The locker was empty except for an ugly, bulky tarp in the far corner and a faint, musty scent that roused an unpleasant bit of nostalgia.
Hidden behind the hospital where I spent months after my first seizure was a tiny arbor, peppered with maples and sugar pines and the sound of fat little finches. Orderlies took patients there for fresh air, where riding mowers didn't fit between the trees and the ground had never been blessed with a rake. The smell of decaying leaves was more distinctive than strong, but it soured what should have been a wholesome experience, giving a fledgling teen, whose life had just been demolished by fate, one more reason to despise the world.
The plastic tarp looked old and over-used, it's sheen completely worn away, and as I drew near, I noticed an old, hemp rope, the source of the smell, binding it around whatever lay underneath. A quick tug at one of the loose knots pulled it free, and my heart skipped a beat as I drew back the covering to reveal a large trunk, about the size of a cedar chest, intricately carved and inlaid with thick knotwork and reliefs of trees, animals, and a few human-like heads.
A variety of light and dark woods were so masterfully assembled that I couldn't tell where one ended and another began. Its black hinges and sturdy iron bands were just as expertly crafted, but what drew my eye was a broad disk at its front, fashioned from the same black metal as the bindings into a wild, bearded face that seemed to grow out of a tangled forest.. It bridged the trunk's seam with wide, staring eyes, a mane of leafy hair, and a mouth shaped around an 'O' shaped hole, as if it were blowing.
I let out a low, involuntary whistle of appreciation and ran my hands across the trunk's surface, which felt more like stone than wood, certain it weighed almost as much as I did. I tried lifting the lid, but it stubbornly refused to acknowledge my efforts.
The chest alone represented a fortune, even I could see that. Was this Miss Gold's gift? If so, there had to be a catch.
Catch. From habit rather than compulsion, rhymes formed in the back of my mind. Hatch. It wouldn't open. Latch. Because it was locked. Locks had keys, and so did I.
With a thrill of excitement I quickly retrieved the envelope and emptied the last of its contents into my hand. The old key had clearly seen hard times while the chest remained pristine, but it was obviously made from the same metal as the disk. I peered closely at the face and put my finger against its mouth. The hole was just about the right size, so I carefully slid the cylinder of the key into it and pushed until I heard something click.
The rest of Miss Gold's note came into sharp focus. I rotated the key to the left and there was a ticking sound like winding a clock. Then I pushed in again until some mechanism stopped me, then I turned it to the right. Tick, tick, tick, click! Out another quarter inch. Click. A final turn...
There was a hiss of air and the lid lifted a fraction of an inch. I tried retrieving the key but could neither turn it nor pull it out of the mask, so I let it be. I was right about it being heavy, but it opened easily as if rigged with a spring or a counterweight and I let out the breath I'd been holding.
The chest was full but not with treasure. A thick bundle of wool lay folded atop a strange assortment of items that left me with more questions and no answers.
Immediately beneath the cloth was a short club made from some exotic wood with twisted, pale and dark striations, about a foot long and thick and gnarled like a root. It had been polished to a shine and it weighed more than I expected, but if it was anything more than a cudgel or a doorstop I couldn't guess its purpose.
Next in line was a shallow, wooden bowl, heavy like the stick and equally inexplicable. Inside the bowl lay a flat, gray stone about three inches across, worn smooth with a hole slightly off-center, tied to a leather cord.
Among the other items in the chest was a pair of intricate cylinders made from silver and red crystal, a bouquet of dried flowers held together with a frayed, lace ribbon, a stone mortar and pestle, both inlaid with what appeared to be Scandanavian runes, a dagger with a long handle and a short, silver blade, a heavy iron chisel, and a variety of other tools and trinkets both familiar and arcane. A leather wrapping contained a necklace with a bird skull, a clay phial stoppered with a wooden plug, a small bronze ring, a scrap of torn silk, and a leather pouch tied and sealed with wax. I piled all of these and more on top of the blanket.
Under everything sat another box, taking up about a third of the space. This one was simply made without any kind of clasp and held several thick books, perhaps a dozen rolls of parchment, and an enormous, wood-bound tome, hinged in bronze with a bronze clasp. The big one was at least as heavy as it looked, with intricate carvings that matched those on the chest, dominated by a stylized tree and a large, clear crystal embedded on the front cover. The heavy clasp had been designed for a lock, but there was none so I opened it gingerly. Its pages were a kind of marbled parchment, pale yellow with age, and the first contained just one line of script:
Si quis furetur, Anathematis ense necetur.
