Ch. 2: A Drawer With No Key

By her third day back, Elena had a system: sort, box, price, sell. The shop had thirty years of inventory and she intended to be done with all of it — and with Alderidge — within the month.

The card catalog gave her trouble from the start. Most of its drawers opened easily, full of index cards logging map provenance in her father‘s cramped handwriting. But the bottom-left drawer wouldn’t budge, and none of the keys on her father's ring fit the small brass lock set into its face.

“It's just an old cabinet,” Row said, when Elena asked. “Your father was always relocking things and losing track.”

It was, Elena thought, a very smooth answer. Too smooth.

She waited until Row left for the evening, then found a flathead screwdriver in the register drawer and worked the lock until the old wood gave with a soft, embarrassed crack.

Inside was a single object: a roll of vellum, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with waxed string, tucked in alongside a folded note in her father's handwriting.

For whoever comes after. Ask Row before you unroll it. — T. V.

Elena did not ask Row.

She untied the string at the kitchen table upstairs, unrolled the vellum under the bare bulb over the sink, and found herself looking at a map of downtown Alderidge — familiar streets, familiar blocks, the shop itself marked with a small ink square on Kestrel Row.

But beneath the streets, drawn in a second layer of fainter ink, was another city entirely: a lattice of corridors and chambers that had no business existing under a town this size. Tiny symbols dotted the passages — what looked like lanterns, hand-drawn and identical, repeated dozens of times. Some passages were crossed out in red. A few, near the edges, looked freshly inked, the lines crisper than the rest, as if someone had still been updating this map days, maybe hours, before they died.

Elena sat with it a long time before she went to bed. She did not sleep well.