Authors: Tam Lin (pdf)
Janet woke up for no reason. It was very dark in the room, except for the dim rectangles of the windows, letting in some of the light of the street lamp between Forbes and Ericson. All the windows were open, and a faint breeze blew the new curtains, but it made no sound. Tina wasn't snoring. Nobody was racing motorcycles up and down Mile Street; nobody was having a beer party in Forbes. If she had been dreaming, she could not remember it. One moment she had been not awake, and now she was awake.
She shook out her pillow and lay down again. Into a mind full of negatives, one more stole. Good heavens, thought Janet, quite clearly, it wasn't Tina who saw
Othello
Friday night. Tina helped Nick soothe Robin with ice cream. It was Molly who stayed for the movie. And I've been fuming at Tina all evening for coming to see it twice just because Nick was there; and she didn't do anything wrong. My mind is going and it's only the first week of classes.
"What was that?" said Molly's voice, softly."I don't know," said Janet, also softly.
"I woke up, but I can't hear anything."
"Shhh. There it goes."
Janet sat up and listened. Far away on the edge of hearing came a vehement sobbing and wailing. Janet went all over goosebumps. The sound drifted and died and came back more strongly, and suddenly it was not sobbing at all, but music.
Somebody was playing bagpipes. "It's a piper," she breathed.
"Far out," said Molly; after a moment, she added, "Why does it have to sound like somebody killing a lot of cats?"
"I think he's only warming up; give him a minute."
"Let's go outside."
"It's three in the morning."
"Lucky for the piper," said Molly. Janet heard her get out of bed and pull her jeans on. She slept in a T-shirt, so that was that. Janet slid her feet into her moccasins, and groped around the corner for her bathrobe, bumping Molly, who snickered.
"Should we wake Tina?" said Molly.
"She won't thank us," said Janet, who was still, unfair as she now knew it to be, as angry at Tina as she had been before she woke up.
"No, I guess not," said Molly, and pulled the door open.
They shut it carefully behind them. The long red-carpeted hall was full of shadows from the one lonely light burning in the middle of the ceiling. Their long coiling shapes looked like dragons. Janet did not mention this to Molly. She went in silence past the shadows under the telephone box and the drifts of darkness below the fire extinguisher, eased open the swinging doors with their eighteen small panes of glass, and preceded Molly down the echoing stairway.
One dim light burned above the oak desk in the entry, where once the dormitory monitor had sat to sign the girls in and out, and to corral and interrogate their visitors.
The big lounge was dark, its furniture lurking in the shadows like indeterminate sleeping animals; but there was a line of light under the door to Ericson Apartment.
Melinda Wolfe was up late. She was being very quiet in there.
"Do they lock the front door?" breathed Molly.
Janet made a shushing motion; she did not want Melinda Wolfe to hear them. She pushed gently on the bar of the door, and it opened without a sound. A gush of crisp and chilly air engulfed them. They stepped outside hastily and pulled the door shut. It was on a spring that made it close very slowly and then shut the final inch with a bang, so first they urged it along and then they held it back, and it closed with barely a click.
Janet looked over her shoulder at Melinda Wolfe's lighted windows, and moved quickly down the limestone steps of Ericson.
The sky was patched with clouds that glowed faintly with reflected light from the campus and the town. The streetlights leered at their own reflections in the dark glass of the Music and Drama Center across the street. The dark bulk of the Chapel cut the sky behind it like the rook in a gigantic game of chess. Only the radiator skeleton of Olin was visible, like a cage from which the building had escaped. Dancing with the dragons in the Arboretum, to the music of the bagpipes, thought Janet, and blinked hard, as if that would quiet her mind.
A few more streetlights pricked the darkness that was the west side of campus, where Nick and Robin slept in Taylor above the old-soup smells of its dining hall.
Janet thought she would like to go that way: tonight even Taylor might be comforting, when the familiar east side of campus was so full of odd thoughts.
But the piper was on the other side of Ericson, east toward Eliot and the Arboretum. They went around Ericson, the long way toward Mile Street, rather than the short way that passed under Melinda Wolfe's windows. The sweep of grass between Ericson and Forbes was just discernible. The light on the asphalt road made a bright circle in which a few moths fluttered. The shoe-box shape of Forbes was dark. Behind and above it the castle shape of Eliot stood dark against the cloudy sky.
