We take his lantern and make our way through the wreckage to the river. I make a magic knot from cadaver hair, make a hole in the soil with my finger, put the knot in, cover it, sprinkle it with water from a rain barrel there. I bend down and speak into the ground, saying whatever comes into my head. A transparent shoot shaped like a budding oak leaf slips from the ground and brushes my lip like a mineral noodle, before it bends at a sharp angle and points in a particular direction. I take a bearing from it.

We follow the line to a building with steps going down to the river. An adjacent tree is growing down through the roof and the long naked branches white as bones bore into the shelves. The pungent odor of decaying paper blends with the usual musty neglect smell, and I hear mice flit along the walls. With Jil Punkinflake’s scalpel I cut along a thickly embossed leather membrane covered with golden curlicues and letters stretched all out of shape, which has grown over the shelves here. Most of the shelves are wrapped up like sleeping bats in folds of thick binding leather. I make a number of lateral cuts, and immediately the pages begin to dribble out onto the floor.

“Catch them! Don’t let them touch the ground!”

Jil Punkinflake darts back and forth snatching pages out of the air, starting to laugh a little, and I am, with mounting silliness, slashing at this groaning leather membrane. The leaves sail out, and Jil Punkinflake’s deft hands catch them.

“All right now,” I say, “Give me those pages.”

I carry them outside and hold them out, let the wind rattle them in my hand. Then I shove them into my satchel.

“This will take a little time.”

I write up the now single screed on a roll of fine creamy paper, with a pen that audibly cuts the ink into the fibres, and bind that paper up with black crepe. That shows a bit of flair. I give this to Jil Punkinflake by the starlight of early that morning, and he takes it in his outstretched hand, then inbrings his hand holding the roll, gazing down at it as though it were an infant.

The mist lifts and lowers; it does this languid dance dreamily over the dank earth and lifts long shoots, limp and elastic, above its level, and I watch a slender probe trailing off and losing itself in the air in front of me. The body of the mist forgets and expends this pinch of its stuff without noticing it; before it vanishes, it acquires a sort of demeanor, like something not far short of a tranquil personality.