I left my last entry without a conclusion. I was weary, but now I can go on.

I suppose the most enduring question is why I continue to write at all. The answer is simple. I believe there is a way out and the only substantial proof I have to convince myself is my continued writing in this book. If I were to stop it would be no different to admitting the spirits of the men before me are lost, that the Ottos were but stepping stones for evil, and that they will never return. To stop is to give up and assume everything they’ve said and done has been correct, that we are doomed. We are not.

The night after I returned to the Duval apartment I was sleepless. I kept an eye at the door, waiting for one of them to break it down and take me. For all their welcoming, I am still unconvinced they do not intend to kill me if I feel I reacted poorly, or if I have outgrown my usefulness to them. I spent the night writing while the memory was fresh, so that I would have a concrete record of events if my mind began to block them. They remain, as yet, by virtue of this precaution.

Somehow, they did not find the book, nor did they search me. This gives me reason to believe their trust is more than just words. On paper I am the ideal candidate, the last of a family of war refugees. In reality they couldn’t have picked anyone worse.

I am choosing now to believe the Ottos are still here, reading as I write, watching over with benevolence. You were manipulated by the spirit of Anne to put my brother in harm’s way, twisted by her visions. You are still here. I write to you now, in this time of darkness, with hope.

In the morning, now turned the 18th of April, I dug out my address book and went to the newest page. The sole address was that of David Duval and Maude Axell. I washed my face, shaved and redressed, took the diary and transcription paper from the bed, and went outside, being sure to take hallway corners at a wide, cautious angle.

The streets of San Francisco seemed alive that morning. The sky was clear and bright blue, white clouds floating idly by above the buildingtops. The sun shone on my face, a gentle ocean breeze ruffling my shagging hair. But for all of it, I was disconnected. I felt both a part of the world and apart from it, coasting as both observer and participant. What grounded me, walking the sunny streets, was the last bit of what Abraham had said to me. I would be there, on the day of death, receiving its harbingers into my own hands. This, and this alone, gave me all the power I needed. If there were any place to stop it, it would be there, in the stomach of the whale, there at the moment of birth. This thought put one foot in front of the other as my mind and body felt too frayed and splintered to move.

Life is a series of doors. The latest was the front door of mister and, soon-to-be, missus Duval. The door was a deep, rich brown with an ornate stained glass window in its middle portraying the Virgin Mary holding her son above the manger. All four eyes were closed in rest. A wreath of light haloed the child’s head and his hand was laid on his mother’s arm, telling her “The time will come, but the time is not now. Now is the time for sleep.” I wished I could join them in their peace, but the time will come. There was an archway leading to the door, with a bay window to the left of the stairs and the little porch. The whole front was painted blue-grey with highlights of white and - as I noticed with intrigue - a beautiful shade of mauve. I see the details of things better when I’m in this sort of headspace, when I am prone to linger, so my memory of their house’s facade is still fresh in my mind.

When I knocked on their door - thirty seconds of delay seemed excessive, even in circumstances such as these - I was greeted with the sound of two voices inside.

“Would you answer the door, please, Mauvy?”

“Were we expecting company, dear?”

“Not mine, if you’re asking.”

The door opened to Mauve’s sweet, full face, which turned quickly from confusion to pleasant surprise. I didn’t have the mental faculties on our first meeting to notice how strikingly emerald her eyes were, though I soon realized that I recognized them. Of course, I thought. They were her father’s.

“Mr. Blake!” she said with a smile. “What a nice surprise!”

“Lord Almighty, is it really?” I heard a great creaking of a chair from inside.

“How have you been, Charles?” Mauve said, waving me in. She took my hand in hers. “You look well!”

“Don’t give him any false hope now!” David met me in the entryway with a smile and a handshake. “Ever think about cutting that hair of yours, Charles?” he asked with a hearty laugh.

“Oh, don’t give him that!” Mauve said, and slapped lightly at his shoulder. “Care to join us? We were just talking business over some coffee, if you’d like some.”

“Yes, thank you, missus Duval,” I said, and began to cry. Mauve’s smile broke.

