What was once the narthex of St. Andrew’s was now the foyer of Groats Good Books, a semicircular vestibule connected to the nave by a narrow archway. Two antique hardwood accent tables stood on either side of the door. They appeared to be duplicates, with identical cherry veneers, pie-crust frames, and ball-and-claw legs. On top of each was a ceramic ginger jar lamp moored to its respective pedestal by cobweb cables. A red parrot in handpainted acrylic adorned the lamp to the left, and a blue parrot by the same artist adorned the lamp to the right. (One always tells the truth, and the other always tells a lie. Richard tried to remember the solution to this riddle, and the reasoning behind it, but he drew a blank.) White splotches where the paint had faded marred the exotic luster of both birds; a clip of wing here, a tuft of plumage there. The poor creatures were being phased out of existence, like Marty McFly’s photograph in Back to the Future. Capped with identical Statue of Liberty green lampshades with black rayon fringe, the parrot lamps scattered a ghostly light across the foyer’s checkerboard floor. A cuckoo clock whose cuckooing had long since been silenced was mounted on the far wall, above a corkboard coated with flyers and posters that announced book-related events in and around Brookline. The most recent was for a reading by the poet Geoffrey Hill at B.U.’s Marsh Chapel on July 27, 2006. Taking up almost half of the foyer was a gray Formica information desk riddled with stress cracks. It was a dead elephant, ridiculously huge for such a tiny space.

After taking in this scene, which never failed to unsettle him a little, Richard turned his attention to what lay beyond. There, behind the desk and through the archway, was a cornucopia of shelves of various heights, widths, and varieties: shelves constructed out of steel grating and pipes, glazed slatwall and Plexiglas, unfinished cedar, and old creaky oak. The shortest shelves were stacked like milk-crates, one on top of the other, while the tallest grazed the roofbeams that supported the steeple dome. They were positioned in haphazard mazes—no order, no predetermination—and were huddled so close together that anyone with a substantial paunch would find navigation treacherous. Interspaced between the shelves, candle-flame bulbs, the room’s only light source, burned in ornate brass sconces attached to the wood-paneled walls. A medieval-looking chandelier of tempered iron was suspended from the shadowy rafters by a slender steel-link chain. No one knew whether it worked or not because no one could figure out how to turn it on. There was no light switch and it did not appear to be connected to any power source.

The church’s architect, whether Winston Millbanks or someone hired by him, must have had a grievance against illumination because he had allocated only one window to the entire structure. It was round, five feet in diameter, and placed high up on the wall on the south side of the nave. Back when the church was active, sunlight would filter through its red-stained glass and sear an incarnadine disc into the gray stone floor. The disc would appear beside the altar an hour after sunrise and begin its slow, undeviating procession toward the narthex. During the morning service in winter months, churchgoers would often stare mesmerized at the red circle as it passed between them, blushing an occasional bald spot, lady’s glove, or open hymnal. As the service dragged on, the disc would stretch into an oval until it reached the shadow under the archway and then dissolve like a cough lozenge. Some worshipers proclaimed the disc to be the Gaze of God disguised as an optical miracle of sunlight and glass; others regarded it as an eerie disturbance and petitioned for the church’s interior to be renovated, or at least for the red window to be boarded up. The former group always seemed to win out; the window had never been touched, not even to be cleaned, and it had long since been eclipsed by grime and ivy. But there were still a few specks of transparency, coin-sized and smaller. And sometimes, on cloudless, overbright days, sunbeams would seek out these apertures and splatter crimson drops on bookshelves, flooring, spines, and patrons.

As Richard approached the information desk, he was taken captive by an unmistakable aroma. Eau de bibliothèque—an intoxicating blend of moldering pages, brittle acetate, and horse-hoof adhesive. His senses heightened, he was able to distinguish a second, underlying source of bliss: silence. Not a single susurration, pother, footfall, ringtone, throat-clearing, or shuffle could be heard from the back of the library. He recalled prior visits when it had just been him, Ivan, and the shelves, the two men perusing and sampling, sometimes passing close enough to each other that one might nod to the other in recognition or pat him on the shoulder, though they never dared risk sullying the sanctified quiet by opening their mouths . How comforted he’d been by that. He closed his eyes and drank it in. There was a sock drawer in his heart crammed with balled-up affection for this odd little place.

But there was something else as well. Something that wasn’t here those other times he stood in front of the dead-elephant desk. Something new, young, and bright, something alien.

