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would make it impossible for him to find whatever it was he was supposed to find.
    Horace began to move more quickly, working his way toward the far end of the room. For the first time he caught sight of the rear wall, and was astonished—a door stood there that would have been at home in a castle, or a fortress. Ten feet high, wooden timbers reinforced with metal bands, sealed by a crossbar as thick as a leg. “A refuge,” Horace muttered,remembering Mr. Meister’s words. He wondered how long the old man was going to stay gone.
    He continued down the line, now just reading the labels.
    Useless
    Misplaced
    Displaced
    Oblong
    Unsavory
    Tangible
    Horace was just starting to think that the labels were becoming less and less sensible when his eyes fell on the label of the next bin down.
    Of Scientific Interest
    Horace stopped, his interest immediately roused. He leaned over the bin. A small sound nagged at his ears as he did so, a faint, low grind like the sound of a tiny motor winding down. He quickly discovered the source: a small, wobbling ball of clockwork. The size of a plum, the entire object was a seething golden mass of turning gears and whirring springs and tiny obscure mechanisms. Nearly every bit of its surface was in motion, so that it rocked slightly in place.
    The OF SCIENTIFIC INTEREST bin turned out to be full of many such wonders. There was a human face—an exquisitemask, thin as paper. Horace understood intuitively that the face belonged to someone, that the face was real, that the woman depicted had been someone’s child, sister, mother. There was also a transparent rod, two inches thick and a foot long. Inside the rod was a fish, black as charcoal and nearly as finless as an eel. It was alive. It was almost as long and as wide as the rod itself, and it shimmied slowly, steadily, as though caught in a gentle, unending current. It could not hope to turn around inside the rod; there was not enough room. It could only keep swimming in place, all but motionless. Horace choked back a rising knot of pity. He knew that the fish was unspeakably old.
    Perhaps most astonishing of all was a grapefruit-sized globe of the earth, surrounded by a glowing haze within which the globe rotated slowly. Horace watched it for a long time and very nearly did pick it up. It was, he determined at last, real. Horace knew its oceans were filled with actual water; he could see currents, and light bouncing off its surface. Its poles were made of ice that gleamed and felt cool to a fingertip hovering overhead. Its green patches were living, growing plants—microscopic trees?—and the clouds that moved over its surface drifted and swirled. It was—strange to say it—the most unworldly object Horace had ever encountered.
    And then Horace spotted a diminutive leather pouch with a buttoned-down flap. The pouch was oval, golden-red in color, a little smaller than Horace’s open hand. The surface was inscribed with a twining figure eight—or was it aninfinity symbol? Horace tilted his head to one side and then the other, gazing at the pouch, and then, before he even knew what he was doing, he reached out and picked it up.
    He opened the flap. He pulled out what was inside—a gleaming oval box. Immediately, the globe and the clockwork ball and the impossible fish—all those marvels—slid from his mind. In many respects, the box was the most ordinary item here: quite small, made of a shimmering striped wood, shades of brown and gold and red. A line of silver snaked across the lid, and on one curving side was a delicate gleaming starburst design. Of all the objects he’d seen so far, only this box could have looked at home on the shelves of an ordinary store. Yet it was the most marvelous thing Horace had ever seen. Next to it, all the other wonders paled like cheap parlor tricks in the presence of real magic.
    Horace wrapped his fingers around the box. The world dropped away, and he