Chapter 4 #2
Stefan never had a stepfather either. “It is important to the pattern that we were raised by a single mother, I think.”
Magda glowers at the food slot. “Somebody needs to go down.”
Stefan turns to me. “What is your profession?”
“Executive assistant to the CEO of InovaSpire. It’s a tech company in Ohio.”
Irina brightens up. “I know InovaSpire! Slices and dices unstructured data? I’m a mathematician and data mining engineer. Data is my world.”
This would explain a few of her tattoos, including the Fibonacci spiral that curves into the sly shape of a fox mid-pounce, inked in fine black lines just visible beneath her sleeve.
Stephen gestures at Magda. “Magda’s lead attorney at Interpol, and I am the youngest-ever head of Special Collections at the Austrian National Library. Very different professions, then.”
“They are different,” I say, raising a finger.
“But when you think about it, we all create order out of chaos. My boss is brilliant but scattered, so I take her ideas and make them into coherent systems. Libraries catalogue information. Data mining sorts and creates order out of bits of information, and obviously, an attorney fits real-world circumstances into a legal framework.”
Magda nods. “What’s the point of this? Why go on a sick breeding spree and then arrange all these events to make our lives parallel?”
“Hard for me to believe Renfield had it in him,” I say. “He didn’t exactly strike me as the mastermind type.”
Everybody turns to me here, shocked.
“You have met him?” Stefan asks. “You have met our father?”
“Only once. I tracked him down to a café in Ostra.”
“What was he like?” Irina asks.
I try to think about how to answer that. “Very odd. Not well.”
“In what way?” Stefan asks.
In the end, I tell them everything, because I’d want to know all of it. The good, the bad, and the buggy.
Magda makes a face. “A fly? Are you quite sure?”
“You don’t mistake a thing like that.”
“I’m impressed that you found him at all,” she says. “I had a top private investigator in London on it. For three years!”
“He was not easy to find. Tracking him down was my hobby for a while, but I had some luck along the way.” I shake my head. “An impregnation spree. That’s not creepy at all.”
Irina points to a door under a large oil portrait of a man with a ruffle collar and cascading dark curls—a real looker, if you can get past the Shakespearean prom outfit.
“There’s a bathroom at the far corner. And most ominously, there are four bedrolls in another corner.
He may want to keep us here. But the good news is that those knives and swords hanging all over the walls are real.
All very sharp.” She lowers her voice. “We’ve hidden them around the room, so if that guy comes back, we’ll make mincemeat out of him.
” She takes a bejeweled scabbard off the wall and pulls out a small sword. “This is a good one.”
“Oh. For me?”
“Yes.” She helps me affix it to the belt under my jacket.
“What kind of captor gives their captives access to this much weaponry?” I muse, toying with the key around my neck.
Nobody has an answer.
Magda says, “I promise you, if our father turns out not to be dead?” She slashes the air with her sword and heads back across the expansive inlaid wood floor to the long table that’s piled high with papers and books.
I trail behind. “Did you guys tear this place apart trying to get out?”
“Of course not, do we look like monsters?” Stefan says.
“Once we realized there’s no escape, we started sifting through all this chaos for some clues as to what’s happening.
And why not put things back in order? We may be here a while, and who can stand this?
” He explains the categorization system they’ve decided to use.
Listening to him, I get the feeling the system was the result of a long and impassioned discussion.
A lot of people, when faced with this entrapment, would make battering rams out of the bookcases or fight amongst themselves, but my siblings are making order out of this mess, searching for clues and patterns. Being thoughtful and methodical.
I feel a jolt of love for them right then.
James disappearing devastated me on so many levels, but here are three more of my half-siblings. Wonderful, thoughtful siblings. One positive thing to come of this really awful situation.
They show me what they’ve been doing. Stefan’s working on the nonfiction books.
Magda’s organizing fiction.
Irina’s been reading and sorting handwritten diaries. “Maybe there’s some clue about the architecture. A secret door. Anything. So far, it’s just business randomness—circa 1885 to last year.”
Magda points at an unruly pile of papers, accounting ledgers, business folios, and what looks like... the tall ledgers with the mysterious symbols.
A pulse of dread blasts through my chest.
I go to them. I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it—I have to see if they’re the ones my father was working on in that café.
Indeed, they are; I recognize the glyphs, the loops, the color-coding.
“Do you want to try and organize those? They’re not all nonsense.”
“I guess.”
“Incoming.” Stefan plops another stack of tall ledgers in my area.
I pick one up. It feels so strangely familiar in my hands. “The one and only time I met our father, he was working with these. He was obsessed. The news of me being his daughter meant less to him than these books.”
“Piece of shit,” Irina mutters.
“He seemed to have developed this whole system for tracking multiple variables using overlapping geometric patterns. I couldn’t get him to say what it was for, but it was like he’d invented his own organizational language.
” I trace a loop on a page. There’s a loop every thirteen entries. Sometimes twelve.
Stefan squints. “Tracking gibberish doesn’t make it not gibberish.”
“Like organizing a junk drawer inside a nightmare,” Irina says.
“Could it just all be about… flies?” Magda says.
“I don’t think so,” I whisper.
“Arrange them however you like,” Stefan says. “Take the bottom rows over on the end.”
My siblings and I work together, organizing, chatting, and exchanging ideas for escape.
I’m freaked out about our situation and tired from travelling, but I’m also a bit thrilled; it’s as if I’ve discovered my people.
Now and then, we take breaks and look for trapdoors or hidden ways out.
We stash more weapons around the place but always go back to the work.
I tell myself that I should just group the tall ledgers in any random order, because who really cares?
But sadly, I do. I know there’s an order.
I flip them open, one after another, comparing and contrasting. Soon, an idea takes shape—not based on content but on something else. An instinct.
I start with the symbols on the first pages—sharp little geometric spirals and interlocking shapes. I group them into families. Then I reorder within each group by vibe, which is a combination of margin notes, ink color, and the feeling I get from looking at the page with my eyes unfocused.
It’s not like me to be so woo-woo, but it feels right. Like I’m singing along with a distant song.
At some point, a meatball noodle dish is delivered through the slot.
I don’t notice at first.
“Hey! Earth to Harriet!” Magda says.
I look up.
“Sorry.”
We eat dinner together at the little table under a tapestry depicting a disturbing hunt of some sort, and then we go back to work.
A few hours later, I’m standing in front of my part of the bookcases, admiring my handiwork. I don’t know what the things mean, but they’re organized. “Done!”
“You devised an order?” Magda asks.
“Yup!”
Stefan wanders over to the rows of tall ledgers. He pulls one out. Then another. “Help me understand. How did you decide which goes first? Can you walk me through it?”
I blink. “Umm... not really.”
He puts the ledger back. “Well, as long as it’s intentional.”
Irina agrees quickly—too quickly.
Magda smiles brightly. “You did it!”
They’re humoring me. Oh my god, I haven’t even been here a full day—what is happening to me?
I assist Stefan with his more conventional task of book organization, eager to show him that I’m still a normal-thinking person. We work side by side, mostly in silence, though we do exchange horror stories about disorganized friends.
It’s around nightfall that we hear the creak of ancient hinges.
I stiffen and turn toward a set of massive doors on the far wall. They swing open with theatrical slowness.