Page 33 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

“You okay there?” Lexi asked. She was out of breath. Must have run to catch up with me.

“No. I was just—I was…”

Moonlight flooded down, illuminating Lexi’s hair so it gleamed like polished brass. I noticed that my stomach was also starting to get fluttery and nervous. “Am I hallucinating?”

Lexi gently touched my arm, but I yanked it away, stumbled, and fell into the dirt.

“Stay away from me,” I said. “You put something in my drink, didn’t you?”

“Jesus, Robin, I was just trying to help. You looked like you were going to fall … which you did.”

“I’m fine,” I said, and the words came out strange and garbled and required too much effort.

“You don’t look fine. Let me help you up.”

The more I tried to speak, and the more I tried to stand up, the more out of control I felt. I started crawling forward, closer and closer to the edge of the woods.

“The tea,” I mumbled.

“The tea is fine. Aspen knows what she’s doing. Your dose was exact.”

I pushed myself up to stand, my feet unsteady, but at least I was somewhat vertical. Still, I stumbled toward the woods.

“Don’t go that way,” said Lexi, and I could detect a note of fear in her voice. “We should head back.”

But I didn’t listen. I just kept heading toward the woods.

“Robin, come back. It’s not safe!”

“I’m fine,” I said like a defensive alcoholic.

She called after me, but then I was in the trees.

There were branches or fingers or something sharp, and they were clawing at me as darkness whispered in my ears.

I moved through, navigating as if by intuition, but with a vague memory of having been in these woods some time in the primordial past. Or maybe it was the future.

Lexi’s voice began to fade, and then I thought I could hear others, a chorus of voices rising up through the night calling my name.

Or someone’s name. Nothing is my name, is it?

Or is it that my name is nothingness? Soon, though, other sounds began to muffle those voices.

Old sounds, old voices, deep and eldritch, as if issuing from the ground itself, booming, sometimes shrieking.

Those other voices were pulling a velvet cloak over reality as I knew it, muffling it, silencing it.

Best to keep moving. Because I knew I needed to get somewhere.

I just wasn’t sure exactly where there was.

Up ahead, the moon shone down with aggressive brilliance, and soon it led me through the tree line and I stumbled out in a field with an enormous temple at its center.

Standing there in the open, moonlight streaming down on me, I noticed that my shoes and the hems of my pants were soaking wet.

How had that happened? Was I losing time?

My head was beginning to clear up a little.

I noticed a figure standing on the steps of the temple.

I’d taken it for a statue initially, but now that it moved, I saw that it was in fact a man—a familiar man.

Up ahead of me, standing in the middle of a clearing in the Rocky Mountains, stood none other than Charles Danforth.

“Charles?” I said, stepping toward him, my voice breaking with emotion. “Is that really you?”

I was so relieved to see him that any residual antipathy was eclipsed by pure elation at the prospect of a reunion.

I raced toward him, met him halfway up the steps, and flung myself into his arms. Only he wasn’t really there, was he?

It was a ghost of a memory, wasn’t it? It had to be.

Still, he smelled the same—exactly the same—and I began to cry.

“Please help me. Please get me out of here.”

“I will,” he said. “I’m here to help. But first I think you should look inside.”

“Inside where?” I asked, my eyes clouded with tears as I gazed up at him. “Oh god, I can’t tell you how good it is to see you again.”

“You look terrible,” he said, laughing a little at the state of me.

I clutched his shirt. “I get it now,” I said, feeling all dreamy. “I really do. I understand what plants do. They open up the other realms. They’re spells. That’s why they’re so dangerous. They open you up to the things that want to use you for.”

“If you say so,” he said.

“Charles, where are we? Where are we really?”

In the depth of the night, the trees seemed to be moving in our direction. Or was it something else?

He kissed my forehead. “Oh, sweetie, we’re in the place monsters come from.”

“Monsters are real?”

“They always have been. You just need to venture far enough out into the woods.” He gestured toward the trees.

“Do you mean here? In these mountains?” I asked, certain now that I had to be dreaming.

“Not just here. But here is very important. You know that.”

“I don’t understand,” I said even though I partially did. I looked up at him, my heart breaking with the memories of a lost friendship. “Charles, who are you to me?”

“I think you know.”

“I thought you were my friend.”

“I am your friend. I always have been.”

“Then why did you leave me?”

He shook his head. “It’s you who left. Don’t you remember?”

“No,” I cried. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Listen, Bugbear,” he said, gently taking my hand, “I’m going to tell you the truth. I’m the only one who ever will.”

Bugbear. My heart felt like it was going to explode. That was his pet name for me. Only not in New York. Somewhere else.

I looked up into the night sky, at the stars swimming like jellyfish above us. Around us the woods were completely silent.

“Why is it so quiet?” I asked, gripping his hand more tightly.

“It’s coming,” he whispered. “If you listen very closely, you’ll hear it out there, moving between the trees.”

Once he said that, it was like a switch was turned on. I could hear something. And now I realized that maybe I could always hear it. Maybe that thing, whatever it was, was always out there, just out of sight, moving invisible through the trees.

“What is it?”

He sighed, adjusting his knit burgundy hat. “Let me ask you something. What is the purpose of alchemy?”

“Aspen said it’s to prove the existence of God. She said that they’d done that somehow.”

“Not them,” he said. “Those who came before us. Long ago. They proved the existence of God by proving its opposite. And now it must never get out,” he said, raising a hand toward the movement in the woods.

“The devil?”

“It’s more complicated than that. It’s impossible to put a name to it because we can’t comprehend what we can’t comprehend.

We die in wars, unwittingly offering up libations in its name.

Unknowing, unthinking, we kill each other in the name of a god or country or cause, convinced we’re doing it of our own free will, but really we are just ants, working in tandem, providing the necessary offerings to placate a monster. ”

“This monster?” I whispered.

He nodded. “Great slumbering horned gods.”

“What happens if it gets out?”

“You mean if they get out.”

“It’s more than just one?”

“It is one, but it’s also legion.”

I stared into the forest, deep into the movement of the trees in the dark.

And for a second, I thought I saw something there, something enormous and cosmic and cruel.

All spindle legs and dripping pedipalps, it reared up toward the sky, flashing a muted pale white against the night sky.

And then it was gone. And perhaps it was never there. Just a trick of the eye.

“What happens if they get out?” I whispered.

“Sometimes they do. And that’s why you have to find your bluebird. You’re nothing without it.”

“Charles, where are we really?” I was beginning to feel excessively sleepy. I sank to the ground, my eyelids starting to flutter shut.

“In the woods. I’ll meet you here again someday. In the dark, amongst the trees. I’ll hold your hand so you’re not afraid, and we’ll go home. I promise.”

“No, I’m serious. Where are we?”

“Under the water that isn’t water. In the time before the accident.”

“What accident?” I barely managed to say.

“This one,” he said, and turning, he exposed the back of his head, where I now saw a deep, horrific gash.

“Who did that to you?” I whispered.

He sat down beside me. “I think you know, Bugbear.” He put an arm around me, and unable to keep my eyes open any longer, I nestled my head into his shoulder and settled into the deepest sleep of my life.