Life and Death in the Stacks

[whistlersmum]

Whistler had so become a fixture at the university library, students had started approaching him for reference information.

UNLV's Special Collections housed unique, rare, and specialized research material that documented the history, culture and physical environment of the city of Las Vegas, the Southern Nevada region, the gaming industry, and the University of Nevada Las Vegas.The collections included books, pamphlets, posters, serials and periodicals, scrapbooks, archives and manuscripts, maps, architectural drawings, photographs, and more recently, video and audio tapes.

Everything he needed about the history of Searchlight, the boomtown years, the historic landscape, prominent citizens. And, after days of searching, the Agent finally found the real treasure map he'd sought: a map of the town before it's decline in the nineteen forties.

His finger traced the streets that led to the (former) Catholic Church. "Here's the church, and here's the steeple. Open the doors..."

Comments

[dori_bell]

The door sighed shut on unseasonably cold weather. A light scent of tea rose wafted into the library and settled like a perfumed fog over the card catalogs, the stacks, and the bent heads of students. The young woman who had entered continued past the circulation desk, though her gaze lingered on the silvery head of a librarian, who pressed her fingers to her temple and a headache that wouldn’t abate.

Her clothes were drab: a wool coat, a pleated skirt, tights and clunky shoes. Her hair was just shy of blonde. Mouse brown, a stylist once called it. There were anemic half-moons beneath her eyes. She climbed a staircase to a lesser frequented part of the building, a reference section where nonfiction books, government publications, U.S. geological surveys, and the like collected dust and silverfish.

She stopped behind Whistler’s chair and tilted her head.

Slowly, she leaned over his shoulder to place her fingertip on the map.

“This is where I live.”

[whistlersmum]

Despite the three layers of clothing, Whistler shivered. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention. It was if someone was.

No. That was cliché.

The voice was small, and, despite coming from right behind him, sounded from a distance and in his head at the same time.

"Me too," he replied, before his gaze followed the finger to the slender girl.

Was that perfume? It emanated from her and yet filled the room. Soft, and. Yearning.

"You. You're familiar. Why are you familiar?"

[dori_bell]

A single shoulder rose to the girl’s ear. “I couldn’t say. It’s your memory and not mine.” She eased around the perimeter of the table and arrived at another wooden chair, its cushion upholstered in a scratchy maroon fabric. As her hand came to rest on it, a spindly insect crawled over the peaks and valleys of her knuckles before making its way to safety in a pile of leatherback books.

She bit her lip, which was dry from the outdoor air.

“What are you doing with a map from 1935?”

[whistlersmum]

It was his memory. Not that it offered any answers. How many thousands of people had he encountered in his lifespan? And if it wasn't her memory, this was their first encounter.

Goddamn, he hated puzzles.

Her question brought him back to a question he'd been asking himself for decades. Why Searchlight? He never had the answer.

But maybe he wasn't asking the right question.

"I used to live here. And I'm trying to find out what was on this spot before they put up a church."

Whistler looked back at the map. Where the slip of a girl had pointed.

"Why do you live 'here'?"

[dori_bell]

“I like the desert.” The girl was thin enough to slide onto the seat without scraping the chair back from the table. “It’s sparse. Quiet.” Without asking if it would be okay to do so, she pulled the map towards her and counted the streets with large, brown eyes; there were more roads, not less, in the past. “It’s strange when a town shrinks. It’s a derelict now. That road’s gone.” Her clear fingernail indicated a passage into hill country, where a mine company had dug until the landscape was riddled with holes.

Returning to task, Dori found the place he had indicated, where a church stood for the better part of fifty years. It had been torn down just after she moved to Searchlight. She remembered the razing.

“It was a strange place for a church,” she said after some thought. “See how far it is from the graveyard and the center of town?”

[whistlersmum]

"Nothing about that town made sense, not then. Definitely not now."

Whistler looked at the map from the new angle. "Why wouldn't they put the graveyard next to the church? It's an extension of..."

Oh.

"Consecrated ground."

He looked at the roads on the map. The Agent reached out and ran a finger from the church outwards in each direction, then back again. Everything flowed into that one point. It may not have been the center of town, but it was a focal point.

[dori_bell]

Dori watched him come to conclusions on topics she knew nothing of. Graveyards were of particular interest to her… a natural habitat, so to speak. The lot in Searchlight left much to be desired. Few headstones dotted the ground. Instead, mounds of dirt were delineated with stones or flat tablets. In some places, iron crosses rose from the dust to puncture the air.

