The Library of Shadows

“Why are you making this so difficult?” Este whined to the circulation computer.

The program the Lilith used for its circulation records probably predated Este’s entire existence, and let’s face it, the early 2000s were not known for their phenomenal digital prowess. When the page refused to load, she dropped her head against the desk. It had been two days since her brush with the Fades, but she was no closer to finding the missing pages—and much closer to single-handedly filing for a grant to update these dinosaurs to iMacs.

Tonight, the library’s first floor was dead quiet. The thing about a college-prep school was that students were supposed to actually prepare for college. The curriculum did not take that lightly. If she listened over the constant whir of the computer’s fan, she could hear clicking laptop keyboards and the occasional “Do we cite in MLA or APA format?” between friends.

“Working hard or hardly working?”

Mateo’s disembodied voice was the last thing she wanted to hear. She answered him with a grunt, refusing to lift her head.

“A bit of both, I see.”

He settled next to her. She could tell only by the way the air shifted and the wisps of hair that wouldn’t stay in her ponytail tickled the back of her neck—when she rolled her head to peek one eye open, his body was nowhere to be found.

Fine by her. She didn’t care to see him or his annoyingly long eyelashes right now. Even if she’d never admit it out loud, some part of her (deep, deep down) appreciated that Mateo hadn’t made himself scarce. He’d crept into her orbit during both shifts since the Fades fiasco.

Thankfully, she hadn’t run into the Fades again since then either, but she’d found every excuse not to trek to the third floor. Just in case.

After she refreshed the page, a shoddy HTML version of the program buffered but nothing more. Patience was not one of her many virtues. Choosing the lesser of two annoyances, she said to Mateo, “I’m trying to run the catalog for every book in section DL97.”

The stapler, the tape dispenser, and the bottle of book-repair glue from her desk scooted across the table as if pulled by invisible strings. Then, the floating desk accessories began to juggle. Thank goodness her classmates were packed into the upstairs study carrels, too busy with the quarter’s first essays to wonder if Este had mastered the power of telekinesis or too sleepy to protest.

“Consider it a loan. DL97. Library book call number.” Mateo hummed, a thinking sound. “Okay, Holmes. I see where you’re going here.”

It wasn’t a bad guess. And, more importantly, it was the only lead they had. So, here she was, just a girl, sitting in front of the oldest computer she’d ever seen, asking it to show her some answers.

Finally, the computer speakers dinged. Este read the flashing black number at the top of the screen with a sigh she felt in her bones. “2,637 results.”

Mateo asked, “Wouldn’t it be just as easy to go to the second floor yourself to look through them?”

“If you want to look through all 2,637 books, be my guest.” Este clicked on the first book. The computer moaned in response as it loaded the new page. “In fact, I think you should get a head start.”

Mateo blinked into view. Even wrapped in a school sweatshirt and a turtleneck, Este shivered as his sudden appearance sent goose bumps down her arms. His existence was an ice-bath shock to her nervous system.

He caught the office supplies he’d been juggling and set them back on the desk. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

Said the boy who could quite literally disappear on command.

Este had finally begun to memorize where everything at the circ desk belonged. Tape dispenser: top-left desk drawer. Recycling can: under the Ellison machine. Flashlight: bottom drawer on the right. She had to shake the flashlight until the batteries lodged into place and the bulb ignited, but once it did, she pointed the beam at Mateo’s chest. Nothing happened.

When Mateo laughed, it tugged at Este’s seams, daring her to unravel. All these years spent trapped at the library, caught between dead and alive, and he still laughed like it didn’t matter.

From his pocket, he retrieved his matchbox and lit a solitary flame. When he cupped his palm around it, his hand faded out of sight. “Nice try, but synthetic light does nothing. It takes the real thing, right from the source. That’s what sees through us.”

He blew out the match, and Este waved away the smoke.

“The point is,” she huffed, “that we have to start somewhere.”

Mateo squinted at the computer screen. “And you want to start with Swedish-meatball recipes?”

Apparently, the Library of Congress classification system’s code for DL97 corresponded with Scandinavian history from 1900 to 1918. So, technically, they were historically accurate Swedish-meatball recipes.

“I don’t see you coming up with any better ideas,” Este snapped. They’d spent the last two shifts going back and forth about whether Consider it a loan meant the pages or The Book of Fades itself, but the pocket for the book’s borrowing card was empty, and none of its circulation records had been digitized—if it had ever circulated at all. Which left Este grasping at the second half of the clue, a rogue call number.

“1900 to 1918,” Mateo said, sighing. He hoisted himself onto the desk, bending one knee up so he could rest his arm on it. “Those were the good old days.”

It was also, conveniently, a time when the Radcliffes could have returned from an overseas trip with an incredibly cursed book. “What are the chances your parents went to Sweden?”

“After the Titanic? Zero. Before . . .” He considered this, bobbing his head on his shoulders like a grandfather clock. “It’s possible. They’d travel periodically, always leaving us at home and always coming back with trunks of books, these books.”

If she wasn’t careful, it would be all too easy to think of Mateo as any other classmate instead of the ghost of the founder’s son. She had admittedly gotten used to having him linger in her periphery. The same way she’d gotten used to wearing her first thong—she didn’t necessarily enjoy it, but it served its purposes.

She tapped a pen against a sticky note, but her eyes glazed over the moment she looked at all the different circ records. Their numbers blurred together. She clicked open a few pages and scanned for any trace of something that would link them to the Fades or the Radcliffes’ questionable book-acquisition techniques. Unfortunately, most of the texts focused on Sweden and Norway’s separation in 1905 and the correct ratio of breadcrumbs to egg yolks in her favorite IKEA meal. As much as she wanted to believe they were on the right path, this already felt like a dead end. It didn’t make any sense why someone would lead them here.

