Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,17

then I got to thinking—why doesn’t anybody talk about Crossfield, or go there? And why is it just a ruin? It doesn’t make sense.”

I waited for an answer.

Justin pushed something around on his plate. Ileana didn’t do anything.

Finally, she said, “This is not a good place to talk about it.”

“Oh,” I said. If Justin had said that, I would have said, “Okay, where can we go to talk?” But the way Ileana said it sounded like there was no good place on earth to answer my question.

“I’ve been thinking I might do my local history project on it,” I said.

“Bad idea,” Justin said.

“Why?” I said.

“Excuse us, please, Cody,” Justin said.

And that was the end of our conversation. He and Ileana got up and walked out of the dining hall.

It looked like if I ever wanted complete privacy at Vlad, all I had to do was say the word Crossfield and I’d get it.

What was there about Crossfield that was so awful that Ileana and Justin would both walk out on me? Some weird New Sodom secret that everybody knew and nobody talked about?

I had one more idea. And after my last class, I went to the library.

Ms. Shadwell, the librarian, greeted me like she was a starving wolf and I was a sandwich. Since Ms. Shadwell was one of those jenti who turn into a wolf at times, this made me a little nervous. Actually, Ms. Shadwell always made me a little nervous. She wasn’t much like your usual librarian.

“Master Cody,” she practically roared. “It’s so nice to see you again. Did you have a good summer? I’ve got some great new books I’ve just finished cataloging. Let me show them to you. Do you like fantasy? I forget. Anyway, we’ve got that new trilogy everyone’s talking about. Oh, and I have some new histories. Do you like the Civil War? Oh, and there’s this fascinating book on diesel engines if you like those—”

“Actually, I am here about history,” I said. “I have that project on New Sodom to write this year.”

“Excellent,” she said, like I’d given her a present. “We have everything on New Sodom. Population stats, public records, newspapers, ephemera—would you like to see my ephemera collection?”

“What would that be, exactly?” I asked.

“Oh, ephemera are so much fun,” she chortled. “All kinds of things. Posters, notices, little commemorative booklets and souvenirs. I have broadsides that go back to the sixteen hundreds advertising anvils for sale. Lots of wonderful things.”

“I’ve been thinking about writing about Crossfield,” I said.

Ms. Shadwell stopped chortling. I saw the wolf come into her eyes.

“Oh, I’m afraid there’s nothing,” she said. “That place wasn’t regarded as local.”

“But it’s part of the town, isn’t it?”

“Well, I suppose you might say that it is now,” she said. “But it wasn’t originally. So I’m afraid there’s nothing. We do have a nice collection of sewer maps.”

“Well, maybe I could take a look at those ephemera, then,” I said. I thought it might be a good idea to pretend to be interested in something. And the ephemera, whatever they were, had to be better than sewer maps.

“Excellent,” Ms. Shadwell said, happy again.

She took me across the room to a big wooden door and unlocked it. A sign over the door said SPECIAL COLLECTIONS.

On the other side of the door was a room that looked like it had been built to store nightmares. High, long, narrow, and dark, with a single table running from the door almost to the back wall, it was filled with shelves that ran to the ceiling and were crammed with books bound in black leather. A tall ladder on rails ran to the ceiling. There were little lights with green glass shades spaced regularly down the table’s length, and along the table were two long benches, one on each side. A chill rose from the dark slate floor. There was one window high up, which looked like it had been meant for shooting arrows through. No light from it reached the floor.

“It’s so good you’re getting an early start on your project,” Ms. Shadwell said. “You can have the entire room to yourself today. Later in the year there’ll be students at every one of these lights. Now let’s find those ephemera.”

She took me all the way down to the end of the room and pulled two huge volumes off the shelves. She held them as if they were as light as a couple of paperbacks.

“These are the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” she said. “Of