A Study in Spirits

by Byrd Nash

  “May I?”

  “Be my guest. In this area, you can touch as much as you like.”

  Em sat down in the chair and typed in the password that Paul gave her. She placed her hand up to her shoulder, and the squirrel scampered down her arm, changing to a removable hard drive in her fingers. She plugged it into a port, and across the wall of monitors, Obake opened multiple text windows.

  Roomy. Lots of space. And very fast.

  Em texted back, Initiate our plan.

  Already done.

  Celia whispered behind her hand to Paul, “Do you know what she’s doing?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea,” admitted the Doppelgänger.

  Louder, so Em could hear, he told them, “I do know this system is plugged directly into the library network. When they upgraded the vault, they placed the generator backup for it down here. I’ve put the machine in a time eddy so it will never wear out or age. No one can cut the power to it or damage it in any way. Unless you do so from this console.”

  Em’s flying fingers paused over the keyboard. She cracked her knuckles staring at the screen for a long moment before spinning about in the chair to face them.

  “I’ve just cut access to the Internet and isolated the library from any outside communication. The next step will be to clean out the archive and remove it from the most important areas. Then I’ll chop off its tentacles; remove all the hooks it left on individual computers. As each computer gets scrubbed clean, I’ll power it down, putting it offline from the network.”

  She bit her lip, sighed, and continued.

  “What concerns me is that as each one goes offline, the creature is bound to realize something is up. It’s going to react and push back. We need to be ready for that. I don’t think it’s going to like erasure.”

  “Perhaps not.” Paul gave a vicious smile. “But, I certainly will.”

  Chain of Command

  Anna Burkhalter hit the punching bag. Thinking about the upcoming morning staff meeting, she punched it harder, making it fly back.

  Her morning routine at the gym started at 5 a.m. It was a combination of rowing, boxing, and weights. She did her cardio runs in the evening. It kept her in shape and helped to alleviate stress. Her doctor still wanted her cholesterol numbers to get lower.

  After her shower, as she repacked her gym bag, her cell phone vibrated.

  “Liam, you rat! What are you doing up this early?”

  “Ha, Anna, I knew it was the only way to reach you. That bookstore is keeping you busy.”

  “Library. You’d know what it was if you ever walked into one. I’m curious, though, why the call? You never call unless you want something.”

  “I just had to tell you, Grossenbacher is out.”

  “What?!” Burkhalter exclaimed. She was outside the gym, heading to the abbey, the false dawn giving the horizon a gray cast to the sky. “Never thought he’d give up command.”

  “He didn’t do it willingly,” Liam said with a laugh. Gleefully, he gave her all the details about their old commander removal from his post. By the time he related the entire story, complete with all the jokes, Anna was swiping her staff card for admittance into the library.

  “That’s hilarious. I’ll have to send you boys a gift. Maybe a crate of champagne. But you slobs would probably prefer beer.”

  “Give us a better gift. You come back. They’d make an exception for you despite your age. We all know why you left. Now that Grossenbacher’s exposed for what he is, they’d snatch you back. Fast track it. With your skills —.”

  For a brief moment, she thought of it, her heart lifting at the possibility of returning. No. Too much had happened. Too many people didn’t stand up for her.

  “Not going to happen,” she told him flatly. Anna smiled at some of her staff she passed, to let them know she wasn’t talking about them.

  “Don’t tell me — the library work is too exciting.”

  “You’d be surprised. Bewachterberg is an interesting country and Geheimetür, a fascinating city.”

  “Huh,” he gave a disgusted grunt on the other end of the line. “Full of dirty tricksters. Making their country disappear for 99 years to evade decades of chaos.”

  “Glad you give the country credit for having the foresight to pass on two world wars. Anyway, I’d thought you’d be more sympathetic since our country also gets flack for having been neutral.”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t disappear to do that! We had the guts to say it upfront, not slink off to the shadows.” Switching tactics, her former comrade pleaded, “Come back, Anna, we all miss you. We need you. Your country needs you.”

  “Stop that, Liam. I’m just one person. My efforts won’t change the course of a country. Now, I’ve got someone knocking on my office door, wanting to meet with me. Thank you for telling me about Grossenbacher. It was good to hear how that dirty old bastard got his. I’ll be sure to eat a hearty dinner tonight in honor of him receiving his just desserts.”

  When you told a soldier to jump from a helicopter for the first time, he did it. When you told a librarian to remove their old lunches from the break-room refrigerator on a timely basis, you got a twenty-minute diatribe.

  “The space in the fridge is limited,” Anna finally said in a voice that brooked no discussion. Yet, somehow her staff needed more debate. Probably because the culprit who had left their moldy lunches in the fridge each week still was unknown.

  Yes, there was a difference in managing librarians versus commanding soldiers. The only thing that saved her was imagining Grossenbacher putting all his stuff from his desk into a cardboard box and leaving her former command post without a goodbye.

  Her smile must have alarmed them, for suddenly, everyone started discussing how they could leave today for lunch at the same time. Staggered lunch shifts would not be necessary since the library was not open yet to students.

