'I know in my heart, / That the pain is worth it all; / My love is your love / And in the end, we love / And for you; / My beloved, my desire, my all.'  Magnus read Beloved, again, and again.

He turned to Andalusia.  'Do you remember / The lilac springtime, and / The death that lives?' Magnus snapped the book shut and tossed it aside.  He stood up and walked over to the window.  Across the street was No. One Haymarket Square, empty and alone.  Like him.

Magnus glanced back at the copy of Forever Composed Of Nows on the sofa.  The cover was of a young, androgynous figure, in nude profile as they swung high on a swing, a fantasyland castle in the background, a castle of thought and air. He turned back to the window.

He thought of his books, and of his typewriters. His favourite was a Remington desktop, circa 1923. He had sent it to the bookshop on Daniel Street to be cleaned. Magnus realised that he hadn't given the bookstore his cell phone number, and that they would probably leave a message on the house telephone.

The landline in the Stark-Woolf house was in the study, on the second floor above the front door, with a wall-mounted extension in the butler's pantry.  The upstairs telephone was a black Bakelite rotary model with a Panasonic Ansaphone on it's own little table.  It had probably been filled up, and needed to be gone over.

Magnus left the Thawne's house, and dashed across the street before Eli could spot him. He walked around the to the side of the house, and tried one of the windows that opened into the drawing room. It gave a little, and Magnus shoved the window-sash up, then lifted himself up over the windowsill. He clambered in over the chair-backed settee, and did a sort of tuck-and-roll onto the thin antique French carpet that wrinkled when you walked on it.

Magnus stood up and walked in through the hall and up the curved front stairs. He opened the door into the study, and pressed play on the answering machine. There were no messages.

Not even the messages that were supposed to be daily from his parents.

No messages from his sisters on Prince Edward Island.

No messages from the bookstore about his typewriter being ready to pick up.

Magnus turned around.  The books on the shelves were neat, and the series of fans hung in a line above the front window were in perfect order.  Nothing was out of place.  Nothing.

The house was empty, and Magnus wandered out of the study towards the rooms on the third floor.  The family bedrooms had been moved to the former servant's quarters perhaps ten or fifteen years earlier, in order to allow for the occasional group of paying tourists to view the first two floors of the mansion.  After he opened his bedroom door, Magnus walked over to the bookshelf.  He ran his fingers gently over the spines of the Blandings Castle novels by P. G. Wodehouse, and pulled out the copy of Summer Lightning.  By the window was an old armchair that had been worn-in by generations of the family, but today it was left to it's own, whilst Magnus opened up the little cupboard-like stairs that were shoved between two of the bedrooms, running up over a couple of closets. 

Halfway up the cupboard stairs was a portable wind-up Silvertone Victrola, with space in the lid for records.  At the top of the stairs, Magnus unbolted the trapdoor into the cupola.  He opened one of the massive double-hung sash windows that provided three hundred sixty degree views of Portsmouth, and carried the Silvertone and Summer Lightning over to the canvas deck chair set up in the shade of one of the chimneys.

He sat down on the edge of the deck chair, and opened the Silvertone. There was a record in the cover, an old copy of Carol Channing when she sang forgotten popular music from the nineteen twenties. Magnus set the record on the turn-table, and dropped the pick-up onto the record groove. He flicked a switch, and the recording burbled to life, and flirted away with the wind.

Magnus opened his book, and read himself away from sordid crime into the charmed world of Blandings Castle, as portrayed by P. G. Wodehouse.  He would do this often, so often that his parents eventually gave up attempts to force, cajole, even bribe, him back to reality.  His was a self-imposed banishment of the sort that most dreaded.  Yet for Magnus, it was welcome respite, especially after a run-in when he was perhaps eight or nine.  After those horrible moments, Magnus withdrew, and became the shell of himself.  Obsessed with books and literature, he became hermit-like.  He read himself into adventures he didn't dare partake of in real life, and met and conversed with people who frightened and confused him when he was directly face to face with any such person. 

After some time, Eli Thawne had grown tired of his friend's misery, and one day barged in rather like how a steamroller would flatten a flimsy port-a-potty, and told Magnus that he was going out, that there had been a drugs bust on the Post Road, someone had been shot, and there would be talk of it at the library.  Eli always believed that if you wanted to know what was going on anywhere, you went to the library, and spoke with the librarian.

It was the first time Magnus had left the house, other than for church, in nearly three years.

But that had been years earlier, and now, Magnus was one of the sort who liked the idea of sailing, but not the actual ride mechanics of it. They had gone seven miles out, to the Isles of Shoals, and there, stopped at Appledore. In one of the cottages, attached to the lighthouse, was a little gift shop, which sold postcards and cross-stitched samplers of Leonore Putnam's poems, the short bits that someone had edited together in a cheap little chapbook to sell to tourists. Magnus had bought it, and became fascinated with the person, not the actual poems. After some time though, he gave up on the person, who's private letters remained in a safe deposit box in Boston, and who's lone surviving biography was in the hands of the MET, in a warehouse to be deaccessioned in the unforeseeable future.

He contented himself with copies of the one published volume of poetry. He acquired a Dover Publications print from the nineteen eighties, then a cheap paperback college reader from the sixties. Then, rather suddenly, he was presented with a boxed first edition as a graduation present. He hadn't expected that, as it couldn't quite make sense.

Some time before though, Magnus knew that he had to leave the house, his home that had been tinted a sort of greyishness after a rather tricky business, that of murder. No matter how much white the outside was, bite how much peach and Wedgwood coloured paint was splashed across the walls soggy with art, the house remained rather greyish in Magnus's mind for a great long time after.