Pull Down the Night (The Suburban Strange)

by Nathan Kotecki

  Bruno tried to think of something. “What if we got her to go into the Ebentwine?” He pointed at the swinging gate and the dark aisle that hurtled into blackness between the rows of shelves.

  “That’s an interesting idea. If we could trap her there long enough, presumably the same thing would happen to her that happened to you.”

  “Something like that,” Bruno said. “If we get her to go in there, I think I could redraw the shelves to trap her.”

  “How would we get her here? She’s never come into the library, as far as I know.” Lois yelped, and Bruno turned to see what had surprised her. “Who are you?”

  “That’s Mariette,” Bruno said, smiling shyly at the girl with the halo of curly red hair and the sweater of many colors. She smiled back at him.

  “What is she doing here now?” Lois asked.

  “I’m pretty sure she has a good reason. She’s a ghost.” Bruno waited for Mariette to do something.

  “That’s the ghost? I’ve heard things here and there, but . . . wow.”

  Mariette stepped forward and said, “The crocodile will be here in eleven minutes.”

  “Tina Moreletii?” Lois asked.

  Mariette nodded. “Unless she gets here earlier.”

  “Why is she coming here?”

  “Because I gave her a note that said Suburban Library, aisle 242—Wednesday—eight fifteen p.m.”

  “Why did you do that?” Lois asked.

  “So she would come.” Mariette looked to Bruno to explain.

  “How have you not heard about the kiss notes? All year Mariette’s been giving people notes with the place and time to find someone kissing someone unexpected.” Bruno looked at Mariette for confirmation, and she nodded.

  “God, I guess I should start eating my lunch in the teachers’ lounge. Maybe I would have known about this. Maybe I would have picked up on Tina. So, you gave her a note, and she thinks she’s going to find someone here kissing someone else? Is that true? Who else is coming?”

  “No one. I just figured it was a good way to get her here,” Mariette said, smiling conspiratorially.

  “So she’ll be here any minute. All we have to do is wait until she’s far enough into the stacks, and then I’ll draw the shelves closed. I wish we had You Are Here—it would make this so much easier.”

  “Do you think it’s back in the stacks?” Lois asked him.

  “It’s on the shelf in your office,” Mariette said.

  They went to look, and sure enough, the book was there. “Should we leave the lights on?” Bruno asked, looking out the window in the office door.

  “Maybe just a couple. I’ll put this flashlight on the table by the gate.” Lois hurried out. Bruno turned to talk to Mariette, but she had disappeared.

  He crouched with Lois in the dark office, waiting. Soon they heard the library door opening.

  “Oh, is that what Unkind feels like?” Lois whispered. “I’ve felt that before—it’s like the change in the air when a storm is coming.”

  “I can’t feel it.”

  “There was a student who used to come into the library who felt like that, but not nearly as strong.”

  “That must have been Van. He’s been harmless since Ms. Moreletii stripped him of his powers, but it really messed him up.” Bruno said. “Won’t she know we’re here? She’s really powerful—I’ve seen her fly, and she erased Van’s memory like a whiteboard.”

  “If she does, we have a serious problem. But it’s too late now.”

  Bruno opened You Are Here to the map of the library. Now three people could be seen on the map: two in the library office and one in the reading area near the gate into the stacks. Through the window from the office to the reading area, Bruno and Lois saw a flashlight beam travel across the room, and then the gate into the stacks squeaked open.

  “She’s going in!” Lois whispered. Bruno closed and reopened the book. The third figure had moved four rows down the main aisle into the stacks.

  “We have to wait,” Bruno whispered. He kept closing the book and reopening it, tracking Tina’s progress deeper and deeper into the stacks.

  “Seal her in now!” Lois handed him a pencil.

  “The Ebentwine effect won’t be strong enough unless she goes a lot farther.” Bruno waited and then opened the book again. “She’s only twenty rows in.”

  “How far do we need her to go?”

