Shadow Days (7 page)

The outside wall of the library was divided by an enormous fireplace. The mantel was at least two feet above my head and the fireplace itself was wider than three, maybe four of me put together.

A portrait hung above the mantel, and I didn’t want to look at it because I worried it was more of the grotesque art that lined the mansion’s walls. When I did finally force myself to stare at it, I was pleasantly surprised . . . for a little while.

This painting wasn’t anything like the others. It was a simple, if austere, portrait of a man standing behind a woman who was seated in the chair. They gazed at the empty library, solemn faced. Despite the lack of violence in the portrait, I found myself needing to look away. The picture turned my stomach as if I’d eaten stones for breakfast instead of eggs. Despair pressed onto my chest, stealing my breath. What was it with the art in this place? If it didn’t make you want to vomit, it depressed the hell out of you.

I didn’t look at the painting again, instead focusing on the jewel tones streaming in through the stained glass windows that lined the outside wall on either side of the fireplace. The colors captured sunlight and made it dance, washing the library with kaleidoscopic hues.

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Turning in a slow circle, I tried to detect anything sinister about the place. Nothing.

The library held books, simple furniture, and in one corner a tall cabinet and a grandfather clock. When I tried to open the cabinet, I found it locked and decided to leave it that way. Strange as it was, I was tired of picking locks.

Maybe leaving it alone would get me sent to a slightly less horrible circle of hell.

My adrenaline from working to get inside the library had been spent. And there was nothing here. My life in Vail suddenly felt like one sick practical joke. And I was pissed.

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nine

E

Here’s A good rule: Don’t make and post web videos when you’re paranoid, sleep deprived, and angry.

I broke that rule big time. I still can’t believe I did it.

fortunately the people that had been hanging out with me online were the forgiving sort. Lucky me. Seriously.

I had to make it up to them. Some of the comments were so sweet I thought I should write personal thank-you notes.

Dear Emily, Roses are red, violets are blue, I would go crazy if not for you.

On second thought, that was just creepy. I’d stick with the videos.

I’d considered fessing up about the weird phone calls as part of my mea culpa, but I was already walking on the edge of crazy cliff and I needed to keep my friends. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to share anything that might scare my helpers away.

With my sketchbook in hand I went back to the library, deter-mined to find out what about it made it off-limits. Ignoring the painting, fireplace, and cabinet, I headed for the bookshelves. Though it was unlikely I’d see a book with
forbidden
written on the spine, maybe I’d find something.

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Glancing at the titles gave me no clues other than that a sometime owner of this place liked turn-of-the-century books. I pulled
Westward Ho!
off the shelf, leafing through its pages.

Someone hadn’t taken very good care of this book. A few of the pages were covered in ink.

Wait a sec.

I laid the book open on the floor so I could get a better look at the defaced pages. The pen marks on the page were deliberate—and exquisite. A pattern, but a pattern that made what?

I grabbed another book,
Songs of a Wanderer.
It took less than a minute to find the ink designs scattered through the pages of the text.

Again the drawings were linked as if they connected random phrases and letters on the pages. But if they were linked, it couldn’t be random. Could it?

Wondering if my discovery might be a fluke, I left the books and went to the opposite wall of bookshelves. I ran up the spiral staircase and took three books from various locations on the wall. All three had the same markings hidden inside.

Who could have done this? And why?

I needed to think about what my next step was. Besides, I’d already come up with my homework assignment for the day. What’s better than thank-you notes?

Thank-you sketches.

Posting the library sketch garnered some flattering remarks about my artistic abilities, probably more than I deserved, but not much in the way of problem solving. I took the suggestion to look under the Persian rug in front of the fireplace seriously. Rowan Estate is the sort of place to have trapdoors, but this rug wasn’t hiding one. I didn’t blame people for their interest in the portrait, but nothing about it seemed off. That’s not completely true. Though I’d seen the portrait 59

a few times, it still left me feeling like someone was trying to drill a hole in my chest. Stranger still, if I looked at it for very long, I started to hear a sound, like someone very far away was crying.

To me that was steering back toward crazytown, which I didn’t want to do, so I decided against any focus on the portrait. Besides, I was getting kind of obsessed with the marked-up books. I spent the afternoon pulling books from shelves and searching for marked pages. It didn’t take long to discover that not all the books had been altered, but a hell of a lot of them were. When I had a stack of a hundred books, I took a break, looking at my tiny towers of clues.

I had no doubt there were more patterns hidden in the stacks, but there was no way I’d get through all of them. I’d never make it through the books I’d already stacked up.

It was time for a little help from my friends.

