At the very center of the town of Four Points, there was a shop called the Fifth Point.
The Fifth Point was a shop, yes, but one that had never sold a single thing. It was small and square and brick and tucked between a coffeehouse and a launderette so that the air around it always smelled both bitter and sweet.
On each of the shop’s four sides, there was a display window, with panes of glass so grimed and grubbed and smudged that nothing on display could possibly be seen. And next to each window, there was a door.
And above each door hung a wooden sign, with script that had once been glinty gold but was now tarnished and spotted. The signs all read:
The Fifth Point
And beneath:
Open by Appointment Only
How to make an appointment, the signs didn’t say. What the shop sold and who owned it, the signs didn’t say that either. And almost no one in Four Points knew, because almost no one in Four Points had ever been inside the Fifth Point.
But plenty of people had been above it.
Because rising out of the top of the Fifth Point was a twisting, tapering, midnight-black iron spire that blossomed—high above the other shops, high above the town of Four Points—into a star-shaped platform.
And on all four corners of the shop, welded to the roof, fixed and firm, there were ladders. Ladders with this message engraved on their eye-level rungs:
Come right up, dear souls.
See the lights above.
Grow the Light inside.
And inside the Fifth Point, someone was watching and waiting, watching and waiting, always watching and waiting for the right ones to come and see and grow.