Library, Thursday (12/4)

[wildandbrave]

Whatever strange feeling was going around had gotten to Cosette, too; she'd chosen not to take her usual early morning walk today out of a nebulous sense of unease. It was just as well (in one sense, at least) that she hadn't, since this way she managed to catch the radio broadcast, and . . .

No, after that there wasn't a question about her coming in to open the library this morning -- not that there ever really was, but even if nobody else got the idea to come look through the books for clues as to what was going on this time, she was prepared to spend her entire shift doing that herself. Even if the sisters at the Petit-Picpus hadn't been the sort to go in for exorcisms or the like, there had been a few books in the convent about the subject and when secular reading material was strictly forbidden you had to read what you could or be incredibly bored.

Or more bored, as the case might be. The point was that whatever had happened on the radio this morning reminded her of a few chapters in those books.

So there were plenty of tables and chairs available, and Cosette would make sure there was plenty of coffee available all day if people needed it; in the meantime, she was trying to round up all the books she could think of on ghosts or possessions or paranormal phenomena in general for easy access (and yes, occasionally this meant literally herding them out of the stacks). Except for the Time-Life ones, which were being very quiet and not volunteering themselves, thank you very much, Mr. Constantine.

Comments

Re: Research: Morning

[wildandbrave]

She'd been working her way through the smaller books at the top of the stack in front of her, but under the circumstances not even Cosette could maintain that much patience before going for the bottom of the stack and the fairly voluminous tome with The Big Book of Exorcisms: 101 Ways To Rid Yourself of Pesky Spirits stamped on its spine.

Honestly, she'd thought that one was a joke, but the book she had been going through turned out to be a compilation of stories of faked possessions, the last one of which had something to do with someone pretending to be possessed by a demon and his accomplice posing as a priest who claimed to be too distracted by not having the money to repair his crumbling church until a pair of rich drunks exposed their scheme.

That was the point at which she sighed in frustration and set that book aside.

Granted, skimming the first several chapters or so of The Big Book of Exorcisms didn't do much to dispel her initial impression of it, since some of the rituals detailed in it were just utterly bizarre.

Fine. She'd work her way through all 101 chapters of this thing if she had to. Which would explain why at one point she got up and did an awkward, slow-motion runthrough of what looked like the Macarena in reverse and sat down again, shaking her head.

"Well," she said with a sigh, once she'd skimmed her way through to chapter 50 and decided to take a quick break, "this doesn't seem to explain much but it does seem to give us a number of --" bizarre -- "things to try."

Re: Research: Morning

[wildandbrave]

Fifty chapters later, the notepad in front of Cosette was filled with (admittedly very neat) handwritten notes about aspects of the various rituals, such as:

Salt
Holy water
73 blank dominoes made of soapstone
Chalk
Conch shells (to blow)
Incense
Jell-O?????
The juice of 1 winter melon, harvested at sunrise on the first day of autumn
Punching ghosts in the face???

The list was much longer than that, and even more eclectic, so it was a bit of a relief when she got to chapter 100 -- titled Call (650) 555-2368 -- to find just a picture of three men with the word "GHOSTBUSTERS" and the phone number from the chapter title on it.

"Oh!" she blurted out, and reached for her phone only to realize that -- gasp -- she'd left it in her room this morning. (Now that was definitely a sign that something was wrong.) "Has anyone got a phone? Perhaps we can give this number a call."

Re: Research: Morning

[wildandbrave]

The number, as it turned out, only led to a recorded message saying that it had been disconnected for non-payment, so there went that possibility.

How annoying.

Well, there was one chapter left in the book, so she might as well read it, and while the idiomatic expression "the kitchen sink" as a phrase (and a chapter title, in this case) eluded Cosette the spell text gave her a good idea of what it meant.

"To free the possessed, to banish all evil spirits, and a chant of protection . . . how thorough! This one ought to be worth a closer look," she decided, and jumped up to go make a few photocopies of the chapter.