They stopped, facing it, and listened. The wailing drifted, waned, and steadied into a thumping march. It was either in Bell Field just beyond Eliot, or in the Upper Arb itself. Probably the field, thought Janet. Nobody was going to lug a set of bagpipes along those narrow paths in the dark. Not even dragons that had left their shadows behind.
"Bell Field," she whispered to Molly.
"I'm game," said Molly.
They took a few steps across the grass, and something flapped through the air and thumped to the ground behind them and to the left. Janet jumped; Molly stood perfectly still ahead of her, but Janet heard her take her breath in. They turned around and looked at Ericson. It was dark except for the dim small squares where the lights of the stairways shone in their little windows. Janet looked up and found the windows of their own room. The curtains blew in and out, and the stripes and shadows in the dim light made a pattern like lace. Something pale flew out of the middle window and smacked to the ground a few yards away.
"That was a book," said Janet, and thought wildly of
The Wind in the Willows.
She ran across the grass, and stumbled, before she got to the book she was aiming for, over another book. She picked it up, keeping half an eye on the wi ndows. It was small and dark and thick. Janet opened it to the title page, and its clean paper glowed a little in the distant light from the Forbes street lamp. The dark parts of the page she looked at said, "A LEXICON abridged from Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon.
Oxford, at the Clarendon Press." Janet turned a thin, crisp page, and read,
"ADVERTISEMENT. THE Abridgement of Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon is intended chiefly for use in Schools. It has been reduced to its present compass by the omission . . ." Janet skimmed rapidly along, to the small type at the bottom that said, "OXFORD,
October,
1871." She had read the right-hand, page; she looked now at the left-hand one, which proclaimed, in an isolated line in its middle,
"Impression of 1878."
Molly, who had gone on past her and collected the other book, walked back across the grass, loomed over Janet, and said, "I've got Matthew Arnold's
On
Translating Homer
here."
"Liddell and Scott," said Janet. "Classics."
"Those came out of our windows."
"They can't have; we haven't got those books."
"You saw it too."
"Yes, I did," said Janet. She stood up, since the grass was damp. The book in her hand smelled clean and inky. She leafed through it slowly, looking at the fantastical Greek letters in boldface; all its pages felt crisp and smooth and clean. She held it out to Molly, who took it and gave her the Arnold, a tiny red-bound book. It, too, was clean and fresh. Janet found the title page. The Clarendon Press at Oxford. 1861. She looked at Molly, who was frowning at Liddell and Scott; and another book swooped out of the air and landed between them.
"Lordy!" said Molly, but bent immediately to pick it up. Janet, breathing carefully in an effort to get her heart to slow down, moved around and looked over Molly's shoulder. This one was McGuffey's
Fifth Reader.
It was more battered than the other books; on the title page Molly had turned to was a small dark thumbprint obscuring the date. Janet forgot, looking at it, the night, the piper, her heartbeat, and her wet feet, and felt as she had felt many years ago on a school trip to a museum. She had looked for fifteen minutes at a porcelain doll in a grubby white dress, and burst into tears.
Something rustled behind them. They sprang apart, dropping the book. A small person in a long white gown, her hair straying over her shoulders and her arms full of books, came pacing toward them across the dewy grass.
"It's the Fourth Ericson ghost," said Molly, as calmly as if she were identifying a starfish.
"No, it isn't," said Janet, with great relief. "It's Peg Powell."
"She may
look
like Peg Powell," said Molly. She stooped for the McGuffey and shook out a crumpled page or two.
"Should we speak to her?" said Janet. "I wonder if she's sleepwalking?"
Peg bent over and came up with the Arnold. Janet had thought she was holding that one herself, and took a firmer grip on the Liddell and Scott. Peg came closer and closer.
Molly promptly stepped aside; Janet stood her ground, and just as she thought she was going to break and run whether she wanted to or not, Peg stopped. She was not exactly looking at Janet; but then, she didn't have her glasses on.
