The company is formed. Ackerly Green is real again. So that’s finished. Orvin has assured me that it gets quiet from Thanksgiving until the new year in the states so I should stop worrying that I haven’t heard anything more from the companies I’ve been investigating in the hopes one will hold the rights to Through The Night and The Wolf and The Wild. (I’m also secretly hoping they’ll have the rights and copies of the rest of the books as well.)

So what to do?

Nothing but obsess over my father’s mysterious forty-year-old journal, that’s what. I spent the past two days funneling all my pent up curiosity into this strange book.

 

That’s The Monarch Papers Volume One (1979-1984). And the hippocampus charm. And the scarf which it turns out was my mum’s (though Mon spelled her own name wrong on the package when she sent all this so I don’t know if I can completely trust her completely.) Notice the marks around the edges of the journal? They’re bite marks. Strange, right? And it gets so much stranger.

There are loads of blank pages, and most of the pages that aren’t are essentially nonsense, symbols and reversed letters in other languages. It’s hard to separate it all out. I’ve had two headaches just from flipping through it. That’s not an exaggeration.

There’s one symbol centered on the second page of the journal. In my googling I discovered it’s the Greek symbol for “psyche.” I thought it might be interesting to my one reader (Hi Cole!) so I took a photo of it. This is what it looks like…

It looks like nothing. I took pics of ten other pages and that’s what they all look like! What?!

Searching for invisible or security ink led be down some interesting rabbit holes but nothing at all explanatory or definitive. Maybe it’s a special ink that was used in publishing? To protect manuscripts? The ink is green which is out of the ordinary. Mystery in a mystery!

I’ve found a handful of “normal” writing so far (aside from the chicken and the fox story) and I admit I keep hoping I’ll find something in his journal to… connect with. Some kind of insight into what he was thinking when he walked away from everything. Like I did. I guess that’s connection enough, knowing how my life has mirrored his without my even knowing it.

With nothing else to do and needing to funnel my curiosity I’ve written down the passages that jumped out at me. These are the normal, run-of-the-mill bits…

“Dark water writhes, less reptile than Castor?”

168.327325

“Six Keys Surround Another.”

26.49757

“Millenary Outstretched Arms Reveal Sadko’s Temptation. Look Above CC.”

“Heart. Bone. Pig. Spider. Vinegar. Sheep. ???”

 

Yes. These are the normal bits. Ugh… I just–

Hours into this and curiosity has finally given way to absolute frustration and now my eyes ache and the passages I’ve just written down are impossible to find again. There’s nothing so frustrating as desperately looking for something that just isn’t there. A hint, even microscopic. Something.

One more dead end I think. But something about it… it’s like the pocket watch I lost. It makes me feel closer to him.