Page 79 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
“It doesn’t matter.” Frank’s voice was a whisper. “It’s in the past. No good will come of it.”
Will sighed unhappily and slumped back on the chair. “I used the book,” he said, deciding that he had to press the issue. “I used the book to re-create the pages you cut out.”
Some colour came to Frank’s cheeks then and his eyes flashed angrily at Will, like a man betrayed.
Will reached into his coat pocket to remove a folded sheet of paper. “What I don’t understand,” he continued, as Frank watched him unfold it and hold it up, “is how this can be?”
He turned the page around and laid it on the bed, on top of Frank’s legs.
“‘I want a child that will live,’” Will said, reading the words that were penned below a sketch of a human baby, lying on its back with thin arms and legs pulled up. The baby was staring out from the page, from a strangely expressionless, blank face.
“What was this, Frank?” Will asked, tapping the image on the paper, aware of the volume of his voice rising, fuelled beyond his control by the outrage he felt. “They used a magic book to make ahuman?”
Frank shook his head slowly, and Will saw tears pooling in the old man’s eyes. “That child wasn’t human,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “It couldn’t be.”
“What happened to it?” Will demanded. “What happened to the baby?”
Frank closed his eyes again, and Will waited, listening to the endless ticking of the bedside clock.
Part Four
The Roses of Bell Street
Magda Destroyed at Home
Magda was broken in every possible way. Her body was exhausted, and her mind was a room ransacked by intruders, all order and sense destroyed, all familiar items shattered and strewn about. All she wanted to do was hide. She was in a safe place, perhaps the only true safe place she had ever known—her own bed with the covers pulled over her head and the curtains closed against the world. In her childhood home. Hermother’shome.
At the thought of her mother Magda flinched physically, like an instinctive reaction to an unexpected loud noise. She pushed all thoughts of her mother away and focussed on physical sensation, on the feelings across her body, the sheets and the warmth.
She remembered the last time she had been lying so cocooned, the morning before flying to Alabama. It was surely only a day or two previously, but it felt like a decade ago. Magda remembered the smells of cooking and the sounds of conversation from the rooms below her, that sense of not being alone, of happy company in a normally empty house. She remembered...
Henry... and James!
Her heart tore apart and she rolled over on the mattress to press her face into her pillow, to scream and shriek her horror at the loss of her friends. Her imagination was immediately eager to upset her, bringingher things like a waiter serving food: vivid images of her friends entombed in the ground, suffocating in the darkness, alone.
Stop it! Stop torturing yourself!
But why should she stop? Had she not been the reason that James and Henry were now dead? The strange man—Lukas—might have opened the earth and dropped them in, but Magda had been the one who had made them go in search of Owen Maddox.
She sat up, suddenly needing to move, to escape her own recriminations, and the cold air on her face made her wince. Her skin was raw and dry like the worst kind of sunburn and for a moment she was confused why that was.
Then she remembered: she had flown. All the way from Alabama to home.
It had all been too much—her mother, Owen Maddox, the shooting, James and Henry disappearing into the ground—so she had escaped her terror. The details and duration of the journey were lost to her, but she remembered images: the vast dark land of the US, fields and forests as she raced over them close to the ground; and then the endless coastline stretching out away from her to the north and south. After that, the cold Atlantic beneath her, the colour of morticians’ tables, and the sun rising through wisps of clouds in the far-eastern sky ahead of her. Magda had closed her eyes, rocketing through the air no more than twenty feet above the waves, with the wind cutting her face and screaming in her ears while the memory of her mother screamed in her soul. After an age she had seen the vast sands of the Sahara Desert, a sea of yellow after a sea of grey, heat on her face, and then she had turned north, the sun to her side. Then clouds, skies as grey as the Atlantic and rain as sharp as needles, the crowded streets of London and the Thames a dark snake curling through the city.
And then, finally, Norfolk Road and her home. She remembered falling into bed but not entering the house nor climbing the stairs.
She frowned and immediately felt the pain of her skin stretching. She had to do something about the windburn. She stood up from the bed and the whole room pivoted like a fairground ride, making her reach for the wall to stop herself from falling. She stumbled to her bathroom,found some moisturiser, and rubbed it liberally onto her face, screaming in shock at the sudden agony the lotion inflicted. She didn’t switch on the light; she didn’t want to see how bad she looked.
Standing in the darkness, rubbing cream onto her face, Magda felt a hunger she had never known, as if she were entirely hollow. Her body and her mind and hersoulneeded food. She pulled on a robe with aching, protesting arms and made her way slowly downstairs to the kitchen. She sat at the kitchen counter and ate ravenously for half an hour—whatever she could find that could be consumed quickly: bread and biscuits and soft drinks and bananas. Finally the hunger faded and she started to recognise more sensible thoughts in her mind. Only then did she check the time on the clock in the lounge and see that it was dinnertime, late afternoon. Had she been asleep all day?
She tried to work out how much time had passed since she had left Masters. She had no idea how long it had taken her to cross the Atlantic, and she didn’t know how long she had been asleep. She wanted to go back to bed now, where she didn’t have to think about Henry or James or her mother...
Oh god... Mum... that emptiness in her eyes.
She closed her own eyes, lips trembling as she forced that memory away. She didn’t have time to drown in her terrors. There were things she had to do.
“Frank,” she said, nodding to herself. She had to see Frank.
