He haunted his old house like a ghost—it took a special effort to make himself visible to his parents, who always looked vaguely surprised when their phantom son requested their attention. James and Julia were away at college, so Quentin took long walks. He visited the branching, angular Gowanus Canal, its water the green of pooled radiator fluid. He shot baskets on deserted courts with missing nets and rainwater puddles in the corners. The autumn cold gave the ball a dead, inert feel. His world wasn’t here, it was elsewhere. He traded desultory e-mails with friends from Brakebills—Alice, Eliot, Surendra, Gretchen—and flipped indifferently through his summer reading, an eighteenth-century History of Magic that appeared quite slim from the outside but turned out to contain, by some subtle bibliographical magic, no fewer than 1,832 pages.

In November he received a cream-colored envelope, which turned up tucked by invisible hands into History of Magic. It contained a stiff letter-pressed card with an elegant engraving of the Brakebills crest, inviting him to return to school at six in the evening by way of a narrow, never-used alleyway next to the First Lutheran Church ten blocks from his house.

He dutifully presented himself at the correct address at the appointed time. This late in the fall the sun set at four thirty in the afternoon, but it was unseasonably mild out, almost warm. Standing there at the entrance to the passageway, looking around for stray vergers who might charge him with trespassing—or worse, offer him spiritual guidance—cars whooshing by in the street behind him, he had never felt so absolutely sure that he was delusional, that Brooklyn was the only reality there was, and that everything which had happened to him last year was just a fanboy hallucination, proof that the boredom of the real world had finally driven him totally and irreversibly out of his mind. The alley was so skinny he practically had to turn sideways to walk down it, his two overstuffed Brakebills duffel bags—they were midnight blue with dark brown trim, school colors—scraping against the sweating stone walls on either side. He was overwhelmingly certain that in thirty seconds he would be standing at the blank wall at the end of the alley.

But then an impossible breath of warm, sweet, late-summer air came wafting toward him from the far end of the alleyway, accompanied by the chirping of crickets, and he could see the green expanse of the Sea. As heavy as his bags were he ran toward it.

Now it was the first day of the semester, and Quentin and Alice were stranded in a baking hot meadow outside a precious white Victorian bungalow. The bungalow was where the students who did Physical Magic met on Tuesday afternoons for their weekly seminar.