“Charles,” David said, patting my shoulder, “the hair isn’t so bad, really.” Mauve took my hand again.

“Please, please, I beg your pardon,” I said, and wiped my face. “I have some explaining to do and I haven’t had any sleep.”

“None at all?” David took me by both shoulders now. “It’s a wonder you’re upright!”

“Come to the table, dear,” Mauve said. “Let’s get you sitting, at least.” She led us past the stairs, through the kitchen, and into a room in the back of the house.

The back wall of the room was all glass, with double doors in the middle surrounded by windows, all leading out to a little flower garden with a hand-placed cobblestone path. The left wall was a vine trellis of green and brown with a catcher trough at its feet for leaves. There was a stone fireplace opposite the trellis and a round, wooden table in the middle. Mauve rushed forward to open the glass doors as David and I sat.

“Thank you, madam,” I said, “but would you leave it closed, please?”

“Of course,” she said, and sat with us.

“Charles,” David said, concern furrowing his brow, “what is this about?”

I cleared my throat and dried my cheeks again before I began.

“I have trust in you. I need to make that clear from the very start.”

“We had no reason to believe otherwise,” David said, picking at his thumb with the other thumbnail.

“I needed to say it, all the same. What I tell you here is of the utmost secrecy. I need to know if we can trust Harrison and Ed, at least as well as I trust you.”

“Charles,” Mauve said with an incredulous smile, “Mr. Harrison knew my father from before he met my mother. He was his closest friend up until the moment he died. They spent his final moments together recounting their old stories while my father was lying on the ground, dying! Harrison is my godfather, and his wife Eleanor was my godmother. If I trust anyone on this Earth not named David Duval, it’s Robert Harrison.” David smirked at that.

“And what of Ed?” I said.

David laughed. “I wouldn’t trust Ed to wake himself up on the right day, let alone to do his job, but for my money he’s just about the most trustworthy man on God’s green Earth. I’ve known him for thirty years and that figure’s only going up until one of us drops dead. I’d trust him with my life, if it came down to it.”

“Now, tell us what this is about, Charles,” Mauve said. My friends’ faces were now wrought with worry, a look not quite befitting them.

“I’ll start with the least concerning news and go down the list,” I said, my leg bouncing uncontrollably. “My name is not Charles Blake. We were given the option to change our surname upon arrival on the island. You may wonder why I wept on my saying missus Duval in your front room. I’ll tell you now. Missus Duval was my mother’s name.”

“Duval?” David sat up, color coming back to his cheeks. “That would make you Charles Duval!”

I stuck out my hand. “Charles Duval. Pleasure making your acquaintance.” David shook it, then Mauve.

“Another Duval!” he said, eyes shining with delight. “How about that? What are the odds we’re related?”

“Not zero,” I said, smiling for the first time in a long time. “I don’t believe our meeting was chance.”

“Nothing is left to chance,” David said. “Not a thing! Walking into the Oyster Depot at exactly the same time, sitting precisely next to each other? There’s no room for chance! On top of that, both men are named Duval? Ha! Charles Duval, fancy that!”

“But Charles,” Mauve said, “why would you change your name?”

A shiver went down my spine. This was the moment I’d planned for, but no amount of planning would ease my body’s aversion. My hands went cold and shook, my face tensed. I felt as if I was doing something wrong.

“We had to. We couldn’t risk being tracked from France.”

Though everything in my body compelled me not to, I took the journal from my pocket and placed it on the table.

“This,” I said, tapping a finger to it, “is no joke. I don’t come here lightly, and I don’t give this to you on a whim. I need you to swear you understand and will take what I’m to say seriously. It involves my brother, my mother and father.”

“You told me you were an only child,” David said.

“Another precaution. Now you know.”

They looked at each other with unspoken words I couldn’t understand. David stood and took something from atop the fireplace mantle. It was an old, leatherbound Bible. He put it on the table and placed one hand on it, the other up in the air.

“I swear,” he said. “Serious as sin.”

He slid the Bible to Mauve, who did just the same.