  After the meeting, Anna checked in with the staff member who was in charge of recording the damage done in the lower stacks. The books needing to be replaced were growing at an alarming rate.

  Initially, Anna thought the destruction was the result of students doing a prank. These were not unknown at Leopold Otto. Usually, the jokes were something to do with the dorms and toilet paper or moving a stone statue around to different areas of the campus. One year, the students challenged each other to climb the clock tower and set it to the wrong time.

  But in the three years, Burkhalter had been at LOTTOS, she had never seen vandalism on this scale. Opening the books revealed interior pages void of text. This damage could not be the work of humans. It was bizarre and strange — the hallmarks of something fae and unnatural.

  Faced with this evidence, she told the staff not to go outside of the nave or their offices unless they were in pairs. The next time she saw the university’s administrator sent from Schubert’s office, she would insist on a fae guard.

  The approval of overtime, and a stack of gift cards to a new popular Italian restaurant, helped morale.

  Burkhalter’s mind kept returning to the monk Bandemer spoke to at the reception. While she was very familiar with the ghosts of the religious brothers who haunted the campus, she didn’t believe this fellow was one of them.

  First, his form was too solid, and it talked, unlike the faded relics of the monks. Secondly, her analytical mind noticed these monk-ghosts repeated the same behaviors and were rarely interactive: they walked to prayers, scrubbed floors, or prayed. They conducted the same routine with little awareness of what was happening around them or the people who stepped through them.

  This fellow at the party was very aware, too aware. He held a conversation with several people at once. This wasn’t the typical behavior of a ghost dead over a few centuries.

  While she had not seen him again, his appearance, coupled with the vandalized books, made her think there was a connection.

  Great, now her computer wasn’t working.

  Anna checked the cord, the connections, and re-boot
ed the machine. The light stayed dark.

  Standing up, she exited her office. Going up and down the hall, she found the offices deserted. Seeing the time on her watch, she realized it was the lunch hour.

  “Let’s hope the tech people haven’t all deserted their posts,” she muttered. Aggravated, she pounded out the extension on her office phone.

  Anna was still frowning at her dark screen in aggravation, when the tech guy, Sam, came to stand in her office doorway. Seeing him, she smiled, “You got here quick.”

  “I was called over to look over some of the other machines about an hour ago. Your computer isn’t working either?”

  She could tell by his dour expression that he hadn’t solved the problem yet. He continued with a grumble, “Power fluctuations. Not unusual in a building this old, but I don’t think this is random.”

  “What do you mean?” demanded Burkhalter.

  “I think your hacker is back. The one who stole those math tests.”

  Forget the cholesterol numbers. Anna didn’t think her doctor would be too happy with her blood pressure at their next appointment.

  “This is not acceptable. I thought your department installed all sorts of protections weeks ago to prevent this same crisis?” Thinking over what he said, Anna said, with more alarm, “Did you say power fluctuations? That our power is going down?”

  “Seems to be. Circuit breakers aren’t flipped for the lights still work. But computers can’t be turned on.”

  Anna stood, pushing past Sam. “We need to check on the vault. It has a generator. It should be fine, but better safe than sorry.”

  The thing wearing Sam’s face shuffled after her, wearing a smirk on its face.

  The abbey monks were the oldest ghosts that Brigit had met on the campus. Being centuries-old, they were faded and blurred. The face of this ghost was worn like stone, his features merely bumps and hollows.

  He sat on a ghostly chair, bent over a translucent podium situated in front of him. Brigit didn’t want to interrupt his work, but time was moving along. Ghosts were often unpredictable in their appearances and could vanish at any time.

  She waited until he lifted his quill from the page, to give a slight cough and an “excuse me?”

  The ghost replied without looking to her, “I must get this page finished. The abbot is not a patient man.”

  Brigit was not rude enough to point out that the abbot had been dead for some time. Instead, she switched tactics. “The abbot sent me. He had some questions.”

  The shade looked blindly towards Brigit. His fingers nervously fretted with the quill’s feathers.

  “Questions? I do not have time to waste. He wants this page finished before our patron arrives.”

  “Just a question or two,” and when it looked like he would return to his work, Brigit said hastily, “about Titivillus.”

  “That imp? That servant of Belphegor, prince of hell?”

  “Does that creature have long pointed ears, black leathery skin, and a thick tail like a serpent?”

  Brigit’s question seemed to have caught the monk’s attention. His form grew more opaque as he set down his quill. With the intensity of emotion, his features gained definition, and his form brightened in radiance.

  “Titivillus is a devil’s spawn. The creature has long been a trial and tribulation to my work! A mischief-maker. It distracts my brothers from our prayers. Makes our inkwells run dry. Puts blots on the expensive vellum. He nudges our hands, pricks our minds with un-Godly thoughts, makes mistakes with the holy scripture.”

  “Are you sure Titivillus causes mistakes?” pressed Brigit. “What about punishing those who make them? Something is roaming the abbey that looks like this creature, but it insists it is here to remove mistakes.”

  “You speak of that creature eating my brethren! He is naught but a lying vagrant! He prowls the corridors, boasting of his abilities. He plays with words and wears a variety of masks.”

