Read Online Codex by Lev Grossman - Free Book Online

woman,” Zeph added.
    â€œLook at those heels,” Caroline said in the background. “Why doesn’t she just wear stilts?”
    â€œI’m gonna...”
    The call cut off there.
    Edward walked back through his apartment to the bathroom, where he splashed some cold water on his face. It had been a couple of days since he’d shaved.
You’re letting yourself go,
he thought.
You wasted last night, and you’ve already wasted half of today. Pull yourself together, asshole.
He should call the office and clear up the mess about the Wents’ library, he thought, staring at himself in the mirror. No, it was already too late for that today. He should just go over there. By now they’d be waiting for him. He pictured the cool, dark quiet of the Wents’ library.
    A fresh bloom of sweat was already breaking out on his forehead. He went to the bathroom to take a shower, then he got dressed and threw a notebook and an old sweater into his leather bag. He wasn’t going to hang around here all day. At least the Wents had air-conditioning. On his way out he stopped in front of his computer. The monitor screen looked weak and dusty in the direct sunlight. It was still on—the screensaver was obsessively drawing randomly generated fractal mountain ranges over and over and immediately erasing them again. He hadn’t even bothered to quit out of the game. He’d left it on all night while he slept.
    Edward tapped the space bar and the screen cleared. He was still alive. Edward frowned. He would have thought some roving space invader or something would have come along and killed him by now. Or maybe it already had—maybe he’d been killed a thousand times since last night and then brought back to life a thousand times. Did it even matter? How would he even know?
    Even though it was early afternoon outside, in the game it was seven in the evening according to a tiny digital clock near the bottom of the screen. Through the trees a thin band of glowing, fading sunset stretched halfway around the horizon, red and gold and green. He moved forward to the edge of the cliff. The scattering of sunlight across the roughened river water was rendered in exquisite detail, veins of fire rippling and shivering. For a while he just stood and watched it.
    Not everything was the same as it had been the night before. The letter that had been in the mailbox was gone, and so was the pistol. He thought of the lyrics from that Beatles song about leaves whirling inside a letter box. And there actually were leaves on the ground now—the scene had altered subtly, becoming more autumnal. The silver hourglass he’d seen was there, but it lay broken on the ground, the pale sand inside scattered in the grass, which was looking a little patchy and threadbare. Time had passed here. He looked around nervously.
    Downstream, the bridge was in ruins. The span had disappeared, and one of the two stone towers that had supported it was completely gone. The other was scarred and blasted. He ran upstream along the top of the cliff to get a better look. He found that he moved swiftly and smoothly in the game, skimming along over the ground in an even, legless glide, faster than he or anybody else could possibly run in real life. It looked like the bridge had aged, eroded, sagged, and finally collapsed under the sheer weight of years. How could so much time have passed? A long, creamy swath of foam swept downstream from the base of the one surviving tower. As he got closer he could hear the faint rushing sound the turbulence made. Part of a carved stone lion still crouched at the tower’s base.
    How could the bridge have aged so much in one night? And what was he supposed to do? Fix it? Was that the point of the game? He glided down a steep embankment, then out to the end of the road, as close as he dared to where the ragged edge of the road sagged precipitately downward. The current piled up against the base of the