The Book of Bad Things

by Dan Poblocki

  Mrs. Yu checked the time in the dashboard. Then she knocked the gear back into drive. “Darn it, I’m late already.” She yanked the wheel and pressed the gas, hard this time, making the last turn onto the main road out of the Estates. “But promise you’ll never pull this stunt again.” Mrs. Yu glared at Ping. “You’ll be sorry if you do.”

  “I promise,” Ping mumbled. She fastened her seat belt, then slumped down in the front seat, hugging her arms across her chest. Cassidy, Joey, and Hal simply stared at one another in the backseat, unable to express the horror that raced through their minds and stopped on the tips of their tongues.

  THEY RODE THE REST of the way listening to the hum of the AC.

  Cassidy remembered the drive from earlier in the week, when she and Joey went to the art class. It was like a lifetime ago.

  She had a hunch that nothing would stop the dead from tracking them all the way here, but the length of the journey would buy them some time.

  On the college campus, Mrs. Yu parked the car in a crowded lot. She led them to the stone building in which her office was located, then pointed them toward a large patch of grass that lay in the center of the many other campus structures. “There you go,” she said. “The quad. Now, I’m going to be here for several hours. So if you get bored … too bad! I don’t want to be bothered, got it?”

  Ping nodded. “Got it,” she chirped, smiling a bright smile.

  Mrs. Yu hiked her heavy satchel onto her shoulder. Cassidy considered her own bag and the book she always kept inside. Glancing at it, she noticed clumps of dog hair clinging to its front. Disgusted, she brushed them off. Somehow, she’d remembered to grab it in the mad dash to leave the Nances’ place. “But if you do need anything, security is located right over there. Emergencies only.” Then she turned and headed up the stairs into the massive edifice.

  The four made their way to the large lawn and plopped themselves down in the shade of a young elm. Each of them continuously glanced around into the shadows between buildings, looking for the shambling movement of the things that had nearly attacked them, impossible as it seemed.

  “That dog is in my house,” Hal whispered, pulling out his phone. “I have to warn my parents.”

  “Maybe one of the others let him out,” said Ping. As Hal typed a text, she added, “Careful what you tell them.”

  “I’ll keep it vague.”

  “It’s us I’m worried about,” said Joey. “Where are we gonna go?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” said Cassidy. “Maybe if we found our way back to the city —”

  “Eventually, they’d find their way too,” Ping insisted. “We have to do something to stop them now.”

  Joey pulled distractedly at his sneakers’ laces. “In movies, you kill zombies with a blow to the head. Destroy the brain. We need to find a baseball bat. A hammer.”

  “You think you’re capable of doing something like that?” Ping asked, lowering her voice.

  “I think I’m capable of lots of things now. I’ll do what I need to do to get us out of this mess.”

  “It wasn’t zombies that caused my car accident,” said Hal. “And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t zombies that got to Mr. Chase or Mrs. Moriarty. It was something else. Something that lives in that house. Or underneath it.”

  “Inside the vortex,” Ping said.

  “None of that makes sense to me,” said Joey.

  “But it’s all happening,” Cassidy said. “If we’re going to believe that one of these things is true, we have to open ourselves to the possibility that anything could be true.”

  Joey released a loud sigh. He squeezed his eyes shut and pulled at his shirt collar, stretching out the cotton. Finally he said, “So what do you think lives in that house, Hal? What is inside the vortex?”

  “I’m not sure. But when I remember last night, I can’t stop thinking about the humming sound I heard.”

  Cassidy chimed in. “I’ve heard the humming too! It woke me up the night I saw Ursula out in the street.”

  Hal nodded. “It felt almost as if something was digging around in my head. Like it was speaking, but without words. It felt like it was telling me what I was seeing. And what I saw was that mannequin grow a head and arms and claws. I can’t explain it. I don’t know if what I saw was real, but I believed it was real. And that’s what made it dangerous. If Ping’s right, then whatever is living inside the vortex is intelligent. And its reach is far. And terrifying.”

  “Can it get at us all the way out here?” Cassidy asked, tearing up clumps of grass. She didn’t want to say that she could feel it watching, listening, investigating the veil of reality to find a loosened thread through which it might sneak. What worried her the most was the feeling that the loose thread may be in her head, in each of their heads, and one errant thought, one wrong word would give it access to their most precious possessions. Their selves.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if it tried,” said Hal.

  “Like I said,” Ping piped up, “we have to fight.”

  “Fight?” Joey asked. “How? With what? Hal says killing our zombie friends won’t stop what’s happening in this town. Or to us. Right? The thing in that house thinks it owns us now. Just like it owns Ursula and the others. And Lucky.” He blinked, momentarily retreating into his head. “How do we change that?”

  “The library?” Ping suggested, nodding at a wide brick building that stood on the opposite side of the quad. “If we’re gonna find the answer before my mom shows up to take us home, we’ve gotta look there.”

  THE LIBRARY WAS COLD AND DARK. Beyond the front desk, rows of tables filled a long room. Dozens of small lamps sat on the tables. A dim glow filled the space. Bookshelves lined the walls. Ladders were propped up in several spots so that anyone could reach the highest books.

