Craig broke the spell. Abruptly, he broke into a run, charging through the wide center aisle, whooping and screaming as he went. Books thudded to the floor in his wake, knocked from their shelves by his outstretched and flailing arms. A few books sailed into the air as Craig heaved them over his shoulders. They fluttered like dying birds, their pages twisting and tearing as they fell.
Tony elbowed Terry’s ribs. "Oh, man. This is so cool!"
Terry stepped away, rubbing his side. "Whatever."
"Don’t be such a pussy, man. Let’s go!" Tony said. He charged off in Craig’s direction, kicking aside the books that littered the path.
They went at it with real gusto. Terry thought for sure they’d tire of knocking books off shelves and tearing posters off walls after a few minutes, but Craig and Tony wrought their petty destruction for some time. Terry checked his watch. 10PM. He shook his head in disbelief. They’d been in here an hour already. How was that possible?
Craig’s whooping rang out from deeper within the stacks, and Tony answered with his own vocalizations. More books took flight. Larger volumes caromed off neighboring shelves and thundered to the floor. Terry took a few tentative steps down the path of destruction his friends had left. Despite the noise Tony and Craig were making, the eeriness of the dark building lingered. Terry felt the prickly sensation of being watched creep across his shoulders and the nape of his neck. He pushed the feeling away.
Of course it felt like they were being watched, he chided himself. They were in a building past closing, committing acts of vandalism. That prickly sensation was just the pangs of conscience.
A clattering noise followed by a metallic crash and snorting laughter went up from the back of the nonfiction section. Bored with flinging around single books, Craig and Tony had moved on to knocking over whole shelves. Next, something crashed to the floor with the tinkling of broken glass and the sharp crack of breaking plastic.
"Oh shit," Terry muttered. "The computers."
He quickened his pace, eager to catch up to his friends. Terry had long been the voice of reason in their trio, and although he lost most of his arguments for a little more sanity in their actions, Terry hoped he could talk Craig and Tony out of more felonious acts.
"Front and center, Jervis!" Craig shouted in his best drill sergeant imitation.
"Yeah! Step up!" Tony added.
Terry broke into a trot, turning left at the end of the adult fiction and heading toward the south side of the building, where the adult nonfiction and reference area sprawled in front of the Special Collections Reading Room.
Autumndale High students had once referred to this reading room as the "Love Shack" until the library staff had declared it off-limits to unsupervised teenagers. Only a couple hours ago, Terry had described in graphic detail the acts he could perform on Amber Donohue if given the chance to get her alone in the Special Collections Reading Room. He arrived in the reference area just in time to see Craig and Tony working feverishly at breaking the lock on the heavy wooden door.
"Can you believe they lock this at night?" Craig asked, flipping his hair out of his eyes as he turned to look at Terry. Craig had what appeared to be a letter opener jammed into the doorknob. "What’s the point of that?"
"Maybe to keep people like us out?" Terry ventured. His response inspired laughter in his friends. "Look, maybe we should get going. You know, before the cops show up?"
Craig continued to work at the lock and barked out in his drill sergeant voice, "Jervis, I want you to sound off like you got a pair and quit being such a sissy!"
"Yeah," Tony chimed in. "Just admit it: you’re scared of the Midnight Librarians. What--you think they live in there, or something? Maybe you’re just too scared to go in there."
Craig let loose with a Vincent Price cackle.
"Fine, go ahead," Terry said. "But I’m out of here."
"No way, man," Craig answered emphatically. "We’re just getting started."
Craig rose from his crouched position and with two steps closed the distance between him and Terry. Craig was nearly two years older than his friends, having been held back in the second grade. He’d hit a growth spurt over the last summer, and now he towered over Terry. Rarely had Craig’s leadership ever been seriously challenged, and Terry now contemplated the consequences of such a mutinous act. He swallowed drily as Craig stood in front of him.
"You don’t really want to leave," Craig said, his voice suddenly serious. "That’s not how we do things."
