Page 21 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

MONSTERS

So when the earth, still completely covered with fresh muck from that just receded flood, was heated by the sun’s rays, she produced countless species; some were the old ones, restored, and others were monsters, novel in their shapes.

—OVID, METAMORPHOSES

The next morning, I spent some time trying to understand the divination tools I’d found, but made little progress.

I knew they had to be important, but I was also keenly aware that I had no idea what to do with them yet.

Instead, I turned my attention to the Coleridge poem, but came away with equally little, aside from a certainty that I would have made a terrible sailor.

I decided to table it and focus instead on the botanical drawing.

I knew it had to be some kind of clue, the first step of which meant identifying it.

So I headed to the scriptorium and settled in with a stack of botanical texts.

Considering the amount of time I’d spent wading through those tomes in recent days, I would have thought the task might have been quicker, but it took me quite a while before I found a plant that looked remotely like the illustration.

Thapsia garganica, also known as deadly carrot.

The similarity to my drawing wasn’t exact, but there was a likeness that I couldn’t ignore, so I settled in to read about it.

A poisonous plant that had proven deadly to grazing animals, especially to camels, Thapsia garganica had long been used in traditional medicine as a purgative and analgesic.

Apparently, it was also extremely beneficial for the lungs.

I tapped my pen against my notebook and sighed deeply.

Could this possibly be what someone was trying to communicate with me? Deadly carrot?

My head was spinning and I needed some air, so I decided to walk down to the apothecary garden and see if the plant in question might be growing somewhere in there.

The day was lovely, with a light breeze tinged with just a hint of coolness.

I experienced a sudden upwelling of optimism and excitement when I saw Aspen, pruning shears in hand, leaning over some shrubs she was tending, appraising them with an intense and quizzical gaze.

Surely she would know about deadly carrot.

But when I asked her if she had any growing on campus, she looked at me like I was a lunatic.

“In this climate? Never.”

“You don’t think there is any way it could be hoopoe’s blood, do you?”

“No, this wouldn’t be an ingredient in any kind of scary witch tonic. It’s basically just a carrot, Robin. Carrots aren’t scary,” she said before returning her attention to her vegetal wards.

Disheartened, I wandered back toward my cabana.

It appeared that I was at an impasse. The divination tools were a dead end, the Coleridge poem was a dead end, the deadly carrot was a dead end.

It felt like I’d had too much information dumped on me all at once—too many clues and no solutions when really the only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to find the relic.

I’d been assuming that the clues would lead me to it, but what if I had it all wrong?

What if they were actually a wild-goose chase meant to distract me, to lead me away?

Although I had already searched the cabana, I was constantly tormented by the fear that I had missed something.

What if the relic was here, somehow hiding in plain sight?

The thought filled me with a compulsion so strong it almost frightened me, and once again, I found myself searching the space, only this time, it was as if something had overtaken me.

In a frenzy, I turned the place upside down, pulling out every cushion, searching in every crack and crevice, every cabinet.

At one point, I even contemplating prying up the floorboards, but I wasn’t quite there yet.

That’s not to say I didn’t spend a good half an hour searching for loose ones.

Once I started looking in earnest, though, I couldn’t stop.

I spent the rest of the day turning over every stone I could find.

I started in Casimir’s office, looking through the detritus in the closet, but finding nothing.

I bothered Dorian in his office, asking when he might be going to that storage space in Denver, but he deflected.

Soon, he assured me. In the meantime, he would appreciate my not snooping around the house.

He didn’t use the word snooping, but his meaning couldn’t have been clearer.

I walked the grounds for a while, eventually heading over to the main academic buildings.

I found my way inside a particularly stately French Norman building.

The exterior felt like something out of a fairy tale, but inside it felt like a ghost ship.

The classrooms were unlocked, but they had the aspect of having been abandoned suddenly.

I went room to room, but all I found were discarded blue books, and in one classroom, a chalkboard onto which someone had once scrawled Surprise Man!

I had thought I was alone in the building, but on the third floor, near one of the circular stairwells, I passed an office and saw Lexi bent over a stack of papers with a pen.

She looked up suddenly, surprised to see me. “What are you doing up here?”

“Just exploring,” I said, quickly glancing around her office.

“Make yourself at home,” she said, and I knew she intended it ironically, but I played dumb.

“Thanks,” I said as I took a seat on a puffy pink chair, imagining the poor students who had someone as petulant as Lexi determining their academic fates.

“You’re a behavioral psychologist?”

“Mmm,” she said, taking a sip from a travel mug on her desk. “Yes. Why?”

“I’m just trying to get a full picture of this place. So your work, does it overlap with Isabelle’s?”

“No.”

I tried not to be too obvious as I scanned the bookshelves. “And what’s your specialization?”

She shook her head quickly. “It’s niche. Suffice it to say, if someone would just give me a gaggle of children to raise entirely without environmental influence, I would be a very happy gal. Unfortunately, that’s unethical.”

“It certainly sounds unethical. So your work really never overlaps with Isabelle’s? It seems like the fields of behavioral psychology and cognitive neuroscience might overlap somewhat.”

She flashed her brilliant smile like she was the belle of a press junket. “They don’t.”

“I’m curious, though, I know she was a cognitive scientist, but I can’t get a clear picture of her work. Can you tell me anything about it?”

Taking another sip, she smirked. “Not allowed, I’m afraid.”

“What, did you, like, sign an NDA or something?”

She looked surprised by that, but remained unflappable.

“Yes” was all she said. “Look, Isabelle was a mystery, and if there’s something specific you want to know about her, I’d ask Aspen.

Those two were tight—annoying little polymaths always babbling away until the wee hours.

If it’s insight into Isabelle, honestly, I’m the last person you should ask. ”

“Did you two not get along?”

“Ha!” She picked up her mug and took an enormous swig. I was beginning to think there was something stronger than coffee in there. “Did no one tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“We used to date.”

“No. I had no idea. You must be worried about her.”

“Worried? No. She broke up with me. She’s a heartless bitch, it turns out.”

We locked eyes, as if each daring the other to speak. There was a palpable tension between us, a sort of violent chemistry that I half suspected might one day end in mutually assured destruction.

“Sounds tough,” I said.

She held my gaze an uncomfortably long time, an indiscernible emotion brewing in her crystalline eyes.

“There are worse things.” She looked at me like I was supposed to understand what that meant, and then she motioned to the door.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I have work to do.

Can you…” She made a shooing motion with her hand, and that was that.

Eventually I called it a day and retreated to my cabana’s patio garden.

Settling in with a warm cup of Earl Grey tea, sweetened to perfection with milk and sugar, I resumed my Thapsia garganica research.

After reading a while, I was stunned to come across an image that looked remarkably like the drawing I’d found, and slowly I began to understand why I hadn’t been able to locate it in any of the pharmacopoeia I perused.

It turned out that the plant in question was called silphium and had been extinct for thousands of years.

Pliny the Elder described it as a wonder drug of sorts.

Most likely a member of the Ferula genus, it appeared one day after a “black rain.” Its resin was said to cure everything from fever to warts.

It was also somehow both a fertility booster and a contraceptive, and there was some indication that it had other properties, more mystical ones to which Pliny gave no credence, but to which later occult scholars vaguely alluded.

One text described it as “the lifeblood of the Terrible Ones,” but I couldn’t find an attribution on that, and I came across it in only one source.

Before it went extinct, it grew in an area called Cyrene, located in present-day Libya, resisting cultivation but growing plentiful and wild. It was so beneficial and sought-after that the Romans quickly got in on the action, exploiting the Cyrenes and the plant until it was no more.