I walked briskly through the door and shut it firmly behind me. The man from the roadside had not been bold enough to follow me up the walk, but even still, I felt myself exhilarated by the encounter – as if I had found a piece of myself that had been missing for some time. Perhaps I would yet again be useful to the guild.

Though its rooms were dark, the old house seemed so very alive to me, so very real. Its angles and surfaces had become skewed and settled, adjusted by time and gravity and the constant wear of human interaction until they had become perfect in their imperfection. Its every detail was laid bare to my sight – the individual grains of dirt in the carpet, the patterns in which the wallpaper had faded, the motes of dust floating through the air like single points of data from which greater truths might be extrapolated.

I walked through the kitchen and up the back stairway to the first floor, my eyes taking in all that was laid before them as if they were only truly seeing it all for the first time. I felt giddy and my brain felt bubbly. I was a child again.

I had been following an otherwise imperceptible pattern of crumbs in the carpet when I came upon Mrs. Hurchur, slumped unceremoniously on the floor of the hallway and for only the briefest of moments I thought I had found her dead. But then I saw the pulse in the arteries under her skin, the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. I swear that if I looked hard enough I might have been able to see the rate at which her hair follicles attained growth. Her skin was not bruised, her bones were not broken. It was as if she had simply sat down and fallen asleep. I roused her and helped her to her feet. She was confused at first, but then smiled at me.

“Such a nice boy!” She whispered in the darkness, “This is why I keep you safe.”

I walked past the doors that guarded Impossibilia and Henrietta’s rooms, observing the angular slivers of mud on the floor, discarded after having ridden along and dried in the crevasses of someone’s boots. At just a glimpse, my eyes became intimately familiar with their curves and corners.

When I arrived at my landing, I discovered an envelope tucked neatly under my door. Earlier in the day I would not have been perceptive enough to notice the all but immeasurable waves the humidity had left in the fiber of its paper, but there at the landing, even in the darkness, I could practically site the mathematical functions by which they were expressed. I felt myself so enamored by their form that it took me longer than it should have to investigate the more obvious question – from whom had this letter been sent?

I flipped it over in my hands and sighed in disappointment. The letter was from my Aunt Charlice. Clearly my delay in contacting her had not gone as unnoticed as I had hoped it would.