That can’t be a coincidence.
* * *
—
I’m in Manhattan.
I took pictures of that building, it’s all blocked off. The shell of the building looks okay except the windows are toast and there’s a lot of smoke damage. It’s kind of a shame, it’s a pretty building.
It has a sign that says Collector’s Club. A lady came out of one of the buildings across the street to walk her dog and I asked about it, she said it was an electrical fire and complained about electrical systems in old buildings while her pug (Balthazar) investigated my boots. I asked what kind of club it was and she said she thought it was one of those private-member clubs but wasn’t sure what type. Said she saw people going in and out but not very often. Said they got a lot of deliveries, but then seemed like she thought she shouldn’t have said that which makes sense because it is a spying-on-the-neighbors-out-the-window thing to say. Either that or she decided I was weird for asking so many (two!) questions about a burned building but she and her pug took off. Maybe she thought I was an arsonist in training.
I looked up “Collector’s Club” but it’s too generic to be helpful. There’s a club for stamp collectors with the same name that’s only a few blocks away. Nothing online connects that name with that address, not that I can tell.
I scoped out the alley behind the building and all its access points and managed to walk through it without looking lost. I kept my hood up and kept walking because there were cameras back there but I got a good l
ong glance at the back of the building. It wasn’t as deep as the rest on the block, with a fence and a snow-piled garden that looked pristine even though the back of the building had the same broken windows and the back doors were boarded up.
The gate was a fancy iron thing and where the two gate halves came together in the middle of all the decorative swirls was a sword.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence, either.
I’m not sure I believe in coincidences anymore.
* * *
—
I took a long walk afterward. I meandered down from midtown and ended up at the Strand. I weirdly kept thinking that I’d run into Z there. Like he’d lost track of time browsing through the stacks and hadn’t realized how many days had gone by already.
I was in that musty-smelling basement level for a long time and I kept feeling like someone was watching me, or that something was close by that I was missing. This is dumb but I felt like the right book was there, somewhere, and if I closed my eyes and reached out to a shelf it would be there, right beneath my fingers.
I tried it a couple of times but it didn’t work.
All the books were just books.
* * *
—
I went to Lantern’s Keep and after being a cocktail geek at my waiter (he asked if I was a bartender so I had to admit I just drink a lot) I used the not-my-hotel WiFi to do a dark net deep-dive and found this conspiracy-theory site that actually had some level-headed people on it (they debunked most of the stuff people posted about on their message board within, like, twenty minutes).
I registered with a fake e-mail and joined and posted this:
Looking for info:
Bee
Key
Sword
I forgot to screen cap, bad me. But I got three replies within ten minutes, one calling me a troll, one that was just seven question marks, and the third was a shrug emoji.
Five minutes later the post was removed and I had two messages in my board inbox.
The first was from one of the admins and just said “Don’t.”
I replied and said it wasn’t spam, just a question.