Isolated in my quest, I have only a few clues to work from.
I may not be able to trust the people around me – because of the stolen cabinet – thought lost at sea, certainly never recovered. It wasn’t truly stolen, I realized that, but in notes I called it “stolen” – less complicated to explain. Lost at sea? Why was it there? Was it being sent across the ocean? From where to where? oh bring back my bonnie to me.
No one was asking at this point, but in case the notes ended up in the wrong hands, “stolen” was the word. So many of the cabinets had disappeared, lost in time or just fallen apart after being ransacked by people who had no idea of the value of their contents. Thinking the gold coin had more worth than the woven bundle of feathers, or that a pink crystal stone was worth more than a photograph of a child. When it was so obvious to me that the skipping rope and hopscotch chalk carried songs inside them that were of much more worth than the dead pearls or decorative hat-pin set. Those songs, you see, held patterns of even greater treasure. Only those who could hear them could decode their mysteries and follow them like a treasure map’s coordinates.
Lost cabinets had a way of resurfacing after a while. Sometimes in other places around the globe. Were they sent? Were they inherently magical and able to move on their own? What was the reason for the old timeworn tradition of cabinet trading along all the major routes? From Azerbaijan to the Cape, from high on the Himalayas down to the heat of old Ceylon, from the far north along the spine of the Americas and the Great Divide, the cabinets moved or were transported, flying coffin-like they travelled, and opened their doors only when at their destined stopping place. Like a beached whale transported to the central square of the town, it was a wonder to behold. But that was in the old days, when every town had at least one resident magician or wise one who could open such a cabinet, learn from it, take the offering it was sent to deliver, add a reply, close it again and send it on.
The thread of my research had led me to follow the work of so many others, down an old well-worn trail. There seemed to be little more to find. But what of the many cabinets that had been sunk to sea without a trace? From time to time there was word of divers having found and opened them, like sunken treasure chests, returning disappointed to find they were only filled with odd curios and long-forgotten objects of little value, barnacle-covered by the workings of the creatures of the sea. Nevertheless, divers brought these objects to the surface, where they were pronounced valueless. Most simply shattered in contact with the air, becoming shards after only a week or two in the laboratory. Only the antique glass bottles filled with elixirs and powders remained intact.
In the warehouse I came upon metal shelving filled with such recovered old timeworn bottles: green glass etched with patterns, brown glass murky and clouded, once-clear glass sandblasted to opacity. Contents unknown.
Every night since seeing them, I had dreamed of the underwater cabinets. In the dream, I was swimming in the depth of a still bay, and it was deeper than I’d expected. Soon I was underwater, hair streaming like seaweed strands, then a cabinet always appeared. In some dreams it was on its side, others on its back, once its doors were flat on the seabed, and only the back of the cabinet was visible. So I couldn’t see inside that one.
Most of the time I was able to open at least one door, or a drawer, and often when I did, all the compressed contents burst propelled through the water. On the sideways cabinets, the objects had piled onto one another; on the flat cabinets, the doors opened naturally but again the contents were flattened, jostled to the back in a jumble. Through the water I moved the objects, examining them as well as I could, until the dream came to an end and I surfaced once more.
“We see you have been exploring the sea cabinets,” a researcher remarked in an early morning text message. “Come to the main warehouse at 9am today. We have some new info for you.”
At this point I was very confused. How could they track my dreams like that? Were they projecting them into me, or was I projecting them out?
The research had taken another leap, but I still couldn’t completely trust them. For hadn’t they been the ones who had destroyed so many cabinets in the past, who had tortured and killed so many researchers in the name of silence and secrecy?
Trust or no trust, the work was fully activated, and nearing completion. My assessment was laid out with all the listings completed, verified, clarified, and approved for upload. It was an easy task. Dreams continued, doubt about the organization meant that I needed to report first to those who had originally reached out to me. But how? The one I’d had tea with had moved or been removed.