The Monarch Papers

3. Kemetic Solutions

Chapter 3

Kemetic Solutions

“We just do not know, we can’t build a full scenario with the information we have.”

ArcChild

The one lead the Mountaineers had but weren’t able to follow very far was the tech firm providing the Cagliostro with email servers and cloud storage: Kemetic Solutions. Bells even did an image search for the logo and came up dry. That struck me as odd. If there’s one thing tech companies want, it’s high-profile branding. If a company has a digital footprint so small that their logo never sees the light of day, it’s because they’re being run by a pack of teenagers too busy surfing to do any actual work . . . or because they don’t want to be seen. My cheesesteak was on the latter.

After a few hours spent contacting some old friends in the telecommunications business, I found a phone number for Kemetic Solutions, but it just sent me to a call center somewhere in Nebraska. Even though the number was pretty much bogus, it was an American phone number. Which most likely meant the business was operating in the States. And if that was the case, Kemetic would have had to provide the IRS with a physical address. So I put in a request to the IRS and waited.

Hunting down leads, following up with sources, researching even the most frivolous clues . . . It felt good to scratch these old itches. This was what I knew. What I was born to do. Find the story, no matter how deeply hidden it was. Thing was, I always had a pretty good idea where a story would take me, whether it be underneath a forgotten overpass or into a boardroom atop a high rise. But this was something new.

Maybe it was this renewed focus on the job, but I was sleeping a little better. I still dreamed about snow and more often than not woke up shivering, but the chill I felt on waking would fade after a few hours. I started brewing pots of hyper-caffeinated coffee using some local brand of beans with a skull and crossbones stamped on the black bag. Pumping that much caffeine through my veins probably wasn’t helping with my sleeping problems, but it certainly helped with the chills. Some steaming coffee in my stained and chipped NYT mug and a pair of tattered slippers got me feeling about as back to normal as I was likely to get.

While I worked on Kemetic, the Mounties were making some serious headway into finding the next fragment, four of which were required to unlock each corner of the Book of Briars. Apparently, the strange passage Lauren had found on the envelope referred to various astronomical concepts.

New Mountaineer Gryphon believed the first clue—“Thirteen volumes, the foundation of our universe until a revolution changed our position”—could be a reference to Euclid’s Elements. But Kelsey suggested Ptolemy’s Almagest—which Brendon noted put forth Ptolemy’s geocentric view of the universe, an idea that remained popular until Heliocentrism began to find favor during the Copernican Revolution. Yeah. That’s how the Mountaineers rolled.

And thanks to Leigha bringing some Olympian insight into the mix, the Mounties also knew that “Aquarius” was the answer to the question: “Borne from Ida to serve the wine, who waits in the celestial court between the whale and the eagle?”

As the Mounties worked their way through the strange clues, something interesting began to happen to the journal pages. The text of those pages had been set around circular areas of blank white space. A couple of those circles were now filled with illustrations of planetary objects, which were marked with strange abbreviations and symbols arranged in lines that emanated from the centers of the circles. The imagery reminded me of an old, circular star map I had as a child during my brief flirtation with astronomy.

It was certainly fun to watch them work. Veterans like Robert, OracleSage, Brendon, Kelsey, and Leigha worked alongside new and clever recruits like Hannah and aTomic to crush the puzzle at hand. In no time, all six circles were filled with the strange letters and symbols. Also of interest was the appearance of what seemed to be “craters” randomly spaced in each circle. Kelsey figured out how to punch out the craters and use the holes of one circle to align with another in a way that gave a series of letters. Brendon rearranged those letters into a series of celestial names that, when entered into the Book of Briars website in a specific order, revealed a constellation called “Galifanx.”

They had found another fragment. Great news, but I was getting restless and wanted to feel useful. Now that I had a night or two of decent sleep under my belt, it was time I got cleaned up and put on some adult clothes.

It was strange, but I had a hard time remembering the last time I showered. The hot water always took forever to heat up, and I must have forgone the idea of soaking in it to warm myself for that very reason. Better to wear half a dozen sweatshirts and hibernate under the covers for warmth than wait for an aging boiler to rescue me.

Washed, shaved, and wearing relatively clean khakis and a button-down, I made my way to a deli down the street. Spring hadn’t officially arrived yet, but it was warm enough that most people only wore light jackets. I, on the other hand, wore a peacoat and a Scottish wool scarf to keep warm. The icy grip of Lauren’s Grand Central transformation was slowly loosening its hold, but there was still a desperate chill inside me, coiled like a hungry snake that would strike the second it felt the slightest rise in temperature.

