Ghost Girl Read online

  This was true for the most part. Zee wasn’t scared of ghost stories; in fact, they were her favorite. She wasn’t scared of spiders or monsters or the dark or even dying. But no matter what she did, she couldn’t get her feet to move one step forward into the new part of the cemetery. Next to the gate was a large weeping willow tree, and its limbs swayed gently, as if daring her to go in.

  A cold wind whipped up, sending leaves across the path in front of her. The sun moved behind a storm cloud, suddenly covering the cemetery in shadows. Something inside her turned cold. She spun around, sure someone was watching her. Her fingertips started to tingle as her eyes bounced from shadow to shadow, stone to stone. Her heart was in her stomach. Something felt . . . wrong.

  Off.

  “Elijah?” she said softly. “Is that you?”

  There was a large black shadow that seemed to move from one gravestone to the next, creeping closer to her. It looked like a dark hunched thing, crawling on all fours across the grass inching closer to her. She told herself it was just Elijah, but she knew that Elijah didn’t move like that. No human moved like that.

  The shadow dipped behind a large headstone with a solemn angel carved on top and then seemed to vanish before appearing again behind another large cross, growing and oozing until the shadow had doubled, now twice the size of the cross.

  As it got closer, the shadow morphed into a thing with four legs, a large humped back, shaggy ragged fur, a sloping snout. It was bigger than any dog she’d ever seen in her life, and it moved with the grace and confidence of a wolf. As it crept closer, ducking in and out of the shadows, Zee could swear it was watching her. Just a stray, she told herself. Someone’s lost dog.

  The creature crept closer, coming out of the shadows. It stopped and lifted its huge head. She could see its fangs jutting out of its snout, lips curled back in a snarl. When it looked at her, her heart froze solid in her chest.

  She blinked, but nothing changed.

  The dog . . . hound . . . wolf had bloodred eyes—not just the pupil, but actual streaks of blood running from its eyes, down its ragged fur, staining its jutting teeth. It stood there still as a statue, those red eyes fixed on her, watching as if daring her to make a move.

  As if daring her to even try to run.

  When her scream finally clawed its way up her throat, it didn’t take long for Elijah to come running out of the new section of the cemetery.

  “What happened?” he asked. Zee wrenched her eyes off the hound and turned to her friend. “Why were you screaming like that?”

  Zee looked back to where the dog had been, but it was gone.

  “I saw . . .”

  “What did you see?”

  As her heart banged around in her chest, the word she wanted was right on her tongue.

  A demon. She saw a demon.

  But instead she said, “A . . . dog.”

  Elijah started to laugh. “A dog got you screaming like a baby?”

  “Shut up, Elijah,” Zee said, squeezing her hands so he wouldn’t notice how they shook.

  “Has the Great Unspookable Zee finally found her terror?” He was doubled over at this point. “Scared of a dog!”

  “Listen to me,” Zee said. “It wasn’t a normal dog. It was huge. Like a wolf. And it had . . .” She swallowed, knowing how this was going to sound. But she’d seen it with her own two eyes. “It had red eyes. Bleeding red eyes.”

  Elijah smiled. “Is this another one of your stories?”

  “It’s not a story, Elijah. I really saw it.”

  “Sure,” he said with a smirk. “I have to get home. My dad is going to kill me. Let’s cut through the new section and take the other gate down by Main Street.” He headed toward the willow tree.

  “Wait, no,” Zee said. The thought of stepping one foot past that willow tree was too much for her to bear. Her father once told her that willow trees grew in the spots that weeping mothers died. When she asked what they were weeping for, he said, “Their children.” She pushed the thought out of her head. It was too much. “I want to go the way we came.”

  “But that way’s farther.”

  “You go wherever you want. I’m going the way we came,” Zee said. She’d had enough. She couldn’t shake the image of that bloody-eyed dog and it hurt that Elijah didn’t believe her. This is what happens when you’re always telling stories, Zee. Was her imagination just in overdrive, like her sister always told her it was?

