Return to the Dark House (18 page)

“You’re probably wondering how I’m still alive,” she says. “I saw the rough-cut version of the film. It looked like I died, didn’t it? Like a giant piece of
pointed glass fell on top of my head. But I was able to step back, thanks to Harris’s warning, just in time. The glass landed on my foot—my leg, actually—right above my boot
laces, hitting an artery.” Staring straight into the camera, she kicks her foot out from beneath her dress. Her leg’s been wrapped with a bandage. “There was a lot of blood, Ivy.
I hope you never had to see it. Lucky for me, our elfin friend doubles as a medic.”

Her face looks exactly as I remember it, if not a bit thinner: pale blue eyes, pointed chin, dark full lips. The background behind her has been blacked out, so I can’t see where she
is.

“My clue for you is April showers. Now, can you guess where you need to go next? I’ll give you a little hint.” She reaches into the pocket of her dress and takes out a tiny
book.
“Shhhh,”
she hushes, placing her finger up to her lips. “There’s no talking in here.” She opens the book up to the middle and begins to read.

I nod, suspecting I know the answer to her clue.

“Oh, and before I forget,” she says, moving closer to the camera, as if about to let me in on a secret. “If you’re seeing this video, then you know that Harris has been
right all along. He was right about the amusement park, wasn’t he? And about your fear of being videotaped? So, know that he’ll be right about this.”

Huh?

“He has a warning for you too,” she insists. “Don’t let her out—”

Static cuts off her words, filling the room with an ear-deafening hum. I remain staring at the screen, not wanting to move, desperate for her to reappear.

But she doesn’t.

And I can’t—move, that is. My chest tightens. My head feels even dizzier than before. I clench my teeth and hold my breath, while the room starts to spin. I silently count to ten,
waiting for the sensation to pass, remembering something that Dr. Donna used to say: “The physical side effects of the emotions that we feel…those are as temporary as the emotions
themselves.”

After a few moments, I’m able to squat down to the floor. I lower my head between my knees, hoping the rush of blood to my brain will give me a surge of stability and enable me to breathe
normally.

“Ivy?” another voice.

I can hear again. The hum has stopped. I lift my head—the room wobbles into place—and peer over my shoulder.

Taylor is standing by the projector. There’s a remote control in her hand. “Are you okay?”

The door is open again. Both knobs are in place.

“I went to look for something to wedge into the door crack,” she tries to explain. “But I couldn’t find anything, and so I gave the knob another shot. Wait, are you
okay?” Her face scrunches at the sight of me.

I can feel the panic all over my body—a cold, tingling sensation. But there’s another sensation too. Hope? Gratitude? Is there a word that falls in between?

Because Natalie’s still alive.

There isn’t doubt in my mind now.

I
VY FILLS ME IN ON
what happened, looking all around as she does—into the hallway, at the projector screen, over both shoulders, and in the far
corner.

“Natalie’s alive,” she says. “It was her, on the screen. April showers.”

“Okay, my head hurts.”

“That’s the clue. Natalie said it.” Instead of shedding any additional light, Ivy moves out into the hallway, ever eager for more punishment.

I begin to follow, just as a door slams shut somewhere, freezing me in place. There’s a sound of footsteps—wooden heels against marble floor tiles. I can’t tell which direction
it’s coming from. I look back toward the classroom, and then down the hallway. A few moments later the footsteps stop, but still my heart keeps pounding.

“There,” Ivy says, spotting a sign for the library. It points us just a few doors down. “That’s where Natalie said we need to go.”

I follow Ivy inside, immediately struck by what I see. The names of all the contest winners (F
RANKIE
, P
ARKER
, N
ATALIE
,
G
ARTH
, S
HAYLA
, I
VY
, and T
AYLOR
) are splattered across the walls in dark-red paint. There are
portraits of all of us too, done in a Renaissance style with rich colors and serious expressions.

While Ivy moves toward the portrait of Parker, I check out the one of Garth. His dark eyes are mesmerizing; I can almost feel them somehow, watching me, studying my every move.

The library is about the size of a gymnasium, with super-high ceilings and a monster fireplace that’s big enough to stand in. There’s a main circulation desk at the front, a baby
grand piano at the back, a bunch of study tables in between, as well as rows and rows of books.

Ivy and I move to the reference desk—a thick mahogany island littered with the dust of broken tile. I aim my flashlight at the ceiling, where there’s a hand-painted scene of seven
sad-looking children sitting in a circle, all holding the same book. “Creepy super freaky,” I mutter, also noticing a three-tiered chandelier.

Ivy searches the desk, in hopes of finding another clue perhaps. “There’s crackling again,” she says, placing her hands on the headset.

I move closer to listen, bracing myself to hear his voice.

“Welcome to the library, Princess,” he says. “The smell of fine literature lingers in the air, doesn’t it? The notes of vanilla and nutmeg? The acidic scent that comes
with paper and ink. Ricky Slater used to escape in here to read the greats: Hemingway, Poe, Keats, Proust…you name it. One thing most people don’t know about Ricky, however, is that it
was the voice in his head that he was really trying to escape—the one that told him how inadequate he was: socially defunct, unable to relate to those around him, even on those rare occasions
that he tried. The reason
I
know all of this…as you can imagine, Ricky was a hot topic after his fatal departure, not to mention that I’m the one who found his suicide
note—stuck in the pages of
Madame Bovary,
his most checked-out work. I want you to go find the note now.”

