“Morrie.” I stepped toward him, my hand raised, not sure what to do.
“Fascinating,” was his only reply.
I peered around him and into the room. My eyes could only make out a few dark shapes, but it was enough for me to tell that I wasn’t staring at either of the rooms I’d seen earlier.
Dark bookshelves lined every wall. Instead of the spines of books, they held niches where rolled scrolls of parchment and paper sat in leather and silver holders. A large, rough oak desk stood in the center of the room. On top of the desk, an enormous book lay open, with tiny columns of text and ornate illuminated illustrations glittering in the dim candle-light. Behind the desk, the door to the pentagonal room was firmly shut. Curtains fluttered at the windows and the scent of wet ink stained the air, as if the room’s occupant had just ducked out and would return at any moment.
I stepped toward the room and grabbed the handle to pull it open all the way. As I did, a white shape streaked between my legs and skidded into the room. The mouse dived under the desk and disappeared. I moved to go after it, but the door jerked from my fingers and slammed shut.
I jiggled the lock, but it was stuck tight, with the Terror of Argleton locked inside!
Chapter Fourteen
“What the hell are you doing?” Morrie’s fingers dug into my arm. “You were trying to go in there. I thought we agreed none of us should enter that room.”
“I was going to chase the mouse out. Now it’s trapped in a wormhole in space and time. It’s you who doesn’t remember that conversation,” I shot back. “You’re the one who opened the door.”
He made a face. “Do you believe I would disobey a direct order from Sir Angus McSurlybritches? I came out of the bathroom and here it was, door open, contents laid bare. As for the mouse, let him rot in the void between dimensions. The village will probably give you a medal in addition to that reward.”
“What’s going on?” Quoth appeared at the end of the hall, his naked body pale against the gloom.
“The door was open again.” Morrie jiggled the lock and tapped the frame. “It slammed shut as soon as Mina tried to go in—”
Quoth’s eyes widened. “You didn’t go inside, did you?”
“It wouldn’t let me!”
“What did you see?”
“It looked a bit like a printer’s office or something. There were all these parchments in niches on the walls.”
“Not a printer,” Morrie said. “A book-binder and copier. I think we might’ve just seen Mr. Herman Strepel’s 9th-century establishment.”
My mind raced.It’s impossible. No way did we just open a doorway and see into a building that existed a thousand years ago.
But then, it wasn’t any more impossible than anything else that happened in this shop, like the fact that I was having a casual conversation about a wormhole into space-time with James Moriarty and Poe’s raven.
“Say you’re right.” I faced the guys. “What does it mean? Have you ever seen that particular room before?”
Morrie shook his head. His eye sparkled with mischief, which, in his case, was a very bad sign. “Did you glimpse that enormous book on the desk?”
“It was hard to miss, even with my eyes.”
“It looked to be a catalogue of all the texts for sale, and the different scripts, illuminations, and decorations available to order. That’s exactly what you asked me to find for you. If we could get hold of it, we could see—”
I folded my arms. “No. You’re not going in there and taking that book. You already took that empty book downstairs. For all we know, that’s made the shop’s magic more unstable.”
“We don’t have to take it. We could just sneak in, peek through, and run out before anything happens. You went into the Victorian bedroom and nothing bad happened.”
I hesitated. Morrie wastechnicallycorrect. I’d spent a good five minutes looking around the room and nothing bad happened.
“Mina,” Quoth’s silky voice warned. “Don’t let Morrie tempt you. He’s good at that.”
I bit my lip. Yes. Yes, he is.
Heathcliff chose that moment to barrel up the stairs. “What’s going on? There are customers downstairs asking questions and I need at least one of you to act as a buffer.”
“Morrie wants to do something dangerous,” Quoth said.
