Diane laughed. “You’re funny. It’s buzzard on Wednesdays.”
“You’re absolutely right,” he said, taking her books and sticking out an elbow for her to grasp.
“I really need help. I think I’m failing the stupid course. Can you believe that? It’s no different than high school bio as far as I can tell. What were you doing in the library today?” Diane asked, as they walked toward the dorm.
“Oh, studying,” but something in his voice didn’t convince her.
“Studying? Studying what?” she asked sharply.
“Marketing … and a little Sociology,” he said sadly. He had a faraway look that puzzled Diane, and she pressed him for more information.
“Keith, I thought we agreed we were always going to be honest with each other.” There was a long pause. “Keith?”
“Really, I was just studying,” he protested.
“Sure. In the deepest part of the stacks? Come on. You must think I’m really stupid.” Diane was annoyed. “I know what goes on down there. I was on Level Twelve and I saw you come up the stairs. You never spoke to me, so I followed you out here.”
“Diane, I—I wasn’t doing anything you would disapprove of, I promise.”
“So what were you doing?” she demanded, but before Keith spoke, she held up a hand. “Never mind. I don’t want to hear anything you’d say. I’m sure it would all be lies. I thought you really cared for me.” She snatched her books out of his hands and stormed away.
“Diane!” he called after her, but she shook her head and kept moving. Keith watched her go with resignation. “I wish a car would hit me right now and end my misery,” he said morosely. “There’s nothing more that could happen to me.”
There was no answer at the office of the Historical Society. Keith spent the evening with his thoughts racing between the quarterly taxes, the mysterious articles, and the elves’ unfriendliness. On top of that was Holl’s unexplained absence, and his frustration in not being able to explain to Diane what was really going on in the library.
He sighed, gazing out the window from where he lay, watching lighting sear the clouds. Maybe if it rained hard enough, he could drown himself without ever getting out of bed.
O O O
It was raining the next day, too. Keith dashed between his classes with his head down, as much from unhappiness as the cold, wet wind. He spent most of Mythology class watching Diane, who sat four rows ahead of him, with sad, soulful eyes. She noticed his gaze, but turned away with her eyes down. It reminded him of the mass shun in the village, and it depressed him further.
“Keith?” Diane followed him out of the classroom when it was over, and drew him close to the wall. “I just wanted to apologize.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Keith said, steeling himself to tell her the true story.
“No, I do.” She held her hands over his mouth. “I’m sorry. I should believe you. You’re a lousy liar. I wouldn’t get so upset if … I wasn’t so involved. I do trust you. If you say there’s nothing to be worried about, I’ll believe you.” She threw her arms around him and kissed him soundly.
Shedding his gloomy mood all at once, Keith got enthusiastically behind the concept of kissing. “You know,” he breathed when they came up for air, “this is the first decent thing that has happened to me all day. Maybe all week.”
Diane pouted. “Only decent?”
“Well …” Keith took another sample of longer duration. “A lot more than that.” A further kiss assured him it was the best possible anywhere. “Look,” he said. “The rain is stopping.”
O O O
The door at the bottom of the fourteenth level of the stacks creaked open, and Carl hid his key so the distinctive green light wouldn’t give him away. He left the classroom door propped open for a quick getaway. It was Wednesday, so there wasn’t supposed to be anyone in there. If Doyle or anyone was here, Carl could just say that he forgot something. He was sure that he could get out of any situation.
He felt his way in, hands out for the iron maidens. The room seemed much wider in the dark. Once he touched the wall, he eased first one way, then the other, feeling for the low door. His fingers showed him the lip of the entrance, and he crouched down and walked hunched over along the tunnel’s rough cement floor. His soft-soled shoes made a tiny “tok” sound each time he set down a foot, but he congratulated himself that he wasn’t making any noise.
O O O
Down at the tunnel’s far end, Dola, along with Moira and Borget, two of her friends, were playing in the empty dining hall. They had already detected his presence and reported it to the Elf Master down in the village, who was giving a lesson in map reading to a group of volunteers who had offered to be the first to move out to the farmhouse.
