The Briar Archive

7. The Guide To Magiq

The Guide To Magiq

“Through the guide, I discovered a new family. And they were all odd too.”

Timidity

The subsequent twenty years proved mostly fruitless. Once the Mountaineers disappeared, online talk of magical alternate histories and the Lost Collection pretty much petered out.

The Low itself became more technically sophisticated and secure as the Internet grew in popularity and ability. It became more and more difficult for me to keep track of the myriad mystical corners of the Internet. Most of the pages I found myself visiting were RPG sites or places for various pagan faiths to share information. Occasionally, I would come across a hint of someone using actual magic, quite often a rather well-connected person trying to get a leg up on their own personal business fortunes. And if there was anything I was good at, it was hunting down corruption, whether it was mystical in nature or not.

But rumors abounded in the bottom rungs of the Low. Secret cabals, magimystic corporations, an immensely powerful magician so secretive no one knew his real name. Yet those leads were like gossamer strands of moonlight that dissolved the moment I touched them. Power players knew how to keep their secrets.

Throughout those years, Bella would send me emails to let me know how Sebastian was doing. He graduated high school as valedictorian, went to Georgetown on a full scholarship, married a whip-smart woman, and had twin daughters. As far as anyone knew, he was a completely normal and healthy young man. He had no memory of the trauma he suffered that day in the library and, as far as he knew, his father had left when he was a baby.

Bella said that on Sebastian’s thirteenth birthday, she had shown him a photograph of all of us standing in front of a Christmas tree when he was five. But he still couldn’t see me. He still had a father-shaped hole in his world, a hole that persisted to this day. But thanks to Bella’s exceptional parenting and stellar choice in a second husband, Sebastian would at least be able to live his life without feeling that it was a hole he needed to fill.

But I still had a son-shaped hole in my own world that I tried to fill by stalking Sebastian online. I only stopped when I saw a picture of my granddaughters and had to lock myself in my room to keep me from drinking down the nearest bar. The sight of those infants, my grandchildren, wrapped in matching pink blankets was one of the most beautiful and traumatizing things I had ever seen.

To keep myself from going over the edge, I threw myself at work. An easy thing to do as a freelance journalist. As the weeks, months, and years went by, the unnamed book slowly made its way to the back of my mind, where I kept the memories of old girlfriends and yesterday’s lunch. And though I kept Brightwell’s coin with me, it was more an affectation than anything else, a conversation starter for the rare occurrences when I needed to speak to someone outside of a journalistic interview. Magic and all its mysteries were no longer foremost in my mind.

Until July of 2016.

A search alert notified me of a website that had just popped up called Ackerly Green’s Guide to Magiq. Someone had found a book from the Lost Collection, replicated it, and shared it online. (As of this book going to print, The Guide to Magiq is still online at h***:://magiq.guide.)

The site claimed that the Guide was first published sixty years ago, despite its absence from Ackerly Green’s own company records. It was a supplement to the Lost Collection, but it had been lost and remained lost until 2005, when a tattered copy was found in the ruins of the insane asylum on Roosevelt Island. The New York City Lunatic Asylum. This was that book, the book I had found, and subsequently lost, on the second floor of the Octagon in 1982. It had to have been. How different would my life have been if that police officer had stopped me just two seconds later, if I had picked up that book and took it home with me? Would Sebastian be a part of my life, or would he still have been lost to me? There was no use fretting over what might have been, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling of missed opportunity and lost possibilities. Almost as if magic had sought me out, offered me wonder, and I had turned my back on it. Or it had found me lacking.

The Guide found at the asylum was, as far as anyone knew, the only physical copy known to exist. It was delivered to a conservation society that scanned and attempted to preserve the book, but it was stolen shortly after and was believed lost forever until, just a few years ago, two children found the book, tattered and crumbling, on a park bench in the West Village.

This, in and of itself, I found captivating. Whether or not it was actually stolen was something I wouldn’t dare wager on. It all but up and disappeared on me. There was no reason that it shouldn’t have done it again soon after it was found by someone else. But being found again by children on a park bench? Children of a fantasy author living in New York City? I was beginning to suspect the Guide had a mind of its own.

The Guide claimed that magic was real, a belief that I found easy to slip back into accepting.

The website included a bulleted list detailing the mysterious history of Ackerly Green, the odd events surrounding its founders, what was known of the Lost Collection, and the long, strange journey of The Guide to Magiq and how it found its way to the creators of the site.

The Mountaineers.

Only they weren’t the same group of people I knew back in the 90s. They were new. And they were open about who they were and what they were trying to do. They’d gone public.

Though the original Guide had disintegrated, they had painstakingly recreated it and put it on the Web for all to see in the hope of finally learning the truth about the Lost Collection.

And the Guide wasn’t alone. Two weeks before the Magiq site went live, another site mysteriously appeared.

It was called “The Book of Briars.”

I clicked the link to that site and found the striking image of a green, clothbound book, with ornate brass locks at each of its four corners, floating in a nebulous sea of shimmering color. The Mountaineers claimed that the site had only just appeared, but there were already clues hinting that it held the truth about everything they, and I, had been searching for all these years. Something big was happening. And this time I wasn’t going to let it pass me by or disappear from my hands.

Just like the legendary climbers of mountaineering history, the Mountaineers were compelled to reach a strange and otherworldly summit. Using the Guide as a recruitment tool to find others who believed in their cause, and in magic, they were going to stop at nothing until they could stare out at the world beyond the peak and behold the vista of hidden knowledge.

When the pioneering mountaineer George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he famously replied, “Because it’s there.” I was driven by a similar, seemingly unquenchable, desire. But unlike Mallory, I didn’t want to climb this mountain because it was there.

I wanted to climb it precisely because it wasn’t.