“For now?”
He was met with sudden silence.
Part Three
Three Will Show the Way
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Call me Sam.
Kathy Marks heard the voice like a cold finger drawn down the inside of her skull. It didn’t sound like a voice at all. And it seemed to tickle at the darkest reaches of her memory….
She looked up from the front desk of the Orangefield Library and glanced at the nearest window, which was half covered in a paper pumpkin cutout, crayon-colored side facing outward. Even though the holiday was a week away, they’d had the annual Halloween drawing contest for the four to eight-year-olds that afternoon, which had culminated in a frenzy of scissor snipping followed by the scotch tape mounting of the winners in the front windows. A week ago, during the awful Jody Wendt business, she’d hosted a Halloween party in the library for the boy’s class, and they had also taped paper cutouts to the windows.
There was no one at the window now – only the faintest whisper of a chill wind outside brushing the pane and making it moan.
Idly, Kathy scratched her left arm, gently soothing the ghostly itch of an old scar.
As if on cue, the street lights outside the library winked on, turning autumn twilight bright again. Kathy Marks jumped involuntarily, then laughed lightly, shaking her head.
She turned back to the paperwork on her desk.
The library was closed; the front door had been locked for twenty minutes. Her assistants Marjorie and Paul, high school students earning extra credit, had gone home. Soon she would follow to her own home, such as it was.
There was no hurry.
There never was: she was thirty-two years old and alone. Almost a cliché, the spinster librarian. She had always had the feeling, ever since she was young, that she was waiting for something.
Waiting for something coming…
Librarian. Open the door.
There is was again – a wind that sounded like a voice.
This time Kathy looked at the offending window with the same stern stare she used on talkers in the library.
“Don’t do it,” that stare said, “because I said so.”
There was what sounded like a faint chuckle from the window, which then faded to silence.
Something very vague pinged at the back of Kathy’s mind, something long ago…
But then it swirled and settled and was gone.
Kathy finished her paperwork, retrieved her handbag and coat, and walked to the front door.
As always, before turning out the lights, she gave a final prim sweep with her gaze across the stacks on the first floor, up the spiral stairs to the second floor balcony, noting with satisfaction the neat short rows of shelves jutting out from the wall, empty retrieval carts in the hallway which ran along the balcony –
No, not empty – one cart was still partly full up there. She would have to talk to Marjorie on Thursday. The girl was obviously in a hormone dither, always flirting instead of doing the few things she had to do–
Something moved behind the cart.
“Who is that?” Kathy Marks snapped immediately. “Who’s up there? Come out this minute!”
The cart was still as stone, and there was no sound.
And then, behind her, a dry cold sound at the window again:
Let me in…
Kathy jumped, spun around and faced the nearest window.
A gust of wind rattled the pane.
There was no one there.
She spun on her heel and caught slight movement up on the balcony behind the cart.
“Stand up immediately!” she shouted, angry with herself that her voice sounded a bit hysterical.
As much to get away from the window as anything, she marched to the spiral staircase and mounted it, her footfalls echoing metallically as she circled higher.
She heard a scuttling sound above her, and the front window below rattled again:
Call me Sammy…
Something tugged harder at her memory, and sent a chill through her. Once again, without thinking, she brushed her left forearm with her fingers.
Thoroughly rattled now, Kathy huffed in frustration and fear as she reached the landing. It gave her a view down the balconied corridor to the far wall.
There was no one behind the cart.
Sam…
“Stop that!” she yelled – and at the same moment saw the briefest hint of movement in the short corridor behind the cart, between two shelves.
In a second she was in front of the opening, staring in –
“What–”
A young girl squatting on the floor held up a book protectively in front of her face, as if to ward off a blow. A backpack was beside her on the floor.
“Please don’t be mad at me, Ms. Marks! I got here late, and left my library card at home, and –”
“Annabeth Turner?” the librarian replied in disbelief. She stepped forward and yanked the book out of the crouching girl’s hands. The exposed face behind it was suffused with a look of remorse and terror and something else – almost defiance.
“Please don’t tell my mother! Please just let me go!”
Startled by the girl’s frantic reaction, Kathy softened her tone. “Just what were you doing in here? Don’t you realize you would have been locked in the library overnight?” She added, in a slightly sterner voice, “Stand up this minute.”
The girl did as she was told.
She looked older than her twelve years – thin, pale, almost as tall as the librarian herself, with straight brown hair cut in bangs. Her haircut, her awkwardness, her height, her way of dressing – in obvious hand-me-downs a decade at least out of date – made her, even to Kathy Marks’s less-than-trendy, Talbot’s-styled sensibility, a walking poster girl for peer ridicule.
Something more easily accessed in the librarian, an echo of her own awkward and unhappy past, sympathized with the young girl. When she spoke again her tone was almost gentle.
“Tell me why you tried to stay here overnight, Annabeth.”
The girl stared at the floor.
