Sarah Monette - White Charles.pdf - Sarah Monette - widez2

The crate arrived at the Parrington on a Wednesday, but it was Friday before

anyone mentioned it to me. Anything addressed from Miss Griselda Parrington,

the younger of Samuel Mather Parrington's two daughters, was automatically

routed to Dr. Starkweather's office, regardless of whose name she had written

on it. I was, in truth, intensely grateful for this policy, for Miss

Parrington most often addressed her parcels to me. She felt that we were

"kindred spirits"; she considered me the only employee of the museum with the

sensitivity and intelligence to appreciate her finds. Considering that she had

inherited all of her father's magpie-like attraction to the outré and none of

his discernment, her opinion was less flattering than one might think. I

endured some teasing on the subject, though not nearly as much as I might

have; in general, the curators' attitude was one of "there but for the grace

of God." They were even, I think, rather grateful, if not to me precisely,

then at least for my existence.

Miss Parrington's packages were inevitably accompanied by letters, sometimes

quite lengthy, explaining what she persisted in referring to as the

provenance, although it was no such thing. "I found this in a lovely antique

shop in Belgravia that Mimi showed me," conveyed no useful information at all,

since nine times out of ten she neglected to provide any further clues to

Mimi's identity, and on the tenth time, when we managed to determine that

"Mimi" was Sarah Brandon-Forbes, wife of the eminent diplomat, a polite letter

would elicit the response that Lady Brandon-Forbes had never been in any

antique shop in Belgravia in her life. The bulk of Miss Parrington's letters

described, lavishly, what she believed the provenance to be, flights of fancy

more suited to a romantic novelist than to even an amateur historian. But the

letters had to be read and answered; Dr. Starkweather had been emphatic on the

subject: they were addressed to me, therefore it was my responsibility to

answer them.

It was perhaps the part of my job I hated most.

That Friday, when I found the letter in my pigeonhole, I recognized Miss

Parrington's handwriting and flinched from it. My first instinct was to lose

the letter by any means necessary, but no matter how tempting, it was not a

viable solution. Dr. Starkweather saw through me as if I were a pane of glass;

he would not be fooled by such an obvious lie. There was, therefore, neither

sense nor benefit in putting off the task, unpleasant though it was. I opened

the envelope then and there, and read the letter on the way back to my office.

It was a superbly representative specimen, running to three pages,

close-written front and back, and containing absolutely no useful information

of any kind. She had been at an estate sale—and of course she neglected to

mention whose estate—she had recognized the name Carolus Albinus as someone in

whom her father had been interested, and thus she had bid on and purchased a

job lot of fire-damaged books, along with a picture she was quite sure would

prove when cleaned to be an original Vermeer. She had not so much as opened

the crate in which the books were packed, knowing—she said coyly—that I would

prefer to make all the discoveries myself. But I would see that she was right

about the Vermeer.

I propped my throbbing head on my hand and wrote back, thanking her for

thinking of the museum and disclaiming all knowledge of seventeenth-century

Dutch painters. I posted the letter, dry-swallowed an aspirin, and returned to

the round of my usual duties. I gladly forgot about Miss Parrington's crate.

I should have known better.

On the next Tuesday, I was standing in Dr. Starkweather's office, helplessly

watching him and Mr. Browne tear strips off each other over a casus belli they

had both already forgotten, when we were startled by a shriek from the

direction of the mail room. Dr. Starkweather raced to investigate, Mr. Browne

and myself close behind, and we found Mr. Ferrick, one of the junior-most of

the junior curators, sitting on the floor beside an open crate, his spectacles

askew and one hand pressed to his chest.

"What on Earth?" said Dr. Starkweather.

Mr. Ferrick yelped and shot to his feet in a welter of apologetic

half-sentences.

"Are you all right?" said Mr. Browne. "What happened?"

"I don't know," said Mr. Ferrick. "I was opening the crate and something—it

flew into my face—I thought—" He glanced at Dr. Starkweather's fulminating

expression and sensibly did not explain what he had thought.

A closer look at the crate caused my heart to sink, in rather the same way

that reading the Oedipus Tyrannos did. "Is that, er, the crate from Miss

Parrington?"

"Yes," said Mr. Ferrick, puzzled.

"Oh good God," said Dr. Starkweather in tones of utmost loathing, probably

prompted equally by Miss Parrington and me.

"She said she, er . . . that is, she didn't open the crate. So it probably—"

"A bit of straw," Dr. Starkweather said, seizing a piece from the floor and

brandishing it at us. "You've heard of the boy who cried wolf, Mr. Ferrick?"

"Yes, Dr. Starkweather," Mr. Ferrick said, blushing.

"Good God," Dr. Starkweather said again, more generally, and stormed out, Mr

Browne at his heels already girding himself to re-enter the fray.

