Page 8 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
“All of the items in the cabinet are hugely powerful,” Frank had said, fixing Magda with a look that was a warning. She had never seen him so serious, not even when her mother had died. “All of them could be devastating if used by the wrong people. That’s why we keep them here. That’s why we keep them hidden. And safe. That’s the job of the Society.”
***
“I’ll go,” Magda said, ten years later, and both Will and Frank looked at her. “To Hong Kong. I’ll go.”
Frank’s response was an immediate frown.
“What’s that look for?” Magda challenged him.
“I was thinking Will should go,” Frank said, and Will immediately leaned back from the table, his head shaking.
“I’m not going to Hong Kong,” he said, his voice rising in shock. “Are you out of your mind?”
“He’s the son of a friend of your father,” Frank said. “There’s a connection there.”
“He’s not my friend,” Will argued, his cheeks flushing pink. “I don’t know the man. I’ve never been to Hong Kong. Besides which, I’ve got a business to run, Frank. Let Magda go if she wants. She’s a writer, her time is her own. I don’t have time to galivant around the world.”
“I already said I’ll go,” Magda replied, her annoyance a sharp-edged thing that she now pointed at Frank. “Unless you think I’m not to up to it. Is that what it is, Frank?”
Frank avoided her gaze, shuffling in his seat. “It’s not that...”
“So it’s settled,” Magda said, patting the table like an auctioneer banging the gavel to make a sale. “I’ll go to Hong Kong. I’ll catch the first flight tomorrow. You can set up a meeting with this James Wei for when I arrive and send me the details.”
Will was nodding, agreeing enthusiastically with this proposal, but Frank was still frowning.
“Unless you want to go, Frank?” Magda pressed, trying to needle him. “You want to fly out to Hong Kong? You love warm weather, don’t you? You haven’t left the country in all the years I’ve known you. You can’t make Will go, so either you go or I go.”
Frank pursed his lips, staring straight ahead, like a man who had driven unexpectedly into a dead end and didn’t know how to reverse.
“Honestly, Frank,” Magda exclaimed, “what is the point of me being in the Society if you can’t rely on me to do anything?”
“Fine,” Frank muttered finally. “You can go.”
Magda nodded, satisfied, and excitement swelled within her at the prospect of a trip to Hong Kong, at the possibility of a new magical item, and at the thought of the Clockwork Cabinet opening once again!
“I can’t wait!” she said, beaming at Frank.
The Watchmaker of Blandford Street
The following afternoon, at about the same time that Magda Sparks was taking off from Heathrow on her flight to Hong Kong, Will Pinn was sitting at the desk in the workroom behind his small shop, working on the repair of an old silver fob watch that had come to him by post. These were the jobs he liked the best. He never refused a walk-in client, but he preferred to minimise human contact as far as possible. People were unpredictable and sometimes difficult to read. A letter or an order was clear and straightforward. Will liked that. He liked things to be black-and-white, definitive.
For a while he had employed a woman to attend to customers in the shop, but she had been an expense more than he could justify. He owned the shop—the ground floor of a redbrick townhouse, on a quiet street on the southern edge of Marylebone, almost into Mayfair—but the work of watch repair and sales did not generate enough income for him to be able to pay the wages of any staff, so he had let her go. Will now managed the occasional customers himself. It was the part of his work he liked the least, and although he understood how self-destructive it was to prefer that people didn’t visit the shop, he couldn’t change the way he felt.
Will was peering through a magnifier as he reassembled the innerworkings of the watch, having replaced a worn piece of the mechanism. This was the part of the repair and servicing jobs he enjoyed most—putting everything back in its place, where things fitted properly and did their job exactly as designed. It was the most satisfying moment for him, when he could click the case back together and give the reassembled watch a polish. But that morning his usual satisfaction with his own work was elusive, as intangible as air and impossible to catch hold of. He sighed, misting up his magnifier briefly, and put down the tweezers to roll his chair away from the workbench.
He gazed out to the front of the shop, mulling his own mood. He had been unsettled ever since the meeting of the Society the evening before. He hadn’t slept well, hadn’t been able to face breakfast that morning, and he hadn’t been able to concentrate on his work all day. All because a magical item had appeared out in the world.
The truth was Will hated everything about magic, and he hated that he had to be part of the Society. Magic was the very definition of unpredictability, of something not following the rules of reality. It was everything he dreaded and despised.
In all the time that he had been a member of the Society—something he did out of duty, because his father had required it of him upon his death—there had never been a need to actually deal with magic in any meaningful way. Will had lived his life, as was his preference, as if magic did not exist. He tolerated the twice-yearly meetings of the Society because they were not demanding affairs. He told himself it was good that he had some sort of human contact, and in truth he didn’t mind either Frank or Magda. And the magical items were always locked away out of sight in the Clockwork Cabinet. Will even hated that name—the Clockwork Cabinet. Anyone with any sense knew what “clockwork” meant. There was nothing clockwork about the cabinet.
“Should have been called the Mechanical Cabinet,” he muttered to himself, not for the first time.
But now there was an item, and Magda was going to retrieve it. And worse than that, Frank had seemed to blame him somehow for something his father might have done. As if it werehisfault his father had told a friend about the Society.
There would be another meeting when Magda got back, Will was sure. Even if she didn’t come back with the item, Frank would want them to get together again to talk about it endlessly. And then the next scheduled meeting was in three weeks and that was already hanging over him. Will sighed in annoyance. He had never agreed to so many meetings. It was simply too much.
He got up from his seat at the workbench and crossed to the table on the opposite wall. He had a small espresso machine that he set to work. Coffee often calmed his nerves. He knew it was strange—for most people coffee set them on edge—but it had always been the opposite for him.
