A sample chapter from THE EYE OF THE ABYSS

Chapter 10: Libraries

Teddy’s alarm clock buzzed exactly one time before his hand smacked it and silenced it. The time was 10:15pm. He cursed himself as he sat up on his bed. He hadn’t fallen asleep. The alarm had only been switched on, just in case. He should have known he would be too anxious to sleep. He crept to the edge of his bedroom door—fully clothed and ready to escape the house—and listened for any hint that his father had heard the brief alarm.

No sounds emanated from the floor below. Then again, if his father had heard what was going on, he might not have taken a blunt approach to stop him. “If I were him, I’d wait silently at the end of the stairs to catch me in the act…” he thought to himself.

Nevertheless, there was no escaping the house from the upstairs windows. The fall was too great. There were no ladders or places to climb. There wasn’t even a thick enough tree branch to grab. His only way out was via the front door or the back door, and that meant getting down there and out without his dad noticing.

Carefully, Teddy crept down the stairs. He had not yet mastered the exact placement of his feet to avoid the wood groaning under his adolescent weight. Each step whined an echoey call, filling the quiet house with its cries. And, with each step, Teddy froze and turned his ear toward the direction of his father, hoping to hear nothing.

In actuality, Arnold was sound asleep and, with the obnoxiously loud ceiling fan in his room spinning madly above his head, he wouldn’t have heard his son if he had stomped down the stairs. Teddy’s journey to the first floor of his house took him three minutes when it could have taken ten seconds.

Anxiously, Teddy stood in the middle of the living room, pondering his next move. He turned his head to the left and the right. To his left was the front door, the more direct and easier way out. His bike was parked right out front, but getting that way meant creeping across the creaking living room floor and out the sometimes creaking living room door.

To his right was the back door in the kitchen. An exit that way would be quieter; the tile floor of the kitchen made less noise under his feet than even the carpet-covered living room floor. The door was quieter too. The only problem was an inescapable sense of dread that came over him whenever he looked at the kitchen exit. There was a cloud in his memory that he could not dissipate. Something had happened the last time he went out there…but he had no idea what. In any case, it was traumatic enough for him to feel like avoiding another trip the long way around the outside of the house.

The longer he stood there, the more exposed he felt. His father only needed to open his bedroom door, on his way to the kitchen for a late-night snack, to see his teenage son—already having been caught sneaking out of school—preparing to sneak out of the house.

There was no more time to think; he had to act fast. So, like any mature almost-adult would do, he looked one more time to the left and the right, sizing up his two options of escape…and squeezed his eyes tightly shut.

 Then he played eeny-meeny-miny-moe.

 He opened his eyes a few seconds later to find his finger pointing at the kitchen. Instantly, he regretted leaving his decision to fate. But, with the decision made for him, he crept to the tile floor and approached the backdoor.

Wisely, Teddy had already penned a note. He pulled it out of the back of his jeans and placed it on the counter. If, in the terribly unfortunate event that his father awoke, called for him, and discovered he was gone, he would at least find the note saying that he was sorry he snuck out and that he would be back before morning to accept his punishment. It’s always better to leave a note when you’re sneaking out. You can always discard it after you get back, if you get back uncaught. Much worse is it to be discovered missing without a note. Parents tend to assume the worst: No rebellious teenager wants to be found after a city-wide police search. It’s much better to come home to angry parents tapping their feet in the kitchen.

Teddy was not rebellious, however. He was merely inquisitive, and a bit smitten. Bonnie wanted to do some digging, and Teddy was not about to say no. The crisp autumn air chilled him instantly. He closed the backdoor behind him and began his slow creep around the house, where his bike was resting by the front steps.

A crack—like a tiny twig snapping under the foot of someone or something—sounded behind him. His head snapped that way, before he even had time to tell himself not to look. An empty darkness stretched out before him. If something was there, he wasn’t going to find it unless it stepped forward.

Breathing deeply, he walked backward along the side of the house until his peripheral vision brightened from the street light between his house and the neighbor’s. His bike was where he left it, and he did not delay mounting it and riding away.

The distance from his house to the heart of Pinewood was about five minutes by car. Of course, five minutes by car was about fifteen minutes on a bike, but it was mostly downhill so Teddy didn’t mind. He just tried not to think about how grueling the uphill journey back would be.

