In The Falling Light (16 page)

The library was a gothic manor complete with
turrets and gargoyles and high windows of cloudy glass, candlelight
glowing from within. The wide stone steps of the entrance were
flanked by flickering gaslight poles, and Philomena climbed the
stairs between them and pushed through the castle-like double
doors.

The main hall was a vast, cold space that
smelled of dust and paper and old leather, and she breathed in the
pleasant aroma as her heels echoed across the stone floor,
Click-Clack-Click-Clack
. The walls were lined with high
shelves loaded with books, interspersed with dark archways which
led to the special collections rooms. Candles burned in sconces and
holders throughout the chamber. This was her temple, for everything
that had ever happened or been dreamed was here.

At the center was a big circular desk with
an enormous QUIET sign on it. Behind the desk, a creature with the
head and wide yellow teeth of a mule stood eying Philomena with a
sour expression. He wore a threadbare green waistcoat from the
19
^th
century. They were the only ones here.

“Shhhh…!” The librarian held a long finger
to his broad lips.

Philomena walked to the desk,
Click-Clack
over the stone floor, stopping before him.
“Hello, Ass Face.”

The mule-headed librarian drummed his
fingers on the desk top. “What do you want, Philomena?”

“Access to the Secrets Collection,
please.”

The librarian scowled. “Out of the
question.”

“I said please.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“The Secrets Collection, Ass Face.”

“You’ve already read everything in
there.”

“Not everything. There’s one shelf left. The
top shelf.”

“I don’t have a ladder for you.”

“I’ll climb.”

“We’re closing.”

“You never close, and you know it.”

The librarian scowled deeper. “That’s a
restricted collection. You can’t check anything out.”

“I’ll read here.”

“I don’t know where the key is.”

“It’s on the peg board behind you. J-4.”

The librarian curled his mule lip in what
passed for a mule sneer, and the little girl smiled up at him.

“What if I just say no?”

Philomena sighed. She reached into the
pocket of her dress slowly, holding the librarian with her eyes,
like a gunfighter, then in a blur drew out her library card and
held it before her like a talisman. “Out damned spot! Get thee
behind me! Give up the booty!”

The librarian flinched and looked away,
quickly retrieving the large brass key and slapping it down on the
counter. He kept his eyes averted from the library card, and only
dared to look once Philomena had returned it to her pocket and
snatched up the key.

“I hope you fall and break your neck,” he
muttered.

“I’ll be fine,” she called,
Click-Clacking
away across the room towards an archway.
“Thanks, Ass Face.”

“Bring it back when you’re done!” he shouted
after her.

Before she entered the archway she had
selected, Courageous Little Philomena picked up a lit candelabra
from a table and held it high to chase back the darkness. She
always felt like she should be wearing a long black cape when she
held one of these, a ghostly organ playing somewhere in the
background. She marched down a long stone corridor,
Click-Clack-Click-Clack
, until she reached a small iron door
which opened with the brass key. She pushed into a ten by ten room
with three full bookcases, two hard chairs and a table. The door
squealed shut behind her on rusty hinges. As far as Philomena knew,
she was the only one who ever came here. Probably the only one in
Petershead who could read something other than comic books and
tabloids, she thought.

She set the candelabra on the table and
inspected the shelves.

Ass Face was right, she had read just about
everything in here. The entire, encyclopedic series on childhood
secrets, petty crimes and cheating in high school and college,
endless lies, an affair… and of course the volumes of creepier
information from the Twilight Time. These were dark tales indeed,
stories of arson, slaughtered animals, girls abducted at
knife-point only to vanish into the woods, never to be found. She
shuddered in forbidden delight. And there was more. The top shelf,
every book still unread, no doubt revealing the deepest caverns of
depravity, the true onset of Midnight.

But today what she wanted was a location,
directions to bait which would prove irresistible to the Crusk.

She dragged a wooden chair to the bookcase
with a squeal and climbed upon it, standing on her pointed little
toes and gripping the uppermost shelf as if she would do a chin up.
She read the titles along each spine.