“Maybe it’s actually OL97, instead?” she tried, chewing on the inside of her cheek.

Mateo shook his head. “That call number doesn’t even exist.”

Boy, she really needed to carve out time to study in case Ives gave her a pop quiz on classification.

Around her computer, Este watched Shepherd stampede into the Lilith, a bull in a very quiet China shop. He aimed toward the circulation desk. A midnight weariness clung to his frame, his arms weighed down with textbooks. Este hadn’t pegged him as the bunny-slipper type, but his shoe choice proved her wrong.

“Hey, Shepherd,” she said when he reached the desk. “Trying to finish up the English essay for Mr. Donohue?”

“Yeah, and I lost my library card, but I need to log on to the computers.” He scrubbed a hand over his eyes. When he looked over Este’s shoulder at Mateo, Shepherd jutted his chin up in a bro nod that Mateo reciprocated terribly.

Trailing her fingers over the drawers until she found the right one, Este yanked open a treasure trove of lost library cards. Somewhere between fifty and a hundred thin plastic cards jostled inside. New ones with freshly laminated edges, old ones with yellowed corners, and right on top: Shepherd Healy.

Handing it to him, she said, “I think all the desks on the fourth floor are taken, but there are probably a few open on the fifth floor.”

“Thanks.” Shepherd turned to leave but paused to ask, “Did you ever find that Mateo guy?”

Before Mateo could say anything arrogant and self-incriminating, Este blurted, “Nope. No luck. He’s still a criminal on the loose.”

“Well, good luck, or—” Shepherd scrunched his face up real hard like he was trying to force neural connections to form. “Break a leg, I mean. Arthur says that’s the right way to say good luck.”

No number of quick recoveries could spare her from the way Mateo’s gaze fixed on her as Shepherd trailed up the stairs.

“You sent a whole search party after me,” he said, sounding as pleased as she had imagined.

“I didn’t send anyone,” she said with a huff. “They insisted.”

She preoccupied herself by sifting through the cards, scooping up a handful and letting them waterfall back down. Hadn’t Ives said someone needed to organize this? Now seemed like a great time.

“I have to admit, I’m flattered.” Mateo vanished from one side of the desk and reappeared on the other, hedging into her line of sight. He cocked his head on a fist, haughty as a man made into a marble statue. “I’m a wanted man.”

While the back of her mind debated the pros and cons of reminding Mateo he hadn’t lived long enough to qualify as anything more than an honor roll student, Este sorted the cards into stacks for each student’s graduating year and set aside anyone who would have already graduated. Clawing through the cards, Este found a set of hazel eyes—the ones she inherited. She barely had time to register them before the card got sucked back into the vortex of lost cards.

“My dad’s in here,” she whispered.

“I thought we’d established that him becoming a ghost went against the laws of mortality.”

Este plucked her dad’s library card from the drawer and held it out to Mateo. “No, this.”

In the corner, there was a faded headshot that looked like it had been taken with a disposable camera. He wore the outfit she’d seen in his move-in day photo, the same Radcliffe Prep crewneck she wore now, new then, and wire-rimmed glasses that couldn’t have been trendy, even in the nineties.

“Does it still work?” he asked.

There wasn’t even a barcode on the back, but when Este typed the card number into a system, the computer chugged, spitting out her dad’s student profile. With a few clicks, she revealed a paper trail of who he’d been back then.

The screen loaded a copy of his school roster, flashing with a red expiration date. All his coursework, his grades, his class schedule had been logged in some primitive form of technology, like Windows 95.

She clicked to a page of previous transactions. Poetry Scansion for Beginners, the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, and a short list of school yearbooks topped the list, and that was just the first page.

Mateo had leaned so close that his words felt cool against her cheek. “I see the library fascination is hereditary.”

Shoving a pad of sticky notes and her pen in Mateo’s general direction, she said, “You said my dad was involved?”

“Maybe—”

“Start writing down titles,” Este said. “We’ll see if any of their call numbers match.”

While she rattled off the names of each text, Mateo scribbled until the desk was lost beneath hot pink three-by-three Post-its. Her dad had checked out several periodical loans from the school newspaper The Radcliffe Register, almanacs and atlases, Herbal Remedies and Antidotes, a horror anthology. A whole slew of supernatural case studies. J.R.R. Tolkien and Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot.

“Okay, we’ve got PR3, G1004, PS3509 . . .”

Este skimmed her thumb across his photo. Her dad sported a goofy grin, the same kind he’d worn when they played Uno together and he’d let her have the winning hand. Next to his headshot was his name and enrollment year: Dean Logano, 1997.

“Wait. It’s not a call number at all.” Breathless, Este said, “It’s him. My dad was DL97.”

All the amusement washed out of Mateo’s face. “You don’t think . . .”

“I mean, if you look past all the normal stuff he was probably reading for class, he’d clearly been doing some digging—all these yearbooks, the newspapers. He literally checked out a book called How to Know You’re Being Haunted.” She could barely squeeze the words out around the hammering pulse in her throat. “So, if you’re wondering if I think my dad stole the spire key, tore the pages out of The Book of Fades, and locked the door behind him to conceal the evidence . . . yeah, I’m kind of thinking that.”

Her voice sounded distant, as if she were two thousand miles away and thirteen years old again, sweating in the central California heat, even as the cemetery’s blue canopy hid her from the midday sun. She was digging her dad up, shovel by shovel, and unearthing a part of him she’d never known. For the first time, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what she’d find.