There were a few cars on the highway as he approached the heart of town, but no police cars on patrol (he had hoped to avoid attracting that kind of attention). Main Street was an old, one-way road, and all its small shops and storefronts were closed up for the night. A few cars were parked along the side of the road, but there was no traffic to contend with. To be safe, Teddy pulled his bike into the alley between the library and a sandwich shop next door. To his relief, another bike was already there, leaning against the brick wall of the nearly two-century-old building.

“Pst!” Bonnie hissed from the shadows behind him. Teddy yelped very childishly and spun toward her. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, and she was dressed in a black turtleneck with matching yoga pants. Teddy felt silly at the sight of her (that wasn’t all he felt, but nevermind that): He was still wearing his bright green shirt and blue jeans from school that day, sticking out like a sore thumb. “Got it open,” she whispered, mercifully ignoring his yelp.

Teddy hurried to the back of the library, where a window had been broken by a rock, leaving a space big enough for them to crawl through. “Open?” Teddy asked, examining the vandalism. Open was too gentle a word for what she’d done.

“It’s open, isn’t it?” she asked rhetorically before diving into the library, flashlight in hand. A moment later, the back door unlocked with a *click* and Teddy entered. Bonnie then made a beeline for the small door tucked away behind the librarian’s desk. It was unlocked and, inside, three tall filing cabinets greeted them.

Slowly they rummaged, with Bonnie digging through one cabinet and Teddy the other. Their work was slow, steady, quiet, and totally unfruitful. Feeling the awkwardness of the silence, Teddy spoke: “I saw you arguing with…Hope, I think you called her?”

“Oh, that…that wasn’t an argument. She was just being a jerk.”

“She said something about…your dad…” Teddy didn’t want to specify, but the cat was out of the bag and his curiosity overwhelmed any decent desire to respect someone’s privacy.

“Oh, yeah, well my mom tried to kill my dad when I was a baby.” Bonnie’s words were so blunt and matter-of-fact, Teddy said nothing for several seconds, waiting for some macabre punchline to follow. “With an ax,” she added, “in case you heard Hope say that part, too.”

“Yeah I think I did.” Teddy replied as casually as he could (his voice cracked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo).

Bonnie just shrugged, unfazed. “I don’t even remember her. Apparently, she and my dad were dating long-distance while they were in high school. He took her to his homecoming and was homecoming king. She took him to her homecoming and she was homecoming queen. It was all very storybook fairytale crap. They got married like a month after graduation, and had me about eight months later, so you can do the math there.”

“Yeah.”

“I was almost a year old when they took me to visit friends at a Christmas party in town…” Her words sort of petered out. Clearly she was trying to find the right way to explain what happened next.

Lacking the awareness to give her time to think, Teddy blurted out an interjection: “So she killed him on Christmas?”

“First of all, it wasn’t on Christmas. It was like a few days before. Second, you know she didn’t. You’ve met my dad, remember?”

“Oh yeah.”

“She was apparently…supposedly, I dunno, having an affair with someone else in town.”

“Who?” Teddy asked, as though he would know the person even if she told him.

“Some guy whose wife had died earlier that year,” she said, shrugging again. “Dad confronted her, or them, I guess, and she went psycho. She grabbed an ax and attacked my dad. They had already been arguing, so the police were on the way when she snapped. They got there before she could finish him off. A cop put her down like a rabid dog.”

“Wow,” was all Teddy could say. He was taken aback by the nonchalant way she described her mother’s death. Then again, he realized, she had been only a year old when it happened, so she had no emotional connection to her.

Bonnie sighed and slammed shut the drawer of the filing cabinet she’d been searching. “There’s nothing here.”

“We haven’t checked this other cabinet,” Teddy said, but she cut him off before he could move over to it.

“No, it’s a waste of time. All the dirt this town has hidden is too hidden to be found in a library. This was a bad idea.”

Teddy, not wanting to leave a stone unturned, opened the third filing cabinet anyway. Alas, all there were to find were more copies of local newspapers. “This is an old one…” he said, before holding up one of the front pages for her to see. It was dated 1919 and read “SCANDAL ROCKS HAMILTON MUNICIPALITY.”

“Oh yeah, The Gazette used to devote a whole section to exposing dirt on Hamilton. I had to do a report in the seventh grade on the Pinewood/Hamilton feud. I think it—” She cut herself off as her eyes widened.

“What?”

“We’re at the wrong library.”

“Huh?”

