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Ramona gulped in dark, musty air. She hadn't moved since the door at the top the stairs had closed. She still craned her neck in that direction, the imprint of the ever-narrowing sliver of light burned into her vision. She didn't think she quite believed what had happened. She hadn't been locked down here, had she? In the blackness? In the musty, close, suffocating blackness? No. NO. NO.
Ramona wanted to scream, but as much as she tried to gulp air, she couldn't. Her lungs had ceased to work. Her hands went to her neck, fluttering in the darkness. Breathe, she willed herself. But she knew it was no good. She wouldn’t be able to. She was freaked out, worse than she had been in a long time. Worse even than the time after the Halloween party, when she'd gotten stuck in her bathroom.
Ramona was claustrophobic, and the close mustiness of the cellar had triggered all her worst fears. She gasped soundlessly, reaching out in the direction of the door, and then her legs fell out from beneath her and she collided with the last step. She hurt her already skinned up knee, but she couldn't cry out. All she wanted right now was to be able to breathe. Air. That was it. Just...air. Blindly, Ramona clawed at the steps in front of her, and her fingers felt purchase. In a clamoring frenzy, she wrenched herself up the stairs, using only her arms, as her legs seemed to have stopped working. She only knew she was at the top when she collided with the door. Ramona began to bang at the door with the flat of her hand. Her movements became more and more decisive, banging harder and harder, until her hands clenched into fists and she was punching at the door as if she could break it down.
She remembered doing this before.
When Ramona was four years old, her favorite game on earth was hide and go seek. Ramona didn't have any siblings, but she played with her parents, especially her father, who always hid in obvious places and then seemed astonished that she could find him. Similarly, no matter where she hid, her father would search for her in the most ridiculous places, calling out things like, "Where's Ramona? Is she inside the coffee pot? No. Is she underneath the television set? No. Where could she be?" Generally, she giggled so much in delight that her father found her, or she popped up from her hiding space and said, "Daddy, I'm here, silly!" As she'd gotten a bit older, her ability to hide had gotten better.
That particular afternoon, she'd accosted her father as soon as he'd come home from work, demanding that he play hide and seek with her. Her father had patted her on the head and said, "Maybe later, honey. Daddy's tired." Ramona had persisted in begging her father to play, until he'd gotten angry and told her that if she didn't stop pestering him, he'd never play hide and seek with her ever again. Ramona knew this was an empty threat. He'd made it before, and nothing had ever come of it. She figured this was just a jumping off point for negotiations. So she'd told her father that she was going to go ahead and hide, and he could come looking for her whenever he was ready. She'd skipped off, barely listening to her father calling after her, "Ramona, do not hide! I am not coming to look for you! Ramona! Do you hear me?"
Ramona had crept through her house, looking for places to hide. She wanted to pick a very good spot this time, but she'd played hide and seek so many times in her house that she'd used most of the good spots. She debated and rejected several places. Not the shower. Not underneath her dad's bed. Not behind the curtains in the living room. After all, her mother was in the living room watching TV, and she always gave away Ramona's hiding places. Then she spied the door to the hall coat closet, which was slightly open. Perfect! She slid inside, scooting aside some boots that were stored on the floor and pulled the door closed after her. Then she waited.
She waited a long time. Finally, she called out for her father to come look for her. Maybe he'd forgotten that she was hiding.
More time passed. Ramona began to think that perhaps her father had actually been serious in his threat not to play hide and seek with her ever again. She was disappointed. But she was also getting hungry, and she thought it couldn't be too much longer until it was time for dinner. So she decided to leave the closet. Maybe if she was very good, her father would play with her the next day.
Ramona tried the doorknob. It wouldn't turn! She hadn't checked to see if the knob on the closet had been locked when she went inside. Her mother was always saying it was stupid to have a lock on the outside of a closet door. And her father always locked it on his way through the hall, because he knew it annoyed her mother to unlock it. It was a way that he teased her.
"Every time you do that, you waste fifteen perfectly good seconds of my life," her mother would say.
"Yes, but in those fifteen seconds, you're thinking of me," he'd laugh back at her.
"Yeah," she'd say. "I'm cursing your name."
Now, because her father was a joker, she had locked herself in the closet. Ramona began to panic. She started to pound on the door and to yell. No one came. They were probably both watching TV, and they couldn't hear her. She pounded and pounded and pounded, until she was sweaty and out-of-breath from effort. And as her breath came in gasps, she began to have a harder and harder time catching her breath. She felt like her throat was closing up.
