“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.

“Let’s discuss your future, young fate-shifter.” Whitlow’s words blurred across the short distance between them, followed by a dozen variations as all the remaining, cut-up strands of fate tried to sum.

“Let’s discuss what is to come, now that you have a strong new body…before your memories fade again, always a problem for your kind…”

Whitlow had repeated these words so often, Daniel had lost count. There could be no finer punishment for all his sins than this—and yet, he could not just throw aside the stone and end it all. He knew the stones in the boxes offered a circle of protection—and did not want to experience what it would feel like if he, like Whitlow, fell just on the edge of or outside that circle. I’ve survived worse—the worst, I think. But my memories are vaguer than the murk outside. If I could only think clearly!

If I could make a move—any move—

He still had hope.

And so he gripped the boxes. At least there would be no hunger, no real pain. He could sit without moving, going through each train of thought in smeared iterations, the changes so slight no outside observer could ever know the difference—

For now, Whitlow had been stymied—perhaps even defeated—by Terminus. The marionette across from Daniel labored as if strung from the hands of a broken clock. “Let’s discuss…what our Livid Mistress will have in store…for such a fine young betrayer of worlds…”

Daniel leaned back and held the boxes at arm’s length behind him, removing their circle a few feet from Whitlow. The seated marionette slowed and fell silent, until Daniel’s arm tingled and he folded it back. The others—Whitlow’s partners, lost out in the vibrating murk—would never arrive to help their boss. As for the Moth—whatever that was or had been, no sign from that quarter, either. With a suck of breath and a cough, Daniel realized that any certainty, even doom, would be better than this staggered eternity.

Still, his feelers—blunted, singed, traumatized—were sensitive enough that he knew this was not all there was. A refuge existed somewhere. Had Whitlow not found him, he might have made his way to that refuge just in time to elude all this.

Caught—something less than frozen—facing a nemesis something less than toothless…

Fully capable of boring Daniel to screaming insanity with his threats and schemes, like thin acid dripping on acres of exposed skin.

“…before the memories of your past exploits fade and get eaten away by a fresh and resentful new mind. The Chalk Princess has such hopes…”

Something changed.

Daniel felt a thrill in his spine, an unmistakable difference in the room’s atmosphere. Though how he could recognize or even detect this in his present state was not clear. But here it was. A loosening. Something powerful jerking at the damaged strands, shaking them out, squeezing a few last hours of usable chronology that something might be done.