Code Grey

by Clea Simon

  ‘Chris …’ She woke, fully, to the realization that her boyfriend was not here to answer for her. And that, in fact, a call at this hour might presage something wrong.

  ‘Hello?’ By the time she found the phone, Dulcie was frantic. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘The moon! The moon is what’s happening!’ Several voices, chanting, and a sound like the wind through it all.

  ‘Lucy?’ It was a guess, but a good one. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Of course it’s me, Dulcinea.’ One voice – her mother’s – came in clear. Lucy had picked up the phone. ‘Did you feel our energy?’

  ‘No, I heard you though.’ Dulcie slumped to the floor. Her mother hadn’t called during a circle in a long time. ‘Excuse me, Mom, but are you stoned?’

  ‘Dulcinea!’ Her mother’s shock was a bit too exaggerated for innocence. ‘What kind of question is that?’

  ‘Sorry, Mom.’ Dulcie leaned back against the wall. Usually, she managed to be more tolerant of her mother’s unconventional ways. ‘You woke me.’

  ‘But it’s the super moon.’ Her mother sounded honestly perplexed. ‘And it’s not much past midnight.’

  ‘It’s three hours later here.’ Dulcie didn’t know why she even had to explain this one more time. ‘I was in bed.’

  ‘Go to the window, dear.’ The chanting in the background grew louder. ‘Come and sing with us.’

  ‘I’ll go look.’ Dulcie pulled herself to her feet and made her way into the kitchen. There, through the bare branches, she could see an impressive moon, low in the sky. ‘Very nice. Is that why you called?’

  ‘I can’t call to invite my only child to join our circle?’ Dulcie didn’t respond. Lucy tended to get rhetorical when embarrassed, and Dulcie suspected she had forgotten about the time difference. ‘But I’m sorry, Dulcie. Really I am.’

  ‘Thanks, Mom.’ Dulcie leaned on the sill, looking at the glowing orb. Esmé’s soft fur brushed against her ankles. ‘It is gorgeous.’

  ‘I’m so glad you have the cat with you.’ Her mother sounded calmer now, even – dare she say it – maternal.

  ‘Actually, she’s right here.’ Dulcie didn’t want to look away, but she lifted one bare foot and felt the cool damp of a feline nose on her ankle. ‘Do you want me to put her on?’

  ‘Not Esmé.’ Dulcie had been joking, but her mother’s dismissal still surprised her. ‘No, I meant the other cat.’

  ‘The other cat?’ Dulcie had never told her mother about Mr Grey’s visits, though Lucy had picked up something about her daughter having a ‘spirit animal,’ as she put it. ‘Lucy?’

  ‘The cat of moonlight,’ said Lucy. ‘Of light and shadows – a creature of the hidden places. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I had thought at first that he was simply a random beast. You understand, of course, a formless but fierce manifestation of the goddess Selene, a creature of light and shadow. And you have to trust the shadow. But now I know – he’s a cat. It was hard for me to tell, Dulcie, because he’s been so hidden, and he can be very dark, you know.’

  ‘It’s dark in your visions?’ Dulcie closed her eyes. She couldn’t concentrate on the moon and her mother. At least Esmé was comforting, leaning against her shin with a rumbling purr. ‘Oh, wait, do you mean the dark of the moon?’

  ‘Something like that, dear.’ Her mother responded as if this were the most natural discussion in the world. ‘What I’m getting is that he did not choose to manifest at first. Not in any corporeal plane. He did keep insisting, “It’s a secret.”’

  That woke Dulcie up. ‘He said what?’

  ‘Oh, hang on!’ The chanting was getting louder, and someone called Lucy’s name.

  ‘Mom?’ The line went dead, and after a moment of silence, Dulcie put the phone down on the window sill. Outside, the moon had sunk further, and now looked as if it could be tangled in those trees. ‘Just like your claws, Esmé,’ she said, as the little cat scrambled on to the sill.

  ‘My claws are neater than that.’ As if to prove her point, Esmé started to groom, the moonlight picking up the silver in her guard hairs. ‘And they never get caught in anything, unless I want them to.’

