Page 28 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

Right from the beginning, nothing at Hildegard had made any sense.

My unremarkable reality had been shifted askew, turned on its head.

Was I part of some experiment? Some cult initiation?

It stood to reason that the bounty yielded from the previous leg of this bizarre treasure hunt should provide the clue to solve the desk lock.

That was how this worked, wasn’t it? Someone was leading me from clue to clue, wanting me to progress.

So most likely I had all the information I needed to get into that desk.

I examined the lock more closely. Thirteen letters.

I thought back to the botanical drawing.

The words scrawled on the back had been the very deep did rot.

I’d assumed this would provide the base letters for another anagram, but that phrase was seventeen letters, and there were only thirteen here.

Still, it was worth a try. I entered those first thirteen letters: the very deep di, but as expected, that did nothing.

Then I tried Coleridge, but that was four letters too short.

What was I missing? I ran my palms over the smooth blue surface and tried to think.

Scanning the room, I searched for anything that might serve as a supplemental clue, but with the wealth of books and little else, there was both too much and too little in terms of options.

No, I had to work with what I had. Returning to the desk, I sat down, tented my fingers under my nose, and exhaled deeply. Think, Robin. Think.

I tried a few more ineffective permutations of anagrams for the very deep did rot, leaving off letters mostly at random, but I knew this wasn’t the path.

The previous clue had reveled in the playful use of language.

So Isabelle liked words. She liked poetry.

Maybe she herself was a poet. I needed to refocus on the poet himself, on Coleridge.

What did I know about him? I knew he was one of the Romantic poets along with Shelley and Keats and that lot.

I knew he was a hopeless opium addict. I knew he claimed that his great poem, “Kubla Khan,” had been interrupted by a person on business from Porlock, but that had too many letters as well.

No. It needed to be simpler. I closed my eyes and counted letters.

Samuel Coleridge = 15 letters

Samuel T Coleridge = 16 letters

Sam T Coleridge = 13 letters

Bingo. I tried it, but still nothing, so I got to work looking for anagrams. I wrote out Sam T Coleridge and began rearranging the letters. The first few I came up with didn’t work: domestic regal, dogmatic leers, disco telegram—I quite liked that one.

And then there it was, sitting right on the page. It practically jumped out at me as if I’d seen it before. I hadn’t exactly seen it, but I had heard it: Latecomers dig. The words Jim had said to me at the shed.

I entered the letters, and when I slid the final one into place, a shifting sound issued from inside the desk, and the drawers unlatched and sprang open a centimeter or so.

Carefully I pulled open the top drawer to find an ancient-looking book and a manila envelope.

I opened the envelope and slid its contents onto the desk.

It was a single photo from the same series as the photo Dorian had shown me, that same glittering gathering of flattering candlelight and stylish cocktails.

A pair of large male hands flashed in front of the camera, though, partially obscuring Lexi and Finn.

I exhaled. I had been expecting something awful—dismembered limbs, a throne made of skulls—but this was just a photo of a group of friends.

Setting the photo down, I turned my attention to the book.

I saw that it was called The Book of Widows, and when I opened it, I was elated to see the symbols that corresponded to the widows’ keys I’d found.

So this was the text that explained those keys, laying them out like a chart with almost mathematical precision.

The left side of each page showed a set of three of the symbols followed by an explanation.

I ran my finger along the top line. Similar to a chart to help a diviner understand a selection of runes or even the hexagrams in the I Ching, this seemed to give an interpretation for a trio of tiles when pulled together.

As I stared down at the images in the book, I could almost find meaning in them, but not quite.

Vibrant Earth, Desolate Moon, Stable Sea

From a mountaintop, he sees three new goats. A wolf attacks. It takes only meat. The toad looks on.

Flipping the page, I selected another:

Desolate Earth, Stable Moon, Desolate Sea

The fox hides in its den. It must not reveal itself until the danger passes. It will not want for food.

