Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  My boss worked with me the first few weeks, then turned over the keys and the alarm system passcodes. After that, I could pretty much do things my own way. I liked hanging out in the old bindery in the basement. Part of my job was managing book repair, so spending time downstairs was expected. Besides, the student workers at the front desk could buzz the bindery if they needed me . . . but that never happened much.

  Anyway, I built a big plywood box—long but not too deep, and not very high. One of the bindery work tables had a piece of base trim at the bottom, and it wasn’t much of a problem to install a hinge in the trim plate so I could hide the box beneath the table. I kept my woodworking tools inside, and I decided I’d make a present for Rebecca during my downtime. My probation was almost over, and after landing the library job I was her star pupil. I figured a gift was the least she deserved for giving me such good advice.

  That’s what I told myself, anyway.

  Rebecca was usually tight-lipped, but she let slip that she was attending a conference in a few months. She planned to present a paper that referenced my case as a positive example of her rehabilitation methods. I wasn’t sure I liked that, because it was information I couldn’t control. But I had a kind of unspoken attraction to it, too—because, in the end, Rebecca was the one in control.

  For some reason that excited me. So did the present I built for Rebecca. It was a himtsu-bako, or Japanese puzzle box. I made it from Hinoki wood, decorating it with a classic Koyosegi pattern. Fifty moves were required to open it. Up to that point the box was probably the finest piece of woodworking I’d ever produced, and I was especially proud of the combination of dowel pegs and sliders which I installed. A few of those sliders were actually lead, should anyone ever decide to x-ray the box. Back then I thought that was pretty clever.

  Put me to the test, and I’d have to admit that opening Rebecca’s himtsu-bako was a challenge for me—and remember, I’d designed the thing. But make those fifty moves, and you’d find a real treasure inside—a duplicate key for one of my storage units. Talk about dangerous stuff, giving something like that to a person who could put me away with a single phone call. Looking back on it, I can’t believe I took such a risk. Not that I thought Rebecca was the kind of person who’d figure out how to open such a complicated puzzle box, let alone turn detective and search out my storage unit. In truth, I figured she’d probably just put the box up on a shelf in her office and let it collect dust. Certainly, that would have ensured a smug and tasty victory for me. And if I’m honest with myself, that’s probably why I took a chance by giving Rebecca the box in the first place . . . after all, it was a pretty sizable thrill to put one over on the oh-so-brilliant Dr. Nakamura.

  But you can’t ever predict what people will do. Not really. The way things turned out I spent a lot of time worrying about the puzzle box, even after I decided to murder Rebecca. I suppose that added some spice to the whole exercise. All those worries were locked up in different places in my skull, in boxes large and small, and sometimes they’d get opened before I even realized it. That was scary. It was like some stranger breaking into your house and rummaging through your most personal possessions when you’re not even there.

  Or to put it another way: It was information that was way out of control.

  I hate to admit it, but that kind of excited me, too.

  It’s crazy the way your mind works, isn’t it?

  You bet it is.

  A few months into the library job, I found out the place was haunted. Everyone thought so, anyway. The Public Safety officers said they got weird vibes in the building after closing, and the motion detectors for the alarm system would indicate movement when the building was empty. There was even a story about a custodian quitting the job cold after she saw one of the second-floor statues move . . . just its head, as if its stone eyes were tracking the young woman as she worked above the dimly lit atrium. She claimed she heard laughter bubbling up from the old fountain on the first floor below, and the sound was like something that belonged down in a cave.

  Weird, right? Of course, I didn’t worry about those stories . . . not at first, anyway. When it comes to the supernatural, I rely on my own sensory input. And that usually means that in the end everything adds up to a big fat zero . . . . except this time.

  The incidents that bothered me most happened when I was alone in the building. I could write off several of them pretty easily—like, the elevator running by itself. The cab would come down to the first floor, and the doors would open. I’d be sitting at the Circulation Desk after closing, and I’d stare across the darkened lobby into that empty box bathed in its internal halogen glow. It was like a king-sized himtsu-bako waiting just for me, and you can probably guess that the very idea gave me a pretty sizable shiver.

  The elevator doors always seemed to remain open just a little too long before closing automatically, but I figured that was just my imagination. Even so, I could write off the elevator antics as some kind of electrical glitch. But I couldn’t explain away other phenomena so easily. Like the elevator, these incidents only occurred when I was alone in the building. For instance, I’d hear doors slam upstairs when I knew no doors were open. Or I’d be shifting books on the second floor, and I’d hear footsteps coming from the Periodical stacks on the third.

  One night I even heard drawers sliding open and slamming closed in some old microfilm cabinets stored on one of the third floor breezeways. When I went upstairs to check things out, I found a spool loaded on the oldest microfilm reader and the machine humming away. I knew that no one had been using that equipment before closing . . . but there it was. Of course, I looked at the screen. Someone had been reading an old Life magazine article about Jack the Ripper. That was a little too creepy for me. I put away the microfilm and turned off the equipment, then set the building alarm and called it a night.

  When I came to work the next afternoon, I ran into one of my closers in the quad. Stephen worked a lot of late-night shifts, and he’d go for a run around the campus after we closed the library at midnight.

