I typed and I typed; all I did today was type. The head curator was riding my butt to get this report out in time before the winter. We'll have to factor in the recent donations too, bringing our work load to over fifty hours a week for the next four weeks just to get everything done before the winter solstice rolls around. I was bleeding paper and ink; calluses pocked my fingertips. The worst thing was that I was going to have to tell him.
My hands hovered over the keyboard. In the stagnant blue light of the monitor, they looked like tree roots reaching out to each other. I sighed, leaning back in my chair to assess the progress I made.
"Still working on the Robinson Acquisition?" I felt a warm nudge on my shoulder. My colleague Aabria Cabrera handed me a steaming hot mug of coffee, one chipped from constant use, a staple of our work kitchen.
"We'd be finished already if Miriam didn't accept it." I took a sip. The coffee burned my throat like a furnace.
"And so you're stuck with the busywork. Tsk, tsk, tsk. You've got to tell her no sometimes."
"Our boss isn't exactly the understanding type."
"She seems to listen to you when shit hits the fan. Remember last time?"
"Oh, P-Perry," I mumbled. "It was a team effort."
She laughed. Her sprinkled cackles reminded me of kindling. It was a lit fireplace in the dead of winter, and I needed it now before the blizzard settled in. It already has.
"And you?" I asked. "She had you working overtime over the weekend. I thought you'd kill her."
"That's where you got us wrong. Miriam and I are birds of a feather."
I peered at her over my glasses and chuckled. Her brown-bronze eyes popped open and beamed at me. I could feel her hand linger briefly as she slapped my shoulder. My mug nearly spilled over.
"It's true! We love this shit. You've got to look out for the kid, though."
"That's what I've been worried about."
"You even worked during the break!" She shook her head like a haughty TA. "I swear, Webster. I'm gonna have to write you up one of these days." She wrote in the air on invisible paper. "Reason for paid leave: working too hard."
"Come on, you need me. I can't just leave you guys to fend for yourselves. The whole museum's gonna be swamped with new acquisitions the second I get home."
"We'll be finnnnne. Oh--" She paused. "How…how is Monty?"
I plopped the mug on my desk and shrugged. I felt colder without it.
"I don't know. He won't talk to me."
"Maybe he just needs some time?"
She was probably right, but it still bothered me.
"I just…I just feel like I'm doing the wrong thing all the time. No matter what I do, I always seem to make the wrong decision. Stay at the hospital with Monty, try to talk to him, give him some space…" I looked down at the mug and thought about the last time we drank coffee together in the morning before school. It was a bad habit. I probably shouldn't have encouraged it at first, but it became a little thing for us. Something we could bond over. "It's been a couple years, and I'm sure he still has it on his mind. Well, I doubt he'll ever be the same, but still, I don't know how to help him besides sending him to therapy. I wasn't there for him when he needed me and a stranger had to step in to do the hard work for me. I didn't even know he snuck out. But he doesn't even want to…" I suddenly grew conscious of my quick-stepped speech. "Sorry for rambling."
Aabria silently observed me. Then, she drew a finger to her lips, as if she was thinking.
"Sounds to me like you're a little overworked."
I laughed. "I think you're right."
"Oh, I'm always ri--"
Plunk!
A brick of a book dropped onto my desk with a loud thud.
A cold voice said, "Imagine a world where you didn't have to work." Callum Crane stood at a solid six foot four. An insane height for his profession. It gave him a lanky thin frame; when confounded with his heavy reading glasses, thick eyebrows, and wide eyes, he was practically a great horned owl wearing human skin. He tapped the face-down book.
"You think this'd be thick enough to bash my head in? Miriam's been riding my ass about this Robinson work like a drill sergeant."
"Hardly," I replied. "Not with a noggin like yours."
He chuckled. Aabria laughed, too.
"Amazing work Webster, on the Perry Collection."
I nodded.
He said, "Found a little something. Think of it as thanks for all your hard work."
Aabria covered her mouth in feign shock. "Callum's turning over a new leaf? Are we finally praiseworthy?"
"Hardly," he murmured. He crossed his arms. "Sometimes, even I have to give you credit. It's not easy work we do. And somehow, you always seem to get stuck with the short end of the stick."
Callum smirked. "Good work, Webster."
