Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

LITTLE BITS OF METAL

MATROPOLIS HAS TAKEN OVER the living room. Mat and Ashley have hauled the couch away, and to navigate around the room you follow a narrow channel between the card tables: the winding Mittelriver, complete with two bridges. The commercial district has matured, and new towers push past the old airship dock, nearly touching the ceiling. I suspect Mat might build something up there, too. Soon Matropolis will annex the sky.

It’s past midnight, and I can’t sleep. I still haven’t been able to reclaim my circadian rhythm, even though it’s been a week since our late-night photo shoot. So now I am lying on the floor, drowning deep in the Mittelriver, dubbing The Dragon-Song Chronicles.

The audiobook edition I bought for Neel was produced in 1987 and the distributor’s catalog did not specify that it still comes on cassette tapes. Cassette tapes! Or maybe it did specify that, and I just missed it in the excitement of the bulk order. In any case, I still want Neel to have the audiobooks, so I bought a black Sony Walkman for seven dollars on eBay and I am now playing the tapes into my laptop, rerecording them, shepherding them one by one into the great digital jukebox in the sky.

The only way to do this is in real time, so basically I have to sit and listen to the first two volumes in their entirety again. But that’s not so bad, because the audiobooks are read by Clark Moffat himself. I’ve never heard him speak, and it’s spooky, knowing what I know about him now. He has a good voice, gravelly but clear, and I can imagine it echoing in the bookstore. I can imagine the first time Moffat came through the door — the tinkle of the bell, the creak of the floorboards.

Penumbra would have asked: What do you seek in these shelves?

Moffat would have looked around, taken the measure of the place — noticed the shadowy reaches of the Waybacklist, certainly — and then he might have said: Well, what would a wizard read?

Penumbra would have smiled at that.

Penumbra.

He has vanished, and his bookstore stands derelict. I have no idea where to find him.

In a flash of genius, I checked the domain registration for penumbra.com, and sure enough: he owns it. It was purchased in the primordial era of the web by Ajax Penumbra and renewed in 2007 with an optimistic ten-year term … but the registration only lists the store’s address on Broadway. Further googling yielded nothing. Penumbra casts only the faintest digital shadow.

In another, somewhat dimmer flash of genius, I tracked down silver-haired Muriel and her goat farm, just south of San Francisco in a foggy cluster of fields called Pescadero. She hadn’t heard from him, either. “He’s done this before,” she said. “Gone away. But — he does usually call.” Her smooth face made a little frown and the microwrinkles around her eyes darkened. When I left, she gave me a little palm-sized wheel of fresh goat cheese.

And so, in a final desperate flash, I opened the scanned pages of PENVMBRA. Google couldn’t crack MANVTIVS, but these latter-day codex vitae were not so cunningly encrypted, and besides (I was fairly sure), there was actually something in this book to be decoded. I sent Kat an inquiring text message, and her response was short and definitive: No. Thirteen seconds later: Absolutely not. Seven more: That project is done.

Kat had been deeply disappointed when the Great Decoding failed. She had really believed there would be something profound waiting for us in that text; she had wanted there to be something profound. Now she was throwing herself into the PM and mostly ignoring me. Except, of course, to say Absolutely not.

But that was probably for the best. The two-page spreads on my laptop screen — heavy Gerritszoon glyphs lit harshly by the GrumbleGear camera flashes — still made me feel strange. Penumbra’s expectation was that his codex vitae wouldn’t be read until after he was gone. I decided I wouldn’t crack open a man’s book of life just to find his home address.

Finally, genius depleted, I checked with Tyndall and Lapin and Fedorov. None of them had heard from Penumbra, either. They were all preparing to move east, to take refuge with the Unbroken Spine in New York and join Corvina’s chain gang there. If you ask me, it’s futile: we took Manutius’s codex vitae and bent it until it broke. At best, the fellowship is founded on a false hope, and at worst, it’s founded on a lie. Tyndall and the rest haven’t faced up to this, but at some point they’ll have to.

If all of this seems grim: it is. And I feel terrible because, if you trace it back step-by-step, you cannot avoid the fact that all of it is my fault.

My mind is wandering. It’s taken me many nights to get this far again, but Moffat is finally wrapping up Volume II. I’ve never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say, it’s a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely happens inside your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes:

“The Golden Horn of Griffo is finely wrought,” Zenodotus said, tracing his finger along the curve of Telemach’s treasure. “And the magic is in its making alone. Do you understand? There is no sorcery here — none that I can detect.”

Moffat’s Zenodotus voice is not what I expected. Instead of a rich, dramatic wizard’s rumble, it’s clipped and clinical. It’s the voice of a corporate magic consultant.

Fernwen’s eyes widened at that. Hadn’t they just braved a swamp of horrors to reclaim this enchanted trumpet? And now the First Wizard claimed it carried no real power at all?

“Magic is not the only power in this world,” the old mage said gently, handing the horn back to its royal owner. “Griffo made an instrument so perfect that even the dead must rise to hear its call. He made it with his hands, without spells or dragon-songs. I wish that I could do the same.”

With Moffat reading, I can hear the sinister intent in the First Wizard’s voice. It’s so obvious what’s coming:

“Even Aldrag the Wyrm-Father would envy such a thing.”

Wait, what?

So far, every line out of Moffat’s mouth has been pleasant repetition. His voice has been a needle bobbing comfortably through a deep groove in my brain. But that line — I have never read that line.

That line is new.

My finger twitches over the Walkman’s pause button, but I don’t want to mess up Neel’s recording. Instead, I pad quickly to my room and pull Volume II from the shelf. I flip to the end, and yes, I’m right: there’s no mention of Aldrag the Wyrm-Father here. He was the first dragon to sing, and he used the power of his dragon-song to forge the first dwarves out of molten rock, but that’s not the point — the point is, that line is not in the book.

So what else isn’t in the book? What else is different? Why is Moffat freestyling?

These audiobooks were produced in 1987, just after Volume III had been published. Therefore, it was also just after Clark Moffat’s entanglement with the Unbroken Spine. My spider-sense is tingling: this is connected.

But I can think of only three people in the world who might possess clues to Moffat’s intent. The first is the dark lord of the Unbroken Spine, but I have absolutely no desire to communicate with Corvina or any of his henchmen at the Festina Lente Company, above- or belowground. Besides, I’m still afraid my IP address might be listed on one of their pirate rosters.

The second is my erstwhile employer, and I have a deep desire to communicate with Penumbra, but I don’t know how. Lying here on the floor, listening to the hiss of empty tape, I realize something very sad: this skinny, blue-eyed man bent my life into a crazy curlicue … and all I know about him is what it says on the front of his store.

There is a third possibility. Edgar Deckle is technically part of Corvina’s crew, but he has a few things going for him:

1. He’s an established coconspirator.

2. He guards the door to the Reading Room, so he must be pretty high up in the fellowship, and therefore have access to many secrets.

3. He knew Moffat. And, most important of all:

4. He’s in the phone book. Brooklyn.

It feels appropriately weighty and Unbroken Spine-ish to send him a letter. This is something I haven’t done in more than a decade. The last letter I wrote in ink on paper was a mushy missive to my long-distance pseudo-girlfriend in the gold-tinted week after science camp. I was thirteen. Leslie Murdoch never wrote back.

For this new epistle, I select heavy archival-grade paper. I purchase a sharp-tipped rollerball pen. I carefully compose my message, first explaining all that transpired up on Google’s bright screens and then asking Edgar Deckle what he knows, if anything, about Clark Moffat’s audiobook editions. I crumple six sheets of the archival-grade paper in the process because I keep misspelling words or smashing them together. My handwriting is still terrible.

Finally, I drop the letter into a bright blue mailbox and hope for the best.

Three days later, an email appears. It’s from Edgar Deckle. He proposes that we video chat.

Well, fine.

It’s just past noon on a Sunday when I click the green camera icon. The feed comes to life and there is Deckle, peering down into his computer, his round nose slightly foreshortened. He’s sitting in a narrow, light-filled room with yellow walls; I think there’s a skylight somewhere up above him. Behind his fuzzy crown of hair, I can see copper cooking pots hanging from hooks, and the front of a gleaming black refrigerator festooned with bright magnets and faint drawings.

