Deciding I’d had enough of the scriptorium for the day, I cleaned up, grabbed my things, and headed back to the cabana. After a quick shower, I retrieved the box of divination tools and examined it once again. Only this time I saw something that had previously escaped my notice. Inside the box, affixed to the inside, was a long, thin object wrapped in a swath of blue silk fabric. Quickly I unwrapped it to find a scientific drawing of a plant with a thick dark stalk and a crown of yellowflowers. It brought to mind Linnaeus’s botanical illustrations, and it had clearly been cut out from a very old book, but there was something uncanny about it. An eerie feeling came over me as I looked at it. I had the distinct feeling that this drawing was terribly important. I turned it over and was jarred to find what looked like the scrawl of a madman. In jagged letters, someone had written:The Deep Did Rot!
What the hell did that mean? Although it seemed vaguely threatening, the more I considered it, the more I thought I recognized it. A quick internet search reminded me that it was from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I had read the poem as an undergraduate and must have remembered it at least somewhere in the back of my mind. If I recalled correctly, it was about a sailor who killed an albatross and in doing so brought down a curse upon himself and his shipmates. At one point he was forced to wear the dead albatross around his neck as a kind of penance. Could that be what someone was trying to communicate? When I looked more closely at the stanza the line was pulled from, I got a sinking feeling that something darker was going on. It read:
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
For some reason, the image of slimy things crawling in the sea repulsed me but also made me feel strangely guilty.
That night I dreamed I was trapped somewhere dark and dank, and somewhere off in the distance, I could hear the squelching and slithering of tremendous tentacles. Somewhere just out of sight.
2.3MONSTERS
So when the earth, still completely covered with fresh muck from that just receded flood, was heated by the sun’s rays, she produced countless species; some were the old ones, restored, and others were monsters, novel in their shapes.
—OVID,METAMORPHOSES
The next morning, I spent some time trying to understand the divination tools I’d found, but made little progress. I knew they had to be important, but I was also keenly aware that I had no idea what to do with them yet. Instead, I turned my attention to the Coleridge poem, but came away with equally little, aside from a certainty that I would have made a terrible sailor. I decided to table it and focus instead on the botanical drawing. I knew it had to be some kind of clue, the first step of which meant identifying it. So I headed to the scriptorium and settled in with a stack of botanical texts. Considering the amount of time I’d spent wading through those tomes in recent days, I would have thought the task might have been quicker, but it took me quite a while before I found a plant that looked remotely like the illustration.
Thapsia garganica,also known as deadly carrot. The similarity to my drawing wasn’t exact, but there was a likeness that I couldn’t ignore, so I settled in to read about it. A poisonous plantthat had proven deadly to grazing animals, especially to camels,Thapsia garganicahad long been used in traditional medicine as a purgative and analgesic. Apparently, it was also extremely beneficial for the lungs. I tapped my pen against my notebook and sighed deeply. Could this possibly be what someone was trying to communicate with me? Deadly carrot?
My head was spinning and I needed some air, so I decided to walk down to the apothecary garden and see if the plant in question might be growing somewhere in there. The day was lovely, with a light breeze tinged with just a hint of coolness. I experienced a sudden upwelling of optimism and excitement when I saw Aspen, pruning shears in hand, leaning over some shrubs she was tending, appraising them with an intense and quizzical gaze. Surely she would know about deadly carrot. But when I asked her if she had any growing on campus, she looked at me like I was a lunatic.
“In this climate? Never.”
“You don’t think there is any way it could be hoopoe’s blood, do you?”
“No, this wouldn’t be an ingredient in any kind of scary witch tonic. It’s basically just a carrot, Robin. Carrots aren’t scary,” she said before returning her attention to her vegetal wards.
Disheartened, I wandered back toward my cabana. It appeared that I was at an impasse. The divination tools were a dead end, the Coleridge poem was a dead end, the deadly carrot was a dead end. It felt like I’d had too much information dumped on me all at once—too many clues and no solutions when really the only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to find the relic. I’d been assuming that the clues would lead me to it, but what if I had it all wrong? What if they were actually a wild-goose chase meant to distract me, to lead me away?
Although I had already searched the cabana, I was constantly tormented by the fear that I had missed something. What if the relic was here, somehow hiding in plain sight? The thought filled me with a compulsion so strong it almost frightened me, and once again, I found myself searching the space, only this time, it was as if something had overtaken me. In a frenzy, I turned the place upside down, pulling out every cushion, searching in every crack and crevice, every cabinet. At one point, I even contemplating prying up the floorboards, but I wasn’t quite there yet. That’s not to say I didn’t spend a good half an hour searching for loose ones.
Once I started looking in earnest, though, I couldn’t stop. I spent the rest of the day turning over every stone I could find. I started in Casimir’s office, looking through the detritus in the closet, but finding nothing. I bothered Dorian in his office, asking when he might be going to that storage space in Denver, but he deflected.Soon,he assured me. In the meantime, he would appreciate my not snooping around the house. He didn’t use the wordsnooping,but his meaning couldn’t have been clearer.
I walked the grounds for a while, eventually heading over to the main academic buildings. I found my way inside a particularly stately French Norman building. The exterior felt like something out of a fairy tale, but inside it felt like a ghost ship. The classrooms were unlocked, but they had the aspect of having been abandoned suddenly. I went room to room, but all I found were discarded blue books, and in one classroom, a chalkboard onto which someone had once scrawledSurprise Man!
I had thought I was alone in the building, but on the third floor, near one of the circular stairwells, I passed an office and saw Lexi bent over a stack of papers with a pen.
She looked up suddenly, surprised to see me. “What are you doing up here?”
“Just exploring,” I said, quickly glancing around her office.
“Make yourself at home,” she said, and I knew she intended it ironically, but I played dumb.
“Thanks,” I said as I took a seat on a puffy pink chair, imagining the poor students who had someone as petulant as Lexi determining their academic fates.
“You’re a behavioral psychologist?”
“Mmm,” she said, taking a sip from a travel mug on her desk. “Yes. Why?”
“I’m just trying to get a full picture of this place. So your work, does it overlap with Isabelle’s?”
“No.”