Terry fought the urge to step back. "Yeah, okay. I’ll stay. Whatever."
Craig’s face broke back into its usual grinning state. He clapped Terry on the shoulder. "Right on. I knew you were just kidding."
V.
"Okay," Hodel said, still scribbling in his little notebook. "So it’s past ten o’clock at this point, and everyone is still…" He stopping himself from adding "in one piece."
"Look," Allen Jervis stammered, plunking his empty beer can down on the table. "You heard him say that he didn’t break any of that shit in the library. Now you can’t hang some charge on him for that! He was there, all right, but that doesn’t mean he did anything."
Hodel put up his hands. "Nobody’s looking to put any charges on your son, Mr. Jervis. This is just an interview."
"See that it stays that way, officer," Jervis snapped, scooting his chair back from the table noisily and heading for the refrigerator.
Becky, leaning against the wall, worried a hangnail with her teeth as she watched her husband.
"All right, Terry," Hodel continued, taking up his pen and putting it to the notebook. "So, it’s getting on past ten o’clock, and your buddy Craig is working at the lock on that reading room, right?"
Terry drank down the dregs of his hot chocolate and rubbed his eyes. "It took Craig a long time to get that lock popped. While he was working at it, me and Tony explored around some. We were getting pretty hungry, so we went back into the staff lounge and looked in the fridge. We busted into the vending machine. I did help with that part."
Terry paused and looked back and forth from his mother to his father. The boy clearly expected a thunderous response to his admission, and was bewildered when none was forthcoming. Terry’s father cleared his throat and gave Hodel another stern look.
"That’s okay, son," Hodel prompted. "Just go ahead and tell what happened next."
VI.
Terry polished off the last slice of microwave pizza and washed it down with a mouthful of soda. He felt better back here in the staff lounge. There were no windows in this little room, which must have been irksome to the employees, but allowed Terry and Tony to turn on the lights. With the lights on, Terry’s uneasiness had melted mostly away. With the lights on, this place was just the library, not some forbidden labyrinth of dark shadows. And this was just a drab little room filled with mismatched furniture, an ancient refrigerator, and a rack of tattered magazines. Sitting there watching Tony chomp down on his egg roll felt almost normal.
The clock on the wall showed a quarter to midnight when Craig joined them.
"Finally got that bitch open," Craig announced as he burst through the door to the lounge. "Thought that lock was never going to give up."
He helped himself to a soda from the refrigerator.
"Well, what’s so special about it anyway?" Tony asked through a mouthful, grease running from the corners of his mouth. "It ain’t like Amber’s back there ready and willing. It’s just a room."
Craig flopped down on the couch, sloshing soda carelessly onto the upholstery. "Well, I know this much. We are going to trash the hell out of that room. Teach those assholes to close it off."
Terry rolled his eyes. He wondered if Craig had ever applied himself as diligently to anything as he had to breaking the lock on that door. No doubt Craig thought of the act as some sort of accomplishment. The self-satisfied smile on his face said as much. Not for the first time, Terry looked at his friends and wondered where they were all headed. He thought of t
heir fathers—two drunk wife-beaters and an absentee drunk—and wondered if their own futures would look any different.
"Any pizza left?" Craig asked.
Tony shook his head, swallowing his last bite of eggroll. "There was only one. There’s some McDonald’s leftovers in there. And we busted the hell out of the vending machine, so there’s like candy and shit."
"I don’t want candy, I want some real food. And I ain’t eating some cold-ass McDonald’s. That’s nasty." Craig chugged down the rest of his soda, crushed the can in his fist, and fired it at the wall. "Well, since you inconsiderate assholes ate all the good food, I guess we should get back out there."
"Yeah, let’s get it on!" Tony agreed, pumping his fist in the air.
Terry forced a smile. "Yeah, I’m down."
They left the brightly lit lounge and moved back into the quiet darkness of the library, walking through the debris to the Special Collections Reading Room.
