Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  This time she was completely ready for his question, an almost hysterical readiness in which her answer nearly preceded his question. ‘Can I do anything for you?’ was uttered almost simultaneously with ‘Help me! For God’s sake, help me!’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I will, of course, if I may.’

  Much later Marianne was to wonder at his choice of words, his saying ‘If I may,’ rather than ‘If I can.’ At the moment, she heard only the ‘I will, of course,’ and let herself fall upon these words as a starving animal upon food, ravenous and unheeding of any other thing. She hung upon his arm while he patted at her, still panting, tongue protruding at the corner of his mouth, eyes full of seemingly uncomprehending concern.

  It was this expression which told her he did not know what she needed or wanted, and that she must go further than she had gone in imagination or all her efforts would be lost. She must define the inexplicable, demand assistance for a condition which she could not define. ‘I am not mad,’ she said tentatively. ‘Truly, I am not mad.’

  No, his expression seemed to say, of course not. You are distressed, only distressed. It was not enough.

  ‘I cannot get out of the library,’ she said. ‘I can’t get out. Please, do you think I’m crazy when I tell you this. It’s true. I cannot escape. Help me.’ There, it was said, and nothing she could add to it or take from it would make it clearer.

  He moved away from her, his dancing little feet carrying him in short, jigging steps to the window and, from it, to the bookshelves and, from them, to the mantlepiece – the reading room had a large and ornate mantle stretching elegant gilt and inlays above a mingy gas fire – and from it, warbling a little aggrieved sound, like a frustrated cricket caught in a dilemma of its own making. At last he came to rest in the bowed window, bent forward a little to peer through the one clear pane, hands behind him as he rocked upon his heels and toes, up and down again, like some children’s toy sent into ceaseless motion by a restless hand.

  ‘The answers to everything are in the books,’ he said to her. ‘It is in knowing which books, of course, and where to look. Most of the people in this city cannot get into the library, you understand that?’ He cast her a sharp, questioning look, began to warble again.

  ‘I read the book you opened for me,’ she said stubbornly, wondering if he were testing her or would question her upon the contents of that book. ‘I did read it.’

  ‘Of course. And I’m sure the answer is there. Would you like for me to open it again?’ He turned to meet her silence, her baffled quiet which hid bursting volcanos of weary rebellion and panic.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ she whispered. ‘Truly it wasn’t. It was only my story. Mine. And I already know it.’

  ‘Tsk. Well, we often say we know things when we are only familiar with them, you know. My dear, I have spent all the time today that is safe. Let me give you my card. When you have read again, I’m sure you’ll find it useful. You will find me there any morning. It may be dangerous to be on the streets after noon. Let me open the book for you again and settle you comfortably, so. Now I must run.’

  And she was seated once again as she had been for a day and a night, the light of the brass table lamp upon the picture of her own face staring up from the basement room. She could see every detail of that room; the couch, the floor, the high barred window with the faces in it, the tea urn, the jar of stale biscuits. Even on the page their staleness was manifest, part of the design intended by the artist, part of the story. The staleness was intentional, as was the dust, the stuffed birds in the basement, the writhing railings beside the stairway. Under her fingers was the card he had given her. Cani Grassi, Consultant, Eight Manticore Street. The card was very heavy, more like metal than paper, with a design embossed upon its back. 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 corners 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 part 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, weeks – perhaps 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 int
ervals, 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 mezzanines 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 sub-basement, 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 handswidth 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 nothin
g 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 corner 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.