“There have been many such over the ages. Some failed and became lumps of useless rock. Some were captured—along with their guardians—and we assume those were sequestered or destroyed. In the names given to them, I suspect, we have clues as to their ultimate nature and function. You may put them away for now.”
“If something has scrambled all order—how can we think or see?” Miriam asked. “Why isn’t our flesh scrambled?” Her voice rose. “Everything should just fall apart!”
Her disturbing observation was met with grim silence.
Bidewell flipped the book’s restored pages one by one. The old man actually had tears in his eyes—tears of relief and awe. “We are just beginning to see how deep the mystery is. For better or worse, all time, everywhere, is now subjective. All fates are local.” He lifted his gaze to a large electric clock mounted over the sliding steel door. The hands were bent and jammed as if invisible fingers had reached inside and twisted them—and the second hand lay at the bottom of the glass. “No timepiece will tick out our remaining seconds. If we end flattened and frozen against Terminus—we are lost. Even these stones will be useless. But we cannot rush the tasks that remain for us. First, we must get to know each
other.” Bidewell pulled a folding chair forward, gripped its seat, and smiled at Jack. Jack sat, eyes sharp.
“Just for this occasion,” Bidewell said, “I have laid in a small feast. Ginny knows where cans of soup and the makings for sandwiches are stored. Ellen, will you begin?”
They sat down to pastrami on rye and tomato soup warmed on the stove. Farrah produced a bottle of red wine and a corkscrew from her capacious handbag. “Wonder what Terminus does to wine?” she asked. She poured a small amount of the dark ruby liquid into a tumbler, sipped it, and lifted an eyebrow in approval, then poured around. “It’s hard to spoil a cheap merlot.”
Ellen lifted her glass and swirled its contents. “The four of us really did start out as a book group,” she said. “We still get together twice a month to eat and drink and discuss literature.”
“We’re well-off,” Farrah said. “Leisure becomes an attractive nuisance.”
Ellen resumed. “Anyway, ladies,after Agazutta’s father passed away, she cleaned out his house. The house had been in the family for over a hundred years. In the attic, she saw an old, dusty box pushed far back into a corner. Inside, she found an unusual book. It had probably been there since before her grandfather’s time.”
Bidewell rubbed his hands, then leaned against the edge of the table. For all his apparent age, he seemed flexible—not spry, but flexible. And tough.
Agazutta seemed bored by this recounting. “Blame it all on me,” she said.
“Agazutta brought it to our group. After a bottle of pinot gris and a fine melon salad with pine nuts and prosciutto, we all agreed the book might be rare—though it was not in English, nor in any language we knew. It seemed to be part of a set. So we thought it would be fun to take it to a dealer in such things—a man I know, John Christopher Brown.”
“They dated in college,” Farrah broadcast to the room.
“We did,” Ellen confirmed, with a short stare. “Can I tell this my way?”
Farrah smiled sweetly.
Jack hunched down in the folding chair.
“Mr. Brown owns an antiquarian bookstore on Stone Way. He seems to know everything about books and a little bit about everyone involved in books—old books, odd books. He knew of a local buyer interested in just this sort of item.”
Bidewell listened as attentively as a child.
“Our dear Conan,” Ellen said.
“Ah,” Bidewell said. “I am drawn into the picture.”
“You drew usin. At any rate, you bought our book. At first, Mr. Brown kept you anonymous, but passed along a portion of the sum Conan paid—a suspiciously large sum, enough to make us happy to continue to search through our attics, our basements, even the walls of our houses.”
“Farrah found another,” Agazutta said.
“In my basement, in a shoe box. I had never seen it before. Really—it might have just popped up like a coat hanger in a closet. It wasn’t old—from the 1950s—a paperback, in fact.” She added, eyebrow raised, “With a lurid cover.”
“A lurid cover—and every single word misspelled, except on one page,” Agazutta said, “which it turned out was transliterated Hebrew. Mr. Brown sold that book for an even larger sum.”
“Remarkable ladies,” Bidewell said, “to have located two such curious volumes in their immediate environs. They obviously had a knack. I gave Mr. Brown permission to refer the ladies to me. Such finds do not arrive entirely by chance.”
“How dothey arrive?” Ginny asked.
“Not to be known—” Bidewell began, and without skipping a beat, the entire group—except for Jack—echoed:
“ Not to be known, surely, not to be known!”
Bidewell bore up with patient good humor. “The paperback was intriguing—yet merely a symptom. However, what the lovely Witches of Eastlake had happened upon, with their first discovery, was the thirteenth volume of a remarkable and elusive encyclopedia.”
“Here we go,” Agazutta said.
“One set had apparently been printed in Shanghai in the 1920s, to the specifications of an Argentinian named Borges. There are no records of Señor Borges except his nameplate in the index volume, and his signature on page 412 of volume one. And so our ladies had made one of the most magnificent finds of this century—a volume of the lost Encyclopedia Pseudogeographica. Only one other volume is known, incunabular, recovered in Toledo in 1432 and currently held in the British Library under lock and key—with excellent reason, I might add.”
“It’s a good thing we couldn’t read it,” Farrah said, stretching like a cat. Which reminded Ginny—she had not seen Minimus or any of the other cats for some hours. They likely had found hiding places until events and new guests settled. “We might have gone mad.”
“Madder than we are,” Agazutta added.
“But who would know?” Ellen muttered.
Bidewell’s laugh was light and rich, like a perfectly baked cookie. Despite himself, despite everything Jack had experienced, he was beginning to like the old man.
“Suffice it to say,” said Ellen, “we all found Mr. Bidewell handsome, fascinating—”
“And wealthy!” said Agazutta.
Bidewell peered around the room with satisfaction bordering on smugness, as if, at long last, he had assembled a long-desired family.
“The rest is history,” Ellen said.
“Pied history,” Farrah said with a small, half-concealed yawn.
“Which means?” Ginny asked.
“History comes in two colors. Everyone else lives one color,” Agazutta explained. “After meeting Mr. Bidewell, we now live the other.”
“What does any of this have to do with me? Or with her?” Jack asked, nodding at Ginny.
“I should rekindle our fire. It’s getting cold,” Bidewell said, pushing away from the desk. “Jack, there are logs and old newspapers in the hopper. We shall pour another glass and toast lost memory. Temps perdu,quite literally. For that is the talent we shall speak of soon—order, chance, times lost, and the recovery of objects that never were, yet ever shall be.”
Jack picked pages of newspaper from the curved hopper.
The pages were blank.
CHAPTER 53
Wallingford
Grayness and dusty sweeps of shadow, a glazed, darkling sky, clouds jerking by in spasms like dying animals flopping and kicking across the heavens—
The rough abandoned house at the center of so many of Daniel’s lives, desolate beyond description—
Freezing isolation made worse by the fact that he was not alone—that he had Whitlow to contend with. Whitlow had entered the old house, passing Daniel on the porch, and now faced him with a wry, twitching smile across the short distance between two old chairs on the water-stained and warped floor—where he and Daniel had seated themselves, nowhere else to go, just as clocks everywhere had stopped humming, whirring, ticking.