Authors: Michelle Knudsen
He nods. “Okay. Yes, okay.”
“Okay. I don’t know what you remember, but I will explain it all later. We just need to get out of here.”
There is a dark chuckle from behind Ryan, and I see him wanting to turn around.
“Hey!” I shout at him. “Don’t you dare turn around. What did I say?”
“Okay,” he says again. He looks scared. I don’t blame him. I am feeling somewhat terrified myself. Except there’s no time for that now, and so I will just have to be terrified later.
“Okay,” I say. “Here we go.” I take a breath and then I move, simultaneously releasing Ryan’s head and turning around to face the door and grabbing his hand again and pulling him forward with me toward the exit. I am certain as I reach for them that the doors will suddenly be locked as they were the other night, but they push open instantly, releasing us into the dim hallway. Mr. Gabriel is letting us go. For now.
With every step Ryan seems to come more back to himself, and together we tear down the hall and the stairs and outside and away, away, away, away, away, running and running and not looking back.
Before too long he is the one pulling me forward, and I curse myself for not having had the foresight to start doing track or something years ago so that I’d be ready for situations like this. But terror is a pretty good substitute for athletic fitness, it turns out, and I’m able to keep going even though my lungs are about to disintegrate and my legs feel like they weigh a million pounds each.
Eventually Ryan slows down, looks behind us, and finally stops.
“Oh, thank God,” I say, stopping beside him and bending over with my hands on my thighs. I am trying to remember how to breathe.
Ryan whips out his phone.
“Who — are you — calling?” I manage between gasps.
“911,” he says, his tone suggesting that this should be obvious.
I straighten and snatch the phone from his hand.
“Hey!”
“And what are you going to tell them, exactly?”
“The librarian is a demon! We have to tell someone!”
“And how well do you think that will go?”
“I —” Ryan frowns at me. “Well, maybe I could say something else, like that we saw blood in the library, and then they can go and see for themselves.”
“Ryan, think about it. Mr. Gabriel will probably be long gone. The police will show up and find all that blood, and they’ll want to ask us all kinds of questions, and we won’t have any answers, and for all you know they’ll think
we
did it! And we don’t have time to be murder suspects right now. We have to — have to —”
“Have to what?”
“Stop him! We have to find a way to stop him.”
Ryan runs his hand through his hair and lets out a strange, shaky sound that’s part laugh, part sigh, with maybe a touch of barely suppressed scream. “Jesus, Cyn. What . . . what
was
that? What did we just see? I mean, he actually was some kind of demon, wasn’t he? For real. That’s . . . not possible.”
Right. I’ve already had a nice slow buildup to this confirmation of my suspicions. Ryan is only just joining us.
He’s holding up rather well, I think, all things considered.
“Yeah. Not possible, I know. Except,” I add carefully, “I guess it must be, because that’s what he is. You saw it.”
“Did I? Maybe we just . . . imagined it. Or, I don’t know, maybe we’re having hallucinations.” He begins to get excited at this possible out. “Maybe it’s related to what’s been happening to everyone else, and there’s, like, some kind of chemical in the air or something, and it makes some kids into zombies and gives some of us crazy hallucinations . . .”
“No. Ryan, you are not going to talk yourself out of what’s going on. We saw it. It’s real.”
“But —”
“No!” I yell at him. He blinks and tries to take a step back from me, but I clutch the front of his shirt and hold him there, looking up at him. “Ryan, please. Please don’t. You can’t leave me alone with this thing. I can’t handle it all by myself. I need you to help me.”
His eyes dart up, around, seeking escape. I dig my fingers even more deeply into the fabric of his shirt.
“Ryan. We have to stop whatever he’s doing to Annie and everyone else before anything else terrible happens!”
Please, please don’t let anything else terrible have happened already.
Where is Annie right now? Is she okay? Is she really safe at home like he said? Or is she still there, in the library somewhere, with him? I can hardly bear to even think it.
Maybe that was her blood you saw,
my brain suggests quietly.
For a second my heart just stops. But no, that can’t be — he’s clearly interested in her for some reason. He wouldn’t — I’m sure he wouldn’t just kill her. He couldn’t.
