Chapter 16
PANDORA’S DIARY
Times I told myself I’m not attracted to Leo: Shut up!
As I drove us to the library, Leo scrolled on his phone, searching book sites and discussion forums. He muttered to himself, which I found endearingly nerdy.
And I had to admit that Gabe was right about how Leo looked at me.
Except I couldn’t tell if Leo was genuinely interested, or just thinking of me in a “normals are for fun” sort of way.
We passed the sign for Beth’s Produce, and I saw another cart coming from the opposite direction. Shrig was driving a sporty-looking couple toward the beach. When I caught his eye he gave me a lascivious wink.
“He’s such a fuckboy,” I whispered to Leo, as both carts stopped for chat.
“Beautiful day!” Shrig said.
I nodded. “It’s good you’re not taking the weather for granite.”
Shrig twitched and told the couple, “This is my old… well, she grew up here too.”
“He’s bringing us to his favorite beach,” the man said.
“Well, I hope it passes mustard!” I called, zooming past them. “We’re off to get expressos!”
“You’re a terrible friend,” Shrig shouted back.
Beside me, Leo laughed at my purposely misused words.
“Teasing Shrig is my gift,” I joked.
Then we gossiped about him and Deja until we reached the library. After I parked, Leo sprang from the cart like a golden retriever at a dog park. He remembered me halfway to the door, then paused, pretending he wasn’t impatient.
“I’m coming, I’m coming!” I said.
Inside, we found Albert leaning against the counter chatting with Hattie, who was watching him wide-eyed, with one hand on her pet plant.
“—in that case, I recommend a book about women who love too much,” Albert was saying.
Hattie tittered. “You silly man!”
“Don’t underestimate the power of love,” he intoned.
“Very true,” she said. “After all, the heartwood wants what the heartwood wants!”
Leo and I exchanged an amused glance as we headed upstairs. We found the illuminated manuscript in the side room, exactly as we’d left it. Leo paused, exhaling slowly. I continued inside, but didn’t touch the cover, not yet.
Instead, I held out my hand warily, like I was greeting a feral cat.
I thought I detected a faint sense of pressure on my palm. A slight warmth. Except when I brushed my fingertips across the cover, all I felt was the deliciously soft leather. After a few more exploratory prods, I opened the manuscript to the first page, and heard Leo’s breath catch.
Elaborate floral designs adorned the center of the frontispiece, while mythological creatures capered around: pixies and goblins, gnomes and serpents.
Rose petals budded from curling stems, sunflowers unfurled around geometric shapes rendered in gold, green, and red.
Impeccably brushed and colored letters in a strange, beautiful language filled the other page.
At least, I thought they were letters; for all I knew they were the calligraphic equivalent of abstract art.
“How do you feel?” I asked Leo.
“Good. Great. Awe-struck.”
“I mean physically, Leo.”
“Oh! Fine. I’m fine as long as I don’t touch it.”
“Not itchy?”
“This isn’t the book that triggered my gift and…” He paused. “Huh.”
“What?”
“I don’t feel itchy at all anymore.” He frowned. “As if the book that called me to the island isn’t in the library anymore. Or maybe the magic from the manuscript is overpowering it.”
“It’s probably the one Hattie borrowed, about women who love too much.”
Leo ignored me. “Okay, turn the page.”
The next page contained mostly text, or glyphs, or whatever those shapes were.
Leo took a few pictures with his phone, standing about two inches behind me, close enough that I could feel his warmth.
The page after that featured curving botanical shapes saturated with gold and blues, greens and yellows.
Leo took another picture and I said, “How did the colors stay so bright?”
“Because fae, Pan,” Leo said, his voice hushed. “Fae.”
“You still feel okay?”
“I feel amazing. Keep turning.”
The next pages were covered in the strange text instead of pictures…
except as I looked closer, my focus shifted, like I was looking at one of those old Magic Eye paintings.
A forest grew in the negative space between—and within—the letters and paragraphs, a lush forest with leaves and branches, roots and berries.
Eyes peered back at me from the shadows, beneath scaly and feathered brows.
When I swayed to the side, the gazes seemed to follow me.
“Hold on, hold on!” Leo’s thumbs tapped at his phone. “I need to quickly email a professor I know. She’s, like, a hundred years old, and knows more about faerie-kin history than anyone I’ve ever met. One second…”
As he composed the email I ran my fingertips along the margins of the manuscript, enjoying the smooth, thick parchment.
It felt almost like silk. When Leo finally told me to turn to the next page, my gaze fell on a humanoid-looking cat.
It stood upright with golden eyes which had a feline slant and whiskers beside its pert human nose.
It was dressed a little like Pinocchio with suspenders and red shorts and a button-up shirt with a round collar.
Indecipherable words wreathed an illustration of a medieval-looking workshop to the side, almost like a labeled diagram.
“It’s a gnome!” I said. “Look, they’re wearing lederhosen.”
