Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

Tyndall shakes his head. “Don’t know. Just a novice. Now never will, never will … unless.” He looks up. There’s a glimmer of hope in his eyes, and he says it again: “Can you run the store?”

*   *   *

I cannot run the store, but I can use it. Thanks to Tyndall, I know Penumbra is in trouble somewhere, and I know it’s my fault. I don’t understand how or why, but it was undeniably me that sent Penumbra packing, and now I’m truly worried about him. This cult seems like it might have been designed specifically to prey on bookish old people—Scientology for scholarly seniors. If that’s true, then Penumbra is already deep in its clutches. So, enough poking around and gently guessing: I am going to raid Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore for the answers I need.

But first I have to get inside.

It’s the middle of the next day, and I am standing on Broadway, shivering, contemplating the plate-glass windows, when Oliver Grone is suddenly standing beside me. Jeez, he’s quiet for such a big dude.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

I eye him carefully. What if Oliver has already been inducted into this cult?

“Why are you standing out here?” he asks. “It’s cold.”

No. He’s like me; he’s an outsider. But maybe he’s an outsider with a key.

He shakes his head. “The door’s never been locked. I always just walk in and take Mr. Penumbra’s place, you know?”

Right, and I take Oliver’s. But now Penumbra is missing. “Now we’re stuck out here.”

“Well. We could try the fire escape.”

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, Oliver and I are using climbing muscles honed in Penumbra’s shadowy stacks. We have a utility ladder purchased at a hardware store five blocks away, and it’s set up in the narrow alley between the bookstore and the strip club.

A skinny bartender from Booty’s is back here, too, sitting on an upturned plastic bucket, sucking on a cigarette. He eyes us once, then returns to his phone. He appears to be playing Fruit Ninja.

Oliver goes first while I hold the ladder, and then I climb up after him on my own. This is all foreign territory. I had abstractly understood that this alley existed, and that there was a fire escape in it, but I still don’t understand where the fire escape connects to the store. There’s a whole back part of Penumbra’s where I do not often tread. Beyond the bright front shelves and the dark reaches of the Waybacklist, there’s a tiny break room with a tiny table and a tiny bathroom, and beyond that, the door marked PRIVATE that leads to Penumbra’s office. I take this injunction seriously, just as I took rule number two (regarding the sanctitude of the Waybacklist) seriously, at least until Mat got involved.

“Yeah, the door leads to a flight of stairs,” Oliver says. “They go up.” We are both standing on the fire escape, which makes a high metallic whine when either of us shifts our weight. There’s a wide window, old glass set into scratched and pitted wood. I pull and it doesn’t budge. Oliver bends down, makes a quiet grad-student grunt, and it flies open with a pop and a shriek. I glance down at the bartender in the alley. He’s ignoring us with the discipline of one whose job often requires it.

We hop through the window frame and into the darkness of Penumbra’s second-floor study.

*   *   *

There is grunting and shuffling and a loud whispered ouch, and then Oliver finds a switch. Orange light blooms from a lamp set on a long desk, revealing the space around us.

Penumbra is a much bigger nerd than he lets on.

The desk is loaded down with computers, none of them manufactured later than 1987. There’s an old TRS-80 connected to a squat brown TV. There’s an oblong Atari and an IBM PC with a bright blue plastic case. There are long boxes full of floppy disks and stacks of thick manuals, their titles printed in boxy letters:

TAKING A BITE OUT OF YOUR APPLE

BASIC PROGRAMS FOR FUN AND PROFIT

VISICALC MASTER CLASS

Next to the PC there is a long metal box topped with two rubber cups. Next to the box is an old rotary phone with a long, curving handset. I think the box is a modem, possibly the world’s most ancient; when you’re ready to go online, you plug the handset into those rubber cups, as if the computer is literally making a phone call. I’ve never seen one in person, only in snarky can-you-believe-this-is-how-it-used-to-work blog posts. I’m floored, because this means Penumbra has, at some point in his life, tiptoed into cyberspace.

On the wall behind the desk there’s a world map, very big and very old. On this map there is no Kenya, no Zimbabwe, no India. Alaska is a blank expanse. There are gleaming pins pushed into the paper. Pins poke London, Paris, and Berlin. Pins poke Saint Petersburg, Cairo, and Tehran. There are more—and these must be the bookstores, the little libraries.