He hadn’t noticed her at first. Hunkered in a heap behind the desk, head resting sideways on a forearm the circumference of a dogwood limb, was an undernourished, pimple-dotted teenage girl. She was chewing on a strand of stringy blonde hair, in tandem with a wad of gum (ick). Inches from her nonblinking eyes dangled one of the Twilight paperbacks. As Richard approached, she lowered the book and straightened herself into an upright posture. Only then did she look up. Her gaze was sunken and peevish, and her expression contracted from a dazed look to a scowl at the sight of him. The transformation was seamless, like a computer-generated effect. No room for misinterpretation: She would rather be doing anything other than what she was doing right now. She had a nose ring, tongue stud, and a dozen faux-silver earrings, six in each ear. Her accessorized cranium sat atop a cardboard frame dressed in a purple halter top with a pink heart stenciled across the front. Roughly eight inches of naked belly were visible.

“Excuse me, um, it’s been a while since I’ve been here, but do you have computers or search stations?” asked Richard, expecting a perfunctory negative.

“Yeah,” said the desk girl, her scowl relinquishing none of its hardness.

“Oh. Well. Great. Can you please point me to them?”

“Yeah, well, the thing is,” she said, scratching the scruff of her neck, “we’re, like, closing soon, and I already shut ’em off.”

Richard’s forehead scrunched up so tightly the tips of his eyebrows just missed grazing the bridge of his nose. To have to search for a book on “runes” without some sort of navigation, in here?

“Are you okay, sir?” said the girl.

“Uh, yeah,” Richard grumbled. “It’s just that you don’t close for another—shit—seven minutes. I mean, I really need to find a certain book. Well, not one book specifically, but as many books as I can find on a specific subject. And Brookline Public closed at five, so—”

Before this performance got him crowned Blubbering Idiot of the Year, the desk girl thankfully interrupted him. “It’s not my fault, sir,” she said, with a look of inept concern. “My Mom says I have to turn ’em off when there’s no one around. You know, to save power? And even if I tried to turn them back on, they take, like, five minutes to boot up, and I’m getting picked up right at six.” (Unbeknownst to Richard, “Mom” was Teresa Frazier, née Groat. The girl minding the desk was Rachel Frazier, Silas Groat’s granddaughter.)

“I see,” said Richard, his voice calm and low. “So you’re conserving electricity. That’s very admirable.”

“Well, the thing is, my Mom believes, and I do too, that we all need to do our part and make sacrifices for the good of the—”

“Okay, okay, do you have a card index, if such an anachronism still exists?”

“A what? A card…? No, sorry. Just databases.”

Richard snorted and turned to leave. He would try again tomorrow. But tomorrow was Sunday, and both Brookline and Groats were closed on Sundays. Shit! He needed to wait two more days to decipher this…this…thing? If it could be deciphered, that is. Was it even possible? Or was he doomed to wander the earth in a great spiral, scouring libraries and booksellers for that one vellum-bound codex that contained a magical spell that, if recited backwards in Old High Elvish, would allow its caster to read every rune-text on earth? Well, if that’s what it would take, so be it. He would see this through.

“Oh, wait!” said the girl, jolting Richard back to Here and Now. “I left one of ’em on. One of the terminals. Someone was, like, using it before. I think they might’ve left, though.”

Blood rushed to Richard's extremities. Hands atremble, fingertips atwitter. This was becoming repetitive. A bad pop song. Every expectation of finding another clue manifested as an involuntary bodily nuisance. Annoying as fuck.

“Where is it?” he asked.

The girl pointed behind her: the Labyrinth beyond the arch.

Richard segued between shelves until he found the computer terminals. There were four in all, arrayed along a back wall divided by panels on an octagonal hardwood platform that had once supported the chancel. Each station consisted of a monitor, desk, and steel folding chair. Three of the stations had Dell desktops, which looked to be straight out of the box, thus embodying everything that Groats was not. These were dark and silent. The fourth was more in keeping with the aesthetic, a Compaq Presario. It was separated from the other terminals by Groats’s “Reference Section,” a single shelf stuffed with World Book volumes from the 1980s, manuals for Windows 98, and other curiosities. As the desk-girl promised, this machine was currently functioning. An old lady sat in front of it. Straight-backed and motionless, she was wearing a pink crocheted wrap and headscarf from which protruded a meringue of blue-white curls. She was not typing anything; she was just staring at the blinking screen, her liver-spotted hands clutching her purse in her lap. She glanced over her shoulder. Eye contact was made. Richard smiled. She turned back to what she was doing—which was nothing, not a goddamned thing. With as much courtesy and detachment as he could muster, Richard began to fidget audibly. The message, he hoped, was registering: I’m in a hurry, dammit. And if you’re not using the machine, you should scuttle off. He shifted his feet, jangled his keys, stared at the ceiling, scratched his stubble, cleared his sinuses, sniffled, mumbled, coughed. She paid him no notice. Not a keystroke was made. So he dove deeper. He scuffed his soles against the hardwood, whistled, clapped his hands, called up a fart. The crone didn’t so much as flinch.