“Huh,” Leo said. “It’s dressed more like a garden gnome than one of the earth spirits of Paracelsus.”
“Para-who?”
“Paracelsus, a Swiss alchemist from the early sixteenth century. Maybe this is more modern than I thought. Turn the page!”
I turned the pages as he took pictures and muttered and scribbled in his notebook.
The illustrations—or illuminations, as Leo insisted upon calling them—took my breath away.
Strange gourds grew from snaking vines, sweet-faced pixies hovered with dragonfly wings above furry-headed gnomes and impish imps.
Lushly furred rabbits grazed outside hobbit-hole-looking caves and waterfalls sparkled with flying fish, who dodged the grasping paws of scaly green guys who looked hungry.
“What’re those?” I asked.
“Goblins, I suspect, though that’s a pretty broad category. I’m not much of a folklorist.”
“I don’t need to be a folklorist to know those are gnomes, pixies, imps. And that one on the branch is a zebra squirrel.”
“Those are brownies, not imps,” he said. “The mischievous ones wearing rags? Yeah, pretty sure those are brownies. And that’s a chipmunk.”
“It’s a zebra squirrel!”
“If I pretend to agree, will you turn the page?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s definitely a zebra squirrel.”
I turned the page to reveal an elaborate two-page spread showing a pack of goblins with bared fangs and unsheathed claws. Tiny pixies and tool-wielding gnomes and even a few brownies fled from them, vanishing into the underbrush.
Leo took twenty pictures of that one. He oohed and ahhed over the next three pages, then blurted, “Oh, Pan! Pan, Pan!”
“Are you going to call me ‘Panettone E. Coyote’ again? What does that even mean?”
“Are those notes? Like musical notations?”
“No, that’s a picture of imps sweeping a cottage floor with brooms made of tulips.”
“Brownies. And I mean below that.”
“Oh!” I frowned at the rows of freeform lines and dots. “Yeah, I think so. They could be neumes.”
“What are neumes?” Leo asked.
“Notations that indicate approximate relative pitches, from before the development of staffs. They look kind of like a director’s hand gestures if you squint.”
“Huh. Could you play them?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think Shrig could figure out this language?”
“I have no idea,” I said, and turned the page. “Okay, that’s definitely a gnome. Bushy beard, silly hat, rosy cheeks.”
“I guess they like woodland cider,” Leo said, referring to the gnome’s frothy stein.
More rows of music unfurled around the gnome—and I remembered that I still had my recorder in my tote bag from last night.
“I’ve got an idea,” I told Leo. “Don’t touch the pages.”
I retrieved my recorder and warmed it up with scales while Leo looked away from the manuscript to watch me, his eyes bright with excitement. “Oh, Dames, Pan. We might be the first people to hear this music in centuries. It’s like reaching back in time.”
“If I can figure it out,” I said. “I think I can come close.”
“How do you even know where to start?”
“Well, say the red pip signifies F and the yellow pip is C. Then the squiggly lines above them are relative to those pitches.”
“And a pip is?”
“Those rough-looking squares and diamonds.”
“Do they mean different things?”
I shushed him. “Let me concentrate.”
I usually stumbled over premodern notations, but today everything made sense.
I played two lines slowly, then I played them slightly faster.
My eyes tracked the neumes as my fingers followed on the instrument.
My lips tingled and music filled the room like the scent of baking bread fills a kitchen.
Sunlight streamed through the bookcases and Leo watched me, so attentive that he almost looked enthralled.
The recorder sounded ethereal, ancient and delicate, the perfect instrument for medieval, magical music.
I played the two lines again and again, and with every repetition the melody felt more familiar, as if I remembered the tune from my dreams. My fingers moved with reflexive assurance and my exhales into the recorder felt endless, like the music wasn’t coming from me so much as through me.
My eyes closed but the world only brightened. A kaleidoscope shifted behind my eyelids: a knot of colors, woven with threads and snarls and tangles. A knot of neumes and pips, an orchestra of notes jumbled together into an incomprehensible mess.
Yet I understood the mess.
I remembered the mess.
At least, the mess felt like memory. Like a thought on the tip of your tongue, when you’ve blanked a fact or a name. The music felt like the recollection of things long forgotten, so I guided my playing into that knot of memory.
I directed the music to unpick the tangles. Urged the notes to tug at the threads, to loosen and unsnarl. To remember.
Pitches and phrases unspooled from me, unweaving the knot that stretched between me and the manuscript, the tangle of memories within the pages.
I didn’t know if my eyes were open or closed.
My body tingled and expanded into a hundred versions of me, reflections spreading in an aura of turquoise and gold.
Then one more thread loosened and the knot splayed suddenly open. The magic surged, free and strong, like a lake through a collapsed dam—and I was just standing in the library again.
Except now Leo was supporting me, wrapping me in his arms, keeping me from falling.