Free A Life To Waste by Andrew Lennon

into the empty night, he could get them for free from
the library. He knew were the library was but he had never been in
there, who knows he might even learn something from reading a
little bit as well.
     
    “Hello can I help you?” The
cheerful librarian asked.
    “Hi, yeah um I’d like to join
the library” Dave asked nervously sounding like a fifteen year old
asking for cigarettes at a shop counter.
    “OK just fill this in
please”
     
    The librarian gave Dave a
laminated sheet of A4 paper and a felt tip marker. The form asked
for all the usual information, Name, address, age, date of birth.
Dave filled in the form and handed it back. The librarian quickly
entered his info onto the computer, grabbed a library card and
wrote his name on the back of it. She scanned the barcode, which
was followed by a beep from the computer then handed the card to
Dave.
    “Ok you’re all set” She
said.
     
    “Thanks” Dave said, he noticed
her wiping his details off the laminated form as he walked towards
the bookshelves. “Saving the planet I guess” he thought to
himself.
     
    Dave had never been a reader
before so he wasn’t entirely sure what exactly he would like to
read. He guessed that if he chose books that were similar to his
taste in films he couldn’t go far wrong. Horror was his favourite
film genre so he decided that’s what he would go for with books.
The horror section in the library was a lot smaller than all the
other sections, maybe horror isn’t quite as popular as the other
stuff he thought, maybe there were some horror like books in the
thriller or Sci Fi section? Oh it didn’t really matter there were
still enough books in the horror section, there must be something he will like. He scanned the books for a while
then decided it would be safest to go for authors he had actually
heard of. He chose Dracula by Bram Stoker, Watchers by Dean
Koontz and IT by Stephen King. This should be more than
enough he thought, although he was pretty sure that he probably
would even get much further than IT, it looked like a
mammoth of a book and him not being used to reading it would
probably take him a month to read, he had loved the movie though so
decided this was definitely the book for him.
     
    Ok he was all set, he had slept
solid from around 11am right through until 6.30pm, that had given
him seven and half hours sleep. He drank an energy drink, followed
by a cup of coffee. Then he sat himself down with his bowl of
cereal and IT , now he knew he was going to be able to stay
awake, so he could wait and be ready for this thing whenever it
turned up. Then a terrifying thought entered his mind, what exactly
was he going to do when it did?
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter 13
     
    Three days of Dave’s “night
duty” had passed. He kept to his schedule as planned, sleeping
during the day so he had the energy to stay awake through the
night. He had heard and seen nothing so far, each night he sat in
silence in a barely lit room. The only light was the lamp he placed
on the table next to him so he could see his book. Outside was
dark, there had been no movement apart from the odd car driving
past or one of the teenagers that lived somewhere down the street
stumbling past at early hours in the morning.
     
    Dave started to wonder if he was
wasting his time, was this thing really going to come back to the
same spot three times? Would he be that cocky, or stupid? It
didn’t matter, he had to keep hoping, this thing had to come
back, it was the only way that he would be able to find his
mum.
    After a toilet break Dave
returned to his table and opened up his book, he was a couple of
hundred pages into it now, he had been struggling a little bit with
not being used to reading, but overall he was following the plot
quite well and was enjoying it. It was another really quiet night,
so quiet that it started to make Dave feel on edge. There is
something eerie about complete silence, noise is comforting,