More importantly, it’s the library from this morning. The camera pans down from high up near the roof, zipping down several floors to hover in front of Winter and me. We watch the moment we first notice Severn in the distance, and then the rush to follow him.

  The point of view of the video changes shortly after, the steady camera angle replaced by something shaky and personal. As though we were being watched.

  As though we were being stalked.

  The screen splits down the middle, showing Nico and Isaac receiving Winter’s text message and then approaching. Again, the camera angle shakes and follows them keeping steady distance, like they could turn around any moment and see the person watching them. Following them.

  As Nico approaches the library in the distance, Winter and I hurry for the third floor. Once we leave each floor, the camera changes, as though there are stalkers everywhere following us, tagging in and out as we move throughout the building. But each time we close in on where we last saw Severn, who never appears on camera himself, we obviously never find him. More than once, though, the stalkers watching us in the camera lens get close enough that they can ruffle the hair at the back of our necks, but neither of us seem bothered.

  We never noticed them at all.

  “What the hell is this?” Winter whispers across the aisle to me, but I don’t know what to say.

  I turn to look at Nico, but his eyes are narrowed and locked on the screen. I can see him studying the footage, maybe trying to place anything around the two of them that might be out of place. Isaac, on the other hand, has dropped his head to the desk and is trying to sleep.

  The video continues but the class around us is zoned out, watching it but not reacting. The video makes no sense, just following their classmates around campus. None is alarmed or disturbed. They’re all just…ambivalent.

  The video cuts out just as the four of us collect at the entrance of the library, but the vantage point is from somewhere on the fourth floor, looking down on us. The three of us who understand what’s going on look incredibly small, visibly spooked, and paranoid. Isaac looks dreamily towards the library where his crush is.

  Then a slow, rasping laugh pours through the speakers. It’s only then that I realize there was no sound throughout the video. No ambient noises, no sounds of movement or overheard conversations. Only the laughter at the end. It’s not Freddie’s laugh, though. It’s more guttural, more… demonic?

  The screen goes black but the laughter continues. Low, raspy, and grating as if taunting us.

  I shiver in my seat.

  Wrath whispers in my ear, “This is… unusual.”

  “You think?” I whisper out loud, forgetting my rule about not talking to Wrath out loud in public.

  The video lasts less than ten minutes, yet when the lights come back up the whole period has passed. Everyone else files out, but the four of us hang back. There’s a weird, discordant note in the air, not just from the odd time skip but from the video itself.

  “So they were watching us?”

  “There’s been more people on campus looking wiped out,” Nico says.

  “Midterms are coming up,” Isaac offers tiredly.

  “Yeah, in like 8 weeks. It’s too early in the semester for that.” Winter shoots back.

  “Finals, then.”

  “That’s not for 14 weeks.”

  Isaac huffs in tired annoyance.

  It hasn’t escaped our notice that Isaac forgot everything from the house last weekend - he’s been remarkably calm, relaxed in a way that zombies don’t allow for.

  There’s nothing else to say, though. It seems obvious that Nec-Romance, or whatever it is, is somehow related to the four of us. Maybe just me, or maybe just one of the others, but definitely one of us four. Otherwise, why stalk all of us?

  Nico isn’t home yet by the time I pedal into my yard, but the scarecrow is still perched near the front gate, waiting for intruders. “I’m just going to take this,” I say, snagging the pitchfork from his limp arms and carrying it around to the back of the house. Past the old garden - the family mausoleum, the dark fairy circles, the cursed gardens, and the greenhouse sanctums - I drop the pitchfork near the shed and head back to the front of the house.

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  Nico’s car still isn’t there. Weird, he should have left before me. None of us had any classes after Freddie’s class. I know everyone was rattled, but did it really send him back to the library to do more research? Or is he maybe lurking around campus trying to find the people who might have been filming him?

  Should I have offered to stay?

  I head up to my room to find Wrath already there. The downside of having a semi-corporeal demonic best friend is that sometimes he just appears wherever he wants to.

  “Tonight,” he starts ominously - never a good opener - “you have to go somewhere with me.”

  “Nah,” I reply flippantly. “It’s hair washing night. You know I can’t make plans on hair washing night.”

  “Theo.” He crosses his arms in front of him and makes a serious expression.

  In the end, I go with him. Of course I do. He’s my best friend, even when he’s an enigmatic monster.

  He makes me take the bike, riding up front in his stuffed animal form. Otherwise, he’d be a seven-foot tall demon and I’d never be able to see past him.

