He came to in a room that smelled of fish and salt and bile, the echo of a scream that sounded familiar rapidly fading from his ears. It was a basement, probably; large, stone, and dank in a way that rooms above ground could never manage. It was also dark — dark enough that the single candle flickering a few feet from his face only made it harder to see.

From behind and to his left, a robed figure dragged a young woman he had never seen into the small island of candlelight. A low keening whimper escaped her lips, but her eyes made it clear that it was the mental equivalent of a light left on; the owner mercifully long gone to some other place. He struggled to stand or to shout, but his hands were tied to something solid and low behind him and all that escaped his painfully raw throat was a low sort of gasp. The robed figure snapped its head up and from beneath the hood the candlelight reflected off two deep-set eyes and a row of smiling teeth.
“Getting to you, Professor,” it said. “Wait your turn.”
Turning back to the task at hand, the robed figure dragged the girl across the circle of candlelight. There it pulled a long, thin-bladed knife from the loose rope belting its waist and almost casually sliced the girl’s dress and belly open. With a snap her eyes registered fear again and the whimper turned into a scream. The robed figure pushed her and she fell away and down, out of the candlelight, her scream echoing and fading for a long time before it cut off. A blast of hot, foetid air struck the Professor’s face and he heaved, finding his stomach mercifully empty.

“You killed her,” his voice quivered with astonishment and a rising anger.
“Hardly,” the figure replied, coming to kneel in front of him and drawing back its hood. It was a young man, unremarkable to look at. “Oh, don’t get me wrong, she is surely dead, but not by my hand. She was just chum.”
“The blood…”
“No, Professor. The terror. At his will, I call them to feed.”
“You worship those… those things?”
“Oh ho, Professor, I was right about you after all. You do know what lurks beneath this town. But no, I am no brainless cultist worshiping monsters in the dark. I serve the deepest. From his watery throne he dreams me here to do his bidding.”
“If you are to kill me, then do it now and dispense with this rot.”
“All in good time, Professor. You must wait your turn. You are an interesting one, though. I wonder, what dreams you?”

The God Of The Wastes was out there somewhere beyond the dunes, buried in the sand. She was the god of death. She was their protector. The God Of The Skies stretched above. He was the god of life. He was their creator.

The stories of the People told of a time when the tears of the God Of The Skies had fallen on the wastes, splash, splash, splash, forming the three oases the People called their homes. To travel between them, one must set out at dawn in the direction the elder indicated and walk straight from horizon to horizon, then again, then a third and a fourth time. When dusk came the next oasis would be in sight. If it was not, the God Of The Wastes had taken you.

In all other directions lay the lands of the dead, from whence the restless spirits sometimes came and charged the air with malice. When they did, the God Of The Wastes threw up sand into the air to force the People to stay inside their homes until the danger had passed.

They say any available evolutionary niche will eventually be filled by some enterprising mitochondrial strain. The human race had bulldozed most of those niches, paved them over and started charging rent.

The dirt from felled mountains had to go somewhere, of course, so into the oceans it went, and more land ripe for the building was the result. The water was desalinated for drinking, or split into vast hydrogen and oxygen reserves for the fuel cells that powered the cities, and the rest, with a little help from the increased heat output of the ever expanding, ever demanding human race, escaped into the atmosphere; a global, roiling storm that stretched from pole to pole. The rain was unceasing. Unending. The only escape from it was to be safely indoors, under a nice sturdy roof.

Roofs, therefore, were humanity’s next great endeavour. What had been cities became city, and then building. The animals had no choice but to move indoors. To adapt. There was space for them, too, in the foundations and breezeways and refuse dumps and reservoirs. The places where humans no longer had any real need to tread. The carnivores went on living much as they had in their new environs. The herbivores adapted quickly. Organic was organic after all, and the understreets were full of the leftovers of locally-lab-grown produce, cave mosses and lichens that were secretly quite pleased about the recent (to a lichen’s way of thinking) changes about the place, and of course the libraries.

