The Golden Specific (2 page)

In Boston it was still 1799, but elsewhere the Ages had gone their different ways. To the north lay prehistoric snows. Across the ocean lay medieval ports. To the south lay a land of many intermingled futures and pasts. And beyond that—who could say? The world had been remade. Scholars and scientists studied the problem and found no solution. Too much was unknown. Too much of the new world was inexplicable. Consider that we do not even know for certain whether the Great Disruption was caused by mankind and, if so, which Age of mankind caused it.

—From Shadrack Elli's
History of the New World

Prologue

September 4, 1891

Dear Shadrack,

You ask me for news of the Eerie, and I can tell you that there is no recent news of them in the Indian Territories. For more than five years they have not been seen here.

But the rumors are true—I traveled in search of them three years ago, when I had need of a healer. It began with a boy trapped in one of the mines. For days his cries had echoed up through the shaft, terrifying any who came near it. His laments were so painful that all who heard them felt themselves sinking into paralyzed despair, and every attempt to rescue him failed. Finally, they came to me. Four of us hardened our hearts and went into the mines, seeking the lost child. We found him in the deep, deep dark, clawing uselessly at the walls. He came with us quietly, whimpering along the way. Only when we emerged from the mine did we realize that the boy had no face.

The creatures, called “Wailings” here and “Lachrima” in the Baldlands, appear rarely in the Territories. Until I saw him myself, I had only half believed in their existence. Now I had no doubts. I had been moved by the duties of my office to rescue a trapped child; now that I saw his condition, I was moved by pity to seek a
remedy. I left Salt Lick in the hands of my deputies and took the Wailing boy north, toward the Eerie Sea, in search of the Eerie and their legendary healers.

The journey became much longer than intended, and the presence of the boy, much as I pitied him, left me despondent—almost fatally so. It was only by chance that, at the edge of the Sea, we came across an Eerie who was traveling east. She understood my errand at once. “How far has he traveled since becoming faceless?” she asked me. I could not tell her. She examined his hands, as if to answer her own question. “We will try,” she concluded. Without more discussion she agreed to lead us to the nearest Weatherer—their name for those Eerie who are most gifted as healers.

We traveled for ten days to a place I have tried to find since and cannot. A strange corner among the pine trees, where the winds from the glacial sea make sounds like the voices of murmuring mourners. The Weatherer lived in an earth-sheltered house made of pine, with a roof of sod. It was dusk as we approached, and I saw deer and birds, squirrels and rabbits hurrying into the woods, avoiding our arrival. They scurried over the pine needles and fluttered into the branches, and they left the place in total stillness.

The Weatherer was hardly more than a boy himself, and I never learned his name. He stood waiting for us; he had anticipated our arrival. Without even glancing at me, he led the Wailing boy by the hand to a smoothed tree stump. He placed his hands over the Wailing's face, as if protecting it from the cold. Then the Weatherer closed his own eyes, and I could sense all of his thoughts and intentions moving through him into the boy. The Wailing leaned forward into his hands, as if accepting a blessing.

I felt the change before I saw it. The forest around us seemed to pause, as if every tree and rock and cloud had taken notice and stopped to watch. The light shifted from the gray murkiness of dusk to a clear and pure silver. I could see dust motes in the air, unmoving as a constellation of stars. The pine needles nearest me seemed to shine like blades. The tree trunks became elaborate labyrinths of curved bark and pierced holes. Everything around me had become more vivid, crystalline, sharp. I felt the sense of despondency that I had grown accustomed to lift and dissipate. Suddenly, the clean forest air seemed to reach through my lungs into every corner of my body, surging through me with a kind of fierce, possessive joy. I have never felt more alive.

I had not closed my eyes, but my attention had drifted to the world made new around me. When I looked again at the Weatherer, he had stepped back from the Wailing. A boy stood before him, whole and intact, an expression of wonder on his realized face.

Since then, I have often contemplated what occurred in those woods, and I have determined that the clarity granted to me in that moment was not unlike that which transformed the Wailing boy. We are all, to some degree, dulled in our senses and our experience of the world. We are all, to some degree, suppressed by layers of accumulated grief. My unmarred features belie the gradual dulling of all those faculties that should animate a human being. We are all, to some degree, faceless.

So, you ask me if I know the Eerie. Hardly. We left the pine woods, the boy and I, having exchanged fewer than twenty words with our guide and fewer still with the Weatherer.

You ask if I could find them again. I cannot. As I said, I have searched again for that forest, and somehow it seems to have vanished.

You ask if the healing powers of the Eerie are true. Without doubt. One who can heal the Lachrima can surely heal those other maladies for which we find only imperfect cures.

