The Book of Air and Shadows

wind. He slipped off his sneakers and lay down on one edge of the pallet.
    Then there was a weird clatter sounding in his ear. He sat upright with a curse and grappled in the bedclothes until he had the source of it in hand: an old-fashioned alarm clock, the kind they draw in cartoons, with twin bells and a clapper on top and a wide white face, and Carolyn had taped the bells so that when the thing went off it would not awaken her as well, a typically elegant low-tech solution. He shut it off and saw that there was a note affixed to it with a bit of ribbon:
    Your turn; I did the last two myself.
    It was written on a slip of heavy antique paper in black ink, the hand an elegant italic. Crosetti’s violent annoyance instantly evaporated. He examined the deeply breathing shape in the bed next to him. He could see a shock of hair on the pillow, an ear, a curve of downy cheek. Cautiously, he leaned over and placed his face close to this, mere inches away. He breathed in long and deep and got soap, some kind of shampoo, a note of glue and old leather, and underneath this something more personal, eau de girl. Crosetti was no stranger to the delights of women, specializing in those that liked nice guys rather than the type (more numerous, in his experience) that preferred the other kind, nor was he even sure he particularly liked this woman. No, actually, he was sure he did not, and also sure that never in his life had he obtained an erotic charge as powerful as the one he now received, sniffing absurdly at the skin of Carolyn Rolly.
    Incomprehensible, but there it was. He peeked under the duvet and found that she was wearing a dark T-shirt. He could just make out the little knobs of her spine bulging the thin fabric. Below that, dim whiteness. He had to know, and so he reached out and touched her, barely touched her haunch with the back of his hand, and felt tight, sheer fabric; a shock like an electric current flowed up his arm; she stirred and murmured.
    He was out of the bed in a flash, and stood there feeling a jerk, with (could it be?) his knees actually trembling and his penis turgid. Holy shit, he said to himself several times, and then Uh-uh, no thank you, this is
not
happening. He marched like a soldier to the sink, where he drenched his face with cold water. He wished he could take a shower, but there was none, nor any bath either. An image of the occupant standing nude on a towel dabbing at her body with a warm sponge suddenly inhabited his mind. He forced it away by an act of will and started on the changing of the blotters.
    After which he found himself with a couple of hours to kill before the next change, scheduled for 5
a.m.
Briefly he considered poking through Rolly’s things, checking out her underwear, her pharmaceuticals, her papers. He let this notion play for a while on his interior TV, and then dismissed the idea. The point was not to penetrate more deeply into whatever weird shit she had going on but to finish this stupid project and escape. Thus the mature Crosetti lectured Crazy Al, a new person who was dying to dive back under that duvet and yank Carolyn Rolly’s panties down, or failing that, gather sufficient material to become a successful stalker.
    But he did explore the kitchen and found in a cabinet (constructed of the ever-present pallet boards) a package of sugar cookies and one of those tin boxes of flavored instant coffee, hazelnut in this case, that he often saw in racks in the supermarket, when he often wondered who bought that crap. Now he knew. He boiled water in a pan and made the disgusting brew and drank it down for the caffeine’s sake, and ate all the cookies, which were stale and like sweet gypsum in the mouth. On the evidence of her larder, Rolly obviously preferred live prey.
    Somewhat pumped up now from the coffee and the sugary snack, Crosetti reset the alarm for five o’clock and renewed his investigation into the old papers. Before half an hour passed he was convinced that either he was going crazy or that the eighteen sheets marked by the post horn watermark were all in a language he did not know, or in some code…no, not code, cipher. Well, well, that might be interesting. The four crown-marked sheets, in a different and easier hand, appeared to be some sort of religious screed:
    Worldly tears fall to the earth but godly tears are kept in a bottle. Judge not holy weeping superfluous. Either sin must drown in them or the soule burn
    He wondered briefly which kind