The three girls weren't really certain how long they stayed there, waiting and watching the base of the stairs like hawks. The ghost, however, didn't seem to have followed them.
"I don't get it," Artemis whispered, hoping that she could speak low enough to not attract its attention and still be heard by Jenny and Lilly. "It feels like it's mad at us, but 's soon as we run away, it leaves us alone. An' if it doesn't want us here, why'd it lock us in?"
Jenny shook her head. "I dunno," she replied. "It's gotta want us in here, but if we jus' make it mad, then what's it want us for?"
There was a pause in the conversation as the three of them pondered what it could possibly want with them, not coming to any particularly encouraging conclusions. Then Lilly frowned. "W-wait," she said, "you mean you ran 'way from it b'fore jus' now?"
Jenny nodded, and they filled her in. Lilly tried to picture it - the two of them being chased all the way back to the book stacks, and then, for some inscrutable reason, just left... Artemis frowned. "Jenny, you gotta do something!" she said. "We can't just sit here!"
Jenny bit her lip and shook her head. "I...I dunno how to fight a ghost!" she said. "An'...it's not like the Enemy. What...what if it...useta be someone?" She looked down at her weapon - comforting though it was to have it, she wasn't eager to use it on something that might, for all they knew, be a real person.
Lilly's eyes widened. "You...you think the sun does that?" she asked. The idea that the Sun, so vital to everything on Earth, might arbitrarily choose to end a person's own life, and bring them back as...as that...
Jenny shook her head. "I...I dunno," she said. "I don' think so...but what if it's someone who...who useta just be dead, an' now they're sorta alive an' all confused?" she asked. "Maybe they useta work here, an' now it's closed down an' they don't know why, or where everybody is..." She shuddered.
"But why wouldn't it ask us?" Artemis mused. "If it was confused, we could tell it stuff. Instead it jus' ignores us when we're quiet an' yells at us an' chases us when we're not..."
Lilly thought about it. There was something odd about all this...even aside from the fact that they were trapped in a haunted library. What Jenny had said about the clock striking and then everything closing up, and just how mad the thing got when there was a mess, or noise...it reminded her of something...that was it. It reminded her of Melanie trying to play dolls with her, and the weird, mechanistic way she tried to make everything fit the way she'd gathered it should. And she thought about the movie she'd been trying not to think about...
"U-um," she said, "what if...um, what if it's the library that's actually doin' this?" she asked. Jenny and Artemis stared at her, not quite following. "Um," she stammered, "like, if for all the time it was open, the librarians were doin' stuff that librarians do, an'...it kinda got to be the way things went, an' the library kinda got used to it. An' now with everythin' gettin' all weird, maybe...maybe the library is tryin' to make things go how they're s'poseta again...?"
They mulled it over. "That's weird," Artemis said. "Wouldn't lotsa old buildings have stuff like this, then? One a' the churches in town is hundreds of years old, that's lots older than this. I think. But nobody talks 'bout stuff like that happenin' there."
Jenny nodded. "I dunno," she said. "But...maybe Lilly's kinda right anyway. It's sittin' at the desk an' everything, and it doesn't come after us when we're quiet...maybe it's just tryin' to run the library."
Artemis frowned. "But why lock us in, then?" she asked. "If it's tryin' to run a library, what's it need us for?"
Lilly had a thought. "M-maybe it's...'cause we're the first people to come here since?" she asked. Like Melanie, insisting on having things the one way she understood them to be... "Maybe it doesn't want us to leave, 'cause...'cause we didn't borrow anythin'?"
The other two stared at her. She was perfectly serious, but...that was nuts...
