42. An Extant Form of Magic #2
‘Briar,’ Tate says, not looking up from his sheets.
‘I think this is . . .’ He hands over a short, typed list of around twelve names, a date next to each one.
It’s been carefully stapled to a hand-drawn map of the school campus.
The woods and the graveyard are dotted with crosses, marking the spot - and beside each cross is a carefully inked set of initials.
It looks to Briar very much like a map of people who never made it out of the Temple grounds.
‘Yeah,’ they say uneasily. Who are these people? Staff? Scholars, who’d never made it home to their parents? ‘I think you’re right.’
There’s a letter at the bottom of the box, the handwriting now familiar. Briar and Tate read it together.
If you’re reading this, I hope we meet on common ground.
I have not yet found anyone sympathetic to my cause within Temple school, though I continue to search, but if this letter has reached you, then we must either be enemies or comrades.
I hope to God we’re the latter – that I told you where to look, that a friendly hand held the key.
That a friend is with me now. I can’t do this alone. Nor can you.
I have reason to suspect that thaumaturgy, the Work we do at Temple, is being kept from the world by nefarious means, although I have not fully unravelled that secret.
Furthermore – I believe the historic board of governors conspired to conceal the existence of a type of practical thaumaturgy contained within so-called ‘lost texts’.
These, I began to uncover in hidden and forgotten places within the school itself, over many years.
Such is the hubris of Temple – they cannot conceive of anybody within their walls betraying them, or, indeed, of any scholar venturing into a junk room on anything less than pain of death.
I can no longer tolerate this stain upon my conscience.
I have been able to retrieve the documents enclosed by pushing the very limits of my own power against security forces at the school, but alas, I have begun to attract suspicion from other members of the faculty, and so the texts have remained in situ.
Their suspicion could prove fatal. I will make one last attempt, but I know my cause might already be lost. If I am not dead, then I am likely to be untethered, my memories lost to me.
If you are a friend, please continue my fight. Force their hands. Burn it all down.
I have dedicated myself to the study of Inquiry as best as I can; I can only hope it fortifies me against their interrogation, when it comes. I have one last trick up my sleeve, should it come down to it. I’d like to see them try to get answers from a mind that’s self-destructed.
Please tell Pete that I love him, and I’m sorry. I hope he understands why I kept him safe in ignorance. If you can, keep the wolves from his door.
Robert Parker
July 17th, 1998
Briar hands the letter to Pete with a shaking hand. He frowns at it, scrabbles in his pocket for his reading glasses, reads the first line - then walks a few paces away, to read the rest of the contents in peace.
‘Robert fucking Parker,’ says Tate. ‘What a guy.’
‘Do you think he’s . . . ?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Tate, glancing over at Pete. ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
When Pete returns, he’s red-eyed as he says, ‘Well. I can’t thank you enough for coming. I spent so many years wondering . . . really, thank you. Do you think he might be out there, somewhere? Unable to come home?’
‘He might be,’ says Tate. ‘I wish we could help more, but . . . if he doesn’t know who he is, it’ll be hard for us to ever know.’ Pete nods bracingly. ‘Look, I’m sorry to ask this, but your friend—’
‘Partner,’ says Pete.
‘Your partner was trying to do something very brave, and I think, if you’ll let us take this with us . . . I think maybe we can finish the job for him.’
‘Well,’ says Pete, putting his hands on his hips and clearing his throat. ‘Yes. I think he’d like that. I think he’d like that very much.’
The news breaks a few days later, and they all gather around the tiny TV in the snug to watch. Helicopter aerials over Temple, fleets of police cars and ambulances.
It was hard to get anybody to believe them.
Everyone’s confused right now, trying to separate what they thought was fiction from this new reality - but eventually, Tate found a police detective willing to listen.
He’d warned them what they might come up against, and Briar had imagined the board at the gate ready to talk the police out of entering, even hordes of scholars lining the battlements, prepared for war - but instead of being a last bastion of the old world order, the authorities arrive at Temple to find it deserted.
