Page 77 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
Magda was on her knees, desolate and destroyed and racked with sobs, watching as Imelda struggled against the vines that restrained and strangled her and pulled her back into the woods out of sight. Everything that Magda had ever known and loved had been taken from her.
The Society was not what she had always understood it to be, its history a lie.
The Clockwork Cabinet was empty, not full of wonders and magic.
Frank was in hospital, fragile and broken.
Henry and James were gone, swallowed by the earth.
And now Imelda had been returned to Magda as a beast, an animal, only to be swallowed by the forest before her eyes.
Magda had always considered herself resilient and robust, but had she ever really been tested? Had she ever faced any real trouble? She didn’t feel strong now. She was made of tissue, translucent and diaphanous, easily blown apart by a passing breeze.
She lifted her eyes to the sky far above, her cheeks raw and wet from her tears, her chest hitching with her sobs. What could she possibly do in the face of such impossible horrors?
She heard footsteps, the easy pace of someone walking without concern. She dropped her eyes from the heavens and saw Lukas approaching. His face was expressionless, like a mask, but looking at him stillpained Magda, still made her feel unwell. He was justwrong;something fundamental was broken or missing. And she hated him in a way she had never hated anything in her life.
“We can be friends,” he said, but he didn’t smile. “We can share the magic things.”
Such a simple request, spoken almost politely, as if all that had just happened had been a simple misunderstanding.
Magda shook her head, sniffing back her sobs. This strange, awful man had the Impossible Box and other magical items and it seemed that not even speeding cars could stop him. “I hate you,” she growled. She saw and was delighted by the impact of her words on the man’s expression. His mouth opened to form an O of surprise, his eyes widening. “I fucking hate you.”
She thought of the pendant lying against her chest, that gift from her mother, and before Lukas could reach her or stop her, she shot up into the sky, up to where the air was thin and everything that had happened was far away.
She raced east, over a landscape of highways and fields and forests, moving faster than she had ever moved before. She just wanted to be home. She wanted to escape.
***
In the darkness, beneath Alabama
Henrietta found Owen Maddox first, the man entirely entombed by dirt and rocks, his body swallowed. His face was set into a permanent scream, mouth and eyes wide open, but the dirt had pressed into his eye sockets, destroying the eyeballs, and it had crawled into his mouth and down his throat. All life had left him, all breath compressed out of him, his evil role in the world come to an end.
Good riddance.
But Henry felt her ghost heart falter at the thought that James—that lovely kind man—had faced the same fate.
She kept moving, exploring the underworld, feeling the rhythms of the earth.
James was not far from Owen, the two men having separated in the fall. But James wasn’t entombed and suffocated; he was curled up and alive in an unnatural cavity in the earth, as if the ground had cradled him protectively like a hand cupped around an insect. Henry detected the void first, as sudden nothingness where there had been the texture of dirt and stone, and then she heard the noise of breathing, the glow of blue light from a phone and James’s face illuminated from below like that of a character in a horror film. It was unbelievable.
No, it’s magic.
Without saying anything to James, Henrietta put a hand on his leg and ghosted him.
“Henry!” James exclaimed, moving the phone around to illuminate Henrietta where she emerged from the walls of his tomb. “Can you believe this?” he asked. “Found myself in this man-sized hole. You have no idea how pleased I am to see you!”
“Come on,” Henrietta said, impatient to get back to Magda.
She pulled James close to her and the two of them rose up together through the earth and into the relief of clear air, like stepping out of a humid day into an air-conditioned room. They glanced around as they emerged and saw the man called Lukas sitting cross-legged on the ground, just beyond the car Owen Maddox had driven at him. He was alone, and there was no sign of Magda.
James pulled Henry into a crouch next to the car, peering out to watch as Lukas removed the Impossible Box from his bag and placed it on the ground in front of him. He opened the lid and reached inside, his arm disappearing into the box up to the elbow.
Henrietta barely dared breathe as she wondered what he would pull out.
“Where is Magda?” James whispered urgently in her ear.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, her gaze fixed on the strange man and the box. “But I have to get the Impossible Box. I have to take it from him.”
