Tara Fuller: Blurred

No. He was no ordinary human. If he were, he’d be dead.

Cash

The library was too quiet. I needed noise. Distraction. I felt like a walking target without either. Not that I was naive enough to think I could hide from the little bastards, but I didn’t want to make it easy for them, either. Me being in the same place twice in a matter of two days made me feel way too obvious. I kept my head down, ducking from book stack to book stack. The musty smell of pages that hadn’t been turned in a decade made my throat itch.

I stopped in the art section, just for a minute, and ran my fingers over the spines of a few of the colorful books collecting dust. What I really wanted to do was curl up in a stack of Jackson Pollock prints and pretend my world wasn’t falling to pieces around me. In the end, my need for answers won out. I didn’t even pluck one from the shelf. Instead I slipped down a slim, dark aisle that contained big, dusty, underused books on mythology, religion, and the supernatural. The people of Lone Pine obviously didn’t get much use out of this section. I could have grilled Finn some more, but honestly that idea sounded about as appealing as putting out a lit cigarette on my arm.

I grabbed a few books, leaving behind the ones I’d read the day before, let my backpack slip off of my shoulder, and sat in the floor. I didn’t know what I was looking for yesterday, and still didn’t. A handbook for how to deal with cheating death? A spell to ward off demons? It sounded so freaking stupid when I put the thoughts together like that, but I couldn’t sit around doing nothing, waiting for some dead guy to show up who might have answers.

I zipped my coat up to fight off the chill consuming me, despite the fact that it was at least eighty degrees in this sweatbox of books, flipped through the two mythology books, and found nothing.

Nothing real that applied to me, anyway. Then again, who was I to say what was real? Nothing felt real anymore. For all I knew, Zeus himself could have been laughing down at me right now, a vampire at his side as they plotted the zombie apocalypse.

I squinted into the last book and found a section on demons. A few sketches. A couple of eyewitness experiences. I froze and ran my finger over one of the drawings. It was one of them. A shadow demon.

Shadow demons are often associated with poltergeists. Not considered to be ghosts, these demons are generally described as black, shapeless, shadowlike entities that appear quickly out of the corner of your eye. Some people have reported the appearances of shadows like these hovering next to their bed while they sleep. These particular demons tend to feed off of emotions. Fear. Depression. Anger.

They- I rubbed my eyes and blinked when the letters started to melt together. They what? I looked down at the page again and the words blurred out of focus.

“Damn it.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, fighting off the headache creeping up on me. A cold prickling pain spread across the inside of my chest, my skull, the walls of my throat. What was wrong with me? I leaned my head against the stack of books behind me and stared up through the towering shelves. One of the skylights was just an aisle over, so you could see the dust motes twirling through some of the stray rays of sunshine that made it over into my section. If only those rays would bring a little warmth my way. I was starting to wonder what it was going to take for me to shake this chill.

My phone started to buzz in my pocket and I flinched. I looked at the screen and sighed. Shit.

“Hey, Dad,” I said.

“Hey, Dad?” he seethed. “Where the hell are you? I know you’re not in class. Your principal just called me. Again.”

I let the back of my head thump against the shelf of books behind me. “I’m…at the library.”

“Don’t lie to me, Cash.”

“I’m not lying,” I said. “I really am at the library.”

“I don’t care if you’re in church talking to the pope. You are supposed to be in class.” Something slammed down against his desk on the other end and I flinched. “Richard’s son got accepted to

Harvard today. Harvard. And what is my son doing? Acting like a lunatic. Skipping school. Pissing away every opportunity to have a successful life that I give him.”

My jaw clenched until my teeth hurt. “Maybe you should adopt Richard’s son, then. You guys could swap since I’m so disappointing.”

Dad’s chair squeaked and he sighed. I could picture him leaned back in his leather chair, pinching the bridge of his nose as if he couldn’t endure another second of listening to me. “Trust me, Richard wouldn’t put up with your shit like I do. You’d be in a military academy by Monday. Hell, maybe that’s what I should have done a long time ago. Maybe I’m the failure here.”

“Look, Dad—”

“No, you look,” he said. “We had a deal. You broke it. I’m calling Dr. Farber.”

I sat up. “The shrink?”

“Don’t start with me. You’re going.”

“But Dad—”

“Get to class.”

I opened my mouth, but he hung up on me before I could get the words out. I stared at my phone for a minute, boiling, anger turning all of those cold prickles of pain into flames. I did not need this shit right now. I didn’t need him telling me what a disappointment I was. He didn’t care if I had a good life —he wanted a trophy, another damn accomplishment to hang on his wall. But if I did happen to make anything out of my life, I’d be damned if he got credit for it. I didn’t need his approval any more than

I needed him. What I needed was someone who could actually help me get my life back.

“Damn it!” I threw my phone across the aisle. I wanted to hit something. I wanted something to hurt as badly as I did. Where was the numbness when I needed it? I balled up all of the anger and hurt inside and tried to force it out of my body on an exhale. It didn’t work. Why did I think it would?

Nothing worked out anymore.

I shivered under my coat as goose bumps rose along the back of my neck, unable to shake the feeling that someone was here. Watching me. An almost painful current spread through my fingers, the strange buzz throbbing in each fingertip, and I flexed my hand trying to get it out.

I sat up, heart pounding, searching for shadows and not finding any. My eyes caught the flicker of a gray coat disappearing around the end of the book stack and I jumped up, clutching the book in my hand.

“Hello?” I made my way down the aisle, listening. It was him. The kid I’d seen in the hall that day.

It had to be. He’d seen the shadows. Hell, he hadn’t just seen them, he’d seemed… amused by them.

These books didn’t have the answers I wanted. He did. “Come on man, I just want to talk.”

No answer. When I got to the end of the aisle, I stopped and looked around, completely alone. Was I seeing things? Was this even real? I knew my insides were broken, failing a little more each and every day. I could feel it, the echo of death, tainting every breath of oxygen I took. What I didn’t want to accept was that my mind might be going, too. I pressed the cool cover of the book in my hand against my forehead and cursed.

“You’re not going to find any answers in those,” a girl’s voice split the silence. “And last time I checked, you had to open them to read the words inside.”

“Maybe I’m trying to read by osmosis,” I replied, dropping the book to my side. I turned around, expecting to see a fellow student giving me crap, but froze when my gaze fell on the unfamiliar girl in front of me.

“Hi,” she said. She leaned with her back against the stacks, holding my cell phone, just a few feet away. Her gold eyes glinted as they looked at me. She looked like a shined-up pearl next to the dusty old books.