“Hello-o? You haven’t gone off to some other world, have you?”
I looked up from the picture, my skin all goose bumps. “It’s just—something I remembered,” I said, trying to explain. But the memory eluded me, and what did I need to explain to this weirdo anyway? I put the calendars in my briefcase and started to go.
“Not so fast. I’ve got to inspect your briefcase before I let you out. Nothing personal. Standard company policy.”
I hoisted it onto the desk. “Nice briefcase,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Looks brand-new.”
“It is. Somebody stole the old one.”
“What a pity. Nothing important in it, I hope?”
“Just the manuscript of a book I’m writing.”
“Well. That is a pity. You should keep those things at home, in a secure place.”
“It was at home. In a place I thought was secure.”
He shook his head. “Seems like we’re not safe in our own homes anymore. Assuming we ever were.” All the while he’d been searching through the briefcase. He pulled out the book I’d carried to Philadelphia with me. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Albert K. Bender, Flying Saucers and the Three Men. Tell me. How is dear old Al, these days?”
I stared at him while I tried to think of an answer. Of course I had no idea how Albert K. Bender was. I didn’t know anyone who might know anyone who knew Bender. For me he was a remote, almost legendary figure, like Jacob and his angels on the shining stairway.
“And how are Al’s three friends?” the boy went on. “From the planet—Kazik, or whatever its name was? The ones with the dark suits and the dark faces and the bright, bright eyes. Their eyes shone like flashlights, didn’t he say?”
My mouth hung open. I tried, not very successfully, to force it shut.
“And how about the three women in black?” he said. “Only they don’t wear black, do they? Tight uniforms, can’t remember what color. You remember them, don’t you? They’re the ones who bring him onto the spaceship. Right before the brain implant. They paralyze him. They strip him naked. They massage every part of his body without exception. Italics mine.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How do you know about all this?”
“Please. Think you’re the only person in the world who reads books? What I want to know is, Why do they all have eyes that shine like flashlights?”
“I—I—”
“Do their eyes just make it easier for Bender to see them? Or do they see better with glowing eyes? ‘Why, what glowing eyes you have!’ ‘The better to see-e-e you with, my dear.’ ”
He gave a very effective horror movie laugh. I felt my flesh crawl. This was not a laugh, I thought, that should have emanated from a human throat. “Look,” I said. “I really don’t think we need to take Bender’s book all that seriously.”
“But we do need to take the three men seriously, don’t we? And Harold Dahl’s man in black. Remember him?”
Harold Dahl. 1947. Harbor patrolman at Maury Island, off the coast of Washington State. “The man in black,” said the boy. “Just one. The other two must have been on missions to other galaxies. He pays Dahl a visit. He tells him he saw something he shouldn’t have. Tells him word for word everything he saw. Warns him: if he loves his family, he won’t whisper about it to anybody.”
“Now, hold on,” I said. “That Maury Island business was a hoax! Wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was a hoax. Do you seriously believe a flying disk crashed into Puget Sound? Dropped slag into Dahl’s boat? Killed his stupid dog? Do you think anyone believes that?”
“Then why are we even talking about it?”
“Because of the people. Don’t you understand? The people involved. Harold Dahl is a man worth knowing. Before Maury Island he was in the dero caves. Fought his way out with a submachine gun. Marvelous story; vintage Harold Dahl. I’d arrange for the two of you to meet, except we lost track of him.”
“Lost track?” How strange that this boy, met by chance, should know the people and things I wanted so badly to know myself. Was it chance? I began to feel frightened; I touched my hand to my pocket. The Delta Device was still there. “You lost track of Harold Dahl?”
“Completely vanished. Somewhere in the Southwest, New Mexico, I think. All of a sudden he’s gone. Disappeared. So lost even God and the Internal Revenue Service can’t find him.”
“Who are you?” I said.
He must have been waiting for me to ask. He reached into his inner jacket pocket and whirled out a business card. “Julian Margulies, of the SSS. And, on alternate Saturday afternoons, of the Philadelphia Free Library. At your service.”