Craig gestured to the jimmied lock and smiled proudly. "How about that?"
To Terry, it appeared little skill was involved in Craig’s labors. Slivers of wood dusted the carpet at the base of the doorframe, indicating that Craig had tried to simply hack away at the door until the lock fell out. But the doors were heavy and thick, and Craig must have realized that such a course of action would have involved many hours of labor. In the end, he’d taken a couple of paperclips from one of the service desks, straightened them out, and inserted them in the lock. Terry doubted there was any method to Craig’s lock picking. Rather, he supposed Craig had simply jiggled and rooted around in the lock until it had opened by luck.
A couple hours ago, Terry would have bet his lawn mowing money that Craig wouldn’t be able to tease open that lock. He’d hoped Craig’s mounting frustrations would wear him down, so that they could leave the library without further damage. Now, luck or fate or whatever force controlled events that night had conspired to force Terry to see Craig’s plan through to the end.
"Man, you could be a burglar or some shit," Tony said, leaning down to appraise Craig’s work. "Picked that lock like a pro."
"Damn straight." Craig pushed the door open and walked into the dark room.
Terry glanced at Tony, seeing for the first time that night a hint of reservation creeping onto Tony’s face. In a way, it was a relief for Terry to see Tony, normally Craig’s stalwart follower, hesitating on the threshold of the reading room. It confirmed for Terry just how wrong, how out-of-bounds this whole night felt. For a moment, Terry even thought that Tony might break ranks and refuse to go any further. Tony turned around, one foot in the reading room and looked back at Terry.
"Well?" Terry asked.
Tony shook his head suddenly, as if he’d walked face-first into a cobweb. His smile returned, but it had a strained quality, as if it was a reaction to a sharp pain rather than an expression of mirth. "Oh shit, man. I ain’t scared of Midnight Librarians. That’s just a bunch of bullshit they made up to scare kids."
Terry watched as Tony stood there in the doorway. "I never said you were."
"Good, ‘cause I ain’t."
"All right," Terry replied. "Then go on in there."
Tony inched into the room, both feet over the threshold now. "Ain’t you coming?"
Terry sighed. "Right behind you."
The two boys crept into the reading room and were greeted by Craig’s cackling laughter. He’d already knocked over some chairs, and the antique globe was out of its stout wooden frame and rolling about like an oversized soccer ball. The room was dark, even more so than the rest of the library. The few windows were small and set just below the ceiling. What little moonlight that crept in was weakened by the yellowed, hazy panes.
Craig was screaming before Terry stepped fully into the room. Tony’s shrieks followed seconds later. Terry’s own screams froze in his throat as he saw the dark shapes that surrounded his friends. His feet were frozen to the patch of carpet just outside the door, his hands grasping the polished wood of the doorframe for support. Terry’s heart ran rabbit wild, hammering in his chest as his eyes captured images that his mind struggled to grasp.
They came from the corners of the room, seeming to materialize from behind the shelves, and although they moved with eerie speed, there forms were solid, corporeal, surrounding Terry's friends and blocking any clear view. In the dark interior of the room, their forms were shadowy and indistinct, yet Terry could perceive in their swift and jerky movements certain features that suggested a macabre whole. They were clad in dark, shapeless garments, their gaunt, sexless frames bony and sharp beneath the ragged fabric. Long, pale arms that ended in fingers hooked into claws wrapped Craig and Tony’s struggling, thrashing forms. Jaws gaped, revealing mouths full of pointed teeth through which darted dripping forked tongues. Glowing eyes shone like dancing fireflies.
There were dozens of them, and more oozed materializing from the shadows. Tony and Craig had stopped screaming, and were now completely in gulfed in the dark and twisting forms of the Midnight Librarians. Terry watched as the walls and ceiling of the room faded away, resolving into a black expanse like a starless sky, against which the gray forms of the Midnight Librarians danced their macabre ballet. It was as if the door had opened not into another room, but into a deep and endless dark place. Terry clutched the doorframe for support, certain that if he stepped into the room, he would be swallowed by the darkness beyond.
