I looked at her. “Nadya, you’re ten years old. Yes, I think you don’t know anything about it.”

Nadya blushed slightly and murmured: “But I watch television. I know that grown-ups like to kiss and hug . . .”

“Stop!” I exclaimed in panic. “Stop. Let’s agree that you’ll talk about this with Mummy, okay?”

“All right,” Nadya said, and nodded.

I tried to hand her book back to her.

“So is it true about the Twilight?” Nadya asked again.

“About the Twilight? Ah, yes . . .” I started looking through what came next. Erasmus had learned how to enter the Twilight . . . Others had decided to take him into the Watch . . . well, well, into the Day Watch . . . What?

I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the text.

“. . . Prophets and Clairvoyants are always highly valued in the Watches, because their gift is only found rarely—especially the gift of a genuine Prophet. And if a Prophet starts working for one of the two forces, it can lead to great disasters. Therefore the Twilight itself tries to prevent this. If a Prophet might say something very, very important that Others ought not to know, a Twilight Creature comes to him. The Twilight Creature is created by the depths of the Twilight and the power of the Twilight Creature is infinite. None of the Others can stop it or defeat it. And either the Watches leave the Prophet alone, or the Twilight Creature kills him—to prevent a great disaster . . . Little Erasmus was lucky. When he realized that the Twilight Creature was on his trail, he went to his favorite tree—an old hollow ash—and shouted out the prophecy into the hollow. When a Prophet utters the most important prophecy of his life, he doesn’t remember exactly what he has said. The Twilight Creature realized that no one would find out about the prophecy and left Erasmus in peace . . .”

After that the narrative continued, talking about how the artful Erasmus also persuaded the Watches to leave him in peace and lived a happy life, amusing himself by creating golems and bringing corpses to life, often uttering ordinary predictions for the Others—and sometimes shocking the people around him in the eighteenth century by telling them about the Big Bang or jet engines fueled by oxygen and hydrogen, or the spontaneous appearance of life in the oceans. There was also a little bit about his grandson Charles, who was far more famous among human beings. In time, Erasmus had retired from any kind of work and staged his own death as Others are in the habit of doing, and now he lived somewhere in Great Britain, not wishing to see anyone . . .

I quickly leafed through the chapter to the end. And what exactly was so remarkable about this Prophet that I personally had never heard of? Ah . . . there it was . . .