“Trouble at home?” Kathy asked. “I know you haven’t lived here long, but believe me, there are people in Orangefield who can help you with –”
“Nothing like that,” the girl replied quickly, not looking up, which told the librarian that there may be something there after all.
“Annabeth, look at me.”
The young girl raised her head slowly – and Kathy blinked, startled by the intensity in her eyes. She had expected them to be full of tears, but here was that hard, defiant look again.
Recovering, Kathy said, “Is there anything you want to talk to me about? You’ve spent almost every day since you moved here in July in the library – first there was the astronomy section you tore through, and then the encyclopedias, and now heaven knows what else. I thought from the talks we’ve had that maybe we’d become friends. I know how hard it’s been on you since your father died, Annabeth. You know I lost my own parents when I was your age–”
“My name is Wizard,” the girl announced, “not Annabeth. I don’t let anyone call me that anymore.”
At a loss for words, the librarian replied, “You still haven’t told me why you tried to lock yourself in here–”
“There are books you won’t let me take out.”
Something that had been lurking at the very back of Kathy Marks’s awareness now came forward. She realized they were standing in front of the section marked LOCAL HISTORY.
“You have a project to do on Orangefield? I’m sure I could arrange–”
Her eyes still defiant, the girl answered, “Not that.”
Kathy turned over the book she had taken from the girl’s hand; the title read Occult History of Orangefield by D.A. Withers. There was a RESTRICTED stamp on the cover.
The librarian looked at the girl. “You’re interested in ghosts and such?”
An almost secret smile came to the girl’s lips. “Yo
u could say.”
For the first time since the strange interview had started, it occurred to Kathy Marks that the girl standing before her might be on drugs, or worse.
“I want you to give me your home phone number, so I can talk to your mother,” the librarian said in a sterner voice than she had yet used. She dug into her bag for the pen and notepad always there.
The girl said nothing, then recited the number in a curt voice.
There was a sudden loud sound below, from the first floor.
The front window with the pumpkin in it began to rattle, as if someone were rapidly knocking on it with a knuckled fist.
The librarian stared at the window, trying to see if anyone was there, but the sound abruptly stopped.
When she turned back to Annabeth the girl had reached down to pick up her backpack.
“I have to go,” Annabeth said. Her voice had become almost sweet, making the librarian reassess her yet again. The awkward girl, lonely, trying to find her way, trouble at home, just like the spinster librarian. “Will you let me check out that book?”
The librarian said, “I’m sorry, Annabeth, but I can’t do that. Perhaps if you come back tomorrow, we can talk about this project of yours.”
Again a sea change in the girl. She became furtive. “Maybe,” she said.
She brushed by the librarian, mounting her backpack as she skipped down the metal circular stairway to the first floor. She was out the front door of the building before Kathy Marks could react.
Absently, the librarian lay Occult History of Orangefield in the retrieval cart; Marjorie could put it away tomorrow along with the books she’d neglected.
She was dismounting the spiral staircase, lost in thought, when another series of loud rappings came against the front window.
She froze and stared in that direction.
To the side of the cutout pumpkin, Annabeth Turner’s face was pressed against the glass, with the strangest look of triumph and fright on her face. She waved at the librarian and then pulled away from the glass into the night.
The librarian heard a single bark of laughter.
It wasn’t until the next day that her assistant Marjorie discovered that three other restricted books, all on the occult, were missing from the LOCAL HISTORY section.
Chapter Thirty
You’ve done very well, Wizard.
She wanted to shout, “Thank you!”
Two blocks from the library, on an empty side street, she suddenly became short of breath. A whirling screen of dizzy images replaced her vision as she stopped dead in the street, putting her hands down to the sidewalk to steady herself, trying to calmly regain the flow of air into her lungs.
Faces, twirling pictures in orange and black, pumpkins, always pumpkins, sheeted ghosts like the white sheet she wore when she was little, a bag in her hand, two poke-holes in the eyes, the faces of mother and dead father, his face as white as the sheet, a swirl of candy corn, orange-and-white, a black cat filling her vision with a hiss, red tongue, white teeth and whiskers, green wild eyes and then gone, the steady of the sidewalk suddenly under her hands and her wheezing, throat constricting–
Asthma attack–
She tried to even her breath but it was too late. Knowing from experience not to move, she relaxed and raised one hand from the sidewalk while resting on the other hand and her knees. Slowly she reached around into her pack for the inhaler.
There was no air –
Now panic began to set in. She curled down onto the sidewalk, still rummaging in the bag and then suddenly ripping it off her shoulders, pushing it away from her arms and clawing in the front pocket–
The inhaler wasn’t there!
And then suddenly it was – her fingers closing around it and yanking it to her mouth, she was on her back now, staring at streetlights and night sky, the sharp corner of an empty house, and with both hands she pushed the instrument into her mouth, began to breathe in slowly…
Breath came.
Still slowly, she pulled air in, pushing it out in little gasps and then in larger gulps, as the attack subsided.
She waited for him to talk to her, but there was nothing in her head.
She stared at a scattering stars between the corner of the house and a streetlight, a tall tree limb shorn of most leaves.
