Awake Read online

  “I’ll eat this, but if you think that I’m sleeping with you just because you paid for my meal you’re mistaken. My decisions about my body are mine and mine alone,” Lee said, smiling as he took his plate.

  “Pfft, I could get you in bed anytime I wanted,” Ivy said. She dug into her omelet.

  “You wish, that’s so sexist,” Lee said, after swallowing a bite and then taking a drink from his orange juice.

  They joked about sex for the entire meal. When they’d finished they continued their mock argument until they eventually ended up back in bed.

  “That was me seducing you by the way, not the other way around,” Lee said after they’d finished and gone back to watching TV.

  “Sure it was, you just keep thinking that,” Ivy said, and gave him a peck on the cheek.

  “God I love you.”

  They lay about for a few more hours, Lee trying unsuccessfully to get some more sleep. It was maddening. It was like only eating one small meal a day: just enough to keep him going, but not enough to ever fill him. He thought that he would have lost his mind already if it wasn’t for Ivy and Ben being with him. And he didn’t mind Stella as much anymore, either.

  “So what do you want to do for lunch? I’m starting to think that I need to get out for at least a little bit,” Lee said, giving up on his nap and sitting up.

  “I’m not sure.” She furrowed her brow the way she did when trying to come up with something, which Lee thought was adorable no matter how many times he saw it. “Do you want to go back to that pizza place? It’s not too far and I wouldn’t mind eating there again. I’m not as big a fan as Ben seemed to be, but it was pretty good,” she said.

  “That doesn’t sound bad, when do you want to head out?”

  “Now?”

  “You read my mind.”

  To their dismay, when they got out of the building they found that it was raining. They’d had the curtains drawn in the hotel room and he hadn’t thought to take a peek out to check on the weather, since it had been so nice every day they’d been in the city so far.

  “Darn, this sucks,” Ivy said as they started walking towards the pizza parlor.

  “I know, it looks like there’s a guy at the end of the block selling umbrellas though,” Lee said, pointing. “I’ll get us a couple.”

  They stopped at the stand and Lee bought two umbrellas for ten dollars off of the Russian man running the booth. As they walked away, a New Yorker passed by them, saying “Here’s a tip, those umbrellas are good for one day of rain,” without even stopping.

  “Only a New Yorker can help you out while still sounding rude,” Lee said to Ivy, smiling.

  They arrived at the pizza parlor and when they went up to order, the man from the day before recognized them. “Where’s your friend from yesterday? He said he’d come back!”

  “Oh I’m sure he will later. He’s sleeping off a hangover, but he’ll probably be here within half an hour of waking up,” Lee said, laughing with the man.

  “He’d better be here or I’ll have to track him down and bring a pizza to him,” the man said.

  Lee and Ivy decided to order slices, since there was no way the two of them were going to down a whole pie. Ivy insisted Lee order first, saying “I still can’t figure out what I want.”

  Deciding to branch out, he got a slice of the chicken and broccoli pizza and one of the eggplant pizza. “That sounds good,” Ivy said when she heard him order the eggplant pizza, and ordered another slice of it. Lee asked for water to drink along with the food, hoping that it would help the mild hangover he had, and Ivy followed suit.

  “Man that guy was right about the umbrellas, maybe even exaggerating about how long they last,” Lee said as he ate, examining his umbrella sitting on the table. “Mine is already starting to come apart in some places and that was what, ten minutes ago?”

  “Mine’s coming apart too,” Ivy said, studying hers as well. “But what can you expect out of a five dollar umbrella?”

  “Good point,” Lee said, taking a bite. “Man, this eggplant pizza is really good.”

  “Yeah it is. Good call.”

  They finished up their meal and trudged back through the rain to the hotel. By the time they got in, Lee’s umbrella was leaking and close to completely coming apart, as was Ivy’s. They threw them away in the lobby’s garbage can and went up to their room.

  They watched some more TV, Lee succeeding this time at getting in a brief nap before a dream he couldn’t remember startled him awake after only half an hour.

