Alive (36 page)

“Well, I should have, because I have an idea.” He says this like he’s just invented the Post-it.

“Super. Does it involve curling up into a ball and losing consciousness?”

“Even better.” He reaches for my hand and drags me out of the booth. “Quentin may be an expert, but he’s not the only expert.” Henry pushes the door to the pizza
joint open and a cowbell clangs. I follow him out to the car. “I’m under the age of, like, forty-five, so I’ve been scouring the Internet for information.” He goes around to
the opposite side of the car. We both slump into our respective seats. The dash dings twice when he inserts the key into the ignition. “But Quentin said himself that most reports on this
stuff are old,” he continues. “Before the Internet, what did people use for research?” Henry doesn’t wait for an answer. “Books!”

“Oh, so that’s what those rectangular things are with the pages in between them.”

“Buckle your seat belt,” he says, pulling out of the parking lot. “We’re going to the library.”

I check the clock. “Not to be a downer—or correction: to be even more of a downer—but the library’s closed.”

“Stella.” He flips on his blinker and then presses his foot onto the accelerator. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the world doesn’t follow rules. And
neither do we.”

I want to convince Henry that breaking and entering isn’t the answer, but he looks so hopeful, and besides, I promised him I’d try. The public library is a utilitarian concrete
building. It’s spooky, all bathed in shadow and completely deserted.

“Henry, we could get in serious trouble for this.” I stare up at the building while he digs around in his trunk.

“You’re already in serious trouble. And besides, it’s not like we’re going to vandalize anything. We’re going to read books.”

He surfaces with a crowbar-looking tool.

“Why do you have that?” I ask, slightly alarmed.

He turns the bar over in his hands. “Don’t you have a tool kit in your trunk?” I shake my head. “All right, after all this is finished, we’re fixing that. First
thing on the list. You’re like a walking disaster, Stella Cross.”

“One thing at a time,” I say, but I lower my head and smile at the pavement.

It takes us a few laps around the building to locate the best window. The surrounding trees cast spooky shadows that move and transform on the ground below. Henry and I resort to whispering and
hand signals in the dark. At last, Henry settles on a low window. He drops to his knees and places the bar between the sill and the bottom pane of glass. I turn my back and stand watch.

“Car,” I warn, and we both drop to our stomachs while a swish of headlights scans the building then rounds a corner and disappears.

My heart thumps wildly out of control. I dust grass off the front of my clothes and Henry resumes fumbling with the window. I hear a seal break, followed by the sound of sliding glass.

“You got it?”

“After you.”

A blast of artificial air. The musty smell of old books. I crawl inside, then offer my hand to help guide Henry in after me. Maybe this isn’t such a bad plan after all, I think, looking
around and taking in the stacks and stacks of books arranged in categories from Spirituality to Self-Help to Eastern Asian Religion & Meditation.

To avoid detection, Henry and I keep the lights off. We explore together in silence. For a moment, it feels as if we’re the last two humans on earth. I move silently through the rows. Near
the entrance, Henry finds a directory and drags his finger down the list of topics. Then I follow him to the darkest corner of the library. He shines the screen of his cell phone over the spines.
We stick close together. Instinctively. Alert.

Henry begins to pull titles and hands them to me. I cradle a stack of them in my arms. When they grow too heavy I tell him that I’m going to drop them on a table near the children’s
section.

“Be there in a few,” he whispers. Without making a noise, I pad over to the kids’ tables. This corner of the library looks even more creepy and abandoned, with its furniture
made for small people and too-bright posters muted in the ambient gloom of nightfall.

I rap my fingers on a book and, even though I know it’s him, I startle the moment Henry appears.

“Just me,” he says, and I relax.

Together, we settle in on opposite sides of a polished-veneer table and each select a book from the stack. A few pages in, I sigh. I’m getting a distinctly needle-in-a-haystack vibe. I
flip through another forty pages, scanning them as carefully as I can. For authors writing about the supernatural, they have managed to make the subject extraordinarily dry.