As if in answer, an oak leaf pirouetted down into view, landed next to her face.
She wanted to laugh.
And then cry.
“I’ve done well, haven’t I?” she said into the night. “I’ve done well as Wizard?”
There was no answer.
The house was dark, but that was no surprise.
Annabeth pushed her key into the front door, opened it with a creak. The porch light overhead was off, had been since the bulb had burnt out a month ago. It had gone unreplaced. Just to make sure, she checked the switch on the inside wall – it was off, as she had expected, and when she jiggled it on nothing happened. There was another switch next to the outside light and she flipped it up, which turned on a single lamp on the far side of the living room.
The room was a mess, as always – magazines, newspapers scattered, unpacked boxes, a nest of cat hair on one side chair where their feline slept, furniture, mantle, a few knick-knacks all undusted. The rug was stained, soiled, hadn’t been vacuumed in weeks. Under the single lamp was an ashtray full of cigarette butts, a near-empty tumbler with clear liquid nesting the bottom, a single ice cube almost extinct.
This is what you get when you have nothing.
With no expectations, Annabeth walked past the stairway, back to the kitchen, which was in similar disarray – stacked dishes, a vague ammonia smell battling the odor of soured milk, a broken dish on the sideboard kept from tumbling into the sink by a half-eaten sandwich perched on the sink’s edge, a full garbage can blocking the door to the backyard. The overhead florescent light, a round, naked white curl whose ornamental glass cover had long disappeared, flickered fitfully and never quite blossomed on.
The short hallway behind the kitchen was lined with dust bunnies, two unmatching shoes side by side in the center, incongruous.
Loud snoring came from the bedroom at the end of the hall, the door of which was ajar. As she stopped Annabeth sensed movement, saw Ludwig, their cat, staring out at her balefully from the end of the rumpled bed.
Her mother made an interrupted snoring sound, turned away toward the wall.
Annabeth retreated to the stairway and climbed up to the other bedroom, her own. Within there was another world. The walls were freshly painted, the floors dusted, the throw-rug bright with its original colors. The desk beneath the single window was tidy, one side stacked with schoolbooks, the other, in front of the cane-backed chair, fronted with a clean blotter and a neat row of pens and pencils. The bed was crisply made, covered with a quilt showing a shower of yellow stars and moons against a deep blue background. Over the bed was a single poster, framed, not thumb-tacked, of a white observatory dome, its slit open, revealing the huge telescope within pointed at the night sky. It had been a time-motion shot, the shutter kept open for hours while the stars revolved in the sky, and they formed streaked halos around the dome.
Annabeth’s own telescope, a sleek white tube four inches in diameter and nearly three feet long, mounted on a sturdy wooden tripod, stood vigil beside the bed.
Behind it against the wall was a bookcase crammed with astronomy books and fantasy novels.
Annabeth put her backpack on the bed, opened it, and drew out the three stolen library books from inside it. She put them on the blotter on her desk, face down. She leaned over them to look out the window.
Above the huge oak tree in the backyard there was a scattering of stars, but clouds were already moving up from the western horizon into the chill night, and there was a waxing moon still high enough to wash out whatever would be visible.
She could just make out the Great Square of the constellation Pegasus, and, next to it, the constellation Andromeda, which, alon
g its split lines, contained the only galaxy outside the Milky Way visible to the naked eye. She could just make out its faint oval blush. In her telescope, it was a magnificent cloud possessing billions of stars far beyond our own galactic neighborhood.
It was said that our own galaxy would someday crash into it.
That, she had decided before coming to Orangefield, was where her dead father’s soul was.
Her father’s soul, along with all the others, was in the Andromeda Galaxy, which would one day crash into our own galaxy, and bring all the dead back.
That had been her belief
Now she no longer believed it – but she believed other things instead.
Things that might actually be true.
She turned from the window and looked down at the stack of stolen library books on her blotter.
She turned back to the window and located the Andromeda galaxy again.
“I promise,” she said, to the Andromeda galaxy, to her father, to the other billions of souls in that hazy oval of false heaven, “that I’ll find you. I promise.”
She pulled the shade down over the window, sat down at the desk, and turned over the first book: Halloween in Orangefield.
On the front cover had been stamped the word: RESTRICTED.
She opened it up; the binding didn’t crack, the way an unused book’s would; this opening was smooth, the latest of many.
Good, Wizard. Good, the returning voice in her head spoke.
“Everything was fine before he died. You promised when you first made me Wizard three weeks ago –”
And I’ll keep my promise, Wizard, if you do what I say.
She smiled to herself and turned the page.
Chapter Thirty-One
As far as the eye could see.
The Pumpkin Tender woke up, and was nearly blinded by Autumn colors. There was wetness on his clothes and face, and he shivered as he sat up. The ground had been hard the night before, under the sickle moon, but overnight it had softened beneath him with dew. He had been foolish not to use the Army blanket, one of his only possessions, along with his felt hat and leather boots and his rabbit’s foot.
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