  “Hey,” he said, “were you in the building last night around one a.m.?

  “No. I cut out about ten minutes after you did. I was already home by then.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  Stephen paused, as if he was hesitant to say more. “That’s weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Well, I was running past the library around one o’clock. You know. Along the access road. And I had this weird feeling someone was watching me. I glanced up at those big windows overlooking the parking lot, and I could see that breezeway on the third floor where the old microfilm readers are. The lights were off, but someone was up there. I only saw his silhouette, but I got the feeling he was staring right at me.”

  “Spooky,” I said. “Unless you’re just yanking my chain to get out of working more night shifts.”

  “Not at all. You know I like nights the best. I just thought I should tell you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Stephen hesitated.

  “Something else?” I asked.

  “Yeah . . . but you’ll think I’m crazy.”

  I laughed. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Well . . . don’t judge, but the guy I saw up there on the third floor?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He was wearing a top hat.”

  Ghost or man, I kind of forgot about the wearer of the top hat . . . at least for a while. There was a lot going on in my head, and some of it wouldn’t shake loose no matter how hard I tried. Mostly I was hung up on Rebecca, the puzzle box, and the hidden key to that storage unit. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. And the worst thing was that no matter how much I thought, I couldn’t decide what I should do about the whole mess . . . so I didn’t do anything.

  I hate inertia. Don’t you?

  Anyway, I knew I’d go crazy if I kept spinning on a (metaphorical) hamster wheel, so I went looking for distraction. The col
lege archivist suggested that I ought to move up the food chain and get a masters in Library Science. It sounded like a good idea, and maybe an answer to the Rebecca problem, too—school would keep my mind occupied during the day, and work would keep me busy at night. At the time I figured it was best to think less and do more.

  So that was the way I played it. I was accepted to a program at a state college just before the semester started. Remember, this was the nineties. There weren’t a lot of online classes yet. So I spent a good chunk of time driving to the campus, which was about sixty miles south of my apartment. Three hours of class, and then I’d make the drive back to work and put in my eight hours. For the first semester, I barely spent any time in my apartment at all . . . and when I was there I was (almost invariably) sleeping.

  Some classes were dull, some interesting. It was the same with the people in them. There was one girl in a couple of my classes. Her name was Daphne, which is one of those names that conjures two very disparate sources—either the seductive naiad from Greek mythology, or the hot chick from Scooby-Doo.

  And maybe in the end Daphne was a little bit of both. In those days most people would have (mistakenly) called her a Goth, but she was really more of a fifties throwback with a rockabilly twist. She wore a lot of black, and had these tortoise-shell glasses and a Betty Page hairstyle. Residing on her left arm was a tattoo of Elvis with a raven perched on his shoulder. Just those three sentences were enough to tell me that she really didn’t see life the way I did at all. Meaning: Forget secreting things away in compartmentalized boxes; Daphne seemed to wear her boxes on the outside.

  That was a strange enough concept for a fellow like me, but it wasn’t what—dare I say it?—sparked my attraction. Not really. What I liked most about Daphne was that she’d say whatever she felt like saying without worrying about stepping on someone else’s blue suede shoes.

  Ha ha. Just a little Elvis humor there.

  What I mean to say is that Daphne didn’t care what other people thought of her. Plus, she was really funny . . . if you got her jokes and references, anyway. Most people in the class didn’t have a clue, but I did. Sometimes I’d laugh out loud at something she said. More often I’d just arch an eyebrow, or grin. Daphne didn’t let on that she noticed, but she did . . . and pretty soon I’d catch her checking me out after she said something just to gauge my reaction.

  Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I knew it I was thinking about Daphne a lot, especially during those drives between school and work. I even bought some CDs with artists I knew she liked—Elvis (of course), but also Wanda Jackson, Robert Gordon, and The Collins Kids. Sometimes I’d get lost in those songs while driving, just thinking of Daphne. I even ran over a dog on the way home one Friday night, so wrapped up in Gordon’s version of “Only Make Believe” that I barely even noticed.

  Bow-wow.

  Clunk clunk.

  Daphne Daphne Daphne.

  Pathetic, right? I know. But that’s the way my world turned . . . for a while, anyway. Of course, I still thought about Rebecca, too. It wasn’t the same. Not at all. And then one night while driving home from work, I realized that I’d finally decided what to do about the oh-so-troubling Dr. Nakamura, and the puzzle box, and the whole horrible mess.

  The solution was simple, once I realized what had really changed between me and Rebecca. My brain had already moved on, along with the small little knot of muscle that passed for my heart. It was time for the rest of me to follow, and (metaphorically speaking, anyway) put Dr. Nakamura in the rear-view mirror.

  There was only one way to do that.

  I’d have to kill Rebecca.

  And close her box for good.

  I’m like most people. There are some things I’m proud of, and (if I’m honest with myself) more than a few that I’m not. Take my criminal record, for instance. It’s embarrassing. I can’t even bring myself to tell you some of the things I’ve been convicted for. Stupid stuff, and more than a little compulsive . . . which is even more embarrassing, because it’s hard to admit that a compulsion can overcome your natural intelligence.