“I liked your letter,” Deckle says, smiling, holding up the archival-grade paper folded into neat thirds.

“Right, well. I figured. Anyway.”

“I already knew what happened in California,” he says. “Word travels fast in the Unbroken Spine. You shook things up.”

I expected him to be angry about all that, but he’s smiling. “Corvina took some heat. People were angry.”

“Don’t worry, he did his best to stop it.”

“Oh, no — no. They were angry we hadn’t tried it already ourselves. ‘This upstart Google shouldn’t have all the fun,’ they said.”

That makes me smile. Maybe Corvina’s rule isn’t as absolute as it seems.

“But you’re still at it?” I ask.

“Even though Google’s mighty computers didn’t find anything?” Deckle says. “Sure. I mean, come on. I have a computer.” He flicks a finger against the lid of his laptop and it makes the camera wobble. “They’re not magic. They’re only as capable as their programmers, right?”

Yeah, but those were some pretty capable programmers.

“To tell you the truth,” Deckle says, “we did lose some people. A few of the younger folks, unbound, still just starting out. But that’s fine. It’s nothing compared to—”

There’s a blur of motion behind Deckle, and a tiny face appears up over his shoulder, stretching to see the screen. It’s a little girl, and I am astonished to see that she is a miniature Deckle. She has sunny blond hair, long and tangled, and she has his nose. She looks about six years old.

“Who’s that?” she says, pointing at the screen. So, Edgar Deckle is hedging his bets: immortality by book and immortality by blood. Do any of the others have kids?

“That’s my friend Clay,” Deckle says, curling his arm around her waist. “He knows Uncle Ajax. He lives in San Francisco, too.”

“I like San Francisco!” she says. “I like whales!”

Deckle leans in close to his daughter and stage-whispers, “What sound does a whale make, sweetie?”

The girl wriggles out of his grasp, stands up straight on tiptoe, and makes a sort of moo-meow sound while doing a slow pirouette. It’s her whale impression. I laugh, and she looks at the screen with bright eyes, enjoying the attention. She makes the whale-song again, this time spinning away, her feet slipping on the kitchen floor. The moo-meow fades into the next room.

Deckle smiles and watches her go. “So, to get to the point,” he says, turning back to me, “no: I can’t help you. I saw Clark Moffat at the store, but after he solved the Founder’s Puzzle — in about three months — he headed straight for the Reading Room. I never saw him after that, and I definitely don’t know anything about his audiobook. To tell you the truth, I hate audiobooks.”

But an audiobook is like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your—

“You know who you should talk to, right?”

Of course I do: “Penumbra.”

Deckle nods. “He held the key to Moffat’s codex vitae—did you know that? They were close, at least for a while there.”

“But I can’t find him,” I say dejectedly. “He’s like a ghost.” Then I realize I’m talking to the man’s favorite novice. “Wait — do you know where he lives?”

“I do,” Deckle says. He looks straight into the camera. “But I’m not going to tell you.”

My dismay must be all over my face, because Deckle immediately holds up his hands and says: “Nope, I’m going to trade you. I broke every rule in the book — and it’s a very old book — and I gave you the key to the Reading Room when you needed it, right? Now I want you to do something for me. In exchange, I will happily tell you where to find our friend Mr. Ajax Penumbra.”

This kind of calculation is not what I expected from friendly, smiling Edgar Deckle.

“Do you remember the Gerritszoon type I showed you down in the print shop?”

“Yeah, of course.” Down in the subterranean copy shop. “Not much left.”

“Right. I think I told you this: the originals were stolen. It was a hundred years ago, just after we arrived in America. The Unbroken Spine went berserk. Hired a crew of detectives, paid off the police, caught the thief.”

“Who was it?”

“One of us — one of the bound. His name was Glencoe, and his book had been burned.”

“Why?”

“They caught him having sex in the library,” Deckle says matter-of-factly. Then he raises a finger and says, sotto voce, “Which, by the way, is still frowned upon, but would not get you burned today.”

So the Unbroken Spine does make progress — slowly.

“Anyway, he swiped a stack of codex vitae and some silver forks and spoons — we had a fancy dining room back then. And he scooped up the Gerritszoon punches. Some say it was revenge, but I think it was more like desperation. Latin fluency doesn’t get you far in New York City.”

“You said they caught him.”

“Yep. He couldn’t find anyone to buy the books, so we got those back. The spoons were long gone. And the Gerritszoon punches — they were gone, too. They’ve been lost ever since.”

“Weird story. So?”

“I want you to find them.”

Um: “Seriously?”

Deckle smiles. “Yes, seriously. I know they might be at the bottom of a dump somewhere. But it’s also possible”—his eyes glint—“that they’re hiding in plain sight.”

Little bits of metal, lost a hundred years ago. It would probably be easier to go looking for Penumbra door-to-door.

“I think you can do this,” Deckle says. “You seem very resourceful.”

One more time: “Seriously?”

“Drop me a line when you find them. Festina lente.” He smiles and the feed cuts to black.

Okay, now I’m angry. I’d expected Deckle to help me. Instead, he’s giving me homework. Impossible homework.

But: You seem very resourceful. That’s something I haven’t heard before. I think about the word. Resourceful: full of resources. When I think of resources, I think of Neel. But maybe Deckle is right. Everything I’ve done so far, I’ve done by calling in favors. I do know people with special skills, and I know how to put their skills together.

And come to think of it, I have just the resource for this.

To find something old and obscure, something strange and significant, I turn to Oliver Grone.

When Penumbra disappeared and the store shut down, Oliver leapt so nimbly to a new job that I suspected he’d had it in his back pocket for a while. The job is at Pygmalion, one of the true-believer indies, a no-bullshit bookstore set up by Free Speech Movement alumni on Engels Street over in Berkeley. So now Oliver and I are sitting together in Pygmalion’s cramped café, tucked behind the sprawling FOOD POLITICS section. Oliver’s legs are too big for the tiny table, so he’s stretching them out to one side. I’m nibbling a scone made with raspberries and bean sprouts.

Oliver seems happy working here. Pygmalion is huge, almost a whole city block stacked with books, and it is supremely well organized. Bright blocks of color on the ceiling mark out the sections and matching stripes run in tight patterns across the floor like a rainbow circuit board. When I arrived, Oliver was carrying an armload of heavy tomes toward the ANTHROPOLOGY shelves. Maybe his big build isn’t a linebacker’s after all; maybe it’s a librarian’s.

“So what’s a punch?” Oliver says. His knowledge of obscure objects doesn’t run quite so deep after you get past the twelfth century, but I am undeterred.

I explain that the system of movable type relies on tiny metal characters that can be slotted into rows that stack up to make pages. For hundreds of years, the characters were made individually, each one cast by hand. To cast the characters, you needed an original model, carved from hard metal. That model was called a punch, and there was a punch for each letter.

Oliver is quiet for a moment, and his eyes have a distant look. Then he says, “So. I should tell you. There are really two kinds of objects in the world. This is going to sound sort of spacey, but … some things have an aura. Others don’t.”

Well, I’m banking on aura. “We’re talking about one of the key assets of a centuries-old cult here.”

He nods. “That’s good. Everyday objects … household objects? They’re gone.” He snaps his fingers: poof. “We’re really lucky when we find, like, an awesome salad bowl. But religious objects? You would not believe how many ceremonial urns are still hanging around. Nobody wants to be the guy to throw away the urn.”

“So if I’m lucky, nobody wanted to be the guy to throw away Gerritszoon, either.”

“Yep, and if somebody stole it, that’s a good sign. Getting stolen is one of the best things that can happen to an object. Stolen stuff recirculates. Stays out of the ground.” Then he presses his lips tight. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

Too late, Oliver. I swallow the last of my scone and ask, “So if you’ve got an aura, where does that get you?”

“If these punches exist anywhere in my world,” Oliver says, “there’s one place you’re going to find them. You need a seat at the Accession Table.”

FIRST GRADE

TABITHA TRUDEAU IS OLIVER’S BEST FRIEND from Berkeley. She is short and solid, with curly brown hair and big intimidating eyebrows behind thick black glasses. She is now the deputy director of the most obscure museum in the whole Bay Area, a tiny place in Emeryville called the California Museum of Knitting Arts and Embroidery Sciences.

