by T E. D Klein
The hour had been later than she realized; it was nearly five by the time she'd reached home. She had noticed an ambulance parked outside the building, and an empty police car, but her thoughts had been on other things. Upstairs, when the elevator opened, she'd heard men's voices; they were coming from the old woman's apartment. Suddenly fearful, she had unlocked the door. A policeman was standing in the front room, talking to Mrs Slavinsky's daughter, while another spoke softly on the phone. Two black ambulance attendants were unrolling something near the entrance to the old woman's bedroom. All turned to look at Carol when she came in, but the only one who spoke to her was the daughter, who explained to her quite calmly, with little apparent grief and without a trace of accusation in her voice, how, sometime after Carol had gone out, she had phoned her mother, gotten no answer, tried again an hour later, still without success, and how at last she'd hurried over to find that the old woman, no doubt having returned to bed for an afternoon's nap, had somehow contrived to wind the blanket around her face…
She didn't seem to blame Carol. Later, after the men had left, bearing with them the shapeless thing in the bag, she had even offered to let Carol stay on in the apartment, at least until she was able to find a suitable place of her own. But Carol was in no mood to remain there; she was too horrified by the voices in her head, the guilty one that insisted it wasn't her fault, she'd done nothing wrong, and the one that reminded her how remarkably convenient the old woman's death had been. For now she was free to take the job at Voorhis; would have to take it, in fact. Absolutely perfect timing…
She reported for work at the library the following Monday and spent part of the first week in the Chelsea Hotel just up the block. But despite the place's legendary glamour and the furtive fascination with which Carol regarded the tenants and visitors who strolled its echoing yellow halls, the hotel was far too expensive. A roommate service in a shabby second-floor office on Fourteenth Street had connected her with Rochelle, whose previous roommate had moved out. Carol was more than willing to take the tiny bedroom; it was private, at least. Rochelle, who slept on a sofa bed in the living room, had the run of the apartment. She was not the sort of person Carol would have chosen to live with, and in the month they'd been together they had not become real friends; but (Carol reminded herself) the girl could be quite good-hearted at times, and besides, with the situation as it was, Carol knew she couldn't be choosy. She was grateful for the roof over her head, grateful she could remain in the city. For a while she'd been haunted by visions of returning home to Pennsylvania a failure, to throw herself, like a child, back on the support of her family. Now, at least, she had a job; she could survive here after all.
At two fifteen today she'd been summoned to the first-floor office by the assistant supervisor, Miss Elms, a greying, harried-looking woman whose desk, opposite Carol's, was piled high with correspondence.
'You look as though you could use a change of scene,' she said, regarding Carol dourly over the top of her glasses. 'When you come back off your break, I'm sending you upstairs. Mrs Schumann's got a four o'clock story hour – and since it's the last day of school, those kids may get a bit rambunctious.'
Carol would have much preferred working downstairs, but told herself that, with the weather grown so warm these days, most of the children would probably be staying outside.
'Remember,' the supervisor added, 'you're not up there to read, and you're not up there to daydream. You're there to give Mrs Schumann a helping hand.'
Climbing the stairs, Carol wondered if Mrs Schumann had been complaining about her to the supervisor. If so, it seemed unfair; she worked just as hard as anyone else. There simply wasn't very much to do on the second floor, short of helping fledgling readers with the harder words and keeping an eye out for the occasional fight. Yet she knew there'd been truth in what the supervisor had said; she had recently discovered that she preferred children's books to the children themselves.
All but the central desk upstairs was half-sized, a world in miniature: worktables like low wooden platforms rose just inches from the floor, and several of the chairs came only to her knee. Though she herself was slight of build and had small, delicate features, it was hard not to feel oversized here, like Alice down the rabbit hole or some invading giant from one of the fairy-tale books in the corner.
