The Bone Princess

Chapter 5: Mother Dust

I lay there, gasping, under the stare of three gargoyles with folded bat-like wings, and then the cold became too much. I pulled myself up, and put my hand on the freezing metal handle of the French doors, fully prepared to have to pummel through the glass if the knob didn't open—doorknobs being one of the biggest threats of the house.

Click.

And quickly, I was resting on the other side, resting in a cozy library. Cozy for Allerdale Hall still meant epically huge ceilings with rugs and vases that probably cost as much as our cars, but something felt different about this room, and not just the floor to ceiling shelves of books. There was a fire gently crackling, and a pleasant tune creaking from the cone of a Victrola. There was something inviting about the room—something that made you want to grab your favorite book and curl up and stay. A copy of Pride and Prejudice and a blanket rested on a soft-looking wingtip chair by the fireplace. Sutton had said we could rest when we got to the library. But now Sutton was dead and there would be no breaks.

I have to save Tabby.

#

I crossed the room, straight to the door, ready to get to the attic. Ready to battle the Bone Princess, ready to defeat Mother Dust, and of course. The door was locked.

Instead of freaking out and shaking the handle with my bleeding hands until my arms didn't work. I paced the room. I shut my eyes and focused. Beyond the music, beyond the fire, I could feel something pounding, thumping. Beneath the walls, beneath my chest. I was so close to the heart of the house, to Mother Dust.

I know it.

My mother would have loved this room. My mother would have loved the gargoyles and the creeping Tell Tale Heart thumping through the walls and the old foiled hardbacks—and then I saw it: a black spine with silver embossing.

P O E

"And the Red Death held sway over all."

I crossed the room to the towering bookcase and pulled the slim volume off the third shelf from the bottom. The books and the shelves reconfigured themselves into a staircase, their pages fluttering.

I wonder if Sutton knew that trick?

The passageway smelled of old book smell as I slowly ascended the stairs, higher and higher, Homer and Dickens and Shelly beneath my feet—Machiavelli and Shakespeare, Matthew and Mark, Luke and John. Aristotle, Rymer, and Hugo, upward and onward, and where was there left to go now but the attic?

To my sister.

To Mother Dust.

I reached the top of the stairs and moved into darkness, the passage sealing behind me with the sound of a heavy tome slammed shut. Thunk.

I was alone.

Only, I wasn't.

"Hey, Shadie," Bobby said, and we were in the hall at school, between classes. I stared at him, and he took a few steps toward me, grinning that stupid grin of his, and I stepped backward and my shoulder bumped into my locker.

My locker. We were in school, not in some haunted house, running from ghosts, but my hands were still bleeding. Onto the tiled floor scuffed with the soles of a thousand hustling feet.

"Hey," I said. It smelled like pencil shavings and erasers, and there were distant voices—the sounds of classes underway.

"You're coming, right?" Bobby asked, hope on his face.

"Uh," I said, leaning against the locker, my head spinning, like I'd had a few shots of my father's Crown.

"To the game," he said, taking another step toward me. "It's the big one. It's important. You have to come. Don't let me down, Sadie."