Sheri Tepper

by Marianne, The Magus

  She ran her fingers over it, feeling a glow, a warm tingling which grew as she pressed the card to her face then thrust it down her neck, safe beneath a strap. Gradually the warmth died, though she could feel the pressure of the card against her skin, the sharp demarcation of comers beside her breast bone.

  She sat until dark, staring at the window, caught in a timeless eddy of despair which allowed no movement or thought. Then the faces pressed against the pane in the window drew her attention and sent her into a spasm of weary revulsion. She turned out the light and made her way to the washroom, the book still open in her hands. She sat in one of the cubicles, her trousers around her knees, to read the story again and again.

  There was nothing new in it. When her eyes were so heavy she could not keep them focused, she struggled through a final sentence: "She was sometimes amazed that she always seemed to be able to get to any place indicated by these oblique instructions." Then there was only wakefulness enough left to get to her couch and stretch out upon it, the book open beneath the cushions and herself wrapped into the timeless security of her blanket.

  When she woke, it was to remember the last thing she had read. Her first act was to recover the book and read the sentence once again. She was sometimes amazed that she always seemed to be able to get to any place indicated by these oblique instructions. The solution was clear in her mind, including all the tortuous steps she would need to go through to accomplish it. Someone in the library must be induced to tell her that something-some book, some paper, some item of equipment was needed outside. Outside!

  But first she had to eat, to drink, to wash herself and comb her hair, to be ordinary, customary. Even if they could not truly see her, there must be nothing in the atmosphere at all different.

  "I must be an ordinary ghost," she said with some cheer. "A usual ghost, giving no evidence of untoward haunting beyond the acceptable routine." When all did, indeed, go as usual during the day, she was made confident enough to approach the chart which hung behind the head librarian's desk.

  The portico was on the chart. The areaway where deliveries were made was shown. The small, walled courtyard outside the board room was labeled. The garden outside the reading room where she had met Cani Grassi did not appear on the chart. She had looked out at that garden, at the swath of lawn, the ragged edging of shrubbery. There was no wall, no fence, and it was not upon the chart. Marianne took comfort from this. What was not on the chart would not be a pan of the library, no matter how close it lay.

  And a place which did not lie on the chart would not be mentioned by any of the assistant librarians. Not today, she thought, nor tomorrow. But later-yes. Later, someone would mention it.

  That night she sat in the reading room until dark, her message carefully prepared on a sheet of paper, the light on to attract the peerers. When she heard the first sound of them, she moved to the window to hold her message against the clear pane where they could not fail to see it. "If you will put a sign out there saying NEW STORAGE AREA, I will bring you some books." There was a confused mumbling from outside.

  She thought she heard the words of her message repeated in a rumbling voice, then again in a higher tone with fringes of hysteria. A confused chattering preceded a tap at the window.

  She moved her own paper away to see a message pressed against the pane from outside. "One book first. Book name

  Eternal Blood. Put out coal chute."

  She did not know the book or where it could be found nor, for that matter, where the coal chute was. Still, if they were in the building, presumably they could be found. She wrote on the back of her paper, pressed it to the pane: "I'll try."

  Outside was only silence. When she looked through the window, there were only the shadows thrown by the street lamps and passing cars, nothing else. Throughout all the days, weeksperhaps longer-that she had worked in the library, she had discovered no system of indexing, no catalogue listing titles or authors. She knew that finding the book would have to occur in the way everything in the library happened, by indirection and repetition. Though she had little confidence in the attempt, having seen nothing communicated in writing heretofore, she left notes on various desks saying that Eternal Blood needed to be taken to the reading room. She replaced these notes at intervals, for they vanished even from desks at which no one was observed working.

  She had had no great hopes for this in any case. Her best efforts went into repetition. Whenever she found herself within the hearing of some other library employee, she would say in a plaintive voice that the book Eternal Blood was needed in the reading room. She set herself the goal of saying this one hundred times during the first three days, and when she went to her rest each night it was with an honest weariness coming from much running about during the day to put herself within hearing of shadowy figures which seemed to dissolve from one place to another in a most unsteadying fashion. The days followed one another. Had she not observed the great length of time it took for messages to be received and acted upon, she would have despaired, but she had estimated it would take at least seven or eight days for anything at all to happen. Thus it was with some degree of surprise that she found the book in the reading room on the fifth day after Mr. Grassi's last visit.

  It lay atop the books Mr. Grassi had requested, massive, covered in black leather with lettering in red. Marianne opened it only once before shutting it with a shudder which recurred all afternoon. It was a book devoted to the subject of torment.

  Marianne did not ask herself what the peerers might want with it, knowing that conscience might rise out of her confusion to attack her if she thought about it. It was enough that the book was the one named, the one which might buy her a way out.

