Monday Next: Finale

The technician at the cell phone store looked disbelieving when I told him the battery had burst when I dropped the phone, but there was no denying the brokenness of the phone. After a close scrutiny of the warranty agreement the technician gave in and handed over the new phone. I spent a happy afternoon playing with the shiny buttons and reprogramming my phone book.

I also went down to the police station to inform them I had been found. The desk sergeant was quietly amused as he deleted me from the missing persons database, and I got the feeling this sort of thing happened a lot. Thankfully, Lorelei had neglected to tell my mom that I had disappeared, so I just had to call her and apologize for forgetting to call last week.

Alex called that evening

"Meet me in the library. The science stacks."

"What?" I asked, not sure I heard him right, but he'd already hung up. The only library he could mean was the University's main library, where Alex worked shelving books, although he tended to get distracted when he ran across interesting titles like The Book of Were-Wolves and The Linguistics of Swearing.

As I waited for the bus to campus, I couldn't help but sigh with relief. As crazy and amazing as the 19th century had been, I had missed my hot showers and internet.

"That was good work, dear."

As I turned, a little old lady, smelling of lavender perfume, enveloped me in a brief hug. I stood there, stunned for a moment, and watched her walk away, pulling a tartan shopping trolley behind her.

It took a moment before recognition hit me like the Number 4 bus. It was the woman who had given us the gold coin a week ago. I ran after her, but she turned down an alley, and between one moment and the next she disappeared.

I stood there a long time. I had a strange and disturbing sense of being a small cog in a large machine. Wheels were turning, but I couldn't hope to see the whole.

Then a pack of freshman skittered by, giggling, and reality snapped back into place.

When I arrived it was nearly closing time and I had to promise the security guard I'd only be a minute. The science stacks were in the basement, next to a wall covered in ceiling-to-floor filing cabinets which held the University's microfilm library. Alex was the only person in the room, hunched over the microfilm reader. I was about to tell him about the old woman at the bus stop, but he cut me off.

"I wanted to see if that picture of you ever made the paper." He said, without looking up. "It's over on the other reader."

I peered through the viewer and saw myself, trying to look serious and not succeeding very well. The headline ran "Bharata a Huge Success!"

"Now take a look at the next edition." Alex said, pushing himself back from the viewer. It was the same picture, but a different and considerably more sensational headline: "Disappearance and Sabotage!" and underneath in smaller letters: "A London Phantom?"

"Oh they didn't." I said.

"No, actually, they didn't. They just mentioned a similarity to the Phantom novel, but that the culprit is definitely corporeal. Check this one out." He placed another roll of microfilm under the scope and spun the dial.

"It's the society pages of the Times. They're talking about the mysterious lady of the opera. She appeared for one night only and disappeared. Legend has that she was a spirit of the opera, who came to make sure that the performance went forward. A Miss Brook Waters made her debut performance that night, and went on to be one of the foremost opera singers to come out of England in the 19th century."

"They say that the spirit of the opera continues to follow the London Opera Company. Lucky coincidences are generally attributed to her intervention, and her appearance at a performance is said to be a good omen."

"You got all that out of one article?" I asked, a little stunned to hear I had been turned into a theatre urban legend.

"Out of all those articles." Alex nodded at a stack of microfilm rolls next to the reader. "I've been here all afternoon."

"And evening. They were closing up when I came in." Alex was surprised and looked first at the wall clock and then his watch to confirm it. He hastily returned the microfilms to an irate librarian for filing and the security guard let us out.

"You must be real keen to be studying before school even starts." He commented with an air of approval. I said something noncommittal and we headed for a café down the street.

It's location near campus made it a popular place for the college-aged crowd and the approach of the new school year made for a rowdier crowd than usual. Alex and I got a table in a back corner, but we still had to yell to be heard over the noise. On the plus side, it was impossible to eavesdrop in a place like this.

