Page 82 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
“I’m sure—”
“Get to the point, Frank.”
“Your mother did the right thing getting rid of his name,” Frank reflected, his voice quiet.
“Did you find him?” Will demanded, crossing his arms. “Did you find the baby?”
Frank looked up in surprise, as if he’d forgotten Will was even there. “No. There was no trace. The wife died a few years after they moved to the US, but there was no information about a child.” Frank shrugged. “It was like the child had simply never existed.”
“But how can that be possible?” Will persisted, and to Magda he sounded angry that there wasn’t a better answer. “A baby doesn’t just disappear.”
Magda stepped closer to Will and placed a hand on his arm, tryingto calm him. He glanced at her, eyes flashing hot and then cooling almost immediately.
“Maybe the father abandoned him or dumped him somewhere after his wife died,” Frank suggested. “He wouldn’t have known the boy couldn’t die. There’s no way your grandfather would have told them where the boy came from. Rudge would have pretended the child was an orphan or a stolen baby or something.”
“So the book created a man who can’t die,” Will muttered, snatching up the page from the table. “That’s just great, isn’t it, Frank? And I thought we were supposed to stop the misuse of these things.”
“What do you want from me, Will?” Frank barked back, twisting where he lay to glare at the other man, Magda seeing anger in his eyes that reminded her of how he had spoken to her in Regent’s Park a few days earlier. “It wasn’t me. I changed the Societybecauseof this. To stop awful things like this—things our fathers did—from happening again. I’m on your side!”
“Stop it, please,” Magda begged, her voice weak, her eyes closing. “I can’t bear all the shouting.” She returned to the armchair next to Frank and the room fell silent. The rain beat against the window, thrown by a wind that seemed to be growing stronger by the minute.
“If he’s an artefact,” Magda murmured to herself, “maybe that’s why he likes the other artefacts. Maybe he feels some sort of connection to them. Maybe he understands them in ways we can’t.”
Frank shrugged, not disagreeing.
“He said he could sense them somehow,” Magda continued. “He came to meet us because he sensed the items we were carrying.”
“These things are supposed to do magic,” Will said, waving the page towards Magda and Frank. His mouth was pulled down at the corners, weighed down by misery. “But what magic does this man do? If the book created him, what does he do?”
Frank appeared to consider the question for a moment. “He lives,” he said quietly. “Is that not magic enough? That’s what Joseph Rudge wanted. A child who lives.”
Magda stared at the coffee table, shaking her head slowly at all that had been revealed to her.
Remember when life was fun and easy? Just writing your stories and dreaming about magical items and secret societies? Life was good back then, wasn’t it?
How had so much changed in so little time?
“It probably also explains why he has Imelda’s bag,” Frank continued, sitting up with a sigh. He pivoted on the couch, turning to face Magda, his feet on the floor. “Imelda hadTheAtlas of Lost Things. She was off on her adventure, hunting for artefacts. If this boy, this man, is an artefact, Imelda’s atlas would have led her straight to him. For what is he if not a lost magical thing?”
“He said he met her,” Magda remembered. “He met her out in the wilderness.”
“And he killed her?” Will asked, his voice rising in alarm, almost a shout.
Magda shook her head, wincing at the noise. “He said he didn’t. He said she fell.”
Will coughed a disbelieving laugh. “Of course he would say that.”
“But why was he out there, in the middle of nowhere?” Magda asked Frank. There was so much she still didn’t understand. “And why was he in Alabama?”
Frank shook his head, gazing past her to the window with eyes that were only half open, struggling against fatigue. “I don’t know. How could I know? All that matters is Imelda found him and she was carrying with her the other artefacts she had found on her travels. Things that might explain what you saw in Alabama.”
“And now he has the Impossible Box,” Magda said. “And the chess piece. He took them off Owen Maddox. What will he do with all of the artefacts in the box? Whatcouldhe do?”
Frank said nothing, and Magda thought he was trying to avoid her gaze. He seemed almost embarrassed by all these truths and secrets emerging, and that annoyed Magda. His embarrassment was of no use to them. It didn’t help.
“You have to do something about it, Frank,” Will said, voicing out loud what Magda was feeling. “He was created by that damned book, so he is your responsibility. Otherwise, what’s the point of the Society?”
“Yes. We have to do something,” Magda agreed. “But what?”