Flipping further through in the text, I saw one that seemed appropriate:

Vibrant Moon, Desolate Moon, Stable Sea

Beneath the water, the eye watches the stars. When the mistress calls, it will make itself known.

As I turned the remaining pages, I was once again struck by a vague sense of recognition, though I couldn’t place it. As I examined each entry, a whisper of meaning drifted past me, but expired before I could catch on to anything. I closed the book.

Standing there, I felt a nagging sensation in the pit of my stomach. Something wasn’t right. Something my body knew but my mind did not. Again, I picked up the photo. The hands, was there some clue for me there?

After examining the hands closely, I came to the conclusion that they were unrecognizable and bore no distinctive features. But then something in the background did catch my eye. A young woman dressed as a maid, head bowed, ducking out of the room.

“What?” I whispered as I peered down at the photo, trying to get a better look at the face. “No, it’s not possible.”

I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. The woman in the photo, this anonymous maid ducking out of view, I knew her. It was my cousin, Paloma.

My heart beat so loudly that it was almost deafening.

Paloma had been here? A wave of cold settled over me as the world seemed to turn upside down.

Paloma had been in Colorado? When could she possibly have been here?

Discordant emotions and realities clashed into one another and seemed to coalesce in my heart, which had begun to beat wildly out of control.

Unable to put a name to the kind of fear I felt, I decided the smartest thing to do was to get the hell out of there.

In a panic, I realized I couldn’t take the book and the photo with me, because I needed to swim.

I would just have to return for them later.

Still shaking, I put everything back as I’d found it and closed and locked the front door.

After leaving the little office, I started back the way I’d come, but when I got to the marble pillar, I felt an odd pull to it.

I walked through the plants toward it, and when I reached it, once again I hoisted myself up to sit on it.

From my perch, I looked out over the trees and couldn’t fight the sinking feeling that something terrible had happened here.

Again, something caught my eye, something in the dirt, down at the base of the plants. I hopped down from the pillar and hurried over to it, pushing aside the foliage. There was something down there. As carefully as I could, I dug down until I had a clear view into the dirt. Suddenly I hit it.

Dried blood. A lot of it. All caked into the dirt in patches, fanning out in all directions from the pillar.

I stood up, my spine straightening. It was possible there was some other explanation, but from my current vantage point—the remote location, the ritualistic-looking pillar—it looked a lot like the site of a human sacrifice.

Sick to my stomach, I started quickly toward the lake.

The sun was all the way up now. People would be waking soon.

At a healthy pace, I made my way back to the shore, and when the water came into view, I noticed something glinting down below.

I could see it for only a second before the clouds shifted and it was obscured once again.

I scrambled down the rocks and slipped into the water.

Again, it felt warm in comparison to the brisk morning air.

I started swimming across the lake, hoping to get about halfway to shore before I dove down to see what I could make of the lake bottom.

By then the clouds should have passed and the sun would help me see what, if anything, could be seen.

When I reached a good halfway point, I treaded water to catch my breath, and then, taking a big gulp of air, plunged quickly down through the water, my eyes fixed on something strange below me.

Despite the clarity of the water, the bottom was hard to see.

It was as if something was blocking my vision, a kind of sheen.

Squeezing my eyes shut and then reopening them, I finally saw what it was that had glinted in the morning light.

Instead of a lake bottom, the place was lined with an enormous metal grate.

Kicking hard, I continued down until my hands nearly grasped it.

The visibility wasn’t great, but as far as I could tell, the entire lake was lined with some kind of metal, and down below it, the basin extended into total darkness, an unknowable abyss beyond.

I didn’t understand and I was running out of breath, beginning almost to panic.

I would need air very soon. I ran my hand along the top of the grate, feeling the algae-covered metal.

And when I plunged my hands through the openings, I saw that the other side of the grate was dotted with huge iron spikes.

And then I understood what I was seeing.

I was up against the mouth of some kind of a cage.

The metal spikes were meant to keep something in.