The Briar Archive

10. The Heir To Ackerly Green-1

The Heir To Ackerly Green

“Trusting and following your intuition is a rare and powerful gift, one most overlook.”

Leigha

A couple days later, Ascender posted to the Mountaineer blog. He had made contact.

Ascender:The last and only other time something like this happened, when we found Sullivan Green in 1997, we bombarded him with questions and crackpot theories. We terrified a fragile man and lost someone who could’ve been a valuable ally in our war.

I didn’t want to do that with Deirdre. Behind the scenes I asked the other Mounties to back off last week, to let me try and get through to her. And I did. Through her i********: account.

She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t remember the books. At least she didn’t seem to. I think Sully was protecting her from all this when he sent her away.

And for Sully’s sake I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what we know, why I wanted to talk to her. So, I lied. I said I was with a literary historical society. I told her that we knew her father had died, and we were hoping to have a look at any interesting artifacts from Ackerly Green that he might have left behind.

I didn’t tell her that I already knew what he left her.

It worked. First off, most important, the book Sullivan left her is not from the Lost Collection. But it’s still a treasure. It’s called Through the Night and is one of the four (possibly five) alternate books that AG published between 1955 and 1961. (There’s a theory floating around that when time was altered, other events were created to fill in the missing spaces. It’s pure speculation, but these books might’ve taken the place of the Lost Collection.)

She also told me about the book page. The one in the photo on her site. I asked to see it.

And she agreed.

She uploaded it to my Dropbox last night. As well as the handwritten page that was in the folder, which is the original manuscript of the book page. There are a few differences introduced during the editorial process, I guess, but they’re pretty much the same text, as you’ll see below.

She also scanned the back of the book page. A poem. It seems like this is all from some AG work, but I’ve never seen it. It looks like it’s from an actual journal of someone who left the civilized world of 1889 behind and walked into the wilderness. It’s interesting, especially toward the end, but it doesn’t make any sense why Sully would leave them to his daughter.

It feels substantial. Maybe because I want it to be. But if he wanted her to cross the Atlantic to have it, it must be. So, as tough as this is . . .

I’m sharing it with you.

This is what Basecamp was built for. Maybe together we can figure it out.

The Guide’s timeline mentioned they’d found Sullivan in 1997. And now Ascender mentioned how they’d lost him, as a cautionary tale about what could happen with Sullivan’s daughter. Was that why I’d been shut out? Out of fear I’d pursue their source? Had they been trying to protect him from a journalist with ties to the Times? I realized pretty quickly that I was making this all about me and that I needed to try and let it go (much as I thought I already had).

Once they had hi-resolution images of the items Deirdre was bequeathed, the Mountaineers set about making quick work of the mysteries locked inside them. Drawings of flowers adorned each corner of the typed page, a nice flourish to accompany the story of someone walking through the woods.

July 17th, 1889:I followed a wooded path for hours today. Worn by animals, the trail had recently been trod by a small-hooved deer. Perhaps a fawn. The soil was wet and the tracks fresh. Far along she stopped in the middle and the hoofprints disappeared. Perhaps she had reversed direction, turned and made off through the wall of trees that grew up on either side. Or had been startled by me? On the trail ahead, a hall-like thick of pricking branches that had grown up, coiling onto itself until only a tall and narrow passage continued on. I took care passing through, the branches catching at my coat, my rucksack. The forest was darker beyond, and warm. The sun had become low. A slow surrender to night, but I found myself unwilling to turn back. I searched and soon found a canopied glade and sat down upon its darkening grasses. I was tired. Filled up with a satisfying weariness. I ate an apple I had brought along, not terribly hungry I found. The forest began to tick and whistle and creak. It was peace to me. I rolled my coat into a pillow. The black treetops swayed above as if I was still a babe and the wild was rocking me off to sleep. I did not stir for hours, nor did I wake until a thin cool wind brought along the dawn. I rose and watched mist drift across the grassy hills. I saw strange flowers that I had not seen the night before. By first light I could see they were scattered all across the glade, their fat curled stem barely holding up a round, unopened bud. I had never seen flowers like these. Buds as large and round as a fist. I might have cut these flowers down in another life. Left them to rot in a cup on a table, their dying bodies arranged for my enjoyment. But not this life. Strangely, thin curling wisps of smoke began to rise from the top of the buds, like a spent pipe left to smolder. As the sun climbed higher the buds began to curl open. Trumpets come to announce the morn. And inside…well, I hurried to take my book from my bag to capture the impossible scene. I could not catch my breath as I sketched what laid before me, for fear it would vanish with the mist. Am I going mad, as many have accused me? Or is it possible that I am only now seeing the truth? The world as it truly is. Ripe and runny with wonder.

At the top of the page was a journal date: July 17, 1889. The Roman numerals at the bottom were now clearly legible, but no one was sure what they meant. The Mountaineers toyed with the idea that they might be a cipher or hidden code of some kind, but to no avail.

