By the time Mr. Morgan’s special agents delivered me back to Little Village, it was very late and I was exhausted. But I couldn’t sleep. I woke to a full moon shining as bright as early dawn. A cricket chirped noisily outside my window.
Against all my wishes and effort, I was again a spy. I was again a prisoner. But it was the absence of my memories that roused me with dread. I pushed open the window to take the cool night air and the cricket stopped his reverie. Had I sprung a leak? Or had I simply amassed more memories than a human could, and with nowhere left to go, the new were pushing out the old? I had the sense that my very self had been slipping out from underneath me without sign, that there was nothing to hold onto, nothing I could cup with my hands to prevent the dribbling away of me. I stood at my window and thought about my life. I felt through it plank-by-plank as one might feel a rowboat for a hole. But a gap of mind leaves no void to mark its absence. Whatever memories I had lost were simply gone along with any sign they had ever been. Was the dark cause still in effect? Would I end up an immortal amnesiac, unable to know or love anyone? I had gotten used to being effectively invulnerable. Now I was scared. I had never contemplated such an attack. Mostly, though, I was annoyed. I didn’t want to chase this phantom stranger. I didn’t want to spar with Mr. Morgan. I didn’t want to have aliases and escape plans. I wanted to replant the tulips the Inspector’s men had trampled. I wanted to get my potatoes in the ground. I wanted to expand my coop so that I could have chickens to eat. I wanted to see if the bulbs of elephant grass I’d ordered all the way from India would grow in my front yard. I wanted to mend my dresses. I wanted garlic for my suppers and berries for dessert. I did not want to be clever. Or dangerous.
I sighed. “I don’t have a choice, do I?” I asked the cricket. “Best get to it, then.”
The hearth in my stone-floored kitchen was covered in ash, which I swept carefully into a receptacle. Once cleared, I used the iron poker to pry up the flagstone, under which was packed earth. Using the little brass fireplace shovel, I dug to a depth of about six inches, where I struck metal. The block chest under the dirt was made of solid lead, and even after I had freed it from its earthy prison, it still took several minutes of heaving to get it up onto the floor. I turned the lock and lifted the heavy lid, which creaked and fell to the back. Inside was all that remained of my former life—one of them anyway, the one before Beltran, the one that brought us together.
At the start, I was a very poor spy. I lost my first partner to a vampiress. But then, Spurgeon Fount was a short, awkward man, despite my many ministrations. He had Napoleon’s stature but not his confidence, and like so many of his Victorian peers, he was lustful yet repressed. The beast we chased traveled under cover of a circus, which is why I had been recruited. Many American circus performers were foreign, lured from across Europe with promises of streets of gold. Thanks to my time with the mizzen, I was handy with a lock pick and a blade, which meant, with some training, I could perform minor feats of escapistry and knife throwing, and with Spurgeon as my handler, I was inserted as an apprentice performer in order to discover the identity of the foul creature, who played some important role for our shadowy adversaries. The vampiress was at least as old as me, and after several months, neither of us could get the better of the other. Alas, I did not take adequate precautions to protect Spurgeon, who was observed sneaking out of my tent and subsequently met a gruesome end.
I avenged him at least. Our vampiress was a tumbler—quite a difficult woman to pin down. I managed to impale her on a tent pole, but only by throwing her off me, whence I was bitten. I cannot describe what followed since I was not conscious to witness it. For the longest time, two curses waged war within me: one granting me eternal life, the other eternal undeath. It seemed neither could get the better of the other. I was wracked with tremors and night sweats that emerged between long bouts of still coma—seventeen years of it. I was moved to a sanitarium, expenses covered by proxies of The Masters. Mine was a unique case, it seemed. No one in the world knew what would happen—or what to do. Countless learned men came and went at first, like carnival-goers. But gradually, the number dwindled and I became just another curiosity, locked behind a steel door. For many of those years, I was tended by the same nurse. She rose every day to check on me, returned thrice during the day, and once again before bed. My own Florence Nightingale. And yet, I never met her. She was caught with millions of others in the influenza pandemic of 1918.
