Essex [the bad familiar]

5: Hide and Seek

The library staircase possessed the curious ability of all old steps: to both provide a comforting, thumping creak as patrons and staff moved up and down throughout the course of the day, and to be absolutely screaming in the dead of night when the space between your ears saw monsters in the unassuming dark.

Sandelene's hand found the light against the wall just beyond the top stair. The crystal was warm in her palm, glued in place by a gloss of sweat. They had made it up the steps unaccosted by whatever thing it was that had stopped her the first time. But just as with sharks in the ocean, there was no looking out across that steady sea of books without remembering what lurked  in the deep.

"So here we are," came the officer's voice from behind. He squinted down an aisle of reference books, then paced around a couple tables, checking underneath for what he knew he wouldn't find. Several tables were missing chairs, which had been carried downstairs to the children's area for the governor's wife tomorrow. Watching him examine those remaining, Sandelene couldn't help but think that it wasn't in the clear, empty waters where splashing around got you attacked. That wasn't where the pointy smiles were waiting to welcome you to a feast. 

"You believe in all this witchy brouhaha?"

"If I did, I might dare call you rude."

"I don't think you do."

Sandelene bit her lip. He wasn't entirely wrong, though he wasn't entirely right, either. Her business was in sales, not spells. If she could bottle magic and sell it, it'd be that. She knew her products and enough about their uses to be considered well-educated on the matter, the way an art curator understands their subject matter but isn't necessarily skilled enough to replicate a master's work. As a general rule she rarely practiced; practicing didn't make money, and if she wanted to stay open, if she wanted show her parents that she could be successful on her own, she had to focus on paying the bills.

"Is Marge aware of  how you think? If I'm looking to get rid of bedbugs, I wouldn't be too eager to hire the person who doesn't believe in 'em."

"What if they know all the theories of bedbugs and what to do if you have them?" Sandelene read the signs by the switch carefully. Objects of relevant historical value had been gifted to the library and preserved in little exhibits around the building; slim posters tacked to the wall by glass table displays. The dead thing she'd glimpsed had come from one of them; this wasn't a fact, mind you, but the early stages in the investigation. Objects got cursed. Books tended to do the cursing. It wasn't very often she'd read stories and reports of the haunting of some yellowed copy of Winnie-the-Pooh.

"There's a difference between coaching and playing," Officer Peabody grunted, dutifully pulling back a chair and looking beneath the accompanying desk. 

Sandelene let herself lose sight of the man; as long as she heard the sound of him, cutting down the narrow aisles didn't feel quite so claustrophobic. She stopped at the first exhibit against a looming piece of what was described as part of the original brick wall and held the crystal steady. When her hand stilled, so did the pendant. Nothing here. She moved on. "In your line of work, have you ever seen someone too desperate to care who they do business with?"

"You should be aware that it ain't always the desperate fella who ends up paying for that mistake." There were footsteps behind her, but it was just the man as he moved around the last aisle to watch her pass the crystal over several antiqued items in one of those display tables. He rested his arm on a hard cover compendium of twenty years' worth of Life magazines. "You really see someone tonight?"

Sandelene continued to walk, pause, hover, and walk again, checking the litany of guns, hair-spun pictures, wooden fans and everything else contained within the library's walls. "I really punched someone tonight. What worries me is that whoever it was, wasn't alive."