I examined the card. A name, a Philadelphia address, and a telephone number crowded together at the bottom. Most of the upper part consisted of a sixty-degree angle, trisected, with an ornate capital S in each of its three segments. In each upper corner was a slender, pointed black oval, beginning near the trisected angle and rising outward toward the edges. If the ovals had been vertical, I’d have thought them the slit pupils of a cat’s eyes. Horizontal, they’d resemble two flying disks seen from the side. As it was, they gave the impression of being the slanted, almond-shaped, wide-apart eyes of some humanlike but unspeakably strange creature.
Whatever—I didn’t want to look at them. Their effect was hypnotic; I wasn’t ready to be hypnotized. I forced my eyes down to the bottom of the card, to the name printed there. “What’s the A stand for?” I said.
He looked baffled. “In your name,” I said. “ ‘Julian A. Margulies,’ it says here.”
“Oh, that A. I’d forgotten. I don’t use it very much. But it stands for Arcturus. If you must know.” He looked at me solemnly, then raised his eyebrows a few times, rapidly, comically, as if doing a takeoff on Groucho Marx.
“Julian Arcturus Margulies?”
“That’s right. I come from the sta-a-ars, don’t you know?”
“And this SSS,” I said, looking at the trisected angle. “What does that stand for?”
“Initials of the three men in black. Sigmund, Sandor, and—uh—Sammy. But you have the advantage of me, sir.”
“Huh?” I said. “Oh.” I fished in my wallet for something that might serve as a business card. The best I could find was a blank membership card for The UFO Investigators.
“How cute,” he said. “ ‘The UFO Investigators.’ Do I have the honor of addressing Mr. OR9-3781, or Mr. OR8-0496?”
I felt myself turn red. “I’m Danny Shapiro.”
“Danny Shapiro. Of course. It was on your library card. How stupid of me. Well, Danny Shapiro, I regret that we meet under these circumstances. With me dressed so informally, that is. I do own a black suit—”
“So do I,” I said untruthfully.
“But I only wear it for funerals. And, of course, for terrorizing UFO investigators who’ve found out too much. I haven’t yet got the hang of making my eyes glow like flashlights, however.”
“I’ve got to go,” I said.
I turned to leave. But then I stopped. “You know that picture you have on your wall,” I said. “The one with the winged horse, or whatever the animal was, and the man riding it. I was looking at it before you came in. It—it fascinated me.”
“The Miraj-Nameh illustration? It fascinated you? You don’t say. You seemed a lot more interested in Joseph and Zuleikha. Mostly Zuleikha.”
I blushed. I looked away. I could not stand to see him do another Groucho Marx imitation with his eyebrows. “Who was Zuleikha anyway?” I asked.
“Potiphar’s wife. The lady who was always trying to get Joseph into bed with her. The Bible doesn’t say what her name was. That’s the Arabs for you. They think they know lots about the Bible that the Bible doesn’t say.”
“So that writing is Arabic?”
“Arabic or Persian. You’ll have to ask Rochelle about that. If she can read it, it’s Arabic. If not, it’s Persian. Or maybe Urdu. I don’t think Rochelle’s ever learned
Urdu.”
“I have to ask—who?”
“Rochelle,” he said loudly, as if I were bound to know who Rochelle was if only he pronounced her name distinctly enough. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t know Rochelle.”
He looked at me closely. Suddenly, for no obvious reason, he broke into a grin. “No,” I said. “I don’t know Rochelle.”
“Well, then. You ought to come over for dinner sometime.”
“Dinner?”
“Yes, dinner. Why do you look so suspicious?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, to explain I wasn’t used to total strangers inviting me to dinner. “At our place. So you can meet Rochelle. Don’t worry, you’ll like Rochelle. You and she will have a lot to talk about.”
“So Rochelle is your sister?”
He seemed to find the question extremely funny. “No, she isn’t my sister,” he said, laughing, mostly through his nose. He threw himself back into his chair and laughed some more. “Not my sister,” he said again. He pushed a button under his desk; there was a loud click from the turnstile. “The phone number is on my card,” he said. “Give me a call. We’ll arrange something.”
