The library staircase possessed the curious ability of all old steps: to both provide a comforting, thumping creak as patrons and staff moved up and down throughout the course of the day, and to be absolutely screaming in the dead of night when the space between your ears saw monsters in the unassuming dark.

Sandelene's hand found the light against the wall just beyond the top stair. The crystal was warm in her palm, glued in place by a gloss of sweat. They had made it up the steps unaccosted by whatever thing it was that had stopped her the first time. But just as with sharks in the ocean, there was no looking out across that steady sea of books without remembering what lurked  in the deep.

"So here we are," came the officer's voice from behind. He squinted down an aisle of reference books, then paced around a couple tables, checking underneath for what he knew he wouldn't find. Several tables were missing chairs, which had been carried downstairs to the children's area for the governor's wife tomorrow. Watching him examine those remaining, Sandelene couldn't help but think that it wasn't in the clear, empty waters where splashing around got you attacked. That wasn't where the pointy smiles were waiting to welcome you to a feast. 

"You believe in all this witchy brouhaha?"

"If I did, I might dare call you rude."

"I don't think you do."

Sandelene bit her lip. He wasn't entirely wrong, though he wasn't entirely right, either. Her business was in sales, not spells. If she could bottle magic and sell it, it'd be that. She knew her products and enough about their uses to be considered well-educated on the matter, the way an art curator understands their subject matter but isn't necessarily skilled enough to replicate a master's work. As a general rule she rarely practiced; practicing didn't make money, and if she wanted to stay open, if she wanted show her parents that she could be successful on her own, she had to focus on paying the bills.

"Is Marge aware of  how you think? If I'm looking to get rid of bedbugs, I wouldn't be too eager to hire the person who doesn't believe in 'em."

"What if they know all the theories of bedbugs and what to do if you have them?" Sandelene read the signs by the switch carefully. Objects of relevant historical value had been gifted to the library and preserved in little exhibits around the building; slim posters tacked to the wall by glass table displays. The dead thing she'd glimpsed had come from one of them; this wasn't a fact, mind you, but the early stages in the investigation. Objects got cursed. Books tended to do the cursing. It wasn't very often she'd read stories and reports of the haunting of some yellowed copy of Winnie-the-Pooh.

"There's a difference between coaching and playing," Officer Peabody grunted, dutifully pulling back a chair and looking beneath the accompanying desk. 

Sandelene let herself lose sight of the man; as long as she heard the sound of him, cutting down the narrow aisles didn't feel quite so claustrophobic. She stopped at the first exhibit against a looming piece of what was described as part of the original brick wall and held the crystal steady. When her hand stilled, so did the pendant. Nothing here. She moved on. "In your line of work, have you ever seen someone too desperate to care who they do business with?"

"You should be aware that it ain't always the desperate fella who ends up paying for that mistake." There were footsteps behind her, but it was just the man as he moved around the last aisle to watch her pass the crystal over several antiqued items in one of those display tables. He rested his arm on a hard cover compendium of twenty years' worth of Life magazines. "You really see someone tonight?"

Sandelene continued to walk, pause, hover, and walk again, checking the litany of guns, hair-spun pictures, wooden fans and everything else contained within the library's walls. "I really punched someone tonight. What worries me is that whoever it was, wasn't alive."

The man's lips compressed into a thin frown. "Wiggling a crystal is gonna sniff it out?"

"Magic isn't about belief any more than cooking is, Officer Peabody. If you're very careful, if you follow the directions and use the proper ingredients, it'll work for you. Trick is knowing the right rules. The older magic gets, the more shit people make up about it. And they tend to only bring up those times it works, not the hundred other nights where they sat with a voodoo doll in their lap, trying to give their ex a bad case of heartburn. Just one coincidence in a hundred failures, that's all it takes to forget it isn't real."

He scratched his bald scalp. "I can't seem to figure if you're telling me the truth or if this is all a fancy form of thievery. You say you take this cursed object away, don't you?"

"And put it into a protective box, which Margery or whomever owns the object can very clearly keep." Officer Peabody did not look convinced. "Wanna make a copy of my license?"

"If it's a fake, what good'll that do me?"

"I'm a small business owner."

"Until we start investigating you, when it turns out you don't even work there." The conversation ended. It was with just a hint of curiosity that he shrugged and said. "Say you ain't a thief. Say you really are doing what's right and removing a cursed object. Won't that mean the curse'll follow you?"

"Not if I give it back, which I plan to do because I am not a thief."

The start of the sound, a faint rustle of paper sliding slowly across metal shelves, was easy to brush off. It was the pulse in her head, the rustle of a mouse or a breath of wind from a cracked window. She stared down at the clear crystal, at its faceted, smooth surface.

And then a book dropped to the floor in the aisle behind Officer Peabody.

The two jumped. The pendant swung wildly in a circle, jumping over a fringed cowhide gauntlet supposedly worn by a member of Company "I" of the 10th New York Calvary Regiment. Officer Peabody, gun extended, nodded to Sandelene and moved into the row with a low warning for all to hear.

