him resemble the traditional concept of Fagin; a much younger man and two women came on his heels. The cat surveyed them for a moment and then shot up a vertical wall and through a broken pane. No one paid any attention. Beside the hooded window, the door of a shop that never opened trembled under the impact of multiple knocks.
“Maybe he’s gone,” said Fern, after a pause.
“Never.” Ragginbone lowered his mouth to the keyhole and began to mutter words they could not hear, words that crept through the crack and into the darkness beyond. The door began to shiver of its own accord; chains rattled inside. They caught the sound of scurrying feet and scraping bolts; the door jerked open to the limit of a safety chain; part of a face appeared in the gap. A pale subterranean face with a single boot-button eye. A smell of unwashed clothing wafted toward them.
“Moonspittle,” said Ragginbone. “Let us in.”
“Too many. Two too many.” Or possibly too too many. The fluting whisper was thin with fear, shrill with obstinacy. “Go away.”
“We will never go away,” Ragginbone said. “There is power here. Feel it. You can shut it out but you cannot make us leave. We will wait for as long as it takes.”
“No . . .”
“They will see us waiting. They will want to know why. They will want to know who is here, making us wait so long.”
They? Fern mouthed.
“His bogeymen,” Ragginbone explained, sotto voce. “Whoever they are. Probably everybody.”
The safety chain was released; the door opened wider. A hand plucked Ragginbone inside. The others followed.
They found themselves groping in almost complete blackness. “Mind the furniture,” said the voice of their host, receding ahead of them. With great presence of mind Fern grabbed the skirts of Ragginbone’s jacket, simultaneously reaching behind her for Gaynor’s hand. Will bumped into what might have been a small table, but it sidled away from him. Ragginbone said: “This way,” and presently a dim light appeared at what must have been the far end of the room. They crammed into a narrow passage and descended a twisty stair where all but Fern had to duck under the roof beam, and then they were in the basement.
Minimal lighting revealed the shop owner, his small round body bundled in peeling layers of cardigan, his spindle legs inadequately trousered, exposing knobbed anklebones above his threadbare slippers. Tufts of hair stood out around his scalp like cloud wisps around a barren hilltop. He carried with him an odor of closed cupboards, stale woolens, things long forgotten left at the back of unopened drawers. His skin was bleached like that of some cave-dwelling creature who had never seen daylight, let alone sun. “You are not,” he began, and then paused, losing the sentence, then finding it again. “Welcome here.”
“We’re sorry to intrude,” Fern said scrupulously. “We need your help.”
“You are . . . the witch?”
“I hope so.” The flicker of a smile did not conceal her apprehension.
“Too young,” he said. “Too green.”
“She has the Gift,” said Ragginbone. “I was very little older when I first drew the circle. And I think the power is stronger in her . . .”
Moonspittle looked unconvinced. “These others,” he said. “You never mentioned any others.”
“My brother, Will,” said Fern, “and my friend Gaynor. We work together.”
“The Gifted always stand alone.”
“That explains a lot,” Will murmured. “Isolation leads to arrogance, alienation from reality . . . No wonder so many of them go insane.”
Ragginbone shot him a curiously bright look. “Enough talk,” he said. “We have things to do.”
The basement was unexpectedly large, book walled and low ceilinged, as if the weight of the buildings above had crushed the available space into breadth rather than height, and shelves and volumes were packed together like a many-layered sandwich. At one end was a conspiratorial huddle of chairs and occasional tables; at the other, a wooden bench was cluttered with chipped glass retorts, convoluted tubes, odd-shaped jars, and even a Bunsen burner. The inadequate lighting was further obscured by huge lampshades whose trailing fringes resembled jungle undergrowth. Fern found a fireplace hiding behind a screen and asked for a brush to sweep it out. “We do not need the fire,” said Moonspittle, and he might have paled if he had not been so pale already; but Fern insisted. No brush was forthcoming, so she settled for an old rag that must have been used as a duster for several centuries. The others shifted furniture, rolled back odds and