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8
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Mort had spent the rest of the day at the reference library and it was now evening. Many of the tables were deserted, and reading lights had been switched on.
Mort shut the catalog he was using and walked over to the bookshelf behind his chair to replace it.
He ran his finger along one of the shelves until it came upon the next catalog he needed. He removed it out of its slot and was startled to see, through the open space, the face of a girl. The face quickly disappeared. Mort could've sworn that he'd seen the girl at Balkan's lecture the other day.
He quickly rounded the end of the bookshelf and looked. But there was no sign of her. She had vanished. But.. She had been there, right? Mort certainly had not imagined her or anything? He was not going crazy. The girl existed and that was that. She had probably just left the library quickly or something. Right?
He looked both ways, but the aisles were deserted. Puzzled, he returned to his seat and opened the second catalog.
He turned some pages in 'The Nine Gates' and came to an engraving of a naked woman riding a seven-headed dragon with a castle ablaze in the background. He looked over the second catalog, which displayed a small reproduction of the same scene with text wrapped around it. He jotted something down in his notebook.
Mort decided that he'd had enough for one day. All he wanted to do was to crawl in bed and fall asleep forever. Wearily, he straightened and stretched. Mort removed his glasses, placed them on the table, and looked around the room. As he looked above to the gallery overhead, he caught an unfocused glimpse of the mysterious girl looking down at him.
He quickly scooped up his glasses from the table and scrambled to place them on his face. But when he looked up again, she was gone.