Pagebound

Chapter VI

It was nearing on two AM by the time Maxwell stepped off of the dingy, gum covered steps of the 794 and onto the broken streets. It was completely dead, save from a small group of teenagers smoking devil-knows-what behind a tree and a uncomfortably stereotypical homeless man reading the newspaper under the glow of a streetlamp.

"Morning Joe!" he greeted the man. Joe folded up his newspaper into a neat square and placed it back into the small tupperware box next to him.

"Morning Maxwell," he smiled warmly, "I must say, this is an early start even for you."

"Yeah, Mum finally made him leave, I needed a distraction," Joe looked like what a stereotypical homeless man would be assumed to look like. Although that may be the case, Joe didn't quite seem to realise it.

He stroked his littered knot of a beard as though it was the perfectly manicured, grey beard of one of the world's most powerful wizards.

"I often find that even things we wish to happen can cause us to regret they ever did."

Maxwell nodded silently... thrice, before turning to face towards the glass doors of the library.

If Maxwell's house was a blank canvas, Kayla's was a Monet; this left the library at approximately an Andy Warhol. It was only one story, standing 23feet high and structured out of a peculiar kind of brick that through Maxwell's research they did not make anymore -or at least for the past 4 year. It was indescribable and yet Maxwell constantly thought of way to describe it.

Like all buildings constructed by the city government it was boring; so boring in fact that they had hired street artists to completely cover the front wall with psychedelic art featuring Maxwell (as he was the library's main occupant and somewhat of a mascot for literature in the neighbourhood) with blue swirl toppling over the sides of the book like waves. If not for the bounties of knowledge held with in Maxwell would have have hated the very building.

Maxwell pulled a thin chain up from in his shirt, shivering as the cool metal knocked against the base of his neck. From the chain hung a thin key. It had taken weeks of convincing but the head librarian finally had given him a key to the library. He had persisted that he be given one of his own after reading seven different books on lock picking and insisting that he would enter the building by any means possible. This was then followed by a demonstration where he did open the door but broke the lock-in the process. The librarians decided (quite sensibly) that it was in their best interests and those of the weathered building that he be given a key of his own.

The key entered the lock smoothly as it had for a thousand people, a thousand times before. It clicked and the door opened.

Maxwell walked inside slowly, tripping over a lip in the carpet yet again as he entered the non-fiction section. He rounded the corner, running his fingers along the spines of the alphabetically ordered parenting books. He reach an ancient computer and sat down heavily on the worn, stained chair that sunk down each time Maxwell moved.

That is where he spent the next four hours. Until he did not need the thin, barely visible light that was emitted from his wrist watch in order to read the books. and he had a list of book titles for all the books relating to his chosen subject. Ghosts.

Many of the books were wrongly placed in the fiction section and, until yesterday, Maxwell agreed with that descission. After about twenty minutes Maxwell had somehow come up with a pile that barely reached his skinny, pencil-like thighs.

The next four hours were spent compiling a simple, dot point list of everything he knew about ghosts and what could cause them to stay in a largely suburbanised house long after their death.

                    Stuff I Know About Ghosts:
                - They are a spirit mimicking their past human form
                - They have no matter so can move through objects
                - Ghosts are more likely to appear in paranormal "hot spots" related to limestone, quartz-rich rocks, rust, [stone tape "theory"] or flowing water
                - Ghosts used to be thought of as solid forms instead of the lucid, opaque forms we think of now
                - Ghost tend to stay in one place until a certain aspect of their life - or death- is resolved or discovered                 (this was most interesting to Maxwell)

Most of the books read by Maxwell were, in his opinion, complete and utter poppycock. By the time the glow of the urban sunrise shone through the smudged glass of the windows, Maxwell had read seventeen books cover to cover and the contents page of incredibly