  Finding the coal chute had been an easy thing in comparison, a matter of prowling the dim corridors of the sub-basement in search of a furnace and finding a monstrous iron octopus at last which bellowed and roared at her as she passed, emitting agonized groans and fitful breaths of fiery heat. She had crept by it fearfully, crouching under its widespread tentacles which reached out through the walls and upward into the flesh of the place.

  As she ducked beneath one of these great, hollow arms, she heard from within it a distant, mocking chuckle carried down through heaven knew what floors and annexes and lofty mez- zanines from some high, remote place where someone laughed.

  It was a derisory laugh. Had it been repeated, Marianne felt she would not have had the courage to go on, but the sound did not come again. In a little room behind the furnace she found the coal chute, too high for her to reach until she fetched a broken chair from the room of furniture and mounted it unsteadily to open the corroded hatch, thrust the book through, and then, half losing her balance, let the hatch fall with a dull, hideous clang like the lid of a coffin or vault.

  The building fell silent, as though listening. The furnace did not roar or breathe. When Marianne crept up the stairs and into the lobby, it was into this same ominous silence. At every desk heads were cocked, eyes staring as though each one waited for motion, any motion, to identify who had been responsible for the sound. She did not move, merely crouched beside the door, as silent and unmoving as they, until someone coughed and the spell was broken. She had not been perceived, she told herself, thankful for the first time that they simply did not see her. She went to her couch that night with a sense of fruition.

  The next step waited on those outside, and she listened in the dark quiet to know whether they had found the book or not.

  It had not been dark long when she heard them cheering, a species of rejoicing with overtones of hysteria and despair. Then a flickering light came through the window and she knew they had lighted a fire. From her place she could see shadows as leaping figures capered and gamboled. Were they burning the book? She was more pleased than otherwise to think they might have disposed of it, and with it whatever damage it might have done. A daytime view of the garden affirmed her assumption, for the scars of fire were there as well as scraps of black which she
could identify as bits of the binding, some with lines of red lettering still visible. She paid little attention to these, for the signboard drew her eyes, a nicely varnished board supported by two uprights, lettered in black and gold as though by a professional sign painter: NEW STORAGE AREA. Very well.

  She planned the next step.

  But all her plans were delayed by a bustle in the library, a boiling, a throbbing of purpose as it was announced by the head librarian that a meeting of the Library Board of Trustees was to take place within hours, short hours, perhaps on the morrow. The morning lineup of assistant librarians was thrown into confusion by this proclamation, and the usual plaintive statement gained an immediacy of effect which Marianne had not seen before. The large double doors to the Board Room were opened for the first time she could remember. Books and papers which had cluttered the approach to this room were carried away. Even Mr. Gerald arrived unannounced and was seen to carry a pile of volumes away to some other place. The room was cleaned and the windows opened to air it out; a fire was laid upon the hearth, one surmounted by an overmantle of such complexity to make the one in the reading room seem simple in comparison. The activity took most of the day, during which time everyone's attention was fixed and could not have been diverted.

  The meeting was held in the late afternoon, after all the staff had gone except the head librarian. The usual shadowy figures which Marianne equated with porters or janitors were nowhere to be seen. She herself had considered hiding in the washroom or the tea room, in some empty room of a subbasement, perhaps in a hidey hole hollowed out among the broken furniture, but the thought of being hidden while this strange, new activity went on was outweighed by her need to see and know what would occur. The juxtaposition of this meeting and the destruction of the book which she, Marianne, had put out the coal chute was significant to her. A book had been burned; a meeting had been called-both notable events and perhaps not unconnected. At last she decided to cache herself in a far front corner of the third mezzanine, a pocket of shadow above the light of the shaded chandelier which hung one level below this to wet the lobby floor with its weak, watery light. From this vantage point she could see the members as they arrived, see them obsequiously, even cravenly greeted by the head librarian. The chairman arrived last of all, and

  Marianne heard the head librarian say, "Good evening, Madame

  Delubovoska..."

  The drawling voice which answered filled the lobby, ascended to the green skylight far above, moved inexorably outward from the place of utterance to the balcony edges, thrust through the banisters to flow into the aisles of books, soaking each volume in turn so that the very bindings became redolent with that sound, not echoing but vibrating nonetheless in a reverberating hum larger than the building itself, a seeking pressure which left no corner unexplored. The words did not matter, could not be heard. The voice mattered, for it took possession of all it touched, penetrated and amalgamated into itself all that it reached.

  Marianne saw the voice, saw the shudder of it go forth through the structure, a tremorous wave as in a sheet shaken by the wind, the returning vibration trembling through the coiled railings. She felt the shudder in the same instant she felt Mr.

  Grassi's card begin to burn upon her shoulder with a pervasive heat which covered her and radiated from her. Her hand lay upon the railing; she felt the lash as the brazen circlets uncoiled to reveal flat, triangular serpents' heads, mouths gaping with fangs extended, striking from among the knots of bronze acanthus to shed venom like rain upon the stacks below. One serpent struck a hands width from her hand, and on the lobby floor beneath she could see the serpents gliding in their tangled thousands.

