Free Cat Out of Hell by Lynne Truss Page B

I’m not supposed to show it to anyone. I just felt you should know.”
    “Can I see the CCTV?”
    “No, of course not!”
    This was very frustrating.
    “All right, where are the books from, at least?” I said. “Do you know?”
    “Oh yes.” Thank goodness, Tawny could see no harm in telling me this. “They’re from the Seeward Collection.”
    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
    “Of course,” I said. “Of course they’re from the Seeward. Well. I see.”
    The Seeward was a world-famous collection, donated to the library on the collector’s death in the 1960s, and classified as “arcana.” Since that time, it had been housed in a twenty-foot-square steel-mesh cage, deep in the library stacks. John Seeward is no longer a household name, but he had been a celebrated journalist-cum-“ghost hunter” in inter-war Britain – the sort of chap who made friends with (instead of running a mile from) self-styled diabolists such as Aleister Crowley. His collection had been used, in his lifetime, by the occult writer Dennis Wheatley. Seeward had collected books on ancient mysteries; also ghosts, witches, satanic rites and so on. In the library’s on-line catalogue, books from the Seeward were indicated with the sensational (and not uncontroversial) symbol of a hand-drawn pentagram, complete with drip-marks – to suggest it had been drawn in blood on a wall. Many of us had, over the years, objected to the continued presence of the Seeward Collection in a respectable academic library, and argued quite forcibly for its removal or sale.
    “Are you all right?” Tawny said.
    I smiled. Unsurprisingly, I was a little distracted.
    She tried to comfort me.
    “In the end, it’s only books and papers that were damaged, Alec. No one was hurt, I’m sure. I think the cat must have just got locked in and gone berserk. An aunt of mine got back to her house in France once and found that a bird – just a single bird on its own – had virtually trashed the place. It came downthe chimney, they think. And before it died, it had pooed everywhere, broken a lot of my aunt’s favourite things, and the worst thing was, it had eaten all the spines off the books .”
    I had to think quickly.
    “Is Julian in today?”
    Julian Prideaux was the keeper of the special collections, and was very rarely seen. Mary and I despised him. He seemed to think that leaving an old threadbare cardigan (with a sprinkle of dandruff on it) over the back of his chair – sometimes for weeks on end – was a brilliant bluff, and that, seeing it there, we would all exclaim, “Look! A cardigan! This means he can’t have gone far! See, this dandruff is quite fresh!” How he kept his position had always been a mystery to me. He never once turned up to a departmental meeting; Mary and I had jointly decided he was the laziest librarian on the planet. I enjoyed asking Tawny whether he was in today. Tawny would know as well as I did that if it was a month with any letters in it whatsoever, the answer was probably no.
    “I don’t know, but I shouldn’t think so ,” said Tawny, choosing her words carefully. “But look. Julian doesn’t know about what’s happened in there. Only a very few people have seen inside. We’re waiting to get a better idea of the state of the books when we sort through everything on Sunday. Alec –” She turned the big eyes to mine, and seemed concerned. “Alec, I think we should get you a glass of water, and then you should go home.”
    I allowed Tawny to lead me to the staff room, where I drank some water and left her there, promising that I was absolutely fine – the sight of the carrel had been a shock, that’s all, I said. Also, I’d found the atmosphere in the library very stifling. Next time I came, I would remember to leave my coat in the readers’ cloakroom in the basement! It was easy to forget to do this, I said, when you used to have an office of your own with coatpegs in it. She seemed satisfied, and she said