“And it’s almost certainly haunted?”

“I don’t care.”

“What’s the matter with you? Usually you laugh at about ten percent of my jokes. But this morning we’re still at zero.”

“Nothing. I’m just tired.”

It was all true about the University Library. Maximilian had found out about the hidden underground archive after he’d arrived there by accident on his way back from the Underworld. To get to the Special Collections (which didn’t come up in a normal library catalog search) without going via the Underworld you had to go down flights and flights of stairs, and then you had to twist a creaky old windy thing to open and close the stacks, which were basically massive shelves on wheels of a sort that had been featured in every horror film about libraries since the beginning of time. Some of the stacks—most of them, if you listened to people like Octavia Bottle or Madame Valentin—had not been opened for hundreds of years and had dead bodies squashed in them. The dead bodies were so old that when you opened the stacks you could hear their bones crumbling to the floor.

Obviously, this all meant it was the perfect weekend treat for children. Well, perhaps not most children. But Effie had been looking forward to it for ages. There were plenty of things she needed to look up. But now, of course, the most pressing thing was to try to find out what she’d been missing about the Otherworld. What was it they wanted her to understand, but for some reason couldn’t tell her?

Baby Luna started throwing porridge at the wall, which meant breakfast was over.

“Ten minutes,” said Orwell Bookend. “Wear old clothes.”

All Effie’s clothes were old, of course, except for the ones she kept in the Otherworld. She sighed wistfully as she thought of her comfortable, light room there, and her cousins. And she felt tears well up again when she thought of Rollo and his suspicions about her. She’d show them she definitely wasn’t a galloglass. She just wasn’t yet sure how.

The ancient old car struggled up the hill past the Esoteric Emporium and then the vast gates to Blessed Bartolo’s.

“Another school?” said Jupiter Peacock, sounding like someone who was trying—and failing—to sound interested. “So many children. It must be quite exhausting living here.”

“Blessed Bartolo’s is quite famous,” said Hazel.

“What for?” asked Jupiter.

But it seemed that nobody could remember.

“Was it a murder?” said Marcel, after a while.

“I thought it was a kidnapping,” said Hazel. “And then a murder.”