Nobody had much known what to do with the libraries. They weren’t strictly needed anymore, of course. Every known scrap of writing had long since been digitised, down to the drunken scribblings of names and phone numbers on the back of bar mats. The most stalwart of book lovers was hard pressed to tell the difference between the feel or even smell of the current electronic readers and the real thing. Of course there were rarities and personal favourites in private collections all around the world, but when it came down to it there were, in the pages (if you will allow me that) of human history, vast swathes of literature, self-help books and recipe collections that were objectively not worth the paper they were printed on. Still, burning them seemed rather totalitarian, and so the libraries had simply been closed, the librarians given new jobs shushing people at funerals or movie theatres, and the building went on around and eventually over them.

They were the new forests. It was as if all that paper had suddenly decided to become trees again. As if the potential had always been there. Exploratory book-finding parties led by rich eccentrics desperate to find and save last remaining signed first editions of this or that were seldom heard from again. The floors were littered with leaves and folios, stalked through by big cats dark as ink. High in the stacks primates capered, and in the rafters brightly coloured birds built nests from pages of picture books.

“What would you have of me, then?”
“Only love. I know that it is an opinion much out of favour in the common custom, but it has always been my belief that true love is sufficient of and for anything. Indeed, that any love that is not sufficient also be not true.”
“It is not, nor has it ever been that simple!”
“You do me ill, madam, to imply so. For, in the implying, you deny the truth of all that I feel for you. More again, of all that I am. At love’s call I would bear all of fortune’s slings and arrows save one, that one being only your wish that I bear none in your name. Even in this I am undone, for guided as it is by Apollo it is the one whose aim I cannot escape.”

“Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was that they no longer believed.”

That’s where it ends, you see. I’ve seen the original edition, hand-lettered and signed. I wish I could tell you other; I wish I could tell you anything else, but everything from there is a lie. Peter was touched. There is no denying that. He’s not the type to change overnight, but he made the effort. Imagine, if you will, Peter making the effort. Hands on his hips, all a-crow, but something holds him and he asks first after her. It’s a dilemma, of course. It’s a problem. But Wendy moves on. Wendy grows up. The adventures are there, but as much as he throws himself into them there is something wrong without her. Day by day, year by year, fresh-faced all the while, Peter grows old.

The rain is fierce on the canopy outside, but only a few drops make it through the leaves to trip a staccato beat on the metal of the roof. The rest trickles and pools, gathering in hollows and slipping down trunks to soak the earth. The path to the door is overgrown and disused, covered with fallen branches and vines on the outside, and tottering piles of books and sheets of loose paper on the inside. The books shift restlessly, still unused to their captivity and nervous about the ability of these walls to keep out the damp. A few eye the fire nervously, gnawing quietly in the corner on a log that might just be someone’s distant relative.

In the House there is a Room. In the Room there is a Wall. This is the Wall of Doors. At the center of the Wall is a fireplace, as tall as a man. The ceiling is lost in the dark, away from the glow of firelight and candlelight, but as high up as the eye can see the Wall is covered in doors and windows and picture frames. Each one is different: large, small, ornate, plain. Through some, snatches of music can be heard. Through others comes the smell of earth or sea air. What are you waiting for? Open one.

The moon rose full in the sky over the sleepy seaside town. It lit up the mist that rolled in over the ocean, and picked out the figures standing on the headlands. The night was so cold that even the sheriff was safe and warm inside, otherwise someone might have been out walking and seen the suspicious figures, or heard the monotonous chant they sent out to sea. As it was, they remained undisturbed. After a time the waves grew larger, disturbing the surface of the mist and whipping the chanting figures into a frenzy. Some collapsed, foaming at the mouth, but a few kept up the chant. From out past the horizon, rising from the depths, it came.

“I’m tired,” he said.
The sun streamed around him and in through the balcony doors, and the air was fresh with a gentle breeze blowing in off the ocean and up the cobbled streets.
“So sleep,” she said. “We’ll be up until dawn tonight.”
“I wanted to walk around the quayside with you today. Stop for coffee or a glass of wine somewhere right by the ocean. Wind our way through the back alleys looking for treasures in antique stores and bookshops and delis.”
“That sounds nice. There’s plenty of time, though. Come over here. Sleep. I’ll still be here when you wake up.”