In a strange turn of events, the images that Ascender had posted to the website had somehow become corrupted. Strange digital artifacts appeared across the pages, and no matter what Ascender tried, he couldn’t get them back to their original state.

According to the timeline on the Guide to Magiq site, something similar had happened when the Thaw Conservation Center had checked their scans of the Guide. They too had been fragmented, with chunks of information missing. The core Mountaineers were convinced that the corruption was magical in nature, and Ascender pressed the new recruits to download the files as quickly as possible. He was afraid they’d deteriorate beyond recognition in a matter of days.

The day after he made the files available for download, and to the utter bewilderment of the Mountaineers’ technical wizards, The Book of Briars itself apparently emailed the group with the following clue:

Four keys to unlock the door

Every key made up of four

The first key grows by light of day

A piece of key is now in play

Since I’d found the forum, others had also followed the Guide to the Mountaineers. A new “recruit” named CameronP noticed the significance of the date on the published page: July 17. The same date that, more than a century later, The Book of Briars had appeared online. He also noticed that there appeared to be text hidden behind the visible lines of that page.

The following day, the book sent them another clue:

Find the words that have been changed

Words both new and rearranged

To find the five among the score

Look deeper than you have before

Beyond the flowers and the bevels

Between the words are deeper levels

And if you wish to earn a prize

See the page with different eyes

Recruit Piki began tweaking the pages in Photoshop, and they and CameronP made several design arrangements using the corner flowers like puzzle pieces. CameronP then discovered that playing with the levels and contrast of the images in editing software revealed five words hidden within:

reversed

searched

flowers

cut

arranged

It didn’t take them long to figure out that The Book of Briars wanted them to take one of the flower arrangements they had made and perform a reverse image search. When they did, they came to a Tumblr page belonging to someone named CR Sumner.

Months before, CR Sumner had detailed in a post that he had dreamed of this strange flower and then posted a sketch of the image along with its name: Fraylily. Recruit AndyisNowSkynet had postulated elsewhere in the forums that the way to unlock a fragment might be to go to the Book of Briars website and add a word or phrase after the URL. They added fraylily, and that led to a completely new web page. On the page were a few small images of scraps of torn paper with writing on them, along with the following message:

Congratulations. You have found the first fragment.

It was heartwarming to see how excited the core Mountaineers were at the development. This new batch of recruits was certainly clever. When I scanned the pages myself, the only thing I could find was a migraine headache. I was good at finding the hidden pieces of a story and putting them together, but this kind of puzzle-solving was well beyond me. Strangely, I seemed to be the only one asking (to myself, naturally) what the point of the “fraylily puzzle” actually was and why The Book of Briars, or whoever was behind it, was doing this in the first place. I mean, it wasn’t really magic, the puzzle. It could have been some elaborate marketing campaign or someone from the Low pulling a prank on the new Mountaineers, but the recruits, and even the guild leaders, seemed completely swept up in the adventure of it. They seemed to know this was what they were supposed to be doing, even though from the outside it seemed pretty suspect. Truth is, I had significant doubts, but also desperately wanted to see what was inside the Book. Maybe they were all feeling that push and pull between doubt and need, and I was the only one too old to set it aside for the sake of a good old-fashioned mystery. There wasn’t much time to ponder.

A week later the Book sent them another clue, and they were off and running:

What joy, what luck, a piece of key

But now there’s two, or maybe three

They’re floating out there, still unfound

One in the dirge, one in the ground

While the Mountaineers were picking apart the new clue, Deirdre, still exploring New York, finally updated her blog.

Deirdre: August 4th, 2016I’m trying to stay positive. I am positive. I am. Really. It’s just a little overwhelming. I’m in a new place. I don’t know a soul – if we don’t count Mr. Wallace. (I don’t count Mr. Wallace!) The only other contacts I’ve had are with the guy who runs the Korean Deli across the street and some random via i********:. Something to do with my dad’s old publishing company.

This city is vast. I mean vaaaaaaaaaast. I feel like the ant running around the glade, carrying a massive load on my shoulders. Uptown things feel easy because of the layout, but downtown I turn a corner and I’m lost in seconds. It’s kind of fun to feel lost. Completely lost. But then that makes me think of my dad. Lost in the city like he was. Homeless. Why was he homeless when he had this awesome (it did used to be awesome I’m sure) townhouse? They call it a townhouse here – I would call it a house or a terrace.

* * *

Deirdre: August 18th, 2016It’s HOT and HUMID – but wonderful. I’ve pretty much got the layout of the city down. To begin with I stayed pretty much on Manhattan, but I have ventured out to Brooklyn a few times now. I’ve even made two attempts to ride the Staten Island Ferry, but both times there was a wait of twenty minutes. Fine, I don’t mind waiting. But I wasn’t too keen on the people that I’d be waiting with – not the (I’m sure perfectly lovely) people of Staten Island, but the tourists! Ugh! I didn’t wait. I’m in love with the East Village and Lower East Side. SoHo seems okay, but the people there feel a little untouchable – that whole commerce of art thing. It’s strange. I’m not that great a fit there.