Mrs Schumann, the children's librarian, sat placidly behind the desk. She was a heavy, slow-moving woman who perspired easily and who left her chair only with the greatest reluctance. Except for her, a pair of laughing little girls, and a dispirited-looking preschooler trudging glumly round the bookshelves with his mother, the floor was deserted, the air oppressive and still. Above the humming of four small electric fans that turned their heads from side to side, she could hear the chugging of the Xerox machine on the first floor, the swish-swish, swish-swish of the outer doors swinging open and shut, and the tread of footsteps on the stairs. School was out; soon the room would be filling up.
The footsteps echoed hollowly in the silence of the hall; a tiny face emerged above the banister. The child peered uncertainly around the empty floor like the first guest at a party, then slunk toward the central desk to confer in urgent whispers with the librarian.
Carol drifted toward the front window and stared idly down at the street. The buildings across the way were drab and dull, a large old residential hotel gone seedy, a furniture showroom, a warehouse with trucks lined up in front of it all day.
The rear windows held a better view. Here sunlight slanted down upon a tiny courtyard hidden between the buildings; overgrown by creepers, vines, and weeds, it had lain black and apparently lifeless all winter, she'd been told, but in recent months had flourished, until it presently resembled a transplanted patch of forest. During free moments of the day – and when, as now, she'd been assigned upstairs before the schoolchildren arrived – Carol liked to stand by the window, glad to find some glimpse of nature amid the bricks.
Below her a clump of thornbushes were irregular green blobs upon a darker field of undergrowth and earth. An oak and two young maples struggled upward toward the light, their trunks thin as walking sticks, while delicate green fernlike vines grew up the side of the opposite building, higher than the floor on which she stood. Through the glass she watched the fronds blow and tremble in the breeze, some of which passed over the top of the open window just below the ceiling. The shade stirred softly above her. Lifting its bottom edge, she felt the touch of cooler air upon her face; it carried the smell of soil and leaves and, from somewhere, the faintest, most elusive trace of roses.
Downstairs the outer doors went swish-swish, swish-swish.
Seen from this height, the view from the rear windows reminded Carol of a garden gone back to the wild, and she could never think of it without a queer, indefinable longing; given over entirely to plants, it hinted at some mystery far deeper than the mysteries in the books that lined the wall. She felt a strangeness in it, yet without the sense of dread that wilderness on a vaster scale inspired. No being had ever set foot back there, at least no one she had seen; she wasn't even sure that one could reach it, for the courtyard appeared to be surrounded by high metal fences. It remained forever beyond the windowpane, like a fragile green world preserved within a bottle.
Suddenly, in the midst of the green, something small and black caught her eye. It lay almost directly below the library window and half in the shadow of a thornbush, down among the ground vines and weeds. She leaned forward to peer more closely, pressing her forehead against the glass, but from this distance it was impossible to say just what it was, only what it appeared to be: an arrangement of small black sticks protruding from a shallow hole in the earth, forming a vague pattern, a circle bisected by a line extending slightly on both sides.
Carol sighed. So someone had been back there after all. Whether the objects had been dropped or buried, they were certainly a sign of human intrusion. Whatever their origin – some broken fragments of a plant, perhaps, a bit of machinery, or me
rely Utter-it came to only one thing: her garden had been violated.
She was still bent dejectedly over the window, a little surprised at the strength of her reaction, when, from the hallway behind her, she heard the measured tread of footsteps coming up the stairs.
'I'm not a young man anymore,' he was saying. 'The doctors tell me not to make any long-range plans.' He smiled wistfully and blinked his mild eyes. 'But before I die I'd like to finish a little book I've been working on. A book about children.'
They stood talking softly by the window, barely disturbing the stillness of the room. The little man's words didn't carry far, and they had a gentle, lisping quality which she found strangely soothing. His voice was high and quavery as a flute.
Though at first she'd half resented him for interrupting her reverie – why didn't he bother Mrs Schumann if he had a problem, why had he come straight to her? – Carol had to admit that there was something rather touching about the man. For all his paunch and double chin he looked surprisingly frail up close, and a good deal older than she'd at first supposed, perhaps well along in his seventies. He was no taller than she was, with plump little hands, plump little lips, and soft pink skin with little trace of hair. He reminded her of a freshly powdered baby.