“I swear. If you feel the need to bring your family into this, I need no other reason.”

“Good.”

I opened the journal to the first page and tapped it.

“The French army found this on my brother’s body. He set himself on fire with it in his pocket in an attempt to destroy it, but it came out unscathed. I told you I don’t take this lightly, and I don’t. This book was given to him by a companyman of his, a spy named John Ashcroft.”

“Ashcroft?” Mauve said. “The German?”

“The same. He used the signal of my brother’s fire to advance the German line across the Aisne River, creating a hole in the French line which led directly to the taking of Paris. The book is cursed. The book is responsible for the fall of France.”

They sat in stunned silence, giving each other another wordless look.

“How could you possibly know that?” David asked with a twinge of broken faith. I slid the journal to him.

“Read it. Read up to when I stop writing and you’ll understand.”

“You wrote in it?” Mauve asked, horrified.

“I have my reasons. You need to read to see them.”

“Charles,” David said, putting his elbows on the table. “I can see why you made us take an oath before you told us about this. If you hadn’t, I would’ve thrown you out of my house by now.”

“And I wouldn’t blame you, but as it stands you did take an oath and now I insist you see it through. Please, read it. I beg you.”

They gave each other another look, though this one was obvious to me. Their wide eyes told me everything I needed to know. David flipped the journal around to face them and began to read silently.

The clock had just struck eight as I arrived and read a quarter to noon when they finished. Much of those four hours were spent in conversation, gleaning my insight from personal experience with Otto, with the Island, and the dungeon. They didn’t know of my father’s death and stopped their reading when they learned of it. It hadn’t occurred to me. Most of all, the Duvals were curious about the true nature of the spirits and whether they were truly the souls of the men before me. Above all I think they believed me, but on this one point I could give them no answer.

“Is there any way to prove the Ottos are still there?” The top buttons of David’s shirt were now undone, collar soaked in sweat. His concern had been replaced with stone.

“I’ve asked after them directly, both in the diary itself and out loud. I’ve gotten no response.”

“The others communicated with each other,” Mauve said, pacing the room. “Why not you?”

“I don’t know.” The question haunts me. Haven’t I made myself clear enough to you?

“I think it’s time we call Harrison and Ed into this,” David said. “The more minds the better, I say.”

“Good idea.”

Mauve stopped her pacing. “I’ll get Ed to drive me to Harrison’s,” she said, and stormed into the kitchen toward the front door. “Hopefully one or the other will know better.”

“Don’t tell them anything,” I said. “Not until they get here.”

“I’ll try my best. Mull this over while I’m away, you two. We’re trapped in quite the mystery. Oh!” She hurried back over to the table and kissed me on the cheek. “My father trusted you. Now you trust in me. Thank you.”

“Hey, don’t be getting any ideas, Chuck!” David didn’t have much time to say it. Mauve ran over to him and silenced him with a kiss of his own. Very few kisses tell a story larger than words, most of these I had witnessed were between my mother and father. This was one of them. “Mercy me, Mauvy.”

“I’ve got a pair of friends to gather,” she said, pulling away. “You two stay put. I mean it!” She was out the door in five seconds.

I smiled at David. I couldn’t help it, the man’s smile is contagious.

“What can I say?” He said, leaning back in his chair. “I’m a lucky man.”

We spent the next hour laying out a timeline and getting it on paper. Most of the work was transcribing information already in the diary for ease of explanation, in case our two initiates were hesitant about joining the cause. David and I spent a few minutes near the end to go over possible additions to our round table, which we noticed had six seats for five knights.

“How would you feel dragging Mary into this?” David asked me. I can’t say the thought hadn’t crossed my mind, though the reason why I hadn’t was obvious to me.

“And risk her father knowing? Who’s to say she’s not involved?”

“Don’t you trust your lady, friend?”

“I trusted Coen too, once. Look how it turned out.”

“Don’t use this as an excuse to lose hope, Chuck. Do you love her? You do, don’t you?”

“How do I know?”

David laughed, this time at me.

