The Rabbit Back Literature Society (9 page)

I
NGRID KATZ
closed up the library at eight and sent the intern home.

She climbed the stairs to the third floor and walked around the upper level to see everything below from a bird’s-eye view. This walking inspection was more a ritual than a necessary act. As always, she reminded herself that all this was her
responsibility
. Then she went back downstairs.

It had been a satisfying day: she’d had to remove only one book from the collections, and for merely ordinary reasons—a patron had dropped it into a bowl of berry porridge.

Ingrid Katz closed the main door, checked to make sure it was locked, and stopped for a moment between the marble columns to breathe the outside air. The columns had once made her feel like the keeper of a sacred temple. That feeling had faded now. They were just pillars of stone. When she was feeling glum she even thought that the books were just bundles of paper with text printed on them.

She walked around to the back of the library where her Ford had its own parking space, and opened the car door. It hadn’t frozen shut this time.

She sat in the car but didn’t yet start the engine. As was her habit, she paused to acknowledge her negative thoughts and go through them one by one.

Today one of them was the recurring thought of changing jobs, leaving the library for someone else to worry about. She
let the idea take over, let it feed her desire to do something else, anything else. Well maybe not anything. What she wanted was to write, to write freely, to write something meaningful. She wanted to write. She did, after all, work among great books, in a virtual garden of creativity, when you thought about it, but she herself hadn’t been able to write anything for a long time. She had been scraping together a modest children’s book, but she had stalled even in that pathetic attempt.

She nevertheless
knew
that she could write something
wonderful
, something unprecedented, if she could just get started. A great novel that would win at least the Finlandia Prize, and maybe even be an international success, a hit with readers and critics, and sell so well that she could build her family a large house in Rabbit Back’s best neighbourhood.

But all her energies were taken up with preventing the library from careening into chaos. Books were being ruined all the time. And they were stolen. Faulty works appeared on the shelves constantly. The budget was cut every year. Another part-time library assistant had been laid off and replaced by an unpaid intern who let loose flaccid farts between the stacks, thinking no one would notice.

Ingrid seized her unpleasant thoughts, shoved them in an imaginary garbage bag, and flung them from her mind.

Then she cast off her skin. She was no longer Ingrid Katz the librarian. She was now Ingrid Katz, wife and mother, who was just getting off work, about to be greeted with smiles.

As she started the car she looked around the library grounds. It was dark in the shadows of the trees; there could be anyone lurking there. For several days she’d had bouts of paranoia like she hadn’t felt in years. She glanced in the rear-view mirror
once more to make sure she didn’t have any extra passengers in the back seat. She was conscious of the fact that this was disconcerting behaviour, but on the other hand she did have past precedents for it.

She drove straight home and greeted her family. She came home every evening in time to put her children to bed. She’d promised her husband she would.

Ingrid Katz had birthed four children in all. The first two had been made by a more or less mutual understanding. The last two were a gift to her husband, who had always wanted a super family.

She liked the children, too, of course.

“This is the life,” her husband would say as they sat
surrounded
by their children.

One time Ingrid had answered, “You don’t read books.” She’d meant it as an accusation, as the worst sort of insult. She said it maliciously.

Her husband laughed. “Books,” he said. “There are a lot more important things in life than books. The children, for instance.”

This evening the children wanted their mother to read old fairy tales to them. She shook her head and read to them from her unfinished children’s book. They fell asleep so quickly that she wondered if she ought to add some more exciting scenes. She tucked them in. After she’d gone to the bathroom, she put on her winter coat and looked for her gloves. She’d put them in her coat pocket, but now they were gone.

“Damn it,” she whispered, standing in front of the
entryway
mirror. She stood looking at her reflection. When had she started looking like that?

“Are you looking for your gloves, honey?” her husband asked from the kitchen. “I put them on the bathroom radiator to warm for the morning. Are you going for a walk again? Did you remember to take your vitamins? You ought to take some or you’ll come down with something among all those books.”