When her parents finally did miss her and discover her in the closet, she tumbled out wide-eyed and frightened, her hair and clothes plastered to her skin with sweat. She'd had nightmares about being in the closet for weeks and ever since then, when she got in tight, closed-in spaces...
Ramona's knuckles were bleeding. But she realized that she was breathing. She was gasping and gulping air because she'd worked herself into a frenzy pounding on the door. But she was breathing. She stopped moving and collapsed against the door, resting her cheek against it and glorying in the fact that she was breathing. BREATHING. Waves of relief racked her body.
But no one had heard her pummeling the door. No one was out there. What time was it? She'd come to the library directly after work, and Garrett usually closed the library about a half hour after the admissions office closed. Where had Garrett been anyway? Had he gone out for a smoke behind the library or something? Was it possible that he'd come back in while she was at the bottom of the steps, trying to make a noise or call for help or do something and closed the library?
Oh God, it must be that. Because if Garrett was out there, he would have opened the door and let her out of the basement. No one was in the library. Blair had locked her in, and she was going to have to stay here for the entire night!
Shit. That was what Blair had said. She'd said she wanted to bandage up Ramona's knee so that Ramona wouldn't have to go all night without getting it cleaned up. What a bitch. How could Blair have done that to her?
Well, that didn't really matter, did it? She had to get herself out of the basement, and now that she was breathing again, maybe she could do that. The latch on the door was a sliding kind. It fit into a groove on the doorframe. So maybe, if Ramona could slide something through the door, she could ease the latch open. She spent as much time as she could handle searching through the dark of the basement for something like that. But even though her eyes had adjusted a little, she couldn't really make out anything in the darkness.
There didn't seem to be anything in the basement. At all. The mustiness and smallness of the room made it hard for Ramona to be there. Several times, her throat almost closed up on her again. Finally, she gave up. She wasn't getting out tonight. But tomorrow, Garrett would open up the library, and she would be free. She just had to hold on all night.
To pass the time, Ramona played the Kevin Bacon game. She connected Kevin to every actor or actress she could think of. She could almost never do it in six moves or less, though. Finally, after the last tiny bit of light disappeared from the cracks around the door, Ramona fell asleep, her head pillowed her arm, leaning half supine on the steps. But Ramona didn't realize she was asleep. In her dream, her latest quest to connect Kevin Bacon to another actor continued.
"Drew Barrymore," she murmured to herself, "was in E.T. with Henry Thomas who was in Legends of the Fall with Brad Pitt who was in Sleepers with Kev--"
"Ramona," said a voice.
Ramona lifted her head, looking around her. In front of her on the steps, sat Angelica. Angelica was glowing.
"Angelica," said Ramona. "I saw you on my porch the night you died."
"No, you didn't," said Angelica. "You saw one of the monsters."
"The monsters?" said Ramona.
Angelica nodded. "They keep us here in the vortex," she said. "We keep them alive."
"We?"
Angelica pointed behind Ramona's head, and Ramona twisted around to look down the steps. The basement of the library was crowded with glowing bodies. The people were crammed against each other. Some of them were trying to move and stepping on each other. They wore clothing from all different eras of history. And to her horror, she realized she recognized some of the faces. Mason. Blair. Owen. Dawn. Cecelia.
Suddenly, Ramona realized that the glowing bodies were all around her, jammed five and six people to a step. They were crushing her, and she pushed at them. They just pushed closer. They were all trying to touch her. Put their fingers on her face. Some of them had started to scream, a high-pitched sorrowful keening. Some of them were whispering her name over and over. Over all of them, she heard Angelica's voice. "Save us, Ramona. Save us. Let us out."
Ramona struggled against the throng of pressing, brilliant bodies. "Save you how? Save you from what?" she cried. "I'll do anything you want, just stop touching me!"
Their fingers were all over her face and they were pushing them into her orifices. Her mouth. Her nostrils. Her ears. And then they thrust her fingers into her eyes. She shrieked. The world went white.
"Save us from them," said Angelica.
Ramona was lost in a whirlwind of whiteness. Hot light surrounded her and then--she could see again. But she wished she couldn't. There were floating people-like things. Wearing long robes that faded into nothingness at the ends. Their fingers were long and pointed, tinged in blood. But the worst was their faces. Their long, long faces, with deep hollow eyes, gaping at her, utter emptiness and dementia in their depths. And their teeth. Fangs like icicles, cold and bright. Teeth like pine needles. Like open cobra mouths. They reached for her, their claws open, their eyes gaping, their mouths stretched impossibly open, so wide, and so deep, infinitely and unendingly bright, their teeth glistening, and Ramona screamed and screamed and screamed and--
Copyright (c) 2010 Valerie Chambers