“It’s not Keith Doyle,” Dola said. She still had a minor crush on the tall Big One. She was sorry she was not allowed to talk to him anymore, but he hadn’t come back since that day she had kicked him.
“Zo?” enquired the Master, setting down his atlas and looking at them over the tops of his glasses. “Go and ask whomever it is vhat he vants.” His eyes twinkled. “But quietly. Other people do not vish to be disturbed.”
The young ones looked at each other gleefully and dashed back to the passage.
Dola waited by the entrance to the village, concentrating hard on a linen cloth woven by her mother, while the other two silently sneaked up on Carl in the passage. Though she was young, Dola’s talent of weaving illusions was one that the elders insisted she begin developing immediately. She was rather proud of it herself, but as yet couldn’t design anything in mid-air. She still needed a “canvas” on which to draw her magical pictures in mid-air. Dola preferred to create beautiful pictures, but the elders had decreed that for distracting intruders, she had to make an ugly, boring image. As Carl turned the corner and looked the rest of the way down the passage, Dola held up the cloth.
Looking straight at her, all Carl could see was a store-room, dimly lit by bare bulbs hanging on cords. Scattered on the floor were elderly cardboard cartons festooned with cobwebs and dust. Concentrating very hard, Dola made the image of a great, black spider walk across the floor. “Huh?” Carl gasped, and then realizing he had spoken, clapped his hand over his mouth, willing the sound to come back. He knew he must have missed the entrance. It was somewhere behind him. He turned and began to feel his way back up the corridor. Moira and Borget were huddled together against the wall behind him, holding hands. As soon as Carl passed them, Moira squeezed Borget’s hand.
“Eeeeeeeeeaah!” shrieked Moira at the top of her voice.
“Hmmhmmhmmhmmmhahahahaha …” laughed Borget, in as sinister a tone as he could manage.
In spite of himself, Carl straightened up to his full height, and bashed his head on the ceiling. There was another burst of ghostly laughter. Clutching his head with one hand, he felt his way out of the tunnel and school room, hotly pursued by his banshees. He screamed curses back at them, but they only laughed. An elvish trick!
“I’ll get you, too,” he swore as he ran up the stairs. He wasn’t going to get his evidence this way, that was sure. The two young elves laughed and ran back to Dola to share the joke.
The Elf Master was thoughtful as they reported their guest’s identity and actions. “This one will bear watching,” he said. “A burglar is the only guest who does not knock.”
“But what would be here to steal?” Moira asked. “We have no fancy possessions.”
The elder elf shrugged. “Our privacy is very valuable,” he said with a sigh.
***
Chapter 34
Something of great importance was definitely going on in the village, but Keith was being kept in the dark. Worse yet, he hadn’t been able to catch Holl outside of class. Every time he tried to strike up a conversation, one of the others would head off the blond elf and lead him away from Keith. The tall student felt it was important that the two of them should talk. Quarterly income taxes would be due soon, a
nd by Keith’s calculations, the amount would far exceed the balance presently in the checkbook which Holl held. Though to be fair, Holl had the forms in hand, too, and he had been faithful about sending them in on time. If it got too close to the deadline, Keith would simply swallow his pride and ask the Elf Master for intervention.
Since he was deprived of his friends in the village, he had been spending more time with Diane, but as his anxiety increased, Diane complained that he was becoming distant.
“You’ve got something on your mind. Is it the craft business?” she demanded as he walked her home from Mythology class one evening. “How’s it doing?”
“I’m not too sure.” Keith replied, running a mental inventory of his available merchandise and groaning over the total. He wished he could ask someone if everything would be ready when needed. Diane studied him, and he flashed her a quick smile. She shook her head.
“Now I know something is wrong. You used to have every single fact at the tip of your tongue. It’s a sign that you’re probably doing too much.” She leaned down from the steps and kissed him. “If you want to talk, or if there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”
“Mmm.” Keith reached for another kiss. “That helped a lot. Good night.”
