Haunt || Matty Healy

Seven.

        

I absolutely hate the library. I hate books, I hate reading, I hate the musky smell and I especially hate the fact that I've cut class to be here. When I was younger, my father used to take me to Barns and Noble every Sunday, usually after church if we went that day. I use to be excited about books. We'd rush home for dinner and later he'd read to me from my new book. After a while, when I realized it wasn't normal for books to be blurry and words to smudge together, I became jaded. What was the point of reading when it was a struggle to make out the letters? What's the point of practicing when I was bound to be blind anyway?

I much prefer the braille Mamá is making me learn, but even then there's an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wouldn't be able to see anymore. Its one thing to kind of make out shapes in picture books and infer the story, but it's another thing to no longer depend on sight for a narrative.

Sometimes I wish I were born blind. It would be much easier for me, I think. I wouldn't know how things look; I wouldn't miss them when they're gone.

It smells like dust and mold in the library. I'm on the second floor where the lighting is a bit off and although the curtains are pulled up, it's little to no help due to the grayness of the sky outside.

"What are we looking for again?" Kelsey asks me with a yawn. She loves reading, on the other hand, and I envy her for that; for being able to let sentences and fragments and jumbled words from the dictionary pull her into another time and place.

Kelsey may be apprehensive of what I tell her, but she humors me because she knows this is something I genuinely believe. It makes sense when she puts everything together, including the strange car accident just yesterday morning. I couldn't face Seven today, not after witnessing him dead and bloodied just yesterday, witnessing his apparent annoyance at me as well. He doesn't remember any of that and it isn't truly his fault but I figured I'd wait until work to face him.

I had pulled Kelsey out of the subway a few stops before school; Nixon was not kind enough to give us a ride this morning due to his uneasiness to be around his car at the moment. Seven informed us he'd becoming late today due to his complete laziness. I don't blame him though, even though he can't remember, I'd want to stay in bed a bit longer given the circumstances of yesterday's events.

"I don't know," I confess, "Demonology?"

"You think Matty is a demon?" Kelsey confirms quietly. Although we were the only two people in this section of the library, it was a force of habit to use hushed voices. She had been giddy at first to go to the library - a big one at that, until I had explained to her what I needed to research. "This is how people die, Nila," she insisted for the umpteenth time since Friday night. She isn't wrong but Matty has already outright informed me that going to church and praying and doing anything remotely holy wouldn't at all help.

Of course, that didn't stop me from wearing my cross necklace and skimming a few pages of the bible on some free bible app I've found on my phone.

"Maybe," I tell her in response to her inquiry about Matty. "Definitely not an angel," I mumble, running my fingers along the spines of the books on the shelf in front of us.

She hums thoughtfully, "What if he is?"

I quirk an eyebrow, "I don't think an angel would try to kill me," I point out.

She shakes her head, snorting a bit, "Lucifer was an angel," she points out. She grabs my wrist and tugs me further up the aisle, pulling a book about angels and demons. "There are the fallen angels...the offspring of them as well - Nephilim..." she muses.

"Are you saying Matty is a fallen angel?"

"In an indie band on the rise to stardom," she nods and I have to laugh at how ridiculous this all sounds. "Maybe he's something else all together? I haven't watched enough episodes of Supernatural to help me with this," she mumbles. "I'm going to check some Mythology books, you read through some Wiccan stuff, there might be something."