Becoming Johanna (10 page)

“
I wouldn’t have liked
that,” she responded. “May I have Mr. Morton’s book
now?”

“
Yes, yes, of course, just
be careful with it. It would never do to have gangs of Bengal
tribesmen running all around Exeter, looking for witches to
kill.”

Johanna must have gaped at
the man, because he quickly added, “Don’t worry. The book is
securely wrapped in brown paper and all tied up with twine in a
nice, neat package. You should be perfectly safe.”

She reluctantly took the
package, and found her way back to the vestibule. The door slammed
shut behind her, and once again, the world grew dreary. She looked
around for her umbrella, but it was gone.
Great.

She made a mad dash for
her car, and carefully navigated the roads of Exeter, looking for
Bay House. When she finally found it, she realized she would have
to run for the door with the book stashed under her coat to protect
it.

Johanna hurried, even
though the walkway was slick. She hoped she wouldn’t slip and fall
and somehow give free rein to the fury of the men in the book she
carried.

She banged the doorknocker
several times.
Manners be damned.
She just wanted to deliver the book and go
home.

A large, muscular man
pulled the door open.

“
Mr. Morton?”

“
You have the
book?”

“
Yes, I do. And it put me
through quite a bit of trouble.” She pulled the book from under her
coat and fussed with the string that bound it.

The man pulled the book
from her hands and slammed the door in her face.

“
Hey,” she screamed,
banging the knocker. “I want a receipt for that, and I’m not
leaving until I get one.” But she waited in vain. In the rain. And
when a bolt of lightning cracked overhead, she retreated to her car
and slowly made her way home.

Johanna arrived at
Book Services the following morning to find the
pile of work on her desk had more than doubled in size. She glared
at her colleague Lucinda. She felt sure the older girl worked late
for the sole purpose of dumping unwanted work on Johanna’s desk.
Lucinda appeared to be as busy as ever and didn’t looked
up.

B-B-B-R-R-R-I-I-I-N-N-N-G-G-G!

Johanna closed her eyes,
just for a moment, and wished she were somewhere else. The phone
continued to ring until she reluctantly picked it up.

“
I want to see you in my
office.”

Disgusted, Johanna threw
her purse under her desk.
I’m only two
minutes late,
she thought, and she’d spent
more than an hour of her own time the previous evening making a
delivery for her boss.
What does he want
from me, blood?

When she got to his
cramped cubicle, he motioned for her to sit down. “How did
everything go last night?”

“
Fine. I got the package
and delivered it to Mr. Morton, who, I might add, refused to give
me a receipt for it. He just slammed the door in my face and left
me standing there in the rain.”

Her boss reached behind
him and pulled out her umbrella. “Here. I believe you left this
behind.”

“
I didn’t leave it behind.
I leaned it against the wall so it wouldn’t drip water everywhere,
and when I left, it wasn’t there. Were you following
me?”

“
No. And I’m not
interested in the history of your umbrella. I just want to know
what you saw when you went to the ... uh ... library.”

“
What do
you mean, what I saw?” Visions of a half-eaten
Moby-Dick
flashed before
her. Had the little old man complained about her?

“
Well, leaving your
umbrella behind would imply that you were either there for some
length of time or left in a hurry because of some
atrocity.”

She wouldn’t really call
the goat an atrocity, and she hadn’t actually seen the pterosaur.
However, she had been there more than a few minutes, soaking in the
wonders of her dream library and the enchanted books it
held.

“
It took me a while to get
in, you know. I think the bell is broken.”

“
I’ve never gotten in,” he
replied offhandedly. “Every time I turn to leave, I hear a rush of
air behind me. By the time I turn back, the parcel is sitting on
the floor, waiting for me. It’s the oddest library I’ve ever been
to. How can anyone look for a book there?”

Johanna broke out in goose
bumps; not just a minor plumping of her hair follicles, but major
zit-sized goose mountains.
He’s never been
inside.

Her boss warily eyed the
tiny elevations on her skin. “Are you all right?”

She rubbed her arms with
an exaggerated motion. “It’s all this rain we’ve been having. It
chills me to the core. And standing outside Mr. Morton’s house
waiting for a receipt didn’t help. I may be coming down with
something.”

“
I’m sure if you work your
way through it, you’ll be just fine. Pros play hurt, Johanna. Don’t
you forget that.” He shooed her out of his office.

She knew he would react
that way. God forbid anyone might need to take off a day from work;
that simply was not allowed. They were given one week of vacation a
year, and employees who took sick days received no pay. They were
each forced to sign an agreement accepting those conditions before
they were hired.

A week later,
her boss again waited until the last minute to
ask Johanna to pick up a book and deliver it to the priory in
Exeter.

Why does it have to be
Exeter again? Why can’t it be a little closer?
At least it wasn’t raining
.
She left work and steered her way to the library.
She thought she’d find it more easily, considering she’d been there
before, but if she didn’t know better, she would think it had
changed locations. She drove up and down the winding streets for
several minutes before she finally found it.

Inside, the vestibule
remained unchanged. She pressed the button, straining to listen for
a ringing sound. Again, nothing happened. She thought back to her
previous visit and what she had said and done. She remembered
punching the bell, but couldn’t remember what she said. She focused
on the small brass plaque.
What are you
seeking?

She pressed the button a
second time and said, “I’m here to pick up a book for the priory.”
Nothing happened. She pressed it again. “I’m seeking entrance.”
Still nothing.

