by Crider, Bill
Burns glanced at her glasses out of the corner of his eye. Maybe she needed to have the prescription changed. He could hardly believe what he was hearing, and he didn't pursue the topic. He was almost afraid to.
"What's this about the library that you wanted me to see?" he asked.
"I'll just have to show you," she said.
It was not far from Main to the library, and they walked the rest of the way in silence, Burns puzzling over her remarks about Napier and wondering what the library held.
The library was a red brick rectangle three stories high, resembling very much the incinerated Administration Building, except that for some reason it had a porch front that resembled the entrance to a Greek temple, complete with Corinthian columns. There had once been flowerbeds in front of the library, but Dean Elmore had purged them when he purged the honeysuckle in front of Main.
Burns and Miss Tanner mounted the five steps to the cement porch, and Miss Tanner unlocked the glass doors, known for some reason as the "E. R. Memorial Doors," perhaps in remembrance of some generous donor now known only by his or her initials. They stepped into a small glass foyer which protected the library from the weather outside and from which they could see the large entrance room of the library. Miss Tanner then unlocked the inside doors.
When they entered the library, the circulation desk was to their right. It had been moved near the doors from the stack area to prevent students from stealing books, something that happened with appalling regularity even at a moral place like HGC. From their perch behind the desk, those in charge of the desk supposedly could give the students the evil eye and cry out if anyone tried to walk out with a book that had not been properly checked out. It was an inefficient and mostly unsuccessful system, but Dean Elmore had long ago decided that it was a lot cheaper than any security system that he could have bought. Maybe Miss Tanner could convince Miller to change things.
"We'll have to go back in the stacks," Miss Tanner whispered.
"All right," Burns whispered back. Like most people of his generation, he was well-trained. He always whispered in libraries.
The stack area was on the left, through another set of glass doors. The upper floors could be reached by way of either a stairway or an ancient Otis elevator that Burns suspected was none too reliable. Since the periodicals took up almost the entire first floor, with the exception of the space devoted to study tables, Burns knew they would be going up, and sure enough, Miss Tanner headed for the elevator.
"Miss Tanner," Burns said.
"Elaine," she said. "My name's Elaine."
The fair lady Elaine, Burns thought, as visions of Arthurian damsels danced in his head and he mentally measured himself for a suit of shining armor.
"I'm Carl," he said, his heart thumping. He felt like an adolescent, but it wasn't a bad feeling.
"What were you going to say, . . . Carl?"
"Uh . . . uh. . . ?"
"Carl?"
Burns shook himself. He was a mature adult, after all. "The elevator," he said. "I'm not sure it's safe."
"It seems fine to me," she said. "I don't like to climb stairs."
They opened the outside elevator door, pushed back the accordion door inside, and entered the elevator. Miss Tanner pushed the button marked "3," and somewhere from within the depths of the building there was a grating, grinding noise. The elevator began to ascend, shaking slightly as it inched its way upward.
Finally it reached the third floor. Burns slid back the folding door and Miss Tanner pushed the outer door open. The dimly lit stacks of books were in front of them.
Burns liked books, even those old, outdated books in their mostly tattered bindings, their pages yellowing, their contents mostly irrelevant to current education. He liked the way they smelled in the hot, airless library, the way they looked on the shelves, short and tall, fat and thin, the way they felt in his hand when he took them down to look at them.
"They're up here," Miss Tanner said.
"What's up here?" Burns asked.
"The books," she said.
"What books?"
They were still whispering, their voices hardly carrying in the musty air because of the way the stacks broke up the sound.
"Street's books," Miss Tanner said. "Come on." She started walking down the rows of stacks, her shoe heels clicking on the cement floor.
Burns followed her. On the end of one of the stacks he saw a penciled sign: "Beware of stack vampires."
"Uh. . . ," Burns said.
Miss Tanner stopped and looked back. "What?" Then she saw the graffiti. "Oh." She laughed. "Don't worry about that." She took his arm and led him to the next row and pointed.
Someone had penciled "Sprayed for stack vampires, 2/21/86." The date had been crossed out and beneath it "3/11/87" had been printed. That had also been crossed out and below it someone had printed "3/28/89."
"I see what you mean," Burns said. "I guess everything's all right, then. Who does the spraying?"
"I have no idea," Miss Tanner said. "But I haven't seen a single stack vampire since I've been here." She tugged his arm. "The books are right down this row."
She turned and took two steps down the row. Then she reached up and pulled down two volumes.
Burns knew what they were immediately: Dying Voices and We All Die Today!
"Those are Street's books," he said.
"That's right. Let's go over there by the windows."
On the other side of the stacks were tables where students could make notes from the books without having to check them out from the library. There were signs posted on the wall by each table: PLEASE DO NOT RESHELVE BOOKS. LEAVE THEM ON THE TABLE.
Miss Tanner put the books down on the table with a thump. The windows were covered with half-closed Venetian blinds. Sunlight slanted through the blinds and across the books.
Miss Tanner opened Dying Voices. "Look," she said.
The pages to which she had turned were covered with something that looked like blood. It was bright red in the slanting sunlight.