I couldn't help but return the gesture. The thin man left as quietly and as swiftly as he came, waving over his shoulder like a sailor off to sea. Miriam herself had said it herself that he acted more like an owl by the day. Aabria gave me a knowing look and said she'd be back to check in on me before she left for the night. She left me alone in the research hall to fend for myself. Beneath the flickering and warm office lamps, I slipped into a stream of workflow, hopping from report to report, record to record. Dust settled on the edge of my desk.
I finished up the last bit of my report. I drew my shoulders back and loosed a yawn loud enough to wake a sleeping giant. After I tasted the air and found it to be a little too dry for my liking I pushed the chair back and rose, but not before slipping Callum's book underneath my arm. It had to have weighed more than a brick as the seams on the spine dug into the crook of my fingers.
"Might as well get a little light reading in," I said to myself.
I stepped outside the hall towards a lounge and started flipping through the book, getting a feel for the crinkled pages and worn leather. The scourge of time-cloaked leather lathered my nose up like a dry whiskey. I breathed it in, reminding myself how much I adored the scent of old books; Reminded myself why I came here to the museum. The world seemed so much simpler.
What am I gonna do? I found myself thinking.
What could I do? As much as I wanted to help him, I didn't think there was anything else I could do. If anyone knew what to do, it'd be someone besides him. Maybe Casey? He hadn't seen her in months. When he ran into her the other day at the hospital, it'd been a relief. An actual adult was there to handle the situation. I clutched the book closer to my chest. Was I really cut out for taking care of him? It wasn't like I hadn't thought about it before. Of course I had doubts about whether or not I was the right person for the job; who wouldn't? I just couldn't imagine Monty not having anyone there for him, so when Casey first called me, I took the chance to give him that normal life. Maybe I was rash, but I never doubted that giving him a home was the right choice. Not once.
I found a bench beneath a gorgeous oil painting of a storm-weathered galley and flipped the book open. On the front page, a gorgeous hand-scrawled map of Arete, before the city grew to what it was, jumped out at me like an image brought to life. Illuminated gold trails flowed through the streets and hills of pre-industrial homesteads. Notes wrapped along the edges of the page and around points of interest.
Beautiful. I found myself repeating it in my head. Callum must have had a field day looking through it. He searched the map for anything that stood out to him.
One note wrote: "Here lies that hallowed land, Arete be."
Another wrote: "Her sister Laurentide lies across the Fogg." A small town sat across from the island of Arete along the northern banks of the Fogg river. Laurentide when it was still its own city and before it was brought into the Areten metropolitan area.
A third note wrote simply: "Van Damme University." And a circle marked the university's grounds across Lake Hieronymus. Aabria's alma mater. It was an old school. One of Arete's oldest, it seemed.
I heard something rattle. Swiftly, the book closed on the map and I looked up to find myself in the dark once again.
"Someone there?" I asked aloud. No one answered. I returned to the book and opened it to the title. A Treatise of Arete. A history book, of course. Its yellow pages reminded me of spilled coffee.
The contents appeared a normal deluge of city aspects and historical eras neatly organized and compartmentalized. Just my jam. The amount of handwritten scrawls decreased as I read farther along. I'm reminded of another memory, of when I first cleaned out a corner of the museum's archive (Back when he first interned under Miriam and still received tasks like a greenhorn) with that ancient leathery-musk of dust bound books that breathed and whispered knowledge of a time long before modern conservation.
I felt that same draw to write some notes. Just a couple things here and there. I kept a ring-bound journalist's notebook on my person. So, I flipped it out and continued to write a few things, here or there. Some of the map notes I wrote down--the ones that stood out more.
I held up the book to the dim light of my phone, and for a brief moment I lost myself in the archaic language. The thick leather spine tickled my fingers. The words stood out from the page with iris-black ink, brightening every once in a while with a splash of color. Red or gold, often.
Another creak, this time, from down the hall, echoed with ghostly reverberance. I placed the book gingerly down on the bench and rose to check out the sound. My brown loafers squeaked slightly as I passed a marble sculpture.
I pulled on the collar of my sweater. Sweat poured down my chest. The hours of today caught up to me. I could feel exhaustion tug at the back of my mind. Aabria? Callum? Miriam? I raffled through a slew of names for potential suspects. Maybe it was just a janitor?
I stopped just around the corner, by another painting. This time it was an image of a knight in shining steel plate cuirass. No one's here. No one hid around the corner. No one shared this corridor with me. No one shuffled about in this part of the museum--except for me--this late at night. I should have called it there.
