Page 97 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
“A quick hug?” Magda asked, opening her arms. “For old times’ sake?”
Will allowed it, and they embraced briefly. “Thank you, Will,” Magda said into his ear.
“For what?” he asked.
“For thinking about it.”
She let him go and he met her gaze, his eyes unreadable. Then he turned and left.
***
After Will’s departure, the three of them wandered down into the basement, the Society meeting room. It was still a mess. Frank’s blood still stained the floor, and the Clockwork Cabinet showed its damaged face to the room. The Impossible Box and all of its contents, and the book with its beautiful golden cover, were in the safe behind the bookshelf, where they had been ever since the night of Frank’s death. Magda didn’t like to think about the Impossible Box—it only conjured images she preferred to forget: not of Frank, although that was hard, but of Lukas and the hope in his eyes before she had betrayed him. Magda had struggled to get that image out of her mind. She found herself wondering what it was like for Lukas, inside the Impossible Box. Was he still conscious? Was he floating through an impossible void? Was he happy surrounded by all the other magical things? Or was he in agony?
As if reading her mind, or perhaps because she had been staring at the bookshelf that concealed the safe, James asked her, “Do you think about Lukas?”
She tried to shrug off the question, avoiding James’s gaze.
“Of course she does,” Henrietta said. “She’d be crazy not to.”
“Do you ever think about what you could have done?” James persisted, as Magda moved past him to the table in the centre of the room.
“What do you mean?” she asked, even though she didn’t really want to talk about it.
“Well,” James said, frowning and looking at the floor. “You have amagic book that could do anything. Do you wonder if you could have made something with the book to... I don’t know... to fix him? Like the pills fixed me?”
Magda stared at James, at his dark eyes. The question irritated her, but she didn’t know why.
“You couldn’t fix him,” Henry answered, shaking her head once. “Fix him how? Make him so he wasn’t so off-putting? He’d still be unkillable, wouldn’t he? And he still knew all about us. No. Too much of a risk. Best he was put away. Magda did what had to be done.”
James nodded slowly but his eyes didn’t move from Magda. She sensed that he wanted her to answer.
“I think about him all the time,” she admitted, hearing her own voice tremble with the burden of this truth. “I hate what I had to do. I hate that I feel like I betrayed him. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way he looked at me.” She shrugged. “In some ways, he didn’t do anything wrong, really, did he? He wasn’t evil... he was just... dangerous.”
She sighed heavily and looked at the floor, trying to calm the brutal fistfight of emotions within her. Grief from Frank’s funeral; despair from all that she had learned about her mother; and horror from all that she had experienced, and what she had done to Lukas. Lots of emotions, more than Magda was used to managing.
She looked at James again. “Just because I hate it and it was the worst thing I’ve ever done, it doesn’t mean it was wrong. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right thing to do.”
James held her gaze in silence, as he seemed to consider her answer. Finally, to Magda’s immense relief, he nodded once and smiled at her, his expression softening to one she preferred, one sheloved.The atmosphere relaxed, and Magda felt her unsettled emotions settle a little too.
“If you are going to keep the Society going, can you at least get a cheerier meeting room?” Henrietta suggested, waving her whisky tumbler around. “At least some natural light or something.”
Magda laughed. “Yeah. I don’t suppose we need to meet here.”
“A question for another day,” Henrietta said.
“So this is the Clockwork Cabinet?” James asked, strolling across the room to stare at the cabinet, hands on his hips. “It’s beautiful.”
“Yes,” Magda said. “A really lovely piece. Shame about the bullet holes.”
“I’m sure I could find a good craftsman,” James said, looking at her over his shoulder. “I could get it repaired. Fix it up. You would never get rid of the scar, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. If you want to still have a cabinet to keep all the things in?”
“I’d love that,” Magda admitted. It seemed to her the Clockwork Cabinet was an essential part of the Society, even if it hadn’t been for many years. Shewantedit to be. She looked at Henry. “What do you think?”
Henrietta shrugged, indifferent, and swallowed some of her whisky. “You keep the pretty cupboard if you want, dear.”
“I think it would be nice,” James said, running a hand over one of the bullet holes. “It will take a while. I’d need to find an exceptional cabinetmaker, and good craftsmen are in high demand. I might have to be here quite often.” He looked at Magda. “If you don’t mind me hanging around.”
Magda felt Henry watching them. She glanced at the other woman and saw a smirk on her face. Magda looked back to James, who was watching patiently.
