that.
He put the first page aside and looked at the second page. This page had words and a sketch in black ink.
Will looked at the sketch and read the words, and then he dropped the page to the table in horror.
He felt himself backing away from the table, his eyes fixed and unblinking on the page as he realised the awful, terrifying thing his father and his friends had done with the book.
And he knew why Frank had cut the page from the book. He understood the secret and the shame that Frank had been trying to hide.
The Man with the Bag
