They completed a circuit to where Ginny had made her little square among the boxes, and she lifted the curtain she had hung for privacy, inviting him in. Jack sat on a small crate, reluctant to take the single wooden chair—more reluctant to sit on the bed. He crossed one leg. “I’m a busker,” he said.
“I saw you at the Busker Jam,” Ginny said.
“Funny I didn’t see you.”
“You were mad at something, I guess.”
“What do you do?”
“I get in trouble, then I run away.” Ginny sat on another box. The corner puffed dust and sagged and she got up, brushed her jeans, and sat in the chair.
“Run away from where?”
“Where tois all that matters.” She shrugged. “We’ve met before. I’m sure of it. Not just at the jam. Don’t you remember?”
Jack shivered again, and not just with the cold. He was letting it all down and he didn’t want to, not in this place and not in front of this girl.
They looked up in wonder and fear at the high small windows. Darkness had fallen. Day might never come again. Two stars shone through the glass panes. Jack tried to imagine time stopping, freezing, then bouncing back—whatever it was doing—all the way out to those stars. He couldn’t.
He got up, lifted the curtain, and returned to the back of the warehouse. Ginny followed again.
Jack pounded on the sliding steel door. The voices behind the door droned on as if nothing had
happened.
“They’ll let us in when they’re ready,” Ginny said. “A busker is a street entertainer, right?”
“Yeah,” Jack said.
“Why would a thunderstorm be interested in a juggler?” She covered her mouth. Jack looked at her, bewildered. The way she laughed—fey, dauntless—gave her a radiant, awkward bravery that shamed him. “Who is Bidewell?” he asked.
“His full name is Conan Arthur Bidewell. I think he’s been here for a long time.”
“He’s, like, the Great and Powerful Wizard?”
“He seems to think so. He’s spent his whole life collecting books,” Ginny said. “There are rooms here that haven’t been visited by a human being in over a hundred years. So he says. I think he wants to put us in them and see what happens.”
“You believe him?”
“I don’t think he’s lying,” Ginny said.
The sliding door rumbled opened. Miriam poked her head out. “You can come in now. Jeremy—”
“Jack,” he said.
“Jack…time for you to meet Mr. Bidewell.”
Ginny walked beside him.
“How can you just accept all this?” Jack asked.
“I’ve had my moments,” Ginny said. “I always come back. It’s safe here, for now—the safest place in the whole city, maybe the whole world. Out there…”
No need to say more about the streets, the city, the sky.
The old man—Bidewell, Jack assumed—stood beside a long wooden table on which someone had positioned a short stack of medium-sized hardcover books. He wore a dark brown suit covered with patches and mended holes.
Miriam joined the other women, and they all sat around a wood-burning iron stove whose square mica eye glowed a friendly orange. Agazutta took the single overstuffed chair, lounging like a spoiled movie star.
Jack and Ginny stood at opposite ends of the table like students awaiting an exam. Bidewell studied Jack, then pulled two books from the stack and let them fall open to their middles. He pushed one across the table toward Ginny and the other toward Jack. Both looked down. The pages were incomprehensible; no words, no paragraphs, just random lines of letters and numbers. Jack looked away and closed his book with a sharp crack.
Ginny left hers open. Bidewell had given her The Gargoyles of Oxfordby Professor J. G. Goyle. She recognized the binding, but could no longer read any of the text, and the pictures seemed muddy and vague.
A third book, the name on its spine also scrambled, was passed among the women.
“You may have noticed the effects of what you experienced outside, what some call the Gape,” Bidewell said as this book was carried back to the table by Agazutta. “Actually, two events have concurred: the Gape, and Terminus. The Gape cuts us off from our past. Terminus cuts us off from any future, and so, by and large, we are cut off from both causality and eventuality, the two pulsing waves of time. The results are obvious, outside. In here, my library is a ruin, but it still offers some protection.”
“ Allthe books are ruined?” Miriam asked, incredulous. “I mean, you docollect curiosities.”
“As many as I’ve examined, including those with which I’m quite familiar,” Bidewell said. “Outside these walls, every book in our region—perhaps every region we could ever hope to access—has also been scrambled. I’ve not seen this before, not on such a scale.”
Jack set his face in a vacant expression—waiting.
“Virginia, you have regained possession of your odd little stone. Now there are two,” Bidewell said.
“Jack, Ginny, could you remove your stones from their boxes…?”
Jack puzzled open his box. The stone lay inside, twisted and black, shining with a single deep red gleam. Ginny lifted hers. “Both present and accounted for,” she said, trying to be cheerful.
“Given their shapes and the way they appear to nest together—but no, we will notattempt that, please keep them separate—I suspect that a third exists, and perhaps more. None of us knows where they might be. None of our sentinels and outriders has reported a third individual with your abilities. But for now, we can’t worry about that. What is outside this warehouse for the time being is beyond our control.”
Agazutta sniffed.
Bidewell nodded. “If they are what I think they are, then they have nearly completed their long journey—they have summed. Bring them to the center of the table, please, and give them a slow wave over this volume. I’ve chosen a particularly valuable book, one I’ve kept in reserve for some time—but which is presently unreadable. Children…”
Jack stood beside Bidewell, following Ginny’s lead. Bidewell opened the book to the middle. Both held out their stones. The women crowded the opposite side of the table to see. Jack and Ginny held the stones over the pages.
At first the text remained scrambled. Then, as if caught in a glowing light of reason, the words began to return—a few, then sentences, phrases, entire paragraphs.
No letters moved, nothing visibly rearranged, but the book under the two stones slowly became readable.
Jack couldn’t help glancing at the first paragraphs to become clear—reading upside down, a trick he had learned years ago.
Language is as fundamental as energy. To be observed, the universe must be reduced—encoded. An unobserved universe is a messy place. Language becomes the DNA of the cosmos. He looked up. Ginny had been reading as well.
“I am humbled by the power you children possess,” Bidewell said reverently. “I’ve waited centuries to observe this effect. It confirms so much that has been, until now, mere philosophy.”
“What arethe stones?” Ginny asked, her hand and the stone trembling. “I’ve had mine as long as I can remember. My parents had it before me. I’ve never been away from it for very long. But I have no idea what it is.”
“Jack?” Bidewell inquired, watching him closely, but with a confident air.
“My mother called it a sometime stone. Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s not. Once, she called it a library stone.”
“Curious. Librarystone. As if she might have known.”
“Known what?” Jack asked.
“For now, these are still just partial shells—journey finished, full and strong, but immature. Even so…as you can see, they have remarkable powers.” Bidewell gripped both their extended hands and pulled them slowly apart. The text below remained comprehensible. In fact, the patch of legibility continued to grow.