Oliver introduced us with an email and explained to Tabitha that I am on a special mission that he looks kindly upon. He also relayed to me the tactical advice that a donation wouldn’t hurt. Unfortunately, any reasonable donation would constitute at least 20 percent of my worldly wealth, but I still have a patron, so I replied to Tabitha and told her I might have a thousand dollars to pass along (courtesy of the Neel Shah Foundation for Women in the Arts) — if she can help me out.

When I meet her at the museum — it’s just Cal Knit to those in the know — I feel an immediate kinship, because Cal Knit is almost as weird as Penumbra’s. It’s just one big room, a converted schoolhouse now lined with bright displays and kid-sized activity stations. In a wide bucket next to the door, knitting needles are lined up like an armory: fat ones, skinny ones, some made of bright plastic, some made of wood carved into anthropomorphic shapes. The room smells overwhelmingly of wool.

“How many visitors do you get here?” I ask, inspecting one of the wooden needles. It’s like a very slender totem pole.

“Oh, a lot,” she says, hitching up her glasses. “Mostly students. There’s a bus on its way right now, so we’d better get you set up.”

She’s sitting at the museum’s front desk, where a small sign says FREE ADMISSION WITH YARN DONATION. I find Neel’s check in my pocket and smooth it out on the desk. Tabitha takes it with a grin.

“Have you ever used one of these before?” she says, clicking a key on a blue computer terminal. It beeps brightly.

“Never,” I say. “I didn’t even know it was a thing until two days ago.”

Tabitha looks up, and I follow her gaze: a school bus is rounding the corner into the museum’s tiny parking lot. “Well,” she says, “it’s a thing. You’ll figure it out. Just don’t, like, give our stuff away to some other museum.”

I nod and scootch in behind the desk, trading places with her. Tabitha buzzes around the museum, straightening chairs and swabbing plastic tables with antiseptic wipes. As for me: the Accession Table is set.

The Accession Table, I learned from Oliver, is an enormous database that tracks all artifacts in all museums, everywhere. It’s been around since the middle of the twentieth century. Back then it ran on punch cards passed around, copied, kept in catalogs. In a world where artifacts are always on the move — from a museum’s third subbasement, up to the exhibition hall, over to another museum (which is in Boston or Belgium) — it is a necessity.

Every museum in the world uses the Accession Table, from the humblest community history co-op to the most opulent national collection, and every museum has an identical monitor. It’s the Bloomberg terminal of antiquity. When any artifact is found or purchased, it gets a new record in this museological matrix. If it’s ever sold or burned to a crisp, the record is dropped. But as long as any scrap of canvas or sliver of stone remains in any collection anywhere, it’s still on the books.

The Accession Table helps catch forgeries: each museum sets up its terminal to watch for new records bearing suspicious similarities to artifacts already in its collection. When the Accession Table sounds its alarm, it means that somewhere, someone has just been duped.

If the Gerritszoon punches exist in any museum in the world, they’ll be listed in the Accession Table. All I need is a minute on the terminal. But, to be clear, a curator at any legitimate museum would be appalled at this request. These terminals constitute the secret knowledge of this particular cult. So Oliver proposed that we find a back door: a small museum with a guardian friendly to our cause.

The chair behind the front desk creaks under my weight. I expected the Accession Table to be a little more high-tech, but in fact it looks like an artifact itself. It’s a bright blue monitor, not of recent vintage; the pixels peek out through thick glass. New acquisitions all over the world scroll up the side of the screen. There are Mediterranean ceramic plates and Japanese samurai swords and Mughal fertility statues — pretty hot Mughal statues, all hips, totally yakshini — and more, lots more, there are old stopwatches and crumbling muskets and even books, nice old books bound in blue with fat golden crosses on their covers.

How do curators not just stare at this terminal all day long?

First-graders are streaming into Cal Knit, yelping and shrieking. Two boys grab knitting needles out of the bucket by the front door and start dueling, making buzzing light-saber noises accompanied by sprays of saliva. Tabitha shepherds them to the activity stations and starts her spiel. There’s a poster on the wall behind her that says KNITTING IS NEAT.

Back to the Accession Table. On the other side of the terminal, there are graphs, obviously configured by Tabitha. They track accession activity in different areas of interest, areas such as TEXTILES and CALIFORNIA and NO ENDOWMENT. TEXTILES is a spiky little mountain range of activity; CALIFORNIA has a clear upward slope; NO ENDOWMENT is flatlined.

Okay. Where’s the search box?

Over by Tabitha, the yarn has come out. First-graders are digging through wide plastic containers, looking for their favorite colors. One of them falls in and shrieks, and her two friends start poking her with needles.

There is no search box.

I jab random keys until the word DIRECTORY lights up at the top of the screen. (It was F5 that did it.) Now a rich, detailed taxonomy unfurls before me. Someone somewhere has categorized everything everywhere:

But wait — what’s the difference between RELIGIOUS and CEREMONIAL? There’s a sinking feeling in my stomach. I start exploring METAL but there are only coins and bracelets and fishing hooks. No swords — I think those are filed under WEAPONS. Maybe WAR. Maybe POINTY THINGS.

Tabitha is leaning in close with one of the first-graders, helping him cross two knitting needles together to make his first loop. His brow is furrowed with utter concentration — I saw that look in the Reading Room — and then he gets it, the loop forms, and he breaks into a wide giggling grin.

Tabitha looks back my way. “Found it yet?”

I shake my head. No, I have not found it yet. It’s not in 15TH CENTURY. Well, maybe it is in 15TH CENTURY, but everything else is in 15TH CENTURY, too — that’s the problem. I’m still stuck looking for a needle in a haystack. Probably an ancient Song Dynasty haystack that the Mongols burned along with everything else.

I slump forward with my face in my hands, staring into the blue terminal, which is showing me a picture of some lumpy green coins salvaged from an old Spanish galleon. Did I just waste a thousand of Neel’s dollars? What am I supposed to do with this thing? Why hasn’t Google indexed museums yet?

A first-grader with bright red hair runs up to the front desk, giggling and choking herself with a tangle of green yarn. Um — nice scarf? She grins and jumps up and down.

“Hi there,” I say. “Let me ask you a question.” She giggles and nods. “How would you find a needle in a haystack?”

The first-grader pauses, pensive, tugging on the green yarn around her neck. She’s really thinking this over. Tiny gears are turning; she’s twisting her fingers together, pondering. It’s cute. Finally, she looks up and says gravely, “I would ask the hays to find it.” Then she makes a quiet banshee whine and bounces away on one foot.

An ancient Song Dynasty gong thunders in my head. Yes, of course. She’s a genius! Giggling to myself, I pound the escape key until I’m free of the terminal’s awful taxonomy. Instead, I choose the command that says, simply, ACCESSION.

It’s so simple. Of course, of course. The first-grader is right. It’s easy to find a needle in a haystack! Ask the hays to find it!

The accession form is long and complicated, but I race through it:

I leave the rest of the fields empty and thwack the return key to submit this new artifact, entirely made-up, to the Accession Table. If I understand this right, it’s now scrolling across all the other terminals, just like this one, in every museum in the world. Curators are checking it out, cross-referencing it — thousands of them.

A minute ticks past. Another. A slouchy first-grader with a dark mop of hair slinks up to the desk, stands on tiptoe, and leans in conspiratorially. “Do you have any games?” he whispers, pointing to the terminal. I shake my head sadly. Sorry, kid, but maybe—

The Accession Table goes whoop whoop. It’s a high, rising sound, like a fire alarm: whoop whoop. The slouchy kid jumps, and the first-graders all turn my way. Tabitha does, too, with one of her big eyebrows arched up.

“Everything okay over there?”

I nod, too excited to speak. A message in fat red letters blinks angrily at the bottom of the screen:

Yes!

Yes yes yes!

The Accession Table rings — wait, it can ring? I peer around the side of the terminal and see a bright blue telephone handset clipped into place there. Is this the museum emergency hotline? Help, King Tut’s tomb is empty! It rings again.

“Hey, dude, what are you doing over there?” Tabitha calls across the room.

I wave brightly — everything is just fine — then snatch up the handset, clutch it close, and whisper, “Hello. Cal Knit.”

