The veneration connected to Purcell College’s repository library, Peabody Hall, was due to its collection of rare books, most of which were cloistered away in tenebrous recesses on the second floor of the rotunda. This level overlooked the ground floor with an encircling balcony. Michael inquired about his mysterious professor at the reference desk, and a librarian put him onto the original copy of Daedalus Monet’s unfinished autobiography. Records and newspaper articles connected to the professor had been downloaded from microfiche to a computer database, and these seemed pertinent to his investigation. The patron soon ran across his first entry of significance, a story from The Stonesthrow Register dated in spring of Nineteen Seventy-nine:

HOME STRUCK BY METEORITE. WOMAN KILLED IN BLAZE.

The first paragraph laid out the details:

Spyglass Darkly House, home of Professor Daedalus Monet of Purcell College, was almost destroyed when a meteorite struck it early Saturday morning. A subsequent fire swept through the residence and killed a young but as of yet unidentified woman in an upstairs bedroom. The professor was hospitalized in fair condition with smoke inhalation. Firemen on the scene say toppled candles were the likely cause of the ensuing fire.

Two days later, things became considerably stranger. The developments also made the front-page:

The identity of the deceased woman is still unknown, although rumors suggest she may have been a student of the professor’s who secretly moved into his house. According to unnamed sources, Daedalus Monet has a history of questionable relationships with female students, although there are no current reports of any students missing from campus. The professor, for his part, is said to have called the deceased girl a “celestial being,” and owing to his sudden deteriorated state of mind, his release from the hospital is being held up pending psychological evaluation.

A second story on page two went into background:

The professor’s eccentricity is the stuff of legend, though colleagues are uniformly quiet on these latest developments; neighbors, however, are not so reticent. They describe the taciturn Monet as an “egregious property owner” who “brings mice into the neighborhood by keeping junk in his yard.” When questioned whether the young woman has been seen around the property, no one at Willis Quadrangle can testify to that fact. Given the girl was allegedly living in the house for several months, police regard it as odd that otherwise attentive neighbors should not have noticed her comings and goings. This mystery is compounded by a delay in issuing a death certificate. No firm conclusion has been reached on the woman’s cause of death.

Only a day later:

The abrupt disappearance of both Daedalus Monet and the remains of the unknown woman have left hospital staff in disarray. The Mayor has called for an internal review of hospital security procedure, while police continue their statewide dragnet for the professor and the corpse presumed to be in his possession.

These bizarre events were soon chased from the front-page with no further developments to report. Nevertheless, leaked police notes led to a follow-up article a year later:

The professor told the police he designed a special room in his house, one where a “rogue angel” resides. He claimed this deity was given to him by his father, who inherited it from his father, who inherited it from the Indians before statehood. Monet explained that tribal elders, being forced off their land, gave the spirit to Adrian Monet for safekeeping, claiming the form was so old it did not have a name, and “fell from the sky to create the mound.” In exchange for sanctuary from his angelic compatriots, this deity reportedly gave the professor’s lineage special powers.

Later in this saga, and initially unrelated to the angel, Monet told police he found body parts of the unknown woman out in the meadow one day while painting. He did not have the heart to turn them over to authorities, so carted the remains back to the house in a wheelbarrow, whereupon the services of his angel were employed to “make her whole.” According to him, the angel was incapable of taking on spatial dimensions, but could assume the woman’s form in the dimension of time as a memory. To affect this end the girl’s bodily remains were returned to the mound in the dead of night and consumed in a pyre. Her ashes were then placed in a special urn, and when stirred accordingly, the angel was “made flesh as a recollection.” 

This “recollection” slept in a guest room. And later when the professor painted her as a nude model, the angel purportedly fell in love with him with “a woman’s heart.” On the night their love was consummated, the other angels, sensing inattentiveness on the part of their cohort, stormed the residence in a fiery invasion. The professor insisted the renegade angel escaped back to its secret place, yet left the young girl behind in the dimension of time as an “inert memory,” one waiting to be “re-inhabited.” When asked how an inert memory could take up space in the present tense on a mortician’s table, Monet simply replied the girl was a memory for all who came across her. Regardless of her perceived state, she had no spatial body.

The only ashes authorities said they found on the professor’s premises, beyond those necessarily connected to the house fire, were burnt remnants of paintings in a suitcase. Police stated these set-aside ashes were demonstrably not human, and it was more likely the professor, seeing the writing on the wall, rushed into his studio to facilitate the destruction of evidence that connected him intimately to a student; and perhaps aggravating the fire in the process. By the time firemen arrived, he had heaped cinders into a ready suitcase and concocted a story. (Police, it is worth noting, have not been able to locate the suitcase since Monet’s disappearance. And as of the writing of this story some eleven months later, it is ironic to add that the meteorite, which started these events, has itself gone missing in a theft over Homecoming weekend.)

After this account, no further mention of the professor or the mysterious dead girl appeared in the paper. Ownership of the house eventually transferred to the college in an intestate state, seeing Monet had no living relatives.

Michael was perplexed by what he read. He had, he believed, found fragments of Monet’s paintings in the battered suitcase, though could not say they were depictions of the girl in question. It seemed improbable that police, or even those charged with the rebuilding of the house, would not have found the suitcase in the readily discoverable crawlspace between the two upstairs bedrooms.

