On her way out, she stops at the coat check. She’s handed her gray down coat in a rustling bundle, her shoulder bag. She points over the clerk’s shoulder to where Housecat, Wildcat rests in a cubbyhole, its silver tree catching a little of the LED light. “That book back there too. That’s mine.”

Fiddler, Fool Pair

Fiddler, Fool Pair

The game has been running under-the-hill since before London was new and it may well continue under-the-hill long after London is gone. Even the boxy arrival of the modern calendar has failed to persuade its custodians; they do not keep to a human schedule. Like trees and cliff faces, the game under-the-hill answers to a more biological kind of time. Only and always, it plays when the moon is new.

Naomi leaves the library at five, in the height of midsummer, shoulder bag heavy against her side. When the moon is new, Naomi has a routine. She walks from the library to Victoria Station and stops to buy two snack bars and two bottles of water, then boards the Metropolitan line toward Chesham. When a seat opens, she pulls a thick notebook from her bag to lay across her knees. Naomi’s handwriting is small and precise; her ex-girlfriend said once that each word looked like a city for unhappy people, but Naomi likes her script. She likes her notebook, with its flashes of canary-yellow highlighter and the inky smudges of her fingerprints at its corners. All its little cities are full of gold.

When she disembarks, Naomi secures her research in her bag, touches the pages of the notebook once, twice as she slips through the small evening crowd in the station. On her walk to the River Chess, she lapses in and out of half-memorized old rhyme, counts her steps by seven, one for sorrow, two for mirth. By the time Naomi comes within sight of the hill, the sky has turned a suffocating purple, almost dark.

Nearly three years ago, when she made this journey the first time, Naomi was planning to write her graduate thesis on gambling in fairy tales. It’s a popular motif; dice games with death, wagers on one’s soul. Folktales rarely locate themselves specifically, rarely name landmarks, and so it was curiosity that first made Naomi hike out to the old, tumbling hill by the Chess; curiosity or the interior propulsion of a narrative. Fairy tales have laws, Naomi knows, which is why she loves them. She finds a deep aesthetic satisfaction in that defining and organizing of things, which is maybe why her childhood heroes were zoologists and mapmakers, astronomers and botanists, researchers who created meaning out of raw presence.