“Are you a historian?”

He looked like someone with a healthy stake in the past, at least so far as his clothes were concerned. But what intrigued her –the reason she had stopped at his table – was that Dori could not sense his internal clock marching towards expiration, as was the case with most people. He seemed to exist apart from time. Like a vampire with respiration and a pulse.

[whistlersmum]

The flowery scent -- tea rose? -- grew stronger, drawing Whistler out of the map. The information was now there; he wouldn't lose it. Not this time.

"I kinda am history," he muttered. It wasn't his intention to admit this. Something about the girl made him want to be honest. "Um, interested in the history of this town," the demon added. "It tends to draw in an eclectic bunch, and I'm worried what'll happen if it hits critical mass."

[dori_bell]

“Probably the usual. Chaos… riots… destruction.” Though no psychic, Dori was adept at figuring out when mass casualties were on the menu. A pall was cast over Searchlight… Death of yore, death to come, and she was a buzzard circling. “Are you going to save it?”

[whistlersmum]

The question stunned the Agent of Balance. It was one he'd never considered regarding Searchlight. Was that his purpose here?

"I didn't save Sodom. I watched Atlantis slip below the sea. I wasn't supposed to intervene then."

He took a breath. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do."

Whistler studied the girl. "What would you do?"

[dori_bell]

“Let them die.”

The girl’s look was neutral, her voice contemplative. Dori had no experience with fighting the good fight; what she knew was that all things ended so that new things began. She slipped a lock of corn-silk hair behind her earlobe and continued, “According to physics, the universe exists in a state of entropy. There is a natural tendency for the world to slip into chaos. Wood rots. Cells mutate. Civilizations crumble. And yet people spend their time here building and fortifying. I think it’s strange to prolong the inevitable.”

[whistlersmum]

Whistler looked at the girl with extreme curiosity. He wondered if she was a prodigy, given her advanced state of reasoning. It took him over a century to get that cynical.

"Okay, but. If people hadn't built and fortified," he countered, "the Roman empire wouldn't have existed. Or the Renaissance. If we didn't fight back, we wouldn't be here now, having this conversation."

He rubbed the back of his head. "I wouldn't, at any rate."

[dori_bell]

Dori's eyes narrowed in contemplation. She folded her hands atop the table. "But the Roman Empire fell. And the Renaissance gave way to Classicism and the Age of Reason. If a town builds toward critical mass, over and over, perhaps it's supposed to."

Downstairs a stack of books tipped and scattered across the floor. People hustled to pick them up.

'I-I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me today. I can't seem to...'

Dori's eyes slid to the stairs and then returned to his. She wore a placid expression.

[whistlersmum]

The noise below didn't faze Whistler. He was too focused on the topic at hand, and the girl who played Devil's Advocate too well.

"Yeah well, just because something hits critical mass, doesn't mean it has to explode. Lookit me. I've been there more than a few times in my life. Whenever I was about to go off, I'd simply--"

The Agent wasn't a man of mathematics or engineering. Maybe if he'd studied these topics in his spare time, the thought would've occurred much sooner than it did. But he did understand plumbing. And for a brief period in the 1920s, he was superintendent of a low-rise in Hell's Kitchen.

"--let off steam."

[dori_bell]

“It may not have to explode,” Dori agreed slowly, seeming to weigh this conversation as heavily as Whistler did, although more for cognitive purposes than personal. “But maybe it should.” She imagined a star becoming a supernova, a fire raging through a forest, a wave wiping out a coastal village. In all cases, the desolation gave way to something new. Eventually.

Dori thought of James; he said that she was unusually pensive in this iteration of life. She couldn’t say. Her memories of the lives that came before ‘Dorothy’ were incomplete. They came in earnest snatches, vivid and close but all too brief. Like dreams, she couldn’t discern anyone’s identity, including her own. People were faceless, and her vantage point was from above. She remembered a doctor euthanizing a patient with a nurse at his side. Was Dori the physician, the nurse in white, or the man lying prone on the table? Was she the mother drowning her offspring in a baby pool or the neighbor standing silent with a garden hose, watching? Was she none of those things?

Dori’s memories of James throughout the centuries were clearer. He said it was the same for him. That double-mystery kept them from accumulating too much mental ‘stuff’ from life to life. They were reference points for one another.

