As an example, among the catalog’s nearly innumerable volumes, there are fully twenty-seven (five hundred pages each, with every page accommodating between twenty-five and thirty entries) describing only Lord Mammon’s collection of porcelain cups. None of these twenty-seven volumes touch upon his porcelain bowls (of which there are many), or his stone cups (of which there are more), or any other vessel of porcelain or any other substance.

At first Yehuda Leib thought the Hoard was entirely without organization, but as he made his way through room after low-ceilinged room, he began to notice affinities in the chaos. Here were several shelves containing dulled sharp things—kitchen knives, needles and pins, shards of glass. On his right was a shelf of writings that had once been legible but were no longer, and up ahead the marks of dirt and clay identified shelves of things dug up from the ground.

Things, things, things—there seemed to be no end to them.

Out of curiosity, Yehuda Leib took an old map down from a high shelf, but the accumulated mass of angry, feathery dust on its surface threw him into such a paroxysm of sneezing that he resolved, as much as possible, to leave things where they were.

On and on Yehuda Leib went. Where was the crow? Where was his father? There were no lamps or windows here—at least none that were operational—and the shelves began to close in, bringing the thick darkness close to his skin.

Before he knew it, Yehuda Leib could no longer see where he was going. Soon he was navigating by touch alone, running his fingers along the rough wooden shelves until his hands were full of splinters.

Carefully, he made his way onward, his nerves fraying further and further by the moment.

But in the thick, silent darkness, time had come to spin in anxious, meaningless circles.

Who could tell a moment anymore? Was there even such a thing?

And just as this notion occurred to him, Yehuda Leib put his boot directly into a large burlap sack of what were unmistakably human teeth.

He cursed and stumbled backward, brushing hard at his pant leg.

And it was only at this precise angle, bent and backward, that he happened to see something far off through the clutter:

A hint of glimmering light.

A door.

And, behind it, a fire burning.

—

Lilith walked alone through the cold blue moonlight. Her attendant cats left small marks in the snow—here the scraping of a claw, there the brushing of a tail—but her bare feet left none.