The grotesque, blurred grin over Sandelene's shoulder seemed to belong to a movie playing out in the glass pane. And then blackened fingertips iced her neck. In that surreal moment of bitter shock a thought flashed through her mind: this is not a ghost. Ghosts aren't physical. Ghosts don't—

The fingers hadn't yet closed tight around her wild pulse. She had a chance.

Instinct electrified her veins. Shrieking, she whirled around and jabbed the attacker's face with the heel of her palm. Her hand smacked against the man's nose, just as hard as she'd imagined when she was practicing self-defense down in the mills with her best friend, Ronnie.

But the man did not react the way she'd imagined.

His nose cracked out of position. Skin slid moistly underneath her palm.  The stench of decay filled the air.

Perhaps from sheer surprise at this sudden turn of events, the bony hands around her throat retreated. Clutching his face, the man staggered back in a whirl of fetid robes. Dark liquid dripped from his clothes to the floor.

Her breath streamed from her lips in frosty tendrils. Sandelene only had moments, seconds already wasted, to decide between fight or flight. She kicked him hard in the groin then whipped around to try the door again as his body squelched across worn carpeting. Wouldn't budge. Margery, a fluttery-pulsed groaning heap at her feet, was no better.

In the door's frosted paneling she watched the dark shape stagger onto his feet. Coarse, deep laughter shook his shoulders. Hands balled into fists, Sandelene turned to hit him again. She didn't want to hit him again because the last touch felt as forbidden an action as hitting a corpse and yet she had no choice. In the marrow of her bones she knew this was it. Him or her.  This was exactly the reason Ronnie had dragged her to those crowded classes in the humid halls.

Dark hair so greasy she couldn't determine the color clung to sallow cheeks. For the time being, that was all she could see. For the time being, the padded drip-drip of water on carpet was all she heard. He wasn't even breathing, it seemed.

The living have to breathe, she thought as her mind raced from one idea to the next.Ghosts aren't physical, but people have to breathe. This was, what was it? Was it really a ghost? Was it something else, something more sinister? Something demonic?

She bounced nervously on the heels of her feet, trying to remember what to do in this situation, trying to hear Ronnie's voice barking commands. She waits for the attacker to strike, right? Or is it the other way around? And does any of this even apply to a supernatural entity?

The man's hands dropped away from his face. Almost immediately Sandelene's stomach heaved.

That stench! As if someone had boiled a soup of blighted vegetables and necrotic cattle. Her nose scrunched in disgust. Her hands rose to cover her mouth and her stomach, trying not throw up. She didn't want to bend her head in front of this, didn't want to do something so vulnerable as heaving her guts when she could  very well have them torn out by the creature standing before her...

The man's head lifted. Inch by inch she saw the face, the tumescent forehead, sunken eyes, blackened teeth: but that wasn't what made her gasp, no. The force of her counter attack had pushed the man's nose almost into one eye socket. From there, the brunt of the nose had begun to fall off. Sickly threads of rotted tissue dangled off dissolving grey cartilage.

The waterlogged, putrefying corpse leered at her through a twisted smile. "Sandy, Sandy, Sandy," it croaked.

Yes, a demon. The thought shambled through her mind as the man shambled forward. This was a demon.

"Not very nice, Sandy." The nose bounced to the floor.

And then came the second thought: I don't have anything to deal with a real demon. Everything is in my bag, and everything needs to be assembled, prepared, spoken. What she did next must've surprised the demon, or it had been such a long time since someone hadn't run at it screaming Latin and flinging holy water that it was curious to see what a silly human like her would do. Yelling at the thing to back the hell off, she yanked the scarf off Margery's shoulders and threw it over the demon's head.

She followed through with a heavy punch, felt her hand stopped midway, felt ice snare her wrist and slowly start to crush bone.

Sirens wailed muffled through the door. Sandelene turned her head just slightly to flail and scream for help.

The corpse, quickly as it had appeared, vanished. The gummy lump of flesh she'd knocked off its face was gone, too. Slick, dark oil coated her palm, and there was a patch of water on the ground where he'd fallen. Margery's colorful scarf, no longer around the monster's head, dropped and coiled almost gently on the wet carpet.

"Holy shit!" she said. Sandelene breathed in and out, in and out, sinking down beside Margery. "Holy shit," she was still panting as EMTs wrenched open the doors and knelt beside the pair of them. Cops came almost sixty seconds later, and then the fire department. Thirty minutes later the woman found herself sitting on the back of an ambulance, a blanket around her shoulders as she tried explaining to the cop, again, what she'd seen. The police took samples of the oil on her palms for evidence, checked over the watery patch and bagged the scarf, but there were no signs of forced entry, no other evidence that the library had played host to anyone but the unfortunate pair now being poked and prodded and checked for blood pressure.

"It'll be on the surveillance footage," she was insisting, even though that voice in the back of her head knew it wouldn't. Nightmares like the kind she'd witnessed didn't follow the rules, thumbed their rotted noses at logic and reason. "He came from upstairs."

Officer Josey Peabody, a handsome if not bald young man who couldn't have been far out of his twenties, ran a hand of his smooth scalp. "Ma'am," he said in a strained, you're-not-helping-me-solve-this tone. "I've been assigned to the society's case a couple weeks now. We've had an issue with library recordings for some time. Marge has been trying to use 'em for weeks now, recording what he and his staff claim are paranormal activities. Ain't seen shit. and I've watched every minute, sped up, but still. I wouldn't count on those tapes showing shit tonight."