The man who woke me, who discovered the means to push the eternal battle within me towards the white curse and against the black, was an American. It seemed in those days as if suddenly everyone was American. It didn’t matter whether you were in Paris or Istanbul. They were everywhere, both on the streets and in the news. They invented industrious processes and married European aristocrats and earned incredible fortunes or lost them. They made motion pictures and jazz music and chemicals and machines and war. My American was Professor Henry Hunter, a classicist and scholar of lost magicks. He was not a practitioner. Strictly speaking, he was a magus, and he pursued the conundrum of my case as a kind of intellectual past time, the way a mathematician might become obsessed with an unsolved proof or a detective, a cold case. I was a terrible mystery, it seemed. The sleeping beauty. The woman who could not be roused, who needed neither food nor drink, who simply rested—seemingly forever—in a locked cell at the end of a long hall in a basement floor of a sanitarium.
When I awoke, he was speaking to a nurse.
“Well,” he said, looking down at me through his wire-rimmed spectacles, “there you are.”
It may seem odd to say it, but I hadn’t missed the years, at least not in themselves. I have a surplus of days. They travel quickly in the aggregate but drag in the singular. After a century, one is very much like the next. I would never have minded the ability to fast-forward a bit, to use a modern phrase. Still, it was uncanny the way the world had changed in my absence. I had seen automobiles in London, but they were little more than a novelty, a new way for the rich to spend their fortunes. I had heard a phonograph as well. As a matter of history, Thomas Edison gave one to Madame Helena Blavatsky, whom I accompanied to India. She kept it in the library. The first records didn’t play music. The quality was too poor. Rather, they played random sounds: the honk of a buggy horn, the chirp of a bird, bits of human speech. It was a novelty, something to give the guests a giggle—that noises could be trapped in a box—and after clustering around it excitedly for a week, the bearded gurus and I never touched it again.
But when I finally awoke from my coma, cars choked the streets. Music, once the monopoly of the musician, played from every open window. There were machines to wash clothes, machines to refrigerate food, even machines to send messages through the air. Greater still, our mysterious enemies had launched a major offensive. The result was total war. It had stretched round the globe. Many wizards and millions of civilians had died. I couldn’t believe it. Truly, I thought someone was trying to trick me. It wasn’t until Dr. Hunter brought me stacks of old newspapers that I began to appreciate the scale of the slaughter. It was easy enough to accept that a lone man could be cruel, or a handful of men, perhaps even a nation, but this insanity had engulfed the species. It didn’t seem possible. What had gone wrong?
Dr. Hunter—“Hank” to those who knew him—arranged for me a convalescence at a women’s home run by a religious charity, where I spent many hours reading. I confided in Hank, either by letter or in person, the whole of my life’s story. A cover had been invented for me while I was in coma. I was said to be a poor girl who had fallen victim to meningitis as a child. I knew that such a disease could affect the mind. After waking from so long a sleep, I needed to say my life out loud, to repeat it continuously if only to prove to myself that it was real, that it had all really happened and hadn’t simply been a dream, as the rest of the world then seemed to be, that I wasn’t Dorothea, a deranged sanitarium girl from Montana, but the immortal daughter of a Russian noble. Some days, it seemed like the one had invented the other.
Eventually, when I was well, Hank admitted his own selfish ends. The war had surprised everyone, he explained, even the High Arcane. No one was sure what was coming next. I promise you, the followers of the dark were never stronger, more numerous, or more openly influential than in the early decades of the 20th century. As a result, a new organization had been chartered, of which Hank and I were founding members—a kind of magical intelligence agency operating under Master Crowley, whose public shenanigans were nothing but a means of keeping the public focused on a fantasy, a cartoonish magic, and so away from the truth, even as he carried it out right in front of them.
It was called the Winter Bureau, and its mission was to engage our enemies directly through espionage and subterfuge—even, where necessary, by means of the black arts, which were for all other persons expressly forbidden. Its aim was to discover, in advance this time, the enemy’s secret intents. Dr. Hunter had convinced Master Crowley that I was singularly qualified. I was attractive, he said, and skilled in the social arts, including deception. I spoke five (and two half-) languages, I could pick a lock, use both a knife and a revolver, and quote classic poetry. I had more than a passing knowledge of magic, from books as well as practical experience, not to mention almost no fear of death. Indeed, I could be killed and still return with information. I was, he intoned emphatically, “the perfect spy.”
I remember being somewhat surprised at my own resume as it was recited to me. I felt absolutely no loyalty to my superiors, who had already sent me to rot in Everthorn, but I did to the good Dr. Hunter. He was a decent man. An honest man. More than that, he was an optimist, like any good American. Americans do not see the world as it is, which often makes them seem clumsy or naive. Rather, they see the world as they want it to be, which is why they have often been successful in making it so. And in those days, I needed to believe we could win. That the world could go off and get itself into such trouble in my absence made me question my faith in our very humanity. If the 20th century proved anything, it’s that cruelty and rationality were not bitter enemies, as had been assumed at least since Plato, but in fact the best of friends. I knew that I had no chance of believing we could win, of holding on to hope, anywhere but in the good doctor’s company.