I rub my eyes. Henry is bent over a book, nose inches from the page, mouthing the words as he goes.

Another hour goes by and I push aside an old hardback.
Banishing the Dead
by Milton Bradshaw. A lot of pages, none of them useful.

Henry yawns.

“Anything?” I ask.

“Maybe,” he says, dog-earing one of the pages to mark it.

“That doesn’t sound promising.”

He rocks back in his chair until the front legs come off the ground. His frustration over Quentin’s prognosis has hardened into a steely resolve while mine remains gelatinous at best.

“This is useless.” I idly thumb through the pages of
The Real Ghost Story
and stare at the black-and-white illustrations between the covers. The whole library has begun to
smell like sweaty socks.

“No, it’s not.” Henry beats his knuckles against his skull. “There’s got to be something.”

“For example?” I ask.

I check my phone. We’re closing in on midnight.

“An exorcism, holy water, I don’t know. Something. We just need to keep looking.”

I take another book off my collected stack.
Clearings: Everything You Need to Know About Clearing Ghosts, Demons & Other Entitities
by Jane Stewart. I studiously bury my nose in the
pages of the book, reading the introduction and the first chapter, but in a few short pages it’s crystal clear that Ms. Stewart has never seen a spirit—at least one like Levi—in
her life.

I snap the book shut. “Henry, I’ve got to use the restroom.”

He looks up. “Need me to come with you?”

I tilt my head and give him a
really?
look.

He hikes his shoulders up. “Sorry, sorry.”

I leave the small work space we’d fashioned together.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of hardbacks line the shelves, each covered with a thick cloak of plastic, like dead scales on a snake. I walk through the rows as if strolling through forgotten
crypts. The piss-colored carpeting muffles my footsteps and there’s no noise but for the swishing of my pants.

I wander farther, letting the bookshelves lead me from Self-Help to Religion and Spirituality to Mystery.

At one shelf, I pause to look at a thick volume with curling script decorating the spine, intriguing, but difficult to read. I slide the book into my arms. In the gap created by the missing tome
an eye is staring at me from the other side.

I jerk back before observing the freckled cheek and auburn eyelashes. The eye blinks. Then the hazel irises disappear. I look to either side of the row. Empty. I peek through the shelf to the
other side. Empty too.

Quickly, I replace the book and hurry over to the next row, where I’d seen her. I arrive just in time to see a mess of curly, reddish-brown hair disappear around the bend.

“Brynn?” I say in a soft voice.

Glancing both ways, I follow. Among the next set of shelves, there she is again, toward the end. “Brynn,” I rasp. She doesn’t turn. I catch a glimpse of her profile as she
vanishes down another aisle.

I furrow my brow. Why doesn’t she hear me? I have a deep, niggling feeling that I should know the answer to this, but it sits tantalizingly out of reach, like a word on the tip of my
tongue. I shuffle along, trying to catch sight of her between the books. I see flashes of motion. Her pinkish skin as she passes in the shadows. But each time I try to catch up to her, she
withdraws into the next row of books.

Finally, I stop following. Heart pounding, I wait at the foot of one of the rows. I can hear nothing of her approach. I hold my breath, waiting, sensing. Sure enough, she appears, having wound
her way from one end of the aisle and into the next.

We’re near the end of the rows, the place that backs up to a dark, abandoned wall of the library. She doesn’t acknowledge me as she passes. She doesn’t even seem to register
me. Instead, she rounds the corner and strides toward a push-through into the women’s restroom.

Before the door swings shut, I take off after her. “Brynn,” I say again. I check over my shoulder and barge in behind her.

Right away, I know something’s off. Pitch-black. Cold. There’s a snap behind me. The door locks.

I fumble along the wall for the light switch and flick it up. Nothing happens. Still empty, hollow black. A tingly feeling races through me like a rat crawling up my back. I shudder as though
it’s something I can literally shake off, and then, all at once, I become very still.