“Come on!” she grabbed his hand to hurry him out the door. It was a simple gesture to her, but it sent a rush of warmth from his finger tips up to his head and down to his toes.

Minutes later, they were peddling across a lonely, quiet road, heading for the railroad tracks that separated Pinewood from the town of Hamilton. “Where are we going?” Teddy asked on the way.

“The Hamilton Library, obviously!” she said. “Back in the day, Hamilton and Pinewood used to be rival towns. Sports teams hated each other. Mayors were always bickering. The whole nine yards. Our paper used to write stories about stuff Hamilton’s paper refused to print.”

“Like what?”

“Scandals, corruption, murders, the kind of hush-hush stuff that makes a town look bad.”

“Okay,” Teddy said, pedaling as hard as he could to keep up with her, “but we’re looking for info about stuff happening in Pinewood, not in Hamilton.”

“Yeah, duh, where would we find info about it? Not in Pinewood. Hamilton would have it, though.”

“Ahh.”

She skided her bike to a halt a minute after crossing the railroad tracks. A sign bearing the words WELCOME TO HAMILTON greeted them, riddled with bullet holes and marred by warn off paint. “Have you ever been here?” she asked. Teddy shook his head. “The library is straight this way, then we take a right on fourth street. It’s not far. Let’s try not to talk.”

“Why?” Teddy asked, but his question went unanswered. As it turned out, Bonnie didn’t need to explain: Teddy could feel the answer without having to hear it. There was an ominous vibe that hung over the town. The houses were not all vacant; a few had the faint glow of lamps burning on the other side of drawn curtains. Even the ones completely in the dark had signs of life: A few they passed had people sitting in rocking chairs, watching nothing, taking in the coolness of the air.

Vagrants had made much of the ex-town their home. The duo rode past a Community Bank whose windows were all broken and whose front doors were gone entirely. A handful of homeless people moved about, settling in for the evening.

“Turn here,” Bonnie said, startling him. She led them down fourth street, a claustrophobic road filled with century-old buildings rising on either side of them. The library looked very much like the one in Pinewood, albeit in far rougher condition.

“I don’t think we’ll need to break any windows,” Teddy remarked as they leaned their bikes against the side of the building. Sure enough, a window next to the front door was completely exposed. Whatever glass had once rested there was long gone. Next to it, the front door was blocked by a large piece of wood, spraypainted with the word: CONDEMNED. “That’s not very encouraging.”

“We’ll be okay. At least we don’t have to worry about any police catching us.”

“No, just some murderous hobo.”

She had no retort for that, probably because it was a reasonable fear to have. Instead, she climbed through the window and led them to the back room where the filing cabinets were kept. It was eerie how similar the layout of the library here was to the one in Pinewood.

As with the previous library, the back room contained three filing cabinets. With a quick glance shared between them, both of them headed for the middle one. In Pinewood, it contained old papers offering dirt on Hamilton. Here, as predicted:

“Jackpot,” Bonnie said, pulling out the first copy of the Hamilton Ledger she could find. The headline read “PINEWOOD MAYOR TAKES BRIBES!” It was dated May, 1922.

“So what are we looking for exactly?” Teddy asked. “There are a lot of papers here.”

“Anything that has to do with murder…or look for the word 'coverup,' or maybe—”

“That’s like half these papers,” Teddy said, exasperated after only a minute of searching. “These are all barely organized. This stack is all from 1941. This one is all from 1980. This one is all from 1976. This one—”

“That stack. Let me have that,” Bonnie said, yoinking it out of his hands. “You keep looking. Search for anything about murders being covered up. I’ve got a hunch.”

Teddy did as instructed, but he found nothing of substance. Instead, he quietly shifted his search for anything to do with Abyss Drive, or his dad, or even his grandfather.

“I found something,” Bonnie said, showing him a copy of the Ledger that bore a picture of Teddy’s house under the caption: “ATTEMPTED MURDER SWEPT UNDER THE RUG IN PINEWOOD!”

“Killers run in the family…” Teddy muttered, remembering something Greg had said on his first day of school. “That’s only attempted murder,” he added, as though that made it better.

“Yeah, because this isn’t about your family. It’s about mine. Look…” She laid the paper down on a small table and shined the flashlight over it. The date in the corner read December 23, 1976. A few days before Christmas. Teddy did not need to do any quick math in his head to know what it meant: He and Bonnie were in the same grade. They were both sixteen. They were both born in 1976.

