They knew that the Chatwin house was on one Darrowby Lane, which helped, although the Cornish were even less interested in signage than the Venetians. Fortunately Poppy turned out to be excellent at this kind of cross-country dead-reckoning navigation. At first they thought she must be using some kind of advanced geographical magic until Josh noticed that she had an iPhone in her lap.

“Yeah, but I used magic to jailbreak it,” she said.

It was late afternoon, and they’d traversed what seemed like several hundred verdant and Watership Down–esque but stubbornly unmarked and unidentifiable rural byways, and the light was turning bluish, before they settled on a target property, which sat on a narrow lane that wasn’t definitely not called Darrowby and as near as they could tell pretty much had to back onto Plover’s enormous estate.

There was no wall or gate, just a gravel track curving back through the late-summer trees. A square stone post next to it supported a NO TRESPASSING sign. They couldn’t see the house from here.

Quietly Julia read out the relevant passage from The World in the Walls:

The house was very grand—three stories tall, with a façade made of brick and stone, and enormous windows, and endless numbers of fireplaces and window seats and curving back stairs and other advantages, which their London house distinctly lacked. Among those advantages were the sprawling grounds around the house, which included long straight alleys and white gravel paths and dark-green pools of grass.

There was a time when Quentin could probably have said it along with her from memory.

Quentin sat in the car and stared across the road. He couldn’t see much evidence of anything as nice as that. The place didn’t exactly scream “portal to another world” either. He tried to imagine the Chatwins arriving here for the first time, the five of them crammed into the backseat of some sputtering black proto-automobile, more carriage than car, and with a fair amount of locomotive DNA in it as well, their luggage tied to the boot with twine and Victorian leather strappage. They would have been funereally silent, resigned to exile from London. The youngest, five-year-old Jane, the future Watcherwoman, reclining on her older sister’s lap as on a chaise longue, lost in a fog of longing for her parents, who were respectively fighting World War I and raving in a posh rest home. Martin (who would grow up to become a monster who would kill Alice) keeping his composure for the sake of the youngsters, his soft boy’s jaw set in grim preadolescent determination.

They’d been so young and innocent and hopeful, and they’d found something more wonderful than they could ever have hoped for, and it had destroyed them.

“What do you think?” he said. “Julia?”

“This is the place.”

“All right. I’m going to go in. Look around.”

“I’ll come,” Poppy said.