The Monarch Papers

2. Remains

Chapter 2

Remains

“As a wise tree once said, “Don’t be hasty.”

Rimor

When I finally found the will to move, I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I was never easy on the eyes to begin with, but now I looked almost feral: red, puffy eyes, sunken cheeks, wiry stubble cracking through dry, leathery skin. The last time I had looked so bad had been at the height (depth?) of my drinking days. I needed to get my act together. Fast.

Oddly enough, my nerves calmed halfway through my second pot of coffee. My skin buzzed with caffeine, but the unnatural chill was finally beginning to dissipate. Outside, the city moved as it did every day, oblivious to the impossible truth I was still having difficulty admitting to myself:

Magic was real. Not just in the abstract. Real. Physical. Alive.

I was first introduced to “The Low World” decades before while investigating the Brandon Lachmann story. The Low was a loosely connected network of secret organizations, quiet societies, and subcultures all looking for proof of something outside our world, specifically the Lost Collection. Groups like the Mountaineers. Early on, I gave their talk of magic little credence. I assumed their belief in magic was much the same as that of Wiccans and their druidic brothers. The pagan concept of magic mostly manifested itself as ritualistic prayer to the Moon or Sun, to Nature itself. Deasil and widdershins, the symbol of awen and pentagrams, robed or sky-clad—all working a magic we find in ourselves to better connect us with one another and the world around us. But that is magic of the mind, the heart, perhaps even the soul. Whereas this . . .

Magic was real. Real, bona fide, honest-to-goodness Dumbledore-and-the-Elder-Wand sorcery existed. I had spent my life searching for verifiable facts and the journalistic Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. And as much as my left brain demanded rational, logical explanations, I could no longer deny what I had seen with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, felt with my own hands: a human being, warm, solid, turning to snow in my hands.

Admitting this terrified me. But I felt solace, too, because I knew I wasn’t alone. There were others who knew what I knew, who at least partly understood this incredible truth. Had it not been for the existence of the Mountaineers, I have little doubt I would have found myself searching for solace at the bottom of a bottle.

I wished I had known all this in ’94. I could have been a bigger help to the original Mountaineers, to their search for the Lost Collection. And I wished I had gotten to know them better.

There hadn’t been very many back then, but I remembered some of them, friends I only knew by their hackeresque aliases: Ascender, Augernon, and Knatz. Tinkerdown and Saberlane. In 1998, they all disappeared. I had heard through the Low that the Mountaineers had gotten close to something that scattered them “to the six corners.” I hadn’t been able to find out what that “something” was or why they needed to disappear. Did it frighten them? Threaten them? Or did the frustration of not being able to find what they were looking for finally get to them?

I didn’t encounter the name Ascender again until the new Mountaineers posted the Magiq Guide in the summer of 2016, in what I assumed was a bulwark against whatever or whoever had wiped them out in the 90s. Ascender was back, but the others were still unaccounted for. I was saddened to learn, through a post written by Ascender, that Augernon had been long ago hospitalized, having lost his mind when the original Mountaineers fell apart. I guess, whether there’s magic in the world or not, life will always intrude in its brutal and inevitable ways.

If Revenir hadn’t contacted me about the Cagliostro, I may never have dove back into the forums. That’s probably not true, but who knows? Perhaps I’d still be fruitlessly looking into bureaucratic corruption. Part of me wished that I was. Ignorance is bliss, after all. But overall I was glad Revenir had drawn me back in. Because of the Mountaineers, I’d found the one thing all reporters search for: the truth. And as unlikely or impossible as this truth was, it only emboldened my sense of purpose. I’d resolved to continue working to expose those in power who took advantage of others. What difference did it make if some of those “powers that be” possessed magic? Abuse of power was abuse of power.

The Lost Collection was erased from history, and with it most knowledge of magic, to the detriment of the world. So was Brandon Lachmann. I wanted to know why. The Mountaineers’ cause had become my own.

I needed to keep moving, keep busy, to try and fend off the cold—never mind that the cold was something inside of me. After I brunched on coffee and cigarettes, I readied myself to venture out into the world, to see what was left of Lauren and the Cagliostro.

It took two days, but I tracked down the Cagliostro’s loft. It was in ruins. Shattered glass littered the floor, and not a single piece of furniture stood intact. The walls themselves were torn open, the drywall ripped away to reveal a complicated nest of wiring. Lauren had mentioned that he had hidden artifacts in the walls. Whether it was her, the Cagliostro’s manservant Carfax, or someone else, whoever had been here had taken whatever treasure the Cagliostro had secreted away.

As I was leaving, I noticed the faintest smell of incense. Not the cloying scent of a head shop or a cheap massage parlor, but the incense I remembered from my youth. It was the smell of churches, of ritual, of reverence. Of power. That lingering scent was all that was left of the immortal man.

I tracked Lauren’s parents to Florissant, Missouri. I gave them quite a scare when I called and asked if they had heard from her recently. They demanded assurances that Lauren was okay. I had no idea how to explain what had happened, so I lied and told them I was simply doing background on a story about rural migration to urban centers and thought she would be someone worth talking to. I don’t know what made me feel worse: lying to them, or that the ruse worked.

