Page 2 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

Until I could find those particulars, I wasn’t able to fully explore that section of the dissertation, but I was still able to make some headway in other areas.

Recently I’d been turning my attention to modern ripples of ancient witch hysteria.

This was a tough one because it meant keeping up with the news, and it seemed that in recent times, the world had become increasingly violent and unhinged.

Murders, brutality, horrifying examples of nearly inhuman depravity—they were everywhere I looked.

A few years ago, I could expect to encounter maybe one or two such stories, but now it seemed like every single headline was designed to give me a panic attack.

Was the world really getting that much more intolerable?

Mostly these forays into modernity left me empty-handed and exhausted, but now and then I would stumble onto some gold.

Every once in a while, some incredibly antiquated-sounding accusation of witchcraft would crop up somewhere.

Often it would be in areas that had suffered from witch-hunt troubles in the days of yore—Scotland was a big one—but sometimes it was somewhere closer.

The day everything changed, I was doing some research on recent animal attacks that were attributed to witch-adjacent mythical creatures—vampires, werewolves, and the like—when I’d stumbled onto a recent case in a tiny mountain village in the Rockies.

It concerned a young woman named Sabine étienne who had been mauled beyond recognition by a wild animal—most likely a bear—but whom locals were convinced was the victim of a werewolf attack.

“They’re everywhere here,” a man in the article was quoted as saying.

“They breed them up there.” Something about the case intrigued me.

Perhaps it was the mention of an ominous they and the unspecified up there that drew my attention.

A very grainy photograph of the young woman accompanied the article.

I couldn’t make out much of her face, but with her chic glasses and long blond tresses, she didn’t exactly look like someone who might be attacked by a werewolf, though I suppose even lycanthropy can be modernized.

Intrigued, I flagged the incident as something to circle back to, and for some reason, I mentioned the case to Paloma.

I even showed her the photo while she was knitting.

Paloma had seemed uninterested at the time, but later that night, she started acting strange.

I was reading in the living room when I saw her slowly shuffling toward the front door.

There was something off about it, her movements jerky and erratic.

I set my book down, stood up, and called out to her.

It sounds like an exaggeration to say the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, but that’s exactly what happened.

Why, I wondered, would my body react with utter terror to seeing my cousin walk toward the front door?

I called out again, but she didn’t respond.

When I caught up to her, I grabbed her arm and she whipped around, the fury in her eyes almost blistering.

If you’d asked me before that moment if I’d be able to identify hatred in someone’s eyes, I would have said no, but that day, gazing into Paloma’s absorbingly dark irises, I was certain there was no other emotion it could have been.

I took a step back without even meaning to. “Paloma, are you okay?”

Her eyes bored into me. “I know what you are.”

Because I am conflict avoidant and hadn’t the slightest clue what to do, I laughed and tried to play it off.

“You know what I am?” I joked with forced laughter. “You mean a lazy academic with a bit of a drinking problem?”

She smiled, but it was wrong, somehow not her smile. “Good luck with your research,” was all she said, and then she turned, opened the door, and stepped out into the bustling city. I ate dinner alone that night, and when Paloma returned well after dark, she shut herself up in her room.

I awoke the next morning with a bee in my bonnet about Sabine étienne.

I poured myself a cup of coffee and settled in to work as an especially blistering sun rose over the city.

After reading through my notes from the previous day, I then searched through several databases for anything I could find about the case.

It wasn’t long before I stumbled onto a piece in a small local paper that mentioned her.

It was about the disappearance of another woman, Dr. Isabelle Casimir, who had vanished about fifteen miles from where Sabine was found dead.

There was no accompanying photo, but the article referred to Casimir as a research scientist who worked at Hildegard College in Colorado.

She vanished without a trace exactly three weeks after Sabine was mauled, but the article didn’t mention any biographical information, not even Casimir’s field of research.

The internet didn’t turn up much, but I was able to find an interview with Dr. Casimir on a blog, and that was when things got interesting.

She talked about a recent overseas excavation she’d been on and mentioned a discovery she’d made near Cressing Temple in Essex, describing it as “an interesting artifact. It’s a sculpture that seems to show thirteen female figures in a circle, and at the center is a representation of a human with two faces.

” She went on to say that she had brought the relic back with her to Colorado for further study.

Could it possibly be? Thirteen female figures—the number Murray claimed was representative of a coven—and at the center, Janus, the two-faced god a sect of fertility cults was supposed to have worshiped.

If I could get my hands on that statue, I could reclaim the throughline of my dissertation and potentially undermine Charles’s entire argument.

That could completely destroy him (and also help my career, though that was honestly secondary to me by that point).

Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I suddenly felt very certain that this sculpture Dr. Casimir so casually mentioned could be the key to proving the veracity of Murray’s hypothesis.

My heart stilled for a moment when I remembered the fact that Casimir was missing and that another young woman was dead.

Was it insensitive to think about my research when this woman might be in danger?

Probably, I determined. Yes, it most definitely was.

I bit my lip and pushed my chair back from the desk.

Needing some fresh air, I headed out onto the spacious balcony, stopping in the kitchen to refill my coffee.

Outside, the redwood patio slats, massaged by the rays of the late-morning sun, gave off a pungent, pleasing aroma.

Gripping my mug, I stared out at the city, my eyes trailing from steaming vents and jaded pigeons up to what I could make out of the glorious New York skyline.

It was always possible that nothing untoward had happened to Isabelle Casimir.

It wasn’t wrong of me to be interested in the artifact, not if it could help fill in a missing piece of the historical record.

Charles wouldn’t think twice about pursuing this lead if he saw it.

A sudden panic seized me. What if he already had?

After pouring myself yet another cup of bitter coffee, I settled in at my desk and pulled up Hildegard College’s website.

Could I just cold-call the archaeology department and ask to examine Dr. Casimir’s research?

Inserting myself into an active missing person case didn’t seem incredibly smart, but I was feeling desperate.

The joke was on me, though, because it turned out the college didn’t even have an archaeology department.

A quick perusal of the site made it clear that it was one of those weird colleges that decide they don’t need to have typical majors (think Evergreen State and its Earth Dynamics track, or College of the Atlantic and their single human ecology major).

At Hildegard, the only course of study was Anthropocene Systematics, whatever the fuck that was.

Although there were several impressive photos of recognizable tech moguls standing with faculty in front of architecturally important arches, there was very little in terms of actual information about the school.

The website did, however, have a good deal about their library, the offerings of which struck me as surprisingly impressive.

Located in what had once been a monastery, Hildegard’s library boasted extensive archives of ancient manuscripts—codices, bestiaries, and pharmacopoeias.

Further exploration of the site led me to information about a residency for academics, artists, scientists, and “thinkers” to come to Hildegard College and work on a project using their facilities.

It couldn’t have been more perfect. I had a feeling that what Dr. Casimir had stumbled onto was possibly the linchpin of not only my research but perhaps my entire career.

I just needed to get access to it. Without missing a beat, I emailed the head librarian (a Dorian Dubois) and outlined my situation: I was working on an examination of the intersection of medical herbology and historical accusations of witchcraft (which was of course true), and access to their archives would prove invaluable to my research (which it probably would, especially if they had any rare herbology books that would help me understand the nature of sangdhuppe), and could I have an application for their residency, please?

I just left out the creepy part about how I was actually stalking an artifact that belonged to one of their professors, who just happened to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Thirty minutes later, I received a reply and a link to the application, which I completed and submitted with more efficiency than I’d probably ever done anything in my life.