  “I’d say at least past the sixty-fourth aisle. She’s a lot stronger; I bet that’s why Mariette sent her to aisle two forty-two.”

  “Check again.”

  Bruno reopened the book. Ms. Moreletii was even deeper into the stacks.

  “If she notices she’s getting dizzy, she might turn around,” Lois said.

  Bruno closed and opened the book yet again. “She’s gone at least sixty rows.”

  “Do it!”

  “Let her go farther!” Bruno protested.

  “Close off sixty. If she goes farther, you can close off more shelves.”

  “Okay.” Bruno used the pencil to connect the shelves across the aisle, isolating the person in the drawing in the depths of the library. When he reopened the book, the aisle was closed, and the figure had continued on. “I don’t think she noticed.”

  When Ms. Moreletii had traveled another twenty rows, Bruno drew the stacks closed behind her again. And in twenty more rows he did it a third time. “There’s no way she’s getting out of there now,” he said. “Unless she flies.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  When Bruno opened the book again the figure hadn’t moved from its position just beyond the third barrier.

  “She noticed. She knows something’s wrong,” Lois said.

  “I hope that’s far enough. If she really needed to go to aisle two forty-two for the Ebentwine to be strong enough to overcome her, we have a problem.”

  “Or maybe it’ll just take longer to work?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder if we can hear her.”

  They went out into the reading area and stood by the gate. A voice called from the distance. “What did she say?”

  “I can’t hear.” Bruno pushed through the gate, and Lois followed him into the stacks.

  Tina was saying the same thing over and over: a single word she called out like a name. “What is she saying?”

  “Orland?” Bruno repeated.

  “Something like that.” They crept along, waiting for Ms. Moreletii to call out again.

  The next time it was clear. “Orland! Or-land!”

  “What is Orland?” Lois asked. “Who is Orland?”

  “I have no idea. But if she’s getting weak, she won’t be able to yell like that for long.”

  For several more minutes Ms. Moreletii kept calling the name, sounding frustrated and then desperate. Soon, though, her voice began to fade. When her calls were too soft to be heard clearly, Bruno and Lois returned to the reading area.

  “How long do we leave her in there?”

  “I have no idea,” Bruno said. “If we let her out too soon, it’s going to be bad.”

  “But if we leave her in too long, could she . . .”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s take care of the school, and we’ll just have to make a decision at some point.”

  Bruno followed her out to the hall. “What are we going to do?”

  “You’re just keeping me company for this part,” Lois said. He accompanied her to the end of the hall, and when she cranked open one of the windows, he opened the other one. Then they went back down the hall, and Lois raised her hands, her palms facing the open windows on the far end. “Here goes,” she said, and a wind rose up in front of her and pushed the stagnant clouds across the ceiling ahead of it. The storm was gradually forced out the open windows, leaving a clear hallway.

  “Ha!” Lois clapped her hands in triumph. When Bruno started down the hall, she stopped him. “Wait, I want to try it from here.” As they watched, the windows at the end close
d and latched.

  “I’m really glad you didn’t leave,” Bruno said.

  “You know, so am I! Now we just need to do it all over again in all the halls in this crazy school.” They went upstairs.

  “I still don’t understand what this is about,” Bruno said. “Van was putting the malaise on people one at a time, and Tina was doing it to a lot of people at once, and it seemed like it was spreading. What were they doing to the school?”

  “The same thing. Buildings take on the energy of the people inside them. If a family is happy, the house is happy. Once enough people at Suburban had the Unkind malaise, it contaminated the building. Then it becomes a vicious circle; the people infect the building, and the building infects more people.”

  “And that’s what they wanted?”

  “Seems like it.”

  “But why?”

  “That’s where I run out of answers,” Lois said. “C’mon, the storm is only the first part. You can help with the next part. We should charge each of the doors.”

  “Charge the doors?”

