We were more grateful when Edith Birch brought us, along with the usual stack of Kirill’s notebooks and references, additional texts and notes. The books themselves, as we examined them, appeared fairly pedestrian—several well-known fakes, a few impressively obscure fakes, a sprinkling of works that were legitimate but common. But the notebooks …
They weren’t anything we’d sought, but they were fascinating. Generations of girls like Audrey, like Mary, even like Sally, had encountered some hint of the art—in Hall’s scant collections, at Miskatonic’s open classes, from boyfriends’ coyly dropped hints—and become obsessed with something outside their permitted knowledge, beyond the strictures that bound them to safety.
It shouldn’t have shocked me. Charlie had come to me with that same desperation for deeper knowledge, and Audrey too in her own way. But magic and the elder tongues had for so long represented freedom to me because they were a piece of home. They were comfort and safety, even as they offered glimpses of things that could never be comforting or safe. And so it took these dozens of voices—desperate diaries, efforts to reinvent ancient knowledge from nothing again and again—for me to truly understand that they were stretching outward in desperation while I stretched inward. That there were people, beyond the few I knew, who might actively seek to understand the strange rather than destroy it in revulsion.
Might even come to its aid, when we were ready. I realized that I was shaking.
I stood and paced around the table, trying to get my body and emotions back under control. I rubbed my arms against the draft, wondering if last night’s adventure had permanently altered my tolerance for cold. I hoped the effects would fade with time, or with distance.
“Are you okay?” asked Charlie.
“Yes.” I forced a smile. “I just thought of something. Not important, just personal.”
“That’s great,” said Audrey. “I hope you’ll tell us about it when you’re ready, but in the meantime I’ve still got a headache, so…”
“Sorry,” I said, and sat down. I returned to the notebooks, full of new curiosity about their creators’ lives and thoughts. About whether any of them had caught more than a glimpse. About people who, found at the right time, might have been friends and allies and students. About chances lost.
And that was Sally, too. And Leroy and Jesse. When they saw me—when Leroy and Sally saw the elders—they might have been scared, might have acted foolishly, but they also saw the proof of their deepest yearnings. If I hadn’t been so frightened myself, if I had seen beyond the elders’ treatment of them as dangerous outsiders, if I had understood, I would have realized that they could never let it lie. Sally and Jesse had broken into the library, had accepted Barlow’s offer of mentorship, because I’d shown them magic—and then given them nothing beyond the demand to keep it a secret.
I set the journal in my hands aside, and paged through others with less attention as I considered my error and whether there might still be some chance of repairing it. Then a name scrawled inside one cover—at the bottom of the stack, perhaps placed there by Birch through an odd sort of protective instinct—brought me abruptly back to our current troubles.
Not wanting to hold this alone, I tapped Caleb on the shoulder. He put down his half-accurate primer to see, and his mouth made a little o.
“What did you find?” asked Spector.
I held the book up. “The name on this journal is Asenath Waite.”
“You’ve mentioned her before,” said Audrey. She leaned forward, then winced and rubbed her head.
I never had gotten around to explaining Asenath to her. I supposed it was time. “Asenath’s name is on the notebook—but it’s her father, Ephraim, who wrote the notes. He was the last perpetrator of body theft tried in Innsmouth. In absentia, of course. The man who shot him, after he jumped bodies again, is in an asylum outside of town. But discovering Ephraim took a long time, and he—as Asenath—went to school here.” I sighed. “I expect someone must have sent her—his—papers here afterward. That librarian who’s been so helpful was a friend of hers. I haven’t wanted to tell her—I don’t see that it would do much good.”
Audrey let out a low whistle. “Yeah. I guess—I don’t know. I feel like I’d want to know, but I probably wouldn’t, actually. What’s he have to say, then?”
I dove into the book, reluctant but feeling a sort of duty. Hall’s librarians took care with personal journals, and there were others in the stack by the same hand—but we soon discovered that Ephraim recorded all but his most innocuous thoughts in a mix of R’lyehn and Enochian, and often supplemented linguistic security with mirror writing and personal shorthand. I was the only one with the skill to make any sense of it.
Even putting aside his crime, Ephraim Waite was not a credit to our people. He obsessed over the supposed defects of his stolen body, convinced that his every failure reflected the limits of the female brain. His evaluations of his fellow students were crude and dismissive—though beneath that, there were hints that he appreciated their company and drew comfort from it. He even saw a little of their potential, in spite of himself. And he never tried to corrupt them for his own use. As I read further, I discovered such reluctance was far from his universal habit.
Ephraim knew that the Yith carried out their tasks with the aid of scattered cults, whose service they repaid with tidbits of knowledge. Not having so remarkable a mission to spark loyalty, he bought his own worshippers not only with carefully tailored scraps of esoterica, but with the assurance that their basest urges were the will of the gods.
I swallowed nausea and suppressed another shiver—and almost glossed past a line in his description of a group working in the outskirts of New York City:
Volkov, a strong and ambitious man, could make a good high priest. V. eager to learn the arts, though perhaps too independent-minded. He hopes to return home when the current troubles pass, assuming they ever do. He constantly reminds me that his name means “wolf” in his native Russian. Must find some way to remind him that wolves are pack creatures—and make a dog of him.
I nearly spoke up immediately, but restrained my tongue. The implications were obvious, but what I should do about them was not. Here was a Russian who might well have brought the rituals of body theft back to Moscow—perhaps to buy immunity from his country’s “troubles.” If this was the Russians’ key to learning that art, it had been taken long ago, long enough that Barlow’s searches for a spy on campus became absurd. And knowing the danger’s source might make it easier for Spector’s people to watch for intruders. At the least, they could make it more difficult for any one person to do great damage.