  ‘Point taken.’ Dulcie stroked the silky black back as Esmé worked on her whiskers. The pressure on her ankles remained warm and constant, as together they watched the moon till it disappeared below the skyline.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  When Dulcie next awoke, the sun was shining through the window and Esmé was long gone. Her present-day pet had sat up with her until the spectral comfort had disappeared along with the moon, and then had accompanied her to bed, washing noisily on the pillow by her head as Dulcie slipped back into sleep.

  That sleep had been dreamless, and she had woken refreshed. But her mother’s comments had stayed with her.

  ‘It’s a secret,’ she said out loud, as she started the coffee brewing. ‘The moonlight cat.’

  In general, Dulcie knew, it didn’t make much sense to credit her mother’s visions. Too often, these seemed to be the result of empty-nest syndrome, loneliness and perhaps regret. At times, as Dulcie had suspected the night before, they came directly out of her mother’s propensity for psychotropic excursions. However, these words came awfully close to what Jeremy had said – and they were reminiscent of her own dreams of stealth and darkness.

  ‘You don’t think it was just the moonlight, do you, Mr Grey?’ The spirit had not made an appearance this morning, but Dulcie could easily conjure up his wise green eyes. Besides, without Chris around – and with Esmé being obstreperous, she wanted to talk to someone.

  ‘I’m here.’ A very solid head butt as the little jellicle made her morning debut. ‘Breakfast?’

  ‘Of course.’ Dulcie opened a can and, as her cat dug in, began to think about her day. The Mildon was probably still off limits, she thought with regret. Griddlehaus had said he would call her, but until then, she thought she should probably stay away. In fact, she realized, she should probably avoid the library entirely.

  ‘It’s not fair, Esmé,’ Dulcie complained. ‘I stayed in town to work.’

  Esmé looked up, licking her chops. But now that she had received her morning due, she had lapsed back into a more usual catlike silence.

  What she ought to be doing was writing. After Chris had shot down her latest theory about the break-in, she had gone on to tell him about her progress. Only she had exaggerated a bit, pretending that she had most of the new chapter drafted. It wasn’t that she wanted to lie to Chris, only that she didn’t want to disappoint him. Clearly, he didn’t believe that unraveling what had happened to Jeremy – or why anyone had broken into the library – should be taking up so much of her time.

  ‘You don’t even know if they’re all connected, Dulce,’ he had said, putting it as gently as possible. ‘Old Mumbles might have been mugged. Or maybe the cops have it wrong and he fell and hit his head.’

  ‘But what about the book?’ Dulcie had asked. ‘Surely the fact that he had that book – from the Stavendish bequest – means something.’ She had started to explain again about how her pages had come from that volume, but Chris had interrupted.

  ‘Sweetie, that book has been missing for years,’ he had said. ‘Nobody ever sees him except in that big old overcoat. You said that the book couldn’t have been stored in that hole, that it was in too good shape for that. But Mumbles could have been carrying that book around with him all along, and we just never knew.’

  He was right, she knew it. Just as he was right about how she should be applying herself to the chapter at hand – using what information she now had.

  ‘If you wait until you know everything, you’ll never get your dissertation done,’ he had said, his voice soft. ‘You might never even start. We call it going down a wormhole in applied math. You start chasing the source of something – the ultimate result – and you get lost.’

  Dulcie opened her laptop and thought about that. The imagery was great. A wormhole sounded dark and deep. Kind of like
how Lucy had described her vision. Only that hadn’t been a worm hole. That had been some kind of cloudy scene with a cat in it. A cat, like Dulcie had seen in the excavation by the library. A cat like the printer’s mark, intended as a signal to readers – a sign to follow.

  Could Jeremy have been hiding that book all these years?

  Dulcie’s screen glowed to life. The previous day’s work opened before her, while another window showed her latest notes with several lines highlighted.

  It didn’t matter. Closing the laptop, she tossed it into her bag. Maybe she’d get a chance to use it later. For now, she needed to get dressed and put on her sturdiest shoes. Dulcie was going down a wormhole.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss. I really am.’ The guard at the back entrance of the library looked honestly pained.

  ‘You can’t keep me out,’ Dulcie protested. ‘I’m a member of the university in good standing.’