Although each intrigued her more than the
one before, and she promised herself to come back and read every
word (How To Cut A Mini-Van’s Brakes looked especially
interesting), it wasn’t until she came upon a small, untitled book
bound in brittle black leather that her little heart began to
pound. She took it down and carried it to the table.

Running a small hand over the simple
unmarked cover, she opened the book and began to read, slowly at
first, then faster and faster, fingers snapping over pages as a
pointed grin spread over her face.

Here it was, and the location of the bait
both shocked and delighted her. She closed the book with a
satisfied thump, tapping out a happy little dance in her pointy
little shoes. Philomena patted the library card in her pocket. Now
she needed to call her friends, and she was confident Ass Face
would let her use his phone.

Johnny and Stumpy and One-Eyed Kate sat at a
picnic table, the three of them on one side, watching Big Moose on
the other cracking walnuts between his thumb and index finger
before passing the nut meat to his companions. He didn’t like
walnuts himself. One-Eyed Kate was wearing her favorite red jumper,
and kindly shared her walnuts with Stumpy, popping every other one
into his eager mouth. Eating was tough for him, seeing as he had no
arms or legs, and he wasn’t so much sitting on the picnic bench as
he was propped on it.

Johnny shoved his walnuts down his gullet as
fast as his pudgy fingers could move, wheezing through perpetually
stuffed nostrils, his swollen belly growling for more. Flies buzzed
around his bloated and hairless head, and he waved at them with his
beefy hands when they weren’t otherwise engaged.

Big Moose concentrated on his task, tongue
sticking out the corner of his mouth. The eight-year-old was
six-foot-nine and weighed three-hundred pounds, was obscenely
muscled and considerably hairy. Pelt kind of hairy. He would have
passed for an adult had it not been for his simple, sunny
disposition, speech impediment and a runny nose he was always
wiping on the Sponge Bob pajamas which he was always wearing. And
he had great, heavy moose antlers, one of the reasons for his
heavily muscled neck. Every year on Moose’s birthday, One-Eyed Kate
tied a red balloon to each antler and sang to him, making him tear
up and smile.

“What time is it?” asked Kate, blinking her
big, blue eye at Moose. It was an old joke, but still made Stumpy
and Johnny laugh.

Big Moose squinched up his face as he
thought about it. “Midnight?”

They exploded in laughter. That was funnier
than the question.

“That’s right, Moose,” said the little
Cyclops girl, patting one of his big hands. Stumpy started to
whine, so she fed him another walnut.

“Mmmph mmff Hmmph?”

“Don’t talk with food in your mouth,
Johnny.”

Johnny gulped and belched. “I said, where’s
Philomena?”

One-Eyed Kate shrugged and ate a walnut.
“She said she’d be here. Why, do you have something better to
do?”

Big Moose watched Johnny closely, wondering
if he did.

Johnny shrugged back at her. “My mom made a
roast. It’s Rottweiler. I want a sandwich.”

Kate shook her head at the pale, fat little
boy.

“This won’t work anyway,” Johnny continued,
leaning his elbows on the table and slumping. “We’re gonna end up
getting eaten.”

“You
are
eatin’,” said Moose.

“No, you big dummy,” Johnny said, flicking a
walnut shell at the giant moose-child. “Eaten.
Eat
-en. As
in, the Crusk is going to eat us.”

Moose thought about that for a minute, then
brightened. “Then you don’t hafta go to school no more!”

That didn’t seem to appease Johnny. In his
opinion, his mom should keep him out of school completely, instead
of putting his life in peril on a daily basis. That hadn’t
happened, for him or any of the kids in Petershead. Despite the
fact that the Crusk caught and ate an average of one kid per week
as they headed to or from school, and despite the fact that the
bridge over the Crusk’s ravine had to be crossed in order to get to
that school, the adults of Petershead sent their young off every
weekday to either learn or be devoured. And what did the learning
even matter? Johnny had been in the third grade for as long as he
could remember, and would always be. Perpetually nine equaled
perpetual third grade.

“Grownups suck,” he said.

“Philomena says it will work,” Kate pointed
out, as if that settled the matter.

