encouraged. “My father was Mr. Bidewell.”
“And how old was he when you were born?”
“Two hundred and fifty-one,” Bidewell said.
“And how old are you?”
“One thousand two hundred and fifty-three.”
“Years?”
“Of course.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Improbable,” Bidewell corrected, pushing up his small glasses and lifting the spine of another book close to his pale blue eyes. “Many things are conceivable, but impossible. Many more are conceivable, yet not probable. A very few are inconceivable—to us—yet still possible.” He hummed to himself.
“Moving stacks does wonders. Look what we have found, dear Ginny—volume twelve of the complete works of David Copperfield. The Dickens character, you see—who was actually a writer. Not the magician—though it would be interesting to meet him , sometime. I wonder what his dreams are like? A few choice questions…My dear, if you have time, could you check for a small fault on Chapter 103?
This print is tiny, and my eyes are not what they used to be.”
He held out the book.
Ginny stood and took it from Bidewell’s outstretched, gnarled hand. She was tiring of this constantly mutating nonsense—how could fictional characters write a book, much less fill a set of twelve or more volumes?—yet she felt safe here. A bitter contradiction.
She remembered when Bidewell had first lightly clasped her fingers, welcoming her to the warehouse and provoking—at once—a shudder and an odd sense of comfort.
“What sort of fault?” she asked.
“Anything, really—a typo, misspelling, lacunae, rivering. We must note the fault—but we must not make any corrections, or try to hide the apparent defects. They could be more important than thou canst know, young lady, to that Citie. Whatever and wherever that Citie may be.”
Another week passed, and Ginny’s restlessness grew. She could feel the foul currents Bidewell had spoken of—and something even more alarming. The river up ahead—her river—seemed to come to an abrupt end. She could not tell how far ahead—weeks, months, a year. But beyond that—nothing. Bidewell refused to tell her more, and most of their conversations ended with his crackling, “Not to be known, not to be known!”
Bidewell’s warehouse was home to over 300,000 books. Ginny estimated the numbers on the shelves by quick count, and the numbers in the boxes by quicker calculation. Besides the two of them, seven cats called the warehouse home, all polydactyl—with many toes, and two with what appeared to be little thumbs.
These two were black and white. The smaller, a young male just out of kittenhood, silently padded up to her as she sorted and read, and rubbed against her ankles until she picked him up, placed him on her lap,
and stroked him. Warm and loose-rubbery beneath soft fur, with a blaze on his chest and one white paw, he purred approval until she stopped, then leaned up on her chest and tapped her chin with a wide paw. She felt a light pinch.
He would not share any of her sandwich when she offered a bite, but instead, as a kind of hint or example, lay at the foot of her bed that night an intact but very dead mouse. All the cats were independent, and seldom responded to her chit-chits and here-kitties, but during the long nights, she would find one or two or sometimes three on the end of her cot, feet curled under, eyes slitty, watching her with warm, rumbling contentment. They seemed to approve of Bidewell’s new visitor. The cats, of course, were essential to the safety of the warehouse. Bidewell did not consider mouse-nibble edits at all helpful.
Time passed a little quicker after she met the cats. Curled one after another on her lap, they even made up for Bidewell’s suggested reading list: he put aside, near her worktable, a stack of books on mathematics, physics, and several texts on Hindu mythology. Three of the books on physics seemed more advanced than she thought science had progressed so
“And how old was he when you were born?”
“Two hundred and fifty-one,” Bidewell said.
“And how old are you?”
“One thousand two hundred and fifty-three.”
“Years?”
“Of course.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Improbable,” Bidewell corrected, pushing up his small glasses and lifting the spine of another book close to his pale blue eyes. “Many things are conceivable, but impossible. Many more are conceivable, yet not probable. A very few are inconceivable—to us—yet still possible.” He hummed to himself.
“Moving stacks does wonders. Look what we have found, dear Ginny—volume twelve of the complete works of David Copperfield. The Dickens character, you see—who was actually a writer. Not the magician—though it would be interesting to meet him , sometime. I wonder what his dreams are like? A few choice questions…My dear, if you have time, could you check for a small fault on Chapter 103?
This print is tiny, and my eyes are not what they used to be.”
He held out the book.
Ginny stood and took it from Bidewell’s outstretched, gnarled hand. She was tiring of this constantly mutating nonsense—how could fictional characters write a book, much less fill a set of twelve or more volumes?—yet she felt safe here. A bitter contradiction.
She remembered when Bidewell had first lightly clasped her fingers, welcoming her to the warehouse and provoking—at once—a shudder and an odd sense of comfort.
“What sort of fault?” she asked.
“Anything, really—a typo, misspelling, lacunae, rivering. We must note the fault—but we must not make any corrections, or try to hide the apparent defects. They could be more important than thou canst know, young lady, to that Citie. Whatever and wherever that Citie may be.”
Another week passed, and Ginny’s restlessness grew. She could feel the foul currents Bidewell had spoken of—and something even more alarming. The river up ahead—her river—seemed to come to an abrupt end. She could not tell how far ahead—weeks, months, a year. But beyond that—nothing. Bidewell refused to tell her more, and most of their conversations ended with his crackling, “Not to be known, not to be known!”
Bidewell’s warehouse was home to over 300,000 books. Ginny estimated the numbers on the shelves by quick count, and the numbers in the boxes by quicker calculation. Besides the two of them, seven cats called the warehouse home, all polydactyl—with many toes, and two with what appeared to be little thumbs.
These two were black and white. The smaller, a young male just out of kittenhood, silently padded up to her as she sorted and read, and rubbed against her ankles until she picked him up, placed him on her lap,
and stroked him. Warm and loose-rubbery beneath soft fur, with a blaze on his chest and one white paw, he purred approval until she stopped, then leaned up on her chest and tapped her chin with a wide paw. She felt a light pinch.
He would not share any of her sandwich when she offered a bite, but instead, as a kind of hint or example, lay at the foot of her bed that night an intact but very dead mouse. All the cats were independent, and seldom responded to her chit-chits and here-kitties, but during the long nights, she would find one or two or sometimes three on the end of her cot, feet curled under, eyes slitty, watching her with warm, rumbling contentment. They seemed to approve of Bidewell’s new visitor. The cats, of course, were essential to the safety of the warehouse. Bidewell did not consider mouse-nibble edits at all helpful.
Time passed a little quicker after she met the cats. Curled one after another on her lap, they even made up for Bidewell’s suggested reading list: he put aside, near her worktable, a stack of books on mathematics, physics, and several texts on Hindu mythology. Three of the books on physics seemed more advanced than she thought science had progressed so
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