What are you doing? Move! Go! Scram! Vamoose! Disengage thyself! Disunite! Detach! I say, Old Girl, remove thy bewrinkled corpus from this proximity with as much haste as your pencil-bones can manage!

The game was on. More aggressive tactics were in order.

“Nice day, isn’t it?” said Richard in a Capote-esque drone.

She didn’t respond.

“I said, NICE DAY, ISN’T IT?”

“Oh, yes,” she said nervously.

He took a step closer. “IT STARTED OUT BAD, BUT NOW IT’S NICE!”

The old lady drew up her shoulders and clutched her knees. Good. Visibly uncomfortable. Feels threatened. Wants—needs—to leave. He glanced back toward the archway to see if the desk girl was aware of his despicable gambit. Her head was hidden behind her novel, which she held at eye level. He turned back to the crone, who was looking at him with real fear. He couldn’t believe what he was doing.

“I MYSELF PREFER THE RAIN AND THE COLD AND THE SLEET AND THE SLOP AND THE SNOW AND THE HAIL AND THE BITING WIND AND THE RAGING TEMPESTS. HAVE YOU EVER READ THE TEMPEST? '… Remember / First to possess his books; for without them / He’s but a sot, as I am; nor hath not / One spirit to command: they all do hate him / As rootedly as I. Burn but his books."

That did it. The old lady got up and fled, disappearing into the stacks. Richard glanced at his phone. Three and a half minutes before Groats closed.

His right hand performed a carpel-tunnel mambo with the recalcitrant, sticky mouse as his index finger clicked into the database. How do they manage to catalogue their stock when they don’t even bother with any semblance of organization? And how often do they update it? I’ll make a note to inquire the next time I’m here.

He typed in “Runes” and pressed Enter. Zero hits. “Futhorc” also failed. So did “Anglo-Saxon,” and “Anglo” and “Saxon” by themselves. “Vikings” brought up two books: a history of Leif Eriksson’s voyages published in 1945, and the autobiography of Fran Tarkenton, Every Day Is Game Day. Emptied of ideas and not knowing what else to try, he walked over to the nearest bookshelf and closed his eyes. He reached out his left hand, fingered a spine, and plucked it. He performed the same action with his right hand. The two books he held were The Old Man and the Sea and English Football: A Fan’s Guidebook. A light blazed behind his eyes.

He returned to the database and typed in “Old English.” The machine purred, whizzed, and spat out two titles. Without even processing this information, he scrambled for a pen, spied one on another desk, and inked the call numbers onto his palm. He hurried back to the desk girl, who had dispensed with the novel and was now bleating into her iPhone. From what Richard overheard, her ride was en route.

“Excuse me, where is section PL 1505?” He was wasting valuable seconds asking this person, who, he assumed, rarely if ever ventured from her post to explore the grottos behind her.

She looked at him with undisguised contempt. Lips curled and zits flared as she saw that the big hand on the clock had not yet clipped the cuckoo’s XII. So close!

“Yeah, I gotta go,” she said into the phone. “There’s still someone here.” Then, to Richard, “Yeah, what is it?”

“Where is section PL 1505?”

“You know where you just were? It’s to the left of the computer stations, lavender shelf, bottom row.”

This was not to be believed. She was correct. Section PL 1501–1505 occupied the bottom half-row of a skinny lavender shelf between a broken radiator and a dirty porcelain drinking fountain along the far wall near the computers. Richard quickly located his two call numbers and grabbed them without looking at the titles. He snaked back to the foyer. The desk girl was donning her jacket.

“No, wait! I want to check these out."

“But…”

“Please, I’d really appreciate it if you could help me.”

“Can’t you come back on Monday?”

“No! I need these tonight.” Richard intended this as a well-aimed embellishment to guilt-trip the girl into helping him. But as soon as he said it, he knew it was the truth.

She glanced toward the entryway. Her ride was running late.

“Yeah, okay,” she said.

Richard wanted to take the girl into his arms. She could have left him stranded but she’d chosen to stay and offer him aid in his hour of need. What an exceptionally well-mannered and upstanding young lady. A tribute to her species. In her arid desert soil, bountiful kindness had taken root!

Another stroke of luck: his Groats Good Books membership card, not used in months, was still in his wallet. Held with delicate care between thumb and index finger, the 2 × 3 unlaminated blue rectangle was unrecognizable as a credential. Gashed and gouged by the rigid plastic of his credit and ATM cards, it resembled a piece of used Kleenex. The word “Groats” had faded into indecipherability, and his name, written in black ink, had been washed away so that only “Rich— Wat—” could be gleaned. He handed it to the desk girl, who looked at it and entered data into her machine. Richard was on a roll. The card was still valid. The two books, whatever they were, were his for as long as he needed them.

Next Chapter: Part Three: Diversions, Digressions, Discoveries, Chapter XI