“How do you know which it is?” Dori asked.

[whistlersmum]

"I ask the people upstairs, the ones I sometimes report to. This shit doesn't go unnoticed." Whistler chewed his thumbnail temporarily, a horrible habit he thought he'd shaken. But it wasn't a good idea to light up a smoke in a library.

"I usually see possible futures, but they're personal, not geographic. 'Sides, something about this town that clouds my vision. Like, I can't get a reading on you at all. It's like..." The Agent searched for a reasonable metaphor. "You stretch out from genesis to rapture, but you're just a teenage girl."

[dori_bell]

“No. I’m not.” Dori watched him chew his nail and found herself unconsciously mimicking the gesture. Her fingers were still damp when she reached across the map and touched his breastbone. Her pupils dilated until the iris was gone and all that could be seen were black orbs. Whistler would have experienced a subtle tug, a sensation like a drawstring cinching and pulling the life from his chest, only for Dori to release so that it snapped back.

Her pupils adjusted.

She was out of breath.

There was so much life in him, so much to take, so many years and so much power.

[whistlersmum]

Whistler fell out of his chair, a clumsy attempt to add distance between himself and the girl.

No, not girl.

He knew that pull. A man of his years and experience didn't escape the world unscathed.

"Fuck me."

The Agent reconsidered his words. She might have taken it literally.

"Custodi me a morte personam."

[dori_bell]

"Protect you?" Dori sat still in her chair, looking all the more stoic for his outburst. She tilted her head in curiosity. "I'm not here for you. It isn't your time." Not by far, if the life force stowed in his chest was a proper measurement of such things. Was he really so afraid of a woman he'd taken for a teenager?

Well... perhaps it was wise to be. Dori had been no more than three when she ushered her first soul from this plane to the next. Barely old enough to comprehend death, let alone embody it.

[whistlersmum]

"Thank Christ for that, then."

Whistler sunk down in his chair. Casting a protection spell like that took an enormous amount of energy.

"So... if it's not my time..." and he was very excited to hear that, "then why are you here?"

In a town this size, it could be anyone or...

"The way you talked about things decaying. Are you here for Searchlight?" The Agent went pale.

[dori_bell]

“I have to be somewhere,” she said, shaking her head lightly as if it were an obvious conclusion. She was not an angel, not some ephemeral, winged creature that managed to be everywhere and yet nowhere, swooping into the bedrooms of the elderly or the wreckage of crashed cars to collect souls. She was human. She breathed, ate, and slept like all living creatures did. She aged. One day, she would die. Why she and her brother were called upon to live among humans, as humans, to occasionally use their power to take life or give it, she didn’t know. She did not have a gospel.

[whistlersmum]

"But you're here, in this library. With me, now."

He didn't believe in coincidences. He didn't believe in luck.

Whistler believed things happened for a reason. Sometimes, he was that reason.

The demon leaned over the map, placed his head in his hands and sighed.

"Some days," he groused, "I really hate my job."

[dori_bell]

“I am going to take someone,” Dori said. She considered his predicament with roughly half the information she needed; his job was still a mystery to her, as was the identity of his boss. “Maybe you were meant to see.”

To see, but not to stop her. Nothing could stop her.

She pressed her palms on the wooden table and stood up. The hem of her skirt rolled up in the back, making it two inches shorter and lopsided. Death had many faces; today it looked harmless and mousy. Before she departed, a tick mark formed between her eyebrows. “Did you know that someone close to you almost met her end? She stared at me for a moment. Through the veil. I felt it.”

Dori eased away from her chair and began her descent to the first floor of the library. Her shoes made hushed noises on the carpeted stairs, her fingers whispering on the waxed rail. As she passed the circulation desk, they dusted along the edge there, too, and a librarian keeled over in her seat, the pain behind her eye revealing itself to be an aneurysm.

[whistlersmum]

He watched the girl descend and pass by the desk, saw the librarian pass. Knowing he was helpless to stop it. Wondering if he was powerless for what was to come.

And then her words, once more.

'Did you know that someone close to you almost met her end? She stared at me for a moment. Through the veil. I felt it.;

That death would've been too much for him.

By that reasoning, if he stood by and did nothing, Whistler valued other lives less.

Which would make him, what? A monster? Technically he was already a demon. No, part demon. But he was also part angel. An Agent of Balance.

Well. Screw that.

It was time to pick a side.