The Bloodline

05

Present day

The makeshift research room out of a small storage room at the far side of the basement of the library feels so humid, not just because the room has very minimum ventilation, and it was worsened from the smoke of cigars that fill the room. The small fan on that room was no match for it.

The room looked like a tornado just hit it, old books tossed around, parchments thrown like pieces of rubbish, as if the scroll of history has no value at all.

Behind the equally crowded table, a woman on her late forties, sit there, one hand holding a scroll of leafstalks with a half lit cigar between her index and middle fingers, and her other hand hold a magnifier to help her to read the faded letters, despite the fact that she already wear a quite thick glasses.

The blue shirt she’s been wearing was crumpled which obviously shows that that t-shirt stayed on her body for days, and the humidity make the color becomes brighter at her back and armpits because it already soaked with her sweats …

Grey hairs started to dominate her once blode hair that bun carelessly just to make sure her hair doesn’t cover her squinted eyes. Which trying to figure the sentence she read on the leaf stalk…

Her eyes suddenly widened…

That is the connection she’s been looking for…

She tosses all irrelevant material out of the table, and spread that scroll of leaves stalk… She crossed reference her findings to other sources she read before… All the urban legends, the folklores….

It’s all linked up…

The woman stood up abruptly, making her chair tossed back to the floor. She grabs all of her finding, put them on her filing rucksack and run out off the room towards the stairs, skipping every two steps as she rushes upstairs. She ignores confused, surprised looks from peoples at the library, keep hurrying outside the national library, stopping a taxi, and drove away, carrying the priceless pieces of history with her like nothing at all.

***

The taxi driver looked worried when the foreigner in the back of his car tells him where to go…. He even asked her for the third time just to be sure as they approach their destination.

The woman opened the door abruptly; throw some money to the driver who at the end screaming and cursing at her for her rudeness then drove away, ignoring the foreign woman who paces herself and mingle with curious crowds since their place is not a site where tourists wishes to come.