“You’ve got to be kidding! You don’t think about love, you feel it! If you have to think about it, there’s something wrong! Don’t you feel it?”

“I’ve forgotten what it feels like. I’ve lost so much, so many I’ve loved, that the feeling is lost to me.”

“Nonsense! I’ve heard the way you talk to us, Mauve and I, with that great big smile of yours! You love us, and we love you, dear friend. You think love has died, don’t you? That’s the trick, you know: love never dies, not truly. Love sleeps, and it sleeps too often, if you ask me, but this doesn’t mean it’s disappeared. You’re like a baby, a new-born, and love is putting its hands over its face saying peek-a-boo, and what do you do? Every time it disappears behind its hands you’re convinced it’s gone! You need to shift your state of mind to see fear as the invader and love as the land.”

The door opened and Mauve came in with Harrison and Ed in tow. The old man wore a plain white buttoned shirt, corduroy suspenders and the look of a young man trapped in an old body. Ed was in almost the exact outfit I’d met him in and looked about as confused as anyone ever was.

“Dave, Chuck, what is this?” He put his coat on the rack without looking for it. “Mauve won’t tell us a thing!”

“We need an explanation, David, and now.” Harrison’s voice was strong and clear, fit for a man at least thirty years his junior.

“Sit, everyone, please.” There was a foreign firmness in my voice. “We’ll get to it.”

Mauve returned to her seat beside David, the others taking empty spots between us. I took a moment while everyone was settling in to evaluate the group. A woman and three men, all bound more tightly than any of them to me, and each of them more different than the last. This, for the time being, was to be my team, my allies against the dark. It occurred to me then that I didn't truly know any of them, yet here we were, bound as soldiers in a war none of them had known before today. Two of them still didn’t. It was enough. It had to be.

“Thank you, everyone,” I began as the murmur died down. The air was tense. “Harrison, Ed, I’ll waste no more of your time. We needed you in this room before I could say what I’m about to tell you.” I tapped on the diary, which was still on the table and closed. “This is my brother’s journal, recovered from his body during the war in France. We have reason to believe it has been cursed. We have further reason to link it directly to a great many tragedies, including the fire at Axell’s shop.”

Ed burst out laughing and looked for David to join him. He didn’t. Ed stopped.

“Surely you’re pulling our leg here, Chuck! What’s with the looks? You can give it up now, I’ve figured you out.”

“Continue,” Harrison said coldly.

“There is a spell of some kind written in invisible ink on the first few pages, a spell attributed to one Laurel Anne Hudson.”

Ed’s face dropped. He turned to David over the table.

“You put him up to this, didn’t you? This is gone past joking, Dave, bringing Anne into this. Accusing her of something like this?” His eyes went dark, twisting into rage. “How dare you bring me here, feeding me these lies? After everything she went through, you’re digging it up like this, with this French dog? How dare you!” He jumped over the table, lunging at me. Mauve and Harrison caught him in time and shoved him back into the chair, struggling to break free. “I’ll kill him! I’ll rip his throat out!” His face contorted, crumpled, red hot.

“He’s telling the truth!” David yelled, running to pin his chest down with his arms. “I read it myself, it’s all true!”

“Let me go, David, so I can spill your fat gut onto these floorboards!”

“Ed,” Harrison said, quiet and steady. “It’s true.”

Ed, without a moment’s hesitation, stopped his thrashing. His chest fell, his shoulders slumped, and his face came back to color. Harrison sat back in his chair and the three Duvals stared at him in disbelief.

“What do you mean, it’s true?” Mauve asked, sitting herself. “How did you know? We haven’t given you the book yet.”

“I’ve seen it.” He tilted his head down, hands in his lap. “I made it myself.” His bright eyes became old and frail, dulling with an invisible shadow. “Charles, what did Axell say to you the day he died?”

“He tried to stop her. I showed him the diary and he said he tried to stop her.”

