Page 81 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
Magda told her story, everything that had happened since she had left Frank at the hospital two nights earlier. Will brought Magda a mug of tea and a plate of biscuits, but nothing for himself, and Magda continued talking in between sips and munches, as the daylight drained from the grey day, leaving only darkness and the faint glow of the city lights in thewindows. Her voice broke off when she spoke about James and Henry, and she turned her face away, working furiously to suppress the emotion and the tears that threatened to wash over her.
“So I flew,” she said finally. “I just ran away. I flew all the way back here. I flew across the Atlantic Ocean.” She gestured at her face. “That’s what happened to my face,” she said to Will, now sitting opposite her.
Will shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his unhappy frown deepening at her words. “Henry’s dead?”
Magda couldn’t look at him, shame making her burnt cheeks ache, and she couldn’t answer the question. It was too hard to confirm the truth, so she stayed silent, staring at the floor. Somewhere behind the wall, pipes rattled and clanked.
“Who was that man, Frank?” Magda asked finally, not lifting her gaze from the floor. “Why did he have Mum’s bag?”
“Imelda is dead; you saw her body ten years ago when you brought her back to be buried,” Frank said, answering a different question from the one she had asked, speaking with his eyes closed. “If the thing you describe had been Imelda once, it isn’t now. Don’t let it occupy your mind.”
Magda shook her head in frustration, the tears coming despite her efforts. “It’s not that easy.”
“I’m not saying it’s easy,” Frank replied, speaking more harshly than Magda liked.
“Who was that man? Who is Lukas?” she asked, rubbing the tears from her eyes. “He didn’t die. Owen Maddox drove his car at him. He should have been killed or seriously injured, but he just got up and walked away. And there was something not right about him, Frank. Just looking at him made me feel unwell. It was...” She struggled to put into words the sensation she had felt. “It was like smelling sour milk or something. You could tell immediately there was something not right. But I can’t think of a way to explain it. And now he has all the artefacts. He has the Impossible Box. I saw him look into it and nothing happened to him, Frank. Not like Owen. He didn’t collapse or vomit. It’s like it had no effect on him at all!”
Will was watching Frank, and Frank was staring at his hands, clasped over his stomach.
“What?” Magda demanded. “What is going on?”
“He can’t die because he’s an artefact,” Will said quietly, his eyes on the floor. He hesitated, frowned, and then added, “Artefacts can’t be destroyed.”
Magda stared at him, understanding the words he had spoken but making no sense of them. “What?”
Will got up and left the room. In his absence Magda looked at Frank, but Frank just kept looking at his hands.
“What does he mean?” she asked.
Frank closed his eyes, mouth set in a tight line.
Magda wanted to scream at him, to weep in frustration and fear. Her hands went to her hair, gripping it, and she felt oddly like she was trying to keep all of her emotions inside, like her head might explode if she relaxed her fingers.
Will returned and held out a piece of paper to Magda. “There was a page missing from the book you left with me,” he said. “Two pages, actually. But this is the one that matters.”
On the page there was an image of a baby lying on its back, words written beneath it:I want a child that will live.
Magda stared at the image for a long time, hands still in her hair and her eyes stuck on the expression on the face of the baby in the drawing. It was an expression she’d seen before, in Alabama.
“No,” she murmured. She jumped up from the seat and walked away, over to the window to peer through the rain at the dark evening. Then, finding it impossible to stand still, she moved away from the window and towards the kitchen, facing away from the room, from Frank and Will and the horror of what had been revealed to her. She found herself replaying the meeting with Lukas, seeing it through new eyes. “He’s an artefact?” she asked, staring at the kitchen wall.
Will answered. “This is why I hate magic.” Magda turned on the spot, hands dropping to her hips. Will was looking at the page, shaking his head slowly. “I hate stuff like this,” he said, his voice strained thin with emotion. “It’s not right.”
“Your grandfather,” Frank said finally. “Joseph Rudge.”
“I know who he is, Frank,” she said through gritted teeth.
“In 1975 he promised a man a child, a baby, for a woman who couldn’t conceive.” Frank turned slightly and reached for Will, urging him closer. He took the page from between Will’s fingers. “This baby,” he said. He shook his head slowly, eyes on the sketch. “My father told me the baby had died. He told me it hadn’t lived. I never really believed that.”
“Lukas is an artefact created by the book,” Magda said. It wasn’t a question. It was a fact she was voicing aloud, trying to grasp the enormity of it.
“Him being alive...” Frank murmured, his voice so low Magda had to take a few steps forward to hear him better. “It explains things.”
“What things?”
“I tried to trace the family,” Frank said, and it sounded to Magda like the old man was offering a desperate plea in mitigation, a defence before sentencing. “After my father died. I tried, I really did. They’d moved to America, to Chicago, I think.” Frank placed the page on the coffee table next to him and then clasped his hands together over his stomach again. “The man was a gangster. I’m sorry, Magda, but Joseph Rudge was not a nice man. He associated with criminals and the underworld.”
“I don’t care, Frank, I never knew him.”
