Free Every House Is Haunted by Ian Rogers Page B

travelling door to door and spreading the word and selling Avon products.
    I will survive, I will survive, I will survive.
    Was Gloria Gaynor ever an Avon Lady?
    Jan 34 (?)
    Soooo tired.
    Hammock rejected me today. Spit me out like a watermelon seed. God, I want a watermelon. If I can only hold on until summer.
    Tentacles are loud tonight. They could wake the dead, ha-ha!
    I will hold on . . . for watermelon . . .



A N IGHT IN THE L IBRARY
WITH THE G ODS
    First there was darkness. Then a series of deep, ratcheting clicks and clacks, followed by a low hiss of escaping air that buffeted his face and tousled his hair. Then, slowly, the darkness not so much lifted as swung away to his left as if an enormous door were opening.
    Lights sputtered to life from somewhere overhead, and he saw it
was
a door. A big one. Not quite as large as the one on a bank vault, but similar in appearance.
    He stepped into a long, windowless room with five tall metal bookcases at the far end. Before him was a long table. Not the fancy kind like in an executive conference room. Just an ordinary reading table like you’d find in a library.
    Was he in a library? He had an idea he was, but he didn’t know for certain. He couldn’t seem to recall exactly where he was—or how he had gotten here. There was something strange about the bookcases. It was so slight that he couldn’t tell precisely what it was, but there was definitely something odd about them.
    He heard someone cough, and turned to see a tall woman standing in the doorway behind him. She was dressed entirely in black—black topcoat, black blouse, black slacks, black gloves, black pointed-toe shoes. Her face was a pallid mask that only served to make her red hair that much brighter.
    “Good evening,” she said in a cool, crisp voice.
    “Is it?”
    “Well, it’s more of a greeting than a description.”
    “No, I mean, is it the evening? I can’t seem to remember.” He looked down at himself, saw that he was dressed in a ratty plaid bathrobe and a pair of slippers. “I can’t seem to remember very much, actually.”
    “I apologize for that,” the redhead said, and slipped past him into the room. Her poise and demeanour exuded an air of indifferent professionalism. As if she belonged in that executive conference room rather than this strange little library. “I realize all of this must be very unsettling. But I assure you, the alternative is much worse.”
    The man in the bathrobe nodded, even though he still had no idea what was going on. “Who are you?” he asked. Then: “Who am
I
?”
    “Names aren’t important.”
    “Are you sure?” The man’s voice wavered. “Because I think it’s actually pretty goddamn important.”
    The redhead waved her hand dismissively. “There’s a difference between knowing a thing and understanding a thing,” she said. “
Knowing
isn’t as important as
understanding
. In this instance—in regards to all of this”—she indicated the entire room—“understanding is key.”
    The man gazed into her cool green eyes for a long moment. His mind felt like a newly washed chalkboard, and the redhead was the teacher about to impart some important lesson. Strangely, he found it wasn’t difficult at all to put things aside and simply go with the flow.
    “First,” she began, “I will tell you something—something you don’t necessarily need to know, but maybe it will help to put you at ease.”
    The man nodded mutely.
    “You’re not in trouble,” she said in a voice that was both calm and firm. “I’m not with the police or any government body. Nor have you been kidnapped. Your life is not in danger.” She raised her hands again. “You’re standing in a little-known room within the Fisher Rare Book Library.” She added: “That’s at the University of Toronto.”
    The man nodded even though he didn’t know where that was exactly.
    “To those who know of its existence, it’s simply called the Restricted Collection. You