We decided to change our Dreamer’s Atlas project. It would no longer be about reversing the styles of fictional and historical maps so they mirrored each other, to evoke a sense of wonder and magic about cartography—rather, it would be about Agloe. About how it was possible that it existed, how there could be two places at once in the same geography.
We would produce only two maps now, but they would be the two most important maps in existence. One would be of the known world, the one that everyone could see and experience, and the other would be of Agloe.
And then we would show the world both places.
We were dizzy with the possibilities. We believed that by finishing our reenvisioned project, a whole new understanding of how maps worked, and their relation to the world, would open up to us. Our ambitions in the first place had been to revolutionize cartography—but how silly that grand idea seemed now that we’d found Agloe. How little we’d truly known about maps, only just hours ago. How little everyone knew, really.
Because as far as we could tell, no one else had ever found, or published, anything even remotely like this.
The day after we found Agloe, as Tam and Romi were brainstorming how to begin our project again from scratch, Francis and Daniel drove to the nearest college, the State University of New York at New Paltz, about an hour and a half away, where they used the catalog system to call for every book and academic journal that might be relevant—but there wasn’t a single mention of anything like this, anywhere. There were plenty of articles about psychogeography, and the concept of phantom settlements, from artistic and legal perspectives, but nothing about phantom settlements being real.
No one else knew about Agloe.
No one that was still alive, anyway.
While Francis and Daniel were at the college, Wally took the other car to do some research on the original makers of the map, General Drafting Corporation. They’d been incredibly productive in the early 1900s, the era from which our map had come, but by the time we’d stumbled onto our copy, their profits had been in decline for some time. The founder and his closest drafters—the ones who had made our edition—had all died decades before, and those running the company now seemed to have no connection to them, and knew nothing about the secret within their work, either. In fact, they seemed only concerned with revenue and were considering selling what remained of General Drafting to some big sightseeing guide conglomerate, where their work would dissolve into the existing structure.
“They told me all about the founder, Otto G. Lindberg, his top cartographer Ernest Alpers, and gave me a tour of the whole drafting room and the archives,” Wally told us when he’d gotten back from General Drafting’s sole remaining office in New Jersey. On the table, he’d spread out a huge pile of their maps and put them in order—General Drafting didn’t have backstock for every year for such a cheap, disposable product line, but Wally had brought back at least half of them. “I begged them to let me buy these as souvenirs. They were so tickled that anyone could be such a fan, they just gave them to me for free. If you look”—he opened each one, until there was no room left on the table—“Agloe doesn’t appear on any of them but our 1930 edition.”
Daniel studied the assortment of useless General Drafting maps in front of us. “And they didn’t have any more copies for that year?”
Wally shook his head. “None, and I poked around for an hour. The oldest I was able to find in their files was this 1941.” He held up one, badly aged. “The office, believe it or not, is an old Tudor-style castle some wealthy family built in the early 1900s. Pretty neat looking, but terrible for conservation and storage. Their basement was a mess—humid in summer, drafty in winter. It would be hard for old paper to stand up to that.”
“What about the old lawsuit Francis found in the county logs?” I asked. “Did you ask them about it?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t get anywhere,” Wally replied. “The secretary said she always assumed that since there are no files from the case, the founder, Lindberg, must have settled and had the records sealed as part of that agreement, to protect General Drafting’s reputation. Except business never really bounced back after that.”