CHAPTER 4. SHE SMILED SWEETLY
Neither of us could have guessed that a huge, well-lit, academic library lay at the end of a hallway about ten yards from the gymnasium, but there you have it. As you can imagine, we were a little surprised.
Gil was first on his feet. “Get up,” he said. “Help me seal this door.”
“EEeeerrgggggghhllllhh,” I said, although I was going for, “One moment please.”
“What? Are you tired? Come on, man, there’s a killer octomom out there. In a second one of its funky suction cup hands is gonna be creepin’ in here to take us back to its pool!”
With effort, I got on my feet, grumbling all the while. Gil got behind one door and pushed. I did the same with the other. They closed, sort of. Something had knocked them out of alignment–probably the combined weight of Gil and I crashing into them at full speed–and they wouldn’t latch. Gil and I each put in some elbow grease. Nothing worked.
“Leave it,” I said eventually. “If that squid thing was going to try and reach us here it would have done so already. I figure we’re safe enough for now.”
Gil shrugged, dejected. “Really, I’d like it better if we could lock this door.”
I gave him a good dirty look before grabbing a chair from a nearby table and jamming it beneath the doorknobs. I settled it against the rug and gave the doors a good pull to demonstrate. “There you go,” I said. “Locked.”
Gil shrugged. “Not really, I mean–”
“Listen Mr. I-don’t-do-research and I-don’t-even-bring-weapons-because-it’s-bound-to-be-so-easy, I think you can throw stones when you bring them. Eh?”
“That metaphor’s a little thin, don’t you think?”
“You brought us to this death trap under the assumption that it was a walk in the park! It has not been a walk in the park! So at least back off on my metaphors, man.” Maybe I was a little pissy, but I was mad. Hell, we’d just been attacked by a Kraken in a haunted mansion.
“Hey man, I told you, I’m not the brains of the operation, remember? I’m just the-”
A pile of books overturned, tumbling from a table into a cluttered mound on the floor, cutting Gil off mid-sentence.
“Oh shit,” he muttered. “We’re in a ghost house, remember? Let’s argue later.”
“Okay,” I sighed, turning to face the library.
Surveying the place only made it that much weirder. From where we stood at the entrance, I couldn’t see the back wall, the room was that deep. It was at least seventy-five feet wide or so, and its cathedral ceilings and chandeliers made it seem even bigger. Above us was an open second floor, the ornate balustrade winding its way around even more book cases. There were books everywhere.
The main floor had long tables typical of most libraries, although as previously stated, the library’s current state would make most librarians want to throw their bodies off the mezzanine.
“It’s a freakin’ mess in here,” Gil said, pointing as if I could not see.
“Yeah, it really is.”
He walked over to the closest bookcase and ran his hand along the spines of old tomes, turning his head sideways to read the titles. At the first hole, he looked at the floor, his eyes searching the titles piled at his feet.
“Look at this,” he said, picking up a book. “Treating Shell Shock in the Modern Soldier, by Charles D. Alderton.” He looked at the bookshelf again. “Goes right here,” he said, sliding the book back into place.
“So?”
He pulled the book free again. “Look.”
I walked over to him and took the book. He was pointing at the line between the faded and unfaded portions of the cover. Like any book that spent years and years on a shelf exposed to sunlight, this old book suffered severe sun damage and fading. I looked up over my shoulder at the grand windows on the second floor above us.
“It’s faded,” I said.
“Yeah, but look where the line stops,” he pointed again.
I shrugged. “So what? It sat there on the ground until the sun faded it.”
He slipped the book back onto the shelf. The fading perfectly aligned with the books on either side of it. “See? It got sun faded here on the shelf, not on the floor.”
“So it hasn’t been on the floor for long.”
“Exactly. Someone’s been going through the books here. For one reason or another, this book got pulled off the shelf and thrown on the floor.”
“Somebody was looking for something? This doesn’t look like the work of a caretaker.”
Gil laughed. “No kidding. More the work of a careless taker. Get it?”
“Uh huh. Clever.”
Rather than laugh at his own joke, he turned, eyes wide as if he’d just heard a sound behind him. “Did you see that?” he asked.
“What?”
“It was like a big blur. A big black blur.”