  But that’s the way it was with me. The only good thing about my rap sheet was that it didn’t match the profile for the type of perp who committed the crimes that were actually my forte. In other words, I was very successful at not getting caught for anything that mattered. In a way, I imagine that was why things went as smoothly as they did for such a long time. My record created a kind of blind alley sure to send inquisitive cops on equally blind detours . . . until that last thing with Daphne, anyway.

  But there I go again, getting ahead of myself. I warned you I’d do that occasionally. Back to the upside—the things I’m proud of. One of them is my woodworking, and the true shame of that is that very few people ever saw the things I made. Like the boxes I built for Rebecca. Not the Japanese puzzle box. The other ones—the custom-made caskets I built to put her in after she was dead. They were beautiful, especially the box I made for her head. It was made of Zelkova wood seasoned for twenty years, and it was as lustrously blonde as the highlights in Rebecca’s hair. I worked with the Zelkova to bring out its glow and inlaid a dark forest of stained hemlock fir against it—the latter wood harvested from Aokiaghara, the Japanese forest at the base of Mount Fuji which was infamous for its suicides.

  Of course, Aokiaghara was famous for its ghosts, too, but I didn’t think about that then.

  I think about it now, though . . . and often.

  To this day I wish I’d never touched that wood.

  It was a night in May, just before the Memorial Day weekend. I’d closed the library, and (now that Rebecca’s boxes were finished) I’d been sitting in my office for hours planning her murder. From out of nowhere, a door slammed upstairs. A moment later, that sound was followed by a short burst of down in the bottom of a cave laughter.

  That laughter didn’t scare me. It made me mad. After all, I already had more than enough on my plate to keep me busy. The last thing I needed was a supernatural side-order of ghostly laughter crowding out the main entrée. I was just about to grab a mallet from my woodworking tools and head upstairs to see if I could pound ectoplasm into cobwebs when the office phone rang. I grabbed the handset, said my name and the name of the library, so off my game that I didn’t even bother with “How can I help you?”

  “Riddle me this, Batman.”

  “Huh?”

  “Where do you find narrow houses that last until doomsday?”

  “The graveyard, of course. Now who is this, and—”

  “Well, my name isn’t Ophelia.”

  “What?”

  “C’mon, slowpoke. You must have guessed by now. It’s Daphne, from cataloging class.”

  “How’d you figure out where I work? I never mentioned the name of the library in class.”

  Daphne only laughed. “I’m a librarian, Sherlock . . . or I’m going to be, anyway. Have you tried this new search engine called Google? It’s pretty amazing what you can find.”

  “I’m more of an AlltheWeb guy,” I said.

  “That’s a good one, too. I like the way you can search by specific dates.”

  “So what’s up?”

  “Well, you answered my riddle, so you’re still in the game. And Memorial Day weekend is just around the corner, which means a certain destination is de rigueur.”

  “So we’re back to graveyards?”

  “Dig it. We should excavate and investigate. You can be Mr. Burke, and I’ll be Ms. Hare.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Certainly, silly. After all, we’re a couple of purely straight-up individuals, embarking on careers as library professionals. So no shovels, no holes in the ground . . . just a nice little picnic lunch among the tombstones.”

  “That sounds kind of morbid.”

  “Indeed it does, but I’m kind of a morbid girl. And you’re not too far off the mark . . . if I read you right, anyway. Besides, the cemetery I’m thinking of has something specia
l.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A library. You need to see it, and so do I.”

  A library in a cemetery—now I was curious. Really curious. We exchanged a few more words, and somehow they seemed heavier now, as if everything we said had some kind of double meaning. I couldn’t even tell you what it was, only that it carried a particular edge . . . and a certain weight not unlike secrets or truth.

  Whatever it was, it was unsettling. I was relieved to hang up the phone. But I’ll be honest—any trepidation I’d had turned to (more than rabid) curiosity . . . and something much stronger. Something I’ll have to let you name. I’ll simply say that I didn’t have to be in Daphne’s presence to realize the power she had over me. It was there, even over the phone. Those lips of hers, painted black, smiling just a little bit. A simple arch of an eyebrow, and a gleaming pupil (nearly) dilated past the color of its iris. All of that a vision in my head, so strong that I had to close my eyes and hold my breath.

  “Daphne Daphne Daphne,” I whispered.

  Speaking her name to myself.

  And no one else at all.

  I don’t like dreams. I’ve never trusted them. They don’t fit well into compartments, and you can’t control them. That means they’re dangerous . . . and the one I had that night after talking to Daphne was the most dangerous dream I ever had in my life.

  It began in the library, and things were just the way they had been a few hours before. Only Daphne didn’t call me, and I wasn’t sitting in my office. No. I was sitting at the Circulation Desk. The library was closed and the building was dark except for that particular square of workplace illumination, which was surrounded by three counters and several metal shelves.

  A door slammed somewhere upstairs, and that sound was followed by a short chorus of (by now familiar) bottom of a cave laughter. The dual sounds spurred my anger, just as they had in real life. And just the same way, I was ready to grab one of my hammers and make a trip upstairs to see if it was possible to pound a hole in a ghost.