“Thanks,” I said. I was about to put the card into my pocket but suddenly dropped it back onto his desk. There was something dangerous about that card—maybe those eyes printed on it, which I hoped sooner or later I’d be able to forget. If I took the card, my life would be changed in some way I could not foresee or undo once it had happened. “Well, see you around.”
“Hey, wait, wait—”
I dashed out. The third-floor elevator was a few steps away from the entrance to the Rare Book Room. I heard him calling me; I had the sense of missing something. I was so eager to be gone I didn’t stop to think what. I ran inside the elevator and pressed the button marked “G.” I went down, down, down. From the elevator I rushed into the Newspaper Room.
And found no one there.
CHAPTER 5
THE ROOM WAS EMPTY. CAVERNOUS.
No Jeff, no Rosa. No shabby middle-aged men at the long brown tables, reading the current newspapers. The fluorescent ceiling lights were on as usual. But the microfilm machines were dark and deserted. Coats, notebooks, pens—all gone. Chairs neatly beneath the tables, newspapers back on their racks. There was no librarian.
My first thought was my watch had stopped. I hadn’t been in sight of a window for hours. Somehow it had gotten to be past five; the library had closed. Outside the building it was dark and cold. The last bus to Kellerfield had left without me.
But the clock on the wall read 3:35, and the second hand swept around its face.
I stepped up to the long, curving counter. RING BELL FOR SERVICE, read a hand-lettered sign. I struck the bell with my hand, listened to it echo through the empty room. I waited. No one came.
I rang again, waited again. My fingers felt for the Delta Device. I forced my hand out of my pocket, back to the counter. Not yet time for that. Nothing was falling from the sky on top of me. Not yet.
For a minute or two I kept on pounding the bell. When I couldn’t stand any more of its ringing, I ran out, down the winding corridor, up the stairs. Then up more stairs. Everywhere was neat. Still. Empty.
No librarians . . . no readers, browsers, borrowers . . . no guard at the main exit checking bags and briefcases. The late-afternoon sun shone through the windows of the high-ceilinged reading rooms, onto the carpeted floor. On the spines of silent rows of books, the gold lettering glittered.
Oh, God. It’s begun.
UFO invasion? Nuclear war? The missiles that should have been fired last October: were they on their way?
“Jeff,” I called out softly. Then, louder: “Kazik! Kazik!” Before I knew it, the Delta was out of my pocket and I’d squeezed it, hard. The soldering popped open. The wiring crammed inside the sheet metal casing erupted onto my palm.
I stared down at it. I tried to push it all back in, to force the gadget together long enough to send out a signal. All I managed was to cut my thumb on the metal’s edge. The mass of curls and coils, spilled out, refused ingathering. The Delta was ruined, wrecked for good, useless as a teddy bear in a thunderstorm. I tossed it somewhere among the long tables and began to run.
At the elevator I jabbed the up button. The arrow of the dial above the sliding doors jerked its poky way along the ring of gold-colored numbers. If it didn’t come soon, I’d go insane.
Julian Arcturus Margulies, sitting at his desk, seemed unsurprised to see me.
“That’s the remarkable thing about rare books, isn’t it?” he said. “You fall under their spell, you just can’t stay away.”
“Julian.”
“You don’t have to be so alarmed. Your nice new briefcase isn’t lost. You left it here next to my desk. I called after you, but you were in such a hurry, you just didn’t hear—”
So that was what I’d had the sensation of missing. I no longer cared about that briefcase. “Julian!”
“Yes?” He peered at me with an expression of kind attention.
“Did they close early today? Or what?”
“Of course not. Why should they close early?”
“The library is empty.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nobody’s here! I went down to the ground floor, to the Newspaper Room, and there was nobody. Not in the reading rooms! Not anywhere!”
He looked puzzled. Only for a moment. “Oh, that,” he said. “That happens sometimes. It’ll be all right.” He walked around the desk and put his hand on my shoulder. “Danny, you’ve got to stay calm. Are you listening to me?”
