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something.”

My disposable cell phone rang. Only Vivian Norby had the number.

“Hello?” I said shakily.

Hud Jacklight rammed back into my world with his trademark insistence: “I’ve been trying all day. To reach you. Big news.”

“Hud, how did you get this number?”

“Milo’s baby-sitter. Had to twist her arm. Tough lady.”

“Hud, I really can’t talk now.”

“Made a deal. For you, Cubbo.”

“I’m going to hang up now, Hud.”

“Wait, wait. Not The Great Gatsby.”

“This again?”

“The Old Man and the Sea. The sequel.”

Although she could not hear Hud’s side of the conversation, Penny put her gun to my head and said, “Fire him.”

“That one doesn’t need a sequel, either.”

“There’s a shark in it.”

“So what?”

“Not the old man. He doesn’t come back. The shark. The shark comes back.”

“Fire him,” Penny warned me.

I started to laugh.

“It’ll be the first. A series. Listen to you. You’re so happy. I love happy clients.”

“I mean it,” Penny told me, her gun still to my head. “Fire him now, Cubby.”

Hud said, “Cullen Greenwich Presents. Sequels to Classics. Big literary thing. You don’t write them. Someone else does. You just put your name on ’em.”

I was laughing so hard tears streamed down my face.

“Listen. Ben-Hur. The gladiator guy? Reincarnated. As a pro wrestler.”

I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. I was convulsed.

“The Call of the Wild. Jack London piece. This time an alien spaceship. Under the ice. Aliens possess the wolves.”

Between gales of laughter, I said to Penny, “You … you do it.”

“Tarzan. Not raised by apes. Not Africa. Alaska. Raised by polar bears.”

Nearly hysterical, I passed the phone to Penny.

She took her gun away from my head, spared my life, and said, “Hud, you’re fired,” and turned off the phone.

“This place is creepy,” Milo said. “Can we get out of here?”

I holstered my pistol, lifted him into my arms, and held him tight. The smell of his hair. The smoothness of his boyish cheeks. The fierceness with which he hugged me. I was alive.

In the garage, we didn’t look in the cargo space of the Hummer. We took our things from the vehicle and walked away from the house.

“Should we maybe wipe our prints off the steering wheel and stuff?”

“No point,” I said, the laughter having passed. “Police will never have a chance to investigate. The agency will clean it up.”

Beyond the house, the sea broke on a beach with a sound like war machines or like the laughter of a crowd, depending on how you chose to hear it.

The night was cool, the moon was bright, and the stars went on forever.

The scenery is stunning where we live now, but I will not describe it.

We reside in a modest house, but beneath it is a secret haven that the Boom family came together to construct.

On the same property, Vivian Norby has a cottage of her own.

I am no longer bald, but I do not look much like the writer whose photos were on my book jackets. Penny styles her hair in a different fashion, has made some other changes, and is lovelier than ever.

Penny, Milo, Lassie, and I use our real names when we are alone with one another, but the rest of the world knows us by names that we chose after much discussion.

Through a series of clever maneuvers involving foreign banks, Grimbald was able to spirit all of our savings out of the country before the people-of-the-red-arms realized we had escaped Shearman and Zazu. Because I’d enjoyed six bestsellers and because the Purple Bunny books had been earning well for eight years, and because we live simply now, we are set for a long, long time.

Grim and Clo have retired from the building-demolition business and now live incognito in their canyon.

I write novels and put them away in a chest of drawers rather than send them to a publisher. I no longer must suffer the shame of excessive self-promotion.

This story of our encounters with Shearman Waxx and his fellow booklovers may be published by a foundation, staffed by courageous people who believe in the beauty of tradition, in the necessity of truth, in the need for reason in a world of irrational ideologies.

Penny writes books, illustrates them, and puts them away as well. We hope the world will want her work and mine one day—and will not require of us that we be executed for it.

We follow the news as much as we can tolerate it. We see the signs, the gathering clouds, the horror that could come upon the whole world.

In spite of all that we have seen