'This will be a book about your own children?' she asked, preparing herself for an onslaught of reminiscence.
He shook his head. 'No, nothing like that. I've never been blessed with children.' Again the wistful smile, all the more affecting in so droll a figure. 'I do enjoy watching them, though. Like those two over there.' He gestured toward the bookshelves in the rear. 'Can you see what they're doing? My eyes aren't what they used to be.'
Carol glanced over her shoulder. Behind the central desk, two small girls darted silently through the aisles of books. 'Oh, them!' she said. She wondered if she should tell Mrs Schumann, but the librarian was leafing through a pile of catalogues. 'I'm afraid they're being rather naughty. They seem to be playing tag.'
The little man nodded. 'A game that predates history. Once upon a time the loser would have paid with her life.'
From behind the shelves came a screech of laughter.
'That's the subject of my book,' he went on. 'The origin of games. And nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and the like. Some of them go back – oh, even farther than I do!' He cocked his head and smiled. 'What I mean is, there's a bit of the savage behind even the most innocent-looking creations. Do you follow me?'
'I'm not sure I do.' She felt a flicker of impatience; he still hadn't said exactly what he wanted.
He pursed his lips. 'Well, take today, for instance, the twenty-fourth of June – traditionally a very special day. Magic spells are twice as strong right now. People fall in love. Dreams come true. Did you have any dreams last night?'
'I can't remember.'
'Most likely you did. Young girls always dream on Midsummer Eve. The night just seems to call for it.'
'But surely we're a long way from midsummer,' said Carol. 'The season's just begun.'
He shook his head. 'The ancients saw things a bit differently. To them the year was like a turning wheel, one half winter, one half summer, each with a festival in the middle. Winter had the Yule feast, summer what we're celebrating now – Midsummer Day. For us, of course, the year's been flattened to death on a calendar, and Yule is just another word for Christmas, but originally it had nothing to do with Christ. The only birth it marked was the birth of the sun.'
'Wait, you mean… another Son?'
He laughed, a little louder than necessary. 'No, no. Oh, my, no! I was referring to that big fellow out there.' He nodded toward the window. 'You see, Yuletide celebrates the winter solstice. Afterward, the days start getting longer. As of last night, though, we've come to the other end of the wheel. The days are growing shorter now. The sun's begun to die.'
Carol found herself watching the sunlight as it streamed obliviously through the window, its radiance undiminished. How odd, with all the hot days still ahead – how odd to think of it cooling, dying, growing dark…
'Long ago,' he was saying, 'Midsummer was a time of portents. Rivers overflowed their banks or suddenly dried up. Certain plants were said to turn to poison. Madmen had to be confined, witches held their sabbats. In China dragons left their caves and flew about the sky like flaming meteors. In Britain they were known as drakes, serpents, "worms," and Midsummer was the time for them to breed. They say the whole countryside shook with the sound, and that farmers lit bonfires – in those days that meant fires of bones – in an effort to drive them away. There were other fires, too: fires, dancing, midnight chants to commemorate the passing of the sun. Even today there are places in Europe where children celebrate Midsummer Eve by dancing round a bonfire. At the end of the dance,' one by one, they leap across the flames. It seems harmless enough, of course – at worst a burnt bottom or two! – but trace it back to the beginning and… well, I think you can guess what you'll find.'
'More than just a burnt bottom, I suppose.'
He laughed. 'A lot more! A ritual sacrifice! Or take a more familiar example: an innocent little counting rhyme like "Eeny meeny miny mo.
'Catch a beggar by the toe?'
'That's it. Except that twenty years ago, before they cleaned up the language, you would have said "Catch a nigger by the toe." And two centuries ago you'd have repeated a string of nonsense words: "Bascalora hora do," something like that. There are hundreds of variations. The one you grew up with, incidentally, puts you – hmm, let me see… ' He scratched his head. 'Oh, I'd say somewhere around Ohio. Am I right?'
'Hey, that's really incredible! I'm from Pennsylvania, right across the border.'