  Muttering, the monk picked up his quill, bending his head over his work. “I must get this page finished. The abbot is not a patient man.”

  Brigit scratched her forehead. Although the creature that had attacked them appeared in the shape of Titivillus, it didn’t quite fit the actions of the demon.

  “What do you know about a man named Aristarchus?”

  The monk was too engrossed in his work to answer Brigit. Instead, the ghost, who had shown her the way, spoke, “From Samos or Samothrace?”

  Brigit paused, stumped. She eventually confessed, “I don’t know. He has something to do with the Library of Alexandria.”

  “Aristarchus of Samothrace would be your man. There were too many versions of Homer’s poems, and he used a precise method to determine which were the best.”

  “But he was a man?”

  “To all accounts, he died in Cyprus.”

  Brigit reviewed her thoughts out loud. “The new library collection has a papyrus fragment supposedly by Aristarchus. Also, an illuminated manuscript with an illustration of a monster matching the description of Titivillus — this creature seems to be attached to these documents.”

  As Brigit paused, the ghost said, “The monks are here because of the abbey. However, my spirit is anchored here by the life of my literary achievement. When Roger’s books vanished, so did he. I do not believe he can return.”

  Brigit looked at the ghost with new-found respect. That was a lot of thinking for something without a brain.

  “Remove the anchor—?”

  “And remove the pest.”

  The ghost blinked out as a brusque voice behind Brigit demanded, “What are you doing in the library, young lady!?”

  Brigit spun to see Ann Burkhalter, the head librarian, and that computer guy standing beside her. She replied tartly, “I had an overdue library book.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Brigit Cullen. The library is currently off-limits to students, especially to a fae whose ID accessed sensitive information.”

  Brigit knew, from confrontations with her parents when discretion was the better part of valor. She said nothing and instead tried to look innocent.

  “The chancellor and I are going to have this out — the way you fae come in here whenever the whim takes you is insupportable,” Burkhalter fumed.

  “Come with me now,” she commanded Brigit. “I have something to do first, but you are to stick with me like glue. I will have you answer to the Rector for this disobedience. And don’t try to use your fae tricks to evade punishment. If you try anything to escape, I will have you expelled.”

  Burkhalter spun on her stiletto heel, and Brigit, without an option, fell in behind her and her companion.

  Well, it looked like she wasn’t meeting up with Logan in an hour. She hoped he didn’t rush in and get into trouble too.

  Exposed

  Logan was sitting cross-legged under a tree when Jib, waving his black tail like a flag, came up to him, yowling, “Where’s Brigit?”

  “She’s in the library.” He wasn’t going to lie to the cat. He suspected Jib already knew something, else why would it be here?

  “Doing what?”

  “Talking to a monk. I gave her an hour. Her time is almost up, so she’ll be out soon.”

  Jib settled itself on Logan’s knee. Its aggravated kneading piercing the denim of his jeans was like jabbing needles.

  “That is not good.”

  “Why?”

  “Whatever is in the library is far more powerful than any of us realized.” Jib related to Logan the events of the Doppelgänger’s loss of magical talent.

  Alarmed Logan sprung up. “We need to warn Brigit! Get her out of there.”

  “Why do you think I’m here?”

  Logan was too busy stuffing his laptop back in its bag to pay attention to Jib’s snark. As he wondered about how to get into the library, he saw some staff members returning from their lunch hour.

  Logan made his way over to the group and addressed the man with white hair, who seemed to be the lea
der of the group. “My mom told me to meet her here, but the doors seem to be locked.”

  “Your mom?” questioned the other in a skeptical tone.

  Logan summoned his bard-power of persuasiveness, lending a false truth to his words that the humans he addressed would not be able to resist or remember. “My mom is Frau Burkhalter.”

  “Oh, she’s your mother?” said a younger woman, standing behind the first person Logan had addressed. “We haven’t seen you about?”

  “I was living with my dad,” Logan explained, seeing the entire backstory of an early marriage and a painful divorce forming in his mind. His mom had gotten pregnant in high school and married too young. It was a tragedy.

  “I just got to Geheimetür, and she told me to come to her job so we could go out to dinner together.”

  They all seemed pleased to discover that their boss had a child. As if that made her more human. They brought him into the library, never noticing the invisible black cat following at their heels.

  They took him to Burkhalter’s office and seeing it empty, told him to stay there while they found her. After they left, Logan asked Jib, “Where is Brigit? Do you know?”

  “Follow me,” commanded Jib, who trotted off, Logan quick on his tail.

  Anna Burkhalter led her companions to the door into the archive. Seeing the green light on the lock panel, she commented, “Looks good. The power surges must not be affecting this area. Probably due to the generator backup.”

  As she turned to leave, the computer tech asked, “Really? Look again. The light is flickering.”

  Suddenly, the green light gave a flashing blink.

  “Damn. If it fails before I can get inside to deactivate it, we will be locked out until security arrives.”

  The librarian put her hand on the plate and her eye into the cup that scanned her retina. Under her voice command, the door lock buzzed, releasing the locking mechanism.

  “Come in, you two, but touch nothing.”