“Brynn?”

The sensation of being watched pushes at me from all sides, begs me to acknowledge it.

This is just the crazies talking, I tell myself. Be reasonable.

The crazies are getting louder by the minute and multiplying like bunnies.

Another shudder. I’m hardly breathing.

The pitter-patter of footsteps is unmistakable. My chest caves in on itself as a whoosh of air falls out. I push my hands against the door. It doesn’t give. Trapped. Deep breaths. I
venture farther into the darkness. The footsteps skitter to the other side of the bathroom. Close.

Breathe. In. Out. In. Out.

Brynn, this isn’t funny.

Think. Whispers in the walls. I cup my hand over my mouth, stifling a scream.

This isn’t happening.

But even as panic sinks its claws into me, the lights suddenly blink on.

Eyes wide, I glance around an ordinary bathroom. Yellowing porcelain sinks. Peach tile. My reflection in the mirror as anemic as a poltergeist.

“Brynn, are you in here?” Underneath the door of the first stall, there’s the fuzzy outline of a shadow.

A low hum fills my ears. It only pauses when I swallow. My legs want to disobey.
Bend down,
I command. They do. Knees crackle like Rice Krispies.

My hands touch the tile floor. Lemon Lysol. Mothballs. I turn my head to peek under the stall. A body sprawls on the floor. The hair’s dark and soaked. Blue chipped nail polish reaches out
toward me.

Scrambling to my feet, I shove open the stall.

Blood seeps out from underneath Brynn’s neck and shoulders. Her chipped nails scrape against tile as I roll her over onto her back with a thump. Her head still hangs limply to the side. I
grip her chin between my pointer finger and thumb to straighten her face.

From the center of her chest, a hole bubbles up with more blood. Frayed, chewed-on edges of flesh peel back to reveal a line of broken ribs, pointy and jagged where they’ve been
cracked.

I want to look away, but I can’t move. There’s a deep twisting around my insides. Spit floods my mouth. I hold my hemorrhaging best friend in my arms, unable to tear myself away.
I’m staring into the abyss. An oozing, scarlet gorge with no bottom.

Because of her missing heart.

“We have to go.” I grab Henry by the arm and pull him upright.

“What? What do you mean? Why?” He starts sweeping books into stacks and scooping them off the table. He reaches for a ragged old paperback and sets it on top.

“We have to go now.”

He grabs his keys and shoves them in his pocket, following me over to the jacked-open window.

“What happened?” he asks.

“Everything’s
happened
.” I’d seen a vision of Tess dying a day before the event occurred in real life. I know a pattern when I see it.

The things I see, they aren’t random. Something or someone is driving them.

I can’t help sneaking a glance over my shoulder. “Brynn.” I force open the glass pane and hike my knee over the windowsill. “He’s after Brynn next.”

“What do you mean he’s after Brynn?” He hands me the books and climbs out after me. He grabs the bar off the ground and we hightail it toward his car.

“My heart,” I say, “is fucking with me.” I take several fast gulps of air. “I saw her. It was just like Tess.” I turn my head, looking away and squeezing my
chin to my shoulder. “It’s like my heart knows what he wants.” This was the worst part. There was terror when I’d seen Tess and Brynn, but there was also a deep, grinding
satisfaction.

“Stella.” He moves to hug me, but I push him away.

“We have to get to her.”

“But how can you be sure?”

“I’m sure. He can’t find her first. It has to be me.”

I pull out my cell and choose her name from my list of favorites. Ringing. Ringing. I tap my foot on the ground. “Answer.”

The ringing stops. I hold my breath. “You’ve reached Brynn McDaniel. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back sooner or later, depending on my mood. Hasta la vista.”

“Brynn, call me back…soon.”
Click
. I drop into the car and look helplessly to Henry. I’m drained. At this point I’ve been up for well over twenty-four hours
and I’m approaching shutdown.