Sex Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 6) (15 page)

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…and 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.

A policewoman sat close enough to her to put both palms flat upon her knees, acting as a twenty-eight-or-so-year-old mother to fifty-or-so-year-old Nina.

Quietly, patiently, while the library’s main floor continued to fill, and the entire area beyond the windows continued to be the Fourth of July, the first officer questioned her again:

“All right, ma’am, I want to be sure I have this right. Your name is…?”

“Nina Bannister.”

“You’re a member of Congress?”

“Yes. Newly elected.”

“And what were you doing in the library?”

“I needed to read. I needed to read a lot. They were nice enough to let me use a carrel up on the tenth floor. My coffee was—I don’t know. Something may have been in my coffee. Anyway I went to sleep.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I was tired. It must have been a little after nine o’clock.”

“No one woke you to tell you the library was closing?”

“No. My carrel, the carrel they let me use is in a corner; I guess they didn’t see me.”

“They should,” said the young woman, her hands contracting slightly as though to show her displeasure with
they
, whoever
they
were, “have waked you up.”

There was nothing to say to that. Silence for a second or so as two women, clearly librarians, came and stood just beyond the ring that was continuing to grow around Nina.

“And when you woke up,” Sand-hair continued, “you saw someone.”

“I heard someone.”

“Where?”

“About five stacks away from me. I was walking to the elevators.”

“The elevators wouldn’t have been working at this time of night.”

“I know that,” she said, trying not to sound impatient, as she realized, somewhat thankfully, that impatience had begun to replace fear as her dominant emotion, “but I knew that stairwells would be unlocked, and that the doors to the stairs were right beside the elevators.”

“Congresswoman Bannister,” asked the defensive tackle, “do you think that the man you saw…”