"Why is he a poor man?"
"I'm sure the last thing he envisioned when he started writing books was the hordes of ravening women who would turn stalker just to get his autograph." I flashed her a quick grin before I closed the door on her outraged protests.
I waved and toddled up the stairs to my attic apartment, a vague uneasy feeling still gripping me despite my determination to pooh-pooh the evening's events.
Miranda's predictions weren't real, couldn't be real, I told myself. At least, they weren't real in any sense a normal, feet-on-the-ground woman of moderate intelligence would recognize.
So why did I feel like I was being dragged slowly, but inexorably, to the edge of a black chasm from which there was no return?
Chapter Three
"So, what do you recommend as the sights to see around Blansko?"
"Oh, there are many magnificent tourist sights," the tall man sitting across from us answered, pushing his glasses higher up on his nose. "There are the karst, of course: Catherine Cave, Sloupsko-Sosuvske Cave, and Balcarka Cave are some of the better-known examples. And the Macocha Abyss is not to be missed; it is 138 meters deep, you know."
I didn't know, as a matter of fact, which was why, when I found an English-speaking ex-Czech national on the train heading north of Brno returning to his homeland for a brother's wedding, I pumped him for information on the area.
Roxy looked up from one of the Book of Secrets novels that I had secretly reread before the trip—secretly because I didn't want Roxy thinking I was reading it less as fiction and more as a guidebook to the area, as she was. "An abyss? There's an abyss? Is it dark and mysterious and bottomless? Are there things lurking in its hidden depths, things that no man has lived to tell about?"
"Ignore her," I told the man and his companion. "She refuses to read guidebooks, preferring to be surprised instead." I pulled out my own guidebook and flipped through it until I found the item mentioned.