“Our Jacob Marley ghost, eh?”
“No, seriously man. It was like...” He paused, chewing on his lip.
“Like what?”
“It sort of looked like, well, like a ninja.”
“Are you serious?”
“Listen, I know how it sounds.”
“I don’t know if you do, Gil, because it sounds crazy. I’m beginning to think there is no one in this building except me, you, and the sea monster. I think a ninja would really tip us over the edge of crazy.”
Apparently, my words temped fate all too well. Above us, the lights snapped off, dousing the room in a pitch black darkness.
“Watch out, the ninja’s around!”
“Be quiet. Where did you put the flashlight?”
“Did I have it?” he asked. “I thought you had it.”
I patted down my pockets, as if I could lose track of a five pound steel flashlight. “I must have dropped it.”
“Probably when we crashed in. I mean you had it in the hall, right?”
“I think so?”
Thunder rumbled outside as Gil and I lowered onto all fours, searching for the light.
“Do you feel it yet?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s why I’m still crawling around on the floor.”
“Ah, yes, okay. Is this it?”
“No, that’s my hand.”
“Ah, yes, right.”
“Hold on, I think I’ve got it.” My hand came to a rest on the cold metal shaft of the flashlight. I sat back on my haunches, lifting it.
Thunder rumbled again, this time accompanied by a flash of brilliant lightning. For a moment, the room exploded in white light.
Standing before us was–for lack of a better word–a ninja.
Really, it was just a slender figure dressed all in black, or at least that’s what it looked like in the momentary flash of lightning.
I dropped the flashlight and leapt at the guy. The light clattered to the floor and turned on, casting a long beam across the cluttered space. I hit the ninja in the midsection, and together we toppled over a particularly large mountain of books, rolling down the slope and crashing into a table leg.
Gil was shouting something I couldn’t hear over the sound of the ninja’s fist slamming against the side of my head. I got a good shot into his side, but he was damn fast.
The flashlight beam found us just as the ninja’s knee found my groin. I rolled over as he got up and took off towards a spiral staircase against the wall that led up to the second floor.
I only lost a beat or two before I was back on my feet, groaning and running unsteadily toward the stairwell.
“Up there!” Gil shouted, leading me with the beam of the flashlight. “He’s up there!”
I took the steps three at a time, only about a half-dozen paces behind the ninja guy. Gil was running behind us, losing a step with each I gained. Lightning flashed again, illuminating the second floor for a moment. The ninja was losing ground, but I could see where he was heading: a window in a small alcove tucked between a pair of bookcases. He was going to make it to the window before I caught him.
Behind
me, Gil had just reached the second level. The beam of his light was behind me, waving across the bookshelves and carpeting as he struggled to catch up.
At the risk of sacrificing a priceless work of academic brilliance, I grabbed a nearby hardback and heaved it, sending it spiraling through the air in the general direction of the ninja. I got lucky–either that or I should’ve been a major league pitcher–and caught the guy on the back of the head with the spine of the old tome. He stumbled and fell to his knees just before the window.
It was enough time, but just barely. As he started rising, I realized I didn’t have the time to catch him, so I caught the next best thing: the adjacent bookshelf. I put my shoulder down and hit it full speed, toppling it into the window and the ninja. Glass shattered, and I heard a muffled ugghh as the guy went down like a sack of potatoes beneath an avalanche of hardback books. He did not get up. Out cold, I presumed.
Behind me, Gil’s footsteps had stopped, as had the waving of the light. I knelt in the darkness over the man, pulling him free of the books. Behind me, I heard Gil yell something. I heard a dramatic snap of a very old light switch before the chandeliers came back to life.
“Sabra cadabra!” Gil shouted victoriously.
In the full light of the chandelier bulbs, I could see our ninja for the first time. Tall and thin, he was indeed covered head to toe in black, including a face mask revealing only two closed eyes. Probably not a ninja, but not a bad guess on Gil’s part. I gave the black cloth mask a pull, revealing the man’s face beneath.
Well, I wasn’t expecting that. Beneath the mask was a pale-skinned and freckled woman with fire engine red hair. “Huh,” I said.
“Hey, I know her!” Gil said from over my shoulder. “She’s a bloody thief!”