“If I’m not—ifwe’renot—in the building at midnight, they won’t come out of their books. So we can just stand outside for a minute or two, then come back inside to an empty shop. And the next time we see them, they don’t realize any time has passed.”
“Really?”
She nodded, then added, “And if we stayed upstairs for the night, they’d show up, but if we stayed out after midnight, they wouldn’t.”
Aurelia was about to go on, but they were both distracted by the arrival of the characters as the clock struck midnight.
She and Julia had been chatting with everyone for nearly thirty minutes when there was a knock at the door. They looked at each other, both confused for a moment until they heard Antonia’s voice from outside.
“It’s no good—we can’t see anything.”
“Excuse me,” Aurelia told Sergeant Cuff as she walked to the door.
Aurelia looked through the window at Antonia, who was cupping her hands against the glass with Oliver a few feet behind her.
“Nothing?”
Antonia gave a slight jump at the sound of Aurelia’s voice.
“No. I didn’t even see you come to the door.”
Aurelia turned back to look at Cuff, who lifted his shoulders with a bemused smile.
“I was going to just open the door and come in, but Oliver told me we should check with you first,” Antonia said.
“Oh, right. You’ve got to come back in.”
For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to her that Antonia and Oliver’s plan would cut the evening short, since they couldn’t very well stay out all night, loitering in the square.
“Um, hang on.” Aurelia raised her voice to address the characters. “Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt. We have a bit of a situation. You remember meeting—sort of—Julia’s mum and Oliver the other night?”
There were nods and murmurs of agreement.
“They’re outside right now and want to come back in. And the only way into the building is through this door. Well, they could climb the fire escape in the back, but the ladder’s a bit tricky, so I’d have to go outside to help them. So either they come into the shop or I have to leave the shop…”
“Which means we must bid you goodnight,” Cuff finished for her.
“Exactly,” Aurelia said with a nod.
“Are you serious?”
Julia, who had been chatting with Kitty, now looked angrily at the door, where her mother continued to peer blindly into the shop.
“I know, I wasn’t thinking,” Aurelia told her.
“But we were just getting started!”
“We’ll have to say goodbye for now,” Aurelia said, not wanting to dwell on their poor planning. Then she turned to the characters and added, “We’ll see you all tomorrow night.”
After giving them a minute for their farewells, she called out to Antonia, “Okay, you can open the door.”
Antonia pushed the door open slowly, as though she might bang it into someone on the other side. Aurelia and Julia watched as the characters snapped back into mist, drawn quickly back to their books as Antonia stepped across the threshold with Oliver behind her. The light that always appeared with the characters went out, leaving Aurelia, Julia, Antonia, and Oliver in darkness.
42
“We’reverysorry.”
Antonia was the first to speak.