Harrison’s gaze sunk to the floor. “As did we all.” The taut skin around his cheeks sagged with age. “She wouldn’t listen to us. She couldn’t listen. The darkness of grief enveloped her until there was nothing left. We knew she had fallen in with dark forces, people who would take advantage of her, but we had no idea what she would do. We didn’t truly know until now. We tried to break through to her. She was there, beneath the surface, still inside waiting for Alice to return.” He slumped in his chair, eyes wide and unseeing. “She got the journal out into the world, and here it is, come back to us too late.”

I wasted no time.

“How did it get out so quickly?”

“She stowed it away in a box of journals we sold to a local market. She waited until cover of night, picked the backdoor lock to do it.” Harrison stared down at his legs. The man had left the body. “I didn’t know until she came to me the next morning and said it herself. By then the box was gone.”

“What day was this?” I asked, and picked up the journal, flipping to the first page.

“July 22nd. Delivered that morning.”

I turned the journal around and pushed it to the center of the table. Ed turned white as he read it. Harrison took a glance, if that. He hardly made an effort to move at all.

“Your brother was here in San Francisco?” Ed asked, steadying his quivering voice.

“No. The first dozen or so entries were written by a bricklayer here in town. Otto, no surname given. We call him Adam.”

“Because he came first,” Harrison said. We were silent then.

I flipped to the German’s first entry.

“Adam was killed, shot by a Bavarian in Oregon while trying to travel north. The Bavarian found the book and started writing in it, too.”

“Why did Adam travel north?” Ed asked.

“He planned on building a log cabin south of the Washington border,” Mauve said. “Not the sociable type.”

“But why was he shot?” Ed said, as if it were the obvious question to ask. His face mirrored the Duvals’, what at first had been fear had turned to grit.

“Accident,” I said, and read both Adam’s and the Bavarian’s entries of the event. “The Bavarian was named Otto, too.”

“Then it was no accident,” Harrison whispered. “It’s trying to find Otto, the tramp who took Alice.”

I tapped on the transcription of Anne’s writings. “And these seem to confirm it. Anne’s entries, all copied by my father and I from the invisible ink. The curse targets Otto, no surname, no description.”

“She cast a faulty spell,” David said.

“And her carelessness threatens us all,” Mauve added.

“But it’s still going,” Ed said. “Why is it still going if it killed Otto, any Otto? If the curse had no more information, it should have stopped at the first.”

“You’re right,” I said. I hadn’t considered it. If the curse doesn’t know which Otto it wants, why not stop at Adam?

“What happened to the Bavarian?” Ed asked.

“We don’t know for sure.”

“Well, what do we think happened, then?”

“One of Otto’s companymen, Charles’ Otto,” Mauve said. “He found the diary on the body of a German officer. He wrote ‘burn’ in mud on the front and shot himself.

“And I don’t see any reason to believe he was anyone other than the Bavarian.” A part of me doubted this, but there’s a pattern to these things. If it had been another man, he would’ve gotten the book directly from him and died without writing in it, so it didn’t matter. The others seemed to agree.

“The journal seeks any man named Otto,” Harrison said. “Any man at all.” I noticed he had pulled the transcription toward himself without my seeing and was presently reading it. “This begs the question, how did it come to Charles?”

“I have a theory,” Mauve said, and flipped to the page where I had pasted the newspaper clipping. “Charles, this news story says Otto was dragged from the fire by a French soldier. The only way command could have known it was a Frenchman and not the spy would be if the soldier told command himself. This was a real French soldier, not a German, who had enough inner strength to risk death to save your brother. Whoever this was must have taken him out of the fire before he died, thwarting fate, and placing the diary in your hands instead of the hands of the next Otto. Your brother only wrote of two soldiers who he was on friendly terms with, and we have to strike Otto Gritzman from the list. If all went to plan, it should have gone to him and then back to Ashcroft, but it didn’t.”

“Ashcroft?” Ed said, leaning forward. “Ashcroft as in German commander John Ashcroft?”

“Yes,” I said. “Ashcroft. This is how he rose to power, this diary here, and he’s been sending men to find it. They haven’t followed me here. I haven’t seen them since I left New York. Men in bowler hats and blue coats.”

Ed stood up.

“Bowler hats and blue coats?”