“This is Consolidated Universal Long-Term Storage calling,” says the voice on the other end of the line. It’s a woman, and she speaks with just the tiniest twang. “Put me through to accessions, could you please?”

I look across the room: Tabitha is pulling two first-graders out of a cocoon of green and yellow yarn. One of them is a little red in the face, like she’s been suffocating. On the phone I say, “Accessions? That’s me, ma’am.”

“Oh, you are so polite! Well, listen darlin’, somebody’s taking you for a ride,” she says. “The — let’s see — ceremonial artifact you just submitted is already on file over here. Had it for years. You always need to check first, hon.”

It’s all I can do not to jump up and start dancing behind the desk. I compose myself and say into the phone, “Gosh, thanks for the heads-up. I’ll get this guy out of here. He’s totally sketchy, says he’s part of a secret society, they’ve had it for hundreds of years — you know, the usual.”

The woman sighs sympathetically. “Story of my life, hon.”

“Listen,” I say lightly, “what’s your name?”

“Cheryl, hon. I’m real sorry about this. Nobody likes a call from Con-U.”

“That’s not true! I appreciate your diligence, Cheryl.” I’m playing the part: “But we’re pretty small. I’ve actually never heard of Con-U…”

“Darlin’, are you serious? We are only the largest and most advanced off-site storage facility serving the historical entertainment sector anywhere west of the Mississippi,” she says in one breath. “Over here in Nevada. You ever been to Vegas?”

“Well, no—”

“Driest place in the whole United States, hon.”

Perfect for stone tablets. Okay, this is it. I make the pitch: “Listen, Cheryl, maybe you can help me out. Here at Cal Knit, we just got a big grant from, uh, the Neel Shah Foundation—”

“That sounds nice.”

“Well, it’s big by our standards, which isn’t that big at all. But we’re putting together a new exhibition, and … you’ve got the real Gerritszoon punches, right?”

“I don’t know what those are, hon, but it says here we’ve got ’em.”

“Then we’d like to borrow them.”

I get the details from Cheryl, say thanks and goodbye, and fit the blue handset back into place. A ball of green yarn comes arcing through the air and lands on the front desk, then rolls into my lap, unraveling as it goes. I look up, and it’s the redheaded first-grader again, standing on one foot, sticking her tongue out at me.

The first-graders jostle and fidget on their way back out into the parking lot. Tabitha closes the front door, locks it, and limps back to the front desk. She has a faint red scratch across her cheek.

I start spooling up the green yarn. “Rough class?”

“They’re quick with those needles,” she says, sighing. “What about you?”

I’ve written the name of the storage facility and its Nevada address on a Cal Knit memo pad. I spin it around to show her.

“Yeah, that’s not surprising,” she says. “Probably ninety percent of everything on that screen is in storage. Did you know the Library of Congress keeps most of its books outside of D.C.? They have, like, seven hundred miles of shelves. All warehouses.”

“Ugh.” I hate the sound of that. “What’s the point, if nobody ever gets to see it?”

“It’s a museum’s job to keep things for posterity,” Tabitha sniffs. “We have a temperature-controlled storage unit full of Christmas sweaters.”

Of course. You know, I’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

On the train back to San Francisco, I type three short messages into my phone.

One is to Deckle, and it says: I’m on to something.

Another is to Neel, and it says: Can I borrow your car?

The last is to Kat, and it says simply: Hello.

THE STORM

CONSOLIDATED UNIVERSAL Long-Term Storage is a long, low span of gray that squats on the side of the highway just outside of Enterprise, Nevada. As I pull into the long parking lot, I can feel its blank mass pressing down on my spirit. It is industrial-park desolation given shape and form, but at least it holds the promise of treasures within. The Applebee’s three miles up the highway is also depressing, but there you know exactly what’s waiting inside.

To get into Con-U, I pass through two metal detectors and an X-ray machine and then I am patted down by a security guard named Barry. My bag, jacket, wallet, and pocket change are all confiscated. Barry checks for knives, scalpels, picks, awls, scissors, brushes, and cotton swabs. He checks the length of my nails, then makes me pull on pink latex gloves. Finally, he puts me in a white Tyvek jumpsuit with elastic at the wrists and built-in booties for my shoes. When I emerge into the dry, immaculate air of the storage facility, I am a man made perfectly inert: I cannot chip, scratch, fade, corrode, or react with any physical substance in the known universe. I guess I could still lick something. I’m surprised Barry didn’t tape my mouth shut.

Cheryl meets me in a narrow hallway, harshly lit by overhead fluorescents, in front of a door with the words ACCESSION/DEACCESSION stenciled on it in tall black letters. They look like they want to say REACTOR CORE.

“Welcome to Nevada, hon!” She waves and smiles a wide smile that makes her cheeks bunch up. “Awful nice to see a new face out here.” Cheryl is a middle-aged woman with frizzy black hair. She’s wearing a green cardigan with a neat zigzag pattern and dusty blue mom-jeans — no Tyvek suit for her. Her Con-U badge hangs on a lanyard around her neck, and the photo on the badge looks ten years younger.

“Okay, hon. The intermuseum loan form is here.” She hands me a crinkly sheet of pale green paper. “And this is the checkout manifest.” Another paper, this one yellow. “And you’ll have to sign this one.” It’s pink. Cheryl takes a long breath. Her brow furrows, and she says, “Now, listen, hon. Your institution isn’t nationally accredited, so we can’t do the pick and pack for you. Against the rules.”

“Pick and pack?”

“Sorry about that.” She hands me a previous-generation iPad wrapped in a tire-tread rubber casing. “But here’s a map. We have these neat pads now.” She smiles.

The iPad shows a tiny hallway (she pokes at it with her finger—“See, we’re right here”) that runs out into a gigantic rectangle, which is blank. “And that’s the facility, through there.” She lifts her arm, which jangles with bracelets, and points down the hallway toward wide double doors.

One of the forms — the yellow one — tells me the Gerritszoon punches are on shelf ZULU-2591. “So where do I find that?”

“Honestly, hon, it’s hard to say,” Cheryl says. “You’ll see.”

The Con-U storage facility is the most amazing space I have ever seen. Keep in mind that I recently worked at a vertical bookstore and have even more recently visited a secret subterranean library. Keep in mind, also, that I saw the Sistine Chapel when I was a kid, and, as part of science camp, I got to visit a particle accelerator. This warehouse has them all beat.

The ceiling hangs high above, ribbed like an airplane hangar. The floor is a maze of tall metal shelves loaded with boxes, canisters, containers, and bins. Simple enough. But the shelves — the shelves are all moving.

For a moment I feel sick, because my vision is swimming. The whole facility is writhing like a bucket of worms; it’s that same overlapping, hard-to-follow motion. The shelves are all mounted on fat rubber tires, and they know how to use them. They move in tight, controlled bursts, then break into smooth sprints through channels of open floor. They pause and politely wait for one another; they team up and form long caravans. It’s uncanny. It’s totally “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

So the iPad’s map is blank because the facility is rearranging itself in real-time.

The space is dark, with no lights overhead, but each shelf has a small orange lamp mounted on top, flashing and rotating. The lamps cast strange spinning shadows as the shelves make their complex migrations. The air is dry — really dry. I lick my lips.

A shelf carrying a rack of tall spears and lances comes whizzing past me. Then it takes a sharp turn — the lances rattle — and I see that it’s bound for wide doors on the far wall. There, cool blue light spills into the darkness, and a team in Tyvek lifts boxes off the shelves, checks them against clipboards, then carries them out of sight. Shelves line up like schoolchildren, fidgeting and jostling; then, when the white-suits are done, they scoot away and merge back into the maze.

Here, in the most advanced off-site storage facility serving the historical entertainment sector anywhere west of the Mississippi, you don’t find the artifacts. The artifacts find you.

The iPad blinks at me, now showing a blue dot labeled ZULU-2591 near the center of the floor. Okay, that’s helpful. It must be a transponder tag. Or a magic spell.

There’s a thick yellow line painted on the floor in front of me. I edge one toe across, and the shelves nearby all swerve and recoil. That’s good. They know I’m here.

