What did these women have to say about their struggles, their difficulties, their defeats, their victories?
And so, the same night she had received news of Helen Reddington’s Lysistrata production—which she found to be a superb idea—she took a cab to the Georgetown University Library. Having been told that, of course, she could access the catalogue and shelves, even as a visitor, as long as she checked nothing out. And having been shown, in answer to her inquiry concerning the quietest place to read, to a vacant carrel on the tenth floor (spring semester had just ended—there was a good deal of room in the library).
Having done all of these things, she glutted herself on the contents of one of the nation’s finest university libraries.
By eight o’clock, she had a paper cup of vending machine coffee in front of her (against library rules but she was all alone up here, so who was to care?)—and she was reading the publication blurb which appeared on the back cover of Dee Dee Myers’ Why Women Should Rule the World.
The blurb read:
What Would Happen If Women Ruled the World?
“Everything could change, according to former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers in her book Why Women Should Rule the World. Politics would be more collegial. Businesses would be more productive. And communities would be healthier. Empowering women would make the world a better place—not because women are the same as men––but precisely because they are different.
Blending memoir, social history, and a call to action, Dee Dee Myers challenges us to imagine a not-too-distant future in which increasing numbers of women reach the top ranks of politics, business, science, and academia. Reflecting on her own tenure in the Clinton administration and her work as a political analyst, media commentator, and former consultant to NBC’s The West Wing, Myers assesses the crucial but long-ignored strengths that female leaders bring to the table. ‘Women tend to be better communicators, better listeners, better at forming consensus,’ Myers argues. ‘In a highly competitive and increasingly fractious world, women possess the kind of critical problem-solving skills that are urgently needed to break down barriers, build understanding, and create the best conditions for peace.’”
My kind of woman, thought Nina.
And she plunged into the book.
By nine o’clock, she had finished it and felt like a prophet newly inspired.
Yes! Dee Dee was right, and No! Nina was not insane nor were the Lissies, nor was Laurencia Dalrymple!
Forty new people on national ballots.
Between now and November.
It could happen!
And if it did not…
…well, there would be a nation of men watching baseball games on television late into the night on July 4.
Thus inspired, she left her carrel unattended for a few minutes, got a second cup of coffee, left it steaming on the desk, and took a short bathroom break.
During this time, she had no idea that a figure had entered the carrel and dropped a tablet of some kind into the coffee.
So that everything looked precisely the same when she returned, opened The Life of Anne Richards, and took a sip.
Different taste?
Probably her imagination.
She was on page 23, when she went quietly asleep, her head on the desk.
The door to her carrel being closed, no one saw that she was there.
At midnight, the library closed.
She awoke at one AM to find herself alone on a deserted tenth floor.
There was a moment’s panic.
How would she get out?
Then she realized that the doors leading to the stairwells all opened outward. There would be, at most, a bit of embarrassment if she should encounter a watchman stationed on the library’s main floor.
Were there watchmen at one in the morning?
Were watchmen needed?
Were there roving gangs of thugs intent on breaking into the stacks in the wee hours, after nights of clubbing and binge drinking, intent on pillaging whatever they could find of fourteenth-century English literature?
The speculation gave her a smile as she got her things together, turned out the small reading light burning in the shelf above and just before her…and, unfolding like an accordion, forced her sleep-ridden knees to straighten.
She turned, exited the carrel, and peered through the austere and musty stacks.
Emergency lamps secreted high in corners emitted enough glimmering light so that she could see the elevators. They would not be running now, of course, but there were stairwells adjacent to them.
As she walked, she was just able to make out the titles of volumes surrounding her.
Piers Plowman
Annals of Fourteenth Century Literature
Second Edition, Chaucer, Troylus and Crisseyde,
Second Shepherd’s Play, Critical Commentary.
She moved with a kind of reverence as though she had broken into a cathedral on All Saints Day and was in danger of disturbing the relics. She had just passed from the early to the late fifteenth century when she heard someone walking through the stacks immediately to her left––perhaps four or five rows over—taking down books, opening them, and laughing softly.
She could not have described that laughter. It was robbed of gaiety, spirit or energy. It was a dry laughter, the color of ready-to-burn leaves.
And it frightened her.
She had no idea why.
The fact that anyone would be here at this time of night was, of course, disturbing. But then, she herself was here. The figure shuffling along through centuries of English literature could have been an eccentric faculty member…almost certainly was a faculty member…immersed in another time, chuckling over forgotten verses and untranslatable colloquialisms.
Faculty members had carrels that were not alcoves, as hers was, but entire offices. Surely, it would not have been surprising to find a professor sitting at his office computer at one AM; why would it be any different here?
