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> “By the time they reach Hartford, it will already be too late. I will make sure of that. Even if I have to continue on in my current state a little while longer.”
“Why did we come here at night again?” I asked as we walked down from the elevated tracks of the 1 train. It was nearly midnight. Another day gone, another day closer to our doom.
“Because,” said Beatrice, “do you want to be the bottom-of-the-hour story on the local news? ‘Two women arrested for digging up historic rock.’ No thanks.”
“Good point.”
We walked west and then south before reaching an odd sight: a pair of magnificent stone staircases set between two buildings that led up to the rest of Inwood.
“This city,” Beatrice muttered, as she began her climb. I followed, taking deep breaths on the flat landings interspersed throughout and ticking off the steps as I went. By the time I made it the top, my count had reached 110 and I was drenched with sweat, despite the cold night air.
“I hope that’s the most exercise we have to do tonight,” I said, as we continued onward toward the park.
“Not likely,” said Beatrice. “And don’t think we’re going to take the easy way out either. No buffs, no ring, if we can help it.”
“Fine,” I said. The streets were deserted and I felt like we were invaders from across the sea, come to plunder this land’s treasure. We had taped shovels to the inside of our long winter coats, but the adhesive was failing and so I brought my arm tight against the side of my body.
Finally, we reached the edge of the park. I considered the threshold we were about to cross. It was as if the forest beyond had finally said “no more” to the city and used the last of its strength to throw up a barrier against further human encroachment. Still, we stepped into the park with little fanfare and continued onward.
“How are you doing?” Beatrice said, after a few minutes.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I feel like this shovel is about to fall out of my coat, but otherwi-”
“No, not right now. I meant, how are you dealing with the aftermath of accidentally erasing yourself from your friends’ lives?”
“Oh,” I said. “I … I don’t know. I haven’t exactly had the chance to process it. Maybe when this is all over and I can finally catch my breath, but for now I’ve forced myself to just keep looking forward.”
“I guess that makes sense. But make sure you look back eventually,” she said.
I nodded but didn’t respond, and Beatrice took the hint to drop it. After all we had been through, these random moments of kindness from her still surprised me. Even though I had saved her life, even though I had proven myself, there was always a nagging thought that this would be the encounter that would set Beatrice off. But I pushed such speculation to the back of my mind, along with the blank stares on Lisa and Stacy’s faces, and tried to focus on the task at hand.
We passed an empty baseball field before the path curled into the trees, around the edge of a field that abutted the marshy water of an inlet from the Harlem River, and we closed in our quarry.
The rock had been unceremoniously plopped in the middle of the path and we approached it gingerly. A lone streetlamp cast a dim glow across the plaque affixed to the boulder, just enough to make out the words.
> “According to legend, on this site of the principal Manhattan Indian village, Peter Minuit in 1626, purchased Manhattan Island for trinkets and beads then worth about 60 guilders.
This boulder also marks the spot where a tulip tree grew to a height of 165 feet and a girth of 20 feet. It was, until its death in 1938 at the age of 280 years, the last living link with the Reckgawanc Indians who lived here.”
I finished reading and opened my coat. The shovel fell free onto the dirt and I stooped down slowly to pick it up, feeling a familiar pang of unease. After all, this was now the second historic rock in a month that I was attempting to unearth. And, given the size of the thing, moving it without any alchemic assistance looked to be a tall order. Beatrice, too, appeared to have misgivings, as she was still considering the text of the plaque.
“Should we get on with the digging?” she asked. “Maybe if we started here,” she scratched a circle in the dirt a few feet away from the rock, “we could tunnel under the rock without having to move it.”
I stared at the dirt, my mind trying to recall that day when I, no, when Rita must have stood on this spot. Despite the incomplete memory, something felt off about what we were attempting to do. It was then that it started to rain. A cold rain, like the one I remembered from that late December morning.
“No,” I said. “This isn’t right.”
“What do you mean?” said Beatrice, who had unsheathed her shovel from her own coat and was testing the stiffness of the dirt.
“She didn’t hide it here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course she did, you said that-”
“I know what I said. I know what I remember, too, and this doesn’t fit. She didn’t pack a shovel.”
“So?” said Beatrice. “Maybe you didn’t see that part.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “Even if I didn’t remember packing up the shovel, I remember walking to the stable carrying the box in one hand and holding an umbrella in the other. What was she going to dig with? Her hands?”
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“Maybe,” Beatrice said. “Or maybe someone was going to help her. You didn’t get to the end, remember?”
“Oh, I do,” I said, the irritation in my voice growing. “But I remember enough. I didn’t hide … she didn’t hide the box here.” I read the words of the plaque again and a smile suddenly bloomed on my face. “And this proves it.”
“What?”
“There was a tulip tree here. A tall one if this plaque is to be believed. So how did Rita, without a shovel, dig through the roots and hide the box? Does she sound like the kind of woman who would get down on her hands and knees and start digging like a gopher?”
“No, but-”
“I do not mind manual labor,” I said, and I could almost hear her voice coming out of my mouth. “But only on my terms and at a time of my choosing.”
“Stop!” cried Beatrice.
“She came through here, the two soldiers must have escorted her. With them as cover, no one would question her. Much simpler than rowing a boat all the way up the East River and then the Harlem River. She wouldn’t have stopped to dig a hole that any idiot could have uncovered later that day, even if the tree hadn’t been planted yet. No, not Rita. She hid the box someplace that would leave no trace that she had been there, that no one would stumble upon accidentally.”
I turned away from the rock and everything suddenly clicked into place.