So then I push slowly into the maelstrom. Some shelves don’t slow down, but bend their trajectories to coast just behind or just ahead of me. I walk evenly, taking slow, deliberate steps. As they migrate around me, the shelves make a parade of wonders. There are huge urns glazed in blue and gold, strapped down and packed with foam; wide glass cylinders full of brown formaldehyde, tentacles inside dimly visible and undulating; slabs of crystal poking out of rough black rock glowing green in the darkness. One shelf holds a single oil painting, six feet tall: a portrait of a scowling merchant prince with a skinny mustache. His eyes seem to follow me as the painting curves out of sight.

I wonder if Mat’s miniature city — well, now Mat and Ashley’s — will end up on shelves like these one day. Will they strap it in sideways? Or will they carefully dismantle it and store all the buildings separately, each one wrapped in gauze? Will the shelves drift apart and go their separate ways? Will Matropolis spread out through the facility like so much stardust? So many people dream of getting something into a museum … is this what they have in mind?

The outer perimeter of the facility is like a highway; this must be where all the popular artifacts hang out. But as I follow the iPad and make my way toward the center of the floor, things slow down. Here, there are racks of wicker masks, tea sets packed in foam peanuts, thick metal panels crusted with dry barnacles. Here, there’s an airplane propeller and a three-piece suit. Here, things are weirder.

It’s not all shelves, either. There are rolling vaults — huge metal boxes set up on tank treads. Some of them crawl slowly forward; some sit in place. All of them have complicated locks and glinting black cameras perched on top. One has a bright biohazard warning splashed across the front; I make a wide path around it.

Suddenly there’s a hydraulic snap and one of the vaults heaves to life. It jerks forward, orange lamps flashing. I jump out of the way, and it trundles through the spot where I just stood. The shelves all move and make room as the vault begins its journey, slowly, toward the wide doors.

It occurs to me that if I’m flattened here, no one will find me for a while.

There’s a flicker of motion. The part of my brain that is devoted to the detection of other human beings (and especially muggers, murderers, and enemy ninjas) lights up like one of the orange lamps. There’s a person coming through the darkness. Hamster-mode: engage. Somebody’s running right at me, coming fast, and he looks like Corvina. I whirl to face him, put my hands up in front of me, and yell: “Ah!”

It’s that painting again — the mustachioed merchant prince. It’s come back around for another look. Is it following me? No — of course not. My heart is racing. Calm down, Fluff McFly.

In the very center of the facility, nothing moves. It’s hard to see in here; the shelves have shut off their lamps, maybe to save battery power or maybe just out of despair. It’s quiet — the eye of the storm. Bars of light from the busy perimeter poke through and briefly illuminate dented brown boxes, stacks of newsprint, slabs of stone. I check the iPad and find the blinking blue dot. I think it’s close, so I start checking the shelves.

They all have a thick layer of dust. Shelf by shelf, I wipe them off and check the labels. In tall black digits on shiny yellow, they read: BRAVO-3877. GAMMA-6173. I keep checking, using my phone as a flashlight. TANGO-5179. ULTRA-4549. Then: ZULU-2591.

I’m expecting a heavy case, some finely wrought ark for Gerritszoon’s great creation. Instead, it’s a cardboard box with the flaps folded in. Inside, each punch is wrapped in its own plastic bag with a rubber band to hold it tight. They look like old car parts.

But then I lift one out — it’s the X, and it’s heavy — and a bright wash of triumph floods through me. I can’t believe I’m holding this in my hand. I can’t believe I found them. I feel like Telemach Half-Blood with the Golden Horn of Griffo. I feel like the hero.

Nobody’s looking. I hoist the X high in the air like a mythic sword. I imagine lightning streaking down through the ceiling. I imagine the Wyrm Queen’s dark legion falling silent. I make a quiet energy-overload noise: pshowww!

Then I wrap both arms around the box, heave it up off the shelf, and wobble back out into the storm.

THE DRAGON-SONG CHRONICLES, VOLUME III

BACK IN CHERYL’S OFFICE, I fill out my paperwork and wait patiently while she updates the Accession Table. The terminal on her desk is just like the one at Cal Knit: blue plastic, thick glass, built-in handset. Next to it, she has a page-a-day calendar with pictures of cats dressed up as famous figures. Today’s is a fuzzy white Julius Caesar.

I wonder if Cheryl realizes how historically significant the contents of this cardboard box are.

“Oh, honey,” she says, waving her hand, “everything in there is a treasure to somebody.” She leans in close to the terminal, double-checking her work.

Huh. Right. What else is slumbering in the eye of the storm, waiting for the right person to come along and pick it up?

“You want to set that down, hon?” Cheryl asks, tipping her chin at the box between my arms. “Looks heavy.”

I shake my head. No, I do not want to set it down. I’m afraid it might vanish. It still seems impossible that I’m holding the punches. Five hundred years ago, a man named Griffo Gerritszoon carved these shapes — these ones exactly. Centuries passed, and millions, maybe billions, of people saw the impressions they made, although most didn’t realize it. Now I’m cradling them like a newborn. A really heavy newborn.

Cheryl taps a key and the printer next to her terminal starts to purr. “Almost done, hon.”

For objects of deep aesthetic value, the punches don’t look like much. They’re just skinny sticks of dark alloy, raw and scratched, and only at the very ends do they become beautiful, the glyphs emerging from the metal like mountaintops in the fog.

I suddenly think to ask, “Who owns these?”

“Oh, nobody does,” Cheryl says. “Not anymore. If somebody owned ’em you’d be talkin’ to them, not me!”

“So … what are they doing here?”

“Gosh, we’re like an orphanage for a lot of things,” she says. “Let’s see here.” She tilts her glasses and scratches at her mouse’s scroll wheel. “The Flint Museum of Modern Industry sent ’em over, but of course they went under in ’88. Real cute place. Real nice curator, Dick Saunders.”

“And he just left everything here?”

“Well, he came and picked up some old cars and took ’em away on a flatbed truck, but the rest, he just signed it over to the Con-U collection.”

Maybe Con-U should put on an exhibit of its own: Anonymous Artifacts of the Ages.

“We try to auction things off,” Cheryl says, “but some of it…” She shrugs. “Like I said, everything’s a treasure to somebody. But a lot of times, you can’t find that somebody.”

That’s depressing. If these little objects, so significant to the history of printing and typography and human communication, were lost in a giant storage unit … what chance do any of us have?

“Okay, Mis-ter Jannon,” Cheryl says with mock formality, “you’re all set.” She tucks the printout into the box and pats me on the arm. “That’s a three-month loan, and you can extend it to a year. Ready to change out of that long underwear?”

I drive back to San Francisco with the punches in the passenger seat of Neel’s hybrid. They fill the interior with a dense annealed odor that makes my nose itch. I wonder if I should wash them in boiling water or something. I wonder if the smell is going to stick to the seats.

It’s a long drive home. For a while I watch the Toyota’s energy-management control panel and try to beat my fuel efficiency from before. But that gets boring fast, so I plug in the Walkman and start up the audiobook version of The Dragon-Song Chronicles: Volume III, read by Clark Moffat himself.

I roll my shoulders back, grip the wheel at ten and two, and settle into the strangeness. I’m flanked by brothers of the Unbroken Spine, separated by centuries: Moffat on the stereo, Gerritszoon in the passenger seat. The Nevada desert is blank for miles, and high in the Wyrm Queen’s tower, things are getting super-weird.

Keep in mind that this series starts with a singing dragon lost at sea, calling out to dolphins and whales for help. It gets rescued by a passing ship that also happens to be carrying a scholarly dwarf. The dwarf befriends the dragon and nurses it back to health, then saves its life when the ship’s captain comes in the night to cut the dragon’s throat and get the gold in its gullet, and that’s just the first five pages — so, you know, for this story to get even weirder is a not-insignificant development.

But, of course, now I know the reason: the third and final volume of The Dragon-Song Chronicles served double duty as Moffat’s codex vitae.

All of the action in this installment takes place in the Wyrm Queen’s tower, which turns out to be almost a world unto itself. The tower reaches up to the stars, and each floor has its own set of rules, its own puzzles to solve. The first two volumes have adventures and battles and, of course, betrayals. This one is all puzzles, puzzles, puzzles.

