A knock and Brother Slootjes entered without waiting to be summoned. They’d known each other long enough to dispense with such formalities.

“Alone?” Slootjes said. “Good.”

Ernst recognized the manila envelope cradled in his arm: the memoir from Mrs. Novak. The loremaster looked shaken. That was not good. Ernst’s stomach turned.

“So you’ve read it?”

Slootjes nodded. “I have.”

“And?”

“It’s quite intriguing, even disturbing, one might say.”

Ernst was finding the loremaster’s penchant for creating drama more vexing than usual today.

“As disturbing as Winslow’s novel? Spit it out, man!”

Slootjes dropped into a chair and looked lost for a few seconds. Then he shook himself.

“If true, it’s a shattering document, but I’m a long way from being convinced of its authenticity.”

“Did you ever believe it could possibly be true?”

“We both know the Order has its enemies, but I’m finding it hard to imagine them expending this amount of time and effort to perpetrate such an elaborate hoax.”

“Details!”

“Very well.” He tapped the envelope. “This purports to be the memoir of a British immigrant who graduated MIT in 1903 and went to work for Nikola Tesla at his Wardenclyffe tower. It’s common knowledge that J. P. Morgan promised to finance Tesla’s broadcast power project, but balked when he realized he would have no way to charge for all the electricity Tesla would be transmitting through the air and the Earth. Atkinson says the Order secretly took over the financing of the tower when Morgan backed out.”

“Can you verify that?”

“Probably, but I haven’t had time. There’s too much else going on in this so-called memoir. According to Atkinson, the tower was successful in transmitting wireless energy, but in doing so it was thinning the Veil, allowing influences and entities to pass from the other side. He states that toward the end he and your grandfather witnessed untold horrors existing on the other side, horrors that would invade our world should the Veil be permanently rent. It says Rudolph realized the Order had been duped into lending a hand in its own destruction. But before he could return to report his findings to the Council, he…he disappeared.”

“‘Disappeared’ how?”

Slootjes’s gaze shifted away. “I’d rather you read it yourself. The events grow increasingly disturbing through the course of the narrative and by the end are downright fantastic. I’m not sure I believe it, but the fact remains that no one saw your grandfather leave Wardenclyffe. In fact, he was never seen again.”

Silence hung in the air.

Ernst didn’t know how to respond to that…his grandfather’s unexplained disappearance had been a blow to the Order and even worse for his family. Ernst’s father, Ernst the first, had confessed to him of being traumatized, feeling he’d been abandoned by the father he’d worshiped. But since grandfather never surfaced again, despite the Order’s best efforts to find him, he was presumed dead, the victim of fatal happenstance or foul play.

But no one had ever mentioned vanishing into thin air.