Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

It’s quiet on the staircase. The only light comes from tiny windows set high in the houses on either side; it spills out into the branches above, heavy with dark plums. Up ahead, there’s a loud rustle and a chorus of squawks. In another moment a flock of wild parrots, roused from their perches, comes barnstorming down the tree-lined tube into the open night air. Wingtips brush the top of my head.

Up ahead, there’s a sharp click and a creak and then a crack of light widens into a square. My quarry’s shadow passes through it, and then it closes tight. Rosemary Lapin is home.

I make it to the landing and sit on a step to catch my breath. This lady has serious stamina. Maybe she’s light, with bones like a bird. Maybe she’s slightly buoyant. I look back down the way we came, and through the lace of black branches I can see the lights of the city far below.

Dishes clink and clatter inside. I knock on Ms. Lapin’s door.

There’s a long conspicuous silence. “Ms. Lapin?” I call. “It’s Clay, from, uh, from the bookstore. The clerk. I just wanted to ask you about something.” Or maybe about everything.

The silence stretches out. “Ms. Lapin?”

I watch a shadow break the bar of light below the door. It hovers there—then the lock rattles and Ms. Lapin peeks out. “Hello,” she says sweetly.

*   *   *

Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit—low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books. It is small but not uncomfortable; the air smells strongly of cinnamon and weakly of pot. There is a high-backed chair that faces a tidy fireplace.

Lapin is not sitting in the chair. She is instead backed into the corner of her ship’s-galley kitchen, as far as she can get from me while still being in the same room. I think she would climb out the window if she could reach it.

“Ms. Lapin,” I say, “I need to get in touch with Mr. Penumbra.”

“How about some tea?” she says. “Yes, some tea, and then you’ll be on your way.” She fiddles with a heavy brass teapot. “Busy night for a young one, I suppose, plenty of places to go, people to see—”

“Actually, I’m supposed to be working.”

Her hands shake on the stovetop. “Of course, well, plenty of jobs to be had, don’t fret—”

“I don’t need a job!” More gently, I say, “Ms. Lapin, really. I just need to get in touch with Mr. Penumbra.”

Lapin pauses, but only barely. “There are so many professions. You could be a baker, a taxidermist, a ferryboat captain…” Then she turns, and I think it’s the first time she’s ever looked straight at me. Her eyes are gray-green. “Mr. Penumbra has gone away.”

“So when is he coming back?”

Lapin says nothing, just looks at me, then slowly turns to tend the teapot, which has started to shudder and hiss on top of her tiny stove. A glittering compound of curiosity and dread oozes into my brain. Time to go for broke.

I pull out my laptop, which is probably the most advanced piece of technology that has ever crossed the threshold of Lapin’s lair, and set it up on a stack of heavy books, all from the Waybacklist. The shiny MacBook looks like a hapless alien trying to blend in with the quiet stalwarts of human civilization. I crack it open—glowing alien guts revealed!—and cue the visualization as Lapin crosses the room with two cups in two saucers.

When her eye catches the screen and she recognizes the bookstore in 3-D, she crash-lands the saucers onto the table with a clatter. Clasping her hands together beneath her chin, she bends in low and watches the wire-frame face take shape.

She squeaks, “You found him!”

*   *   *

Lapin spreads a wide scroll of thin, almost translucent paper on the table, now cleared of books. It’s my turn to gape: it is a view of the bookstore, rendered in gray pencil, and it, too, shows a web of lines connecting spaces on the shelves. But it’s incomplete; in fact, it’s barely started. You can see the curve of a chin and the hook of a nose, but nothing else. Those lines, dark and sure, are surrounded by the fuzz of eraser marks—a layered history of ghost lines that have been drawn and removed many times.

How long, I wonder, has Lapin been working on this?

Her face tells the tale. Her cheeks are trembling, like she’s on the verge of tears. “That is why,” she says, glancing back at my laptop. “That is why Mr. Penumbra went. Oh, what have you done? How did you do that?”

“Computers,” I tell her. “Big ones.”

Lapin makes a sigh and finally surrenders to her chair. “This is terrible,” she says. “After all that work.”

“Ms. Lapin,” I say, “what were you working on? What is this all about?”

Lapin closes her eyes and says, “I am forbidden to speak of it.” She sneaks a peek with one eye. I am quiet, open-faced, trying to look as harmless as possible. She sighs again. “But Mr. Penumbra did like you. He liked you a great deal.”

I don’t like the sound of the past tense here. Lapin stretches for her tea but can’t quite reach it, so I lift the cup and saucer and hand them to her.