It begins with the friendly ghost who appears to release Fernwen the dwarf and Telemach Half-Blood from the Wyrm Queen’s dungeon and start them on their ascent. Moffat describes the ghost through the Toyota’s speakers:

It was tall, made of pale blue light, a creature with long arms and long legs and the shadow of a smile, and above it all, eyes that shone bluer still than its body.

Wait a second.

“What do you seek in this place?” the shade asked plainly.

I fumble to rewind the tape. First I overshoot the mark, so I have to fast-forward, then I miss it again, so I have to rewind, and then the Toyota shakes as it crosses the rumble strips. I pull the steering wheel and point the car straight down the highway and finally press play:

… eyes that shone bluer still than its body. “What do you seek in this place?” the shade asked plainly.

Again:

… bluer still than its body. “What do you seek in this place?”

It is unmistakable: Moffat is doing Penumbra’s voice there. This part of the book isn’t new; I remember the friendly blue ghost in the dungeon from my first reading. But, of course, back then I had no way of knowing Moffat might encode an eccentric San Francisco bookseller into his fantasy epic. And likewise, when I walked through the front door of the 24-Hour Bookstore, I had no way of knowing I’d met Mr. Penumbra a few times already.

Ajax Penumbra is the blue-eyed shade in the dungeon of the Wyrm Queen’s tower. I am absolutely sure of it. And to hear Moffat’s voice, the rough affection in it, as he finishes the scene …

Fernwen’s small hands burned on the ladder. The iron was ice-cold, and it seemed each rung bit him, tried its evil best to send him plummeting back into the dark depths of the dungeon. Telemach was high above, already pulling himself through the portal. Fernwen glanced down below. The shade was there, standing just inside the secret door. It grinned, a pulse of light through spectral blue, and waved its long arms and called out:

“Climb, my boy! Climb!”

And so he did.

… incredible. Penumbra has already earned a touch of immortality. Does he know?

I accelerate back up to cruising speed, shaking my head and smiling to myself. The story is accelerating, too. Now Moffat’s gravelly voice carries the heroes from floor to floor, solving riddles and recruiting allies along the way — a thief, a wolf, a talking chair. Now, for the first time, I get it: the floors are a metaphor for the code-breaking techniques of the Unbroken Spine. Moffat is using the tower to tell the story of his own path through the fellowship.

This is all so obvious when you know what to listen for.

At the very end, after a long weird slog of a story, the heroes arrive at the tower’s summit, the spot from which the Wyrm Queen looks out across the world and plots domination. She is there, waiting for them, and she has her dark legion with her. Their black robes seem more significant now.

While Telemach Half-Blood leads his band of allies into the final battle, Fernwen the scholarly dwarf makes an important discovery. In the cataclysmic commotion, he sneaks over to the Wyrm Queen’s magic telescope and peeks through. From this vantage point, impossibly high up, he can see something amazing. The mountains that divide the Western Continent form letters. They are, Fernwen realizes, a message, and not just any message, but the message promised long ago by Aldrag the Wyrm-Father himself, and when Fernwen speaks the words aloud, he—

Holy shit.

When I finally cross the bridge back into San Francisco, Clark Moffat’s voice in the closing chapters has a new warble; I think the cassette might be stretched out from my rewinding and replaying, rewinding and replaying, again and again. My brain feels a little stretched out, too. It’s carrying a new theory that started as a seed but is now growing fast, all based on what I’ve just heard.

Moffat: You were brilliant. You saw something that no one else in the whole history of the Unbroken Spine ever saw. You raced through the ranks, you became one of the bound, maybe just to get access to the Reading Room — and then you bound up their secrets in a book of your own. You hid them in plain sight.

It took me hearing them to get it.

It’s late, past midnight. I double-park Neel’s car in front of the apartment and bang the wide button that sets the hazard lights blinking. I jump out, heave the cardboard box from the passenger seat, and dash up the steps. My key scratches the lock — I can’t find it in the darkness, and my hands are full, and I’m vibrating.

“Mat!” I run to the stairs and call up to his room: “Mat! Do you have a microscope?”

There’s a murmuring, a faint voice — Ashley’s — and Mat appears at the top of the stairs, wearing just his boxer shorts, which are printed with a full-color reproduction of a Salvador Dalí painting. He’s waving a giant magnifying glass. It’s huge and he looks like a cartoon detective. “Here, here,” he says softly, scampering down to hand it off. “Best I can do. Welcome back, Jannon. Don’t drop it.” Then he hops back up the stairs and shuts his door with a quiet click.

I take the Gerritszoon originals into the kitchen and turn all the lights on. I feel crazy, but in a good way. Carefully, I lift one of the punches out of the box — the X again. I pull it out of its plastic bag, wipe it down with a towel, and hold it under the glare of the stove’s fluorescent light. Then I steady Mat’s magnifying glass and peer through.

The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father.

THE PILGRIM

IT IS ONE WEEK LATER, and I have got the goods, in more ways than one. I emailed Edgar Deckle and told him he had better come out to California if he wants his punches. I told him he had better come out to Pygmalion on Thursday night.

I invited everyone: my friends, the fellowship, all the people who helped along the way. Oliver Grone convinced his manager to let me use the back of the store, where they have A/V gear set up for book readings and poetry slams. Ashley baked vegan oat cookies, four plates of them. Mat set up the chairs.

Now Tabitha Trudeau sits in the front row. I introduce her to Neel Shah (her new benefactor) and he immediately proposes a Cal Knit exhibit that will have, as its focus, the way boobs look in sweaters.

“It’s very distinct,” he says. “The sexiest of all apparel. It’s true. We ran a focus group.” Tabitha frowns and knits her brows together. Neel goes on: “The exhibit could have classic movie scenes looping, and we could track down the actual sweaters they wore and hang them up…”

Rosemary Lapin sits in the second row, and next to her are Tyndall, Fedorov, Imbert, Muriel, and more — most of the same crowd that came out to Google on a bright morning not so long ago. Fedorov has his arms crossed and his face set in a skeptical mask, as if to say, I’ve been through this once before, but that’s okay. I’m not going to disappoint him.

There are two unbound brothers from Japan, too — a pair of young mop-haired men in skinny indigo jeans. They heard a rumor through the grapevine of the Unbroken Spine and decided it would be worth their while to find a last-minute flight to San Francisco. (They were correct.) Igor is sitting with them, chatting comfortably in Japanese.

There’s a laptop set up in the front row so Cheryl from Con-U can watch. She’s beaming in via video chat, her frizzy black hair taking up the whole screen. I invited Grumble to join in, too, but he’s on a plane tonight — headed for Hong Kong, he says.

Darkness blooms through the bookstore’s front door: Edgar Deckle has arrived, and he’s brought an entourage of New York black-robes with him. They aren’t actually wearing their robes, not here, but their attire still marks them as strange outsiders: suits, ties, a charcoal skirt. They come streaming through the door, a dozen of them — and then, there’s Corvina. His suit is gray and gleaming. He’s still an imposing dude, but here he seems diminished. Without all the pageantry and the backdrop of bedrock, he’s just an old— His dark eyes flash up and find me. Okay, maybe not that diminished.

Pygmalion’s customers turn to watch, eyebrows raised, as the black-robes march through the store. Deckle is wearing a light smile. Corvina is all sharp gravity.

“If you truly have the Gerritszoon punches,” he says flatly, “we will take them.”

I steel my spine and tilt my chin up a little. We’re not in the Reading Room anymore. “I do have them,” I say, “but that’s just the beginning. Have a seat.” Oh, boy. “Please.”

He flicks his eyes across the chattering crowd and frowns, but then he waves his black-robes into place. They all find seats in the last row, a dark bracket at the back of the assembly. Behind them, Corvina stands.

I grab hold of Deckle’s elbow as he passes. “Is he coming?”

“I told him,” he says, nodding. “But he already knew. Word travels fast in the Unbroken Spine.”

Kat is here, sitting up front, way off to the side, talking quietly with Mat and Ashley. She’s wearing her houndstooth blazer again. There’s a green scarf around her neck, and she’s cut her hair since the last time I saw her; now it stops just below her ears.

We are no longer dating. There has been no formal declaration, but it’s an objective truth, like the atomic weight of carbon or the share price of GOOG. That didn’t stop me from pestering her and extracting a promise to attend. She, of all people, has to see this.

