Page 14 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

THE HORNED GOD

—MARGARET MURRAY, THE GOD OF THE WITCHES

The next morning, after my coffee, I wandered down to the apothecary garden and found Aspen at work in the culinary section, the fresh woody scents of rosemary and mint rising on the breeze.

“Good morning, you,” she said with a bright smile. She wiped her hands on her overalls. “Would you like a cup of tea? I was just about to make one.”

I took her up on the offer, following her over to the garden house.

We went through a little wooden door into what must at one time have been a storeroom but was now a comfy sitting area.

Bookshelves lined the entirety of the back walls—mostly medical and botany books with a few Latin books here and there as well.

I took a seat in a plush green chair as she put a kettle on over in the kitchenette.

“It’s nice back here. Cozy.”

“This is where I spend most of my time,” she said. “You’re welcome to join me whenever you like.”

My gaze shifted to a thick metal door at the back of the room. “What’s through there?”

“Nothing. Just some sleeping quarters for when we have visiting scholars. Also, there are times when it just makes sense to crash out down here.”

A moment later, she brought over two mugs of steeping tea, followed by a smattering of cookies artistically arranged on a yellow plate. I took one as she settled into the couch.

“Did Professor Casimir spend much time here in the garden?”

“Isabelle?” she laughed. “No. She wasn’t a plant person by any means.”

“Were you two friends?” I adjusted my position and sank farther down into the soft fabric of the chair.

She gazed over her mug, her eyes growing distant. “I thought we were,” she finally said.

“What was she like?” I asked. “I find everything about her to be somewhat contradictory. It’s like I can never get a complete picture of her. Like, do you know what she was doing on an archaeological dig?”

Aspen sighed and looked down at her hands. “Can I give you some free advice?”

“Sure,” I said cautiously.

“I would stop worrying about that relic or artifact or whatever it is.”

“Why?”

Aspen shook her head. “It’s a waste of your time.”

“It definitely isn’t. I’m convinced that it’s the key to everything I’ve been working on.”

“Look, Robin, this blog post you’re talking about—this is the first I’m hearing of it. And if she really went on some kind of expedition to Egypt—”

“Essex,” I corrected.

“Wherever. If she went to Essex, she did it somehow without any of us knowing.”

“I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

“Robin, as far as I know, before her big departure, Isabelle hadn’t left the college in more than five years.”

I sat staring at her in silence, completely dumbfounded.

Five years? She really hadn’t left the campus for five years?

That made no sense to me, but I also didn’t know how much I could trust Aspen or why she would necessarily have been privy to everything that Casimir did.

Clearly she wanted to throw me off track, but I hadn’t the slightest idea why.

I decided to change the subject, hoping that it might ease some of the tension that had been building in the room.

Getting up, I wandered over to the bookshelves.

She came to stand beside me, looking over them with a mother’s approval.

“Do you have a favorite book?” I asked.

“It’s quaint of me, I know, but I still love Culpeper.” Standing on her tiptoes, she reached and grabbed a recent print of the seminal seventeenth-century herbal text and handed it to me. “It’s what first got me interested in botany.”

“I can understand that,” I said, turning it over in my hands. “What about fiction?”

“I don’t read novels.” She grimaced.

“Seriously? Why not?”

“I don’t like things that aren’t real. They make me nervous.”

“To each her own, I guess.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t have a favorite book, but if hard-pressed, I would have to say that Jorge Luis Borges is my favorite author.”

“Ah yes,” she said with a giggle that spoke of familiarity. “He was Isabelle’s as well.”

“Really?”

“She made me read some of his stories. I didn’t mind them because they’re basically philosophy, aren’t they?”

I shrugged, not wanting to enter into a literary debate. “Is philosophy more your cup of tea than fiction?”

“It certainly is.” She met my eyes. “I don’t like being lied to.”

Conversation turned to other topics as we finished our tea, but I felt a discernible shift in Aspen’s demeanor. It was ridiculous to think, but for a moment, I sensed something ominous from her—something like fear.

That night I went to bed early, drifting off with a sense that I needed to remember something very important. I tossed and turned, aware of my head against the pillow, a breeze on my cheek, but never fully awake.