Yours,

Adler Fox

Sheriff, Salt Lick City, Indian Territories

 1 

The Convert

O
N
THE
MORNING
of May 31, Sophia Tims stood on Beacon Street, staring through a gap in the iron fence at the monolith before her. Junipers, tall and immobile, lined the winding lane that rose to the mansion's entrance. The building itself, from a distance, seemed cold and forbidding, all stone walls and curtained windows. Sophia took a deep breath and glanced up again at the sign beside the gated entryway. It read:

The Nihilismian Archive

Boston Depository

For the hundredth time that morning, Sophia wondered if she was making a mistake. Reaching into her skirt pocket, she took hold of the two tokens that always traveled with her: a pocket watch and a spool of silver thread. She clasped them tightly, willing them to send her some sign of assurance.

The note leading her to the Nihilismian Archive had arrived three days earlier. Returning from yet another fruitless excursion to the Boston Public Library, she had found an envelope waiting for her on the kitchen table where Mrs. Clay, the housekeeper, had left it. There was no return address and she did not recognize the handwriting; she opened it at once. Inside was a pamphlet. On the front, an illustration of a gargoyle wearing a blindfold squatted below the title:

T
HE
N
IHILISMIAN
A
RCHIVE
:
B
OSTON
D
EPOSITORY

On the inside, two long columns of text explained the archive's purpose. It began:

T
HE
WORLD
YOU
SEE
AROU
ND YOU IS A
false world. The true world, the Age of Verity, vanished in 1799, at the time of the Great Disruption. At the Nihilismian Archive, archivists and preservationists have dedicated their lives to finding and collecting the documents of the true world that we have lost—documents from the Age of Verity. With extensive collections pertaining to the lost Age
of Verity as well as this Apocryphal Age that we inhabit, the Archive strives to ascertain how far we have strayed from the true path.

The pamphlet boasted of the archive's forty-eight rooms of documents pertaining to every corner of the known world: newspapers, personal correspondence, manuscripts, rare books, and all other manner of printed text. It ended with one short but important sentence:

Only Nihilismians are permitted to consult the Archive.

On the back, in the same hand that had addressed the envelope, was written,

Sophia—if you are still looking for your mother, you will find her here.

Had the pamphlet arrived some months earlier, Sophia might have thrown it out with a shudder the moment she saw what it contained. She knew Nihilismians; she knew the ferocity of their convictions, and she knew that those convictions made them dangerous. Sometimes she still awoke from nightmares in which she tried to run along the roof of a speeding train, her feet heavy as lead, while a Nihilismian behind her threw a shining grappling hook straight toward her heart.

But the last year had changed things.

• • •

S
OPHIA
COULD
REMEMBER
clearly the moment in December when she ran down the stairs to the hidden map room at 34 East Ending Street, clutching the clue to her long-lost parents' disappearance. Her uncle Shadrack Elli sat at the leather-topped table beside his close friend, the famous explorer Miles Countryman, and Theodore Constantine Thackary, the boy from the Baldlands who had become one of their small family. The three were silent as Sophia, her voice choked with emotion, read the letter from her father.

He had written it eight years before, telling Sophia that their journey had taken an unexpected turn: they were planning to follow the lost signs toward Ausentinia.

Miles whooped for joy at the discovery, pounding a laughing Theo on the back, and begun making plans for their immediate departure. Shadrack listened with elation, which turned to bewilderment as he reread the message once, twice, three times. “I have never heard of Ausentinia or the lost signs,” Shadrack declared, perplexed. “But no matter!
Someone
will have heard of them.”

And yet, it became blindingly clear as the days turned to weeks, no one had. Shadrack Elli, the greatest cartologer of New Occident, the man who could create and read nearly every sort of map in the known world, wrote to every explorer and every cartologer and every librarian he had ever known, along with many he had never met. No one had so much as heard or read the words.

Still, Sophia had held out hope. She had faith that while she
continued to learn cartology, the Fates, in their wisdom, were planning how to lead her onward with a promising thread of discovery. Their guidance had steered her true before, and surely it would again.

Every so often, a possible lead would emerge, and Shadrack would send Miles or some other explorer friend to hunt it down. Each lead dwindled into a dead end. And as the months went by, and the list of failed attempts grew, Sophia remained convinced that surely another, better lead—perhaps the one that would finally point to Minna and Bronson—would appear.

Then in late winter, with the election of a new prime minister, Shadrack was offered a government position as the Minister of Relations with Foreign Ages. Prime Minister Bligh was a trusted friend, and Shadrack could not refuse the offer to replace another friend, Carlton Hopish, who still languished in the Boston City Hospital. Left horribly injured and deprived of his senses by a violent attack, Carlton showed no sign of even the slightest recovery.

As he left at dawn and returned after dinner, Shadrack's days at the ministry grew longer and longer. Sophia still waited at home for him each evening, eager to discuss her day's findings, but Shadrack seemingly wearied more each day. His eyes were tired, his gaze, abstracted. One evening at dinner, Sophia left to get her notebook, and when she returned, she found Shadrack slumped over the kitchen table, fast asleep. Little by little, Shadrack's searching stopped. The lessons in cartology, which Sophia had waited desperately for each evening, stopped as well.