Ryan looks back at me, clearly not wanting to give up on the possibility that none of this is real.
I force myself to focus on convincing him.
Annie is okay. He wouldn’t kill her. He wouldn’t.
“Think about Jorge,” I say. “Think about your other friends. Not to mention all the teachers and everyone else. Think about all that blood, Ryan. He must have killed someone! Who knows what else he’s capable of!”
“But — but what can we even do? How can we possibly . . .?”
That is, I have to admit, a valid question. I hand him back his phone. “I don’t know. We need to . . . we need to think.”
Ryan nods, tucking his phone back into his jeans. “Okay. But not here, out in the street. Let’s go to my house.” He looks back toward the school, mutters something about getting his car tomorrow, then starts off down the street in the other direction. I hurry along beside him.
On the way, I call Annie. The call goes to voice mail the first two times, which could be because she’s busy or because her brother stole her phone again or because she’s not speaking to me or because she’s lying dead or dying in the school library. I try again. The third time her stupid brother picks up. When I ask to speak to Annie, he says she’s not home. Which could be true, or could be what she told him to say to me. But the fact that he has her phone means that she must have come home after school, at least. She’s probably still there. She probably just still hates me right now and doesn’t want to talk to me. Which is okay. I mean, it’s not
okay,
it sucks, but I’ll take it over that being her blood splattered all over the library and the librarian. I try to ask him where she is but he hangs up on me midsentence. I hate that kid.
Ryan’s house is one of three well-kept two-story houses arranged around the end of a cul-de-sac about two miles from school. Neither of us said much on the walk over, lost in our own impossible thoughts, but I pull myself out of my brain as we approach and try to come back to the present so I can look around properly. It seems like a nice place to live. Large leafy trees cast friendly shade over everything, and the mailboxes are uniformly white and shiny with recent painting. The houses aren’t as close together as they are in my neighborhood, where most of the homes are attached on one side and share a yard fence on the other. There’s a basketball hoop in a small paved area between two of the houses, and Ryan steers us toward the one on the right of it.
We go up to the porch and then he unlocks the door and steps inside, holding it open for me behind him. The house is dark and quiet. I follow him down a short hallway into the kitchen. Ryan grabs a plate and two pieces of what looks like banana bread from the counter and tucks two bottles of water under his arm and then leads me up the stairs. We pass an open door that gives me a glimpse of a neatly made bed and a poster of some sports figure I don’t recognize. (“My brother’s room,” Ryan explains over his shoulder. “He’s at college.”) And then Ryan opens the door at the end of the hall and we step inside. My heart does a stupid little fluttery thing inside me as my brain needlessly whispers with barely contained excitement:
We’re in Ryan Halsey’s bedroom! His bedroom! Where his bed is! The room where he sleeps and does his homework and surfs the Internet and does whatever else boys do in their bedrooms!
And then it tries to start calling up a very non-PG collection of images of what boys might do in their bedrooms, and I cut it off before it makes me blush uncontrollably.
Yes, thanks, I almost didn’t realize,
I tell my brain.
Now shut up.
Ryan’s bedroom is both like and unlike the few other boys’ bedrooms I have seen thus far. It falls somewhere happily toward the neater end of the spectrum, but there’s still plenty of stuff everywhere; stuff that gives a very full and abundant sense of
Ryan-ness,
complete with all his lovely contradictions.
Like his brother, he’s got a poster of some sports figure I don’t recognize, but he’s also got a framed
Empire Strikes Back
movie poster over his bed and a series of
Playbill
covers from various Broadway shows tacked to one wall. A program from last fall’s school musical — signed across the front by the other cast members — occupies a place of honor on a shelf above his desk, flanked by rugby trophies and a couple of photos of Ryan and his brother, one of them when they were little kids, the other taken two or three years ago at what appears to be his brother’s graduation. (His brother is kind of hot, too, but in a different, distant way that doesn’t really do anything for me.) There’s a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall and some nice-looking speakers hung in the corners of the room and a pile of dirty laundry in the corner near the closet, and I have to forcibly remove my eyes from a pair of cherry-red boxer briefs tossed atop the white T-shirts and jeans and gray sweatpants and socks and whatever else he’s worn in the past few days.
