Page 41 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

For the first time, I felt like the library wasn’t a safe place to linger. I finally had a direct piece of communication, and I needed to put it to use. Those numbers were coordinates, and I was fairly sure they would lead me somewhere on campus. I just needed to find it.

Replacing the book, I left the library and headed into the main house.

Without my phone or computer, I would need to find something with a map function, and knew there was a computer in Dorian’s office.

Thankfully, it wasn’t password protected, and I was able to look up the coordinates with ease.

Zooming out, I saw that they put me squarely at the apiary.

Momentarily, my heart sank. I couldn’t go rummaging around the apiary with a bee allergy.

Then I remembered that Finn had said Isabelle used to steal his honey to mess with him.

That meant that Robin may have been allergic to bees, but Isabelle was not.

Useful to know before I plunged headfirst into a beehive.

I was about to leave the office when I had a sudden thought: I could reach out to anyone with the computer.

I could contact 911 and be rescued in an instant.

But then I thought better of it. If I called the police, I would be calling them on myself.

Sometimes no rescue is possible—not when you’re the problem.

Despite the darkening sky, the apiary looked especially gorgeous that day.

I tucked in my clothes to cover any naked skin, grabbed Finn’s bee veil and gloves, and started poking around.

After a quick visual scan of the area, I zeroed in on the little bee houses.

Would it be possible to hide something inside one of them?

It seemed like that could disrupt honey production, but what if it wasn’t inside the hive? What if it was underneath the house?

Getting on my hands and knees, I inspected the first house, even going so far as to put my face to the ground to see if there was anything underneath.

It wasn’t until I searched the third house that I found it.

Something small and metallic was affixed to the underside with duct tape.

Reaching, I slid my nails under the edge of the tape and tore.

When I pulled it out, I saw that it was another key.

A glimmer of excitement lit up my nerve endings as I stared at the key.

It was embellished on the bell, like the peacock key that opened the storeroom on the second floor of the library.

Only in this case, the embellishment was a rendering of an owl.

I was almost certain this would open the door I’d been unable to open at the back of the storeroom.

Cautiously hopeful, I climbed out of the protective gear and stowed it back where I’d found it, my heart racing with excitement.

This was it. I knew it. Thunder groaned across the sky, and the atmosphere sizzled with electricity as I slipped the key in my pocket.

As I hurried back toward the library, fantastical scenarios played out in my head.

Opening the secret room to find Charles waiting there with a glass of champagne ready to inform me everything would be fine and he’d just wanted to play a little game. Did you like my treasure hunt, darling?

Dark clouds, heavy with rain, began erupting just as I made it under the covered walkway that led into the old monastery.

The library was empty, and as I started up the stairs to the closed wing, I felt especially unsteady and nervous.

Upstairs in that lonely corridor, rain lashed against the stained-glass window, drawing my attention to the image of Mary and the olive branch.

Only, what if it wasn’t the Virgin Mary? And what if it wasn’t an olive branch?

Slowly I walked toward it, taking it in as if for the first time.

All it took was a perspective shift, and the woman was no longer the Virgin Mary, but Mary the Prophetess, cloaked in blue, staring back at me as if she could see through space and time right to this moment.

I took a step closer, and reaching out, I traced a finger along the outline of the plant she cradled.

This wasn’t necessarily an olive branch, was it?

With those flecks of yellow, it could just as easily be silphium.

It had been here all along right in front of me, a message encoded within a seemingly ordinary work of art.

What else, I wondered, had I missed? What messages still lurked just outside of my line of sight?

A streak of lightning flashed, bringing the image to shocking life, and as the thunder rumbled in its wake, I turned and hurried back to the antechamber, opening the door and rushing inside.

I switched on the light and made my way through the maze of file boxes until I reached the door at the back of the room.

When I slipped the key in the door and heard the ward lock turn, a giddy relief washed over me.

I was close now; I could feel it. Floorboards creaked beneath me as I stepped into the darkened space, and I caught a whiff of extinguished candle.

Inside, I was met with an astonishing sight.

It was a large room, big enough to hold at least forty people fairly comfortably.

Through the light filtering in from the antechamber, I could make out what at first appeared to be stalactites and stalagmites, but which, upon closer inspection, were glass bottles.

Multicolored, and by the looks of them, very old, they hung from the ceiling just like the ones in my basement, but here they were matched by similar bottles secured to the floor, each rising up to meet its twin.

The entire installation spooled out in matching concentric circles, their openings aligned as if they were exchanging energy somehow.

A quick search for a light switch proved fruitless, so carefully, I walked around the bottles until I came to an enormous altar.

It was strewn with candles and various quasi-religious paraphernalia—stone gods and metal goddesses, twig structures and prayer candles.

It felt cluttered and haphazard, but it gave me a bad feeling.

There was nothing overtly diabolical, no pentagrams or Baphomets or anything like that, but whatever this was used for, I knew in my bones it wasn’t good.

At the center of the altar was a set of books, one of which lay open like a holy text.

Leaning over it, I could just make out images on the open pages, but the light from the antechamber wasn’t enough to see any detail, so I grabbed a match from over by the candles and lit it.

Under that flickering illumination, the chilling illustration became clear.

It was similar to the drawings I’d once seen in the codex in the scriptorium.

The left-hand page featured the woman in the blue robes, Mary the Prophetess, but where the images in the other book had been meticulously rendered, this had none of that beauty.

It was inexpertly executed and had a squalid malevolence to it.

And then there was the right-hand page. It showed the horrific details of a bloody massacre—a blindfolded victim and hordes rising up from the underworld coming to collect her.

What followed on subsequent pages were depictions of bloodshed, of monsters, and of unthinkable torture and pain.

The final page showed a crude depiction of a man in a robe feeding a yellow plant to horrific beasts.

Below the image, the text read Les Terribles. The Terrible Ones.

I knew that phrase. I’d heard it in my dreams, but I’d also seen it once before. Help! Paloma’s email had begun. And then it had gone on to describe being kidnapped, having her memory erased, and nightmarish creatures she had called the Terrible Ones.

A wave of disgust washed over me, though I couldn’t say exactly why, and I took a step back from the book.

I didn’t want to be in this space anymore.

It felt toxic, spoiled somehow. Satisfied this was what I meant to find, I started from the room, but then stopped and turned around slowly.

Something had caught my eye. There was something else on the altar, wasn’t there?

Among the carved wooden figures and the candles was something I’d passed over initially.

Since discovering who I was, I had been focusing solely on Charles and the code.

I’d all but forgotten about the relic, had thought it was no more than a red herring, but there it was, sitting on the altar between a bundle of foul-smelling dried herbs and a statue of what might be Anubis.

It was much smaller than I imagined it would be, only a bit bigger than the palm of my hand, and where I had imagined graceful figures, the thirteen bodies were twisted, distorted, with holes for eyes, large, terrible sunken things.

In the center was Janus, but it was also something else, wasn’t it?

It had two faces, but it also bore horns, and it had a hostile wickedness to it that made me finally certain that whatever magic or science was practiced at Hildegard, there was some arm of it that bled fiercely into the occult.

Time was running out—I’d been in that room far too long already—but I was now faced with a dilemma.

Take it with me and risk angering whosever space this was, or leave it and assume it held no deeper importance?

A beat and then it was decided. I slipped it in my pocket, bolted from the room, and locked the door behind me.