Why was she frightened?
Dangerous people did not inhabit libraries.
She had almost convinced herself of that fact, and was on the point of identifying herself, when she heard a high cackling voice:
“I have been watching you.”
Then absolute silence, followed by the tiniest of clicking sounds, metallic, clicking, opening and closing, opening and closing.
And…click…click…click…
Finally she realized:
It was a knife.
“I have been watching you. I have been told to watch you. And I have. You and the others. The others who follow you.”
She could not move. She strained, almost against her own will, to see through the stacks, but there were too many of them. Nothing was visible except the implacable white-paneled ceiling above her, and, far to her right and left, windows that did not unlatch or move, opening out onto the campus with its rows of live oaks glowing in soft yellow streetlamps.
“You are detestable. And your goals are detestable. All of them.”
What was the next sound?
She could hear the book’s pages being carefully cut out, one by one. Then there was a scratching sound.
“There is a Hell. And a devil in Hell. And, if you continue in these perverse ways…”
After a time, she could smell smoke.
He was burning the pages.
She could see the wisps of smoke rising above the stacks , whirling in ashen clouds as they made their way up through the circular ventilator in the middle of the ceiling.
“You will burn in Hell. Just as this paper is burning.”
Then all sounds stopped.
The smoke continued to swirl in miniature rising funnel clouds, whirling aimlessly higher, drawn through the dust particles she could now see floating in what she had assumed, always, had been sterilized air.
Then she could hear footsteps moving toward the end of the fifth stack, a bit faster, shuffling, shuffling…until they reached the end
of the row, and began making their way toward her.
She lifted her purse, slung it over one shoulder, and walked quickly to her left.
Whoever this was, she did not want to see him.
He had a knife, and he was ripping out and burning pages of books, at one in the morning, while telling her that she was detestable.
No, she needed to get out. And now.
It was as though she was in a canyon of literature, its walls towering above her, the river that had carved it having disappeared long ago, tile flooring all that remained of the fossilized creatures once inhabiting it.
Where was the break in the stacks?
There!
Turn there!
She did, breaking into an open area, a clearing…and there in front of her, the elevators.
The footsteps, purposeful now, were coming down the stack-row she had just left. She threw herself against the elevator and rammed the flat of her palm against the down button; it remained colorless, the elevators having been cut off.
From some fifteen feet behind her…for her back was to the shelves now... she heard a shout:
“Eve thou art dust! And to dust thou must return!”
And the footsteps continued, but with them, was interspersed the clicking sound.
Open shut open shut
Click click click click…
Above her and just to her right glowed the white rectangle with red letters:
Exit.
The fire door, leading to the stairwell.
She threw herself against the rod that ran horizontally across it, precisely the height of her belt.
It gave with her weight; she lunged against it, and the heavy, army-gray door swung open, groaning slightly as it banged against the rail of an inner metal inner stairway leading downward.
She spun around and glanced backward: through the foot-square glass window in the doorway she could see a figure emerge and come toward her.
She could also see that there was no way to lock the door from within the staircase.
She began to run down the stairs, grasping the rails at each landing, as she corkscrewed around tight turns leading flat across for three steps and then downward again…when, finding herself on the eighth level now…the tenth floor door burst open above her, a swampy green light bathing the well in which she found herself, and the singsong voice, not male or female, but seemingly mocking both genders in a kind of sexless cackle, erupted:
“You are hateful in the sight of God Almighty! And you will be put down and trodden upon, even as the serpent is trodden upon!”
She continued to descend, palms wet now and slipping on the pipes that were handrails.
The white-lighted floor number:
6
“Woman is an abomination!”
She could hear the rubber soles of her own sneakers squealing on the steps as she descended.
“BUT NOT UNSEEN BUT NOT UNSEEN! FOR GOD SEES ALL!”
Finally, she reached the main floor and burst through the doors, running now and trying not to hear the quick-shuffling footsteps behind her.
The check-out desk spread before her, computer screens glowing green on top of it, while a forest of dark similar screens surrounded her like square and blackened flowers sprouting from the tables used by undergraduates during the day, and only lines of impediment and useless demarcation in this ozone-buzzing half light.
Twenty steps and she was outside.
But did she want to go outside?
He could follow her there, too.
She stopped beside the reference desk and stared back at the doorway from which she had emerged, half expecting it to burst open, revealing…
…what?
What was this thing that was ripping books apart and setting fires in the library?
Nothing came from the door.
She could hear nothing, except, through the thick plate-glass windows far across the main floor, the mournful clanging of college cathedral bells.
No other sound.
What was he doing? Waiting behind the doors?
Or had he somehow found another entrance to the main floor?
She whirled, staring at the main entrance behind her.
