The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

This man will show you the way. I will need your name, and your signature…here.” He indicated a second ledger on the desk top, and held out a pen. Chang took it and wrote, and handed it back.
    “The name is Chang,” he said.
    “Just ‘Chang’?” the man asked.
    “For the moment, I’m afraid so.” He leaned forward with a whisper. “But I am hoping to win at the races…and then I shall purchase another.”
    The soldier led Chang along a wide corridor and up an austere staircase of polished black granite with a wrought iron rail. They moved among other men in dark suits walking up and down, all clutching thickly packed satchels of paper, none of whom paid Chang the slightest attention. At the first landing the soldier led the way across a marble corridor to another staircase blocked off with an iron chain. He unlatched the chain, stepped back for Chang to pass, and replaced it behind them. On this staircase there was no other traffic, and the farther they climbed the more Chang felt he was entering a labyrinth he might never escape from. He looked at the red-coated trooper ahead of him and wondered if it would be better to simply slip a knife between the man’s ribs here, where they were alone, and then take his chances. As it was, he could only hope that he was indeed being taken to Bascombe—or Crabbé—and not into some isolated place of entrapment. He had mentioned Miss Temple’s name on a whim, to provoke a response—as well as to see if she had been there before him. That he had gained entry without any particular reaction left him mystified. It could mean that she was there, or that she wasn’t—or that they merely wanted to find her, which he already knew. He had to assume that the people who had allowed him in did not ultimately plan for him to leave. Still, the impulse to kill the soldier was mere nervousness. All that would come soon enough.
    They climbed past three landings but never a door or window. At the landing of the next floor, however, the soldier took a long brass key from his coat, glanced once at Chang, and stepped to a heavy wooden door. He inserted the key and turned it several times in the lock, the machinery echoing sharply within the stairwell, before pulling it open. He stepped aside and indicated that Chang should go in. Chang did so, his attention neatly divided between the instinctive suspicion about the man at his back and the room he was entering—a short marbled corridor with another door on the opposite side, some five yards away. Chang looked back to the soldier, who nodded him on toward the far door. When Chang did not move the soldier suddenly slammed the door shut. Before Chang could leap for the knob he heard the key being turned. The thing would not budge. He was locked in. He berated himself for a credulous fool and strode to the far door, fully expecting it to be locked as well, but the brass knob turned with a well-oiled
snick.

    He looked into a wide office with a deep green carpet, and a low ceiling made less oppressive by a domed skylight of creamy glass rising over the center of the room. The walls were lined with bookshelves stuffed with hundreds of massive numbered volumes—official documents no doubt, collected through the years and from around the world. The wide space of the room was divided between two great pieces of furniture—a long meeting table to Chang’s left and an expansive desk to his right—that, like oaken planets, cast their nets of gravity across an array of lesser satellites—end tables, ashtrays, and map-stands. The desk was unoccupied, but at the table, looking up from an array of papers spread around him, sat Roger Bascombe.
    “Ah,” he said, and awkwardly stood.
    Chang glanced around the office more carefully and saw a communication door—closed—in the wall behind Bascombe, and what might well be another hidden entrance set into the bookcases behind the desk. He pushed the main door closed behind him, turned to Bascombe and tapped the tip of his stick lightly on the carpet.
    “Good afternoon,” Chang said.
    “Indeed, it is,” Bascombe replied. “The days grow warmer.”
    Chang frowned. This was hardly the confrontation he had expected. “I believe I was announced,” he said.
    “Yes. Actually, Miss Celeste Temple was announced. And then your name of course, in turn.” Bascombe gestured to the wall where Chang could see the sending and receiving apparatus for the message tubes. Bascombe gestured again