It’s eerie, watching the helicopter footage of the wrecked library, a hole in the roof so large that you can see part of a sofa and piles of partly burned books beneath. The lawns, empty. No smoke piping from those ancient chimneys.
‘Where the hell is everybody?’ Bastian says, leaning in closer.
‘Gone home to their estates, I’d imagine,’ says Westby. ‘Burned the records and got the hell out of dodge. Harder to track everyone down and mete out punishment, if they’re scattered.’
Tate snorts. ‘So much for vows, and the Templetonian fraternal spirit.’
‘Ha! This is the Templetonian spirit. We’re all in this together, as long as it benefits us, and the second it doesn’t - every man for himself.’
Eugenia sends a text, inexplicably in all caps. The way it’s delivered implies that she might be abroad. SAFE. DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE BODIES. YOU NAILED THOSE FUCKERS.
They start finding human remains straight away, an enormous operation combing every inch of the grounds, and Briar is surprised that they cry alone at their laptop as photos of the dead fill their screen.
They cry again, later, when the search seems complete and Robert Parker’s name stays safely off the list of victims, and they pick up the phone to find Pete imbued with new purpose on the other end of the line.
One week since they left Temple, tempers are fraying.
Orpheus has been returned to his mother, dropped off at the end of her lane like stolen goods, but the house is still too small for all five of them; it’s very nice, tall ceilings and underfloor heating, but there are only two bedrooms, so Hadley sleeps on the sofa downstairs and gripes at anyone who wakes her too early in the morning, and bitches when Westby leaves his wet laundry to dry on the rail by the fire.
‘That’s what it’s for,’ he keeps insisting, when she’s furiously removed yet another pair of his dripping pants.
Pressure is mounting on him to return home for his father’s funeral; nobody’s sure exactly how safe this will be, with an entire extended family of thaumaturges waiting to receive him, but the fact that they haven’t stormed the cottage yet is a good sign.
The board have gone silent, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to let this go unanswered.
Briar often finds Westby sitting by himself, caught in the claws of grief, but when they ask if he wants to talk, he just says, ‘That’s all right, Jones. Same liver, new eagles.’
‘We will come with you, though,’ Hadley says one evening, as they sit down to eat an uninspired dinner of instant noodles.
She’s been uncharacteristically kind of late, although it clearly pains her.
Briar supposes she’s trying to make amends.
They don’t exactly trust her, but they think they can sort of understand her.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t put you through all that again,’ Westby says irritably. ‘You know. My mother, the uncles. An entire clan who might be set on murdering us. Golf.’
‘West,’ Tate says seriously, ‘I would suffer a thousand uncles for you. A million uncles.’
‘Good,’ says Westby, ‘because if you come, you certainly will.’
They’ve all been wearing Westby’s family’s clothes, whole wardrobes of spares packed away in plastic, Hadley speechless with delight when she discovered a hidden T-shirt of West’s that reads BIGGEST SLUT AT THE ANTIQUES STORE that she’s now refusing to take off.
It’s very unnerving seeing Bastian standing in the kitchen each morning drinking his chamomile tea, wearing corduroys and a classic Westby cardigan.
Briar feels painfully soft whenever they catch a glimpse of him, unaware he’s being watched, sitting out on the deck with his eyes on the sea, or caught in a thought as he reads by the fire.
The loss of Temple has hit him the hardest; he doesn’t seem to know who to be without it.
The constant tension of such close quarters is getting to him most of all. Having seen the consequences of his stronger emotions, the way the lamps begin to rattle when he’s approaching his limit, it’s a good thing that Briar is so attuned to his mood they can usually head things off at the pass.
This morning, as Hadley and Westby launch into another argument about the offensiveness of the smell of wet cotton, Briar catches Bastian’s eye and jerks their head towards the exit, and they both pull on their shoes and slip out of the back door, crunching down the stone path until they reach the security gate, and then out onto the beach.