"Shit," Burns said. Then he looked around guiltily.
"Don't worry, I've heard the word before," Miss Tanner said. "Just look."
Burns looked. As Miss Tanner flipped through the pages, he saw that they were all covered with splotches of the red color, which obscured the words on most of the pages.
"What is that stuff?" he said.
"I don't know. I came in here this morning to get the books before the seminar. I thought I might get Street to autograph them for us, if he'd do it for free." She looked thoughtful. "I wasn't sure he would, though. Anyway, I flipped through them and saw that they were both like this."
"Did you tell Boss Napier?"
"No. I . . . I wasn't sure whether he needed to know or not. I hadn't looked at the books before. I don't even know when this . . . vandalism was done."
Burns picked up the copy of Dying Voices. He looked in the back for the check-out record and pulled the slip from the pocket. "Somebody checked the book out last month," he said. "It must have happened since then."
"Unless whoever checked it out made the mess," she said.
Burns shook his head. "I don't think so. It looks . . . fresh." He looked at the check-out slip and tried to read the name which had been imprinted on it in purple letters. The name would have been printed from the faculty or student ID card of whoever had checked the book out, but Burns could not quite make out the words.
He moved the card into a better light, and then he could read the name. "Dr. Franklin Miller."
"Uh-oh," Burns said, not liking what he saw at all.
"What's the matter?" Miss Tanner asked.
"Look," he said, pointing to the name with his index finger.
"Oh. Well, it's only natural that he'd be curious about our guest, isn't it?"
"You'd think he would have read the books before now," Burns said.
"I suppose, but—" Miss Tanner looked around. "Did you hear that?"
Burns had heard
nothing. "What?"
"I thought I heard something from the stairway. It must have been my imagination."
Burns put the check-out slip down on the table and looked down the aisle formed between the tables and the stacks. Suddenly the sunlight seemed dimmer than before.
"I don't see anything," he said.
"The stairway's over by the elevator," Miss Tanner pointed out. "You can't see it from here."
"Of course," Burns said. "I knew that." He wondered if she wanted him to go over and check out the staircase. That shining armor he had measured himself for was suddenly feeling a little tight. "I'll go look," he said.
"Never mind. It was probably nothing. Let's see if anyone checked out the other book."
She picked up We All Die Today! and began leafing through it. Burns could see the red stains spreading across the pages.
Just as she was about to pull out the slip in back of the book, there was another noise. This time, Burns heard it too. "Someone's in here," Miss Tanner said.
"Did you lock the doors downstairs?" Burns asked.
"No. I thought that on Saturday no one would even try to get in."
"Probably just a student, someone who wants to get started early on his term paper," Burns said. "You do open on Saturdays later in the semester, don't you?"
"Yes," she said. "But I don't think it's a student."
"Maybe not," Burns said. He didn't really believe it, either. "Who's there?" he called out.
There was no answer.
"Maybe we'd better go now," he said.
Miss Tanner did not agree. "I can't leave the library unattended, not with someone sneaking around in it. We've got to find out who's up here."
"What if it's a stack vampire?"
"Very funny," Miss Tanner said, but she wasn't laughing. "I'll go down this row. And you walk on down about three tables and go down that one. Maybe we can catch whoever it is."
Burns didn't think much of the idea, but there wasn't anything he could do. He didn't want to look like a wimp English teacher to Miss Tanner, or even to himself.
"I don't think you should go alone," he said.
"Don't worry about me. I can take care of myself. It's probably just a prankster."
She sounded completely confident, a lot more confident than Burns felt.
"All right then," he said. "But yell if you need any help."
"I will," she said, but he didn't think she would.
Chapter 7
Burns usually liked the feeling he got when he was alone in the old buildings at HGC. He liked listening to the sounds they made, and he liked the feeling of freedom and timelessness he experienced.
This time was different, however. It wasn't that Burns believed in stack vampires, but suddenly the library did not seem a friendly place.
He had heard the stories, which he had also heard at other schools, about the kinds of people libraries sometimes attracted. It was told for truth that one of HGC's more unusual students had developed a method of sexual harassment that he perpetrated in the library. Burns could not recall the student's name, if he had ever known it, but the young man was supposed to have waited until the stack area was deserted and then cleared out the books from the bottom row of shelving, distributing them elsewhere in the stacks. He would then lie down on the floor and roll onto the shelf, where he would have an excellent view of the ankles of young women who walked by looking at the upper shelves. And if the women were wearing skirts, so much the better.
He had been caught one day when an alert student spotted him peering up at her cotton panties, but not before he rolled off of the shelf, bit her on the calf, and led the authorities, including an incensed Miss Watts, on a merry serpentine chase in and out of the rows and rows of shelving.
Burns hoped that the noise he and Miss Tanner had heard was caused by someone as relatively harmless as the stack-peeper, but he was a bit worried. After all, a man had been murdered and his books had been defaced, not the usual thing at quiet, peaceful HGC.