I pulled out my laptop while I spooned down a steaming bowl of soup and saw that Deirdre had only published two posts on her blog since I’d last checked. I had been so lost in the aftermath of the Translation that I had forgotten that Cole had finally told Deirdre about the Mountaineers, the Lost Collection—everything. It had obviously been a lot for her to process. Her first post after learning the truth was a poem titled “The Sea.”

Deirdre: February 2nd, 2017:To learn at last why I have always felt adrift and wanting.

Why my efforts always left me lacking, lost.

It was you, after all, the one I didn’t know I was chasing.

The one who built a box and packed me up inside it.

Wrapped tight in the lies you wrote for me.

I’m going to do you one last favour, one mad deed I do for you.

And then I cast you out to sea.

I’m going to write a new story and see what it can do.

One where I’m no longer blind. One where light can get inside.

One where all of what I could’ve been can be dusted off and made to be.

Possibility. Possibly.

Where you have no more reign on me.

I pray the truth is brighter than the lie that was your gift.

I pray I wake tomorrow and I see the curtains lift.

Then I will set you out to sea and meet the girl you wouldn’t let me be.

A girl who doesn’t need to know you any longer.

A daughter that can see.

It was the story she had to write to break the spell that her father had cast on her. She’d done it. She’d decided to walk the path.

Cole hadn’t been back to the forum since coming clean with Deirdre at the train station, but he confirmed Deirdre’s spell-breaking in a post on his Tumblr blog a couple weeks later.

Cole:I texted with her on Valentine’s Day. (It was a coincidence, calm down.) She knows everything now. She’s read everything. She knows about the Mountaineers, the Lost Collection, King Rabbit, the other volumes of her dad’s journal, every time we talked about her, everything . . .

And I told her everything about me too. The night I brought her the spell.

And then she left the country. Back to Ireland. She didn’t say how long she’d be gone. Hell, who knows if she’s ever coming back. I don’t know if I would.

I haven’t been back to the forum. I think it’s best like this. If you ever need anything though, I’m here.

What a mess, huh?

But . . . we did the right thing. And we did it as soon as we could, right?

Hope you guys are doing alright. Not getting into too much trouble.

Deirdre’s next post was over a month later. It was a direct message to the Mountaineers.

Deirdre: March 22nd, 2017To the Mountaineers,

I haven’t posted to my blog in a while because it feels, well, compromised? But it’s not like I’m trying to cut you all off.

I’m all caught up on what you’ve been up to since I got to New York. Yes, it’s weird. Yes, it’s unnerving. Yes, this is all waaaaay too much. I mean, I was stalked by a talking rabbit who’d possessed a human body to steal my dad’s pocket watch.

But as hard as all this is to get my head around I realise that you saved me. You tore the plaster off, which is good, but right now it’s painful and raw and I feel very exposed.

I read everything on your forum but I don’t go there anymore. It’s too weird to read people talk about you like you’re a character in a book. But I get it. That’s your space to figure out what’s going on.

Meanwhile, here’s what’s happening with me . . . I can read my dad’s journal now. Most of it still doesn’t make sense, in that it’s rambling and disjointed, but the words are words now, not jumbles of headache-making blobs.

Whatever my dad did to me protected me from the truth. From “magiq.” So his journal, The Monarch Papers, must lead to the truth, or some part of it, because now that his spell is broken, I can read parts of it. It’s all I have to go on right now.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks, following my father. He talks about a trail that was left behind hundreds of years ago. A trail that leads to the buried truth. A trail of paintings and sculptures and tapestries and books, all around the world. And as I follow the trail, more appears in the journal. I don’t know what I’m doing or why, but starting a publishing company doesn’t seem like my prime imperative right now, right?

Strange to ask a question and realise there are people on the other side of this with help, advice, maybe even answers for the first time in a long time.

Magic is real. My father learned how to perform it. And he left a trail for me to follow him. Maybe it’ll lead to the lost books, maybe it’ll lead me to learn magic, or maybe it won’t lead anywhere. Maybe back to a warren in Central Park where he died, alone.

I don’t know. But I’ll stay in touch. You deserve that.

To Cole:

I had a hundred reasons to walk away from New York City. What you confided in me wasn’t one of them. I promise.

When Deirdre said she was following her father’s trail, she meant it literally. She’d started posting images to i********: from her travels: Ireland, Amsterdam, Spain . . . I could only imagine what she must be feeling as she tried to work through all of this. And I was sure that Cole was having a difficult time as well. He told her the truth, and she left to go on a global walkabout. My heart ached for those two kids. Sue me, I’m a softy.

