Read your Handbook. It will tell you what to do.

That's what he said, the guy who looked like Wicket W. Warrick. And Tim had read his Handbook, practically cover-to-cover by now, though every time he thought he was done he found an index entry he'd overlooked, a chapter he must have skipped, a line he'd never read before. He read about things that had yet to happen, things that sunk cold spikes of fear into his chest and made him close the book in horror—yet when he recovered, he couldn't find them in the book again, and their memory dissolved in his mind like sheets of gelatin in hot water, leaving only a lingering unease.

But he couldn't find anything about the key the bearded man spoke of, or the door it unlocked.

He couldn't even find an entry for "key" or "door" or anything key- or door-adjacent in the index, though he was sure he'd looked up both of those exact things at some point since arriving on campus.

Wicket had mentioned a name, though: Peter Kirkland. And the name was there in the index, square in the middle of a page:

Kirkland, Peter.......158

somehow darker and denser than all the words around it, warping the page with its irresistible gravity. A sweet malevolence emanated from the name, Wicket's warning more a siren's song every time Tim turned to the index to stare at the name and ruminate on the one rule he was told to follow, and how it would feel to break it.

Tim didn't want to turn to page 158. He had avoided it so far. But nothing else was working. He pressed his thumb to the gilded edges of the pages and gave them a riffle, feeling each page lock into place in the furrows of his fingerprints, like teeth on the gears of some vast incomprehensible machine.

"Mr. Levitt?" The voice was gunshot loud, a herald of trespass in the private space of the Handbook. The gleaming edge of a page sliced into his thumb as Tim jerked his hand away from the book,. The hair-thin cut glowed red, a crack in the thin membrane that held back the roiling molten core underneath. "Mr. Levitt?"

He was in class. Dade's class. He had only the vaguest recollection how he'd gotten there. Dade was halfway down the aisle of desks, encroaching in Tim's airspace. He held Tim in his violet gaze, a displeased twist in his moustache. "I have to assume you've done the reading, since you've found something else to hold your interest."

Tim couldn't look away from Dade, but he was sure his classmates were staring at him too, as much as they dared (he was sure Dade didn't countenance rubbernecking or schadenfreude), trying in vain to suppress laughter. He shut the Handbook and groped for his backpack, maintaining contact with those intense amethyst eyes. "I—"

"Huck Finn's Pa. Tell me about him."

Tim's fingers found the fat spine of the Norton, as yet uncracked between the boundaries of the Twain section. He tried to recall something, anything from 10th-grade English, but the only image his brain would release was the day Mr. Mills accidentally wrote "Fuckleberry Hinn" on the whiteboard. Laughter erupted from his throat in a throttled bark.

"Something's funny?"

"Sorry, I just remembered some..." Tim hoisted the Norton onto his desk and started flipping, looking for whatever chapters they were supposed to have read, for whatever remained of his dignity.

"Page 50, Mr. Levitt." A snort from somewhere toward the back of the room. Tim found the page and his finger landed on a sentence:

We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the key under his head nights.

There it was. The key. Read your Handbook. It will tell you what to do. One way or the other. "He hid the key."

"And?"

"He hid the key." The rational part of Tim's brain, what remained of it, was telling him that he had uncovered no new information; that finding the word "key" in his assigned reading a mild coincidence at best and far from a statistical impossibility. But rational thinking had never done him much good. Rational thinking is what led to him abandoning Christy at her doorstep and driving home alone, the windows down, screaming into the hot wet night. Rational thinking made him abandon Joanie too. Whatever this was, whatever he was supposed to find, he couldn't abandon it. He couldn't let fear talk him out of joy or pleasure or discovery.

The Handbook sat plump and purple and smug on his desk, dwarfed by the Norton. A plum, cold and sweet. "He hid the key."

"We've established that." Dade dropped his eyes, dimming the violet lights. It was a gesture of disappointment, but Tim thought he saw recognition there too. An understanding. Tim knew, he knew, he could feel it vibrating in his temples: He's been where I'm going. He can show me the way. "Mr. Levitt, I'd like to see you this afternoon during my office hours. And please do the reading next time." Dade turned to return to his podium, and as he passed Lata's desk he tapped her on the shoulder. "Ms. Khan, do you have anything more cogent to add to the discussion?"

To be continued...