Free That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote by K.J. Bishop

landscapes to surround each house with the necessary amount of space.
    I was taken with the thought that these were dream homes, literally: here was space from which history had been expunged, and an optical illusion of history set up in its place. The real houses were elsewhere on earth. Was this what one built when one lived with a sense of being precariously positioned in space and time? I imagined them all to be sleeping an enchanted sleep that would go on through the years, until they were embedded in a thick enough buildup of time to wake without vanishing into the air.
    No shops or workplaces were in evidence here, only these evocations, these love letters to the past and the distance. I wanted to go invisibly wandering through them. Such nostalgic houses cried out, I thought, to be haunted.
    You might well have been inside one of them. It was their nostalgic quality that had made me think of you, of course, or you who had made me think of their nostalgic quality. However, I knew there would be no point asking Sharon to drop me off down there so that I could go looking door to door. Since it was a weekday, you probably wouldn’t be at home in any case.
    We drove out of the valley onto a wide flat plain. This, too, was covered with houses, but only brick bungalows too modest and sensible to inspire any further flights of sympathy for the devil. We were heading towards a structure in the middle distance. A fort -like grey building made of numerous intersecting boxes, I began to appreciate its titanic size as we approached it. There were colourful flags on the parapet of its flat roof, and crowning it an enormous sign in red and blue lettering.
    ‘ There it is,’ said Virgil, pointing at the prodigious building just as I was deciphering the sign:
     
    MEDINA
    WORLD OF SHOPPING
     
    I felt distinctly swindled, but decided to hold my tongue until we were there. Leaving the freeway, we headed out a road that eventually reached a ramp curving down into the black, tiered harbour of a vast car park beneath the Medina.
    Down and around, around and down. I waited, getting impatient and a little motion-sick, until we were inserted in a parking spot on the fourth underground level. Sharon turned off the engine.
    ‘ Thank you for the lift,’ I then said, ‘but isn’t this just a shopping mall?’
    Virgil laughed and ignored my question. ‘You should give Sharon a good tip,’ he said. Sharon reached around into the back of the van with her hand held out and wiggled her fingers expectantly. This was when I saw that she had an eye in the palm of her hand.
    ‘ And you should give me a good tip too,’ Virgil said. ‘Otherwise, maybe I won’t be able to help you find what you want.’
    They were both grinning, as if they didn ’t take any of this too seriously.
    So I grinned too. We were all grinning. Lovely. Who were these two jokers? Were they local demons, or had I somehow brought them with me from the sandy city, or even the preceding desert? Had they been going ahead of me, like long morning shadows? Was this all some kind of scam, to which the woman at Delphi Travel had also been party?
    An idea had been sitting quietly in the back of my mind while we were driving. It now moved to the front of my mind.
    ‘ Okay,’ I said, and began fishing in my bag, ‘but you have to face the other way and close your eyes. All of them. No peeking.’
    ‘ Okay, okay,’ they both agreed, nodding. Good, they assumed I was an idiot. They turned their heads, so that only Vigil’s rear eye and Sharon’s palm-eye faced me, and both of those were squeezed shut like the eyes of children waiting to be given a surprise present.
    Bringing out two of my mirror coins, I held one over Sharon ’s palm, and the other just in front of Virgil’s eye.
    I didn ’t have to do anything else, because both eyes opened a crack, trying to peek at what I was giving them.
    Any question about the species of my two chaperones was answered. Demons cannot