“There,” I said, pointing toward the water at the edge of the field.
Beatrice followed my gaze and when she saw what I was looking at, her face fell.
“You’re joking, right? The great Rita van Asch hid her most important treasure in the muck of this swamp?”
“Exactly.”
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The stone sunk into the brackish water, its otherworldly red glow piercing through the muck. I crouched down, the cold marsh soaking my pants for the third time and the cold rain continuing to drench the rest of me, and scanned the radius of light to see if the box was there.
It wasn’t.
I stood up, cringing as the trickle of remaining sludge dripped down my legs, and fished the stone out of the water again with my shovel.
“Any luck?” called Beatrice from the shore.
“Nope,” I replied as I waded even further into the morass, the red rock beating back the darkness like the Phial of Galadriel. It was a stroke of luck that I had even managed to hold onto the stone during that awful night in the cave, but at the time it seemed like a useless consolation prize for surviving Gilbert’s attempt to kill us. Who needed a magic glowing rock when you had one of the most powerful flashlights ever created included as a throw-in feature on your phone? But the last marsh in Manhattan had bested our technology and so alchemy had answered the call.
“How much longer are you going to trudge around in there? I told you that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance that the box was still there. She probably came back after the war was over and fished it out.”
“Then why did the memory ring still exist? No, it’s still here, we just need t-”
My foot knocked into something hard on the swamp floor and I nearly tumbled face first into the water. I traced the contours of the object with my foot before dropping the stone. This time, its light illuminated the lid of a familiar wooden box and I nearly jumped in the air with joy.
“I found it!” I yelled to Beatrice and her face lit up as she ran to the edge of the water.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Sure enough that I think you need to come into the water and help me.”
Beatrice winced as she entered the mire but soon was standing next to me over our submerged prize. I dug my shovel into the ground below the box and tried to wedge it free, but it protested.
“The weights must still be in there,” I said, recalling the metal that Rita had placed inside. “We’re going to have to pick it up ourselves.”
Beatrice nodded and together we reached into the water, grabbed an end of the box, and pulled upward. It was as heavy as I remembered, but with our combined strength, we wrested it free from its watery prison and slowly carried it to shore.
The rain beat down upon us as we considered the box. Its similarity to the one that we had found and then lost that night in the cave was eerie, almost as if it hadn’t been sitting at the bottom of the marsh for who knows how long.
“Shall we?” said Beatrice.
I nodded and lifted the lid, which, surprisingly, opened without a fuss. And, inside, just as Rita had placed it, was an object wrapped in cloth, along with the metal weights.
“I don’t believe it!” I said, shaking my head.
“Well, don’t believe it just yet,” Beatrice said, as she retrieved the object and peeled back the wrapping to reveal a brown leather tome.
“That’s just how it looked, incredible!” I said. The weights, too, looked exactly as they had in the memory, and I removed them carefully from the bottom of the box and dumped them on the wet grass.
I closed the box, laying the linen on top, and Beatrice put the Compendium down on the lid. It hadn’t aged in the slightest from the day it was hidden, its cover still the same shade of brown. I wondered if it was the box or the linen shroud or something else entirely that had protected the book from the ravages of time.
We huddled close together to block the rain from soaking our newly found treasure and I pulled back the cover to reveal the first page.
Which was blank.
I turned the page to find a second blank page, and then again to find a third, a fourth, and so on. The book must have been hundreds of pages long, but I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that I could sit here for hours flipping through it and not find a hint of writing.
“What. The. Hell,” Beatrice said. “It’s completely empty!”
She shook her head and repeated the fruitless exercise, before closing it and throwing her hands up in disgust.
“I knew it couldn’t be that simple,” I said. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew!”
I stared at the book and wanted to light the damned thing on fire before dropkicking it into the swamp.
“Calm the fuck down,” said Beatrice. “Let’s just get out of here and we can regroup at the office. Maybe there’s something we’re missing.”
“Fine,” I said, as I ran my fingers down the edges of the pages, which ran together as if the book had never been opened. It was then that I felt it: a small bump, barely perceptible among the scores of vacant sheets. I searched for it again, to make sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me, and found it a second time.
“What is it?” asked Beatrice.
“There’s something in here, just need to…”
I opened the book near the spot and slowly turned the pages until I found them. A trio of them was stuck together, but my fingers worked them apart quickly. The first page was blank, along with the second, but the third had several lines of handwritten letters at the bottom, in a familiar script.
> “The discovery of Raphus cucullatus in 1598 by the VOC was a revelation, but like most discoveries of the last several centuries, it quickly succumbed to the savage appetites of a populace hungry for new magic. Untold dodo bird specimens were wasted by virile men hoping to be imbued with the power of ancient times. It was not until the wife of a board member secreted away a pinch of the ground-up beak for her ailing daughter that the bird’s true potential was realized. The restorative properties were soon demonstrated to be almost unparalleled, capable even of reversing the effects of Relics now lost to us.”
I looked up from the page and my eyes met Beatrice’s, who nodded silently. We were cold, tired, and soaked to our cores, and to top it off, we now had to locate the remnants of a bird 400 years extinct in just four days. Not to mention that we still didn’t know where the other wooden box was.
Even with alchemy fueling our bodies and our minds, it all seemed too much to bear. A growing part of me just wanted to give up, to let the Guild kick us out, and then I could go back and pick up the deteriorating pieces of my old life. But as I learned long ago, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And as I struggled to pick up the wooden box, I saw that opposing force running toward us from the tulip tree rock.