“Halt, little crow,” said an owl. He rose above me, five times my size, and carried a golden spear in each talon. “For you to pass through the gates, we must make sure you are actually a bird, a noble creature of the air, older than Kronos, than Time itself.”

“Not one of those foul, treacherous humans, made of dust and dirt, wearing a disguise,” said a second owl, even larger than the first.

Behind them, just inside the gates, beneath the hanging plums, almost within reach, a tortoise plodded slowly past with a pillar of honeycakes piled on his back. I leaned forward but the owls bristled their feathers. After crossing half the Milky Way, would the Fates really have me torn to pieces by magnificent beasts such as these?

… stood as tall as I could and ruffled my wings. “I am just a humble crow,” I said, “and I have traveled far.”

“Solve our riddle, little crow,” said the first guardian. “And you can come right in.”

“Though it will seem simple at first,” said the second, “it’s actually…”

THE LAKEPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

5:41 P.M.

Seymour

Ear defenders around his neck, he listens. A radiator clangs somewhere in Nonfiction; the wounded man breathes at the base of the stairs; a police radio crackles out in the snow. Blood ticks through his ears. Nothing else.

But he heard thuds upstairs, didn’t he? He remembers the police SUV rolling onto the curb, Marian dropping the pizza boxes into the snow. Why was she bringing a stack of pizzas to the library just before closing time?

Someone else is here.

Beretta in his right hand, Seymour creeps toward the stairwell where the wounded man lies on his side, eyes closed, sleeping or worse-than-sleeping. The glitter in his arm hair glints. It occurs to Seymour that maybe he placed his body there as a barricade.

He holds his breath, steps over the thickening lagoon of blood, over the man, and goes up. Fifteen steps, the edge of each lined with nonslip adhesive. Blocking the entrance to the Children’s Section is something unexpected: a plywood wall painted gold, the gold almost green in the glow of an EXIT sign. In the center is a little arched door, and above the arched door runs a single line of words written in an alphabet he does not recognize.

Ὦ ξένε, ὅστις εἶ, ἄνοιξον, ἵνα μάθῃς ἃ θαυμάζεις

Seymour sets his palm on the little door and pushes.

Zeno

He crouches among the children behind the L-shaped barrier of shelves and looks at each in turn: Rachel, Alex, Olivia, Christopher, Natalie. Shh shh shh. In the gloom their faces become the faces of a half-dozen little Korean deer that he and Rex came upon one day while gathering wood in the snow near Camp Five: their antlers and noses looming up out of the white, their black eyes blinking, their big ears twitching.