  She shook her head. No. She knew what she saw. It was real.

  “Zee?” Elijah said. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine. I just . . .” She looked up at the willow tree again. “I don’t want to go that way.”

  “Because of the dog?”

  “Yeah,” Zee lied. A breeze sent the willow tree’s branches toward her, stretching like hundreds of arms. Without thinking, she stepped back to avoid their touch.

  “Okay,” Elijah said. “We’ll take the long way.” He said it like it was no big deal, and for that Zee was thankful.

  On the walk home, Elijah told Zee the plot of the book he was reading—about some English girl who had a pet that could change shape. Something about fighting armored bears. There were no ghosts or monsters, so normally it wouldn’t have been the kind of thing Zee would have cared about. But today, after what happened, it was nice to be quiet for a change.

  And even when she caught sight of another shadow out of the corner of her eye, she bit her tongue and tried to just listen.

  3

  MOST EVERYTHING WAS CLEANED UP FROM THE STORM BY THE NEXT day, so that meant school was in session. Zee went through her morning trying not to think about the dog. While she knew what she’d seen in the cemetery, the farther she got from that moment the less real it seemed. It felt instead like something she’d watched on a movie screen. As the hours passed and day turned to night and night turned to day, she was mostly convinced that it had just been a trick of light. A shadow. It was probably just some poor old mangy thing that got loose in the storm and was lost. Poor thing was probably hungry. Or sick.

  “Zera?”

  In fact, she reasoned, by now someone would have probably put up a Lost Dog sign for the poor thing. With a reward. A hundred dollars for the safe return of . . . Pickles. Or Lucky. Or some other cute name like that.

  “Zera!”

  Zee jerked in her desk and snapped to attention in the classroom. “Yes?”

  “It’s time to go,” Mr. Houston, her history teacher, said. The rest of the class was lined up near the door, jackets on, backpacks slouched on shoulders. Today was the trip upstate to the big library. How could she forget?

  Knobb’s Ferry didn’t have much, but it had a library. Sadly, it was about the size of Zee’s living room and only had two computers. The ladies who volunteered there were nice enough, but Zee had gone through every book in the children’s section by the time she was in third grade. About an hour upstate in New Castle there was a real library. With three floors. It was the library that Zee always wanted to go to but rarely did. With Abby working as much as she did, it was hard to find the time to get all the chores and grocery shopping and homework done let alone an extra trip to the library. It was one of her favorite places on earth. And today, they were getting a backstage tour.

  “I’m coming,” Zee said, scrambling to get up and get her coat out of the cupboard.

  “A touch distracted?” Mr. Houston said.

  Zee scowled, grabbed her things, and lined up at the door behind Nellie Bloom. Nellie was perfect, or at least she acted like she was. Her strawberry-blond hair in perfect curls, her dress perfectly matched to her shoes. Zee shuffled behind her in her jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt she already wore two . . . or maybe three . . . days in a row now. Nellie gave a condescending sniff because perfect Nellie, to be perfectly honest, hated Zee.

  “Nice job, zoned out again, huh, Zero,” she said with a muffled laugh, making the shape of an O with her hand.

  “Shut up, Nellie.”

&nbs
p; And Zee, for the most part, hated her right back. It was a feud that had started a year earlier over something trivial. Since then it had blown up into an all-out war.

  Mr. Houston led the classroom out to the waiting bus. The driver opened the door, and Mr. Houston said, “Where’s Principal McCaffery? I thought he was coming with us.”

  “Beats me,” the driver said.

  Mr. Houston gave a quick worried glance around the parking lot before muttering, “Strange,” under his breath. He turned back to his class. “Let’s go, kids.”