I saw an opportunity to let Dr. Starkweather forget about me, and stayed where

I was. Mr. Ferrick edged over to the crate as if he expected something else to

leap out at him; it was with visible reluctance that he reached inside.

"What did you think it was?" I said.

"Beg pardon?"

"The, er, whatever it was that flew into your face. What did you think it

was?"

"Oh. I've been spending too much time in Entomology," he said with a grimace.

I waited while he lifted out a book so blackened with smoke that it was

impossible to say what color the binding had originally been. "It looked like

a spider," he said finally, tightly. "An enormous white spider. But Dr.

Starkweather was right. It was just straw."

"Make out an inventory," I said, "and, er, bring it to me when you're done."

And I left him to his straw.

Mr. Ferrick's inventory included several works by Carolus Albinus, one by the

alchemist Johann de Winter, three by the pseudonymous and frequently

untruthful Rose Mundy, and a leather-bound commonplace book evidently compiled

by the owner of the library—a deduction which would have been more satisfying

if he had signed his name to it anywhere. One of the Carolus Albinus books was

rare enough to be valuable even in its damaged condition: the 1588 Prague

edition of the De Spiritu et Morte with the Vermeulen woodcuts said to have

driven the printer mad. The rest of them were merely good practice for the

junior archivists. I heard from Mr. Lucent, who was friends with Mr. Browne's

second in command Mr. Etheredge, that the "Vermeer" was no such thing and was

sadly unsurprised. The crate and straw were both reused—I believe in packing a

set of canopic jars to be shipped to San Francisco—and that was that. Another

of Miss Parrington's well-meaning disasters dealt with.

Except that the night watchmen, a pair of stalwarts named Fiske and Hobden,

began to complain of rats.

"Rats?" said Dr. Starkweather. "What nonsense!"

The rest of us could not afford to be so cavalier, and even Dr. Starkweather

had to rethink his position when Miss Chatteris came to him on behalf of the

docents and announced that the first time one of them saw so much as a whisker

of a rat, they were all quitting.

"But there have never been rats!" protested Mr. Tilley, the oldest of the

curators. "Never!"

Hobden and Fiske, stolid and walrus-mustached and as identical as twins, said

they could not speak to that, but Mr. Tilley was welcome to tell them what

else the scuttling noises might be.

Mr. Lucent rather wistfully suggested getting a museum cat and was promptly

shouted down.

Dr. Starkweather grudgingly authorized the purchase of rat-traps, which were

baited and set and caught no rats.

Mr. Browne was denied permission to purchase a quantity of arsenic

sufficient—said Miss Coburn, who did the calculations—to poison the entire

staff.

Frantic and paranoid inventory-taking revealed no damage that could be

ascribed to rats, although Decorative Arts suffered a species of palace coup

over an infestation of moths in one of their storerooms and our Orientalist,

Mr. Denton, pitched a public and monumental temper tantrum over what he

claimed was water damage to a suit of bamboo armor. Mr. Browne took advantage

of the opportunity to start a campaign to have the main building re-roofed.

Dr. Starkweather chose, with some justification, to take this as fomenting

insurrection, and the rats were forgotten entirely in the resultant carnage.

Except by Hobden and Fiske—and by me, although that was my own fault for

staying in the museum after dark. I was writing an article which required the

consultation of (it seemed in my more despondent moods) no less than half the

contents of my office. Thus working on it at home was futile, and working on

it during the day was proving impossible, as the inventories were bringing to

light unidentifiables overlooked in the last inventory, and everyone was

bringing them to me. The puzzles and mysteries were welcome, but I had

promised this article to the editor of American Antiquities nearly six months

ago, and I was beginning to despair of finishing it. Being insomniac by

nature, I found the practice of working at night more congenial than

otherwise, and the Parrington was blessedly quiet. Fiske and Hobden's rounds

were metronomically regular, and they did not disturb me.

And then there was the scuttling.

It was a ghastly noise, dry and rasping and somehow slithery, and it was

weirdly omnidirectional, so that while I was sure it was not in the office

with me, I could never tell where in fact it was. It was horribly

intermittent, too, the sound of something scrabbling, and stopping, and then

scrabbling again. As if it were searching for the best vantage point from

which to observe me, and the night I had that thought, I went out to the front

entrance and asked the watchman if they had had any luck at ridding the museum

of rats.

He gave me a long, steady look and then said, "No, sir. Have some tea."

I accepted the mug he offered; the tea was hot and sweet and very strong. He

watched, and when I had met whatever his criteria were, he said, "Me and Hob,

we reckon maybe it ain't rats."

This was Fiske, then; I was relieved not to have to ask. "No?"