  “Are you kids students?” said the man behind the desk. He wore a jean vest and a gray T-shirt. His pitch-black hair was tied back in a ponytail. His tired eyes were saddled with puffy, slightly wrinkled bags. Cassidy thought he looked more like a member of a biker gang than a librarian; then again, she’d lately seen stranger things than this. Beside his desk stood a glass barrier and a rotary turnstile, like the ones in the city subway stations.

  “My mom’s a professor here,” said Ping. “We need to use the library.”

  “Is your mom with you?” he said, sizing them up. He stared especially long at Hal, whose bruises and bloodied eyeball must have set off all kinds of alarms.

  “She’s in a meeting.”

  “Well, when she gets out, have her meet you here. Then I can sign you all in.”

  “This is kind of an emergency,” Ping whispered.

  “An emergency?” said the man. “Wow. This sounds exciting.” He leaned forward, as if he expected to hear a story of action and adventure. It took Cassidy a few seconds to register his sarcasm. He tapped the desk with a pencil. “Sorry, kids. I really can’t let just anyone through the gate. What if one of you turned out to be some sort of dangerous criminal? Someone has to be held responsible. You want me to lose my job if one of you goes off the deep end?”

  Cassidy watched as Joey squeezed his hands into fists. The guy behind the desk had no idea how close he was to being right. “People are dying,” Joey whispered. Cassidy felt her cheeks burn. The man squinted at them, as if he hadn’t heard correctly. Several patrons passed his desk showing their IDs, unaware of the little drama playing out only a few feet away. “You said someone has to be held responsible? Well, if you don’t let us in here, you’ll be responsible for what happens to this town. How about that?” Cassidy wanted to grab his hand and raise it like a boxer who’d just won a fight. Yes. This was the Joey she remembered.

  Wide-eyed, the man reached for a phone sitting next to his computer. “How about this,” he said, “you guys all turn around and walk out of here right now, and I won’t call security?”

  Ping shot Joey a look of death. Hal swayed, looking ready to walk out the door. But Cassidy stared into the library,
seeing what she hoped might be the key to their entry past the gatekeeper. Sitting at the table closest to the front, a young man flipped through an oversized art book.

  “Vic!” Cassidy called out. Her voice echoed through the otherwise quiet chamber. When the art teacher glanced up, she waved her arms over her head like someone who was drowning.

  VIC APPROACHED THE FRONT DESK, standing beyond the turnstile. “Hey there! You guys coming back to my class next Tuesday?”

  “We hope so,” said Cassidy, glancing at Joey, who looked mortified.

  “Cool,” said Vic. “That would be fantastic. We’re going to be working on —”

  “Excuse me,” said the desk attendant. “What the heck is going on here?”

  Cassidy ignored him. “We need to use the library. But he won’t let us through.”

  “Really? Why not?” Vic crossed his arms, smiling a confused and charming smile.

  The biker-librarian was flustered. “They’re not students. They’re not guests.”

  “These two are my students,” said Vic, winking at Cassidy. “The others, well, they can be my guests. Can’t you let them through?”

  The man sighed, defeated. “Sign ’em in,” he said, handing Vic a ledger and a pen.

  Afterward, Vic waved them all forward. One by one, they passed through the turnstile. Joey leaned toward the desk and whispered, “You won’t regret this.”

  Ping smiled and said thank you, then quickly pulled Joey away from the entry before the man could change his mind. Cassidy followed. Nearly everyone sitting in the main room watched them enter. As long as every pair of eyes stared out from a living, breathing human, she didn’t even care.

  When they reached the table where Vic had been working, he lost his smile. “So what are you guys doing here?” he asked, his tone now serious. “That was bad form back there. I really can’t get kicked out of the library this afternoon.” He glared at Joey and Cassidy. “You gonna pull another stunt like the one you tried on Tuesday?”

  “No,” they answered, sounding like scolded children, which Cassidy realized, they sort of were.

  “Good. I want you guys in my class. But I want you to want to be there too.”

  “We do,” said Cassidy. “You have no idea how badly we want to be there next week.”

  “No idea,” Joey mumbled.

  “Ping wasn’t lying. Her mom is a professor here,” Cassidy explained. “We need to do some research, but that guy wouldn’t let us in without her.”

  “But there’s a public library in Whitechapel,” said Vic. “And don’t tell me you have no Internet at home.”

  “We can’t really be at home right now,” Joey said. Vic squinted, as if putting together puzzle pieces in his mind. “Thank you for helping us. We’ll behave. Promise.”

  Vic sighed. “Fine.” He sat down, opening the large book on the table. “Go forth, then. Research and be well. Hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  They say the world can be a scary place. I totally agree. But when you have a panic attack, the world becomes much scarier than usual.

  My guidance counselor, Mrs. Ames, told me today that she thinks I’ve been suffering from panic attacks. According to her, lots of people deal with them. She promised me that I’m not going crazy. Which was a relief. Sort of.

  Mrs. Ames explained that there is this chemical my brain makes when I get scared. It’s called adrenaline. She said normally, when adrenaline rushes into our veins, people have a reaction to it that she called “fight or flight.” This means either you stand your ground or you run away.