"Oh, thank you," she said, precisely as she would if you passed her the salt. She held out the hand that was not cradling a pile of books. "It's so tedious to pick them out of the wet grass."
Janet handed her the Liddell and Scott, reluctantly, and stooped for the McGuffey.
"This isn't a college text, is it?" she said. She had a vague notion that one ought not to confront or challenge somnambulists.
"No, it was brought along for sentimental reasons," said Peg, tucking the Liddell into her pile and holding out her hand again for the McGuffey. "Well, good, I think that's all of them. Maybe we'll have some peace for a few nights now."
In ironic commentary, the distant bagpipes, which had been muttering in the background, wheezed into a mournful, rolling tune that would have been more at home on a church organ.
"Does this happen often?" said Janet.
"No, I wouldn't say often," said Peg, judiciously. "It does get tedious, though. I'm going to take these in now; the damp's not good for them." She gave Janet a brilliant smile and trailed away over the grass toward the side door of Ericson, her white gown floating around her.
Molly went after her, and stood at the bottom of the steps until Peg had opened the side door and disappeared inside. "I guess," she said, rejoining Janet, "if she came down, she can go up again by herself. We'd better make sure Nora knows she walks in her sleep."
"I'd think Sharon would have to know," said Janet.
"I hope she didn't, if she was letting Peg climb in and out the window their freshman year."
The bagpipes set up a vigorous hooting.
"Come on, let's go find the musician," said Janet.
"If you can call it music," said Molly, but she came along.
Past the square shape of Forbes and the battlemented bulk of Eliot they hurried, and stood at the top of the steep hill that led down to Bell Field. The moving stream slid darkly along two sides of the field with only a muted gleam or two. Behind it the trees blotted out the sky. The town was behind them now, and the scattered farms and the vast area of the game preserve sent no light to show up the clouds. How could anybody have lugged a set of bagpipes around in this dark? She and Molly were probably going to break a leg just getting down the hill unencumbered.
"I don't hear anything," said Molly.
They stood listening. A car went by on the highway, to their left, beyond Dunbar and the lilac maze. A few stubborn summer insects creaked. A pigeon in the eaves of Eliot rustled and mumbled and settled to quiet again; one querulous coo answered it. A faint music came out of Dunbar, but it was electric and rather desperate-sounding. Janet's feet were cold, and the belt of her bathrobe was slipping. She undid it and knotted it again viciously.
Somewhere in the woods across the field, the bagpipe spl
uttered and wheezed and
played again. Tom, Tom, the piper's son, learned to play when he was young.
"Very funny," said Janet.
"Not your ordinary pennywhistle," agreed Molly, chuckling. "Shall we follow?"
"He's on the other side of the water and we haven't got a flashlight."
"A silly omission," said Molly. "Put it down on the next Jacobsen's list. Flashlight, piper hunters, for the use of."
"I think he's moving along the stream," said Janet. "Maybe he'll come to us."
"Well, let's go down to the bridge and wait, then."
They groped their way down the steep steps that descended the hill with Eliot, stepped softly along the sidewalk, under students' windows and then past the big triple windows of the dining hall. The sidewalk ended at a service door; Janet and Molly skidded on down the eroded gully to the bridge, and frightened two ducks, which floundered out onto the lake, making indignant noises that for a moment almost drowned the sound of the bagpipes.
When the lake was quiet again, the bagpipes were quite close, just the other side of the stream, and were playing a song that Janet, who had helped Danny Chin run the lights for their high school's production of
Twelfth Night,
recognized at once. When that and I was a little tiny boy, With a heigh, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day. Their school edition had not footnoted that song; she still remembered Danny's astonished glee when she dragged out her father's Shakespeare and showed him what that verse meant.
"There he is," said Molly softly.
Eliot's outdoor light on this side was burned out. Across the water and up the hill, the light mounted on Dunbar's south end lit up half the sidewalk and the top of the hill and cast the bottom of it, where the piper was coming out of the woods, into deep shadow. Molly stepped onto the bridge, and Janet followed her hastily, before the prickles going up her spine could turn into cowardice. She suspected that Molly was trying to make up for having backed away from poor harmless Peg, but that was no reason to abandon her.