The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(75)

Quentin kept taking out his pocket watch and looking at it. Plum wanted to find it annoying—it was kind of a hipster affectation, that watch, like a novelty beard, especially since it didn’t appear to work in spite of Stoppard’s attentions—but it was such a strange and beautiful object. It drew her gaze, magnetically. It must have been a gift, she supposed, from someone who loved him. That Julia person maybe. More stories.

“Do you want to read the book?” he asked.

Oh, that. The leather-bound book that had been in the case. They’d taken it with them, of course, humped it through the woods, but now the thought of opening it filled her with dread.

“Maybe we should burn it,” she said. “Sooner or later the bird’s going to come after it. So maybe when it does we’re going to want to not have it.”

“The bird will have to hire some new muscle first. Round up more stooges like us. That’ll take time. In the meantime maybe it would help if we knew why the bird thought it was so important.”

“I guess. We could always burn it later.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“Lemme see it.”

It was an old leather notebook, or maybe ledger was a better word for it. The kind of thing an accountant with a green eyeshade might have written in, in an old-timey bank. The cover had the same monogram as the suitcase: RCJ. The spine was oddly mottled, blue and green.

“This was my great-grandfather’s.”

“I figured.”

“What do you think’s in it?”

“Diary?” Quentin said.

“What if it has dirty parts in it. Like intimate confessions, that sort of thing.”

“One way to find out.”

She nodded, resigned, but still she let the book lie in her lap. It felt heavy, too heavy to lift. She was at a crossroads, but the kind that had no signs at it. She wondered what could possibly be inside the book that people should have died for it; she was assuming that Lionel had done away with Pushkar too. She wondered if later on she would wish she hadn’t looked. That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.

But she could feel Quentin practically panting with excitement at her elbow—whatta dork. Always the eager beaver. Suddenly a wave of physical and emotional exhaustion just steamrolled over her, and Plum did want to be reading something, anything at all, rather than sitting in this empty train station lobby staring at the cinder block walls. She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else.

She was ready to sink, really sink, to the black, airless bottom of where this all began.

“OK,” she said. “Bottoms up.”

“Skoal.”

That made her wish she had a real drink instead of this shitty coffee. She opened the book.

From the first page it was evident that Great-Grampa Rupert had had literary aspirations, and that he’d undertaken this project with some actual seriousness of purpose, because he’d arranged the page like a formal title page. He wrote with a fountain pen, the blue ink faded now from midnight blue to midday, but still elegant, a diligent schoolboy’s handwriting. The pages weren’t ruled for prose, they were set up for columns of numbers, but Rupert had filled them with letters instead.

Plum’s heart went out to the guy. Probably he was having a midlife crisis, and this was the novel or memoir or whatever that he just had to get out of him. This was how he was going to make his mark, have his say, show the world he wasn’t like the others. (But if that was true why lock it in a case?)

With great ceremony, in the deliberate hand of a man who genuinely believed he was making a new beginning for himself, a clean breast of things, Rupert had written and then crossed out two possible titles:

THE FRIENDS OF FILLORY

and then

OF CLOCKS AND KINGS

before he settled for good and all on:

THE DOOR IN THE PAGE

My Life in Two Worlds

By Rupert Chatwin

“Good call,” Quentin said.

“I think he nailed it.”

“Third time’s the charm.”

She turned the page. The next one began:

We all thought Martin would get into trouble one day and in the end he did. It just wasn’t the sort of trouble we were expecting.

Evidently Rupert was happy with that first line, but then not with what came next, because the rest of the page was ripped out, leaving the sentences alone on their own orphaned strip of paper, a single accusing finger. The next page was gone too—in fact there was a thick chunk of stubs where somebody, presumably Rupert, had ripped out four or five pages at once.

Plum realized she wasn’t as eager to go on as she thought she would be. She’d kind of forgotten that her great-grandfather was a real person, and his brothers and sisters too. They’d lived real lives. They’d had real hopes and dreams and secrets, and none of it had worked out the way they wanted it to. They’d felt like the heroes of their own stories, just like she felt like the hero of hers, but that was no guarantee that everything would work out. Or anything.

After that false start Rupert wrote quickly, fluidly, with minimal punctuation and only occasional corrections. Plum got the impression he’d never even reread it after he started writing.