  ‘No, I know that. I do.’ His brow wrinkled with the effort. ‘It’s only that I have your name on a list. If you came in, I was told to call Mr Truckworth and let him know, and well, I have to ask you to stay here while I do that.’

  Dulcie slumped against the wall. It was hopeless. She had hoped to locate her colleague and enlist his aid. If he had called, she would have explained it to him – she felt sure the librarian would understand. Except that he hadn’t, not yet, and she realized she had no way of reaching him. Unless …

  ‘Look.’ She reached out to the guard. He’d been scrolling down a screen, clearly reluctant to make the call. ‘What if I don’t go into the library proper? What if I just poke my head into the staff reading room over there?’ She gestured past the guard’s station, to the door to Griddlehaus’s book-lined sanctuary. ‘Just a quick visit. I’m looking for Mr Griddlehaus and either he’ll be there or I can leave him a note. I don’t need to go into the stacks today.’

  ‘Oh, well, if that’s all you want.’ Relief flooded the guard’s broad features. ‘That’s not really part of the library.’

  Dulcie smiled and nodded, giving her tacit agreement to the slight fiction. She was almost about to offer to leave her bag, as a surety, when she remembered what had happened the day before. Instead, with a smile and a nod, she tugged the strap up on her shoulder and – aware that his eyes were following her – she went up to the recessed door and knocked softly.

  ‘Mr Griddlehaus?’ She wasn’t sure how well insulated the little room was. It had certainly seemed quite quiet when they had been there. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him yet today.’ The guard was standing right behind her. ‘Maybe you should just leave him a note.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll do that then.’ Retrieving the key from its niche, she unlocked the door. ‘Mr Griddlehaus?’

  The guard was right. There was nobody here. Even the motion-sensitive lights seemed to have been turned off, and the windowless room was pitch black. There had been a lamp, she recalled. A tall old-fashioned floor lamp, off to her left. She reached and felt cold metal. Working her hand up, she found the knob and turned it, closing her eyes against the sudden brightness.

  ‘What the hey?’ The guard’s voice caused her to turn, so that her first sight was of his face, lit by the lamp, shocked and open.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked as she turned, and then gasped. The comfy chair she had relaxed in had been sliced open, its stuffing spilling out on to the floor. The lamp she had reached was the only one standing. And all the books – or what seemed like all of them – had been pulled from the shelves to lie in a heap on the floor.

  THIRTY-SIX

  ‘Oh, dear Goddess!’ Dulcie wasn’t sure how Lucy’s expression got into her mouth, but the words seemed appropriate as she stared at the mess before her.

  ‘What the hell?’ The guard, who pushed by her, was a little more profane. ‘I’m calling security.’

  He turned and raced back to the booth, leaving Dulcie frozen to the spot.

  ‘Hello? We’ve got a problem.’ She heard his voice, as if from far away, but she couldn’t stop staring. The neat little hideaway of the other day, Griddlehaus’s sanctuary, was a mess. The chair …

  ‘Yes, of course.’ The guard was still speaking. ‘Right away.’

  Worst of all were the books. Dulcie saw one lying face down, splayed open, its leather spine already cracking. It had fallen – or been thrown – almost to the doorway. She couldn’t stand it. She stepped in and picked it up.

  Looking around for where to place the poor thing, she spotted another, its pages folded beneath it. And a third, the cover bent back by its odd angle against a fallen lamp. Before she knew what she was doing, Dulcie had her arms full of books and was reaching for another.

  ‘Miss, Miss, you can’t be in here.’ She looked up to see the guard standing in the doorway, a pained look on his face. ‘Please, Miss.’

  ‘But …’ Dulcie paused, suddenly aware of the books she held against her body. ‘They could have been damaged.’ It was all she could think of to say. But as she was looking around, trying to find a flat surface where she could place the books, she heard a bustle in the hallway.

  ‘What happened? Oh, no, not you.’ Stuart Truckworth had stepped in front of the guard and was now coming forward. ‘What have you done here? What did you pick up?’

  ‘Just these.’ Dulcie held out the books as evidence, but the facilities manager didn’t seem interested in examining their cracked and twisted spines.