The library patron, engaged by his subject, moved to a large wooden table to peruse the professor’s autobiography under a reading lamp. Before settling into its pages, he noticed an empty display case nearby. It lured him over to read the plaque mounted on its base:

Nadir Meadow Meteorite. Crashed May, 1979. (Stolen the following year.)

One could presume this was the missing space rock mentioned in the newspaper, although Michael did not understand why an empty case should be left up all these years later. Given the decrepit state of the library, it was doubtful anything was ever touched here on principle. Regardless, this element of the queer story was a little too conveniently placed in his path. The visitor returned to his table, albeit with a warier eye to his surroundings.

He was soon engrossed in his reading material, and it was as strange a book as he expected to find. There were many notes in the margins and crossed-out passages, which made deciphering the text problematic. After a half-hour of reading, a wearing day began to catch up with Michael. The pages grew increasingly heavier in his hands until, lost in an absent thought, the book dropped to his feet with a thud. When he reached down to retrieve it, he blearily spied an elderly woman dusting books with a feather duster across from him. She carried a tote bag almost as big as she was, and in it was a small asthmatic dog that resented the dust settling on its head. By her looks, the lady did not appear to be either a student or a library employee. The place where she stood was shadowy, but she was clearly engaging him in eye contact. She continued to poke her duster into cubbyholes with a sense of purpose, and the patron’s attention gradually drifted back into his book. There it remained until the woman, abruptly in front of him, tapped the glass-covered tabletop with a fingernail; her frighteningly huge eyes caught his in the two-way reflection.

“She followed you in here,” she said.

Michael met her stony gaze head on. “Excuse me?”

She rapped the table again. “The naked woman. She followed you in through the door.”

The rest of the library was uninhabited except for the librarian at the front desk flipping through the crisp pages of a magazine.

The old lady jabbed at his book. “She put a note in there while you were napping. Just thought you should know.”

The woman resumed her self-appointed duties, leaving Michael bewildered. He opened the back of the book to see a note slip out. The acid from the yellowed paper left a ghost image on the inside flap of the cover, indicating it had not been disturbed in years. The handwriting was feminine:

I know it’s wrong. I know it’s a violation of our relationship. But last night I slipped into your room and watched you sleep. I cannot help the way I feel. It is not enough to tell you I love you, but I want to show you.

Given this was Monet’s original manuscript, the seeming crush note was presumably from one of his students. The reader looked up, but the old woman had disappeared into the murky bookshelves. He was not sure what to make of her remarks, or how they related to the dated correspondence. Closing his book, he took stock of the darker stacks encircling the upper level, yet could not say whether his feeling of being watched was a legitimate one, or simply owed to the power of the lady to spook him. There was squeaking in the vicinity, though probably a shelver’s book cart. Michael collected his things and, in the process of standing up to leave, glimpsed another female face reflecting in the glass tabletop; he shuddered. Raising his sights, he finally took in the domed ceiling over his head. The cave-like light traced-out the sculpted plaster relief of a nude woman wrapped around its concaved surface; a swirl of stars burst from her womb in a winding vortex.

The patron returned the book to the reference desk and crossed back through the connecting mezzanine passageway to Nadir Hall. What he thought was an exit turned out to be an alcove. Small lamps highlighted several portraits on one wall. Each image was set in the form of a window in the same building, one seen from the outside and below. Someone looked out each pane of glass, though the foreshortened perspective had the person gazing over the head of the viewer at something fixed at eye level in the sky. Collectively, the looks on these faces were inscrutable, as if the frozen moment was so small an increment of time there was an insufficient amount of it to convey a readable expression. The facing wall contained no artwork—no clue as to their meaning. They were disquieting pictures, and on working his way down all seven of them Michael found himself at a dead-end in more ways than one.

The campus visitor was turned around, and given he did not have a watch—and the only “clock” in the huge building was stopped—, it was surely later than he realized. He moved quickly past a student lounge where a roaring fire was peculiarly quiet. The lost man doubted he had gone completely deaf, but was eager to have evidence to refute it. The interior of the Hall had taken on an unsparing quality, as if the late hour, in some vampire way, drained the warmth from the limestone. A distinct squeak rose to puncture the silence. It resembled the wheels of the shelver’s cart heard in Peabody Hall, although it was somewhere between comical and creepy one should have followed him back into the connecting building. The sound reverberated a short distance before being dissipated by the many tapestries and rugs that stitched the premises together. Peeking around a corner, Michael was startled to see something ghostly move over the reflective surface of a tall ebony vase at the end of the corridor. The fretful man crept by the ceramic piece and turned down a second passageway, closing in on what appeared to be a scaled-down model on a table. It was a replica of Nadir Hall, which thankfully provided a walking map. As the visitor figured out his precise location, the high-pitched sound was closer to his ear. He faded from the model and took in its many tiny windows. Each was a peephole where something could look out. Instantly, a small bird—his finch from the entryway—shot out of one to startle him. It zipped off in the direction he intended to go.

Flapping wings are what he saw in the vase; chirping explained the squeaking.

Stumbling over the main atrium at last, Michael was relieved to have his exit. He glanced down in passing to see the finch lying at the bottom of a plate glass door; it evidently died in a collision. A hail of dead leaves pelted him on entering a courtyard, but the man was of no mind to humor his over-stimulated imagination as he cut the shortest path across campus toward home.