“I remembered,” Ingrid lied. “Yes, I’m going out. It’s too bad one of us has to stay and watch the kids. I’m going to the kiosk to buy some liquorice and brush off the book dust.”

As she went out the door she asked, “Do you need anything from the kiosk?”

Her husband thought about it. Finally, he said he didn’t need anything. Ingrid Katz left. Her husband never needed anything from the kiosk, she knew that without asking, but ritual required her to ask. Their marriage was a careful construction of interlocking rituals, and was rather precious for that. Sort of like Midsummer or Christmas.

It was nine o’clock. The ritual of her evening walk required that she be back by ten. Then her husband could go to bed and she could sit up on the sofa reading for a couple of hours. She wanted to wish her husband goodnight. That was how they did it.

Ingrid walked here and there through the familiar streets of the town. A few dogs came to meet her. A small, mixed-breed mutt stopped in front of her and growled, but a sarcastic snort sufficed to send it on its way.

Ingrid liked her walks through Rabbit Back. They always skirted close to the centre but it was easy to imagine that she was walking in a great forest, far from civilization.

There were seven statues altogether along her favourite route. They were part of the Rabbit Back art campaign. The idea
was to make the whole district into one big gallery. You might see a statue at the foot of a tree, in the shrubbery, on the shore of the pond. Some of them were grotesque—frightening, in fact—others comical, graceful, even provocative, like the
bare-breasted
water nymph beside a certain small pond.

The model for the buxom water nymph had been the artist’s own daughter, who taught the younger grades at Rabbit Back School. Ingrid saw a crowd of little boys gathered around the statue to admire the artist’s work.

Beyond the water nymph and the crowd of boys Ingrid reached the lonely portion of her walk. The path narrowed, there were fewer ponds and the trees grew thicker.

She glanced around. She didn’t want to be surprised, not when she was already feeling paranoid. She also didn’t want to see every statue too clearly. There were two malevolent-looking goblins along this stretch, not to mention the grotesque figures her imagination made from the snow and shadows. Ingrid’s silly children’s author’s head slipped easily into monster stories that she used to frighten herself.

She stopped twice under street lamps to listen and look to see if anyone was following her.

Then she saw coloured lights in the dark. The little shop signs gave her a happy feeling. The signs in Rabbit Back were nostalgic, old-fashioned:
HELI’S SALON
, read one, and Ingrid remembered that she ought to make an appointment for a cut and dye.

Exactly an hour after she’d left the house, Ingrid halted at her front door. She dug out her house key and started to fit it in the lock.

Suddenly there was a movement in the darkness.

She spun around and stared hard at a nearby bush. It seemed to have moved about half a metre. Nonsense, she thought. Then the bush started rolling towards her.

She dropped her keys, her heart lurched and started to pound in her chest. She looked at her watch. It was 10:01.

It was happening again.

Her hands and feet went bloodless and she felt dizzy, awful. She closed her eyes and turned her back on it, forcing herself to smile nonchalantly.

Then she felt a breath on her neck whispering the dreaded words:
I challenge you, Ingrid Katz
.

She turned around slowly, her eyes wet, a strained smile on her lips, and saw Ella Milana’s amused face before her.

Ella watched as Ingrid gradually recovered.

Katz was slumped sideways on the porch steps, pale and breathless. At the library and the party she had seemed stern and brisk. Now the irony was crumbling and dropping away. Ella wondered if she’d gone too far. But Arne C. Ahlqvist had clambered up a ladder and scratched at her bedroom window in the middle of the night to get to her.

“Sorry to startle you,” Ella said, “but I had the impression that this was how you did it in the Society.”