Silent, black, empty…nothing at all moved or breathed in the vast ground floor of a library that could have been…and was, at least at this time of early morning…a cemetery for the thoughts of dead writers.
She should hide.
He was not watching her now, could not be.
She could hide in the restroom, there, just behind her.
But the restroom door could not be locked from the inside.
She would be vulnerable there, with no place to run.
Here, she might at least see him coming.
But outside?
Outside was better. She might be able to outrun him…thank God for the morning jogs, she was a good runner…
…and she was strong.
Let him try what he would try.
Also, outside there might, almost certainly would, be people. She could scream if need be. The campus was never truly deserted, and revelers always wandered from dorm to dorm or frat house to all night bar.
That decided, she would make for the main doors and go outside.
She had just taken the first steps in that direction when the alarms started going off.
First, red lights over the door in front of her; then similar lights hanging from the ceiling to her left.
Then there were red lights everywhere, and the piercing scream of bomb-warning sirens, or something similar:
EEEEEEEEEEE
Dentist drills magnified and sharpened, while the entire football field of chairs, desks, terminals, volumes, shelves, and founder-portraits flashed and shadowed, reddened and darkened—pulsated like a midway on Saturday night.
She looked back—still nothing coming out of the stairwell exit…
…but could she even see a figure if it did emerge, so surreal had the hall become.
EEEEEEEEEE
What the hell was going on?
A rattling behind her: she whirled toward the main entrance, where a figure was unlocking the glass double doors.
Rattle. Rattle.
EEEEEEEEE
Finally, these doors burst open and a policeman entered.
She was standing now just beside the check out desk. She leaned over it, her lips only inches above hard black whatever material might have been its surface, and, now letting her forehead rest on the counter, she lisped out the words, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“What is going on here?”
The patrolman walked quickly toward her. He was an imposing figure, and might at any other time have been even more frightening than whatever kind of man/professor/lunatic/poetry reciter/book burner that had been following her.
“What is this? Ma’am, who are you? What is happening?”
He was a transformer, a creature from video games. There were arms, legs, badges, hair (for he carried his hat pinned between upper arm and chest) and even glasses…somehow it reassured her that he was wearing glasses…but enough additional paraphernalia hung off and extended outward from his blue trunk/torso as to render him a science-fiction cartoon. Gun, flashlight, key ring, walkie-talkie…there was more of it than there was of him, and she remembered thinking, idiotically given the situation, that he was more hardware catalogue than peace officer.
He was facing her now:
“Ma’am, what is happening?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you doing here?’
She could see his face now; even the light green eyes that bored into her…but somehow not unsympathetically…from thinning, boyish, red hair.
“I…I fell asleep.”
She felt like a child, and was quickly becoming as deeply humiliated as she was monstrously relieved.
No, she told herself. She had done nothing wrong.
And she was all right now. Whatever had been following her…an
d some deeply disturbed creature, whatever its nature, had been following her…she was all right now.
Get control of yourself, Nina.
“I fell asleep on the tenth floor. When I woke up…somebody was up there with me.”
“What?”
“Someone chased me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who are you, ma’am?”
“I’m Nina Bannister. I’m a member of Congress.”
“My God. Everyone’s heard of you, Congresswoman. You’re the one who told my wife not to have sex with me on the Fourth of July.”
“I’m sorry about that; I really am.”
“Who chased you?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at him.”
“Did you see a fire?”
“I…no, I…wait!”
“Yes?”
“He was striking matches.”
“Striking matches? In the library?”
“Yes, I heard him.”
“You didn’t see him?”
“No, there were several stacks between him and me. But I heard him; and I smelled the smoke.”
After that, the library began to fill up like a supermarket on Saturday morning. The red emergency lights on the walls and ceilings had gone dark now, but were replaced by equally garish and equally red lights outside, as police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks, sirens wailing, stopped beyond the huge plate glass windows that looked out over the campus pond.
Two police officers arrived; civilians, seemingly library personnel, entered through side doors; a security patrolman, dressed differently from the policemen, began walking back and forth, purposefully and uselessly, between the circulation desk and the card file computers.
Nina found herself seated on a wooden chair in the middle of a circle of uniforms, guns hanging beside them, people ostensibly within them, instruments of all kinds—mostly black and shiny though—hanging from them as rattling, blinking, appendages.
The original red-haired officer began questioning her again; but a newly-arrived ex-defensive tackle-turned peace officer—he had to have been a defensive tackle—who could have made two of any of the others in the hall, leaned solicitously toward her, sweat droplets forming on his mocha forehead, which turned from time to time to allow him to glance at the exit from the stairwell.
Sex Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 6) Page 10