Then she works her way through the books. She studies hieroglyphs and understands how symbols are sometimes meant to chronicle history. And she looks up hobo ciphers scratched on fence posts and sidewalks, and she studies wartime correspondence sent across enemy lines, and learns about symbology as a secret language. Here are tattoos meant to impart power and wisdom, and runes meant to doom a person to death or disease. If you scratch down a certain pentagonal design on paper—and if you send it to a person by mail, or sneak it under their pillow, or rip it up and put it in their food—then they will supposedly perish within a week.
Most of the books are old—brittle and yellowed with red mites chasing away from the light when she turns a page—but some are ancient. These he pulled from climate-controlled glass cases. The one she cracks open now has a mottled leather cover with what looks like a warped face cast onto it. There is no title. It is handwritten in slanted black letters with sharp corners.
She has trouble with this book. The language is not always English, and even when it appears to be, the letters bend occasionally into shapes she cannot translate. There is no table of contents, no index, no chapters, no clear design—just a bramble of ink and illustrations. But she encounters two words over and over again. Door. And open. And she begins to understand that these signs and symbols, many of which appear replicated on her skull, are meant to beckon or allow entry, like keys. Her skull is a key. Could that be right? An honest-to-goodness skeleton key? But to what?
She reads a word aloud, “Demonis,” that opens into a yawn. By this time it is nearly two in the morning. The rain takes on a lulling timbre, a thrum that would be nice to fall asleep to. Her eyelids slip lower. She slaps her cheeks softly, pinches her thigh, stands up to stretch and swing out a few jumping jacks. She needs to use the bathroom and splash some water on her face.
A gray glow seeps in through the windows and burns hellishly from the exit signs, but otherwise the store is dark. She fetches a lipstick-sized flashlight from her purse. It doesn’t give off a lot of light, but enough.
In the bathroom she locks herself in the stall. For a long time after she’s done, she rests her face in her hands and listens. One of the sinks drips, a counterpoint to the rain drumming outside. But beneath that she thinks she catches something. A click-click-clicking. A sound she recognizes distantly. The sound her dog, Hemingway, makes when he roams the wood floors of her apartment. The sound of claws.
Maybe it was a register clinking to life. A pipe settling. A mouse scurrying in the walls. She flushes and slides the lock and washes her hands and splashes her face and dabs it dry with a paper towel. And listens. Nothing but the rain.
The door to the bathroom snicks closed behind her. When she climbs the stairs and reaches the landing and moves toward the Rare Book Room, she sees, at the far end of an aisle, that one of the windows carries the shrinking steam of something’s breath.
At least she thinks so. What else could it be? A vent’s gust. She swings the flashlight left, right.
She isn’t far from the Rare Book Room. The desk is an island of light. She knows she shouldn’t look at it directly, for fear she’ll ruin whatever night vision she’s established. But her notes are there, her purse is there, the skull is there. She has kept it close since she stole it from the construction site—has guarded it as though someone might snatch it away any instant—and now it feels irrevocably distant. She can’t not check to see if it remains.
She braves a quick glance—yes, there it is, beside the pile of books—and then starts toward it, edging along the wall. She sweeps the flashlight back and forth. Gilded lettering and brass lamp stands flash back at her. Probably she is imagining things, but she can’t help but feel that skin-tightening certainty that she is not alone. This is confirmed a second later by the thud of a book knocked off a shelf in the near distance followed by the click-click-click of something scurrying away.
She quits with the caution and sprints for the desk. She shoves her hand inside her purse and half expects her knife to be gone, replaced by something fanged or clammy. Then her palm rounds the grip. She yanks it out and thumbs the blade and holds its point before her. Her arm shakes. The blade quivers with light. “Who’s there?” She doesn’t like how her words come across as a shriek.
She gets behind the desk, as a defense, and in doing so knocks her hip against the landline phone. It gives a quick chirp as the receiver pops from the cradle. She considers calling the police, but it would be minutes before they arrived, and then she would have to explain why she was hiding out in a closed store and what she was doing with human remains in her possession. She takes a deep breath and tries to convince herself the noise came from a rat—there are plenty of those infesting downtown—or a cat, like the ones roaming the feminist bookstore on the east side.
But the skull won’t allow her to calm down. This skeleton key. It pulls at her. As if it contains some haunted gravity. As if it would draw the very shadows out of the night like crows dragged into a funnel cloud. The skull makes her feel as though she ought to be afraid. It’s right to be afraid.
A minute passes, maybe two, before she shoves the notebook, pen, and skull into her purse and then shoulders the strap. She wills herself to move, but it’s difficult to come unfooted. To travel from light into dark.
She heads for the staircase, where she has just two flights of stairs to chase down. Her footsteps echo through the store and make it sound like she’s chasing herself, so she pauses every few steps to address the silence. The farther she goes, the more relief she feels, so that by the time she hits the lower level, the Orange Room, she’s convinced of her foolishness.
That’s when she notices again the sound of claws clicking. Fast and constant. Like marbles dropped down a stairwell. The emptiness of the building manipulates the noise so that she can’t be certain whether it comes from above or below or before her. Then it is gone.
She trades her knife to the other hand and wipes her palm dry on her shirt. She cocks her head, listens. She tries not to feel, not to taste, not to see or smell, tries to make every nerve in her body twist into a receiver so that she might hear better.
There. Beneath the rain, she again catches the click-click-click of something pacing the Orange Room. It is already down here. Or it was always down here. Or there is more than one.
She waits. Her eyes ache from looking so hard, tracking through the tables and shelves and carts and pillars and potted plants. There is the dark and the rain falling through the dark, so that it appears the night is moving, is alive. Everything is a threat. She does not run, but moves in short, quick-footed steps to reduce the noise of her passage. And then, from around the corner of an aisle, it appears. The hound.