The light, overhead and barebones white, made it worse. You could see everything in the light. The light didn't leave room in the imagination for dumbass teenagers hiding in a closet or ducked below a row of autobiographies.

But she couldn't look at the light, or the shelves, or what Officer Peabody was doing. She heard his footsteps round the far corner. Her eyes were on the glass table, locked with a key she didn't have. Her eyes were locked on a small, battered coin beside the glove, over which the crystal  continued to shudder. It was either the coin or the glove.

Slowly her hand's shadow fell over the white leather, slid along yellowed fingertips and past an embroidered cuff. The movement ceased. She passed nearer the coin, some burnished gold piece from the 1860s, and the pendant began to swing.

"Found it!" she called, a slip of triumphant excitement overriding her.

And it was then, in the span of time she waited for a response, that she realized the upstairs floor had gone coldly silent.

"Officer Peabody?" she called, slipping the crystal back around her neck.

No answer. No footsteps. No breathing.

Sandelene looked back at the looked glass display. She studied the objects inside, decided nothing was particularly breakable, and with as much force as she could muster she pushed the table over. The case toppled with a leaden thump. All the items pinged off the glass fell together in a contained pile and...

The table had dented the floor. Not broken, not smashed. Despite the crash that'd sent a spike through her heart, there was still no response from the officer.

"Fuck," she said, running a hand through her dark hair. She thought back to what she'd told Officer Peabody. The trick to magic is getting it right. Had she gotten something wrong? Had those wet, dead eyes zeroed in on the officer? Were they watching her now? She called his name again in the dusty quiet, started to walk towards the aisle where the book had fallen, where she'd last seen him.

No.

That's what it would want her to do. Lure her away from the source so it could take her out, like those stupid people in horror movies (which, she realized somewhat dully, she already was; coming into a place after what she'd seen, the fool!).

On cue, a low, masculine moan shuffled through the air.

This was a trick, she told herself again, dragging the fallen table on its side until it was in range of the nearest bookcase. I've got to take this coin. If I take this coin, it'll leave Officer Peabody because it'll be with me.

Unless she'd done something wrong.

When she'd positioned the fallen table where she wanted, she moved around to the first bookcase in the row, grabbed it with both hands, and pushed. The case tumbled forward with a thunderous crash, pages twisting and bending beneath its crushing weight. The corner of the case slammed into the carefully positioned corner of the glass table. Cracked veins burst from the point of impact and collapsed.

Sandelene kicked away the glass, bent to reach for the coin.

A rush of putrid air blew the glass and pages away, ripped the books from the shelves all around her. The coin leaped away from her outstretched fingertips as if it were alive. She dropped to her knees, scrambling for that bouncing golden glimmer. Glass cut her skin, pages and books thumped against her head and shoulders. Still she lunged forward, managed to curl her fingers around the object before it rolled underneath a bookcase.

That case, too, toppled down. One minute she was seeing the highest books begin to tilt and topple; in the next, she was on her back and breathing heavy, pushing off the weight of dozens of textbooks. By chance it'd hit the opposite case, and the two had come together over her. She scrambled out, panting hard, bloody fingers clenched around the coin. She scrambled out of the aisle, down the stairs, and all the way outside before she stopped and looked back.

From the outside, there was nothing to see but the warm glow of lights. Her eyes watched the glass panels for what seemed like an hour, but the shadow of the thing, or Officer Peabody, never appeared. Chest heaving, Sandelene wrenched open the door of the man's cruiser with slippery fingers and radioed for help. She told the dispatcher that he was missing, that he might have been attacked, that she had gotten the hell out and wouldn't go back.

And then, in the leafy gloom with a potentially haunted coin in her pocket, she ran out to the road and hailed a cab. There was guilt as she sat stonefaced and sweating in the backseat of the cab with her hands bleeding from a half dozen tiny cuts, and then there wasn't; and there was fear and then there wasn't.

What the hell had she done? What the hell had she gotten herself into?

Under the buzzing neon of a stressful night, Sandelene unlocked the door to her shop. She carried the coin straight to her back office, stopping only to greet Neville and turn on the radio. Sandelene liked radios, no matter the station. Even static brought life to the dead air. Tonight, techno beats bounced off the walls of the back office, where she placed the coin gently on her desk long enough and began to move stacked boxes. From the second to last box she pulled one of three boxes.

If the object had been larger than baseball, Sandelene would have had to drive out to Murfreesboro and head over to the lumber yard where Mitzy worked to have something custom made by sundown, which would've been hell on the purse.

But the odd gold coin fit inside the simple willow box with its silver lining. She closed the lid, locked it in her safe, and sat down in her desk chair to tend to her injuries. Even with all the lights on, the corner containing the safe seemed darker, sullen, angry. And on the corner of the desk, beside anxiously tapping fingers, her cell phone rang nonstop.