  The warmth which came from the card at her shoulder surrounded her, close as the blanket she had found, so that she looked out upon madness from the security of her own impenetrable shell, as marvelous as it was unexpected. In all that lofty, ramified building there was only this one flaw in the fabric of the place, this one error in calculation of resonances, this one gap in the fatal architecture of the building to allow a small sphere of warm protection where the voice did not reach.

  She saw the serpents strike and strike again while the woman walked with the head librarian through the doors of the Board

  Room, saw them coil again into those baroque tangles from which they had emerged, and knew that she had been reprieved, saved, by some intent she had known nothing of. Had that voice fallen on unprotected ears she would have been bitten, poisoned, dead.

  When the members of the board had shut the great doors behind them, Marianne stayed where she was, not daring to move so much as an inch to the right or left, as sure of her safety in that one place as she had ever been sure of anything and as sure of her jeopardy if she moved as she was sure she had heard nemesis in the voice of Madame Delubovoska.

  The meeting was not long, barely long enough to offer an excuse for the assembly to have met at all. When they had gone, truly gone, she came down from her perch at last, slowly, sniffing the air as for fire or some odorous beast. All was as usual to the eyes, to the nose, to the ears, but she knew that something had sought to smoke her out, and she knew that every previous threat had been multiplied a hundredfold; every previous shadow folded upon itself to a deeper opacity; every mystery stirred into menace and jelled. Only the remaining tingle of Mr. Grassi's card against her skin, only the sound of whisperers at the windows demanding books, books she had promised, brought her to full determination again.

  From that time on, whenever books were mentioned,

  Marianne would say, "You said the New Storage Area, didn't you,

  Librarian?" Whenever she was within hearing range of any

  'figure, she would say, "Those books should be taken to the

  New Storage Area." So it went, day by day by day. She had become so accustomed to failure that success almost eluded her. Almost she missed the assistant librarian's gesture toward the pile of books on her desk. Almost she missed the figure's quiet voice saying in the usual indirect manner, "These books belong in the New Storage Area."

  Marianne gathered them up. There were six or seven, not a heavy load. She had kept the two books Mr. Grassi had asked for on her desk for days, for it was her intention to take these as well. If they were useful inside the library, they would be doubly useful outside, or so she reasoned. She added them to the pile and started for the door, sure someone would stop her.

  The doorman ignored her. She leaned against the glassy slab, feeling it move reluctantly before her slight weight, stepped through onto the portico. She trembled as she went down the steps and around the comer to the garden, to the sign. The shrubbery was full of shadows and eyes. Those who had danced, cheered, whispered through high windows were there, just out of sight, watching her through the foliage with greedy intensity.

  She dropped all the books but her two and fled back to the sidewalk, hearing them scrambling behind her. One of them came after her, not threatening, merely following; she could hear the scrape of shoes.

  Against her skin was the card Mr. Grassi had given her.

  Behind her in the library was only an enormous quiet. Behind her on the sidewalk the muffled steps came on, hesitant but determined, giving notice they would go wherever she chose to go.

  SHE HAD BEEN so intent upon leaving the library that she had spent little time planning what to do once she had escaped.

  She would, of course, find her way to Number Eight Manticore

  Street. She assumed that she would be able to ask directions, that conditions outside the library would be somehow different from conditions inside it. However, there was no one to ask.

  The footsteps behind her, persistent though they were, did not indicate a visible person to whom a question could be directed.

  She found herself walking through a neighborhood of narrowfronted houses which stared nearsightedly at her over high stoops and scraps of entryway relieved only by tattered yews and spectral cypresses. An iron-fenced square centered this a
rea, a stretch of weedy grass around a dilapidated bandstand where shreds of paint flickered like pennants in the light wind.

  She went on walking. The houses gave way to massive, windowless warehouses, every wall plastered with colored posters, layer on layer, variously tattered, all showing human figures, the irregular tearing and layering offering odd, sometimes obscene juxtapositions of hands, breasts, groins, and mouths.

  Occasionally a figure was untorn, almost whole, and all of these seemed to be fleeing from her as though she saw them from the back, though faces were sometimes turned over shoulders in expressions of terror. Soon the warehouses gave way to smaller buildings, dirt-fronted and surrounded by bits of rusty machinery, and then came open country stretching in a featureless plain to a distant wall which ran endlessly upon the horizon.

  In all this way there had been no person, no living thing, no sound except for the hesitant steps far behind her. Sighing, she turned to her left for a few blocks before returning on a course parallel to her original one. She began to see shops on the side streets, some of them overhanging the street in the archaic manner of fairy tale illustrations. The buildings here were plastered with the same type of paper posters she had seen on the warehouses. A little farther on the shops invaded the street she walked upon; a news kiosk, papers arrayed on the counter, caught her eye. The headline displayed on the paper said LIBRARY BOARD DISCUSSES THEFT, VAN-