I'd taken classes in nomenclature and there had been plenty of Latin so I understood the references to a curse, a sword, and thieves. It reminded me of the warnings written on Egyptian tombs to deter grave robbers.
Every page was beautifully illuminated, but the pictures were hard to focus on, as if some odd illusion in the illustration deflected the eyes. The text was just as strange. I carefully turned a few leaves expecting more Latin script, but instead it presented me with Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, Sanskrit, and a couple different sets of hieroglyphics. There were Asian characters as well, at least Japanese and Korean, possibly Chinese, probably more, a section of Norse runes, and symbols, and others I couldn't possibly recognize. Worse, few lines began and ended in the same tongue. It would be impossible to read if you weren't perfectly fluent in all of them, and as I was most definitely not, I gently closed it and set it down, careful not to mar its unblemished surface.
There was more to dig through, but after a few more minutes sitting on the cold, concrete floor, I selected the large book and one of the smaller ones, the bowl, pendant, club, and blanket, and replaced everything else carefully for later inspection. The lid of the trunk provided some resistance suggesting a spring or some pneumatic component that prevented it from slamming shut. When it clicked into place the iron face made a whirring, tapping noise and with a metallic "ping," it spit out the key as if reminding me not to leave it behind.
I bundled everything in the green cloth and set it in the hallway while I replaced the tarp. The bundle alone was almost too heavy to carry without the risk of dropping it, so I'd have to come back with a hand truck to get the chest itself. For a moment I hesitated, wondering if it would be safe, but Miss Gold clearly trusted her arrangements, and the office girl's confidence in the facility's mundane security was convincing. Aside from that, it couldn't be moved inconspicuously, and not at all by fewer than two people.
I closed the door and snapped its lock back into place, then hauled my double armload toward the front office. Becca saw me coming before I reached the door and rushed to open it for me.
"Thanks," I said, struggling with the awkward load.
"Can I help with that?" she looked worried I might hurt myself. A few days earlier I probably would have.
"No, I'm good, but if you could get the other door..." I nodded toward the front parking lot.
"Right! Sorry, um—sorry, I don't know your name," she said as she trotted ahead of me to pull the door open.
"It's Tom. Thank you, Becca."
"Tom," She repeated with another hesitant smile, looking down at her feet as I passed through, and said nothing else as she let the door shut behind me.
I managed to get the trunk of my car open on my own with some difficulty and set everything gently inside to avoid damage. At the last second, I decided the wood-bound book was potentially too expensive to risk scratching its surface. I set it on the passenger seat, and sliding in beside it, I stuttered my poor car back to life and returned home.
***
Back at the apartment I walked the heavy book upstairs and sat it on the coffee table then returned for the rest, which weighed slightly less than the tome alone. I couldn't understand why anyone would write such a huge volume then bind it with hardwood and brass. A deterrent to theft? I certainly wouldn't want to run down the street hanging on to that thing.
Once I'd hauled everything up both flights, I piled them on the coffee table and stood back to take stock. The dark green blanket turned out to be a long, wool cloak, delicately embroidered along the edge. I held it up and threw it around my shoulders, fastening it with ornate silver clasps stitched into the hem, then I lifted the stone pendant from its place in the bowl and hung it around my neck. I struck a pose for my own benefit, but feeling like a cheap extra from a fantasy film did nothing for my self esteem, so I tossed the cloak onto the sofa and sat to consider the rest. If the bowl contained any secrets, it stubbornly refused to share them with me, the stick remained a lifeless stick, and the books—
The alarm on my phone went off again, this time alerting me to a lecture hall on the effect of mitochondrial DNA on neurotransmitters but I made a very rare decision to skip it since Dr. Barnes had written two well-circulated papers on the subject and I'd read them both.
Instead, I picked up the smaller, leather-bound volume and turned it over in my hands. The cover had been engraved and dyed with a simple design, similar to the tree on the larger book, but it was clearly worn from frequent use. Opening it, I found what appeared to be a single language.
