It’s warm inside the shop and smells slightly of furniture polish. The door has a little bell that keeps jangling for a good three seconds after I close it, and soon a young woman comes out from behind a large set of bookshelves, holding a can of polish and a yellow duster. She smiles briefly and tells me that the shop will be closing in about ten minutes but that I am welcome to look around. Then she sits down and starts tapping something into a keyboard connected to a computer on the front desk.

“Have you got a computerized catalog of all your books?” I ask her.

She stops typing and looks up. “Yeah. But I don’t know how to use it. I’m only filling in for my friend. Sorry.”

“Oh. OK.”

“What did you want to look up?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No, tell me. I might remember dusting it.”

“Um . . . OK, then. Well, there’s this author called Thomas E. Lumas . . . Have you got any books by him?” I always ask this in secondhand bookshops. They rarely do have anything by him, and I’ve got most of his books already. But I still ask. I still hope for a better copy of something, or an older one. Something with a different preface or a cleaner dust jacket.

“Er. . . .” She screws up her forehead. “The name sounds sort of familiar.”

“You might have come across something called The Apple in the Garden. That’s his famous one. But none of the others are in print. He wrote in the mid to late nineteenth century but never became as famous as he should have been . . .”

“The Apple in the Garden. No, the one I saw wasn’t that one,” she says. “Hang on.” She walks around to the large bookcase at the back of the shop. “L, Lu, Lumas . . . No. Nothing here,” she says. “Mind you, I don’t know what section they’d have put him in. Is it fiction?”

“Some is fiction,” I say. “But he also wrote a book about thought experiments, some poetry, a treatise on government, several science books, and something called The End of Mr. Y, which is one of the rarest novels . . .”

“The End of Mr. Y. That’s it!” she says, excited. “Hang on.”

She goes up the stairs at the back of the shop before I can tell her that she must be mistaken. It is impossible to imagine that she actually has a copy up there. I would probably give away everything I own to obtain a copy of The End of Mr. Y, Lumas’s last and most mysterious work. I don’t know what she’s got it confused with, but it’s just absurd to think that she has it. No one has that book. There is one known copy in a German bank vault, but no library has it listed. I have a feeling that Saul Burlem may have seen a copy once, but I’m not sure. The End of Mr. Y is supposed to be cursed, and although I obviously don’t believe in any of that stuff, some people do think that if you read it you die.

“Yeah, here it is,” says the girl, carrying a small cardboard box down the stairs. “Is this the one you mean?”

She places the box on the counter.

I look inside. And—suddenly I can’t breathe—there it is: a small cream clothbound hardback with brown lettering on the cover and spine, missing a dust jacket but otherwise near perfect. But it can’t be. I open the cover and read the title page and the publication details. Oh shit. This is a copy of The End of Mr. Y. What the hell do I do now?

“How much is it?” I ask carefully, my voice as small as a pin.
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” she says, turning the box around. “The owner gets boxes like this from an auction in town, I think, and if they’re upstairs it means they haven’t been priced yet.” She smiles. “I probably shouldn’t have shown it to you at all. Can you come back tomorrow when she’s in?”
“Not really . . . ,” I start to say.
Ideas beam through my mind like cosmic rays. Shall I tell her I’m not from around here and ask her to ring the owner now? No. The owner clearly doesn’t know that the book is here. I don’t want to take the risk that she will have heard of it and then refuse to sell it to me—or try to charge thousands of pounds. What can I say to make her give me the book? Seconds pass. The girl seems to be picking up the phone on the desk.
“I’ll just give my friend a ring,” she says. “I’ll find out what to do.”
While she waits for the call to connect I glance into the box. It’s unbelievable, but there are other Lumas books there, and a couple of Derrida translations that I don’t have, as well as what looks like a first edition of Eureka! by Edgar Allan Poe. How did these texts end up in a box together? I can’t imagine anyone connecting them, unless it was for a project similar to my Ph.D. Could someone else be working on the same thing? Unlikely, especially if they have given the books away. But who would give these books away? I feel as though I’m looking at Paley’s watch. It’s as if someone put this box together just to appeal to me.
“Yeah,” the girl is saying to her friend. “It’s like a small box. Upstairs. Yeah, in that pile in the toilet. Um . . . looks like a mix of old and new. Some of the old ones are a bit musty and stuff. Paperbacks, I think . . .” She looks into the box and pulls out a couple of the Derrida books. I nod at her. “Yeah, just a real mix. Oh, do you? Cool. Yeah. Fifty quid? Seriously? That’s a lot. OK, I’ll ask her. Yeah. Sorry. OK. See you later.”
She puts the phone down and smiles at me. “Well,” she says. “There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you can have the whole box if you want, but the bad news is that I can’t sell individual books from the box, so it’s all or nothing really. Sam says she bought the box herself from an auction, and the owner hasn’t even seen it yet. But apparently she’s already said she hasn’t got the space to shelve loads more stuff . . . But the other bad news is that the whole box is going to cost fifty pounds. So . . .”
“I’ll take it,” I say.
“Seriously? You’d spend that on a box of books?” She smiles and shrugs. “Well, OK. I guess that’s fifty pounds, then, please.”

My hands shake as I get my purse out of my bag, pull out three crumpled ten-pound notes and a twenty and hand them over. I don’t stop to consider that this is almost the only money I have in the world, and that I am not going to be able to afford to eat for the next three weeks. I don’t actually care about anything apart from being able to walk out of this shop with The End of Mr. Y, without someone realizing or remembering and trying to stop me. My heart is doing something impossible. Will I collapse and die of shock before I’ve even had a chance to read the first line of the book? Shit, shit, shit.
“Fantastic, thanks. Sorry it was so much,” the girl says to me.

“No problem,” I manage to say back. “I need a lot of these for my Ph.D., anyway.”
I place The End of Mr. Y in my rucksack, safe, and then I pick up the box and walk out of the shop, clutching it to me as I make my way home in the dark, the cold stinging my eyes, completely unable to make sense of what has just happened.