the end of the hallway. She could not see his face, but she knew him nonetheless. He stood there in his tall dark overcoat watching her, as he had watched her in her memories for many years. As the door closed between them, she felt herself slipping away. By the time the elevator reached the lobby, she was unconscious.
She awoke in a hospital bed. Mario had found her and called an ambulance. The doctor explained that Zilpha’s daughter and granddaughter were on their way from New Jersey to help take care of her, but this news did not calm the old woman. If what she’d seen in the basement was real, she would have wished Sarah and Abigail to be as far from New Starkham, Massachusetts, as possible. When she asked the nurse for a phone so she might contact her daughter to convince her to stay home, the nurse simply placed her hand over the old woman’s own, trying to comfort her. Zilpha, however, knew that this was not the type of demon who was quelled with comfort.
Action must be taken, and soon.
This was not good. Not good at all.
1.
Timothy July first noticed the jars lining the top shelf along the side of room 117 at the beginning of the school year, but by mid-April he’d still not looked closer. The specimens inside the jars had been pickled decades earlier in an opaque and yellowish liquid by some forgotten alumnus of Paul Revere Middle School. Over the years, most of the labels had faded or peeled away from the glass, and so the true identity of the strange multilegged worms, the twisted slimy bodies of mammalian fetuses, and the hollow exoskeletons of beetles would be left to the imaginations of those students who bothered to crane their necks and peer into the dusty heights of the classroom’s shadowy wall.
Until today, Timothy had taken no interest in them. No one had, not even Mr. Crane, Timothy’s seventh-grade history teacher, over whose classroom the specimens watched silently and who was presently providing instruction for the next day’s field trip.
“You’ll work in pairs,” said the teacher evenly, pacing in front of the long green chalkboard. “Together, you will choose a single artifact to study. I want ten pages from the two of you, illustrated in the manner of your choice—collage, drawings, charts, graphs, whatever—describing where your artifact is from, how it compares to the art of the era, and how …”
Timothy was not paying attention. Something in one of the jars was staring at him with a glassy black eye.
Stuart Chen leaned across the aisle and nudged him. Timothy jumped. “This is so lame,” Stuart whispered. “I thought field trips were supposed to be fun. I can’t believe he’s actually going to make us do work.”
Timothy glanced at his friend and distractedly grunted in agreement before turning back to the specimen in the jar. It’s funny, he thought, how things that were once invisible suddenly become visible. The black-eyed creature continued to watch him, silent and unmoving, as if waiting for him to turn away so it could shift position … or maybe unscrew the lid. Timothy shuddered with the sudden thought that there might be countless other invisible things out there in the world that he’d never noticed before, watching him all the time.
“The whole idea is dumb,” Stuart quietly droned on, speaking over Mr. Crane’s speech. “I mean, how are we supposed to know what to pick? Anything in the whole museum …?” He glanced at Timothy. “You’re going to have to choose for us. I don’t really care.”
Timothy nodded. “I don’t care either,” he whispered.
To his right, he heard a strange clicking sound. For a brief moment, he thought the thing in the jar had actually moved; then he quickly realized that the sound had not come from the shelves above but from two rows away in the back corner. The new girl was hiding something underneath her desk. She rested her left ankle on her right thigh and stared at something she held in the crook of her knee. Timothy heard the clicking sound again and watched as a small flame from a silver lighter burst at this new girl’s fingertips.
“Let’s get you paired up,” said Mr. Crane, taking a notebook and pen from his desk.
As the teacher began to ask each student whom they would like to work with, Timothy watched the new girl in the last row continue to quietly flick the lighter open and closed.