  Shortly after he woke up there was a tap on the connecting door. “I’ll get it,” he said to Ivy. Ben was standing at the door, with Stella sitting on the bed watching the TV behind him. Both were dressed, and looked like their long sleep had managed to stave off the worst effects of the drinking they’d done the night before.

  “Oh shit, you just discovered this door too?” Lee said. “I thought it was a closet.”

  “I knew it connected the rooms. Haven’t you ever been in a hotel before?” Ben said. “Anyway, Stella and I wanted to see if you guys wanted to go by that pizza place to get some food.”

  Lee laughed. “We just went there a little while ago. The owner actually asked why you weren’t with us. I told him you’d go there as soon as you got up, looks like I was right.”

  “He asked about me? Oh my god, I feel so special now. I’m his biggest fan! The man is an artist,” Ben said jokingly. “I guess we’ll head down there by ourselves, then.”

  “Oh yeah it’s raining out there, in case you hadn’t checked. There’s a vendor down the block selling cheap umbrellas, but they don’t last long.”

  “Thanks for the tip, we’ll come by when we get back and see what you guys are up to,” Ben said.

  “Sounds good, talk to you then,” Lee said, and closed the door.

  As soon as the door was shut and Lee had sat back down on the bed, Ivy commented on their exchange. “Man, you called that one, he really is obsessed with the place,” she laughed.

  “Yeah he is, not that we’re any better. We went there today too, after all,” Lee said, smiling.

  “Well, it is pretty good.”

  Lee was quickly tiring of watching TV, and he could tell Ivy was too. Fifteen minutes of yet another idiotic sitcom later, Lee turned to Ivy and said “Man, I don’t know how much more relaxation I can take. I’d forgotten how boring TV can get after a while.”

  “I’m getting kind of bored too, what do you want to do?”

  “Maybe we could go with Ben and Stella to dinner and a movie later. I know we told them we’d take a day off, but I’m sure they’ll be up for it.”

  “Yeah, Stella’s the type of girl who has to be moving constantly, whenever she’s not passed out drunk,” Ivy agreed. “That’s going to be hours from now though, what should we do in the meantime?”

  “We haven’t seen the public library yet. I’ve wanted to check it out ever since I saw Ghostbusters for the first time. I’d almost forgotten about it, but we passed by it in a cab the other day and I noticed the lions out front.”

  “I wouldn’t say that scene in Ghostbusters is one of the portrayals that make me want to see it, what with the ghosts and all, but considering the books you write, it makes sense for you, I suppose,” Ivy said, giving him a wry grin. “I’m in.”

  “Should we wait for Ben and Stella to get back?”

  “Nah, I’ll just call Stella and tell her we’re going there. There’s no way she’s going to go visit a library, no matter how famous it is.”

  “Ben would probably want to go, but I doubt he’d leave Stella by herself, now that she’s come around to him.”

  “I think she really likes him, he’s got her figured out. Your friend is pretty smart - he knows how to be sweet without being a doormat, exactly her type.”

  They were able to catch a cab quickly. As it took them to the library Ivy called up Stella and told her where they were going, as well as asking her and Ben about the movie and dinn
er plans.

  “What’d they say?” Lee said when Ivy finished the call.

  “She said they’d be cool with going out later, and thanked me for us for not dragging her along to the library. I could hear Ben in the background and he sounded pissed that we were going without him, though.”

  “Meh, he’ll get over it.”

  He felt like something was off almost as soon as they got out of the cab. He studied the area around him closely. The long flight of steps leading up to the entrance wasn’t nearly as packed as it had been when he’d seen it the first time while passing by, presumably due to the weather, but that wasn’t it. He wasn’t quite sure what it was.

  The strange feeling grew stronger as he began walking up the steps towards the lion statue and the library. Ivy followed him, oblivious to his unease. Though Lee almost expected the statue to change into some kind of unrecognizable horror, it remained its usual noble self, looking exactly like it had the thousands of times he had seen it in movies and photographs.