  “If I clean the malaise out of the school, but everyone who was here today is still carrying it, they’ll just bring it back in, and by noon tomorrow everything will be back to the same bad place. So we have to clean the malaise out of the people, too. And doorways are good for that.” Lois went to the first set of doors in the front lobby. She pressed her palm against the door frame and waited a moment. “I wonder if you can do it, too. Try it. You can feel when it’s done.”

  Bruno went to the next door and put his hand up to the frame. For a moment he felt nothing; then the metal pulsed twice against his hand, like a single heartbeat. “Wow!”

  “You felt it? When someone walks through these doors now, it will pull the malaise out of them, just like a hug. How’d that go, by the way—touching people?” Lois asked Bruno.

  “It totally worked. It was so drastic; I was surprised that they weren’t suspicious. Their moods changed like night to day.”

  “They were just relieved to not feel like that anymore. One of the nice things about citizens is that they will write you as many excuses as they need. If something they can’t explain happens, but it’s good, ninety-nine times out of a hundred they won’t question it. God bless human nature.”

  They worked their way through the building. In each hallway Lois pushed the storms on the ceiling out the nearest windows. And they charged every exterior door they could find, so that no matter how people entered the school in the morning, they would pass through a cleansing door. In a few hours they were finished. Suburban slumbered in a familiar, benign stillness, without a cloud in sight.

  Back in the library, Bruno erased the lines he’d added to the plan in the first page of You Are Here, unblocking the main aisle. He and Lois reentered the stacks, pushing into the darkness. “Tina?” Lois called. “Tina?” She looked around as the darkness loomed. “Now I wish I hadn’t given her the flashlight.”

  “There’s usually a lantern up here,” Bruno said. He looked into the rows on each side, and soon he spotted it on the floor, glowing like usual.

  “Well, that’s a pleasant surprise. We have to be quick, or the Ebentwine will affect us, too, right? Tina!” Lois continued calling as they hurried into the darkness of the stacks, wondering what awaited them. “I can feel it,” she said, slightly out of breath. “Lights around the edge of my vision.” It wasn’t until they were almost to the hundredth row that they heard anything. Lois stopped short and caught Bruno’s arm. “What was that?”

  Bruno listened and heard a faint voice. “It sounds like Ms. Moreletti.”

  “She’s weak. That’s good.”

  They found her slumped on the floor right where Bruno had closed off the aisle the last time. Bruno stared down at her, fighting the lightheadedness that washed across his brain every time he moved his head.

  “You tricked me,” Ms. Moreletii whispered up at them, her eyes dull and defeated.

  “Yes, we’re the Unkind ones here,” Lois said. “Can you stand?”

  “No,” Ms. Moreletii said from the floor. But then she began to rise, as though someone very tall had grabbed her underneath each arm and hoisted her up until her feet barely grazed the ground. Her head was too heavy for her to hold it up, and she hung there like a marionette.

  “Are you doing that?” Bruno asked Lois, who nodded.

  “We’d better get back,” she said. “I’m not going to last much longer back here, myself.” They hurried toward the reading area, with Tina Moreletii floating between them.

  “Hopefully it’ll go away pretty quickly as we get farther out,” Bruno offered. “Other than the one time I stayed too long, it’s always gone away as soon as I got out.” He couldn’t be sure whether his own exhaustion was the effect of the Ebentwine or his body’s natural comedown after the adrenaline rush of the past hours. He wondered what time it was.

  When they reached the reading area, Lois turned to Ms. Moreletii. “Do you think you can stand?” Lois lowered her down and she sank into a chair.

  “What are you going to do to me?” Her voice was low but stronger. She looked a little more alert.

  “Nothing. I don’t know about the Unkind, but we’re Kind; we can’t harm you,” Lois told her. “The malaise is gone, and now you have to go, too. If you come back and try something like this again, or anything that hurts people at Suburban, I wouldn’t be surprised if we got an admonition to strip you of your powers for good.”

  Tina shook her head. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s a start. I know you’re quite powerful, or at least, you will be once your strength returns. But we know who you are now, and we’ll be ready for you.”

