Grey Dawn (2 page)

Dulcie broke into a run.

D
ulcie arrived home, breathless but safe, to find Esmé waiting at the front door.

‘What is it, kitty?' Grateful for the sight of the little cat, for the off-center white star on her fuzzy face. For the pure normalcy of the scene, Dulcie had dropped the student papers on the floor and scooped up her pet. ‘Were you worried about me?'

‘No!'
The answer came quickly, as Esmé pushed her white paws against Dulcie's chest. ‘
Put me down.'

Dulcie obliged, a little saddened. ‘No, you weren't worried about me? Or, no, you don't want to be held?'

‘So silly.'
The cat stalked away, tail held high, leaving Dulcie to wonder. Did Esmé mean she had gotten scared about nothing? Or had she done something else to merit her pet's scorn?

‘Mr Grey?' Dulcie picked up the papers and took them into the kitchen. ‘Are you there? Do you have any thoughts?' It wasn't that she didn't trust Esmé. Still, Mr Grey, the late grey longhair who often returned to advise and comfort her, was older and presumably had access to information that might not be available on the physical plane.

‘Why are you asking
him?'
The answer came not in the calm voice of her older pet, but in the slightly peevish tone of an adolescent, as Esmé barreled back – and into Dulcie's shins.
‘Why don't you play with me?'

And so she did, tossing a catnip mouse until the young cat was exhausted. By then, Dulcie had calmed down enough to grade the papers she'd gone through so much trouble to reclaim. It was after two by the time she finished, and by rights she should have gone to sleep. After her various labors, however, she couldn't help but feel that she deserved a treat. Calling Chris was always an option – he'd be awake and at his terminal till seven. But Dulcie didn't want to confess that she had gone out alone so late, and unless she did that she certainly couldn't explain what had frightened – no, alarmed – her so. Agitated, that was more like it. The empty office had just been so quiet. And the howls, well, nobody likes to think of a dog in pain, and that was what it must have been. None of it any reason for her to disturb her boyfriend at work. Not when it might worry him. And so she got into bed – with her laptop – planning on reading just a little more of the recovered text.

‘Esmé, want to read with me?' She called for the cat, who was batting at something – Dulcie really hoped it wasn't a bug – in the corner. ‘It'll be fun.'

The cat simply twitched an ear, letting Dulcie know she'd had her fill of her, and so Dulcie started to read.

Fierce as the wind were the cries that rent the night. Foul and fearsome Voices rang from unearthly throats, wailing like the very hounds of Hell, they called to her, hailing her and keeping pace e'en as the coach raced forward, tossed like a Ship in a Storm, the horses white-eyed and screaming as the coachman whipped them on, breathless with panic, as were they all.

Daring a glimpse, she had pushed back the curtain and seen them, the foul demonic Beasts. Undaunted by the storm, as the flash of lightning rent the night, the glare of light revealed the sable tossl'd pelts, the glowing eyes. One damned Beast pursuing caught her glance with an eye o'er shot with Blood, and turning toward her visage e'en as she closed the curtain with hands that trembled, howled anew.

No wonder she'd been spooked. At least the woman had made it into the carriage. In the last passage, the heroine had been fleeing an evil stranger, leaving behind the relative safety of an inn for the crossroad where she faced the stormy night alone. Until the strange carriage had picked her up, anyway, just as the wolves had started howling.

What would merit such a danger? What prize was worth such risk? Such Questions she clasped to her bosom, held close within the very breath that warmed her. For her Soul's sake, they could not know. Yet, closer they came, fiendish voices whipped by the night's wind, jagged Fangs snapping at the air.

It was all so vivid –
jagged Fangs, the tossl'd pelts, glowing eyes … o'er shot with blood –
and strangely familiar
.
It sounded like … No, she was imagining things. Seeing a resemblance where there was none. She needed to focus, to think as a scholar, not a scared girl caught up in a ghost story too late at night.

Part of the problem was that it was hard to read this as a straightforward narrative. Too much was unclear or missing. She had to focus on what was actually there, in the text. To start with, there was that curious question – what risk was the heroine talking about? And then the strange description.