“What is it, Ed?” David asked.

“We passed a group of them on the way to Harrison’s, about a block away from Axell’s. Kept their heads down, straddling the corners of an alley.”

“Mauve?” David said, eyes desperate.

“I didn’t make the connection,” she said, mouth agape. “Bowler hats and blue coats.”

“How far are we from Axell’s?” I asked. There was no time to waste. We had suddenly found ourselves in the position of mice against a pack of cats.

“Five miles southwest,” Ed said. “Forty-five minutes by car, double that by foot.”

I’d been a fool. I’d been far too reckless, far too conspicuous. Somehow, Ashcroft was on my trail and knew I was right here in San Francisco. Somehow he had found me.

“Is there any way to link this place to Axell’s, or any of you?”

“The employees know us all,” Harrison said. “They know my address.”

“Do they know the address of this house?” I was afraid of the answer. Had I led us all into a trap? Had I endangered all their lives for nothing?

“No,” David said. “We moved in after the fire, just after the funeral. We’ve only given this address to the people at this table here.”

The knot in my chest untied.

“Good. Harrison.”

“Yes?”

“You can’t go back to your house. If they haven’t found it already, they will find it today. We’ll all have to stay here for the time being.”

“Sweet Lord help us,” David said, and made the Sign of the Cross across his chest.

“What do we do?” Ed asked, sitting back down. For this I did have an answer.

“I’ve infiltrated the cult who taught Anne the curse, and I’ve gained their complete trust. Anne’s writings contain something, a story, a myth, belonging to them, and I believe they see it as a prophecy. Here,” I said, pointing to her entry from January 12th, 1900. I read from it, “Three winged women. They’re trying to summon them back, but their attempts have failed so far. They have the embryos of some creature they believe to be these winged women, and they’ve implanted them in three real women, who are set to give birth in a week’s time. They’ve given me the job of delivering the children.”

“Good God!” Ed yelled. “How did you manage that? What the hell’s going on?”

“Whatever force is behind this curse is being challenged here, by something of equal power,” I said.

“There’s no such thing as fate,” David said. “Good is fighting back! All we have to do is help it along!”

“Yes,” Harrison said. “All we have to do is keep Charles alive and unsuspected until he can deliver the children and kill them.”

“Or,” Ed said, slamming his fist on the table, “we break into the cult, get those ladies out, and stop the births from ever happening!”

“How do you suppose we do that?” Mauve asked suspiciously.

“We kill them. We take the ladies and we kill them!”

“It’s not a bad plan, Ed,” David said. “I’d hate to do it, but it’s a good plan.”

“Is there no better way?” Mauve asked, disgust in her voice.

“There’s no safer way,” Ed said, “and we need to be sure.”

“How do we infiltrate the base, Charles?” Harrison asked.

“It’s under the Polytechnic High School. I work as a caretaker there. They have an opening into a hidden basement under my office.”

“Well, don’t that make it simple?” Ed said, smiling. “All we need to do is sneak ourselves into the school tonight, get inside your office, lock the door, get the ladies out and leave before anyone sees!”

“Why don’t we kill them then and there, if we have to do it?” Mauve asked.

“There can be nothing left,” I said. “We need to burn them to ash somewhere they can never find the remains. Now is no time for half measures. We need to burn them and destroy the other embryos.”

“Other embryos?” Ed said.

“They keep the others in three containers filled with fluid. We need to kill them as well, or they’ll just start the process over again.”

“And how do we do that?” Ed asked.

“Poison,” Harrison said calmly. “Drop enough poison in the tanks to saturate them, leaving no room for error.”

“Where do we get such a thing?” David asked.

“Leave it to me,” Harrison said, dragging himself up.

We stayed in the Duval house as Harrison went to fulfill his promise, leaving us with nothing but time to draft up our plan. I’ve spent most of the day writing this entry to inform you, spirits, and to refresh our memories for the planning process. Either I will return with another entry tomorrow detailing our victory, or I am dead. Adam, if there were ever a time to intervene, now is it.

Tonight we dive into the whale’s stomach.