  ‘Stupid.’ With one long stride, he was by her side, grabbing the books out of her hands. ‘Don’t you have the sense—’

  ‘What’s going on here?’ A gruff voice interrupted and Dulcie looked up to see that iron buzz cut backlit by the hall light. ‘Truckworth?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said the manager. ‘I mean it’s under control.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it.’ The bulky officer stepped in, nearly filling the doorway. ‘Though it is interesting to find you in what is quite clearly a crime scene.’

  ‘We were just leaving.’ Truckworth looked around and – faced with the same problem Dulcie had – stooped to put the books on the floor. ‘Come on, Ms Schwartz.’

  ‘Wait, you shouldn’t …’ Dulcie reached for the books, but Truckworth was too fast for her. With one big hand on her back, he pushed her forward, and she stumbled toward the door.

  ‘Watch it.’ She turned as she righted herself. ‘There’s no need to be rude.’

  ‘You should not have been in here.’ Truckworth caught up with her and marched her toward the library exit, his voice strained. ‘You shouldn’t be in here at all.’

  ‘I have a right.’ As soon as she was out the door, Dulcie pulled away, whirling around to face the tall and balding manager. ‘And you, sir, are totally out of bounds.’

  ‘You are a stupid girl.’ He was nearly spitting. ‘Stay out of this, while you can.’

  ‘Stay out of what? The library?’ But he had already turned and stormed back in. Shaken, despite herself, Dulcie took a deep breath and then another, and straightened her coat collar where it had gotten rucked up. It was only when she reached up to brush her unruly curls off her face that she realized how close to tears she was. As she squeezed her eyes shut a few stray outliers made their escape down her cheeks.

  ‘You OK?’ She hadn’t noticed the guard slipping out, but now he stood beside her, sheltering in the brick entranceway. ‘That was a little rough.’

  ‘Thanks.’ A few blinks and her eyes cleared. ‘I’ll be fine. I was startled, that’s all.’ Embarrassed, she turned back toward the door. Inside, she could see Truckworth talking to Wardley. The facilities manager towered over the cop, but as skinny as he was tall, he appeared flimsy and insubstantial. ‘What are they doing?’

  The guard shook his head. ‘Not much. The room’s on lockdown until the cops can investigate. I don’t know what they’re going to find.’

  ‘Maybe they can figure out who did it? I mean, the door wasn’t forced, was it?’

  ‘No.’ Anoth
er shake, confirming what Dulcie had thought. ‘I think most of the library staff knew about it. Knew where the key was, too.’

  Dulcie didn’t respond. There was something so depressing about it all: Griddlehaus’s lovely reading room despoiled. ‘Why would anyone do such a thing?’

  ‘Some people don’t like books,’ said the guard. ‘Or they don’t like the university. Think we’re privileged. You know.’

  Dulcie nodded. She did. But as the guard turned and returned to his post, another thought occurred to her. Griddlehaus’s private reading room was just that – private. Not obvious to the outside world, and certainly not ostentatious. Besides, the guard had said that its existence – and the whereabouts of its key – were known to the library staff. That was a large group – Ruby, Kyle, Griddlehaus himself – but a pretty cohesive one. At any rate, it wasn’t made up of the kind of people who would be likely to trash a room just for having books.

  Of course, there might be another reason to destroy library property. As Dulcie began to walk away, she recalled how upset she had been during that brief moment when she had been accused of stealing library property. Might Kyle be harboring enough resentment to take it out on some innocent books – or even on Griddlehaus himself?

  As she wandered, collar up against the wind, she tried to think back to the diminutive librarian’s involvement with Kyle’s arrest. Had he given evidence? Had he been the one to identify the missing document? No. Dulcie kicked the ground. She was conflating events. Griddlehaus had identified the book that had been found on Jeremy. Kyle had been arrested by Wardley, though Dulcie still didn’t know how the big cop had been led to the young guard. She would have to ask—

  ‘Mr Griddlehaus!’ Dulcie looked up in time to see him hurrying by, head down. ‘It’s me. I, I mean.’

  ‘Ms Schwartz.’ From the anguish on his face, Dulcie knew he had heard. ‘I just received a call from Mr Truckworth. I’m afraid I have to hurry.’