After that, there seemed to be a gap, and she'd made a note to herself to look for a missing page. She scrolled down to the next bit: suddenly, it seemed, the woman was no longer alone. She was talking to someone who hadn't been mentioned when the carriage had pulled up, offering her refuge from the storm. Was there another traveler in the carriage? Or could it be the coachman? She shook her head. It wouldn't make sense that the character in the next scene would be the coachman. How would a passenger be able to converse with the driver, especially as they raced through a stormy night? But if the stranger – if that's what the word was, Dulcie still thought it might be ‘Frenchman' – was there from the start, why had he not been mentioned before? A manuscript this old, and in this poor shape, could easily be missing pages, but everything else had followed pretty normally. Still, it wasn't like a character could just appear out of nowhere. Could he?

Of course he could, Dulcie reminded herself. Especially in an early, handwritten draft of a book. Because however it came to be, by the next scene, her heroine was conversing with the stranger – or the Frenchman. What he said, though, would have to wait, because after all the excitement of the night, Dulcie realized her eyes were growing heavy. She closed the laptop and pushed it aside, and felt, near her feet, the telltale thump of a feline landing beside her. Too tired to look, to see if her young pet had jumped up or if a spectral presence had joined her, Dulcie let her eyes close. She heard purring, she felt paws kneading, and that was all.

S
he couldn't help it. She couldn't stop staring at him. As Martin Thorpe called the departmental meeting to order, Dulcie found herself gaping at the balding scholar. At his pale face and his deeply shadowed eyes, still rimmed in red like the hellhounds in her story. At his teeth.

Partly, it was lack of sleep. Not only had she retired late, but despite the comforting presence of a cat on the bed, she'd slept badly, her night broken up by strange and disturbing dreams. At one point, she'd woken to the howls again, and she'd thought about getting up, about checking the doors and windows, only to be dragged back down by fatigue. At another, she was sure that an intruder had come in and turned on the lights, the moon was shining so brightly.

When she finally did slip into unconsciousness, it was with a sense of eyes watching her. Yellow, feral eyes that radiated menace. She had tossed and turned then, almost waking, when they had changed. It wasn't that they had dimmed, exactly, though they had softened from that poison yellow to green. It was more that their intent seemed to shift. When, near dawn, Dulcie finally fell into a deeper sleep, she had the sense of someone watching over her.
The stranger,
she remembered thinking, briefly, in a half-awake moment.
The man in grey.

She had woken late to find Esmé gone and Chris beside her, snoring gently. His clothes had been left in a pile by the bed, and Dulcie could only imagine how tired he must have been when he'd come in. Maybe, she told herself, she had been subconsciously waiting for him and that was why she had had such troubling dreams. Maybe he had been the comforting stranger, the new presence who had allowed her to slip into a calmer sleep. Except that Chris's eyes were brown.

Whatever. By the time Dulcie finished her shower, she was already late. Nancy always had a fresh pot on for the departmental meeting, so grabbing her empty travel mug, Dulcie ran out the door. It was funny, she thought as she trotted up the familiar brick sidewalks. By daylight, her city looked innocuous. More like a big town than some urban wilderness. It must have been the moonlight – the cool, blue light – interacting with the vivid scene she had read before heading out. Well, that and that poor dog. If she heard it again, she would call animal control. That howl had sounded like an animal in pain.

As luck would have it, she wasn't the last one into the meeting. Thorpe himself was late, which meant that Dulcie had a chance to file the student papers, slurp down half her mug, and refill it before tromping back to the meeting room. There, she found a seat between Lloyd, her office mate, and Trista. Although she'd successfully defended her thesis the spring before, Trista had swung a one-year post-doc at the university that let her add to her credits before leaving the nest to seek a tenure-track teaching position. It also let her stay around her boyfriend, Jerry, who, like Chris, was still a grad student in the applied math department.

‘Hey.' Trista leaned forward as Dulcie sat down. But whatever she was about to confide was interrupted as the door opened once more behind Dulcie and Trista slid back into her seat. Martin Thorpe had entered the room.

