Chapter Text
“If you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget.”
—Cecil Gershwin Palmer, Welcome to Night Vale e02 “Glow Cloud”
Something was off.
Either she had a knack for reading people, or Norman had a preternatural ability to warp his surroundings in accordance with his mood. Whichever it was, Mary always knew. A darkness suffused the library today, brought on by more than just the encroaching evening, sharpening the shadows into lethal weapons. She’d marveled at it, at first. All the lights were on, and at the height of summer the sun wouldn’t be setting until well past eight. It wasn’t cloudy, last anyone had seen. In fact, Mary had groaned aloud and nearly bruised her forehead slamming it into the kitchen table that morning when the radio had promised clear skies for a whole week. Here, now, dusting off a fiberglass tree branch in the children’s section, she saw a fluorescent light flicker in her periphery and wondered if that might have been it. They had needed some new fixtures for a while… not that anyone listened, of course, certainly not anyone with the power to do something about it. The Fairvale Public Library was so scantly attended and so appallingly underfunded that most of Mary’s paycheck circled right back into it. She reshelved a chewed Dick and Jane as she contemplated this, then a Scuffy the Tugboat, then a Watership Down whose spine crackled. Had to be first edition… maybe Joyce would let her keep this one if they had to replace it… Mary’s nose wrinkled with a sneeze that wouldn’t come out.
Norman wandered into the room, and everything clicked together right as Mary’s sinuses relieved themselves.
He looked at her after a cacophonous sneezing fit so violent it left her ears ringing and, despite the profound exhaustion etched into his face, uttered a dry “Bless you. And shush.”
“You shush,” Mary sniffed back. “Are you alright?”
It had become their standard greeting, but he didn’t much look it. Norman shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, the carpeted floor creaking underneath. Looked a little grayer, a little gaunter, a little more lined than usual. His hair had grown a good couple of inches since the two had made their dramatic escape from the Bates house; and where he’d usually kept it fairly (if clumsily) groomed, it frayed this way and that, adhered to his forehead by a familiar nervous sweat. He could’ve hauled away half the library’s stock in the bags under his eyes.
And the room was dark. Again with that flickering. Outside the sun was as high and bright as ever, but in here—the place had just closed, but the strange, shadowy veil over the shelves, the ponderous silence—it might as well have been abandoned for years.
Norman smiled, of course. Strained, all teeth. “Yeah. You?”
His fidgeting only intensified when Mary tilted her head.
“Don’t—don’t look at me like that,” Norman wavered, squirming like an ant beneath a magnifying glass. “We can—we can—we’ll talk about it at home. Okay?”
“Okay.” Mary nodded. At least he wanted to talk about it. “Will you help me reshelf, or are you just gonna stand there?”
He dragged his feet, he took his time; she got distracted, lost in Adams and Allende and Borges and Davis and Delany and Jones and Orwell and Potter and Shelley and Sontag and at least three different Ellisons; she picked up Blue Lotus when Norman wasn’t looking and promptly shoved it back in, appalled by the rampant heterosexuality. Where were all the nosy “concerned citizens” when you really needed them?
But they got it done, nevertheless.