People are shifting in their seats and the vegan oat cookies are almost gone, but I have to wait. Lapin leans forward and asks me, “Are you going to New York? To work at the library, perhaps?”

“Um, no, definitely not,” I say flatly. “Not interested.”

She frowns and clasps her hands together. “I’m supposed to go, but I don’t think I want to.” She looks up at me. She looks lost. “I miss the store. And I miss—”

Ajax Penumbra.

He slips in through Pygmalion’s front door like a wandering ghost, fully buttoned into his dark peacoat, the collar turned up over the thin gray scarf around his neck. He searches the room, and when he sees the crowd in the back, full of the fellowship — black-robes and all — his eyes widen.

I sprint over to him. “Mr. Penumbra! You came!”

He’s half-turned away, and he puts a bony hand up around his neck. He won’t look at me. His blue eyes are glued to the floor. “My boy, I am sorry,” he says softly. “I should not have vanished so — ah. It was simply…” He lets out a whispering sigh. “I was embarrassed.”

“Mr. Penumbra, please. Don’t worry about it.”

“I was so sure it would work,” he says, “but it did not. And there you were, and your friends, and all my students. I feel like such an old fool.”

Poor Penumbra. I’m imagining him holed up somewhere, grappling with the guilt of having cheered the fellowship forward to failure on Google’s green lawns. Weighing his own faith and wondering what could possibly come next. He’d placed a big bet — his biggest ever — and lost. But he didn’t place that bet alone.

“Come on, Mr. Penumbra.” I step back toward my setup and wave him along. “Come sit down. We’re all fools — all except for one of us. Come and see.”

Everything is ready. There’s a presentation waiting to start on my laptop. I realize that the big reveal really ought to happen in a smoky parlor, with the sleuth holding his nervous audience spellbound using only his voice and his powers of deduction. Me, I prefer bookstores, and I prefer slides.

So I power up the projector and take my position, the blank light burning my eyes. I clasp my hands behind my back, square my shoulders, and squint out into the assembled crowd. Then I click the remote and begin:

SLIDE 1

If you were going to make a message last, how would you do it? Would you carve it into stone? Etch it into gold?

Would you make your message so potent that people couldn’t resist passing it on? Would you build a religion around it, maybe get people’s souls involved? Would you, perhaps, establish a secret society?

Or would you do what Gerritszoon did?

SLIDE 2

Griffo Gerritszoon was born the son of a barley grower in northern Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century. The elder Gerritszoon was not rich, but thanks to his good reputation and well-established piety, he was able to snag his son an apprenticeship with the local goldsmith. This was a great gig back in the fifteenth century; as long as he didn’t screw it up, the younger Gerritszoon was basically set for life.

He screwed it up.

He was a religious kid, and the goldsmith’s trade turned him off. He spent all day melting old baubles down to make new ones — and he knew his own work was going to suffer the same fate. Everything he believed told him: This is not important. There is no gold in the city of God.

So he did what he was told, and he learned the craft — he was really good at it, too — but when he turned sixteen, he said so long and left the goldsmith behind. He left Germany altogether, in fact. He went on a pilgrimage.

SLIDE 3

I know this because Aldus Manutius knew it, and he wrote it down. He wrote it down in his codex vitae—which I have decoded.

(There are gasps from the audience. Corvina is still standing at the back and his face is tight, his mouth a deep grimace, his dark mustache pulled down around it. Other faces are blank, waiting. I glance over at Kat. She’s wearing a serious look, as if she’s worried that something might have short-circuited in my brain.)

Let me get this out of the way: There’s no secret formula in this book. There’s no magic incantation. If there truly is a secret to immortality, it’s not here.

(Corvina makes his choice. He spins and stalks up the aisle past HISTORY and SELF-HELP toward the front door. He passes Penumbra, who’s standing off to one side, leaning on a short shelf for support. He watches Corvina pass, then turns back toward me, cups his hands around his mouth, and calls out, “Keep going, my boy!”)

SLIDE 4

Really, Manutius’s codex vitae is just what it claims to be: it’s a book about his life. As a work of history, it’s a treasure. But it’s the part about Gerritszoon that I want to focus on.

I used Google to translate this from Latin, so bear with me if I get some of the details wrong.

Young Gerritszoon wandered through the Holy Land, doing metalwork to make a bit of money here and there. Manutius says he was meeting up with mystics — Kabbalists, Gnostics, and Sufis alike — and trying to figure out what to do with his life. He was also hearing rumors, through the goldsmiths’ grapevine, of some pretty interesting stuff happening up in Venice.

This is a map of Gerritszoon’s journey, as well as I can reconstruct it. He meandered around the Mediterranean — down through Constantinople, into Jerusalem, across to Egypt, back up through Greece, over to Italy.

Venice is where he met Aldus Manutius.

SLIDE 5

It was at Manutius’s printing house that Gerritszoon found his place in the world. Printing called on all of his skills as a metalsmith, but it bent them to new purposes. Printing wasn’t baubles and bracelets — it was words and ideas. Also, this was basically the internet of its day; it was exciting.

And just like the internet today, printing in the fifteenth century was all problems, all the time: How do you store the ink? How do you mix the metal? How do you mold the type? The answers changed every six months. In every great city of Europe, there were a dozen printing houses all trying to figure it out first. In Venice, the greatest of those printing houses belonged to Aldus Manutius, and that’s where Gerritszoon went to work.

Manutius recognized his talent immediately. He also says he recognized his spirit; he saw that Gerritszoon was a searcher, too. So he hired him, and they worked together for years. They became best friends. There was no one Manutius trusted more than Gerritszoon, and no one Gerritszoon respected more than Manutius.

SLIDE 6

So finally, after a few decades, after inventing a new industry and printing hundreds of volumes that we still think of as, like, the most beautiful books ever made, both of these guys were getting old. They decided to collaborate on a great final project, one that was going to take everything they’d experienced, everything they’d learned, and package it up for posterity.

Manutius wrote his codex vitae, and in it, he was honest: He explained how things really worked in Venice. He explained the shady deals he’d struck to secure his exclusive license to print the classics; he explained how all his rivals had tried to shut him down; he explained how he’d shut a few of them down instead. Precisely because he was so honest, and because if it was released immediately it would damage the business he was passing on to his son, he wanted to encrypt it. But how?

At the same time, Gerritszoon was cutting a typeface, his best ever — a bold new design that would sustain Manutius’s printing house after he was gone. He hit a home run, because those are the shapes that now bear his name. But in the process, he did something unexpected.

Aldus Manutius died in 1515, leaving behind a very revealing memoir. At this point, according to the lore of the Unbroken Spine, Manutius entrusted Gerritszoon with the key to this encrypted history. But something got lost in translation over five hundred years.

Gerritszoon didn’t get the key.

Gerritszoon is the key.

SLIDE 7

Here’s a picture of one of the Gerritszoon punches: the X.

Here it is closer.

And closer still.

Here it is through my friend Mat’s magnifying glass. Do you see the tiny notches in the edge of the letter? They look like the teeth of a gear, don’t they? — or the teeth of a key.

(There’s a loud, rattling gasp. It’s Tyndall. I can always count on him to get excited.)

Those tiny notches are not accidents, and they are not random. There are notches like that on all the punches, and all the molds made from the punches, and every piece of Gerritszoon type ever made. Now, I had to go to Nevada to figure this out; I had to hear Clark Moffat’s voice on tape to really get it. But if I’d known what I was looking for, I could have opened up my laptop, typed out some text in Gerritszoon, and blown it up 3,000 percent. The notches are in the computer version, too. Down in their library, the Unbroken Spine doesn’t deign to use computers … but up above, the Festina Lente Company hired some very diligent digitizers.

That’s the code, right there. Those tiny notches.

Nobody in the fellowship’s five-hundred-year history thought to look this closely. Neither did any of Google’s code-breakers. We were looking at digitized text in a different typeface entirely. We were looking at the sequence, not the shape.

The code is both complicated and simple. Complicated because an uppercase F is different from a lowercase f. Complicated because the ligature ff isn’t two lowercase f’s — it’s a completely different punch. Gerritszoon has tons of alternate glyphs — three P’s, two C’s, a truly epic Q—and those all mean something different. To crack this code, you need to think typographically.

