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HOUSE
    ARCHITECT: THOMAS TEFFT
    COMPLETED 1854
    At over 150 years old, in a town famous for hauntings, the place had to have collected a ghost or two. Sean hadn’t noticed any when he had helped Dad take out the library windows last year, but that had been in broad daylight. Come nightfall, old Endecott might show up. Maybe Mrs. Endecott, dragging a gauzy train and a ghost-pug. Or did magical wards repel ghosts, too? If so, the Arkwright House would be spirit-free; an invisible barrier started a foot from the terrace walls, and an experimental probing had given Sean a hair-raising tingle on the verge of painful.
    Inside the house, an unseen hand twitched lace curtains from a window. No ghost: Helen Arkwright emerged, and with her shorts and flip-flops, she was about as far as you could get from a Victorian specter. She ran down the steps and through the gate to join them. “You guys made good time!”
    â€œPretty amazing, with Eddy driving,” Sean said
    Eddy was too busy hugging Helen to protest, but afterwards she punished him: “I had to drive. Sean was hungover.”
    â€œBull!”
    Helen hugged Sean. If she was sniffing for alcohol, he couldn’t tell. “I vote bull, too,” she said.
    Eddy clarified: “I meant from no sleep because he was talking to aether-newts all night.”
    Would it have killed Eddy not to mention the sighting out on the sidewalk, where any lurking invisible familiar might hear? Helen must have read Sean’s mind, because she gestured them inside the gate and thus through the ward-barrier before saying, “Aether- newts ?”
    â€œNot plural,” Sean said. “Just the one we think is Orne’s. It let me see it last night.”
    â€œAway from your house?”
    â€œIt was outside, I was in.”
    â€œDid it communicate anything?”
    â€œFlicked its tail, whatever that means. Then I kind of yelled at it, and it went invisible again.”
    Eddy raised her eyebrows.
    Helen asked no more. “We’ll talk about it later. Let’s have lunch first.”
    Because the Arkwright House had been built way before it was fashionable for rich people to cook, the kitchen was in the basement. Luckily the basement was mostly above ground level, so Helen had been able to install a whole wall of windows to brighten up the long room. They ate chicken salad at a breakfast bar overlooking the back garden, which for now grew only Dumpsters and stacks of plywood—the carriage house was being remodeled to provide offices for the Order.
    Lunch done, Helen led them through the first floor. Last summer it had featured stepladders and plaster dust and the frayed guts of knob-and-tube wiring. Now the marble floors, walnut woodwork, and plaster moldings looked like new. Eddy was impressed by the grandeur of the parlors and dining room, but when they walked into the library that took up the rear third of the floor, she went into near shock. At the east end were tall windows and a conference table with chairs as ornate as thrones. At the west end was a fireplace fronted by a leather couch and armchairs. Directly opposite the doors was a dais like an oversized pulpit or the upper deck of a ship. Computer stations ringed it, but on top was a massive antique desk, and above the desk were the stained glass windows Dad had restored: The Founding of Arkham .
    Every other inch of wall space, from floor to fifteen-foot ceilings, featured bookcases, and every inch of every shelf was crammed with books.
    Eddy came out of her bug-eyed catatonia and walked around the room, trailing her fingers across the book spines. “God, Helen. This is in your house .”
    Someone who didn’t know Eddy might have mistaken her awe for horror, as if she’d opened a closet, and it had spilled out a horde of rats. Helen knew her well enough to say, “It’s great, isn’t it? None of my doing, except for the new workstations. Endecott Arkwright was the