  Ivy walked up beside him. “Wow, this is even cooler to see in person. The detail is so intricate. I feel like it’s going to jump at us at any second,” she said, which didn’t help his feeling of unease.

  As they ascended the rest of the stairs up to the library, Lee began to hear a low humming sound. He looked around, but couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

  “Do you hear that?” he asked.

  “Hear what?” Ivy said, looking at him with a confused expression

  “Nothing.”

  Lee kept hearing the hum, even after they walked through the front door. It wasn’t quite enough to disturb his hearing, but it did unnerve him even further. Before his diagnosis, sometimes he’d hear a high-pitched whine when around a television set, so he told himself it must be something like that. But he knew it wasn’t. There was something about the tone of the buzz. It sent shivers through his body and made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  “Are you okay?” Ivy asked, noticing something was off with him.

  “Yeah, I just keep hearing this weird low buzzing, maybe part of my hearing is going out or it’s an auditory hallucination or something,” Lee said.

  “Should we head back to the hotel?”

  “No, we just got here.” They were standing only a few feet inside of the front doors. “I want to check out that big reading room that’s in Ghostbusters.”

  Overhearing them, an elderly female librarian sighed and said, “I believe you’re talking about the Rose Reading Room. It’s that way,” she pointed in the direction of the room, “but please keep your voices down, don’t take any pictures, and try not to be a disturbance. This is a library after all, not Times Square.”

  “Uh, thank you,” Lee said.

  “Man, what’s her problem?” Ivy said after they’d walked away, towards the direction the librarian had pointed them in.

  “They probably get a lot of loud tourists here. She’s trying to run a library, but people like us treat it as a tourist attraction,” Lee reasoned. “Not that we’re loud or rude tourists.”

  “That makes sense I guess,” Ivy said. “She could be a little nicer, though.”

  They found the reading room to be even more grand and majestic than it looked on television. It was completely packed with people sitting at the numerous tables reading, studying, and doing work on laptops in an almost eerie silence. It was just the way it looked in Ghostbusters. He felt like he was stepping into the television of his childhood.

  Lee couldn’t enjoy it much though, because as soon as he’d set foot into the room with Ivy, the humming amplified to the point that it made his head start throbbing painfully.

  “Wow, this is really something, isn’t it?” Ivy said.

  Lee opened his mouth to answer, but just then an overwhelming nausea overcame him and he knew he was going to throw up. He spun, starting to gag, and ran back to some bathrooms they’d walked by that were outside of the reading room.

  Holding his hands over his mouth to keep himself from vomiting all over the floor, he barely managed to get into the men’s room and into an empty stall before everything he’d eaten for lunch came spewing out of his mouth and into the toilet bowl. Whoever had used the stall last had left the toilet unflushed, and the smell of the previous occupant’s waste made him throw up even harder as he fumbled for the toilet handle to flush it.

  Just when he thought he’d finished, the buzzing sound amplified even further and he threw up again, only bile left to come out. Even after he had nothing left to offer up, he continued dry heaving for several minutes.

  Finally he stopped heaving, even though the buzzing continued. As he walked out of the stall and went to wash his hands, a few of the men in the busy bathroom looked at him quizzically, but more either ignored him or pretended to have no idea what had happened. Thankful for once for the “I’ve seen everything” attitude that New Yorkers had, Lee washed his hands and cleaned the vomit off of his face as best he could with a damp paper towel.

  “Are you okay? What happened?” Ivy asked when he walked out of the bathroom, waiting for him a few yards away from the door.

  “Just started to feel sick again, like yesterday,” he said.

  “Is it that pizza place? We shouldn’t go there again,” Ivy said.

  “It’s not them. You’re fine, and Ben and Stella were fine yesterday after we’d been there,” Lee said. “It’s this damned disease. That buzzing sound keeps getting worse and worse.”