But after that, it’s simple, because all you have to do is count the notches, which I did: carefully, under a magnifying glass, at my kitchen table, no data centers required. This is the kind of code you learn in a comic book: one number corresponds to one letter. It’s a simple substitution, and you can use it to decode Manutius’s codex vitae in no time.

SLIDE 8

You can also do something else. When you lay the punches out in order — the same order they’d use in a case in a fifteenth-century print shop — you get another message. It’s a message from Gerritszoon himself. His final words for the world have been hiding in plain sight for five hundred years.

It’s nothing spooky, nothing mystical. It’s just a message from a man who lived a long time ago. But here’s the part that is spooky: look around you.

(Everybody does. Lapin cranes her neck. She looks worried.)

See the signs on the shelves — where it says HISTORY and ANTHROPOLOGY and TEEN PARANORMAL ROMANCE? I noticed it earlier: those signs are all set in Gerritszoon.

The iPhone comes loaded with Gerritszoon. Every new Microsoft Word document defaults to Gerritszoon. The Guardian sets headlines in Gerritszoon; so do Le Monde and the Hindustan Times. The Encyclopædia Britannica used to be set in Gerritszoon; Wikipedia just switched last month. Think of the term papers, the curriculum vitae, the syllabi. Think of the résumés, the job offers, the resignation letters. The contracts and lawsuits. The condolences.

It’s everywhere around us. You see Gerritszoon every day. It’s been here all this time, staring us in the face for five hundred years. All of it — the novels, the newspapers, the new documents — it’s all been a carrier wave for this secret message, hidden in the colophon.

Gerritszoon figured it out: the key to immortality.

(Tyndall jumps up out of his seat, howling, “But what is it?” He tugs at his hair. “What is the message?”)

Well, it’s in Latin. The Google translation is rough. Keep in mind that Aldus Manutius was born with a different name: he was Teobaldo, and his friends all called him that.

So here it is. Here’s Gerritszoon’s message to eternity.

SLIDE 9

Thank you, Teobaldo

You are my greatest friend

This has been the key to everything

FELLOWSHIP

THE SHOW IS OVER and the audience is clearing out. Tyndall and Lapin are lined up for coffee in Pygmalion’s tiny café. Neel is still pitching Tabitha on the transcendent beauty of boobs in sweaters. Mat and Ashley are talking animatedly with Igor and the Japanese duo, all of them walking slowly toward the front door.

Kat is sitting alone, nibbling the very last vegan oat cookie. Her face is drawn. I wonder what she thinks of Gerritszoon’s immortal words.

“Sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s not good enough.” Her eyes are dark and downcast. “He was so talented, and he still died.”

“Everybody dies—”

“This is enough for you? He left us a note, Clay. He left us a note.” She shouts it, and an oat crumb comes shooting off her lips. Oliver Grone glances over from the ANTHROPOLOGY shelves, eyebrows raised. Kat looks down at her shoes. Quietly, she says, “Don’t call that immortality.”

“But what if this is the best part of him?” I say. I’m composing this theory in real-time: “What if, you know — what if hanging out with Griffo Gerritszoon wasn’t always that great? What if he was weird and dreamy? What if the best part of him was the shapes he could make with metal? That part of him really is immortal. It’s as immortal as anything’s going to get.”

She shakes her head, sighs, and leans into me a little, pushing the last bits of the cookie into her mouth. I found the old knowledge, the OK, that we’d been looking for, but she doesn’t like what it has to say. Kat Potente will keep searching.

After a moment, she pulls back, takes a sharp breath, and lifts herself up. “Thanks for inviting me,” she says. “See you around.” She shrugs on her blazer, waves goodbye, and heads for the door.

Now Penumbra calls me over.

“It is amazing,” he cries, and he is himself again, with his bright eyes and wide smile. “All this time, we were playing Gerritszoon’s game. My boy, we had his letters on the front of the store!”

“Clark Moffat figured this out,” I tell him. “I have no idea how, but he did. And then I guess he just … decided to play along. Keep the puzzle going.” Until someone found it all waiting in his books.

Penumbra nods. “Clark was brilliant. He was always off on his own, following his intuition wherever it led him.” He pauses, cocks his head, then smiles. “You would have liked him.”

“So you’re not disappointed?”

Penumbra’s eyes go wide. “Disappointed? Impossible. It is not what I expected, but what did I expect? What did any of us expect? I will tell you that I did not expect to know the truth in my lifetime. It is a gift beyond measure, and I am grateful to Griffo Gerritszoon, and to you, my boy.”

Now Deckle approaches. He’s beaming, almost bouncing. “You did it!” he says, clapping me on the shoulders. “You found them! I knew you could — I knew it — but I had no idea how far it would go.” Behind him, the black-robes are all chattering to one another. They look excited. Deckle glances around. “Can I touch them?”

“They’re all yours,” I tell him. I haul the Gerritszoon punches in their cardboard ark out from under a chair in the front row. “You’ll have to officially buy them from Con-U, but I have the forms, and I don’t think—”

Deckle holds up a hand. “Not a problem. Trust me — not a problem.” One of the New York black-robes comes over and the rest all follow. They bend over the box, oohing and aahing like there’s an infant inside.

“So it was you who set him on this path, Edgar?” Penumbra says, arching an eyebrow.

“It occurred to me, sir,” Deckle says, “that I had at my disposal a rare talent.” A pause, a smile, and then: “You do know how to pick the right clerks.” Penumbra snorts and grins at that. Deckle says, “This is a triumph. We’ll make fresh type, reprint some of the old books. Corvina can’t argue with that.”

Penumbra darkens at the mention of the First Reader — his old friend.

“What about him?” I ask. “He — uh. He seemed upset.”

Penumbra’s face is serious. “You must look after him, Edgar. As old as he is, Marcus has little experience with disappointment. For as firm as he seems, he is fragile. I worry about him, Edgar. Truly.”

Deckle nods. “We’ll take care of him. We have to figure out what’s next.”

“Well,” I say, “I’ve got something for you to start with.” I bend down and lift a second cardboard box out from under the chairs. This one is brand-new, and it has fresh plastic tape in a wide X across the top. I tear the tape and fold back the flaps, and inside, the box is full of books: shrink-wrapped bundles of paperbacks packed tight. I poke a hole in the plastic and slide one out. It’s just plain blue and on the front it says MANVTIVS in tall white capitals.

“This is for you,” I say, handing it to Deckle. “A hundred copies of the decoded book. Original Latin. I figured you guys would want to translate it yourselves.”

Penumbra laughs and says to me, “And now you are a publisher as well, my boy?”

“Print on demand, Mr. Penumbra,” I say. “Two bucks each.”

Deckle and his black-robes ferry their treasures — one old box, one new — to their rented van outside. Pygmalion’s gray-haired manager watches cautiously from the café as they sweep out of the store, singing a happy carol in Greek.

Penumbra has a contemplative look on his face. “My only regret,” he says, “is that Marcus will certainly burn my codex vitae. Like the Founder’s, it was a kind of history, and I am sad to see it go.”

Now I get to blow his mind a second time. “When I was down in the library,” I say, “I scanned more than Manutius.” I dig into my pocket, pull out a blue USB drive, and press it into his long fingers. “It’s not as nice as the real thing, but the words are all here.”

Penumbra holds it up high. The plastic glints in the bookstore’s light, and there’s a wondering half smile playing on his lips. “My boy,” he breathes, “you are full of surprises.” Then he arches an eyebrow. “And I could print this for just two dollars?”

“Absolutely.”

Penumbra wraps a thin arm around my shoulders, leans in close, and says quietly, “This city of ours — it has taken me too long to realize it, but we are in the Venice of this world. The Venice.” His eyes widen, then press shut, and he shakes his head. “Just like the Founder himself.”

I’m not sure where he’s going with this.

“What I have finally come to understand,” Penumbra says, “is that we must think like Manutius. Fedorov has money, and so does your friend — the funny one.” We’re looking out across the bookstore together now. “So what do you say we find a patron or two … and start again?”

I can’t believe it.

“I must admit,” Penumbra says, shaking his head, “I am in awe of Griffo Gerritszoon. His achievement is inimitable. But I have more than a little time left, my boy”—he winks—“and there are still so many mysteries to solve. Are you with me?”

Mr. Penumbra. You have no idea.