I’m dreaming of Charles. We’re in Washington Square Park again, standing by a sundial. Whirls of snow glisten in the light cast by the streetlamps.

“Why did you leave me?” I ask.

I’m angry, yet I’m the one filled with guilt. I feel that I’ve done something horrible, something irreparable. I push him and he stumbles back. He falls against the sundial but catches himself, stands upright. I stare up at the now-blazing orange sun.

“I didn’t leave,” he says. “You left me. Don’t you remember?”

He’s himself again, all warmth and charm and little-boy innocence. There isn’t even a shadow of the monster he would become.

“There is so much I need to tell you,” I say.

He takes my hands. “There’s no time. You need to find the bluebird.”

“My bluebird?” I whisper, and a rush of longing sweeps over me. He’s right. I need to find my bluebird. I need to find it more than anything I’ve ever needed. Even more than I need Charles back.

There’s a noise like a screech owl, and he jolts, turns, holds out his arms as if to shield me from something.

“It’s coming,” he says, and then he turns and holds my face in his hands. “You have to wake up.”

And then I’m in the cabana, sleeping, but also staring at a very tall person standing at the foot of my bed.

No, not a person. The dimensions are all wrong.

It’s more of an animal, isn’t it? An enormous doglike creature, but bipedal, with antlers.

No, horns, twisted horns. I can’t see its eyes, but I know it’s staring at me.

It lets out a terrible, earth-shattering howl.

I close my eyes and it’s gone.

I surged out of sleep, the fear stretching so tightly across my chest that I felt like my ribs might break. Sweating and shaking, I was reaching over to turn on the light when I realized the sound—that howl—had followed me into the waking world.

That’s when I noticed my patio doors were standing wide open.

Somewhere in the distance, a siren was going off.

I could hear voices, movement, and people outside.

Bounding out of bed, I grabbed my robe from the back of a chair and rushed to the door, but before I could open it, Aspen and Lexi burst inside.

Pushing past me, Lexi rushed to the French doors and closed them. Aspen grabbed me by the shoulders.

“Listen to me,” she said, staring me squarely in the eyes. “We’ve had a problem and we need you to stay inside. Do you understand?”

Outside, the siren seemed to move through time and space as if spreading out into a canyon of echoes and then retracting into a shadowy whisper.

I’d never heard anything quite like it. It was like a tornado siren or a tsunami warning, but somehow different, carrying with it an ominous sense of ever-increasing danger.

The sound of hurried footsteps pounding down the brick path drew my attention, and I saw a shock of gray hair flash by. Jim, the handyman?

“What’s happening?” I asked, trying to see around Aspen, but she was blocking my view.

“It’s fine,” she said quickly, “but we need you to stay in here.”

I looked over to where Lexi now sat. She’d pulled a chair over to the French doors and was watching the garden intently. I tried to focus. Whatever was happening, I didn’t have any cultural reference for it.

“Are we … in danger?”

Aspen shook her head quickly. “Everything’s fine.

We just need you to stay in here. Do you understand?

” I looked over at Lexi and suddenly understood that she was staying with me.

I nodded. “Great. I’ll be back in a bit,” Aspen said, and then hurried out the door.

“Lock it behind me,” she called from the other side.

My hand shook as I turned the bolt. I stood there in my robe, alarmed and confused. I looked over at Lexi, but she just sat in the chair, staring outside. When I walked over toward her, she pointed abruptly at the bed.

“Stay away from the windows. Just … just sit on the bed and … and read or something. Don’t talk to me.”

I wanted to tell her about my open doors, about what I thought I’d seen, but it couldn’t have been real, and if I was going to confide in someone, it wasn’t going to be Lexi.

So I did as instructed, trying to make sense of the odd noises that trickled through the walls.

There seemed to be more voices, more footsteps than made sense.

And that siren, swelling up and then receding in an irregular rhythm, chilled me.

I don’t know how long I sat there, but when it ended, it ended suddenly, and I noticed Lexi’s shoulders immediately relax.

“Is everything okay now?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

But she ignored me. A few minutes later, a heavy pounding sounded against the door and I startled, jumping off the bed.

“What’s that? Should I get it?”