He wished that the lighting were better, but the stacks were not lit by the usual method. Each row of books had its own lights, suspended from the ceiling and covered with a milky-white globe. A string hung down from each light so that they could be turned on one at a time. All this was no doubt the result of some long-ago economy measure enacted so that no more than one light would be burning at once, so long as whoever turned it on remembered to turn it off. Miss Watts had been vigilant about the lights and usually had one student worker who was assigned to do nothing more than walk up and down the rows of books turning off lights that had been left burning.
Burns himself walked through the rows now, not turning on any of the lights but looking carefully down each row as he went. He did not see anyone. He did not hear anything, either, not even the sounds of Miss Tanner's heels clicking on the floor. Maybe she had taken off her shoes.
He was looking down the row labeled QL-460/RB-139 when he finally heard something, though not from the direction he expected. The noise came from behind him, a faint "shhhh" sound, as if someone had slipped a book from its place on the shelving.
He turned, half-expecting to see Miss Tanner, but he didn't see anything.
Or, technically speaking, he saw something, but it was nothing more than a blur heading straight for his face. He found out later that it was a book, but at the time he didn't really have a chance to examine it.
He experienced something like a really sudden migraine as the book smashed into his forehead and nose, and then he felt something crush. The crushing was accompanied by a terrible crunching noise that echoed in his skull and that came almost at the same instant as the thud that the book made when it met his forehead.
What had crunched was his nose.
Burns did not yell. He couldn't yell effectively with his teeth clenched as tightly as they were, but he did manage a sort of pained groaning as he stumbled backward into the shelf behind him, his arms outstretched.
He hit the shelf with the middle of his shoulders, which wasn't so bad, and with the back of his head, which was. It was even worse than being hit with the book, since the shelving was made of metal.
There was no loud clong like the tolling of a cathedral bell as his head struck, though Burns later imagined there must have been. There was more of a noise like a dull thonk. But it was effective, and pain shot from Burns's head right down to his shoes.
He realized then that his eyes were shut tight, so he tried to open them and get a look at his assailant. That was when he realized that he was falling.
And he wasn't the only thing falling.
The shelf that he had hit, the seven-foot-high, God-knows-how-many-feet-long shelf, was falling, too.
Burns did get his eyes open, and they opened extremely wide, since what he saw was the shelf he had just passed, QL-460/RB-139, and that shelf was also falling.
I didn't hit that one, Burns thought, just before he realized that the shelf was not only falling but that it was going to fall on him.
The books were already sliding off the upper shelves and pelting him: red ones, black ones, brown ones, their covers opening as they fell like heavy birds that were trying to fly like eagles and were falling like stones instead.
The noise was terrible, not only because of the falling books but because the shelf Burns had toppled hit the next shelf, which had hit the next one, which—
Burns didn't want to think about it. He covered his face as the first books began hitting him and rolled to his right, trying to get out of the way of the shelf.
He stopped rolling when he hit a table near the windows, and he lay there face down on the cold floor for a second or two waiting for the noise to stop. He didn't want to see what was happening.
It was soon quiet except for the occasional sound of one or two more books falling over on their sides.
Burns still didn't want to look. He was afraid that whoever had hit him might try it again, and his nose was hurting fiercely. It felt completely stopped
up, and he could feel blood running out of it.
In fact, since his face was a few inches from the floor, he could hear the blood running out, or rather he could hear it as it dropped onto the cement with dainty splatters.
Someone touched him on the shoulder, and he was galvanized into action. He lunged upward, got to his feet and stumbled across piles of books. One of the piles collapsed and he catapulted forward. Luckily, he had his arms stretched in front of him so avoided a headlong collision with the library wall.
The wall brought him up short and gave him the opportunity to turn around and face his adversary.
Burns was not much of a boxer, but he had read a lot of Hemingway and a bit of Norman Mailer; he had even read a book about boxing by Joyce Carol Oates. He brought his hands up into what he believed to be the proper fighting position.
"I didn't know you were a fighter," Miss Tanner said. She was standing there holding her shoes in her right hand.
Burns dropped his hands. "I'm not. I thought you were the guy who hit me." His voice sounded funny to him, as if he had a bad cold.
"Someone hit you?"
Burns looked at the devastation around him. Books were strewn everywhere in heaps of prose. Five shelves—he had been near the end of the stacks, thank goodness—leaned crazily on one another, the final one resting on the wall. Most of the books were under the shelves, but many of them had spilled out into the aisle. Burns noticed for the first time that the shelving was in six-foot rather than twenty- or thirty-foot sections, so that only the first part of each row had been toppled.
"I hope you don't think I did this all by myself," he said.
"Well, I wondered. There was so much noise, but I didn't see anyone else—why, you look awful!"
Burns put a hand to his face, on his upper lip. Not to his nose. He wasn't about to touch his nose. He was afraid that he might scream if he did, and he didn't want to do anything so unmanly in front of Miss Tanner. He suddenly thought of Boss Napier, who, Burns was sure, would never flinch at something as wimpy as a nose injury.
His fingers came away from his lip stained with blood. He glanced down at his jacket. It was stained too, and so was his tie. He brushed his lip with the tie and wiped off most of the blood, though a little more trickled out of his nostrils almost immediately.