“
Open sesame.” “Let me
in.” “Why are you doing this to me?” “Is this thing broken?” With
each request, her voice grew louder and her actions more animated.
Disillusioned, she leaned her forehead against the button. “How can
you call this a Library of Illumination when no one will illuminate
me on how to get in?”

The wall slid open,
revealing the splendor she remembered from the previous
week.

She stepped inside. The
little old man was nowhere to be found. She peeked behind the
couch. He wasn’t there. Neither was the book the goat had snacked
on during her previous visit.

She perused the titles of
books scattered about the area until her eyes came to rest
on
Little Women
.
She had first read it at the age of thirteen, and loved the Louisa
May Alcott book so much, she often daydreamed about being Jo. She
opened it to a random page and read to herself.

Suddenly, Jo sat before
her in a barber chair, arguing with a man over how much he should
pay her for her hair. “Twenty-five dollars and not a penny less,”
she demanded.

Johanna watched in
amazement as the barber picked up a strand of Jo’s long, luxurious
hair and fingered it. “All right. But don’t let this get around, or
you’ll send me to the poorhouse.” He combed her hair back from her
face and tied it with a string. Picking up a pair of shears, he cut
off her ponytail and gently placed the locks on a counter. He then
snipped Jo’s hair shorter and shorter, until he’d littered the
floor with her severed tresses.

“
Oh, dear.”

Johanna slammed the book
shut and whirled around to find the little old man staring at the
floor. “I ... I ... I came to pick up a book for the priory,” she
stammered.

“
I have it right here. But
I must ask you to linger a moment and help me out. My lumbago is
acting up.” He shuffled across the room and opened a narrow closet
hidden in the wall paneling. “In here. There’s a shovel and a
broom. Would you please sweep up those hair clippings? I wouldn’t
want to slip and fall.”

Johanna took the broom and
shovel and returned to where she had seen Jo getting a haircut. Jo
may have vanished, but bits of her hair lay all over the
floor.

A foul odor emanated from
the broom as Johanna swept. She wrinkled her nose.

The little old man
apparently noticed. “That broom still stinks, does it? I tried
cleaning it, but I guess I didn’t do a good job. I must need new
spectacles. But it’s your own fault, you know. Those animals
from
Noah’s Ark
left quite a mess last week, and I believe that was all your
doing.”

Noah’s
Ark
? Johanna thought about the elephants
and other animals. She had been so busy trying to get the book away
from the goat that she hadn’t given much thought to what the other
animals may have left behind.

“
What should I do with
this?” She jiggled the shovel containing the pile of loose
hair.

The little old man pulled
on a handle near the closet door. It opened up into a chute. “In
here,” he answered.

Johanna dumped the
snippets, and Malcolm Trees nodded toward the closet. She put the
tools away without saying another word.

He picked up a parcel and
handed it to her. “Be careful. Templars can be
ruthless.”

She nodded, and delivered
the package as instructed.

The following
morning
, Johanna found a huge pile of work
on her desk, no doubt due to another nocturnal visit from lazy
Lucinda. She busied herself with getting it done, so she wouldn’t
have to stay late.

Johanna’s boss startled
her. “How did it go last night?” He had actually come out to her
desk to ask about the book delivery, rather than call her into his
office. Even Lucinda stopped typing and gawked at him.

“
Fine,” Johanna answered,
not offering him any additional information.

He stared at her in
silence for a minute or so, then walked away without saying another
word.

“
What’s that all about?”
Lucinda asked casually.

“
I have no idea,” Johanna
answered. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Lucinda returned to her
typing, with a scowl on her face. About the only things she and
Johanna had in common were that they worked for the same company
and neither of them liked their boss. He reminded Johanna of the
cold and calculating headmaster who had used an iron fist to rule
the orphanage in which she grew up. She didn’t know why Lucinda
hated their boss, but she knew Lucinda would never ask him
anything
.

A few days later,
Johanna’s boss told her she would have to pick up
two parcels and deliver them to two different
destinations.

She didn’t mind visiting
the library, but she hated her boss for intruding on her personal
time. She thought he waited until the last minute to ask her to
make deliveries as a demonstration of
his
power over
her
job. She wondered if he told her
to make two deliveries because he had tried to make one himself and
had failed.

“
Where are they
going?”

“
They’ll give you the
addresses at the library.”

“
I hope they’re local,”
she said, walking toward the door. “I don’t have a lot of gasoline
to devote to running all over creation. And my fuel costs are
getting out of hand. I asked the garage to send you the
bill.”

She watched his face turn
white, then red, just before the door closed behind her. She hadn’t
really asked anyone to send him the bill, but saying so made her
feel like she was taking back control of her life. She smiled. She
didn’t do it often, but when she did her face instantly changed,
and her beauty emerged.

In Exeter, she
again felt like someone had switched the streets
around. It took her an extra half-hour to find the library, and it
seemed like she stumbled upon it by accident.

She entered the vestibule
and walked over to the button on the brass plaque. She pressed it
and said, “Illumination.” The doors opened, and she walked inside,
smiling at having figured out the key to gaining
entrance.

The little old man stood
waiting for her. “Feeling pretty proud of yourself, are
you?”

“
What do you
mean?”

“
Very few people come to
our door, and rarely does anyone gain admittance. It would seem
that hardly anyone ever seeks illumination. They punch the button,
pound on the door, and rant and rave in general, but no one is
going to get in unless they say the right thing.