“Uh-huh, and Phil’s always right. Like when
she said those wings she built would work, right before she
strapped them to Stumpy and pushed him out of the bell tower. That
worked great, didn’t it?”

One-Eyed Kate frowned, and Stumpy shook his
head vigorously and grunted. It most certainly had
not
worked, as the permanent dent in the side of his head
demonstrated.

“And what about her little experiment with
the woodchuck, the cattle prod and my ass? That worked like a
charm, huh?”

“No,” said Kate, “
that
was so funny I
almost peed myself.”

Big Moose chuckled at that and cracked a
walnut. “Peed.”

“And how about the…”

Kate held up a hand, her eye narrowed. “We
get the point, Johnny. No one’s making you stay. Go home and stuff
your face with Rottweiler if you want to. Just remember you’ll have
to explain to Clap why you weren’t there when she needed you.”

Johnny thought about that. He thought about
friendship. He thought about teeth.

Johnny stayed on the bench.

Big Moose cracked another walnut.

The night wind kicked up a storm of dead
leaves that spun through the playground like a little tornado,
making the kids cover their eyes to keep out the grit. Stumpy
couldn’t, and caught the worst of it. Big Moose opened his mouth
wide to catch the grit on his tongue.

Courageous Little Philomena walked into the
playground and saw her friends sitting at a picnic table on the far
side. She pushed through rusty swings, making the chains creak, and
strode towards them, a canvas bag slung over one shoulder.

Big Moose saw her first and grinned broadly,
revealing his single tooth and showing off a severe cleft. “Mena!
Mena!” Johnny and Kate ran to her, and Stumpy, left on the bench,
craned his neck to see over his shoulder, grunting.

“Did you get it?” One-Eyed Kate asked,
jumping up and down in excitement.

“Yep,” said Philomena, unslinging the bag
and setting it on the picnic table. “It wasn’t hard at all.”

“Where did you find it?” asked Johnny,
poking a fat finger at the bag, then jerking it back quickly when
the bag twitched.

“You’ll never believe it. It was hiding in a
corner of my Uncle Waldo’s potato cellar. Can you imagine? It’s
been right there all along.”

Johnny raised an eyebrow. “Wait a minute.
The ultimate bait to catch the Crusk has been hiding in your
family’s potato cellar?”

“Yep.”

“And no one knew it was there?”

“Nope.”

“And no one ever saw it?”

“Nope”

“And it never tried to get out?”

“Uh…nope, guess not. Anything else?”

Johnny shrugged and waved at a fly.

“It wasn’t hard to catch, either. I just
grabbed it and stuffed it in this bag. I think it’s scared.”

The children watched as Philomena dumped the
bag out on the table. Its contents rolled onto the splintered and
initial-carved wood like a soft blob, then shuddered. About the
size of a basketball, the bait was translucent, cloudy, shimmering
with a soft, internal white light. It quivered now and again like
Jell-O.

“
This
is it?” Johnny said,
frowning.

Philomena ignored him, watching the blob of
light with fascination. “Touch it,” she said, and they all did,
little hands – or in Moose’s case big hands – crawling over its
surface. It was smooth and spongy and cool to the touch. One-Eyed
Kate lifted Stumpy off the bench and held him so he could rub his
head against the thing. The limbless child closed his eyes and made
a purring sound.

“Did you bring what I told you?” Philomena
asked her friends. They all nodded and pointed to a Red Flyer wagon
they normally used to pull Stumpy around town. It was piled high
with heavy chain, and something long was underneath, shiny metal
peeking out between the links.

“Moose pulled it,” Johnny said. “It was way
too heavy for us.” A fly landed on his ear and he swatted it
away.

Philomena inspected the wagon’s contents,
then, satisfied, she re-bagged the bright blob of bait and tossed
the canvas sack over her shoulder once more.

“Let’s go catch the Crusk.”

Petershead School sat on the far edge of
town, a one room structure in the classic style, complete with
shuttered bell steeple, which had once been painted a cheerful red
with white trim. Now, the paint was gray and peeling (and, as it
turned out, lead-based), its windows had broken panes, and the
steeple which had once housed a resonant bell was now a home for
crows.