True Grey

by Clea Simon

  The second reason for Dulcie’s renewed optimism was more personal – and, admittedly, less likely. As supportive as Trista and Lloyd tried to be, Dulcie worked alone, essentially, the outcast of Literature and Language. And although her friends in the department always trod carefully, she knew that the bias against the Gothics was still huge. The idea of meeting someone with whom she could share her passion was appealing. They would be colleagues. Who knew? They might even become friends.

  Her mind had raced with the possibilities – if she wanted to, Melinda would be in a position to do her a world of good. If Melinda introduced her, or even deigned to mention her as a scholar doing something, anything complementary to her own work, it would help legitimize Dulcie’s research. Perhaps she would invite Dulcie to that exclusive gathering before the talk. Perhaps they would publish together, farther down the postdoc road. As she strode across the Yard, Dulcie was positively optimistic.

  The final piece, she told herself as she trotted up the stairs of Widener, was that manuscript page. She should have time – more than twenty minutes till closing – to find it again. And this time, she’d make sure she kept a copy until her laptop had been able to process it.

  She was so busy picturing her progress – which page to pull from which box – that she was stunned to see Mr Griddlehaus standing at the front counter, shaking his head.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ms Schwartz,’ he said. ‘I thought you must have heard.’ He went on to tell her that as of midday, everything having to do with Gothic novels had already been put on hold – locked away and made inaccessible to other scholars in anticipation of Sloane Harquist’s visit.

  ‘But . . . but . . .’ Dulcie heard the whine of frustration in her voice. ‘She’s not even here yet.’

  ‘I know, Ms Schwartz. It’s out of my hands.’ Griddlehaus looked stricken as he explained. University scholars were allowed to request material during the lockdown, but for all intents and purposes, all works pertaining to Dulcie’s subject were off limits. ‘I do feel terrible about this.’ He looked so sad, Dulcie wanted to cheer him up.

  ‘That’s OK, Mr Griddlehaus,’ she said, and as she spoke, she realized that the ban really didn’t affect her: what she was looking for wasn’t classified yet as ‘Gothic’. Plus, she had another reason to be sanguine. ‘I figure, if she’s pulling all these books, it means she’s still fishing.’ She confided to the clerk. ‘And I’m more interested in the uncataloged work anyway. The boxes I was just looking at.’

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she knew something was wrong. Although they appeared to be alone in the hallway, the little man pulled her in to the rare book collection’s sterile reading room. His eyes darted back and forth, the movement exaggerated by his oversized glasses, before he leaned in to whisper in her ear.

  That’s when her final shred of optimism was shattered. ‘You can’t,’ he said, drawing back to look around once more. ‘I’m not supposed to say anything, you know. I was told that it was a confidential request. That it was worth my job.’

  Dulcie drew back in surprise. That anyone could threaten – would even want to threaten – such a competent librarian was beyond her. But before she could protest, he motioned for her to lean in again.

  ‘But you have a right to know.’ His eyes flicked back and forth across the room. ‘What she requested, it’s more than these titles. She called this morning and was quite insistent. Almost, well, threatening.’ His voice dropped with disbelief. ‘I told her that I had her list, and that I was fully prepared to hold these particular works for her. But she brushed that off. She almost laughed, Ms Schwartz.’

  He looked into Dulcie’s face. ‘She had a new request, a more urgent one, she said. She wants to look in the uncataloged material as well, and on the same terms I told her, that, well, there’s reams of it – much of it barely legible. She said she didn’t care, and she stressed that she needed sole access. I argued with her, Ms Schwartz. I told her that this would deeply inconvenience an entire community of scholars. I almost, Ms Schwartz, said she was being unfair.’

  He shook his head, either amazed at her stubbornness or his own daring. ‘It did no good. She reminded me that she had the dean’s backing, without reservation. She told me I had to start pulling material for her own private use from those uncataloged works, and I was to start immediately. Specifically, she said, I was to pay special attention to anything relating to Thomas Paine, especially any correspondence from the last five years of his life. And also to any recently uncovered fiction from those years. In particular, any unattributed or unclaimed fragments of fictional works of horror.’