The winter stretched on, and Sophia sank into a long gloom. Shadrack had no time. Miles departed in pursuit of a slim lead, taking Theo with him. Sophia struggled against the feeling that she was alone. She tried, fruitlessly for the most part, to continue the cartology lessons on her own. After school, she haunted the Boston Public Library, poring over every relevant book she could find, and at home she plumbed the depths of the map room, finding more riddles than solutions in Shadrack's obscure collection. By the time spring arrived, she felt her hope wearing thin. She had difficulty sleeping, and this made her feel forgetful, unsteady, and unsure. There were times, as she drew in her notebook recounting the day, when tears spilled over onto the page. The careful lines of text became great gray clouds; the drawings blurred and puckered; and she could not point to the reason.

And then, finally, the Fates sent her a sign. It first appeared at dusk. Sophia had been watching for Shadrack from her bedroom window when she saw a pale figure lingering by the front gate. It stood indecisively, taking a step toward the street and then a step back toward the house. The cobblestones shone from a recent rain shower, and a low fog had settled in around the streetlamps.

The woman seemed familiar. She had to be a neighbor, but which one? The woman placed her hand on her heart and then lifted her palm toward Sophia's window: a gentle gesture of affection.

It struck Sophia like a blow. For a moment she stared,
unmoving. Then she bolted from her room, throwing herself down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out into the street. The woman was still there, pale and uncertain, by the gate. Sophia stepped haltingly toward her, hardly daring to breathe. “Mother?” she whispered. Then the figure vanished.

The following evening, she appeared again. Sophia had partly persuaded herself over the course of the long day that her mind was playing tricks on her and that the figure she had seen was conjured by exhaustion and misplaced hope. Still, she waited by the window. When she saw Minna by the gate, silent and hesitant, Sophia rose shakily and rushed out of the house.

This time, Minna waited. She took a step backward onto the sidewalk and another onto the street. Sophia opened the gate and stepped after her. Minna moved silently over the cobblestones. “Wait, please,” Sophia pleaded.

Minna stopped. As Sophia approached, her footsteps loud in the silence, she could see her mother's face: pallid and insubstantial, but still discernible in the dusk light. There was something odd about her that Sophia could not place until she had closed the distance between them: the figure appeared to be made of paper. She seemed a perfect rendering of Minna Tims brought to life. She reached her hand out plaintively as Sophia neared, and then she spoke:
“Missing but not lost, absent but not gone, unseen but not unheard. Find us while we still draw breath.”
The last words seemed to prove the substance of the riddle, for they sounded after Minna had, once again, disappeared.

But Sophia did not care. She felt as if she had just taken air into her lungs for the first time in months, as if she had been drowning and the words spoken at dusk by Minna's semblance had pulled her from the deep. She was still in those dark waters, but now, at least, she could breathe. The paralyzing sadness that had gripped her all winter was something she could look at: she could see how vast it was; she could see how far she had to swim.

The next day, the second sign appeared: the Nihilismian pamphlet. Sophia told herself, as she read the handwritten note over and over, that the Fates could not have spoken more clearly.

She had not mentioned seeing Minna or receiving the pamphlet to Shadrack.

There are some things that only keep their enchantment, their full promise, when they remain unspoken. Sophia knew the pale figure she had seen at dusk was improbable, and when she imagined speaking of it, she felt the power of Minna's presence dissipate like fog. The wonder of it, the potency of the whispered words, were uncommunicable. Indeed, even in her own mind she could not approach the thought of what she had seen and heard too closely, for the moment she did a flurry of troubling questions rushed forward:
What
is
she? Is she real? What does it mean that I can see and hear her?
Sophia turned away from these questions resolutely, and she did not contemplate the vision too closely. She accepted a simpler and, to her, undeniable pair of truths: her mother was asking for her help, and the Fates were sending her a sign.

Shadrack did not believe in the Fates. Even if she could somehow convey the sense of desperation in Minna's message, the sense of clarity from the pamphlet, Shadrack would not see their guiding hand at work. He would see something else, and Sophia wanted to see what she saw now: an unmistakable urgency, a clear way forward. Instead of telling him, she thought about it for two days. And then she made a decision.

• • •

S
TANDING
NOW
BEFORE
the soaring iron gates, Sophia took a deep breath. She pushed, and they swung soundlessly inward. Her boots crunched on the gravel path as she walked slowly uphill, bringing the great house into closer view. Here and there the curtains hung open. A groundskeeper near the mansion's entrance was carefully raking the gravel, making a perfect set of concentric circles. Other than the sound of the rake combing the fine stones, the air was still.