  But with me, she said, the adrenaline-stuff just keeps coming and coming. I become sort of paralyzed. I get dizzy and I can’t breathe. I can’t fight or flight.

  The scariest part is how everything around me feels really strange. Like REALLY strange. And it’s this part of it that made me worry my brain was broken.

  Like, the first time it happened, I was sitting in music class and a dump truck passed by outside. It hit the road and bounced and made this really loud clanging sound. And all of a sudden, I couldn’t hear the words Mrs. Mendez was saying. I only heard her voice, which had twisted up into this weird high-pitched squeal.

  When I glanced around to see if any of my classmates noticed, I realized most of them were staring at me. They all looked really angry with me. Almost hungry too. As if they were wild dogs and I was a juicy steak.

  That’s when I realized I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt like I was going to puke.

  I stood up and backed against the wall, certain that everyone was about to chase after me. And if they caught me … I don’t know what.

  Eventually, Mrs. Mendez took me to the nurse’s office where they made me lay down on a cot and drink some water.

  Since then, the attacks mostly come when I’m home alone. At night. I hear slithering noises in the hall. I see movement in the shadows of the living room.

  I know that Mr. Stanton is next door, and he said I could knock whenever I need to. I just wish I didn’t need to.

  Mrs. Ames said that there are ways to beat the attacks, but that it takes work. She explained that whenever I feel one coming on, I must remember that it’s only temporary. But when your mind is trying to freak you out, it’s hard to remember anything. And the last thing you want to do at that point is work. The only thing you want to do is curl into a ball so small that you disappear.

  CASSIDY, JOEY, PING, AND HAL found a bank of computers in the center of the room. They pulled up the library catalogue. Ping entered some keywords into the search field — ley lines, vortexes, curses — and soon the group had acquired a short list of books and periodicals that they thought might provide answers to their questions. Ping printed out the results for each of them. To save time, they decided to split up.

  Cassidy clutched her paper in one hand and a strap of her backpack in the other. The library was immense, the dark ceiling as high as a cathedral’s. From the front of the space to the back, a dozen aisles led off into the stacks, many of them disappearing into shadow. Dewey decimal system numbers were posted at each corridor, labeled by category, white on black. Cassidy checked the digits on her list and headed purposefully toward the first corresponding aisle.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the others spread out, vanishing into their own corridors. The farther away from the main space she strolled, the faster Cassidy’s heart raced. She suddenly felt very alone. And very afraid. She was tempted to go back and chase after Ping. Why hadn’t they partnered up?

  What would she do if she came around a dark corner to find the gaping mouth of Owen Chase waiting for her?

  Where was this stupid book?

  Cassidy scanned the shelves for the title. Archaeology and Folklore of the Twentieth Century. Sounds snooze-tastic, Cassidy thought, trying to make herself laugh. It didn’t work. The prospect of flipping through hundreds of pages to find an answer filled her with a sense of dread, which only grew larger when the fluorescent lights over her head began to flicker.

  She held her breath, froze all movement.

  The lights sputtered, then quickly faded away. Instinctively, Cassidy reached her arms out, gripping opposite shelves. She pressed her lips together. Light from the main room spilled about halfway down the aisle, and an ambient glow came through the spaces between books from the passages on either side of her.

  Cassidy stood still, keeping her mind quiet. She would not run away like she had that awful night in New York. Not this time. That was what the vortex-thing would want her to do. She was nobody’s puppet. Mr. Stanton had taught her that years ago.

  Listening to the sound of her own breath, she studied the dim titles of the books surrounding her. It must be here, somewhere, she thought, fighting against the dark images her brain was producing. Pushing it all away, she ran her fingers along the spines, squinting to read the words through the blanket of encroaching shadow. “Wh-where are you?” she stammered.

  The floor shuddered. The books trembl
ed. Cassidy thought of the subway at night, passing through her neighborhood. She pulled back, glancing all around. Down the aisle, in the light, people were moving around the main room. No one else seemed to notice the disturbance.

  A low growl filled the air, barely audible. The sound vibrated in her stomach, and she recognized it. That familiar humming. The vortex-thing was here. It had found her. Her confidence began to ebb. Cassidy knew if she moved at all now, she’d collapse, or wet herself, or something worse, so she planted her feet. She closed her eyes, and a dizzying flood of strange images spun past the inside of her eyelids — objects she recognized from Ursula’s driveway, in the Dumpsters, scattered on the ground.

  Her spine smacked the shelves behind her; she felt faint. When she opened her eyes again, through the space between books, she saw an enormous shadowy shape moving, no, pulsing down the next aisle, like a giant black worm, into the darkness away from the main room. As it slid past her, she noticed iridescent scales glistening on its back. She opened her mouth to scream, but all that came out was a silent puff of air.

  An angry voice whispered, maybe in her head, maybe aloud, Bring it back … Bring it back … Bring it back to me …

  A BOOK FELL TO THE GROUND with a resounding whap, jarring Cassidy away from the horrible vision in the adjacent aisle.

  She blinked, and the creature was gone. Only the echo of its voice remained.