He took off his glasses and wiped them with a cloth.

He was getting to be a pretty old dog-he’d be thirty this year-but this particular game was new to him.Īt least it was warm inside. He wondered if it would be obvious, if he would know right away, or if there would be a trick to it. You would almost have thought they’d come there to buy books.

A middle-aged black man with elfin cheekbones stood staring at the biographies through thick, iridescent glasses. A tall boy with large curious eyes who couldn’t have been older than sixteen was absorbed in a Tom Stoppard play. A jewel-faced girl with a pixie cut was reading Dante in Italian. They browsed the shelves silently, each one on his or her own, slowly wandering the aisles like sleepwalkers. The store should have been empty, coming up on nine o’clock on a cold rainy Thursday night, but instead it was full of people. It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

He pushed his way back through the racks of greeting cards and cat calendars, back to where the actual books were, his glasses steaming up and his coat dripping on the thin carpet. It was a bookstore, and he felt at home in bookstores, and he hadn’t had that feeling much lately. That’s how un-charming this store was: it had a crow in a cage. The only unexpected touch was a wire birdcage in one corner, but where you would have expected a parrot or a cockatoo inside there was a fat blue-black bird instead. Inside you could still hear the noise of cars on the wet road, like long strips of paper tearing, one after another. The enormous bearded cashier didn’t look up from his phone when the door jingled. Satisfied, Quentin crossed the parking lot. This was just another strip-mall outpost of a struggling chain, squeezed in between a nail salon and a Party City, twenty minutes outside Hackensack off the New Jersey Turnpike. Not one of your charming, quirky bookstores, with a ginger cat on the windowsill and a shelf of rare signed first editions and an eccentric, bewhiskered proprietor behind the counter. Quentin spent fifteen minutes watching it from a bus shelter at the edge of the empty parking lot, rain drumming on the plastic roof and making the asphalt shine in the streetlights. It wasn’t much of a night for it: early March, drizzling and cold but not quite cold enough for snow. The letter had said to meet in a bookstore.

The magicians land