"No, sir. Y'see, Hob has a dog what is a champion ratter. Very well known, is

Mingus. And me and Hob brought Mingus in, sir, quiet-like, feeling that what

His Nibs don't know, he won't lose sleep over . . ."

"Quite," I said, perceiving that Fiske would not continue until he had been

reassured on that point.

"Thank you, sir. So Hob brought Mingus in, and the dog, sir, did not rat."

"He didn't?"

"No, sir. We took him all over the museum, and not a peep out of him. And

before you ask, sir, that dratted scratching noise seemed like it was

following us about. Mingus heard it, sure enough, but he wouldn't go after it.

Just whined and kind of cringed when Hob tried him. So we figured, Hob and

myself, that it ain't rats."

"What do, er, you and Mr. Hobden think it is?"

Mr. Fiske looked at me solemnly and said, "As to that, sir, we ain't got the

least idea."

Two nights later, I saw it, entirely by accident—and not "accident" meaning

happenstance or coincidence, but "accident" quite literally: I fell on the

stairs from the mail room to the west storage rooms. The stairs were of the

sort that consist only of treads—no risers—and when I opened my eyes from my

involuntary flinch, I was staring down into the triangular space beneath the

stairs and watching something scuttling out of sight. I saw it for less than a

second, but I saw that it was white, and it was not a rat. And I all too

easily recognized the sound.

For a moment, I was petrified, my body as heavy and cold and unresponsive as

marble, and then I scrambled frantically up the stairs, banging my already

bruised knees, smacking my raw palms as I fumbled with the door. It was more

luck than anything else that I got the door open, and I locked it behind me

with shaking fingers, then slumped against it, panting painfully for breath.

And then I heard that dry, rasping, scuttling sound from somewhere ahead of me

in the storage room, and with the dreadful epiphantic clarity of a lightning

bolt, I knew and whispered aloud because it was too terrible a thing to have

pent and unvoiced in my skull, "It's in the walls." Even that was not the

truth of my horror, for in fact that was no more than a banality. What made my

chest seem too small for the panicked beating of my heart was not that it was

in the walls, but that it was using the walls, as a subway train uses its

tunnels.

Subway trains, unlike rats, have drivers.

And then I was running, my mind full of a dry, rustling panic. Later, I would

reason with myself, would point out that it had not harmed anyone, or even

anything, that there was not the slightest shred of proof that its intentions

were malicious, or indeed that it had any intentions at all. But nothing I

came up with, no reasoned argument, no rational observation, could withstand

the instinctive visceral loathing I had felt for that white scuttling shape. I

remembered that Hobden's dog, a champion ratter, would not go after this

thing. I remembered Mr. Ferrick, shaken and embarrassed, describing the

"enormous white spider" that had flung itself in his face. And I wondered that

night, pacing from room to sleepless room of my apartment, just what else Miss

Parrington had bought in that job lot of worthless books.

Was it a sign of insanity that I assumed from the moment I saw it that it was

not natural? I do not know. I do know that discovering it to be a gigantic

albino tarantula would have been an overpowering relief, and by the very

magnitude of that imagined relief, I knew it was no such thing.

The next morning, I prevailed on Mr. Lucent to ask a favor of one of his

friends in Entomology, and the two of them met me in the mail room. I brought

a flash-light. Mr. Lucent's friend was Mr. Vanderhoef, a shy young man who

wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles and was an expert on African termites.

Everyone in the museum, of course, knew about Mr. Ferrick's spider, and I

explained that I thought I had seen it the night before. Mr. Vanderhoef looked

dubious, but not reluctant, and contorted himself quite cheerfully into the

awkward space beneath the stairs. I passed him the flash-light.

"A big piece of plaster is missing," he reported after a moment. "That must be

how—oh! There is . . . something has been nesting here."

"Nesting?" Mr. Lucent said unhappily. "You mean it is rats?"

"No," said Mr. Vanderhoef, rather absently. "There aren't droppings, and it

doesn't look . . . In truth, I'm not sure what it does look like."

"What do you mean?" I said. Mr. Lucent and I were now both peering between the

treads of the stairs, but all we could see was Mr. Vanderhoef's shock of blond

hair.

"There are no droppings, no caches of food, no eggs—nor viviparous offspring

for that matter . . ."

"It couldn't be a, er, trap?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, er, like a . . . like a spider's web."

"Ah. No."

"So, what is it using to nest in?" Mr. Lucent asked before I could find a way

to get Mr. Vanderhoef to expand. "It isn't as if we've got a lot of twigs and

whatnot in the museum."

"No, no," said Mr. Vanderhoef. "Paper. Newspaper, mostly, although I think I

see the remains of one of Dr. Starkweather's memoranda."

Sarah Monette - White Charles.pdf

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