And now I have to forcibly prevent my eyes from darting to his general pelvic region and trying to see through his jeans to whatever tantalizing color boxer briefs he might be wearing today.
Maybe he’s going commando today,
my brain whispers, and I walk abruptly over to stare at the
Playbill
collection.
“Have you seen all of these?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He comes over to stand beside me. “My aunt takes me to a show every year for my birthday. It’s kind of our thing.”
“That’s awesome,” I say, because it is. My aunt doesn’t even send me a card on my birthday.
“Yeah, she’s pretty cool.” He walks back over to the door and closes it, and then he sits on the floor, setting the plate of banana bread and bottles of water in front of him. I notice the lack of chairs, notice that he did not invite me to sit on his bed, and plant myself on the floor a little ways away, facing him. I arrange myself so I can lean back against the edge of his bed, though.
I can’t be in his bedroom and not touch his bed. I mean, come on.
One edge of a dark-blue sheet barely brushes the back of my neck as I settle into place. I allow my brain exactly two seconds of thinking about what parts of Ryan that edge of sheet might have come into contact with while he was last wrapped up in it. Then I force myself to focus on what we’re supposed to be doing.
“So, uh . . .” Ryan looks at the floor, looks around, meets my eyes.
Right. Time to get down to business.
“Okay,” I say. “So . . . the new librarian is some kind of evil demon, huh?”
Ryan looks at me a second longer and then laughs suddenly. And briefly. He rubs the back of his hand against his forehead. “Jesus, Cyn. This is really happening, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I take in the room around me, which seems perfectly real and there and normal. The navy-and-crimson sisal rug beneath me is rough and gritty where my hand rests on it, and I can tell it is in severe need of vacuuming. Ryan’s chemistry textbook is propped open on his desk. There’s a crumpled-up energy bar wrapper lying on the floor next to a small wastebasket bearing a sticker that says Ryan in bright-green puffy letters that looks like something he stuck there when he was about six years old. This is clearly the real world we’re in.
And yet.
Ryan nods. Then he blows out his breath, sits up and leans forward, and grabs one of the banana bread pieces.
“All right, then,” he says. “What are we going to do about it?”
I could kiss him.
Well, okay, yes, this is not a new desire, the kissing. But in this moment, I feel my lust and longing and liking swirl themselves together into something much more like love. He’s not running away from this crazy and terrible impossible thing. He’s still here. He’s going to help me. We’re going to do this together.
I hadn’t realized how afraid I was of facing this alone, afraid that Ryan would find a way to deny what was happening after all. But he’s not, he didn’t, he’s sitting right there ripping off giant, boy-size bites of banana bread with his almost-perfect teeth and looking at me expectantly, ready to go, ready to make a plan and take action and get things done.
My relief is immense.
Except, of course, I still have no idea what we can do.
“Okay,” I say for about the millionth time. “What do we know so far? We know that Mr. Gabriel is some kind of demon.”
“Check.”
“We know that he killed someone. Or at least, he probably killed someone. I don’t know where else all that blood could have come from.” Ryan nods. I think we’re both trying not to think too much about whom he might have killed. Someone from school? Someone we know? I keep talking. “We know that he was at least temporarily stuck inside that shape he’d drawn on the floor, or he would have killed us.”
“What — what
did
he do to us? He did something . . . I remember . . . and you, uh —” He blinks and looks at me with sudden surprise. “Did you slap me?”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry. I had to! He was hypnotizing you or something.”
“With his crazy giant eyes,” Ryan says.
“Yeah.”
“But why didn’t it work on you, too?”
I explain what Mr. Gabriel said about the super-roach thing. Ryan listens with fascinated interest.
“Cool,” he says. “So he can’t hurt you?”
“No, he can, just not — not so easily, I guess. I mean, if he was even telling the truth. Because, you know, evil demon librarians, not so much known for the honesty policy, I bet.”
Ryan waves this away. “He obviously was trying to hypnotize you, or whatever, and not managing to. And I can’t really think of why he’d bother to lie to you about it. I mean, it would make more sense to lie in the other direction. You know,
not
tell you that you had this resistance thing.”