‘Good morning, good morning.' The acting head seemed more distracted than usual, and Dulcie and Trista exchanged glances. Only when Lloyd, seated to her left, nudged her, however, did Dulcie realize just how much of a mess their departmental boss was. Not only was his remaining hair standing up, but the shoulder bag he had dumped on the conference table in front of him was spilling forth folders. For the usually tightly wound acting head, it was an unimaginable display of disarray, and Dulcie couldn't stop staring.

‘Obviously, we're running a bit late here. Mr Derwin, would you tell us the progress with the new grading procedures?' Whatever had happened, Thorpe wasn't going to explain it. If anything, he sounded more businesslike than ever, moving over the meeting agenda like clockwork, until he got up to Dulcie.

‘Ms Schwartz, I'm glad to see you made the midterm grading deadline.' Dulcie looked down, blushing. She had – barely. ‘Even if you had to resort to a midnight visit to our offices to do so.'

‘I'm sorry.' She looked up, taken aback. ‘Did I do something wrong?' The alarm – no, she was sure she had set it.

‘Nothing
wrong
, Ms Schwartz.' He was staring at her now, and she saw how tired he looked. How pale. As if aware of the scrutiny, he ran a thin hand over the remnants of his wiry black hair. ‘Only if you are going to set the alarm for a building as you leave, you might have the courtesy to make sure nobody else is still within that building.'

A general chuckle broke out around the table, and Dulcie felt herself blushing. So that was why she had felt another presence in the little clapboard. Because there had been someone there – Martin Thorpe, presumably.

‘I'm sorry, sir.' She shook her head. ‘At that hour, I just didn't think.' She paused. ‘But, sir, when I came in, the alarm had been on. I had to turn it off.'

‘Did you?' The dark eyes that held her were frankly skeptical.

‘I thought I did.' Dulcie ran her hand over her own unruly curls. Had she? She'd kept going over the numbers in her head on her way there, wanting to be certain she had the correct sequence, so afraid of setting the alarm off. ‘I was sure I did.'

‘Well, if you're
sure …'
Another giggle leaked out of the crowd, and Dulcie felt her cheeks growing redder.

‘I'm sorry. I must have been mistaken.' She shook her head. Part of her embarrassment was her unconsidered use of the word ‘sure.' Wasn't it only the week before that the department had hosted a debate on the role of context in determining supposed absolutes, like certainty? It had been the latest in a series on dueling literary theories, pitting a more traditional style of study against a kind of post-structuralism that questioned everything. Very hip, but also increasingly abstract. The whole series was Thorpe's baby, and so Dulcie couldn't complain – even though she had begun to feel like in all the discussion of what was real and what was merely ‘real' for some literary purpose, the actual reading of books was getting lost. For now, however, she tried to turn it into a joke. ‘Clearly, I misinterpreted the context of the setting,' she said.

Another chuckle rippled through the room, and Dulcie realized that maybe, in this case, ‘context' did have genuine meaning. After all, Thorpe was clearly upset because he'd been the one locked in. That also would explain why he had looked so distraught when she had seen him on the street. ‘When I saw you on the corner after I left,' she added, ‘I didn't think that you'd been behind me.'

‘The corner?' Thorpe was shaking his head as he looked at her. ‘I don't know what you're talking about, Ms Schwartz. The moonlight must have been playing tricks on you. A question of
context
confusing
content
.'

Dulcie smiled, accepting the gentle ribbing. Thorpe was showing off, but if she had locked him in, she could understand why. The rest of the meeting went by in a blur. Partly, that was because Thorpe seemed so intent on rushing through the usual agenda items, as if his theoretical points made the day-to-day basics of the department – teaching assignments, deadlines, and whatnot – passé. Partly, it was Dulcie's confusion. Context or no context, some things were simply facts. She
had
turned off the alarm when she'd entered the building; she was sure – or was it certain? – of it. And she had seen her adviser on the sidewalk about a block away. If she'd locked him in and his exit had unwittingly sounded the alarm, wouldn't she have heard it? Or wouldn't he have said something? Unless he hadn't left till after she was gone – and that had been some other thin, balding man in the moonlight. Perhaps that was why the man she had seen had looked so strange to her – because he was.