“NO!” Black Veil screamed. Its voice was a mixture of a monster and a child. “PLEASE DON’T!” it began slamming its hands onto its head.
“MADOLOK, SHOW YOUR TRUE FORM!” I shouted at the quivering entity. Just like the ghosts it had been tormenting, pieces of it began to flake away until there was only a person in a tattered black dress and a moth eaten veil lying on the ground.
I watched as it stood up, wobbling from side to side. It lifted the veil, revealing its true form: a thirteen-year-old girl.
I understood now, all the clues pointing to her and the spirits, Madame Helena, and my parents trying their best to tell me what was really happening. Morgana and Jonathon weren’t trying to tell me it was Octavia. They were trying to tell me that it was the younger sister in the photo. The one with her face covered by a veil… a Black Veil. God, I can be such a moron sometimes.
“Jade…Childermass,” I said, gritting my teeth.
She was crying now as if I’d taken a toy from her. I waited for her to stop acting helpless. She was just in her true form now, but she was still pretty powerful.
“I THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS!” she screamed at me. Her eyes were different now, almost catlike. She looked primal. I almost expected for her to prance on top of me and rip my face off.
“Friends don’t kill their friend’s parents!” I shouted back at her. She’d tricked me with everything, even letting me in on her emotions. It was all fake. She’d been using the power from the mural all along. I still couldn’t believe that all along it had been Jade. I still didn’t want it to be, but there she was, hovering above the ground, a sinister grin growing on her demented face.
No matter what I’d thought of her before, I could not let it stop me from putting an end to her reign of terror.
“Why did you do all of this to me?” I asked. The wind was dying down because she had less power, but the runes were still being lit one by one and there were only several left. I was wasting time trying to understand why she did what she did. She was a demon, she didn’t have a soul.
“Because… it was fun.” She shook with laughter once again, her eyes glowing like spirit orbs in the dark. She’s not a real person, I had to tell myself. She must’ve attracted a demon’s attention when she was alive and when she died, she let it have her soul and take over her form. Whoever Jade Childermass was, she’d left a long time ago. I’d heard about stuff like that before, but never had I seen it firsthand. This was absolute insanity on so many levels.
“You’re going back to hell, Jade! Or should I say Madolok!” I told her and she laughed even more, her high pitched voice slicing into my ears like razor blades.
“You’re not strong enough, Simon. You may know my name but you will never ever be able to condemn me… you’re just a sad little boy with dead parents and a deadbeat uncle who cares more about counting the money in his wallet than ever loving you!” she was trying to hurt me, but it wasn’t working and as I stepped into the sacrificial circle, her demeanor switched from vicious glee to straight up concern.
“Remember when Madame Helena asked you to go get that purple bag out of that room?” I asked Jade as I picked up piece of broken light bulb and wiggled it between my fingers.
“So what!” she grinned, trying to play off that she wasn’t worried about what I might be doing.
“See, she casted a spell over that room and when you came back it was like you’d been gone a minute or two… but it was longer and during that time gap, she told me how to really destroy the Déjà Quimorta…” I could see the realization hit the demon and it was one of the best feelings in the world.
I smiled as I jammed the piece of glass into my right palm and then slammed my bloody hand onto the reflection of the runes.
I began rubbing at them like a pencil eraser. I waited a moment, hoping that what Madame Helena had told me was true and surely enough, they began to crumble away and chunks of the actual mural above began to flutter to the ground like burnt pieces of paper.
“NO!! STOP!!” Jade shrieked in a monstrous voice that shook me to the core. But I didn’t stop. More pieces of the mural fell to the ground, this time actual chunks of the ceiling were coming down, but didn’t land anywhere inside the circle.
“Say bye-bye to your precious portal!” I yelled out before I rubbed my hand over the final rune and the building began to rumble once again. This time, the wooden floor began to crack and splinter.
“I’m going to kill you, Simon… just like I did your parents!” faster than I had anticipated Jade sprung into the air and headed straight toward me.
She slammed head first into what looked like an invisible force field.
“I can only hold it for a minute longer…” I turned and saw Octavia holding her palm out toward the ceiling, a light green beam of light hovering above her. “She’s controlled me, these spirits, and my family for too long, Simon… Send her back to where she belongs.”
“YOU DARE TO BETRAY ME, SISTER?” Jade bellowed at Octavia.
“You’re not my sister! You don’t belong in this world. None of us do.” Octavia was losing her strength. I needed to end it all now.
I gathered up all of my courage, anger, sadness, and soul and stood up from the ground. My energy was bubbling at the surface. With a vicious glare set on Jade’s feral eyes, I held my bloodied palm out at her and readied myself for all the energy I was about to use.
