The distance between my boot and the red plastic box on the wall was less than six inches.
It might as well have been a mile.
My wrists were raw, the rope biting deep into the soft tissue every time I shifted my weight. The wooden chair I was bound to was heavy, a solid piece of oak that belonged in a courtroom, not a torture chamber.
Mrs. Gable was still talking. She was pacing the aisle between the stacks of banker’s boxes, the gun held loosely in her hand, the muzzle pointing at the floor. She was lost in her sermon, weaving a narrative of salvation and innocence, her eyes fixed on the ceiling as if she could see through the concrete to the heavens she believed she was serving.
”…and when the fire comes, Elara, it cleanses. It burns away the rot. Elias understands fire. He knows that to save the forest, sometimes you must let it burn.”
“You’re right,” I rasped. My throat was dry, tasting of dust and fear.
She stopped. She turned to look at me, a beatific smile stretching her thin lips. “I am?”
“Fire cleanses,” I said.
I dug my heels into the thin industrial carpet. I clenched every muscle in my core. I didn’t think about the pain. I didn’t think about the gun. I thought about the boy in the wall. I thought about the tea party. I thought about the years of silence this woman had orchestrated.
I threw myself backward.
It wasn’t a slide. It was a violent, convulsing lurch. The chair tipped onto its back legs, hovering for a split second in a terrifying equilibrium.
“Elara, no!” Gable shrieked, raising the gun.
I kicked.
My right boot connected with the fire alarm pull station.
CRACK.
The plastic casing shattered. The lever snapped down.
The world exploded.
WHOOP. WHOOP. WHOOP.
The sound was a physical blow, a sonic hammer that slammed into my skull. It wasn’t just a siren; it was a scream engineered to induce panic. High-intensity strobe lights mounted on the ceiling began to flash, turning the basement into a strobe-lit nightmare of white bursts and pitch-black intervals.
And then, the rain came.
It started with a hiss, a sharp intake of breath from the ceiling. Then, the sprinkler heads popped.
Water.
It didn’t sprinkle. It hammered down. A deluge of cold, brown sludge—water that had been sitting in rusty pipes for fifty years—blasted into the room.
Mrs. Gable screamed.
It wasn’t a scream of fear. It was a scream of pure, unadulterated agony.
“My books!” she wailed, dropping the gun to clutch at her head. “My history! You’re ruining them!”
She spun around, grabbing a stack of files from a nearby shelf, trying to shield them with her body. The ink was already running, turning the paper into black pulp in her hands. The town’s secrets, the lies she had curated for decades, were dissolving before her eyes.
I didn’t watch her. I twisted my body, slamming the side of the chair against the concrete floor.
Crack.
One of the back spindles snapped.
I did it again. I thrashed like a fish on a deck, using the slickness of the water to slide the chair, smashing the wood against the metal shelving unit.
Snap.
The frame gave way. The ropes loosened.
I ripped my left hand free, the friction tearing skin from my wrist. I didn’t feel it. The adrenaline was a drug, cold and sharp in my veins.
I clawed at the knots on my ankles. My fingers were slippery, numb from the cold water, but I tore the wet rope away.
I scrambled to my feet.
The basement was flooding fast. The drains were likely clogged with decades of dust. An inch of black water swirled around my boots.
I looked for the gun.
It was gone. Kicked away in the chaos, lost under the rising tide of ink and sludge.
“You…”
I turned.
Mrs. Gable was standing ten feet away. She had abandoned the files. She was soaked, her gray hair plastered to her skull, her cardigan hanging heavy and wet.
She didn’t look like a librarian anymore. She looked like a witch pulled from a bog.
“You broke the rules,” she hissed. Her voice was barely audible over the whooping siren, but I read the hatred on her lips.
She lunged.
I expected her to be slow. I expected her to be frail. I braced myself for a shove, a slap.
I was wrong.
She hit me with the force of a wrecking ball. Her bony shoulder slammed into my chest, knocking the wind out of me. We went down, splashing into the freezing water.
She was on top of me instantly. Her hands—those dry, papery hands that had stamped thousands of books—closed around my throat.
She wasn’t just strong. She was wired with the hysterical strength of madness. Her thumbs dug into my windpipe, cutting off the air.
“Ungrateful!” she screamed, spit and rain flying into my face. “I brought you home! I gave you back your shadow!”
I gagged, clawing at her wrists. Her skin was slippery, hard to grip. The strobe light flashed—white, black, white, black—making her face look like a stop-motion monster.
I bucked my hips, trying to throw her off. She rode the movement, pinning my legs with her knees. She was heavy, dense like old wood.
The water was rising. It was in my ears now, muffling the siren. I was drowning on the floor of a library.
I reached out, my hand sweeping through the water, searching for a weapon. A pen. A book. Anything.
My fingers brushed against something metal.
The hole punch. The heavy, three-hole punch that had been on the desk.
I grabbed it.
I swung it in a blind arc.
