Minutes passed, and every once in a while there again came that crinkling, spine-tingling sound as page after page turned. Once I thought I heard a voice mumbling along to words I couldn’t quite catch, and another time there was a shh-shh like someone’s shoes grazing along the dirty blue carpet. But both sounds faded away slowly until I couldn’t hear them at all, and I was about to tell Jaden that all this silly page-turning we were hearing was just a book left in the way of a fan (again leaving out important facts like how there were no fans here in winter, and how no matter the technology of a fan, it simply can’t put on shoes and walk around a library mumbling things), when someone spoke.
“Too scared to come and find me?” it crowed, seeming to echo from every shadow—and trust me, there were way too many.
Jaden trembled, turning to wrap his arms around me, bury his face in my shoulder. I looked around desperately for any sign of a man, or a kid, or anyone, but there was nothing. Nothing but me and Jay and a load of a haunted library to keep us company.
“Well,” said the same, grating voice, “I can hardly blame you; I am terribly frightening, you know.” And just as I was going to scream, maybe only to fill the nasty, cold silence, the lights flicked on. It wasn’t so much the turning on that freaked me out as the way they all came on together, no flickering or weird buzzing sounds.
And then, as if all this other scary crap wasn’t enough, there he was.
A dark, dark man, from head to well-dressed toe. He had papery pale skin and short, inky black hair that somehow still managed to be pathetically stringy. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he turned and was just one flat picture scribbled on a huge piece of paper. Maybe to be even freakier – if that was possible – or maybe for dramatic effect, he opened his mouth, wide as wide could possibly be, and snapped his sharp white teeth together.
I’mma tell you right now the only thing going through my head was why I had to be stuck in a library with my little brother and not someone more deserving, like that mean girl in my math class. Unless she’d already killed her little brother with those creepy red nail-polished hands of hers, which to me didn’t seem unlikely.
He interrupted my self-pitying thoughts by sighing angrily and throwing, I mean throwing himself to the floor. Somehow it didn’t seem to bother him much, but he did bonk his head on one of those bookshelves that looked as if a kingdom of mice had done everything to deface it, chewing, scratching, the works. “This was s’posed to be interesting,” he whined, and I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not. “You were s’posed to be scared.”
“Jaden,” I whispered, “Jaden, when I say lollipop, you get up and you run to the desk in the back, ‘kay? Call 9-1-1.”
Jaden looked up at me, eyes still misty from crying, shaking like a leaf in a maelstrom. “I don’t want to, Kat. I’m scared,” he said, and I realized I couldn’t. Couldn’t fall apart, couldn’t let someone else take charge—this was me, or no one. And I knew what no one meant the moment I looked back to the papery freak across the way.
It meant we were gonna die in here.
“Jaden, Mom’ll be here soon, and if she finds out you didn’t listen to me, there won’t be any—ice cream—forever,” I hissed. This kid could bug the hell out of me sometimes, but that didn’t mean I wanted to watch him get cut into little bite-sized pieces by Mr. Strawberries and Creep-Os over there. Or—I winced—worse.
His eyes widened, his adorable blue eyes, and he whispered back, “For-forever?”
I nodded solemnly, and it seemed to get to him then, the gravity of the situation. “When I say lollipops, remember.”
“What’re you two whispering about over there?” the paper-man said in an obnoxiously singsong voice, and the icky grin on his face got bigger when we both started.
Plucking up every bit of courage I had, and some I didn’t, I said, “You sound like a donkey.” It was a horribly simple thing to say, and all the worse because I’d no idea if he’d get mad, or if he’d laugh, or make a funny face and disappear.
“I know, I know. It might be because my father was a dragon. ‘M not sure, though,” he said, so matter-of-factly I was thrown off for a second. Fortunately the question had distracted him from being suspicious. Small blessings. Not that they counted for much in here.
“A—a dragon?”
Jaden shifted in my lap, shivering with that nervous fear that came whenever you were about to do something crazy in front of a grade-A madman. Which wasn’t often, but if you’ve ever been in such a place as we were, you might get it. The fluorescent lights buzzed ominously, as if they were threatening to shut off, and the papery man nodded.
“Yeahhhh,” he said, yawning. The conversation had begun to bore him, clearly, and if I didn’t throw lollipop out there sometime soon, he’d probably pull a knife from his weird black pants like in those horror movies and turn my face into a bloody jack-o-lantern.
Oh, ew. Didn’t need that mental image.
“So this granddragon-er, father, granddragonfather thingie, did he like lollipops?” The papery man looked at me strangely, like he was just starting to suspect I was as insane as he was, and before I could start crying or anyone could turn into anything they didn’t want to be, Jaden jumped out of my arms and dashed across the room, sneakers making an awful shnook, shnook across the ugly blue carpet.
The paper-man didn’t move. Didn’t blink. He looked vaguely in my direction, hiccupped, and then leaned back against the bookcase. “Meh,” he said.
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Once again, no italics. Speaking of no, I'll pass on the nitpicks, if you people don't mind. Any comments or suggestions would be niiiice.