  TEN

  Writing, she was writing again. Furiously, but with joy – a pleasure long denied more sweet for having returned. Once again, the words were flying, thoughts coming so fast she barely had time to dip her nib. An image of horror, so fraught with terror, she shivered as she penned the lines, her own raven curls falling forward, as if to shield her from any inquisitive soul. Pressed a little too hard and – wait! Seated at her desk, the writer cursed quietly. An unladylike sound, but not an unusual one – not to the eyes that watched her, unblinking. Green and gold, they saw her retrieve the razor, hone once more a pen long overdue to be replaced. Watched as she paused – that image, with its ravenous, foul face, so familiar and yet so feared – and started, with a cry. The razor, the nib – some movement had provoked her outburst, and yet she bit down on her pain. She was not alone, not any more. She could not risk a sound, instead letting her lips pale with pressure. And the eyes watched as she did, at the slow welling, of the blood that dripped, dark as ink, on the page.

  Dulcie woke with a start, grateful for the respite, and gasped as she saw the green eyes watching her, unblinking.

  ‘Esmé!’ She shook her head to clear it, and the sleeping vision receded, pulling Dulcie back into the modern day. Responding to her name, the cat yawned and stretched out one white mitten. ‘What are you doing here?’ Dulcie asked.

  It was an odd question, but the little tuxedo didn’t seem to mind. Instead, she looked over toward Dulcie’s desk. There, Dulcie could see, her laptop was open and glowing. The cat must have been sitting on it again.

  ‘Is it the warmth, Esmé? Is that it?’ She couldn’t really blame her pet. After all, she must have left the machine open. ‘Was it the light that made me dream of writing, Esmé?’ The tuxedo didn’t answer, and Dulcie was left with the impression that her pet was watching her, waiting for some kind of response that she had yet to give.

  ‘I guess it doesn’t matter, does it?’ Sitting up in bed, Dulcie gathered the cat into her arms and watched as the laptop screen faded into sleep mode, wishing she could do the same. Esmé didn’t seem similarly inclined, however, and once she was settled in Dulcie’s lap she started her morning toilette. Human carelessness had, presumably, messed up her impeccable black coat. ‘It’s the two of us against the world.’

  That wasn’t fair, nor entirely honest, and Dulcie knew it. Unlike the author in her dream, she was alone, but the day outside looked bright and fine – and Dulcie wasn’t hiding from some mysterious watcher.

  Besides, her loneliness was at least partly her own fault. Chris had received a late-night phone call from Darlene, who had asked him to cover for her. He had been planning on taking back the overnight shifts – at least some of them – for weeks now, so this shouldn’t have been that big a deal. Only they’d had words earlier in the evening, their quarrel prompted by the malfunction of Dulcie’s computer.

  ‘I know I saved it.’ Dulcie had been tired and cranky. Her disappointment at the closure of the Mildon had blown the loss of the excerpt into a major frustration. ‘Your program is broken. It lost my file.’

  Chris had looked worried at first, and had taken her laptop. ‘It’s not the program,’ he announced, after a few minutes of furious typing. ‘Whatever you had in here was accessed badly, that’s why it’s corrupted in the memory, and then you erased it.’

  ‘I d
id not.’ Dulcie had been using the program for several months now, with no problems.

  ‘You did, Dulce.’ If he’d been looking at her, instead of at the screen, he might have held back the next words. ‘I tried to idiot-proof it, but there’s only so much I can do.’

  The evening had gone downhill from there, to the point where they’d both been somewhat relieved when Darlene had called, pleading some sort of domestic crisis.

  ‘She is seeing someone,’ Chris had said, as he disengaged the cat from his sneaker laces. ‘And it hasn’t been going on that long, so maybe they do need some extra time together.’

  Biting back the more bitter of her possible retorts, Dulcie had smiled and hugged him. He might not be the most sensitive man at times, but he hadn’t meant to screw up her work – or insult her. She knew that.