“MADOLOK…”
“NOOOOO!” Jade threw an entire bookshelf my way but the force field knocked it back with a bang. I couldn’t stop. I had to keep going.
“MADOLOK… IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, THE SON, AND THE HOLY SPIRIT… I BANISH YOU BACK TO HELL!”
All around us, windows exploded inward, glass and metal flying all over the place. The walls groaned as if they were going to combust and the shelves crumbled to chunks of wood. I turned and watched as the second floor crashed to the ground. I could see the secret library perfectly now.
The spirits held captive were now vanishing into orbs and flying out through the shattered windows, finally released by the demonic presence that had been keeping them here for so long.
I turned back to Jade and stared her straight in the face as she began to disintegrate just like this building. She gave me one last look of mercy before she crumbled away into black dust, her scream still lingering in the air.
It was over. It was all over.
I wobbled over to a chair and fell into it, exhaustion pulling at my mind and body. Something fell from above and landed softly on my chest. Using what little strength I had left, I grabbed whatever it was and looked down at it.
It was Morgana’s notebook and written in her beautiful cursive handwriting were two, simple, but strong words:
Thank you
EPILOGUE:
CASE CLOSED?
I was standing in front of the library once again. But this time, there was nothing dark or sinister lurking inside of it. It was basically all rubble now and the only thing left standing was the front of the building. The windows were blown out but the doors were somehow still intact.
I couldn’t help but feel worse about the books that had been destroyed than the demon that masqueraded as a friend of mine and had been trying to kill me all along. I helped all of the spirits that were stuck in the library get free and that filled me with so much happiness. I made my parents proud and I proved to myself that I could do anything if I put my mind… and soul into it.
“Are you ready? You’ve been standing there forever!” Monty called from his idling Buick. I smiled back at him.
It had been a few weeks since I’d knocked the demon’s lights out and Monty and I were finally getting on good terms with each other. Things were getting better, I noticed that right away. After I’d woken in the hospital for the second time in my life, Monty had been right there waiting for me to wake up. He was trying, and that was really all I could ask for. But I knew with time, we’d be just fine.
“There’s just one more thing I need to do,”
I said as I pulled my camera out of my bag, which somehow survived the library’s paranormal demolition. I held it up to take one final picture of the library.
I focused in on the building and snapped a good photo of the Childermass Public Library, or what was left of it. I smiled as I looked down at my display screen and didn’t see a single spirit.
“Let me ask you something, kid,” Monty turned down the radio in his car and I turned back to him. “How did Jade and Octavia get past your ghost radar?”
“Honestly, I still don’t really know. I think I might need to pick at Emerson’s brain to find out more about that. I’m thinking it might have had something to do with how much energy Jade was consuming from the portal. She was using the power to make herself and Octavia more human. I mean, she fooled Emerson and Madame Helena and that’s pretty serious. But it’s a load of craziness that I’ll just have to figure out eventually.”
“That’s some pretty heavy stuff, isn’t it?”
“Yeah… it is.”
As we drove through town for the last time, we passed Madame Helena’s cottage and Ghost Town Souvenirs. I was going to miss Madame Helena and Emerson. But they told me I could always come back and visit, which I promised to do.
A tiny spark of electricity stunned the middle of my chest as we passed the Now Leaving Childermass town sign. I peered down at my camera, still dangling around my neck and pulled it off of me. Maybe it had suffered at the library after all.
The display screen was on and the photo of the library began to flicker and become distorted. I watched as the malfunctioning stopped and then I looked down at the photo once again and my eyes grew wide in shock.
Standing in one of the front broken windows was a white silhouette. Almost instantly my heart dropped into my stomach and I nearly dropped the camera on the floor of the car.
“Everything alright?” Monty said as he changed the radio station and nodded along with a new song.
I didn’t know what to do. But as I looked back down at the photo, the silhouette was gone, which probably meant that it wasn’t from the library… it was something else entirely and it was trying to tell me something. But right now, I didn’t want to deal with a single ghostly thing. I just wanted to be happy for as long as I could. I’d dealt with the paranormal for so long that I felt I deserved a much needed break from all this chaos and that was exactly what I was going to do.
So I turned the camera off, took the battery out, and tossed the camera into the backseat. I looked over at Monty and smiled.
“Yeah… everything’s just fine.”
***
RICHARD DENNEY resides in Texas. He enjoys reading, writing, pizza, horror movies, making YouTube videos & fending off wicked demons with bad hairdos in his spare time.
The Library of Souls Page 8