That didn't make it easier to read. It looked like someone's journal, a loose collection of handwritten symbols with notes in the margins and drawings on some of the pages. Most of those were various plants with additional notes beside them. On a few of the pages someone had drawn vertical lines with shorter lines intermittently branching off either side resembling a timeline or a graph, but having no context I couldn't imagine what they were for.
I pulled my laptop close and started looking up language scripts to see if I could narrow it down to a family, or at least a region. After an hour of searching, I found similarities to Younger Futhark, a written language based on ancient Scandinavian runes, but most of the translation tools I found were medieval, focused on phonemes rather than meaning. I uncovered nothing that could tell me what it actually said, so I finally tossed it on top of the pile in frustration.
It wasn't until then that I realized my stomach had been trying to get my attention. The pharmaceutical cocktail that kept me functional had also left me with a near constant low-grade nausea, which restricted my eating habits, so I never kept much food on hand and ate only when my body demanded sustenance. Skipping meals had been a common occurrence. Aggressive pangs of hunger were new.
That left me with another problem. Where most college guys stored cold pizza and a six-pack of beer, I had part of a half-gallon of milk, a fairly new package of low-sodium turkey lunchmeat, a three-month-old sugarless energy drink, half a loaf of bread, and two eggs left out of a dozen.
I opted for an egg and turkey sandwich, but found the first bite bland and the texture uninspiring. I normally ate for nutrition alone, but that afternoon I deeply wanted to be entertained by the flavor, so I set it aside and stared down the empty refrigerator from across the kitchen. It stared back unhelpfully.
Taking advantage of my digestive fortitude felt like an act of rebellion after so many years of hard won discipline, but for the first time in my adult life, my body's urges went unchallenged by fear of consequence. I wanted food, not just sustenance, so I pushed myself away from the table and walked out of the apartment, stubbornly determined to indulge myself.
I hadn't used my car so much in one day since arriving at BAU, other than rare outings with Katherine. If I'd been able to handle the stress of repeatedly walking everywhere I might not have driven at all. But the rules had changed. I had the stamina and the motivation to do things just for the hell of it and that made everything new.
A short time later, I paced the aisles of Pathway, the mid-sized local grocery chain, pulling everything into the cart that was remotely appealing: potato chips, peasant bread, whipped honey, cookies, apple jelly, frozen strawberries, beef patties, a bag of chicken alfredo, canned chili... I had no idea if I'd enjoy half of it, but I didn't care. I found enough pleasure in buying whatever I wanted for the first time in my life without fear of reprisal.
As the cart began to fill, I began noticing a few uneasy stares in my direction. At first, I chalked it up to a heightened awareness of the world around me, but nobody else seemed to be drawing the same attention. One man kept glowering suspiciously as if he'd seen my picture on the wall at the post office, and I had to stop repeatedly for the same woman reaching languidly for something off the top shelf. A dozen others seemed to have an unnatural interest, and I started to check my fly every few minutes to make sure I hadn't forgotten to zip it up.
I avoided other shoppers as best I could, but didn't leave until the cart contained more food than I'd ever purchased at one time. After a short wait in line, accompanied by more uncomfortable stares and glares, I checked out and escaped to the solitude of my car.
Back at the apartment, the problem of storing my haul both amused and annoyed me. I didn't have places reserved for things like cereal, soda, pancake mix, or any of the other dry goods but that also meant the cupboards were more or less vacant so I just pushed most of it behind one door and called it done. Everything else went randomly into the refrigerator, including a six-pack of beer. I'd never in my life tasted alcohol and wasn't promising myself anything, but if I was off the drugs... well, it was there now regardless.
I settled on a bowl of thick, beef and vegetable soup with saltines and sat mulling silently over the puzzle that littered my coffee table. Nothing made sense. A strange woman. A cup of tea. A mysterious chest with mysterious contents. My mom, Janet Lane. My dad, Caratacos something. A strange history that compelled Caratacos to end Janet's life. Miss Gold stepping in and nursing her until I was born. Why did she show up now after two decades? If she had a cure for me, why wait to hand it over? Was it even a cure or just an illusion? Back to fantasies and guesses. Back to the beginning.
She'd said two days, and one had nearly passed. What should I do with it? Did I sequester myself in fear of a catastrophic relapse or run around and try to get as much out of it as I could? And, I thought, what would happen when I saw Miss Gold again? If this chaos was merely an introduction, what might come next?