  Sitting in her lonely bed, however, she regretted what she thought of as her generosity. Not only had the nightmare left her with a racing pulse, it had raised some questions. The kind she longed to bounce off someone.

  ‘Why has the dream changed?’ In lieu of her boyfriend, she asked the cat. ‘I mean, I’m glad that I’m not seeing a murder any more, but there’s still the same sense of dread, right at the end.’

  Esmé continued to wash, moving on from the smooth black fur of her back to her white hind foot. And Dulcie had to admit that the cat had a point. ‘I know; it’s because my situation has changed, right?’

  Without Chris – and without another shot at that tantalizing manuscript – Dulcie faced the day with a heavy heart. Her toilette done, Esmé did what she could, scampering around until Dulcie – running late and hurrying to the kitchen – nearly tripped over her in her distraction.

  ‘Esmé! Can’t you watch it?’ Dulcie heard herself snap, and caught herself. ‘I’m sorry, kitten. It’s not your fault I lost the excerpt and can’t get back into the Mildon. It’s not your fault I’m going to be late for section. Nothing’s your fault.’

  Whether it was the unexpected outburst or the sudden apology, the round little cat stopped her heedless scurrying. Instead, with her head tilted ever so slightly so that the whiter side of her nose was uppermost, she examined her person.

  ‘What’s wrong, Dulcie?’ The voice, so quiet and yet so definitely there, startled Dulcie to the point where she almost dropped her coffee.

  ‘Esmé?’ Dulcie swung around to look at the little cat. ‘Was that you?’

  ‘Who else?’ The cat flopped, exposing a fluffy white belly.

  ‘I thought – no, never mind.’ Dulcie sat heavily in a kitchen chair. ‘You never speak, and I was beginning to think . . .’

  ‘You thought it was him, huh?’ Esmé stretched her white legs above her portly tum. ‘You think the old man runs everything around here, don’t you?’ She flexed her pink toes and ended up rolling herself over. ‘Meant to do that,’ she muttered, and Dulcie suppressed a smile. ‘But, I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Dulcie didn’t want to be disrespectful, especially after that undignified move. In truth, she hadn’t given much thought to the relationship between the two feline presences in her life. ‘I guess, I thought Mr Grey had seniority.’

  ‘Huh!’ The little cat extended one foot and began to wash it furiously. ‘As if there were such a thing as cat tenure! No, our bonds are deeper and more subtle than you could ever know, with your concerns of legacy and birthright.’

  ‘Birthright?’ Dulcie paused to do the math before realizing that Mr Grey had been neutered. ‘No, it’s not possible.’

  ‘I said we were more subtle, as so should humans be. But wait.’ The little cat stopped mid-wash and stared up at her person. ‘You were about to say something about my intellect, weren’t you?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Clearly, Dulcie had lit upon a touchy subject. ‘I was thinking that you speak so rarely, I was beginning to wonder if perhaps you had lost—’ She stopped herself, suddenly aware of the need to tread carefully. ‘That perhaps you chose not to converse with us.’

  ‘Nuh!’ With a not inconsiderable effort, the little cat swung herself around again. ‘What is this “chose”? As if we didn’t all have our own roles to play.’

  With that, Esmé scrambled to her feet and galloped off to the living room.

  ‘Our own roles? Like jobs?’ Dulcie was tempted to follow up, but from the sounds in the other room, Esmé was already busy with one of her toys. Maybe that was her job: catnip monitor. And Dulcie’s? Well, with the Mildon off limits and her thesis hanging by a thread, she had little better to do than actually try to teach. If she hurried, she told herself as she screwed on the top of her travel mug, she’d make it to her section on time. Even the strange conversation with the cat had cost her a few minutes she could ill afford. For her Saturday section was all the way down by the river – in the library of Dardley House.

  Dardley House, where Melinda Sloane Harquist would be holding court in only a few hours. The visiting scholar had her sights set on Dulcie’s topic – and seemingly had no interest in sharing. For all that Esmé had been talking about connections, Dulcie couldn’t see how that would work here. Maybe cats simply were superior creatures. Taking a sip from the mug, Dulcie clattered down the apartment stairs and set off.