  They loaded onto the bus, and Zee didn’t bother to search the rows for a familiar face. Elijah wasn’t taking this trip with them. He was in advanced classes, and they had their own, better field trips. Like to the city for museums and science centers. That’s what you got to do when you were really smart. Zee slipped into an open seat, scooting all the way in toward the window. Martin Pearsly sat down next to her, giving her a quick glance before burying his head in a book with a spaceship on the cover. Zee respected people that wanted to be left alone. She watched the landscape zip by, town turning into highway running past fields of grass. She let her mind wander back to a story she’d been thinking about and was deep into what Abby called “Planet Zee” by the time the bus pulled off the highway and dipped down the hill toward New Castle’s public library. It was right on the river, so as they pulled into the parking lot, light bounced off the water and lit the building up. She tried to remember the last time she’d been here. It had to be before her father left to find work upstate. For a brief moment, Zee couldn’t remember how long that had been. It felt like forever even though she knew it wasn’t.

  The bus door hissed open, and the sixth-grade class clambered off.

  “Okay, line up,” Mr. Houston was shouting as the class ignored him and gathered in groups. He finally got control of the situation and led them up the front steps toward the doors, where a woman in a red skirt and black blazer, hair in a braided halo, waited.

  “Welcome to New Castle library,” she said, holding her arms wide. “I’m Mrs. Washington, one of the archivists. Today we are going to have a tour of the parts of the building that the public doesn’t usually get to see. But before we venture inside, I want you to take a look at the outside of the building. Notice anything interesting?”

  Zee stared up at the wide, flat face of the building, two vast architectural wings jutting out on either side reaching back toward the water. There were quotes about reading carved into the walls and a large revolving door. Everyone near her shrugged and shuffled their feet.

  “No one? For instance, the two wings on either side. Does that remind you of anything?”

  Zee sighed and raised her hand. “An open book.”

  Mrs. Washington lit up. “Yes, that’s correct. Did everyone hear? The library was designed to mimic an open book with these two wings acting as the covers and the front being similar to a spine. I’m delighted you noticed.”

  Nellie Bloom muttered something under her breath, but Zee didn’t catch it as they followed Mrs. Washington into the building. The truth was, her father had told her that little nugget of trivia years ago. He had a thing for useless trivia, especially about art and architecture. She missed him so badly sometimes—like right this second—that the ache knotted in her chest like a second heart. Her sadness was a thing she couldn’t figure out how to carry.

  The lobby was grand and ornate, two marble staircases leading off to the left and right. Down the hall you could hear the noise from the children’s room, but here in the lobby all was deliciously quiet. Ahead of her Zee could see a wide reading room with majestic columns and big red reading chairs. In the center was a round wooden pen inside which people were working, checking out and returning the public’s books. Mrs. Washington ushered them into a side office where they left their coats and their lunches. Before they started, she gave everyone a small slip of paper that contained a series of letters and numbers: a call number.

  “We’re going to be using those later, so be sure to put it somewhere safe,” she said.

  The tour took them through the public areas first, the art department and the history department, before dovetailing through literature. It was there at the back of the literature department that they passed through a door marked “Library Employees Only.”

  Zee had never been in any of the behind-the-scenes spaces of the library, and she was giddy down to her bones. Mrs. Washington herded the class onto a freight elevator. It was the old kind that had a large metal grate that groaned and came slamming down like a guillotine after the door closed, startling the class. Mrs. Washington smiled. “Just a noisy old thing. Nothing to worry about.”

  The gears roared to life, sounding like a monster waking up as they plunged downward.

  “These are called the decks. They are mainly storage areas. We have four stories’ worth of decks under the library, which means more of this library is underground than aboveground.”

  Zee let those words sink in as the elevator came to a stop and groaned open. The decks were darker than upstairs, and exit arrows were marked across the floor. The shelves were metallic and bursting with books, most of which were coated in a fine layer of dust. It was more than a little spooky.

  “These are items that we need to keep but that don’t get as much use as the more popular items upstairs. If patrons are interested in seeing them, we send down a page to bring the book up to them. We also keep rare books in a special room down here. Follow me.”

  They wove through the stacks, the ceiling low. There were small metal staircases here and there leading deeper underground.

