I work at the information desk at the Museum of Antiquities. If you want to know where the region’s premiere collection of Etruscan bronze wolf statues is located, or which floor the touring display of 16th century Mughal manuscripts is on, you ask me. Likewise, I refer all reports of clogged toilets in the restrooms to the head custodian, hand out brochures, and explain how to read a map to tourists. I also run the lost and found.

Last thursday, right after I’d just returned from lunch, a man in a suit came up to the desk and cleared his throat. I smiled, which is what I am supposed to do, and asked him how I could help.

He said, “this is the lost and found?”

I noticed that he had an accent he was trying to cover up. Low country, I thought, like Holland or Belgium; I don’t really know geography, but we get a lot of foreign tourists. I asked him if he’d lost something, or had something to turn in.

“Yes, do you have a blue notebook? I have lost a blue notebook, spiral bound, with the spirals on the top. The wire, I mean.”

Which was odd, because someone had called the desk earlier that day, asking if we’d found a blue spiral notebook that opened on the top, but he hadn’t had an accent. The call was also odd for other reasons, like the terrific, almost threatening tone in his voice, and the fact that he’d left his name, and made me actually say I promised not to give it to anyone but him.

I asked the foreign gentleman in the suit what his name was. He started looking nervous, and he said, “what name? Why am I asked names? This is not necessary!”

He had said it louder than he’d had to, and one of the security guards at the door had noticed. The guard looked at me to ask if the gentleman was about to cause a disturbance, but I shook my head to indicate it was under control. I told the foreign man to please lower his voice, and I reminded him that when he’d called earlier that day, he’d made me promise not to give the notebook to anyone but him.

The man lost his color, looked around the museum furtively, as though everyone was watching him. “It can’t be him,” he said, “how could he know?” Then he looked at me and narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t call you today, sir, nor have I ever called you. But you must give me that notebook now.”

I looked over at the security guard, who was still watching all of this, and he came toward the man, ready to escort him out of the building. The foreign man saw this and reached into his pocket, pulled his wallet out. “Please, you don’t know what you’re doing! I will give you ten thousand dollars for that notebook, only do not let him get his hands on it!”

I informed him that the man on the phone had offered twenty thousand, which was a lie. The man said he would pay anything I wanted, that money was, in his words, immaterial. He was screaming this.

Just then the security guard put his hand on the man’s shoulder and began to pull him away, but the man, not intending to go quietly, began chanting in tongues. Before the security guard had dragged the man three steps towards the door, the hand that was touching his suit began to turn transparent. The guard’s hand could no longer hold on to anything, and the foreign man was free. Soon, the rest of the guard’s body had become as transparent as his hand, and his uniform slid off, and his belt with his walkie talkie fell on the floor. I saw the light glint off his contact lenses as they fell straight down from his eyes.

He stood there, terror-stricken, naked but nearly invisible. People started screaming. He started screaming too, but his voice was inaudible. Then he began sinking through the floor, which I supposed could no longer hold him up.

“He’ll fall forever,” said the foreign man. Meanwhile, the room had filled up with yellow smoke and all the lightbulbs had started exploding. A tall figure with the head of an owl was riding a giant fox down the spiral staircase; he had owl wings, too, and a sword slung over his left shoulder. He seemed familiar, then I remembered I had seen a picture of him in de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal.

“Behold,” he squawked, “Andras, who ruleth thirty legion!” I recognized the voice from our previous phone conversation.

The foreign man hissed like the lowest note on an oboe, as a column of golden light engulfed him, and shined through him as it does through a stained-glass picture of Saint George. “You will not harm these people,” he said, and he now held a sword in his right hand.

I looked around and noted that the museum patrons had disappeared, and the three of us were now in an underwater grotto.

The foreign man attacked the man with the owl head, and the edges of their swords became jigsaw puzzles that interlocked for an instant when they struck.

This was all very interesting to me, so I watched it for a few more minutes. The two kept fighting until at last one of them smote the other one. I won’t mention who the winner was, because I don’t really think that is relevant to the story.

What is important is that the winner (and again, I am not saying who that was) got his notebook back, and left, and I got to be on television. The fellow who interviewed me asked if I had looked in the blue notebook to see what was written there, and I said of course I had, wouldn’t you? He said well, wouldn’t you like to tell us what it said, and so I told everybody.