Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

Wait, what kind of report? Are we talking about a police report? Grand theft codex? “Mr. Penumbra, is there a problem? I don’t understand why—”

“Oh, yes, I know,” he says sharply, and his eyes flash at me. “I see it now. You cheated—would that be fair to say? And as a result, you have no idea what you have accomplished.”

I look down at the desk. That would be fair to say.

When I look back up at Penumbra, his gaze has softened. “And yet … you did it all the same.” He turns and wanders into the Waybacklist. “How curious.”

“Who is it?” I ask suddenly. “Whose face?”

“It is the Founder,” Penumbra says, running a long hand up along one of the shelves. “The one who waits, hiding. He vexes novices for years. Years! And yet you revealed him in—what? A single month?”

Not quite: “Just one day.”

Penumbra takes a sharp breath. His eyes flash again. They are pulled wide and, reflecting the light from the windows, they crackle electric blue in a way I’ve never seen. He gasps, “Incredible.” He takes a breath, a deeper one. He looks rattled and exhilarated; actually, he looks a little crazy. “I have work to do,” he says. “I must make plans. Go home, my boy.”

“But—”

“Go home. Whether you understand it or not, you have done something important today.”

He turns and walks deeper into the dark and dusty shelves, talking quietly to himself. I gather up my laptop and my messenger bag and I slip out the front door. The bell makes just the barest tinkle. I glance back through the tall windows, and, behind the curving golden type, Penumbra has disappeared.

WHY DO YOU LOVE BOOKS SO MUCH?

WHEN I RETURN THE NEXT NIGHT, I see something I’ve never seen before, something that makes me gasp and stop in my tracks:

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is dark.

It looks all wrong. The store is always open, always awake, like a little lighthouse on this seedy stretch of Broadway. But now the lamps are doused and there is a tidy square of paper stuck to the inside of the front door. In Penumbra’s spidery script, it says:

CLOSED (AD LIBRIS)

I don’t have a key to the store, because I’ve never needed one. It’s always been a handoff—Penumbra to Oliver, Oliver to me, me to Penumbra. For a moment I am furious, full of selfish rage. What the hell? When will it open again? Wasn’t I supposed to get an email or something? This is a pretty irresponsible thing for an employer to do.

But then I get worried. This morning’s encounter was well beyond the pale. What if it got Penumbra so worked up that he suffered a tiny heart attack? Or a massive heart attack? What if he’s dead? Or what if he’s weeping to himself in a lonely apartment somewhere, where his family never visits him because Grandpa Penumbra is weird and smells like books? A flood of shame washes through my blood and mixes with the anger and they swirl together into a heavy soup that makes me feel sick.

I walk to the liquor store on the corner to get some chips.

*   *   *

For the next twenty minutes, I stand on the curb, dumbly munching Fritos and wiping my hand on my pants leg, not sure what to do next. Should I go home and come back tomorrow? Should I look Penumbra up in the phone book and try to call him? Scratch that. I know without checking that Penumbra will not be in the phone book, and besides, I don’t actually know where to find one of those.

I’m standing there, trying to imagine some clever course of action, when I see a familiar figure come gliding up the street. It’s not Penumbra; he doesn’t glide. This is—it’s Ms. Lapin. I duck behind a trash can (why did I just duck behind a trash can?) and watch her scoot toward the store, gasp when she reaches a range at which she can detect its dereliction, then swoop in close to the front door, where she stretches up on tiptoe to inspect the CLOSED (AD LIBRIS) sign, nose pressed to the glass, no doubt auguring deep meaning in those three words.

Then she glances furtively up and down the street, and when the pale oval of her face swivels this way, I see a look of tight-drawn fear. She turns and glides back the way she came.

I drop my Fritos in the trash can and follow her.

*   *   *

Lapin breaks away from Broadway and picks a path toward Telegraph Hill. Her velocity is steady, even as the landscape rises underneath her; she’s the little eccentric that could. I’m huffing and puffing, quick-stepping a block behind her, struggling to keep up. The nozzle head of Coit Tower rises on the hill high above us, a spindly gray cutout against the deeper darkness of the sky. Midway along a narrow street that curves up around the contour of the hill, Lapin disappears.

I sprint to the spot where she last stood and there I find a skinny stone staircase set into the hillside, running like an alleyway between the houses, cutting steeply upward under a scrim of branches. Lapin is somehow already halfway up.

I try to call out after her—“Ms. Lapin!”—but I’m too winded and it comes out as a wheeze. So I cough and grunt and lean into the hill and follow her up.