I nodded.
“You know the elevator you just got off?” He pointed down the hall. I nodded again. “Go back there. When you get in, push the button for the basement. The one marked ‘B.’ As in boy. Not ‘G,’ this time; the floor below it. Have you got that?”
“I think so,” I said.
“When the doors open, walk out and turn to your left. Go about fifty feet, and you’ll see a small door to the outside. To Nineteenth Street. It’s below street level, though. Are you listening?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Go out that door. Climb to the sidewalk. Directly up the slope. It’s icy, but I think you can make it. You’ve got that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then go around to Vine Street, to the front entrance. Come in again. It’ll be all right.”
I started off toward the elevator. “Danny!” he called.
“What?”
“Don’t forget your briefcase.”
I pressed “B.” I rode down to the basement. I forced myself, faint with dread, down the dimly lit hallway. On either side of me boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling, such that I could barely make my way through the passage. The door was where Julian had said it would be.
I slipped more than once, getting up that slope.
At first, when I reached the sidewalk, it was the library all over again. Nineteenth Street was empty, still, silent. But then I began to feel the rush of traffic, to hear the honking of a taxicab. I saw I’d wandered into the street and leaped back to the sidewalk. I leaned against a building, catching my breath. A man in earmuffs and a thick overcoat marched past, glaring.
It was a few minutes past four when I walked back through the library’s entrance hall. Filled, as usual, with people. I wasn’t ready for the Newspaper Room. I walked into the general reading room on the second floor and sat down at one of the long tables. I opened my briefcase. I pulled out Bender’s Flying Saucers and the Three Men and the three Jewish calendars. I began flipping through the calendars, mostly looking at the pictures.
My eye fell upon Saturday, December 22, 1962. My thirteenth birthday, by the Jewish calendar. The day that should have been my bar mitzvah—
When I should have proclaimed myself a man.
Only my mother was too sick, so we couldn’t—
I stopped leafing. I thought of all the things over the years that we couldn’t do, I couldn�
��t do, because she was too sick. She couldn’t go outdoors; needed rest, needed quiet. Needed me to stay with her, read to her. My friends, when I had any, had to be hushed. Asked to leave the house if they couldn’t be still . . .
Sadness transfixed me. I could not move so much as my eyeballs. I don’t know how long it was before I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“You all right?”
Rosa Pagliano. Some kind of hallucination? Her touch was real, though, or had been before she took away her hand. Relief flooded me; happiness too. But also confusion. “What are you doing here?” I said.
“I wouldn’t leave with Jeff. He wanted me to. You wouldn’t believe the fight we had. They almost threw us out of the library, we were screaming so loud.”
“So the bus did stop in Braxton—”
Of course it had. And today she’d come with us, not just me and Jeff. She’d climbed onto the bus at Braxton, told Jeff to move over, wiggled into the seat beside him. . . . Each detail so vivid; how had I forgotten, even for a moment? “Rosa,” I said, and felt my tongue curl around her name.
“Where were you? Why didn’t you come back to the Newspaper Room? We waited and waited.”
Rosa slipped into the vacant chair beside me. She carried a book, which she slid into her lap, where I couldn’t see it. I caught a whiff of her perfume, strong stuff, the kind the sexier girls in our school wear, but I’d never before noticed it on Rosa. Why hadn’t I?
“Jeff got sick of waiting,” she said. “He started carrying on, the way he always does when he doesn’t get his way. Got himself so worked up, that finally—”
“I did come down. You were gone. The room was empty.”
“Wha—a?” Her lips parted. “I understand,” she said after a second, which was enough time for my eyes and mind to have glued themselves to those lips. Not quite rose red, as the poets say. Yet red enough, and luscious, without benefit of lipstick. I was too hypnotized, those few silent moments, to ask what it was she’d understood. “Finally he says to me, ‘Come on! The hell with Danny! We’re going home.’ I told him to screw himself.”
Journal of a UFO Investigator Page 4