  English 10, the year-long survey course by which potential majors lived or failed, had been one of her favorite classes, she reminded herself as she darted across a one-way street with barely a glance at traffic. Like most such courses, it covered way too much – jumping from Puritan sermons to Mark Twain’s satires, all before midterms. As an undergrad, Dulcie had loved the way it drew connections between these, linking entire schools of thought through philosophical arguments over time. Only now, teaching the course, did she understand that for some students, those links were a bit too much.

  ‘The key is attitude,’ Dulcie rehearsed to herself, as she waited for a light. ‘Let yourself see how ideas can do the connecting.’

  She tried a few takes on it, attempting to sound as encouraging as possible and startling another pedestrian as she spoke out loud. ‘It’s all about attitude,’ she said, and realized she was beginning to sound like Esmé.

  Wednesday’s lecture had involved the course’s first difficult leap, from those early sermons to the first-hand reports of Kentucky explorers. Some of her students – she was thinking of two in particular – were not going to make it, she feared. Well, speaking of roles, it was her responsibility to reach down and haul those two up. The fact that this section was held in one of the conference rooms of Dardley House was neither here nor there. Melinda Sloane Harquist wouldn’t have arrived yet, anyway. And she would get to talk to her later. The Dardley clock rang the quarter hour. Nearly eleven. Picking up the pace as she turned on to the walkway to the house entrance Dulcie took another chug of coffee. Almost there. Which meant a few more moments to focus on the task at hand.

  ‘Try thinking about the mindset of the writers.’ It sounded good. Maybe it would work with the scared and scattered undergrads she was about to face. ‘How did they view this big new country of theirs? Were they frightened? Invigorated? A little bit of both?’

  Such questions invariably brought up her thesis topic. The Ravages was not covered in any of the big courses – Dulcie had only discovered the remaining fragments of the book in a graduate-level discussion group she’d wiggled into in her junior year – and its author was firmly identified with a British tradition. Still, she couldn’t help asking herself the same questions. Her author had been here, somewhere. A newcomer to a new world, fleeing some kind of danger. What had she thought of her new world?

  ‘I don’t care.’ She was steps from the open door when a woman burst out of the house’s front door, voice raised nearly to a shriek. The clock chimed again, but it didn’t come close to drowning her out. ‘I’m sorry, Rafe, but I don’t,’ Dulcie heard, between peals. ‘You’re always on about grabbing the opportunity, about networking, about bettering yourself. You should talk!’

  The owner of
the voice – a young black woman – stopped on the path and turned. Arms akimbo, bent slightly at the waist, she seemed to be using a good deal of her energy to yell at the young man who had followed her out the door and was holding it open. Glancing at him, Dulcie got the impression of cheekbones and a certain grace, the kind that some men took advantage of. Maybe she had reason to be angry.

  ‘You’re a hypocrite!’ With that one last cry, she spun on her heel and took off. Dulcie stepped off the path to let her pass, unsure whether to offer condolences or turn her head. As it was, she went by too quickly, and Dulcie had only a moment to see her dash a tear from her cheek as she stalked off toward the road.

  Head down, Dulcie pretended to be looking for her ID as she approached the main entrance of Dardley House. The double doors were oversized, more fitting for a castle than an undergraduate house, but the dark-haired man managed to almost block them anyway as he stood there, looking slightly stunned. Dulcie got a quick impression of Heathcliff on the moors – lost, dark, and undeniably romantic.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, as gently as she could. In an ideal world, she’d have ducked aside for a few minutes and left the abandoned lover to collect himself. However, even if most of her section was likely to be late, she should at least try to be on time.

  ‘What? Oh, sorry.’ Heathcliff – Rafe – stepped to the side, pulling one of the heavy doors open for her. She smiled up at him. She and Chris didn’t have many screaming fights, not any more, but after last night, she could certainly relate. ‘Maybe you should go after her?’ As soon as the words were out, she regretted them. This was a private matter, none of her business. But certainly they must have both been aware of her, scurrying through their private affairs.