The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen Page A
Authors: Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
Tags: Fantasy, Contemporary
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You should show Ms White your dissertation. It’s quite a competent bit of research. Maybe sometime in the future you might agree to let me interview you about your experience. I just happen to be about to embark on a new project on Laura White. Thank you for calling and telling me. It’s always so heart-warming to hear news like this. By the way, would you tell Laura White hello from a humble professor who is still the world’s leading Laura White expert? You might also mention that the same professor was just inTokyo delivering a lecture on her works. If she would just relent and grant me an interview…”
When the media announced that Laura White had disappeared without a trace, the professor called Ella in quiet bewilderment , lamenting the fate of everyone involved and wishing his favourite student the best in the future. “Perhaps we can discuss what happened later, when you’re back on your feet. I don’t want to trouble you any more for now.”
Ella called him a couple of days later. She enquired whether he would be interested in paying her for a research project on Laura White and the Rabbit Back Literature Society.
He could hardly contain his joy. Two days later he called to tell her that everything had been arranged handily.
“I put some weight behind your grant application, and did what I could to get assurance from my contacts that your funding was basically guaranteed. We’ll have to wait for the allotted time, of course, but there shouldn’t be any problem. You’ll get a stipend from the university for your first few months of work. It’s a time-sensitive topic, after all, the fact-finding, in light of recent events. But are you quite sure that the members of the Society will agree to be interviewed? At this point the whole affair is still at the level of the women’s magazines.”
“Yes, they’ll talk to me,” Ella promised.
She would receive funding for a year of work. She was guessing that a year of The Game would get her all the information she needed from the writers in the Society. After that she would find a teaching position at some school far from Rabbit Back.
Ella was afraid of The Game. It certainly wasn’t an easy way to gather information. But the idea of it was also exhilarating.
If The Game worked the way she imagined, based on the rule book, she would learn things that would otherwise have been left to speculation for all eternity.
She could dig up anything she wanted from the Society’s past.
12
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. Shelet 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
When the media announced that Laura White had disappeared without a trace, the professor called Ella in quiet bewilderment , lamenting the fate of everyone involved and wishing his favourite student the best in the future. “Perhaps we can discuss what happened later, when you’re back on your feet. I don’t want to trouble you any more for now.”
Ella called him a couple of days later. She enquired whether he would be interested in paying her for a research project on Laura White and the Rabbit Back Literature Society.
He could hardly contain his joy. Two days later he called to tell her that everything had been arranged handily.
“I put some weight behind your grant application, and did what I could to get assurance from my contacts that your funding was basically guaranteed. We’ll have to wait for the allotted time, of course, but there shouldn’t be any problem. You’ll get a stipend from the university for your first few months of work. It’s a time-sensitive topic, after all, the fact-finding, in light of recent events. But are you quite sure that the members of the Society will agree to be interviewed? At this point the whole affair is still at the level of the women’s magazines.”
“Yes, they’ll talk to me,” Ella promised.
She would receive funding for a year of work. She was guessing that a year of The Game would get her all the information she needed from the writers in the Society. After that she would find a teaching position at some school far from Rabbit Back.
Ella was afraid of The Game. It certainly wasn’t an easy way to gather information. But the idea of it was also exhilarating.
If The Game worked the way she imagined, based on the rule book, she would learn things that would otherwise have been left to speculation for all eternity.
She could dig up anything she wanted from the Society’s past.
12
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. Shelet 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
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