He was certainly a sharp fellow, if a bit bookish, but in a way that you don’t find much anymore. He was an athlete as well as a scholar—a fit, vigorous, studious man who had once rowed competitively for Harvard. He hated guns, but he could throw a punch if need be. He could read and write almost every ancient language, and although he enjoyed his old books immensely, never more than people. He didn’t drink, except for the occasion celebratory toast. Yet, if you played the right tune, he would dance like Fred Astaire. If he had a fault, it was most certainly his naivety, which is a poor trait for a spy and one that got us into trouble on numerous occasions. My time with the mizzen aside, I had never thought of myself as particularly deceitful, at least not by nature, but in Hank’s company, it became necessary—even fun—to indulge that side of me. During our many adventures through the radio era, we made quite the pair, a fact we demonstrated to the high society of Berlin on our first mission together. The room practically fell silent as we lightly joined a gala. That is how I remember him, as that dapper young man, hands in the pockets of his jacket, reaching for a cigarette to calm his nerves. He had forgone the wire-frame glasses that night at my request—we were, after all, undercover—and with impaired eyesight, he tripped and fell over a crystal punch bowl at just the right time to avoid getting shot. The crowd broke into screams and we were off on the first of many adventures: Timbuktu, Moscow, Shanghai, Baghdad. Automobiles and radios and airplanes with ghost pilots and boats that descended to a city under the sea.
Working for the Winter Bureau was much like working for any intelligence agency and came with all the usual accoutrements, with one or two special extras. I’d been issued a makeup compact, very much like the mahogany-haired woman’s, except of a much older style. In those days, no one thought twice about a woman checking herself in the mirror. Under the pad in the base was a pill we were to take if ever in danger of being captured. I was told we would simply fall asleep and not wake up. I had lost that compact after using the pill. In the box under my hearth was all I had left, including stacks of cash issued by countries that no longer existed. I flipped through my East German passport. It was useless, as were the communist Deutschemarks. Under a stack of files, all former aliases I was not ready to forget, was a handgun with a single clip of ammunition, also of a type no longer made. After that was a “miniature” camera—laughably large even by 1990s standards—with three rolls of film, and a Polish infantry knife still in its sheath.
“Gotcha.”
And then there was a compass—handmade by Spurgeon Fount. He had thrown it away in a fit, but I had retrieved it. I dubbed it the Cowardly Compass, much to his chagrin, and I pecked him on the cheek for it. It was made from a sliver of enchanted lodestone he’d acquired at troll auction, one of the last held. As was typical of the clumsy man, he’d affixed it in error such that it did the exact opposite of what was intended, which was to identify danger. Spurgeon’s compass pointed toward the safest possible exit, forever urging its owner to retreat. As such, it was considerably less useful than it could’ve been. But like its inventor, it was hardly useless.
I put my trunk back under the hearth and covered it, and later that morning, as the bells of the Little Village church chimed long and loud, calling the penitent to morning mass, I tossed my trampled flowers into a burlap bag. I opened the chicken coop and shooed away the occupants. Instead of mending the dresses draped over the side table, I quickly stitched a new lining into one. It wouldn’t last long, but it didn’t have to. Then I found my yellow-and-red silk shawl, a gift from Beltran, which the shopkeeper’s daughter down the lane had admired on more than one occasion.
The shop, which was a kind of general store, filled the narrow front room of a house that opened onto the dirt lane, pocked with puddles. It mainly sold tobacco, newspapers, and a few popular magazines, but there was also a small selection of overpriced candy, some vegetables, and a wall of dry goods for anyone who couldn’t make the trek to Big Village on market days. I asked the shopkeeper for his daughter, who commented on my shawl immediately. I told her I had made a Mărțișor, a traditional spring gift, for the beekeeper who lived on the hill on the far side of town, but that I wasn’t feeling well. I asked if she could deliver it for me. When she predictably made an excuse, I told her she could wear the shawl for the week. On her way back, I reminded her, she would make her way past the pastures, where a handsome hand from Big Village was working.
After a brief consultation with her father, she agreed, and I gave her the shawl and the basket. She was about my height with similar color hair. When she set off, I bought a small lunch—an apple and some hard cheese—and walked out the back. There, I lifted my dress over my head and reversed it. The bright patterned lining I had stitched into it was similar enough to the girl’s dress. I hoisted a bundle of kindling on my back to hide my face and headed up the grazing path, which steepened gradually as I walked out of town.