"We need a story to tell Lei so she'll get off my back," I told Alex after our drinks arrived. "I kinda sorta already implied we were on a case."

"I thought about that too. I looked through the papers of the last week and I found a small mention of a theft of a rare book from a museum in the Midlands."

"Which book?" I asked.

"I dunno. The paper didn't say. Oh," he said after he caught my look. "Let's say that it was an early edition of the King James Bible. I remember hearing those are worth a lot."

"So we were looking for an old Bible and we can't tell her many details because of the very wealthy client and the delicate nature of the people involved."

"Sounds like a plan. You know Lei, if we don't tell her anything specific, she'll just make up the details for herself. "

I really wished we could tell Lei the truth. Assuming she would believe us, that is. Alex and I had just experienced something that would knock the assumptions of physics and science into the dustbin, but we couldn't tell anyone because they'd assume we were lying. Or nutters. We had no proof, aside from an ancient photograph and a coin and even that wouldn't stand up in a court of law.

We sat in silence for a long time, while the noise and the people ebbed and flowed around us. I had the peculiar sensation of being in the crowd, but not a part of it.

"What's the matter? When you came into the library, you looked ... odd."

"You mean apart from everything else?" I sighed, and told Alex about the old woman. He sat in silence for a minute, staring into his cup, an odd look on his face.

"I still don't understand why this happened," he said, running his hands through his hair.

"The show must go on?" I offered.

"That's a stupid reason."

"It's the only one that makes sense." I said. I'd said it without thinking, but now the idea seemed plausible.

"It's still stupid."

"Reasons are just reasons; they don't have to make sense."

"I refuse to believe that it was some quirk of fate. That woman, this coin. It must all mean something."

"Why?" It was the wrong question to ask a philosophy major.

"Or else it means that none of us have any control of our own lives! It's all just fate and destiny and unseen machinations. What the point of that?" Alex said hotly, scowling. He wasn't a man who was happy with uncertainty, which was part of the reason he was so good at solving mysteries. He just kept pushing until he found an answer. The downside to this approach was that sometimes, other people pushed back.

"Maybe," I said, thinking carefully, "maybe somebody wanted Brook to get her debut and if we hadn't been there to play piano and catch the saboteur she never would have become famous."

"But why have us do something so insignificant in the grand scheme of things? Why not have us do something useful? Like kill Hitler or save Gandhi?"

"Okay, so maybe that's not the reason. Maybe it doesn't have to have a reason. Maybe it just is."

I wasn't much happier about than Alex was. Events ought to have reasons, and things ought to make sense. But I was beginning to realize that the universe was a whole lot more interesting.

" 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'" Alex said. I grinned and returned one of the few bits of Shakespeare I had ever memorized.

" 'The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!'"

Alex laughed and I saw a familiar look in his eye. Already he was plotting an investigation into the Mystery of the Old Woman and the Coin.

"It really happened," I said finally. Alex didn't answer at once. He took out his wallet and withdrew the gold coin and a small white business card with one of the most famous addresses in all of fiction written in black copperplate script.

"When faced with the impossible…" He said.

"Go for the merely improbable." I finished.

Three weeks later I was staring at the blinking cursor on my screen. My history essay had dwindled out two pages before the page requirements. History class had taken on whole new dimensions after our trip to the past. It was more interesting for one thing. Names and dates were no longer abstracts on the page, but actual people and times.

A sudden thought struck me. I opened a new document and began typing.

"It began on Sunday morning. It might be more correct to say it all began on a Saturday afternoon…"

FINIS

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot

Author's Note:

Phew! Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.

If you happened to remember the first version of this story, thank you so much for reading it all again. I hope you found it entertaining. Please let me know what you thought! Pretty, pretty please, with sugar on top!

Even though I don't publish any more, I do keep an eye on reviews. If you have a question or correction or random thought, I'd love to hear it.

Cheers!

.•´¨•»¦«•Kerowyn•»¦«•´¨•.