  “Let’s head back then, you’re starting to get pale,” Ivy suggested, looking worried.

  “Alright,” Lee conceded, not having the energy to disagree.

  18

  As they made their way to the front of the library, Lee’s attention was caught by something out of the corner of his eye. He stopped and turned to look.

  It was a shrunken head sitting on top of a shelf next to some books, as though it were a bookend. It was maybe six inches across and its eyes and mouth were sewn shut. A long black ponytail hung from the scalp, and suddenly Lee was sure that the man who had killed the head’s former owner had used the ponytail to pull the man’s head back and saw his throat open with a crude knife, the vision playing out in front of him as clear as day.

  He noticed that the books next to the head were ones he’d never heard of before. Genocide for Beginners, The Eye of Archon, Lucifer’s Just Journey, and more. One book that didn’t have its title on the spine appeared to be bound in some kind of leather that Lee had never seen before, thinner and lighter than the rest.

  “This is awful, what’s stuff like this doing here?” he said, turning to Ivy.

  But she wasn’t there. No one was. What had moments before been a busy and bustling library corridor, had suddenly become empty and silent. It had gotten darker too, the only light coming from torches and chandeliers full of candles that had somehow replaced all of the electric lights.

  The library had changed too. The classical design of the interior had changed to a dark and gothic one, with each pillar a clawed leg holding up the roof, and intricate scenes of demons and damnation carved into every wall. One particularly disturbing wall appeared to show the horrors of hell, with demons torturing damned victims in a variety of disgusting and creative ways.

  Lee spun around to look for a door, but they’d all disappeared, save the one that led back to the reading room. Desperate, and hoping that he’d find a another way out through the reading room, he went through.

  The reading room had transformed into a demonic chapel. The busy tables had been replaced with empty pews that stretched out across the room in rows. At the far end of the room, opposite Lee, was an altar shaped like an open hand. Behind it was a huge red pentagram painted on the wall, illuminated by a source Lee couldn’t quite make out. The otherworldly light both frightened and fascinated him.

  Something moved behind the altar, pulling Lee’s attention away from the pentagram; it was a shadowy figure, an impossibly tall, thin, black thing. It wa
s looking at him. In an instant, it went from frozen to animated, moving around the altar and starting towards him with unnatural speed, its gait distinctly inhuman.

  He froze for a moment, but thankfully, unlike in his dreams, he quickly figured out how to move again and spun, away running out the way he came.

  Only the room he found himself in wasn’t the one he’d come from. It had been replaced yet again, this time by a circular room with a pit in the center of it and a door on the other side. There was a ledge around the pit to the door, but it was only about two feet wide, just wide enough for him to edge across.

  Lee knew he had to get to the door, but hesitated, not wanting to go anywhere near the pit. He heard the thing in the other room approaching and forced himself to start shuffling along the ledge around the pit to the other side before it could come through the door. As he rounded the pit he could hear something deep down at the bottom of it, growling. He chanced a quick glance down into the pit, but it was so deep that he couldn’t see whatever horror was lurking in its depths.

  Just as he reached the door he heard the thing explode through the door behind him and charge into the room. Not daring to look back, he arrived at the door opposite the one the monster had come through, and threw himself through it.

  He was in a hallway that seemed to be a hundred feet long. He realized with dread that there was no way he’d be able to run that distance without the creature catching him. He started running anyway, moving as fast as he could. A few seconds later he heard the door behind him burst open and the thing chasing him uttered a noise that was a dreadful combination of a growl and a scream. Not daring to look back, Lee kept running, moving faster than he could have dreamed he could..

  The hallway narrowed as he got closer to the door, so much that he had to turn his shoulders slightly to keep them from scraping the walls, but he didn’t let that slow him down. As he ran, he could hear the creature gaining on him, huffing hungrily.

  The narrowing hallway must have slowed the creature, because it seemed to stop gaining on him, and instead it started keeping pace with him. He could hear it scraping across the walls, only mere feet behind him, with something that he could only guess were claws.