However, something pushed on me. An invisible blanket wrapped around me. It wasn't tight enough to stop me from moving, but it was there. My addled brain tended to play tricks on me, especially working late.
I knew then that it was just another one of those kinds of nights. Maybe I needed a coffee. I brushed the thought away. Really? A coffee this late? You are crazy. Time to pack it up.
I returned to recover the book, feeling its weight in my hands as one would with an overgrown vegetable. Our office curled around towards the south side of the building, near our storage facilities. It's never too far from the exhibits, but at night, the dark made the trip more difficult. A Treatise nestled firmly in the crook of my arm.
The hallway opened up to my left with the Robinson exhibit. One I personally had a hand in curating. His paintings coated the walls like a collage of magazine clippings. Pride swelled up within me as I passed it.
On my right, a few more sculptures took up the space. Each different and uniquely perturbed. A duck with a beaver's head, for instance, sat on a pillar regal-like and indignant, flippers flat and beak raised. A toilet with sharpened plungers stuck to the bowl, a rather perilous venture for the adventurous. A sculpture built from the husk of a muscle car, abstract and almost phallic-like.
A third time, I heard it. It slipped across the floor, a slight scrap of something against the polished wood. I could hear it easily now. My heart skipped a beat.
"Boo!" Callum pounced out from the corner and gave me a mini heart attack.
"What the hell Callum! It's almost nine."
He cackled maniacally.
" 'Looked for you in the office. After I couldn't find anyone, I knew you'd be slinking around here…" He glanced towards the book, still nestled under my armpit. "Oh, have you read it yet?"
"Hardly," I said. "Just a quick rifle."
"Mmhmm," he hummed. "And?"
"It's interesting, for sure." I reached for it and held it out to him, expecting him to take it back. He nodded his head to it and said, "No, keep it. Really. I gave it to you for a reason."
"That being?"
He shrugged. "I can't make heads or tails of it."
"What do you mean? It just seems like a normal old textbook. A little dusty maybe. But I couldn't find a date on it."
" 'Couldn't either. But I think you'd have a ball trying to figure it out. Check this though. Come on, open it up." Callum turned on his phone's flashlight and waved for me to open A Treatise to the front-page map. He raised the flashlight above, casting its angelic glow onto the pages like a midmorning sun along the eastern seaboard.
"Right here." He pointed toward the lake.
"VDU?" I asked. He nodded.
"The college, yes."
"Well, what's there to it?" He was starting to get on my nerves. I refrained from snapping, but with him scaring me like that and the constant guesswork, I wanted to hit him around the head. His glasses peered down at me, hung on his nose like a slipping ledge.
"Look here." He pointed across the Fogg river.
"Laurentide?" I asked. He nodded again. Then, he leaned in, as if he wanted to hide what he was about to say next from some unseen observant.
"Van Damme University wasn't built until after the two cities merged--" Before he could finish explaining, I scanned the page again.
"What does that mean?" I asked. He must be wrong. Why else would it be written in this history book? "It has to be a mistake."
"That's why I want you to have it. Perry, Robinson. You've been on a roll lately. Honestly, you're probably one of the best local history specialists we've got right now, besides Miriam, of course."
"Why not give it to her to look at?"
" 'Cause she's got too much on her plate. Please, David. For me?"
"Fine. I'll take a look at it. But why are you so invested?"
He smiled wide.
"Everyone loves a good mystery."
After returning to the office, I called a friend of mine who worked with rare books in Ambrugge to see if they knew anything about A Treatise. They didn't seem to know anything either. But they agreed with me that it was likely a local textbook from before Van Damme was officially built in the Quoxwood ward. Maybe it had been published right before plans were made to merge the cities.
The archive housed a multitude of online resources and tools for collaboration with smaller repositories, so I browsed an online repository of textbooks written around the time between the merger and the erection of VDU. I came across a few works with similar contents and designs, though nothing came up one-for-one. I was exhausted and increasingly growing agitated. Well I, for one, felt myself dreading the mystery.
A bellowing yawn escaped me right before a text popped up on my phone with a bright, theatrical buzz. In all caps, my friend in Ambrugge answered back to me. Butterflies fluttered beneath my stomach. Their words struck me with an anticipation I last felt when I heard that Monty had woken from his coma: I FOUND SOMETHING! CALL ME.