  “You have no idea.” The teacher’s eyes filled with tears, and Bruno and Lois exchanged a curious look. This is how a powerful Unkind reacts when she’s beaten?

  The clock on the wall had its hands up to midnight. “I need to go home,” Bruno said.

  “We all need to go home,” Lois agreed. “We should make sure she gets to her car, though.”

  They walked her out of the library, down the stairs, and out to the parking lot. Tina moved like someone twice her age, and a few times she had to stop and rest. She seemed defeated, and Bruno was tempted to feel sorry for her. “You knew I was Kind?” he asked her when they were outside.

  “Of course I did. And I knew you’d be a problem, which is why I kept trying to get you to drop the class. I also knew you had an Ambassador, which made things harder.”

  “And you were working with Van?”

  “Of course. That fool was supposed to be my project, but he was useless. It was a relief when he got taken out of the picture.”

  “Did you turn him Unkind?” Lois asked.

  “I may have supplied the right temptation, but the choice was his.” Tina said wearily. “And Van didn’t need a push; he jumped over to the Unkind side.”

  “Why did you do this? Why would you try to make everyone lose hope?”

  “Why do you think? It was in my admonition. But it’s so much bigger than that.” Her face came alive with defiance.

  “Who is Orland?” he asked her.

  Her eyes widened. “You know what, why should I keep any secrets? If Orland couldn’t be bothered to help me in there, it’s pretty clear how little I mean to that—” She straightened up to her full height for the first time. “I was prepared to be loyal, but it seems I’ve been abandoned, now that I’ve failed.” She looked around angrily. “I was ready to go into exile, and try to get back to the Kind side, before this. And I see now that I should have.”

  Bruno asked again. “Who is Orland?”

  Ms. Moreletii fixed her eyes on him and then Lois. She paused, as if to make it clear she was about to tell them something more important than anything she had ever said out loud. “Orland is—”

  There was a blinding flash and a sickening crack. Bruno threw up his hands. When he lowered them, Tina Moreletii lay in a heap on
the pavement in front of them. An acrid smell hovered in the air, and a charge lingered, like a science experiment gone terribly wrong.

  “Was she struck by lightning?” Lois clutched at Bruno’s arm. “Who is that?” she asked under her breath.

  Bruno looked up. The night was full of stars, and the nearly full moon cast a cold light on everything. There were no clouds to be seen. Instead, there was a figure in the middle of the open air above them—standing calmly as if on a glass platform five stories up.

  “I thought . . . I have no idea,” Bruno whispered. The school was too far away for them to run for cover. He and Lois huddled together as though they might somehow make themselves a more difficult target for the next lightning bolt. Bruno braced himself and held his breath.

  Then the figure rose higher into the sky and shot across the curved night, disappearing over the trees on the far side of the school. A cool wind pushed down against them, and for a minute they didn’t move.

  Lois spoke first. “That was Orland? The one Tina said betrayed her?”

  “I guess so,” Bruno said. “When I found out she was Unkind, I thought she was the one who took Van. I didn’t realize that was who she meant when she said Orland. Why didn’t he strike us with lightning, too?”

  “Was it a man? I thought it was a woman. Who knows.” Lois looked down again at Ms. Moreletii’s body. “Is she alive?” Bruno knelt down and carefully pressed his fingers under her chin, hoping to find some breath, some life in her form, but there was nothing. He shook his head and Lois gasped. “I never would have asked you to come here tonight if I’d thought—”

  “It’s okay.” He was in shock.

  “We can’t leave her here.”

  “If we call someone, we’ll have to explain what we were doing here at one in the morning.” He stood up. “Lock me in the school and I’ll pull the fire alarm before I go, so they’ll come and find her.”

  “Okay,” Lois said. They hurried back to the door. “Well, at least we took care of the school,” she said. “I never thought she would die. I’m sorry you saw that.”