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The professor’s gaze was piercing me through, perhaps perceiving the omission.
“How lucky for me that your unextraordinary circumstances led you here to help me in my hour of need.”
The taunting tone perplexed me, encouraging my ears to grow warm. I picked up the notebook he’d abandoned in the chair, giving my hands something to do.
“Where should I file this?” I asked, eager to be moving.
“Hm?” He was still considering me, his thoughts far away.
“Your cartoon book,” I joked.
He focused. “Oh yes, on the shelf with the yearbooks over there. It’s worthless, but I’m a fool for nostalgia.”
An unlikely characterization.
A silence fell as I walked to the bookshelves. Its heaviness unsettled me, and in an attempt to continue the tenuous but pleasant easiness that we’d been enjoying, I ventured to keep him talking.
“You said your mother inspired your interest in folklore, but what made you focus your study on the malevolent?” I asked.
He didn’t respond, and I thought he hadn’t heard me. I pressed the book into its spot and turned to find he’d grown still, cup hovering a mere breath from his lips. After a moment, he cleared his throat, drank the remainder of the cold coffee, then replied, “My wife.”
The mood soured quickly, my stomach with it. I’d managed to ask the wrong thing.
I didn’t have a chance to apologize or salvage the moment as the professor put his cup down and politely excused himself to retrieve files he’d left in his quarters. When he’d gone, I indulged in a hearty curse and pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars. I clearly wasn’t fit to navigate the moods of an isolated widower.
Without the professor for company, the library became vast and the remainder of the work insurmountable. With no guess as to when he’d return, I continued my duty, picking up a stack of bound papers that someone with forethought had tied together. There were five or so, and they were heavy. I overjudged my ability and lost hold of the top two as I carried them to the desk, and they fell, exploding into a shower of paper, sliding in all directions, including under the heavy furniture. Tears stung my eyes.
I’d deposited the surviving stacks in a nearby chair and begun fishing for the wayward notes under the sofa when I spotted another drawing. I pulled it closer, expecting one of the professor’s childhood caricatures. The beast depicted wasn’t a boyish sketch done in jest but a monstrous rendering made even more foul by the earnestness of the artist. The figure was man-shaped, hooded in black, its eyes nothing but two glittering spots in the dark void of shadows hiding its face. The body levitated, white hands raised in a gesture of invitation. Beneath the drawing, a description read:
Gancanagh
Seduces human women, feeding on their love until they waste away and perish. One kiss will seal a victim’s fate.
I recognized the handwriting—the same as the notes I’d assumed had been written by the professor’s former assistant. This was only the second time I’d encountered a mention of the Gancanagh in all of the essays and annotations I’d examined. I checked a few other papers and, though there were no more drawings, everything in the stack belonged to that hand. Whoever the previous assistant had been, at least they were organized, if not macabre. I returned to the task of gathering the scattered papers, picking up several bits at once, when a small pocket journal, bound in green cloth, slid into view, having been tucked carefully in the stack. It didn’t look like the others I’d found in the research piles, and I opened it curiously to where a fraying white ribbon marked the last used page. The same handwriting greeted me.
“Every day his eyes darken,”the first line read.
He’s grieving. I can’t give him the family he so desperately wants.
My brow furrowed, an alarm sounding in my conscience. This wasn’t research. I should close it, set it aside. I didn’t.
I sometimes wonder if he regrets our marriage; it happened so quickly. But when I begin to think he hates me, he’ll envelop me in his passion, opening my body up to him no matter where we are. This morning he debauched me in a hallway alcove, the statue of the goddess Brigid watching over us as he pleasured me with his tongue. I believe he would have had me there on the floor if we hadn’t heard the voices of staff moving our way. I’ve feared several times we’d be discovered, but even these anxieties don’t restrain me. His desires are too intoxicating, and I can’t deny him.
My face grew hot.
I know he believes he can break the curse I suffer if only he loves me viciously enough, but losing myself in him seems only to attract my troubles all the more. My Callum. He will be the death of me.
A noise at the door caused me to startle, and I raised my eyes to find Professor Hughes. He looked lethal, a vicious scowl marring his handsome features, turning them deviant. As I moved to stand, he approached, reaching me in only a few long strides. My instincts implored retreat, but he was already upon me, yanking the book from my grasp and throwing it into the fireplace, where it hit with such force that embers blew out like gore from a blunt force wound, burning the rug.
“Professor,” I said, astonished, but I balked at the fire in his eyes, as unforgiving as the one turning the book to cinders.
“Those were not papers meant to be pried over,” he barked.
“Yet they were in a pile of notes you asked me to organize,” I retorted.
“Are you incapable of deciphering between personal entries in a journal and academic notes on mythological bogeymen?”
“Professor Hughes,” I raised my voice, the warring sense of shame and indignance overstimulating my nerves, “I won’t be blamed for reading private notes when those very notes were mixed with items I am being paid to examine! I had no intention of prying into your personal life, and I ask that you not scold me for something that wasn’t done with ill intentions.”
