The library on Saturday morning smelled like old paper and someone's instant noodles from the breakroom down the hall, which was either very wrong or very right depending on how you felt about libraries.

  Maya had already abandoned any pretense of being there for a good reason. She was in the picture book section, sitting cross-legged on a beanbag chair, reading something with a rabbit on the cover like she hadn't just spent the entire car ride complaining about being dragged out on a weekend.

  "You said you had homework," she said when Lark walked past.

  "I do."

  "This isn't homework. Homework doesn't need the library."

  "This kind does."

  She made a face and went back to her rabbit book. Their mother had gone to run errands nearby and said she'd be back in an hour, which meant Lark had exactly one hour to find something useful.

  He went to the computer catalog station first, the one that took about forty years to load, and typed in everything he could think of. Folklore. Spirit rituals. Old texts. Summoning. He even tried the word Aether on a long shot, which came back with zero results, because of course it did.

  What came up instead was ghost stories. A lot of ghost stories.

  He found the right shelf anyway. Walked the whole row, reading spines. Pulled out every book that looked like it might have something real hiding inside it, anything beyond campfire stories and people who thought cold drafts meant a dead grandmother was dropping by for a visit. He stacked them on a table and went through them one by one.

  Ghost Legends of the Northeast. Famous Haunted Buildings. Spooky Tales for Young Readers. One with the word Ghosts on the cover in big dripping letters like it was personally trying to frighten him just by existing on a shelf. He opened all of them. He read fast, skimming for anything that looked like real theory dressed up in old language. A symbol. A placement diagram. Anything about blood or fire or how to make something sleeping wake up.

  Nothing. Campfire stories, mostly. People misinterpreting creaky old houses. One book that called itself a serious paranormal investigation was just a man writing about a cold spot in his hallway for two hundred pages. Lark closed it gently because he wasn't the kind of person who was rude to books even when they deserved it.

  He tried the library computers after that. The internet in 2007 was a specific kind of experience. Slow loading bars. Websites made mostly of broken images. Forums full of people arguing with no sources. He found one page that looked like chunks of a translated old text, posted by someone who might have actually known something, but the site had been taken down and the cached version had most of the content missing. He stared at the fragments for a while anyway, hoping something useful would appear between the gaps.

  It didn't.

  He sat back.

  The book I read when I was seventeen. That's the only real thing I had and I don't even remember the title. I just remember reading it in my room and thinking it was interesting, not knowing any of it was real.

  He drummed his fingers on the desk.

  Okay. The library has nothing. That's fine. I already knew it probably wouldn't. Now I work from what's already in my head.

  The symbol was still there if he reached for it carefully. Interlocking curves. A center point where everything converged. Four placements around it. He'd drawn it once into a notebook at seventeen and then lost the notebook, which was exactly the kind of thing he would have done. But the shape itself hadn't gone anywhere. It was like trying to remember a song, easier to just let it come than to go looking for it directly.

  It's not about calling something through. It's more like making enough noise that something nearby turns its head. That's all I need. Just something close enough with enough of whatever it carries inside it.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  "Find anything?"

  He looked up. Maya had appeared next to the table with her rabbit book tucked under her arm, apparently done with the picture section and bored enough to come hunting for him.

  "Not really," Lark said.

  "What were you even looking for?"

  "Ghost stuff. Old books about it."

  She looked at the pile of ghost books on the table. Then at him. "Did you find ghost stuff?"

  "Just stories," he said. "Nothing good."

  "So you wasted a Saturday."

  "I was checking if the good stuff was here. It's not. That's useful."

  She squinted at him. "That's not useful. That's just nothing."

  "It means I have to remember it myself."

  "Remember what yourself?"

  "Just some stuff I read once." He started stacking the books to put them back. "It's for a project."

  "What project."

  "A ghost project."

  She stared at him for another second. "You're so weird." She didn't say it mean, just the way she said things that were simply true. "Mom's probably almost back. Come on."

  She was already heading toward the entrance. Then she stopped and looked back over her shoulder with the expression of someone who had just thought of something important.

  "Hey. Don't do ghost stuff by yourself."

  "Why?"

  "Because that's how kids die in every scary movie ever." She said it completely seriously. "You always need at least two people so one of them can run for help."

  "I'll keep that in mind," Lark said.

  "I'm serious."

  "I know you are."

  She turned and kept walking. Lark put the last of the books back on the shelf, none of them having helped him at all, and followed her out.

  On the walk to the car, his mind was already running ahead of him. He knew the shape of the symbol. He knew what materials he needed and roughly why. The candles because fire was the oldest thing people used to call attention to something. The blood because it was the most personal marker a living body could offer. The symbol because it was a shape that focused things, at least that was how he remembered the explanation reading it at seventeen, and it had made more sense to him every year since.

  The school grounds. Old cemetery under everything. If there's anywhere nearby with anything worth noticing, it's there.

  His mother pulled up to the curb. He got in. Maya was already in the back with the rabbit book open, apparently deciding to check it out.

  "Find anything good?" his mother asked.

  "Not this time," Lark said.

  "That's research for you." She checked her mirror before pulling out. "Sometimes you look and look and the answer turns out to be something you already knew."

  "Yeah," he said. "Exactly."

  He watched the streets move past outside the window.

  I just need to get the materials. Then a time when no one's watching. Then a place with enough of whatever I'm hoping to find.

  One thing at a time.

  That afternoon, while his mother was watching something in the living room and Maya was upstairs, Lark sat at the small desk in his room with a blank notebook and a pencil and wrote down everything he could pull up. Not for school. The other kind of remembering, the kind where you had to sit still and be quiet and let things surface on their own instead of grabbing for them.

  The symbol took three tries to get right. He drew it, looked at it, drew it again with the curves adjusted, then drew it a third time and felt something settle when the proportions finally landed where they were supposed to. He looked at it for a long time.

  Underneath it he wrote the material list. Chalk. Candles. Matches. Something sharp. He stared at the last one for a second before writing what it was actually for.

  Blood. Just a little.

  He stared at that too.

  He'd read the explanation at seventeen with the detached curiosity of a person who had no idea any of it was real. Now he understood the reasoning behind it better than the person who wrote the book probably had. Blood was the most specific thing a living body could offer. Not in a mystical way. Just practically. It carried everything about you. If something nearby was looking for a signal, blood was the clearest one you had. Like a name said out loud in a quiet room.

  The question is whether anything nearby is actually listening.

  He tapped his pencil on the paper.

  The school is the best option I have. Old cemetery underneath the whole property. Whatever is left of all those people has been sitting in that soil for decades. Even in a world this thin on whatever I'm trying to find, decades of that has to add up to something. It has to.

  I think. I'm actually just guessing. I don't have a way to check.

  That was the honest answer and he knew it. He was working from memory, from a book he'd read as a kid in a previous life, in a world where none of it had mattered yet. He was five years old with no way to verify any of his own theories. Everything he was planning was based on things he believed to be true and had no current way to prove.

  Well, he thought, I've done stupider things for worse reasons.

  He wrote the location at the bottom of the page. School. Old building at the back. Then he thought about timing and wrote that too. Late. After everyone's asleep.

  He looked at the full page for a while.

  Then he drew a small circle in the corner of the paper, the way he had in kindergarten on the day this whole thing started in his head. He stared at it.

  This time, he thought. Figure it out before the world ends. Figure it out before any of it matters.

  He closed the notebook and slid it under his mattress.

  Materials first, he thought. Everything else after.

  He got up and went downstairs to see what was for dinner.