Part 21 (1/2)

It felt like a portal had opened up, from my present world to a world of husbands and wives, houses and children. I remembered the windows in her Delacroix painting, warm and orange.

I wanted to kiss her, but I decided not to. We just sat there, and after a while she put her hand on mine.

21.

I got back to the dorms and saw a homeless man out front, right by the steps leading up to my entryway. He wore a long gray coat and steadied himself on the railing as he leaned into the bushes, throwing up. I was never sure how to act around homeless people. The town was full of them. What could be more magnetic than five thousand undergraduates with a student's conscience and a parent's bank account?

As I approached the stairs, the man swung around and held up his arms defensively. I saw it wasn't a homeless man at all but Humpty Dumpty, the crown prince of the library, looking like a train had hit him--his bow tie was undone and hanging in two limp strands; his thin white hair was scattered, the part long gone. He reeked of gin. He sheltered a bottle in a brown bag under his arm.

When his eyes fixed on me, they went wide.

”I've been looking for you,” he said hoa.r.s.ely. He wiped an arm across his mouth.

This was not good. That much I knew already.

I glanced around. The yard was quiet. I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him into the shadows behind the bushes.

”What are you talking about?”

”You know what,” he said.

”No I don't.”

”You know.”

”I don't have time for this.”

He just grinned dumbly and starting laughing.

Enough games.

”Listen to me,” I said. ”I'm done.”

He shook his head like a toddler about to say Don't wanna.

”I'm done,” I repeated. ”I don't know anything. I have no interest in them. I pose no threat. You tell them that.”

He laughed wheezily, and a plume of sour breath hit me.

”They know it was you.”

A cold s.h.i.+ver went down my neck.

”I have no idea what you're talking about.”

”Last night.” His eyes were wide, crazy. ”Trying to get into the tunnels. You had a map. They know it was you.”

I shook my head.

Keep it together. Get a poker face, G.o.ddammit. But I felt it--the walls crumbling. The skin under his right eye was twitching madly.

”You're not safe,” he said. ”You need to see the dead man.”

I felt fear drip down my back.

What was he talking about, see the dead man? But there it was, the logic unfolding: The V&D party. The red-haired professor. The obituary. Who gave me the obituary? The library clerk. And who ruled over the library?

It was Humpty all along, trying to guide me. I thought of his angry exchange with Bernini in the hall; how he seemed like he was half-in, half-out of Bernini's secret world; maybe half-insane from what he knew. And now he would take me to the man with the red toupee. Maybe he could help me out of this. If I trusted this nut.

What choice did I have?

They knew it was me. They knew.

That portal, that vision of family, the bliss of a normal life, suddenly collapsed like a dead star. I felt a hand on my shoulder, pulling me out of my thoughts.

”I'm trying to help you,” the old man said.

I followed him to the library. He was stumbling and muttering, taking swigs from his bottle, making less and less sense as we went. I tried to stop him from drinking, but he knocked my hand away. After a while, I had to help him walk. I held him by his thin arm, and the skin moved loosely under my hand, like a coc.o.o.n about to give birth to a skeleton.

We reached the front entrance of the library, with its grand columns, but he took us around back to a door I'd never seen before. He selected a key from a crowded ring, and we entered a loading bay and went down a spiral staircase two floors below ground level.

He looked at me.

”Turn around,” he said.

I heard him perform a complicated set of maneuvers: things being pulled and replaced, something large dragging across the floor. When I turned around, I found a door where a wall had been. He used another key, and we went through the door.

So these were the steam tunnels! They weren't at all what I'd expected: no dirt floor, no cobwebs, no blue phantoms pa.s.sing in and out of the air vents. Just a long white hallway, covered in a complex angiography of pipes, wires, gauges, and dials.

”Don't touch,” he muttered. He clinked his bottle on a pipe. ”Hot.”

Humpty barreled forward with that head-down walk, swaying a bit, no noise but the occasional mumbled curse. We went several minutes in silence until he blurted out f.u.c.k! and barreled on again.

We turned into a narrow side hall and stopped.

There were several metal panels on the wall. Humpty scrutinized them and finally tapped his finger on one.

Written on the panel, in neat print, were the small letters dm.

He grinned. His smile looked like a garage-sale xylophone.

He told me to pull off the panel. It led into a tunnel, much smaller than the one we were in. I'd have to crawl, he explained. He handed me a small penlight. The tunnel was dark, and the penlight cast a faint sphere of light that reached about a foot ahead of me. Just follow the signs and I would get there, he told me. Stay quiet. Don't divert.