Ingrid waved a hand at her. “I won’t claim otherwise. It’s just that I’ve been out of practice for a while. It’s such a crazy thing to do. Dreadful, really. Utter foolishness. It’s no wonder
you can’t talk about The Game to outsiders. They’d laugh at us, shut us up somewhere, the lot of us. But those are the rules. Laura wrote them, and it’s not our place to change them around.” She searched in the snow for her keys as she muttered this, her face lighting up when she found them. “But we can, in theory, be civilized about the whole thing,” she continued. “We could use the phone, for instance. ‘Hello, this is fellow Society member so-and-so. Could you possibly join me for The Game tonight after dinner?’ But we hardly play The Game at all anymore. It’s been more than three years since I last played.”

Katz thought for a moment and then said, “We can play at the library, if you like.”

Ingrid jangled her keys, opened the door and hung her coat on a hook. “You’re the challenger. You decide where we play. The children’s section? The reading lounge?”

They passed the elves, gnomes and nymphs standing in the dark and Katz led them between the shelves to a reading corner with a table and two bar stools. In the middle of the table stood a small stone figure of a woman with plump breasts, wide hips, and butterfly wings.

Ella liked this spot. She lost herself in looking at the floors opening up above them and the skylight, the winter night falling through it into the room in a grid of light.

“Do you have a handkerchief?” Ingrid enquired, taking off her glasses and placing them carefully in their case.

Ella took out a red scarf and tied it around the librarian’s eyes, as the rules of The Game instructed.

“I hope it’s not too tight,” she said.

“No,” Ingrid answered. “You managed to get a rule book from somewhere, then?”

Ella could smell liquorice on her breath. “Yes,” she answered. “Martti Winter loaned it to me. I’ll return it when I get my own copy, of course. That’s promised in the rule book:
Every member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society shall receive one copy of the rules of The Game for their own study
.

“You can blame me for that,” Ingrid said. “I’m the one who put you up to asking him. I suppose you’ve read the part about how to present the questions as well?”

“The rules say that I can ask you anything at all and you have to answer with absolute honesty,” Ella said. She had the rule book in her bag, just in case. “If I’m not satisfied with your answer, I ask again until the answer sounds sufficiently
believable
. You’re expected to try with all your might to be completely open and honest. If I get a sense that you’re not making an effort to answer honestly, it’s my right and responsibility as the challenger to help you by any possible means to find the truth within yourself.”

Ingrid thought for a moment. “You haven’t been trained in The Game,” she said at last. “Are you quite sure you can follow through all the way to the end?”

“When I’ve got my answers from you, I am indeed ready to answer any questions you may have, if that’s what you mean.”

Ingrid shook her head. “That’s my responsibility. What I’m worried about is whether you’re ready to get the truth out of me if I don’t answer truthfully enough. I have to know if you can honour the spirit of The Game to the last. You should understand that once a question has been asked, you have a duty, to both of us, to make sure that I give a complete and honest
answer. You simply cannot content yourself with anything less than the whole truth.”

Ella felt her palms sweating. “I’ve read the rules,” she said, “and I understand them.”

Ingrid’s mouth grinned. Ella wished she could see her eyes.

“But I find it hard to believe that you have it in you,” Ingrid said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you can play The Game properly. Laura White hasn’t trained you.”

Ella bit her lip. “Are you trying to make me say that I
understand
the meaning and the demands of Rule 21?” she said.

Ingrid Katz nodded.

Rule 21 wasn’t an easy one. Ella had read it through many times until she was sure she understood it.

Once she’d read Rule 21 it was easy to understand the rituals associated with challenging someone to The Game. People could more easily free themselves from their inhibitions at night, and once you had the other person in your clutches, like a predator, it was easier to temporarily abandon common courtesy.

Ella took hold of Ingrid’s lower lip. Then she twisted it until the woman let out a high-pitched cry of pain.

A drop of blood rolled down her chin. She pushed Ella’s hand away and gave a squeak as she felt her lip with her fingers.

“All right,” Ingrid said, mollified and a little frightened. “You understand Rule 21. So let’s play.”