[Poule]

It was while I was standing there, absorbed in his notes, that he entered the room from an entirely different direction than the one he had left. Which brought him perilously close to my right shoulder without me seeing him. Which made me start, the way you do when you sense the immediacy of someone and then open your eyes only to be confronted with a close-up of their nasal hair.

"Oh!" I said, trying to look disinterested and guilt-free although such attributes rarely go together.

"Mmm?" he replied, from under a very arched eyebrow.

"Aha" (This was either turning into a phonetic rendition of a Nebraskan town, or a Neanderthal conversation.)

"I haven't seen Sanskrit used as shorthand before" I said, trying to remain neutral, impassive, and not at all nosy. A fulminating blush screamed my discomfort, not at snooping, just at being found out.

"You know Sanskrit?!" he asked, with a wry smile. "How very interesting. But this isn't it." (oh floor, swallow me up!)

"My mistake. It has been a while"

Too right. It had been years. My PhD had been in changing thought patterns in religion, and included transfiguration, transmutation, transcendentalism, and other trans words. Mythology was closely linked. Sometimes I would explain the link to the old ladies who thought they knew me, but sometimes I got bored. Sanskrit was just one of the things I had had to learn without any assistance in that rathole of a university. Finally I had learnt that applied philosophies had more merit. Which is probably why Newton spent far too long on alchemy and just a little on falling fruit. Why go for gilded truths if you can find the real McCoy instead?

He was staring at me. Reading my mind almost.

"Digitalised foxglove. Know where I can find some?", he asked.

[Gaby]

Digitalis...digitalis...muffled alarm bells of something half-remembered...San Francisco, gypsy women who had married wealthy gentlemen and dispatched them with digitalis...

I dropped my head to hide my confusion, and the barrette holding back my hair clattered to the floor. Smooth, I thought, blushing furiously.

"Allow me," he said, flowing forward from the waist to retrieve it. His voice, like his eyes, faintly mocking. A smile in it somewhere. I held out my palm but he gathered up my hair between his manicured fingers and clasped the barrette. His gesture brusque and kind like someone passing a hand over a cat's fur. But I shivered, invaded by a curious lassitude.

"Changeling"...the word came into my thoughts with detached clarity, as though I had stolen a glance at a fellow passenger's newspaper on the train...

[Beth]

“So do you?” he repeated, as I struggled to collect my thoughts from the swirly universe to which they had flown.

“Why do you want to know?” I countered.

“I have my reasons,” he replied cryptically.

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“I have my reasons,” I returned. The corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk.

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” his voice lowered an octave, giving the phrase a definitely indecent tone. Another shiver ran through my body. How long had it been since anyone affected me this strongly… or even at all.

I forced myself to meet his hypnotizingly blue stare. “How about we do this the other way around… you go first.”

He stood there, silently, staring at me as if he were taking my measure as a person. I continued to hold his gaze steadily as the silence began to grow uncomfortably tense. And then he began to speak.

[Mysterywoman]

"Do you have the Internet here" he asked.

"Er, yes, it is something I introduced myself quite recently - why?"

"Well, maybe we can look up the books I need on the Internet and you could order them for me?"

"I don't see why not", I replied, leading him to a computer on one of the many tables that appeared to move around the shop.

I typed 'Changeling' into a search engine and we both stared at the screen. 46 hits, I scrolled down and he pointed to German Mythology. The shop was about to close and I motioned to Cornelius that I would stay late - you bet I would! Surfing the net with a weird guy with fantastic shoes and make-up.

turn the page

 

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