Mr. Morgan had told me to wait for instructions. Whether that was true or he was simply hoping to scare me into secret action, it was a foregone conclusion my house was being watched. I needed to be rid of them. He had also given me a clue. He had mentioned a quarry. He had seemed most insistent on it, in fact. If I was going to get my memories back, it seemed I would have to start there. At the very least, a retreat through the remote mountain forest would disguise my departure.
I dropped the bundle under tree cover and turned onto the cart path that cut sideways up the south hill toward the lonely peak. I stopped at a large, solitary oak that had been deliberately planted to mark the end of the town. Beyond was the shattered remnants of a Roman-era cut-stone wall. But it hadn’t been built by Romans. No one knew who had built it, in fact. The superstitious townspeople knew only that to go beyond was to invite catastrophe, and more than one child in Little Village had been hided for daring to step over it, as I did, turning immediately to look out over the broad valley, which curved in a broad U-shape around the pair of distant peaks to the north. I saw my house, sitting next to the chicken coop on the pillow-shaped hill. I saw the cluster of homes at the center of town, each a different pastel hue. I saw the modest church spire and the green of the commons and the little groves of trees that dotted the borders of the rolling pasturelands. I saw sagging barbed wire fences and oxen dotting the open spaces. I saw the distant train tracks and the road that danced around it like a dog following its master. I saw the dot of a red-and-yellow shawl hiking up the far side of the valley. I saw the pair of men surreptitiously following it at a distance.
Past the stone fence, I found an old road, little more than an overgrown depression blanketed in damp, dead leaves and broken by the occasional sapling or deep puddle. It disappeared into the increasingly dense tree cover. I followed it. The snowdrops were in bloom and they speckled the old, old forest in white. Most forests today are not old, let alone very old. I remember the shock I felt when the circus in which Spurgeon and I traveled stopped in the hills of West Virginia. There was nothing but stumps as far as the eye could see. The forest had been cut for fuel or timber, mostly to feed the coal industry, which needed trellises and buildings and railroad ties and struts to support mine shafts. Some of that old forest was later regrown and is now federal land. It’s a forest, but it’s a domesticated one. You wouldn’t know the difference unless you had walked the elder, wild forests that had never been tamed.
The trees of the wood above Little Village were stout and very tall, and they stood shoulder to shoulder like barbarian soldiers. I did not feel they were hostile to me, but neither did I feel welcome. As I ascended to a kind of plateau, the ground became very flat, and I noticed twigs gathered around the heavy base of a nearby trunk, which had been cleared of bracken. I dared not imagine there were any treeherders left, hidden by the furze. If so, then I was in greater danger than I imagined.
A snap in the distance stopped me. The forest was quiet. A cuckoo and several larks had greeted me earlier. But now there was nothing. I had the sense I was being watched. I started walking again, only to discover in my fright that I could no longer discern the path of the abandoned road from the undulations of the forest floor.
I stood and listened.
It was Einstein, supposedly, who taught us that space was not a featureless plain but rather a warped and crannied canyon distorted by the weight of the objects it contained. But the old sages, while they would not have described it that way, nor measured it precisely with mathematics, were aware of the effect. It had been known since ancient times that there were creases in the world whose insides could not be reached by traversing a line between here and there—that certain clefts in the forest or under the sea would, if approached, say, from the east, deposit you back onto the path, but if from the west, worm you someplace else entirely—that there existed entire kingdoms that, like heartbreak, you cannot find if you are looking for them but cannot avoid if you are not. In my youth, I heard of Sadko, a merchant called to the underwater kingdom by the Tsar of the Sea.
It was through such a cleft that I had stepped. I turned and saw a barrier, a crack in a cliff that had not been there before. It was jagged-walled and no more than a few feet wide, but the flat earth continued through it to the far side. I heard another snap, closer still, and did not hesitate.
Inside, it was not only quiet but still, and after walking a hundred paces, my hands alighting the walls lest they slam shut and crush me, I emerged into a different forest, a denser forest of evergreens that seemed trapped in perpetual gloaming. Ferns covered the ground, as they did in the forests primeval, and I tread a soft carpet of fallen needles. Tree frogs chirped softly in the distance. A nearby mound teemed with ants. Everything smelled of pine.
“Who goes there?” a distinctly baritone voice demanded.