“Good night. Oh, I just remembered. Ms. Voordman wants you to stop by. She wants to talk to you. Good night again.”
Diane disappeared behind the frosted glass of the front door and Keith turned away into the twilight.
The evening was quiet, with the hint of scent in the air that proved spring had arrived and it meant business. A few late birds chorused with the crickets that lived in the cellars of the ancient brownstones. Keith thought of stopping in to see Ludmilla and telling her his troubles. Her kindness and her warm sympathy were very soothing to miserable souls. She didn’t live far from Diane’s. He smiled. The two of them would probably get along very well. They were both strong and caring women.
A few early bicyclists whizzed past him along the curb. Keith heard the whirr of spokes and a burst of swearing as one of them accidentally flashed in front of a pedestrian in the crosswalk. He glanced back. There were two men at the intersection about half a block behind him. One of them was still swearing, and his buddy was holding him back from giving chase. It would have been pointless. The bicyclist was probably half a mile away already.
Keith had expected more foot traffic on a nice night in a campus town, but he put it down to the indoctrination of the elves that he walked more than he ever had before he met them. Most of his Big Folk classmates still drove wherever they could. Self-locomotion was only used when nothing else was available. He thought it was weird that these same students would jog or run eight miles every morning before dawn, but they’d rather die than walk to the movies. He turned a corner onto Ludmilla’s street.
After a while, he began to have a funny feeling between his shoulder blades. He looked back. The two men were still walking about half a block behind him. They weren’t exactly casual strollers. There was purpose in their stride. He thought that he recognized their forms: they looked like the union president’s men.
It could have been a coincidence. Keith walked past Ludmilla’s brownstone and turned left on the next street, reluctant to lead them to his friend. The men kept pace. He turned another corner, and another, and still his shadows stayed the same distance behind him. The streetlamps sprang alight high over his head. It was growing darker, and Keith found that he was nearly back to the Midwestern campus. The buildings were closer together here. He could hide. Closing the distance between them, the two thugs passed under a light and Keith caught a glimpse of their faces. It was the union men.
Keith panicked and started for the alleyway between the Science Building and the faculty garage. His only thought was to find a security guard, who would drive his pursuers away. There was a cry behind him. He threw a glance over his shoulder. The men had seen him break into a run and sprinted after him.
Keith ran down the ornamental paths on the other side of the Science Building and leaped over a marble bench onto the lawn next to the library, avoiding the thorn bushes that flanked it. He could open the stone facade and escape into the elves’ village. If he was fast enough. He didn’t know how far behind him the men were. Safety was getting closer. He ducked around the side of the thorn hedge, and swung past the sycamore tree by the boulder. There was rustling in the shrubbery to either side of him. To his dismay, the thugs had separated. One was bounding toward him across the grass, and one was heading off his other escape route, past the main entrance to Gillington. He couldn’t open the facade now; he’d give the elves’ secret away.
Rough hands caught him from behind and held his arms as he turned back into the thorn bushes. Keith cried out and kicked, striking his captor in the kneecap. The man swore and kicked back a few times, staggering Keith to his knees with the angry blows to his calves and buttocks.
The other thug moved in slowly, like a boxer under water. He smacked one gigantic fist into the other. It sounded like a pistol shot. Keith winced. “Mr. Lewandowski has been waiting for your list. It is bad business to keep him waiting.”
“Sorry,” Keith grimaced. “I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
“Wrong answer,” the man told him, and the giant fist took Keith in the stomach. He folded over, gasping, seeing black stars against the darkness.
One of the ham-hands clutched his hair and his face was dragged up, away from the agony in his midsection. “You get that list, or you’re going to have real trouble, you hear me?” Keith nodded weakly. The man let go, and Keith sagged down against the thug behind him. He stared at the ground, trying to get up enough strength to say something, when he noticed that the thorn bushes were moving.