  “It’s gross down here,” someone muttered. Steve Cotter pulled a book from a shelf and blew the dust off it, which caused Amanda Peal to erupt into a sneezing fit. Before Mrs. Washington could see, Mr. Houston snatched the book away from him and returned it to the shelf with a stern look. Mrs. Washington chattered on at the front talking about the foundation of the building and how long it had been around for. She mentioned that with the river right next to them, extra protection had to be built to ensure that the decks would not flood.

  With a shiver, Zee pictured all those beautiful books floating underwater, their pages fanning out like the hair of a mermaid.

  “Come now, follow me,” Mrs. Washington chirped as her heels clicked down the metal staircase to the next deck. It was even darker and dustier down here. The class followed her down the steps. At the end of each row was a small timer dial. As she turned dials, the light in each row flicked on. “We have timers down here to ensure that we are not wasting electricity.”

  The timers ticked a slow, steady pulse that Zee found unnerving. Because Mrs. Washington couldn’t turn them all on at the same time, instead of just ticking to one beat it sounded like rapid fire. Tickatickatickaticka. How strange, Zee thought, to feel so out of place in a space I love so much. It was a cold feeling, like an ice cube in her belly, something she didn’t recall feeling before. That is, prior to yesterday in the cemetery . . .

  “Now,” Mrs. Washington said, “before we go to the Morgue—”

  “MORGUE!” Amanda Peal shouted as the rest of the class descended into chatter.

  Nellie crossed her arms and said, “So immature.”

  “Quiet, quiet,” Mr. Houston said, shushing the group.

  “Yes, yes,” Mrs. Washington said with her hands up. “I know it’s a strange term. The Morgue is our archival storage area. It’s a newspaper term for the storage space in which old papers are kept, so we’ve adopted that term for this space. So,” she said, “no dead bodies or anything. Though I will say, since it’s October, rumor has it this whole building is haunted.”

  “Haunted?” said Clare Wrobleski. “What do you mean ‘haunted’?”

  “Oh, just stories about workers who died during the construction of this building or older librarians who keeled over and didn’t realize they were dead.” Mrs. Washington chuckled, but the kids looked serious. “It’s an old building. Ol
d buildings carry a lot of history. But I assure you there is nothing in this place that will hurt you.” Mrs. Washington clasped her hands together. “Now before we go on, take out those slips of paper that I gave you at the beginning of the tour.”

  Zee pulled her slip out of her pocket. 398.25 R was written in neat handwriting.

  “We’re going on a little scavenger hunt. So let’s see if you can find the item attached to that call number.” Mrs. Washington produced a small box of little pencils, which the class took and passed around. “The items I selected for you are fragile, but not too fragile. Once you locate them, write down the title and author from the spine. DON’T remove anything from its resting place . . . er, shelves. We’ll meet back here in ten minutes.”

  The class dispersed, some excited, others lagging behind and complaining about being bored. Zee glanced down at her call number, and then searched the shelves for direction. Her call number pulled her farther from the group, out to where the timer lights had not been turned on yet. She turned the dial just like Mrs. Washington had, and a splash of light and the ticking of the timer filled the aisle.

  This must be what it’s like to be a librarian, she thought. It seemed like a good job if you had to have a job. Unless of course, you could make storytelling your job. Getting paid to tell stories seemed to Zee like a dream come true.

  She continued down the long row of shelves, moving between the dusty tomes, getting farther from the group. The rest of the rows were still dark, and for a second she was sure she saw snatches of shadow moving between the stacks. Her arms were awash with goose bumps, and her breath hitched in her throat. It was hard not to think of the cemetery shadows and the hound. She turned the dial on the edge of the next row, but nothing happened. Zee glanced down the long dark row of books and then steeled herself and kept walking.

  It’s just a library, she thought. You’re being silly. But it was still there, that cold rush in the belly feeling. One step after another and she reached the end of the dark row. She glanced back and swore she saw another shadow move, slipping like a ghost between the shelves. It made the hairs on her arms stand up.