By the time I got back home, the mail had arrived. And there, in the midst of a stack of credit card offers and coupon booklets, was something from the IRS. My first instinct was to panic—it was quite possible my financial diligence wasn’t up to Uncle Sam’s snuff. But when I got inside and opened it, I was doubly relieved. It was the information I’d requested on Kemetic Solutions.

Sadly, there wasn’t much there. A phone number (to the same call center), a business ID number, and a physical address. Someplace just outside Boston. On a whim, I headed up the following morning.

The drive wasn’t too bad, all things considered, but my constant need for coffee’s warmth left me no choice but to make a few pit stops along the way.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but the ordinariness of the place was a letdown. It was a small office park set back just off the highway, nothing more than a couple of bland, rectangular buildings surrounded by several copses of trees.

I drove through, keeping an eye out for anything unusual. But there was nothing. And that was what I found so strange. The nothingness, the blandness of it all was suspect. There were no placards on any of the buildings, no signs indicating what businesses lay inside; even the lone trash can outside what I assumed were the front doors was so pristinely clean I’d swear it had never been used.

Perhaps strangest of all was the empty parking lot. It wasn’t very large; there were about twenty spaces or so, but not a single one was filled. It was completely clean of any garbage or debris, without even an errant oil stain marring the pavement. It looked more like a movie set than a business park.

I assumed Kemetic Solutions had given the IRS the address of some unused and abandoned offices. If that were true, I could probably blackmail them into speaking with me. Defrauding the IRS is no small thing, not even for secretive tech firms with ties to magic. Of course, I still had no idea how I’d get a hold of them. This was looking like a dead end, and I wagered the call center was a facade, too.

But if this place were truly abandoned, it should have fallen into disrepair. Yet the park was clean, the lawn well manicured. And there were no “space for rent” signs anywhere, which meant that the upkeep wasn’t for the sake of attracting new tenants. Someone had to be using the place.

The windows were all opaque and reflective. There was simply no way for me to get a good look at what was behind them, and what little I could see was the uniformity of closed, beige blinds.

I parked the car and made my way to the front doors. Sunlight glared off the glass of the double doors, so I pressed my shading hands against it and peered inside. I saw an empty lobby with a marble floor and a hallway that faded into darkness. There was nothing else: no furniture, no lamps, no legend on the wall to indicate which business resided on which floor.

I pulled at the doors. Locked.

“May I help you?”

The voice came from a call box on the brick wall next to the oddly clean garbage can.

“Sir?” the voice asked again.

Sir? That meant they could see me, but I didn’t notice any cameras anywhere.

“Uh, yeah. I’m Martin Rank with the Globe. I’m doing some background on a story. Electronic security protocols, voting machine vulnerabilities, that sort of thing. I was told someone at Kemetic Solutions could help.”

“You’ll have to make an appointment.”

“I’m just looking for some basic info, a couple of quotes, shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

“Make an appointment and someone will be more than happy to speak with you.”

“Appointment, okay. Can I confirm your number? It’s . . . Ma’am? Ma’am, are you still there?”

Silence.

“Ma’am? Hello? Hello!” The call box was dead. I peered inside once again, thinking I might see a security camera or maybe even a person hiding in the shadows. But there was nothing.

I tried the call box for a few more minutes, but whoever had been on the other end either didn’t hear me or was ignoring me. And since I was confident that they knew their number was bogus, I figured they had no intention of ever talking to me.

On a hunch, I pulled out my phone. I wanted to see if they had a Wi-Fi hotspot and what kind of protections they were running. But right away, I saw there was a problem. There was no Wi-Fi signal at all. None. Kemetic Solutions was looking less like a tech company and more like a CIA-funded black site every minute. I’d never been one to have truck with conspiracy theories, but then again, I’d never been one to believe in magic. I knew this wasn’t really a government operation, though. If it had been, security would have escorted me from the premises. But there was no security. There wasn’t anyone.

I was getting frustrated, and my steady intake of coffee was wreaking havoc with my bladder. I toyed with the idea of testing the “no security” theory by relieving myself against the wall, but decided against it. They could just call the cops and have me hauled off to jail for indecent exposure and never have to interact with me at all. And given how shabby I was looking even after a shower and shave, there was a good chance the police would tack on a charge of vagrancy for good measure.

Instead, I went back to my car and got my camera. It was an older Nikon Coolpix that I had held onto since the Baltimore Sun had brought me on as a photojournalist for all of a week. I snapped a few quick pics, hoping security would finally materialize to confiscate the camera, but no one came.

I thought I’d hit another dead end, until I got home and checked the photos.