For a moment he was so fascinated he forgot about his pain. Thin switches of thorn, with the buds of new leaves gleaming at alternating intervals along their lengths, were weaving out of the hedges, along the ground, and twining themselves up around the legs of the man in front of him. And the man behind as well. The vines pulled taut.
“Didn’t you hear me, punk?” The man grabbed Keith’s hair again. When his face came up, Keith could see two pairs of bright eyes behind the bushes. Or rather, one pair of eyes and one pair of spectacles. The Master, and possibly Holl. “We mean business.”
“Yeah,” Keith grated out, not recognizing his own breathless voice. “I see what you’re doing.” The spectacles in the shrubbery glinted. Message received. With a heroic effort Keith straightened up. “No sale. Tell him I’m not interested.”
“I’m warning you, punk,” the man growled. He reached for Keith with both hands.
With a swift jerk, Keith pulled both arms free from the grasp of the gorilla’s assistant and jumped to the side. Both men twisted to grab him, and ended up flailing their arms wildly in the air for balance. They fell forward, emitting ululations of pain and obscenities; the dormant thorn bushes had nothing on them as yet to conceal or pad the inch-and-a-half-long thorns as sharp as roofing nails that grew between the buds.
Keith was not going to wait around for them to get free. He took to his heels and fled, searching for the security patrol. A mighty wrenching and ripping of cloth, accompanied by much swearing, suggested to him that one of the thugs was abandoning modesty and stripping off his trousers to come after Keith.
While they struggled, he dodged between the hedges and pelted down the ornamental path to the street. To his everlasting gratitude, a patrol car rolled into view as he rounded the corner of the library building. He leaped into the street to flag it down. The car screeched over to the curb. He dashed over to it.
“Help!” Keith yelled in the window at the two security guards, waving back toward the library. “Officer, two flashers out there near the library! Muggers! Perverts!” Steadying riot clubs and flashlights on their belts, the uniformed officers followed Keith’s energetic pointing, and were just in time to intercept the union men as they appeared around the angle of the building cla
d in jackets, socks, shoes and undershorts.
Spotlighting their captives with flashlights, the guards shoved the men against the wall of the library and started to frisk them. The senior guard shone his flashlight on the torn backside of one man’s peacock blue shorts. “You a streaker, bud? I don’t think your butt’s so pretty that you ought to show it. I wanna see some I.D. What are you doing on this campus without authorization?” He noticed Keith hanging around behind him, and shone his flashlight into Keith’s face. “What’s your name, son?”
“Keith Doyle, sir. Power Hall.”
“Okay, Doyle. We’ll want a statement from you in the morning. In the meantime, get out of here. Thanks for alerting us.”
“Sure thing!” Keith waved a jaunty salute, half to the security officers, half to the invisible figures in the bushes. “Thanks again.”
“I’m gonna get you, kid!” the muscular thug shouted. “Now it’s personal!”
“Up against the wall, you,” the guard growled, shoving him back into place.
***
Chapter 35
“Keith!” Marcy came running up to him as he walked Diane toward the Science Building for her Biology class. “Oh, Keith, I’m so glad to see you!”
“Hi, Marcy,” Keith greeted her warmly, and turned to Diane. “Diane Londen, this is Marcy Collier. We’re former fellow sufferers in Sociology class last semester. Marcy, Diane.”
“Hi,” Marcy said, a little offhandedly. It was clear she had something on her mind, but didn’t know how to convey it to Keith.
“Pleased to meet you,” Diane returned somewhat suspiciously. Keith saw the danger signals flaring in Diane’s eyes, and hastened to ask Marcy, “So how’s Enoch?”
There was nothing false about the glow which lit Marcy’s face. “Wonderful. I had the most marvelous time over the break. My mother didn’t understand why I didn’t come home, but …” She smiled again and blushed. Beside Keith, Diane relaxed.
“So how’s everything else?” Keith asked meaningfully. “I haven’t seen the Folks lately. Most of them aren’t speaking to me.”
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