Page 7 of Endless Anger
They point up at the building, which looms behind a clock tower that doesn’t appear to tell the correct time.
I glance at Mom, who’s already reaching for me. The diamond ring on her left hand catches in the sunlight as it pokes through a cloud.
“Kallum,” she says to Dad. “Asher and I will meet up with you three in a bit.”
He nods once. “At the dorms.”
Noelle frowns. “You’re going in there? Didn’t you just hear them say it’s haunted?”
Quincy rolls her eyes. “They say everything is haunted on this campus. Fury Hill residents are extremely superstitious and paranoid.”
“Dates back to the founding families,” the tour guide tells us. “Lot of conspiracy theories surrounding the creation of the school and how the joint venture turned into an undead bloodbath.”
“Undead?” Dad cocks an eyebrow. “As in zombies?” He glances at Quincy, his expression skeptical. “Are we sure you should be attending a school that promotes the existence of the supernatural? What happened to art and science?”
“Mr. Anderson, you don’t think humans are alone in the world, do you?” the tour guide questions. “You think all the stories about ghouls and goblins are fake?”
Dad’s jaw clenches. “If there’s a creature out there worse than a human, I’ve yet to be convinced.”
He continues walking, leaving the five of us standing at the library’s entrance. Quincy exhales, her shoulders slumping, and starts after him. The tour guide follows suit, marking something off on their clipboard.
Noelle purses her lips, glancing at us and then the Obeliskos. Something unreadable flashes through her gaze…like the passing of a shadow behind an empty window, rustling the curtain. “He has a point, but I still don’t want to go in there. I bet you’ll fall through the stairs. This place doesn’t look like it gets inspected often.”
Sprinting after the other three, Noelle’s dark brown hair swishes against her back, which is rigid despite her excited gait.
I look up at Mom, who simply watches her daughter with eyes that seem sad.
I’m not sure why, and I don’t bother asking.
Snapping out of it, Mom drags me through the Obeliskos’s revolving glass door and into a lobby with a giant circulation desk and rows of tables with desktop computers behind it. Two staircases and an elevatorpunctuate the center of the room, splitting the halls beyond that seem to go on for miles.
Sturdy bookshelves lines the walls, cut so they fit beneath more stained glass windows, and the dark wood floors creak as we walk on them.
Mom sighs wistfully. “Nothing beats a campus library.”
We migrate slowly through the many rows of books, circling around study areas and tiptoeing past the offices toward the back. Eventually, we come to another elevator, where a sign with the building’s levels is plastered above the buttons.
“Fury Hill archives and world encyclopedias,” I read, tracing the words with a finger. “Thirteenth floor.”
“Looking to prove your father wrong?” Mom asks, reaching for my hand. She squeezes as the elevator doors slide open, tugging me inside.
“He’s never wrong,” I mutter.
“Never say never, my darling boy.”
The thirteenth floor is as creepy as it sounds like it would be. The first level had decent lighting and enough human paraphernalia that, despite its emptiness, still gave it a sense of agency.
Up here, it’s like time is stuck in a bottle and hasn’t moved for centuries. City archives are locked in glass display cases alongside rare leather-bound classics and an endless collection of encyclopedias.
Posters on the wall instruct visitors not to touch the books without proper handling equipment and not to remove them from the premises.
I grab one from a shelf and flip to the middle, searching until I find something mildly interesting. The entries are mostly about the founding of Fury Hill, but there’s a name that continually comes up, making me pause when it gets to the actual person.
Cronus Anderson (born c. 1550—died unknown). One of the six founding family members, Cronus is attributed with the conception of Avernia as a learning institution, the construction of town around campus, and promoting drilling near the base of the White Mountains for raw minerals that would boost Fury Hill’s economic growth.
Eventually, like the other founders, Cronus would go on to establish hisbloodline and grow his wealth. Though he survived the consumption crisis, Cronus was excommunicated before his death.
There are no records of the death of Cronus Anderson. It is likely they were destroyed in a fire that eventually burned down his farm or perhaps intentionally erased at the behest of his daughter.