“This is about your mom…” he said grimly.

“And the Christmas party where she tried to kill my dad was at your house,” she said, equally as grimly. She looked at him, narrowing her gaze as if she was trying to make sense of a blurry image.

“It wasn’t me,” he said clumsily. “I mean, it wasn’t my dad or whatever. He was gone. He left in the 50s. I don’t know who lived there then. It’s just a coincidence.”

“It’s an awfully big coincidence.”

She turned her eyes to the article and began to read. As she did, Teddy did not join her. His eyes focused on hers, watching them as they scanned from left to right, reading each line. When they stopped, he leaned in, waiting for her to summarize what she read, but she never did. The stop was only momentary, and then they continued, left to right, top to bottom, until reaching the end of the article.

“Well?” he asked.

“You didn’t read it?”

“No, I…got distracted.”

“You’re right; it wasn’t technically your house at the time. Some other guy owned it. Gibson. But that’s not the craziest part.”

“Wait…Gibson? I know that name.”

“Forget it; that’s not important right now,” she said, cutting him off. “Your grandad…” Her words fizzled as she wondered how to finish the thought.

“What about him? Don’t stop now. What?”

“Do you know why your dad left in the 50s?”

“No…”

“Listen to this…” She turned back to the paper, choosing to let the author of the article say it so she wouldn’t have to. “…The love triangle ended in an ax-wielding attack, during which, Mrs. Windsome—that’s my mom—,” she added before continuing, “…during which Mrs. Windsome was shot and killed by Pinewood Police Officer Linus Byers, who left her lying dead on the living room floor, next to the ax with which she nearly murdered her husband.” She raised a finger, as if anticipating Teddy’s interruption, and continued. “This event is only the latest in a series of strange and unexplained deaths that have occurred at 1 Abyss Dr.”

“A series…” Teddy muttered.

“Most recently was the death of William Gibson’s wife Clara, who was determined to have choked to death in January of this year. Before that, a previous wife, Lorainne, was killed in an accident in their basement.”

“The word 'basement' sent a chill down Teddy’s spine, completely erasing any thoughts he had about following up on the name Gibson. He had read that name before, but couldn’t remember where or when.

“Most infamously of all,” said Bonnie, continuing to read the paper, “were the murders of Maurine and June Gillespie, wife and daughter of Franklin, whom he killed in July of 1955, for reasons unknown. The murders left one survivor, a son, Arnold.” Bonnie ended her reading and looked at Teddy, who had no words for her. A part of him wasn’t even surprised, something Bonnie picked up on. “You’re taking this well.”

“To be honest, I’d been mentally preparing myself for the worst and…that certainly qualifies. I think we should go home now.”

“Alright,” she said, but they had no sooner turned toward the door when a sound stopped them both in their tracks. The library was a two-story building, and they were on the bottom, presumably alone. The sound of someone walking on the second floor changed their presumption immediately.

Neither one needed to tell the other to move quietly but quickly to the exit. The open window near the front was on the opposite side of the first floor; they would have to cross the stairway to the second floor to reach it. A quick sprint could get them there in a hurry, but it would also make a bit of noise. They decided to move slowly. They made it halfway there when a voice whispered to them from the top of the stairs.

“Dale McDowell…”

Bonnie stopped. Teddy grabbed her arm to help her along, but she shrugged him off. “Why did you say that name?” she asked, loudly and fearlessly.

“You’re looking for him,” the voice answered from the darkness above. Bonnie, in no mood for games, flicked on her flashlight and shined it directly onto the darkened shape. A simple man stood there, elderly, looking homeless, with an old, worn-out cloak over his upper body, and a shaggy grey beard on his face. His eyes were sunken, with great bags underneath that looked black in the harsh angle of Bonnie’s light.

“Who said I’m looking for him?” Bonnie asked.

He lingered for a moment before answering, appearing unthreatening. “Come up here and I’ll tell you,” he said with a feeble, almost quivering voice.

She turned to Teddy and for half a second, he worried she was about to try and talk him into something stupid. Instead, she whispered a single word: “Run.”

They ran. Turning on the spot, they ran for the window. As they did, the library burst to life with the echoing sounds of footsteps. A dozen, two dozen, maybe fifty people seemingly came from every darkened corner of the abandoned building, all converging on one target: The pair of young people trying desperately to escape.