  He directs me to the school. At night, Hollow Hills University is not much different than it is during the day, but there’s a certain level of menace that’s there even during the daylight that is somehow more hungry at night. It’s like the cry of a newborn baby; hungry, sad, or just in need of attention. The school cries out, unheeded, and it makes everyone still out and about scurry from their origin to their destination.

  I’ve been to the school at night before, obviously, but there’s something different now that there’s a known threat out there. Well, unknown threat. Something is out there, that’s all I know.

  “The stars look so beautiful tonight,” Wrath sighs from the front of my bike. “Almost makes you forget they’ll find this place and consume it down to the smallest little fragment.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  Wrath gasps in affront. “I can’t believe you think I’d be trying to help. That’s the meanest thing that anyone’s ever said to me.”

  “You say that any time I say anything nice to you.”

  “Exactly! I thought we were friends, Theodominus Elizabeth King!”

  “Hey! What did I say about using full names? And my middle name isn’t Elizabeth. You know that.”

  “But I bet Winter would believe it, and she’s not someone who will forget it, will she?”

  I glare at the back of his doll, but when he doesn’t tell me where we’re going, I pull into the same bike rack where I chain my bike up every day. He doesn’t make any attempt to emerge, so I grab my bag with the Wrath stuffed animal inside and sling it over my shoulders.

  The thought of Wrath being able to communicate with one of my new friends is an idea that I haven’t given enough worry. Up until now, he’s been a silent participant in my life - not silent to me but to everyone else around me. My secrets are literally safe with the demon. Now, though, there was an outlet that there’d never been before. Winter could hear him now - something Wrath realized he could exploit.

  “Start spilling my secrets and I’ll change the Babylon Prime password. No more two-day summonings for the demon who loves cookware.”

  Wrath hisses. “You wouldn’t dare.” And then a moment later, “Head for the library.”

  We don’t head for the library front entrance, though. Wrath has me head around to the rear of the building, where there is a stairway that descends into the darkness. “Book cellar?”

  “Only the best kind.”

  We begin to descend the stairs into the dark, but it never actually gets dark. There’s a twilight to the stairwell, as though emitted by the stones themselves, or maybe the moss growing in between them.

  Stranger still, the more I descend, the stones themselves rotate. The row of horizontal stones shift to an angle, then eventually lay vertically before rotating so that top and bottom are reversed. There’s never a gap where the lines change, and in fact it just seems natural. But it certainly is not.

  At the bottom - I think - we emerge back above ground and in the rear of the library. Wrath doesn’t say anything so I walk back to the front of the building and this version of the library is… something else entirely.

  The library looks nothing like the one I know on campus. For one thing, it’s even more creepy than the one I see every day. Gargoyles don’t just line the walls, they climb them, perched amid acts of violence. The windows are thick and lead-lined, and impossible to see in.

  No electric lights inside, but the windows all glow from hundreds of candles, some pressed to the glass, others casting faint color from deeper within.

  “Welcome to the Library,” Wrath says grandly.

  “I’ve been to the library. This is not the library.”

  “That’s because this is a Library.”

  I know he’s putting an extra emphasis on the word, but I decide to play dumb. He dragged me out of the house on hair-washing night, after all. He should suffer a little bit. Darkness knew he likes to make me suffer often enough.

  “I know,” I reply patiently. “I was there earlier - someone stalked me and streamed it. The Hollow Hills library is a southern gothic haunted house chic. This one’s if Mary Shelley wrote Dracula versus Frankenstein’s Monster at Loch Ness.”

  “There’s a copy of that in the Library,” Wrath muses idly. “Though I don’t think you’ll like how it turns out. No one did. It’s got the worst rating in the collection. Which is saying something - they’ve also the fanfiction that Hitler wrote about himself and Socrates. Which was just awful, and anatomically implausible.”

  Wrath is trying to distract me. I don’t fall for it, and instead study the library building in front of me. In every way, the vibe is more hostile than the normal library - and did I really think the Hill House library was suddenly ‘normal’? - But it also makes more sense.

  Everything in Hollow Hills has a touch of creepiness to it. This building is more like Morecroft Manor - it wears its creepiness on its sleeve. I can’t say why I think it fits in better, only that it does. Other buildings around the campus are represented here, and each of them has a similar vibe.

  Is there a secret college? It feels like there’s a secret college.

  “Welcome to the Library-under-the-World!”