I spun round and saw nothing but the dim trees and ferns and an imposing pile of twigs and moss gathered to one side of the stony gap. It rose up immediately. I saw a face and a chest and two arms but no legs.
“Who are you?” he demanded. Then he relaxed. “Oh. Excuse me, my lady. I didn’t recognize you without my spectacles.”
“Spectacles . . .” I repeated. I didn’t know what else to say. I was nearly speechless. “Do—Do you know me?”
The question seemed to stymie him, and he thought hard.
“Is it a riddle?” he asked. “I was never very good at riddles. I was supposed to ask one of every visitor, but I could never remember the answers.” He paused and turned his green eyes sideways. “You won’t tell anyone that, will you?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I’m very sorry to say this, but I have forgotten who you are.”
“Who I am?” He stood straight. Even without legs, he was twice as tall as me. “I thought it would be obvious by the uniform.”
“Uniform?”
He bent his leafy head to his riblike chest of branches, inside of which were clusters of dead leaves and moss.
“Oh dear. Where has it gone?” He took a deep breath. “My uniform!” he yelled.
I heard scampering. A pair of minks hopped down from the nearby evergreens and curled on his head, one atop the other, like a hussar’s fur hat. A cluster of silver insects scurried from his insides and arranged themselves head-to-head in a star shape on the upper left of his chest, like a badge. Blue wildflowers budded in rings around both of his cuffs.
“There,” he said, adjusting his hat. A tiny face appeared from it and sneezed meekly. “That’s better.”
“You look very handsome.”
“Thank you, my lady. I believe it is very important to take pride in one’s appearance.” He trilled the R in pride fantastically.
“May I ask you something else?”
Another worried look flashed across his face. “Only if I know the answer.”
“Why do you call me ‘my lady?’”
“Well . . .” That question seemed to surprise him as well, and he shifted his prickly mass as if to recline in contemplation. He was a complete gnarl of leaves and twigs. His beard was a carpet of green moss, and it wobbled when he spoke. “I don’t know. Aren’t you?”
“I was once. But that was a very long time ago.”
“Ah, I miss the very long times ago,” he said, yawning. Even his tongue was a broad leaf, and it unfurled like a fern bud. “You could really stretch out in them. The times today are so curt. Have you noticed that? Never bother to stick around, as if they’ve got some better place to be. Rude, if you ask me. What brings you out today, my lady? Another adventure?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know I was having adventures. I seem to have lost some of my memories.”
“No! That’s a terrible business. Terrible. Memories are like roots. They ought to stay where they’re planted.” He leaned closer like he wanted to tell me a secret. His face was as tall as my chest. “You know, when most people lose something, they wait until the last place to look before finding it. I like to start there. Saves time, you know. That’s important since there’s so much less of it these days.”
“Well, I don’t think I have to worry about that. I’ve only ever kept my memories in one place.”
“Smart,” he said with a wink. “Very smart. Then you don’t have to worry where they’ve got off to. Have they escaped before?”
“Never.”
“Hmmm. Tricky . . .” His leafy fingers stroked his mossy beard. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with where you’ve kept them?”
“Not entirely. But I’ve given it a good once-over, and it seems sound.”
“Hm. Stolen then.”
“It appears so.”
“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I lost some memories once.”
“You did? Where did you find them?”
He opened his mouth to answer. Then he stopped and scowled at the heavy canopy over his head. “I don’t remember.”
I smiled. “Well, I’m afraid I shall have to keep looking.”
“Quite right. Quite right. Best not to give up. But you’d better hurry. The train is coming.”
“Train?”
“Yes. It always rattles my bones as it comes over the peak.”
I looked across the overgrowth. It was identical in every direction. If there’d been a path, it had long since been swallowed by the ferns. “Is there a platform?”
“Platform?” He thought for a moment. “Oh dear. I hope we haven’t lost that, too.” He pounded his heavy trunk on the ground and I nearly fell. “Get up, you louts! The lady needs to know the way.”
Fireflies blinked among the ferns. They flickered as they drifted up, like a dance of constellations. They floated on the air and gathered inside glassless street lamps that rose here and there among the trees. I hadn’t noticed them in the perpetual gloam. I thought they were dead trees.
A path was lighted, a gas-lit walk through a twilight forest.
“Straight ahead,” my guide said in his baritone. Then he yawned.
“Thank you,” I told him, reaching a hand to grasp the branch of a finger. “I’ll leave you to dream of the very long times ago.”
“That sounds lovely,” he said.
And with that, the minks jumped off his head and he sunk back down.