Again, Lexi didn’t answer, but she stood, walked to the door, and opened it. No one was there. This surprised me, but it was clear Lexi hadn’t expected there to be.

“You’re free now” was all she said, and then she stepped outside and closed the door behind her, leaving me alone and confused, with a sick feeling rising in my chest.

I wasn’t able to get back to sleep for hours, and when I did, it was fitful, and I had a sense that someone I didn’t trust was nearby, too close.

In the morning, I woke with a start, so frightened by something I couldn’t explain that I jumped out of bed.

Now standing in my room, wincing at the light of the early-morning sun, I understood what it was that had alarmed me.

The French doors to the garden stood wide open again.

“Hello?” I called, trying to sound menacing. When no one answered, I slipped into my robe and stepped out into the garden. “Who’s here?”

My heart thudded uncomfortably in my chest. The garden was empty, but when the steps down to the basement came into view, I knew I had to check down there.

“Hello?” I called as I started down the stairs, my voice echoing around me.

As I stepped into the dank space, it took a moment for me to process what I was seeing. Or rather, what I wasn’t seeing. The bottles were gone, completely gone. The basement was empty.

Shocked, I backed away and darted back up the stairs and into the garden patio. Movement I caught out of the corner of my eye sent a scream bursting from me, and I turned to see Finn poking his head over the wall.

“Are you okay?”

Standing there in my robe, half crazed with exhaustion and paranoia, I probably looked an absolute mess.

“I’m just … I think someone might have been here last night.”

“That racket. I know. I’m sorry you had to go through that. One of the dogs escaped and it was a whole thing.”

“No, it was before that. Initially I thought it was a dream, but now I’m convinced someone was in my room last night. I thought I saw someone, and then my French doors were open. And they were open a second time this morning. Now someone has been in the basement.”

Finn’s smile wavered, his expression shifting to a pinched sort of fear before finally settling on blank uncertainty. Did he know more than he was letting on?

“I’ll come check it out,” he said.

I let him in a moment later and was pleased to find he was once again wearing board shorts and flip-flops.

“Show me the basement,” he said, following me out into the garden. Together, we headed down the steps and into the dark, empty space.

“There were bottles hanging from the ceiling. Hundreds of them. And now they’re just gone.”

Finn shook his head. “Weird. Housekeeping probably cleaned them up.”

“Housekeeping? There’s a housekeeping staff? I thought everyone but you all went home ages ago.”

“There’s a small staff,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Probably responsible for the French doors being open, too. I bet they came in, wanted to air the place out, removed the bottles, and left again. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Together, we climbed back up the steps and into the garden.

“The cleaning staff, eh? And the sirens last night—was that the milkman?”

“I already explained that. It was one of the dogs.”

“A siren like that for a dog? Is this like a hellhound, Cerberus- type dog? It all seemed a little extreme for a dog. And my doors were open last night, too, not just this morning. Was that the cleaning staff, too? In the middle of the night?”

Whatever uncertainty he’d been feeling now gone, he smiled, a comfortable, brilliant smile, and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.

“I have no idea. Maybe keep your doors locked. A year ago, that would have been a ridiculous thing to say, but since Isabelle disappeared, this place hasn’t felt the same.”

“What do you think really happened to her?” After last night, her disappearance had taken on a decidedly more ominous tone.

He shrugged. “Fuck if I know.”

I sat on the stone bench at the center of the garden and stared up at him. “You don’t seem especially bothered by it.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re not worried about her?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“But everyone else is despondent. Dorian called her an angel. Everyone else keeps talking about what a genius she was and how much you needed her work.”

He shook his head. “They’ve all got it wrong. Look, she was gifted or whatever, but the work she was doing, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t ethical. I’m glad she’s gone.”

“You’re glad?”

“Okay, fine,” he said, sighing deeply and gazing skyward.

“Someone will probably tell you, so why not me? I couldn’t stand Isabelle.

Despised her, even. And it was mutual. Most likely she disliked me because I knew what a terrible person she was.

She was pissed she didn’t have me fooled.

We were enemies, in fact. Sounds silly to say, but it was true. ”

“You’re not answering my question, though. What do you think happened to her?”

“I told you already,” he said, patting me on the head. “Fuck if I know.” And with that, he left the cabana.