A distant howling sliced through the blackness. As the sound rose in volume—coming nearer and nearer—Terry found the strength to turn and run.
VII.
To Hodel, the Jervis kid looked like someone who’d been holding his breath under water for too long finally breaking the surface. Terry’s face was ashen, and he blinked slowly, as if dazed by his recitation of the night’s events. There was more to the story, of course. Terry had fled the scene, run home, and thrown himself into bed before his parents had returned home. But Hodel could see Terry was clearly all talked out. Anything Hodel got from this point on wouldn’t amount to much. He flipped his notebook closed, stuck his pen into his breast pocket, and stood up. He snapped his radio off his belt and called a patrol car for a lift. A rookie named Lamont Deekins was set up in a speed trap over on 71, and he was all too eager to swing by.
He let Terry’s parents know that he might need to ask Terry a few more questions in the coming days, but for now, the boy should just get some rest. He gave them a number for a trauma counselor who worked with teens, and went outside to have another cigarette while he waited for Deekins to arrive. He’d just ground out the butt and placed it in his jacket pocket when the squad car swung into the Jervis’ driveway.
Hodel slipped into the warm interior of the car. "Take me back to the scene," he instructed Deekins. "I think I’m going to take another look."
Deekins nodded. He dropped Hodel off on Maple Street, near the edge of Veterans’ Park.
The state crime scene techs were there, working behind cordons of yellow tape. The bodies, or rather the pieces that they were able to find, were bagged, tagged, and on their way to the lab, but the techs were still going over the ground for evidence. This case—two kids mutilated almost beyond recognition in a public park—had political shitstorm written all over it, and the techs knew that missing the tiniest detail now would mean their asses swinging in the wind down the road.
There was a reason that Hodel had been vague with Terry’s parents when breaking the news about Terry’s friends. The two kids had been ravaged, pulped nearly beyond recognition. It was one of the worst scenes Hodel had ever laid eyes on. The Gilberts and the Peraza woman, they’d broken into hysterics at the sight.
Hodel bypassed the techs and headed for the library, which may have been dark when Terry and his friends were trashing it but was now fully lighted.
Dave Parker, one of the three other full-time detectives on the Autumndale force was standing near the front desk, looking out over the mess that the kids had made. He was rooting around in one nos
tril with his pinkie.
"You believe this shit?" Parker asked around the toothpick that seemed to be permanently wedged in the corner of his mouth. "Kids really did a number on this place. You were interviewing the possible third, right?"
Hodel nodded. "Terry Jervis. Just came from the house."
"Allen Jervis the father?" Parker shook his head. "That guy’s one top-flight asshole. Anything doing there?"
Hodel shrugged. "We’ll see. That kid’s still in shock. His story was pretty wild."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. Don’t ask," Hodel said. "I’m going to take a look around, see if I can get a few details from the kid’s story straight."
"Help yourself." Parker inserted the finger back into his nose.
Hodel took a long, circuitous walk through the library. Parker was right; the kids really had done a number on the place. Several shelves had been knocked over like big dominoes, and the books had spilled onto the floor in haphazard piles, their pages bent and torn, their covers and spines broken. In the reference area, two computers had been demolished. A few more of the state crime scene techs were back here, dusting for prints and snapping pictures.
It all fit with the Jervis kid’s account. Except for one detail. One big detail. The door to the Special Collections reading room appeared to be untouched. The lock was intact, and the rest of it certainly didn’t look like someone had been hacking it to pieces with a letter opener. Hodel frowned. He reached out a hand and rubbed the surface of the wood around the lock and the doorknob. It was smooth, the dark brown varnish unblemished. He tried the knob and found it locked. One of the scene techs dusting for prints back around the smashed computers looked up from his work.
"Looks like they left that room alone, detective," the tech said. She was a short, slight redhead, her face a riot of freckles.
"You guys dusted it for prints?" Hodel asked.
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