He nodded, not at all surprised. 'A very pretty area. I know it well.' Turning, he gazed dreamily out the window, sunshine playing on the little pink baby skull, the wisps of hair that glowed white with a touch of yellow.
Carol watched him in silence as he stood before her, blinking in the light. There'd been something in his tremulous old-man's voice which hinted at considerable experience, but till now she hadn't been inclined to take him seriously. Maybe it was his size, or his funny little lisp; he was far too small to be threatening. No doubt his reference to Ohio had been a lucky guess; still, she found herself oddly impressed.
Presently he turned. 'I'll tell you what's even more remarkable,' he said. 'You can trace that little rhyme of yours all the way back to the Druids.' He smiled at her look of disbelief. 'Oh, I assure you, it's quite true. Once upon a time, when Britain was occupied by the Romans, it was a sacrificial chant. The Druids had a rather nasty habit, you know – they liked to burn people in wicker cages! – and they used the "Bascalora" method to choose a victim. "Basca" means basket, and "lora"-'
'Isn't that Latin for "straps"?'
His smile widened. 'Well, bless me, you are smart! Binding straps, yes. To tie the hands.'
She was pleased to see the admiration in his eyes. 'My one good subject,' she said, and allowed herself a modest smile. Briefly another thought intruded: the night sky, a mound aglow with flames, and a girl very much like herself bound naked to a kind of altar. Something long and white was emerging from the shadows. She pushed it from her mind. 'I've had a lot of practice,' she said. 'In Latin, I mean. And your subject is – this type of thing? Childhood and primitive rituals?'
He nodded. 'More or less.'
Behind him three more children had arrived, and soon they'd be asking for her help. She would have to cut this short. 'It sounds absolutely fascinating,' she said, 'but you know, you're really in the wrong place. The books we have up here – well, they're very basic, strictly for pre-teens. You want downstairs, under Anthropology. Or you might try looking through Child Development… '
He nodded genially. 'Yes, I know, I've already been down there. Voorhis has a very good collection.' He patted the briefcase beneath his arm. 'Until this afternoon, in fact, I'd been looking for a certain little book, a study of Agon di-Gatuan, the so-called "Old Language." I'd searched
the whole city, top to bottom, and this was the only place that had it.'
Carol was amused at how pleased he sounded with himself. 'Oh, really?' she said. 'Top to bottom? You must be pretty thorough! The city's an awfully big place.'
'Not at all. Not when you know what you're looking for.'
He smiled and took a step closer.
'And of course, the nice thing is, you get to meet such interesting people. If I hadn't come up here, I'd never have made the acquaintance of a charming young lady like yourself.'
'Oh, now you're just teasing,' said Carol, flattered and uneasy. She had heard this sort of thing before; there were always one or two old men who tried to flirt with her in a joking, grandfatherly way. 'Maybe I'd better say goodbye now. My mother always said that when a man pays a compliment, watch out!'
'What? Watch out for a poor old thing like me?' He laughed and shook his head. 'I assure you, young lady, I'm perfectly harmless!' His smile was so dazzling that she didn't stop to wonder if he wore false teeth. 'I'm nothing more than a-'
Suddenly he looked past her. Carol saw his smile fade into a frown and, at the same moment, felt an insistent tug on her sleeve. She pulled back, startled; a belligerent little white face was peering up at her.
'I have to have something on entomology,' the boy demanded, still gripping her sleeve. 'With pictures.' He seemed greatly put out by Carol's hesitation. 'Insects!' he hissed, and was duly directed one row past Outdoors and Adventure.
When she turned back to the little man, he was staring out the window. She realized that he still hadn't explained precisely why he'd come upstairs. No doubt he was just another lonely old pensioner who'd lived too long and read too much and now wanted a chance to tell somebody what he'd learned.
As if sensing her eyes on him, he turned. 'Lovely garden,' he said softly. Behind him the topmost vines arched toward the sunlight. 'I wish I had more time for nature, but that's the one thing I don't have. I'm busy every minute of the day.'