Ivy stares at me, her mouth snarled open, as if there’s a booger hanging out my nose.

“
What
?” I sniff.

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Well,
duh
. Ever see
The Amityville Horror
or
The Conjuring
? I don’t mess with spirit shit.”

As if on cue, music starts to play from an old-fashioned record player in the corner.

I go to check it out. It’s one of those big, boxy players with the automatic arm and the vinyl disk that goes round and round.

A female voice sings:
“I’ve got my eye on youuuuuu, Sweet Cherry Pie. My eye’s on youuuuuu, oh, no, I can’t deny. Oh, Baby Boooooo, I’ll be coming for
youuuuuu.”
Denise Kilborn’s voice; she’s one of my dad’s favorite singers.

The rhythm is slow and haunting. It’s being played at the wrong speed. There’s a lever at the top of the player. I move it a notch to fix the speed, but nothing happens. I click the
power off, but still the machine plays—even when I smack the arm off the record, scratching the needle across the vinyl. The music is obviously coming from somewhere else.

I shine my flashlight all around, searching for a speaker. Instead I find two glowing red lights, two aisles over, in the stacks of books. The lights hover over a set of encyclopedias.

I move closer, angling my flashlight between the bookshelves, able to see that the lights are actually eyes.

They belong to a boy—the same one we saw in the kitchen, against the door of the fridge.

Ivy screams at the sight of him—a bloodcurdling wail.

I move to the end of his aisle. The boy looks freakishly real. He has a stark white face and blond hair, and is dressed in prep-school gear: khaki pants, navy suit jacket, leather loafers,
striped tie. He’s standing against the wall, staring in my direction.

I get even closer; I’m just a few inches away now. He looks about fourteen years old.

“Taylor?” Ivy’s voice. She’s standing behind me, at the end of the aisle.

There’s a pile of books at the boy’s feet and something metal gripped in his hand. He grabs a book off the shelf, opens it up, and plunges down with the metal object: a
librarian’s due-date stamp. The word DIE! appears on the inside cover.

He tosses the book, grabs another, and does the same; his teeth clench with the force of his stamping.

DIE!

DIE!

DIE!

He goes to take yet another book—a copy of
The Masque of the Red Death
, by Edgar Allan Poe. But instead of stamping, he pauses. His eyes zoom in my direction again, as if he can
really see me.

The music stops. The boy’s lips part. He’s mouthing something, but I can’t hear him.

“What?” I move closer.

“Get out,” he hisses. A deep, angry voice.

A shiver runs down my spine. I take a step back, bumping into Ivy, letting out a gasp.

She pulls me away, her fingernails digging into my skin as she brings me back to the main area, with all the study tables. “Did you blow out some of the candles?” she asks me.

It takes my brain a beat to make sense of the question—to notice that while most of the candles in the library remain lit, the ones on the study tables have all been blown out. Tendrils of
smoke linger in the air, as does the smell of sulfur.

“No.” I shake my head.

“Someone’s been here. With us.”

No shit, Sherlock
.

Her flashlight stops on a sign at the end of a row of stacks, denoting the call numbers of the books contained within.

“The Dewey Dummy Decimal System.” I sigh. “Some evil librarian’s idea of classification.” I angle my flashlight over the card catalog—basically a hutchlike
piece of furniture with a bunch of narrow drawers containing a bazillion tiny index cards. “Lucky for you I used to volunteer at my school library. The ball-busting, menthol-smelling
librarian insisted that I learn Dewey, the old-school way.” I open up the appropriate drawer, and sift through the row of cards, eventually finding the right one. “Gustave
Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary,
” I announce, pulling the card out. “Eight-forty-three-point-eight.” I move my flashlight beam over the series of call numbers at the ends of
the rows of stacks, finally landing on the right one. “Bingo,” I say.

Ivy takes the card and hurries in that direction—a couple of rows over from the DIE!-stamping boy. She squats down at the end of the aisle, running her fingers over torn, cracked spines.
“It’s here,” she says, after only a few moments.
Madame Bovary
looks absolutely ancient with its wrinkled yellow pages, most of which are loose. Ivy flips through it, her
hands trembling.

“Hurry up,” I tell her, more than anxious to move on.

“Shhh,” a voice says from behind, making me jump.

Ivy jumps too, and lets out a gasp.

An old woman is there, behind us, wearing a billowy white dress. She has long gray hair and the most wrinkled skin I’ve ever seen; the lines form tiny checkerboards. “Are you ready
to check out?” she asks, her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling.

Ivy’s in complete panic mode. She avoids the librarian’s gaze, continuing to search for the note. But I remain looking at the woman—at the dark-red tears running down her face,
getting caught up in those checkerboard lines.

The old woman’s image wavers slightly, but just like the boy, she looks so real.

“I’ve got it,” Ivy says. Her fingers tremble as she opens a folded up piece of paper.

The note has yellowed with age, but the words are still very clear.

“Holy shit,” Ivy whispers.

“What’s the clue?” I ask her.

Ivy looks back down at the letter, and then at the bookshelf.

“Are you ready to check out?” the old lady asks again. She starts to laugh—a high-pitched cackle.