Chapter 3 — The Harwick Letter
The note was short.
Mr. Voss —
The matter we discussed before your indisposition has not resolved itself in your absence. Certain parties are becoming impatient. I would strongly advise you to attend the gathering at Harwick House this Friday evening, if your health permits. Your presence will communicate what your silence currently does not.
— R. Harwick
He read it twice. Then he set it face-down on the table and finished the tea, which had gone cold.
The matter we discussed. A matter that existed before the curse. A matter that Dorian the original had apparently been involved in — willingly or otherwise — and that had continued developing in his absence without any apparent concern for the fact that he had been unconscious for a week.
Certain parties are becoming impatient.
He turned the note back over and looked at it.
Harwick. He had no face for the name yet, no context beyond this letter and the
rescheduled physician. Someone with a house large enough to hold gatherings. Someone who wrote to a Voss as an equal rather than a superior, which placed him somewhere in the same social register. Someone who used phrases like certain parties when he meant
something specific and didn't want to write it down.
A careful man. Possibly a frightened one.
He folded the note and put it in the inside pocket of his waistcoat.
Friday was three days away. He had three days to understand what Dorian Voss had agreed to, what Harwick wanted from him, and what certain parties were prepared to do if patience ran out.
He opened the book.
He wrote: What did Dorian Voss agree to with Harwick?
The mark on his hand pulsed. He waited.
This time the book didn't answer in words. Instead, the blank page beside his question
slowly filled — not with writing, but with an impression, like heat rising from paper. A date. A location. Harwick House, Merchant Quarter, six weeks ago. And one sentence, faint as watermark:
He agreed to say nothing about what he heard.
Dorian looked at the page for a long moment.
What he heard. The east wing. The gathering he hadn't been invited to. Thomas had said he was nearby — that he didn't know what the young Mr. Voss had heard. But apparently Harwick did know. And apparently it was significant enough that silence had been negotiated.
Which meant Dorian the original had known something. And someone had found out that he knew it. And shortly after that negotiation, a curse had found its way to the wrong Voss.
He closed the book and sat very still.
The physician was coming at ten. He had perhaps forty minutes.
Dr. Fenwick was a small man with an impressive collection of grey in his beard and the manner of someone who had seen enough unusual things in enough unusual households to have developed a policy of not commenting on them. He arrived precisely at ten, was shown up by Thomas, and spent twelve minutes conducting an examination that Dorian submitted to with the cooperative stillness of someone who had decided that the less eventful this visit was, the better.
"Reflexes normal," Fenwick said, making a note. "Eyes clear. No fever." He paused, pen
hovering. "You seem — considerably more present than when I saw you last week, Mr. Voss."
"I feel considerably more present."
"The — episode. Has it happened before?"
"Not that I recall."
Fenwick wrote something down that Dorian couldn't read upside down. "The family
indicated it was stress-related. I'm not certain I concur, but stress is a useful word." He closed his bag. "I'd recommend fresh air. Moderate activity. And —" he paused at the door, "— I'd recommend against spending too much time in the east wing. The ventilation in thatsection of the house has always been poor. In my opinion."
He said it with the careful neutrality of a man delivering a message that he had decided
wasn't his business to explain.
"Thank you, Doctor," Dorian said.
Fenwick nodded once and left.
Dorian sat in the chair and thought about ventilation.
He spent the afternoon reading.
The room had a bookshelf — one wall of it, floor to ceiling, the kind of collection that had
been built over years rather than purchased all at once. Philosophy. History. Natural science. Three shelves of what appeared to be Vaelmoor's local history, organized by decade. And on the lowest shelf, slightly apart from the others, a row of slim volumes with no titles ontheir spines.
He pulled the first one out.
It was a journal. Handwriting he didn't recognize — small, neat, the kind of penmanship that came from being taught carefully. Dates at the top of each entry. The earliest was seven
years ago.
He opened to a page near the middle and read.
The family met again tonight. I heard them through the study wall — not the words, just the tone. Father's voice and Uncle Aldric's voice and two others I didn't recognize. Whatever they're deciding, they've been deciding it for months. I don't think they know I can hear them from the reading room. I don't think they've considered that I might listen.
He closed the journal.
He sat with it in his hands and looked at the shelf of slim volumes. Seven years of
observation from a quiet young man who read, kept to himself, and apparently had been paying very careful attention for a very long time.
He was kind, Thomas had said. He remembered names.
He had also, Dorian now understood, been keeping records.
He reached for the book of truth.
He placed it on his knee, beside the journal, and opened both. He looked at the blank page of the Book and then at the handwritten page of the journal and thought about what itmeant that a man could spend years documenting something he couldn't act on, and then simply — disappear, at the moment the documentation became relevant.
He picked up his pen.
He wrote in the Book: Show me what I haven't found yet.
The mark burned — not painfully, but with more intensity than anything he'd written so far. He felt it in his hand and up his arm and somewhere behind his sternum, brief and clarifying, like cold water.
On the page, one line appeared:
Check the back cover.
He turned the Book over in his hands. The back cover was plain leather, identical to the
front. He ran his thumb along the inside edge where the cover met the final page and felt — a ridge. A seam that didn't match the binding.
He worked his thumbnail into it carefully.
A folded piece of paper slid out. Old — the edges slightly browned, the fold lines deep with age. He opened it.
It was a list. Names — twelve of them, written in a hand he didn't recognize, in an alphabet he couldn't read. Except for the last two, which were written in the same script as the rest but with a translation beside them, added later in different ink:
The Ashen Compact.
And below it, with no translation, no explanation, circled twice in red:
Azareth.
Dorian looked at the name for a long time.
Outside, the fog was coming in again off the harbor. The gas lamps on the street below were beginning to matter. Somewhere in the east wing of this house, there was something the physician had advised him not to approach and the book had told him he wasn't ready for.
He folded the paper carefully and placed it inside the journal.
Not yet, he thought. But soon.
He had three days until Friday. Three days to become someone who could walk into Harwick House and play the role of a man who remembered what he'd agreed to.
He opened the Book to a fresh page and began to make notes.