Eventually, I went online to catch up on what the Mountaineers had been up to while I’d struggled to process everything I had seen. Robert had found a fresh link on the Cagliostro website that led to a message from Lauren—a message written after she had dissolved in my arms on the floor of Grand Central Station. Just seeing her words on the screen sapped the heat from my bones.

She had found something she believed was meant for the Mountaineers. It was an envelope, hidden inside the book she had taken from the Morgan Library; Cole had evidently missed it when the two of them had been racing to find the spell that protected Deirdre. The envelope contained another entry from the mysterious journal from 1889, this time chronicling the writer’s disbelief upon finding himself in a new and magical land. I could relate.

The 1889 Journal:I could not return home. Though wonder had kept its unspoken promise and once again visited me, called me to its heart to witness the world of dreams, I dare not leave it. Not for fear of trusting it would visit me another time, but for fear of casting myself out to the cold world, the world in which I do not belong. I am a wandering man. Unshackled. Free from all that sent me from civilization to hide in the untamed country. Free from judgment and sidewise glances. Free from whispers about the man who cannot remember. I believed that I was escaping the false comforts and trappings of this modern existence, to live an unfettered life. But in truth, I was running toward the heart of wonder. Running back as if I’d been asleep there all my life and only temporarily awakened.

My whiskers unshaven, clothes worn through and tattered, I wash myself in teal-blue streams by light of glowing vines like fairies perched on swaying swings. I eat fruit that joyfully stings my tongue and fills my belly for days at a stretch. At times there are baskets of sandwiches on the paths I follow, filled with gold-speckled cheese and purple, squashed-flat tomatoes. The edible vines of the tomato still attached, coiled around the soft sliced bread as if they were holding their hats to their heads in a gust of wind. The things I’ve seen. I’ve followed the lilting sounds of children giggling and instead found five moons circling one other playfully in the sky.

Ah, the sky. What is black and cold in the old world is teeming with untold forms of life here in the wondrous dream. Eddies of stars swirl and loop like schools of fish. I am not without moments of doubt however. I recall the visions that infrequently overwhelmed me in the city. Visions of other worlds. Another life. Of all manner of unbelievable machinery and towers piercing the sky. I wonder, am I simply wandering the backroads of the farmland I claimed as home, imagining all I see now, deserving of all the terse whispers and fearful looks given me? Did I long ago lose my faculty and have since simply stalked the gray world, imagining all that lay before me? Even if it were true, would I want to leave this lie? No. I venture deeper. Alone, yes. Missing kind faces, a familiar wave of a hand calling me on. Everything here is soaked in wonder, but distant. Sumptuous to see, but not in need of me. I am enraptured, but useless. In my old visions I was in a strange, unfamiliar world, but yet I felt purpose. Here, I am simply a wanderer. This will all go on without me when I’m gone. A mad man’s vision of heaven, that need neither his eyes nor mind to continue on in existence. But is that not life in summary? I decide I will continue my writing, my sketches. My purpose here is not to affect this world, but see it. Suppose it. I find a tree whose bark peels away into thin sheets of paper, whose leaves are tipped in ink-like sap of many colors. I find a berm beneath the dark, open sky. And I see what no else will look up to see.

Additionally, a passage was written on the outside of the envelope:

Thirteen volumes, the foundation of our universe until a revolution changed our position.

At the whim of the master clock, Shepherd Gate shows all time. And in the courtyard the Astronomer Royal observes from here.

Because of the tenth there now are eight. When Xena fell, discord rose in her place.

What sees what we cannot? A giant, a Titan, a dragon, and all great light combined?

Three ancient stones mark the midwinter’s sunset, their faces toward Cora Bheinn and the mountain of the sound.

Borne from Ida to serve the wine, who waits in the celestial court between the whale and the eagle?

This is where the Mountaineers excelled. As their numbers grew, their collective intelligence grew as well, and they were well positioned to find the answers to these mystical riddles. They’d learned to go with the flow of these challenges, these puzzles. With them, we were not only unlocking the Book of Briars, but also learning more and more about the world, and the power still tucked away in its hidden corners. I could do the legwork with the nosiness and tenacity of any reporter worth their salt, but solving puzzles created by a magical, truth-telling book struggling to make its way into our reality was most certainly not my forte. So I decided to help them by doing something that was a little less magic but a bit more up my alley: sticking my nose in places it didn’t belong.

I still had the RSVP list for the performance that had ended with Lauren becoming the new Cagliostro, and I thought it might be worth digging into some of the names. They were all big fish when it came to morally and financially questionable business dealings (it was the corruption of a select few that put me on the Cagliostro’s path in the first place), but judging from their reactions on the night of the performance, none of them had been prepared to swim with sharks. I’d bet a Tony Luke’s Philly cheesesteak that many of them were nothing more than rich LARPers who’d thought they’d be slumming with Mina Crandon. If I hadn’t been too busy soiling myself, I might have even enjoyed seeing the looks on their faces when they realized just how big the shark was.

But I had already barked up several of those trees already, so I knew most wouldn’t lead anywhere. Or, if they did, they would only lead me into the shallows. I wanted to go deep. I wanted to find Leviathan’s lair and have a good snoop around.