Chapter 5
Five
For most of the next thirty-six hours, Arthur felt stunned, as if he had a fever. Everything he ate smelled wrong and tasted
spoiled. He sat in hour-long lectures and walked out having heard nothing, learned nothing; he could not have said what was
discussed.
Arthur had a shift at the library on Wednesday but begged off, pleading sickness. It wasn’t much of a lie. His stomach knotted
up on him whenever he imagined walking into the vast, marble-floored reception, footsteps echoing off the domed ceiling.
His next rotation, though, was the Friday one-to-seven slot, and he didn’t think he could avoid the place any longer. When
he entered the Brooks Library through the battered twenty-foot-high bronze doors, he paused and cast a look in the direction
of the Special Collection.
To reach the Special Collection, one had to pass behind the walnut counter at the far end of reception and climb a twisting
wrought-iron staircase to a Juliet balcony one floor above. Up there on the second floor, a whole wall of leaded glass panes
looked into the room itself, the glass old and melty, so anyone moving around behind it looked like a figure swimming beneath
rippling water.
The room on the other side was a large, rectangular space with a blue slate floor and loophole windows, as if archers might be required to repel the illiterate hordes.
The walls were lined with valuable books .
. . although the most irreplaceable volumes were locked in a barred cabinet.
These included Rackham College’s most notorious possession, the memoirs of Enoch Crane, who had been executed in New Hampshire “for trafficking with the devyll” in 1701.
At Crane’s request, the book had been bound in his own tanned and dried skin after he was hanged.
There were only five other volumes encased in human hide in all of New England: two at Harvard, one in the Boston Athenaeum, one at Dartmouth, one at UMO.
Arthur, who loved a good word when he came across one—he chewed on them like caramels—even knew the formal term for such books, anthropodermic bibliopegy, language both scientific and somehow vaguely dirty, as if it described a perversion instead of an object.
In the first weeks of term, he had spent a fair amount of time alone in the Special Collection, wearing white cotton gloves
and dusting down the books, inspecting them for silverfish, book lice, and mold. Anything in bad shape was marked for repair
and restoration. He had the index to the complete collection in a blue binder and as senior student librarian had earned the
glamorous job of copying everything into the new IBM DOS computer, with updated notes on the condition of each volume.
The Podomaquassy Record had made the work sound like something out of WarGames, akin to hacking the Pentagon.
In fact, it was a task only slightly more rewarding than cleaning a floor with a toothbrush.
He had no intention of entering the Special Collection today, didn’t want to be anywhere near the valuable old books. He wanted
to keep them safe from him, felt he was a far greater threat than bugs or mildew. Arthur checked himself in and spent an hour
pushing a cart around, returning books to their proper places on the shelves. While he was wandering the aisles, he located
a hardcover copy of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, one of three on the shelf. He checked, confirmed it was the second printing with the battlefield maps
on the endpapers, and put it on the cart. In another ten minutes he had collected a mint first of Katherine Anne Porter’s
Collected Stories and a slightly battered first of Percy’s The Moviegoer. He figured altogether it was five hundred dollars’ worth of books. Better still, there were multiple copies of everything
he intended to steal. The liberated editions might not be noticed for years.
When he was back behind the checkout counter, he used an X-Acto knife to peel the magnetic strips out of the spines of the books he had selected.
He packed them into his school backpack and went on with his duties.
By six in the evening, he had the library almost to himself, most of the students in the cafeteria.
At the end of his shift, Arthur slipped away to Periodicals, to do a little homework that had nothing to do with his classes.
The microfiche machines—big blocks of brushed steel and glass—were in a darkened alcove. He collected half a dozen reels containing
every issue of the Portland Press Herald from 1987 to 1989 and sat down with them. His mother had been in prison for three years, but he had not come across the Nighswanders
until this September. That suggested Daphne Nighswander had only been locked up there a few months.
Arthur threaded the first reel, May–June 1989, and twisted the dial. History whirred past, like the windows of a brightly
lit train flickering by at night. Grainy black-and-white photographs: George Bush, Manuel Noriega, Danny DeVito, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Coke—you can’t beat the feeling. Army—be all you can be. Sega Genesis—your world will never be the same.
He was prepared to spend an hour scanning articles, but he had only been blurring through the pages for a minute when he got
his first hit, in the back pages of the Herald’s June 11 issue.
Postal Assailant Receives Max Sentence
Augusta, ME.—The sentencing hearing was scheduled to begin at 2PM. It took less than ten minutes for Justice Levon Skelton
to make his decision, and sentence Daphne Nighswander to serve not less than ten years, for firing a 9mm pistol into the leg
of postman Albert Frown on March 15. Additional state charges are pending in the matter of the nearly twelve-hour stand-off
with law enforcement that followed the shooting . . .
Arthur found the tape for March–April. The reels shrilled, spinning forward to March 16. He read the first report—it was a
front-page story, but light on details—then the more fully fleshed-out piece that followed the day after.
Daphne Nighswander had been in her kitchen, listening to the radio and sorting a pound of PCP into individual plastic baggies—mixing it with baking powder as she went along—when postal officer Albert Frown reached her door.
Frown’s hands were full with a bulky package and the doorbell hadn’t worked for at least two years.
So instead of knocking, he thumped at it with his knee.
Frown was a new hire and it was his first time delivering to houses on Reddy Lane in Gogan. And he was Black.
Daphne’s Massachusetts supplier had recently exchanged words—and gunfire—with the Intervale Posse, the gang that moved most
of the hard drugs in the Boston area, and that aimed to control the entire flow of angel dust in New England. Daphne’s connection
had cautioned her to watch out for “a slick n***** who would flash a badge to get inside her house and then lay waste to her
hillbilly ass.” Nighswander looked at a twenty-three-year-old Black man in a blue uniform, holding a long brown package in
both arms, and saw an Intervale Posse shooter with a shotgun in a box. She aimed her 9mm at Albert Frown’s head, missed, and
put three bullets into his knee, shin, and ankle instead.
She held the police off for most of the day, promising to execute the first Barney Fife motherf***** through the door. She
didn’t surrender until channel 5 announced the Powerball numbers that evening, at 9:30 p.m. She checked her tickets, determined
she wasn’t a winner, and came out with her hands up, saying it just wasn’t her day.
Arthur was reading about the prospects for Albert Frown’s recovery (good, although he’d probably always have the limp) when
he heard Van’s voice from behind him.
“You ever been to a house with a name before? Shit, it’s not even a house. It’s an estate.”
Arthur started and swiveled around. Van was leaning in, narrowing his eyes to examine the screen of the microfiche machine.
Arthur casually put his thumb down on the button to rewind the tape.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
Van straightened up. “Colin Wren. Come on. The girls are outside. We’re going over to his place. He wants to run some tests on Donna and me, find out how psychic we are. You and Allie got to be there too.”
“Why’s that?” Arthur popped the microfiche cassette out of the machine. If he was going to talk to anyone about his predicament,
it would be Van. But he wasn’t ready yet. He was in a filthy mess and had some obscure dread of getting the grime on anyone
else . . . maybe especially a friend. And then there was this: to discuss it would make it more real. The situation was already
too real as it was.
“He said he needs two people without any psychic talent for a control group. I said you were the least talented person I know,”
Van told him.
“Can’t argue with that. But why Allie? You have no idea the extent of her powers. For all you know, she’s the female Uri Geller.”
“Shit. That girl can’t read minds. If she could read mine, she’d never talk to me again.”
“Oh, Van,” Arthur said. “She knows.”
“Shit,” Van said, and actually blushed.