Thud.
The metal base connected with the side of her head.
Mrs. Gable gasped, her grip loosening for a fraction of a second.
I sucked in a ragged breath of water and air. I swung again.
This time she caught my wrist.
Her grip was like iron. She twisted my arm, forcing me to drop the hole punch. It splashed into the water and vanished.
She snarled, baring yellow teeth. She leaned down and bit me.
She clamped her teeth onto my shoulder, grinding down. The pain was white-hot, shocking. It was primal. She wasn’t a human being; she was the feral thing she had turned Elias into.
I screamed, the sound lost in the wail of the alarm.
I jammed my thumb into her eye.
It was cruel. It was necessary. I pushed hard, feeling the squish of the eyeball.
She shrieked and recoiled, rolling off me, clutching her face.
I scrambled backward, crab-walking through the muck until my back hit the metal shelving. I gasped for air, coughing up water. My throat felt crushed. My shoulder throbbed where she had bitten me.
Gable was on her knees, shaking her head like a wet dog. Blood streamed from her nose, mixing with the ink-black water.
She looked at me with her good eye. The other was swollen shut, weeping tears.
“You can’t leave,” she whispered. She reached into the water and pulled out a letter opener. A silver blade, dull but long. “The story isn’t finished.”
She started to crawl toward me.
I tried to stand, but my boots slipped on the slime. I fell back.
She was slow, methodical. A predator that knew its prey was cornered.
“Elias is waiting,” she crooned. “He’s waiting for his bride.”
I looked around. The stairs were blocked by her body. The elevator was on the other side of the room.
I was trapped in the maze of metal shelves.
“Stay back!” I shouted, my voice a raw croak.
“Shhh,” she hissed, raising the letter opener. “Quiet now. It’s reading time.”
She lunged.
I kicked out, catching her in the chest, but she absorbed the blow and grabbed my ankle. She dragged me toward her. The knife came down.
I threw my arms up.
BANG.
The sound wasn’t the alarm. It was louder. Deeper. A gunshot.
The heavy metal door at the top of the stairs flew open, slamming against the concrete wall.
A silhouette filled the frame, backlit by the emergency lights of the upper floor.
Mrs. Gable froze, the knife hovering inches from my chest. She looked up, squinting into the light.
“Elias?” she whispered, hope breaking her voice.
The figure stepped onto the landing. He was leaning heavily on something. A cane. Or a crutch.
He raised a gun.
“Drop it, Gable,” a voice boomed.
It wasn’t the raspy voice of the Sandman. It was deep, authoritative, and thick with pain.
Julian.
Mrs. Gable snarled, turning back to me. She didn’t care about the gun. She was going to finish it. She drove the knife down.
I rolled.
The blade sparked against the concrete floor, missing my ribs by an inch.
BANG.
A second shot rang out.
A bullet sparked off the metal shelf next to Gable’s head. A warning shot.
“Next one goes in your leg, Martha!” Julian shouted, descending the stairs one painful, limping step at a time. “Get away from her!”
Mrs. Gable looked at Julian, then at me. The madness in her eyes clarified into a cold, hard calculation. She couldn’t win this. Not like this.
She scrambled back, disappearing into the maze of the stacks, moving deeper into the flooding archives.
“Elara!” Julian called out. “Where are you?”
“Here!” I choked out. “I’m here!”
I dragged myself up, using the shelf for support. I was soaking wet, bleeding, and covered in the dissolved history of Oakhaven.
Julian reached the bottom of the stairs. He was using a metal crutch, his face pale and slick with sweat, but his eyes were burning with a focus that terrified me.
He scanned the room, gun trained on the darkness where Gable had vanished.
“Did she hurt you?” he demanded, limping toward me through the water.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “Watch out. She has a knife.”
“She has a lot worse than that,” Julian muttered.
He reached me, grabbing my arm with his free hand. His grip was solid, real.
“We need to move,” he said. “Miller is five minutes behind me. If he finds us here…”
“Gable,” I said, pointing into the dark. “She’s the Mother, Julian. She did it all. She made him.”
“I know,” Julian said. “I heard.”
He looked at the shadows. The sprinklers were still hissing, the strobe lights still flashing.
“Come out, Martha!” he shouted. “It’s over! The book is closed!”
A laugh echoed from the back of the room. It bubbled up, wet and frantic.
“Closed?” her voice drifted through the shelves. “Oh, Julian. My sweet, stupid boy. You can’t close a book when the ink is running. You can only rewrite it.”
A match flared in the darkness.
A tiny, orange flame.
“What is she doing?” I whispered. “Everything is wet.”
Julian’s eyes widened. “The microfiche,” he said. “The film. It’s acetate. It burns even when wet. And the chemicals…”
He grabbed me, pulling me toward the stairs.
“Run!”
The flame dropped.
And the back of the archive, where the chemical solvents were stored, ignited with a whoosh that sucked the air right out of the room.