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ten

F

i’d never been more glAd that I had my own

bank account because otherwise I would have had to do some serious explaining about the gigantic postage bill I ran up sending packages all over the country.

Waiting to hear back from friends about the books was hard. I did some more hiking, sent out personal thank-you sketches to Liz and Victoria since they’d been taking such good care of me, and hunted down some more patterns from books I hadn’t sent out.

I was excited and frustrated. I hoped that the books would enlighten me as to what was hidden in the library—and I was more and more convinced that what I saw, a beautiful room full of books, was not why Bosque wanted to keep me out of the room—but I also knew that given the number of books left to go through, I’d never get the whole story. I just hoped I could get enough of it to find some answers.

fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long. The clues poured in so fast I could barely keep up. It’s a good thing I wasn’t in school. Also a good thing: everyone helping me seemed to be avoiding work and school themselves.

My bare walls were no longer bare; instead they were covered with pages from the texts, clues, and notes being sent from too many places to count.

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But it still didn’t make sense.

first there were names: Alistair, Nightshade, Cameron, Rowan, Marise, Lumine. The more information about these people we gathered, the stranger the clues got. At first I thought it was a family chronicle, but the dates didn’t work out. People don’t live to be 283.

They just don’t.

With that set of clues leading to a dead end, I focused on the others. These phrases appeared to be part of a history. Alistair’s name came up again, but in the context of his participation in a war. The factions in conflict were unlike anything I’d come across in my history classes: Conatus, Searchers, Keepers, Guardians. I didn’t know what to make of them. And the war centered around a woman (I assumed she was a woman) named Eira. Again, this was no part of the wars in medieval Europe I’d heard of. I even went back to my Western Civ texts to try to find some connection, but there was nothing.

The final group of clues I didn’t even want to deal with. It put me right back in creepy, hellish territory. Witches. Lots of stuff about witches. And elements. Not the periodic table of elements you mem-orize for chem class. These were old-school elements: earth, air, water, and fire.

I was right back to where I’d started: frustrated, angry, and tired.

Maybe I was on a wild-goose chase. I wasn’t supposed to be in this library, and what I’d found hadn’t led me to any of the answers I’d hoped for. Part of me was tempted to call it a day, lock up the library, and hope my uncle never found out I’d been in there. It couldn’t be too much longer before he got me into that school. And the thing that went CRASH in the night would have to get tired of tormenting me eventually.

Why was I doing any of this?

I’d started a blog post apologizing to everyone for wasting their time when I came across something new. It was a clue from a book like the others, but it was not like the others.

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Records you seek are behind time’s wheel.

Not a name. Not a history. Not witches.

This wasn’t a clue; it was direction.

Time’s wheel. Something else I hadn’t heard of, but the phrase was simple enough that I was sure I could figure it out. And I didn’t have to do it on my own.

I said it out loud, as if to reassure myself that this was the right way to go.

“Records you seek are behind time’s wheel.”

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw I had a new text message.

Stop.

I looked to see who it was from. The message vanished. It had been there. A text that only read
Stop.
And now it was gone.

Maybe the ghost haunting my phone was a friend. Maybe it was an enemy. Either way, I wasn’t stopping. Not now. I was closing in on something vital, closing in fast.

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eleven

A

i doubted i would HAve figured it out on my own.

from the triskelion to the face of the grandfather clock, the library was filled with wheel-like objects. It turned out the clock was in fact just a clock. The triskelions were part of window decorations, which meant behind them were the grounds of the estate. I only wanted to start digging up my uncle’s garden as a last resort.

Before I had to find a shovel, Anthony and Becky rescued me, pointing out that one of the symbols I’d sketched was the pagan calendar. With a little more digging—I was still grateful I wasn’t doing the literal kind—I learned that the pagan calendar is also often called the witches’ wheel of the year. As much as that information was useful, it made me shudder. More witches. I wished I could find a clue that was, like Traci said, about rainbows and happy stuff. Then again, I was pretty sure Dante didn’t see any rainbows on his trip through hell.

The wheel had been carved onto one of the wooden columns on the second floor of the library. I looked at it for a while. Weird words were carved around its circumference: Mabon, Samhain, Yule, Imbolc. Anthony had written that they were the eight major holidays of the year. Inside the first circle was another circle. These symbols I recognized as astrological signs.

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Great. More puzzles. I was guessing I’d have to line up the astrological signs with specific holidays. Maybe I’d need to invest in a telescope. I ran my fingers over the polished wood, tracing one of the wheel’s spokes until my hand reached the intricately carved compass rose at its center. When I touched the rose, I thought I felt the wheel move.