"There's a very fine thread of gold in the center," he explains to Horvath. "There were more smiths around when I bought the place."

Balthazar probably has a few boxes of sci-fi pulps and back issues of 'Weird Tales' in his attic. A guy can go through a lot of books in a few decades.

He's mildly surprised by Dave's question. But then, he did imply he hadn't been here in a while. Something may have happened. But then, Balthazar wasn't planning on running the shop forever. "Well, not in the basement," he says. "There's an apartment in the floor above the shop. And a small attic."

It's all a bit oddly-shaped and labyrinthine, much like the way he packs inventory into the shop itself. One gets a distorted sense of physical space.