As soon as he said it, she realized how foolish she'd sounded. She rubbed her sanitized, if not thoroughly bruised, hand against her shoulder. "My bag?" she asked.

Officer Peabody looked from her hand to her eyes. "They give you the seal of approval to leave?"

"I'm fine," she lied. "I'd feel great if I could have my bag. I was supposed to meet someone later tonight and I'd like to let them know I'm taking a long bubble bath instead."

After a brief talk with the EMT who'd cleaned the gunk off her hand, a lovely young woman with dark eyes that made Officer Peabody blush, Sandelene was allowed to collect her belongings and make her way to Margery.

He'd also been refusing to leave, but for a different reason. Sandelene edged into the back of the ambulance, looking at the man strapped down to the table. White as a sheet he was, with round eyes and a pulse that quickened on the monitor screen nearby. The slashes on his chest were bandaged.

"Sorry about your scarf," she said.

"My scarf?" He looked down in complete surprise. "Oh," he said. "What did you do to it?"

"It's evidence," she said, rolling her eyes. "In the case against the invisible man, so you probably stand a good chance of getting it back. Maybe. I've gotta tell you, I don't know anything about how policing works."

Margery stared up at the ceiling. "It's alright," he said in a weak voice. "Can you fix this? The governor's wife is coming and-" He rambled on.

Sandelene shifted around to stare at the imposing brick structure and its innocuous glass doors. About ten yards away in the revolving red-blue glow of his car, Officer Peabody conversed with the pretty EMT. His partner flashed a light idly through the bushes, understanding that they were hunting for a ghost without understanding that there really was a ghost.

No, worse than a ghost.

Collecting her thoughts on a deep breath, Sandelene pulled her bag around to the front of her chest and fished around for her spell book. Book of incantations, really. It wasn't as impressive as Margery made it sound when he saw it; a thick book, maybe about two hundred years old, inked in quill with yellowed pages that often slipped out from a dried glue binding. She shuffled through the papers, mumbling to her client about how this probably wasn't going to work but he needed to pay her anyway.

"Hazard pay," he agreed. "I'll bump you another five-hundred."

She flipped through the pages, wondering idly how many of the folks in her shop had actually used spells, had actually encountered the innocuous and succubus and wealth they'd so often purchased charms to attain. She'd never been a huge practitioner, not much of a believer now, but tonight the only thing she trusted were pages from a book that men and women more experienced than her had used. She didn't just want to believe the words worked; she needed them to. For her own sanity, she needed to know that there was something, anything, that could hold at bay darkness like that.

She'd found the page in the last third of the book, when the ambulance was getting ready to leave and Officer Peabody was coming back around.

There in her lap, misfiled in the wrong section, was a crinkled page of Latin she had to squint and borrow the officer's flashlight to read. "Here we go, the Exilium spells..." she mumbled, scanning bolded titles one by one. "This is what we want. The Binding Banishment. This," she continued, pulling the paper from the book. "This will send the spirit back into the object it's attached to. You've just got to divine the right object and lock it away in a protected box before the next sunset, or the spirit will walk again, and it'll be right pissed."

"That's it?" Margery asked. "A couple little words?"

Sandelene turned the page twice. The entry for Binding Banishment was a mere half page in the center. "Yeah," she said confidently. "You should notice an immediate change in the atmosphere."

Wincing, Margery sat up a bit. "Seems like I could've done that myself."

"Probably," she consented. "Witchcraft is pretty DIY when it comes down to it. If you've got the right stuff and right words, anyway. It's a blessing and a curse."

"And you're certain it works?"

"Quite," she insisted, taking a long glance at the place. "I'll stay all night to find the object if you'd like."

Dumb idea, Sandy, she thought. Real dumb.

"I'll be back soon as I can."

Officer Peabody, who by now seemed as though he knew this was the most interesting, and, with another glance at the young EMT, probably best part of his evening, had stayed close to Sandelene and Margery as they spoke. Dark eyebrows rose.

"You were just attacked," he said.

"Allegedly," Sandelene responded, flexing sore fingers. "You know nothing's gonna turn up."

"I can't let you go back in there," the man said with another glance at the pretty woman hopping up beside Margery. "At least not alone."

A few minutes later, the ambulance turned out onto the road with Margery abroad. Officer Peabody watched it go with a different kind of reluctance than the one Sandelene felt as she headed back up the steps. She rehearsed the short lines over and over in her mind, rolled the Latin dust off her tongue- a tongue that felt thick and heavy as they passed inside the doors. The lights were on inside. Officer Peabody had his hand on his holster. The look on his face was at best a mixture of skeptical concern. It was one thing to not believe in ghosts in the daylight. It was another kind of belief that took over among crowded shelves, where books sat hunched in the light like bats waiting for evening.

Shaking the image from her mind, Sandelene pressed herself a little closer to him than she needed. She pulled a crystal charm from around her neck, held it tight in her purple fist and tested out the first few words of the spell. With Officer Peabody three steps ahead, they walked forward down the bright halls, past the historical fiction and Hot Reads display, and began the ascent to the second floor.