The office boy looks up from his desk in the corner. “Damn.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say quickly. “Would you like me to . . . ?” I look around for where the bell landed, though locating anything in this room would be a feat. In contrast to the tidy exterior, the office has achieved a level of clutter that most junkmen can only aspire to. There doesn’t appear to be any actual furniture, just stacks of various objects cajoled into poor imitations. There’s a coffeepot on a stack of books, the dregs cold and stodgy in the bottom of two mugs beside it. The office boy sits behind a desk that looks to be made entirely of documents, and the walls behind him are papered with maps, each marked with inscrutable lines in various shades of ink. Some are so marked up it’s difficult to see what landmasses they were charting to begin with.
“Leave it!” the office boy snaps, and I straighten quickly. “Can I help you with something?” He sounds irritated, perhaps at the bell and perhaps at me and perhaps both in equal measure.
I’m so overwhelmed by the room and the logicless system in which so many things seem to be arranged that it takes me a moment to put words together. I have to close my eyes, just so that I’m able to focus before I finally turn back to the office boy, who is giving me such a look of concerned bafflement that I apologize without thinking. “Sorry.”
“What for?”
“Sorry I”—I wave a hand at the office—“I was distracted.”
He sighs, nostrils flaring wide enough to shove olives up, and I am yet again unsure what his annoyance is aimed at, but assume it’s me. My shoulders slump, but I manage to stammer, “I’m here to see your proprietor about an object he’s in pursuit of. A curator at the British Museum gave me this address.”
The office boy pushes his spectacles up his nose. “We’re about to close for the day, but I can make you an appointment for later in the week.” He opens his diary to a page that looks as cluttered as the office. “What did you say your name was?”
I don’t have later in the week. I don’t have time for any of this. I won’t sleep until I’ve met this man, until I know why he’s looking for the same spyglass I am and who he is. I won’t eat. I won’t think of anything else. I’ll waste away waiting for a word from a stranger, even though, when it finally comes, if ever, it may be nothing.
But I say, “It’s Montague.”
The office boy huffs again. The lenses of his spectacles fog. “No, your name.”
I stare at him, not sure if I’ve misunderstood the question or if it didn’t make sense to begin with. “It’s Montague.”
“That’s not—” He looks up from the diary and squints hard at me. I resist the urge to reach up and touch my face to make sure I haven’t anything stuck or smudged or bleeding there. He flips the diary shut and clambers out from behind his desk. “Have a seat for a moment, will you?”
“Um.” He pauses at the door to the back office, and I ask meekly, “Where?”
With another theatrical sigh, he manages to unearth a chair from under a leaflet of botanical drawings and the skull of some sort of enormous bird, and I have no idea where I am or what I have gotten myself into or whom I am about to meet. “Wait here,” he instructs, then picks his way to the back office door, which he knocks upon once before letting himself in.
My heart feels like a wasp under a pint glass, and my breath comes in erratic gasps. Something is happening.
Think. Of. Something. Else.
He told me to come back later, until he heard my name. I have a sudden horrible vision of my father emerging from the back room and shouting “Aha!” as he snatches the spyglass from my hands and cracks it over his knee. Is this a trick being played on me? Or some kind of trap? It’s impossibly hot in here. I struggle out of my coat, consider hanging it upon the rack, evaluate the stability of said rack and find it wanting, and instead ball it up and hold it in my lap, trying to use it to cover the nervous bouncing of my leg.
Think of something else. I look around. There’s no want of distractions, but I am difficult to distract once I’ve started down the path of greatest catastrophe. The longer I pick my surroundings apart, the more it seems that the room has been cleaved down the middle, the side with the desk and the maps a shipping office recovering from some sort of beastly storm, the other a cobbled-together, half-disguised excuse for a living space. There are blankets rolled up in one corner, a washbasin and a shaving kit balanced precariously between them. Several socks are draped over the hearth screen, half of them darned, the other half practically unraveling with wear. A stack of books is wedged beside the coal bin, the top volume labeled as an atlas of cursed places, and beside that, a battered violin case with several holes peppering its side.
My fingers are going numb. I can’t tell if it’s dread or panic or both or neither, but the office boy has been gone for too long—I think. My sense of time feels unreliable. But I am suddenly certain that I should not be here. I need to go. I stand up, ready to flee before something terrible and unknown happens, just as the door to the back room opens again.
A man appears, immediately trips over a crate in front of the door, and curses. “Son of a bitch. Who put that there?” he demands, doubling over to massage his shin.
The office boy, who darted through the door behind him, glances up as he resituates himself behind his desk. “You did, sir.”
“Oh.” The man glares down at the offending crate, then at his office boy. “Don’t let me do that again.”
“Yes, sir.”
I freeze, my hand resting on the door knob, as the man straightens his jacket, then turns to me.
For a moment, I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing. It feels like waking in the middle of the night and trying to convince yourself the shadows at the end of your bed really are just the furniture, not a restless ghost at your window.
But this—this must be a ghost. I close my eyes hard, then open them again, but he’s still there.
He looks like my father. Younger, and trimmer, and leaner in the face than my father ever was, but he looks like my father.
He looks like me.
The same coffee-dark hair, and, though his is starting to salt around the temples, it’s still thick and curls handsomely, just like mine. He’s missing his right ear, and one side of his face is webbed with faint red scars, giving his skin the look of porcelain broken and then glued back together, but I can see my father’s jawline. He’s built like my father as well—short, but sturdy. Broad shoulders—I have those too. And the same Grecian nose and veined blue eyes. My mother’s eyes.
When the man sees me, he too goes eerily still, and I realize I must be the same phantom in the mirror that he is to me. I half suspect that, were I to raise my hand or bend at the waist, he would do the same, my strange reflection. We are two ghosts, staring at one another, not sure which of us is haunted and which is haunting.
Then he says, “What are you doing here?”
And his voice is nothing like what I expected. It’s flat. Emotionless. Not even the sort of pomp and formality one might use when addressing a stranger—this is the sort of careless affectation reserved for someone already known. And disliked.