1: Buried Treasure
2: Down with the Ship
3: Summer Party
4: High Score
5: Late Checkout
6: The Closed Carousel
7: The Haunted Heist
18: Here Comes the Bride
19: Under the Surface
20: Man’s Best Friend
21: Stopped in His Tracks
22: Last Call
23: Christmas Past
24: All Aboard
25: Play Me a Song
26: The Show Must Go On
27: Picture Perfect
28: Lost and Found
29: The Final Shot
30: Hide-and-Seek
31: Curse of the North
My guess is it’s a few hundred bucks,” Jared said. “A rainy-day fund that would have been worth a lot more a few decades ago than it is now.”
“Maybe it’s that fancy pocket watch I saw on him in all the pictures,” India guessed. “I’ve never seen it in person.”
When she was a little girl, India’s mother had told stories about how she practically grew up at her grandfather’s butcher shop, which was located in a local strip mall, squeezed between a sandwich shop and a bakery. Each of the three shops was owned by rival brothers—Earl, Carlos, and Bill—and they had a longstanding history of sabotaging one another’s businesses. A mysterious flood, destroyed shipments, emptied cash registers—the stories had become a family legend at this
point, but at the time, the family war was intense, and it bred secrecy among the family units.
For instance, India’s mother told her about how her grandfather Earl supposedly kept his finest goods under a secret trapdoor in the basement of the butcher shop, and he never told anyone where it was. His ghost, India’s mom said, still haunted the shop, stopping anyone from stealing his treasure.
India suspected the story was just to keep her from wandering around the dangerous equipment when she was a little girl. But now, more than two decades later, reunited for her parents’ fiftieth anniversary, India and her cousin Jared were determined to get to the bottom of the family legend. They snagged the key from the junk drawer and popped over to the shop.
“I’ve stuck my head in once or twice, but I was always too scared to actually go in,” Jared recalled. “I tended to spend my time over at the bakery.”
“How do we even know what we’re looking for?” India asked as she descended into the damp basement with her phone’s flashlight illuminating the steps. She hadn’t been in the butcher shop in over a decade, and she rarely frequented the basement. The phone’s light flashed against the metal of the equipment stored down below.
“Was that a rat?” India asked as she heard an animal rustling through the shelves. The moon was full, and its light cascaded through the small window in the corner.
The smell of dried animal blood from the butchering competed with notes of sandalwood and musk, her grandfather Earl’s old cologne. Rows of machines, aprons, and large brown
bags filled the space. Quarters were cramped between the two of them.
“Just start opening stuff, I guess,” Jared said.
India lifted one of the giant brown bags, and suddenly, a dim, green fluorescent bulb flickered to life above her.
Both India and Jared jumped, surprised by the sudden light. They heard a howl from outside the shop.
“Did you turn that on?” Jared looked cautiously at the lantern. India shook her head.
Jared turned pale and wondered aloud if they should leave, but India was determined to see it through.
“This shouldn’t take us long. It’s not like there’s a lot of ground to cover,” she insisted.
That’s when she noticed a sand-speckled tarp covering a bottom shelf, and she leaned down to inspect where its corner met the wall.
“I would guess we’re looking for a hole.” India lifted the corner of the tarp.
The green light turned back off. Jared dropped the box he’d been inspecting. India turned her phone’s flashlight on, excited by the adventure.
Sure enough, in the back left corner, hidden by the tarp, there was an old plank of wood covering a hole in the floor.
“X marks the spot,” India joked.
When she touched the wood plank, the green light began flickering in rapid succession.
On. Off. On.
Off.
The door to the basement clanged shut, startling them both.
“Is this a good idea?” Jared asked as India moved the plank aside.
“Seems like Grandpa Earl knows we’re close to finding it.” India acted as if she were joking, but she was secretly spooked out.
India hesitated, and Jared leaned forward.
“What is it?” Jared said.
Inside the shallow hole was a single object wrapped in a piece of cloth. She picked it up.
Afraid of how Earl’s ghost would react—if it even existed— India carefully lifted the object out and unwrapped a worn leather bifold wallet. Opening it, she saw a sallow, yellow piece of paper featuring a list of names.
A fearsome sound, like a coyote howling, filled the night as a creature dashed across the window.
“Put it back!” Jared demanded, a tremor in his voice.
“His treasure,” India whispered, showing the list to Jared. His eyes were darting between the closed door and the still-flashing light.
“We have to get out of here.” Jared grabbed the list from India’s hand and started to wrap it back up in the wallet. But then he stopped and gasped. “Look.”
India stared at the list in the flickering light. Most of the names on the list had been crossed out, but there was Jared’s father’s name—Robert—one of two remaining names, written clear as day. India scanned the names that had been crossed
out, recalling how she’d attended all of their funerals over the last decade.
India and Jared stared at one another.
“Do you think . . . ?” India was horrified at the thought. She looked around at the giant knives hanging around the ceiling. “Surely not.” Grandpa Earl had always been so sweet.
“I have to warn Dad.” Jared frantically pulled out his phone, but they had no service down in the basement. “It’s dead!” he exclaimed as he rushed back up the stairs.
The green light turned on, almost blinding them now as they escaped the shop.
Jared drove wildly, blasting through every stop sign and red light, weaving around traffic in the pouring rain.
As they neared the house, Jared swerved to miss a coyote standing in the middle of the road. India noticed the moonlight produced an increasingly greenish cast.
“Stop!” India yelled when she saw a silhouette of a man walking in slow motion down the center of the road.
“Dad!” Jared yelled, jumping from the car.
Robert awoke from his trance, a small bottle of sandalwood and musk in his hand.
“What are you doing?” Jared pleaded.
“I . . . I don’t know . . . ,” he stammered. “But Earl asked me to bring this to him.”
Maya had stayed at the library way later than she meant to. She had a final tomorrow, and she needed to go home and get a good night’s sleep. It was now nearing midnight, and she was the last person on this floor of the university library.
Maya had always hated studying here. It gave her the creeps at night, and she had heard the librarians were incredibly strict, so she preferred to study somewhere else. Maya wasn’t the only one who felt like this place was a little odd. One of her friends insisted it was haunted and would never come in at all. Maya didn’t take the feeling too seriously, so she had agreed when her study group had wanted to meet here. It had
just made sense to stay where she was when they were done, so Maya had settled in for a night of cramming.
Her eyes started to droop as she stared at the page in front of her, and she knew if she didn’t leave soon, she would fall asleep on top of the table. She propped her head on her fist and closed her eyes, promising herself she would just rest them for a minute and then she’d leave.
One minute turned into five, and Maya dozed off until a thud startled her. She bolted upright, blinking the sleep away, and saw that the thud had come from a book that had fallen off the table from the top of a stack that was precariously close to the edge.
Good thing that noise woke me up, Maya thought, because she had knocked over her water bottle, which was now leaving a growing puddle on the table that was inching closer to the corner of her book.
With a shouted curse, Maya moved the book out of the way, righted the bottle, and ran to get a stack of paper towels from the bathroom to clean up the spill. Someone whispered an annoyed “Shh!” at the sound of her shout. Weird , Maya thought. She hadn’t realized anyone else was still in this area of the library.
Maya quickly wiped up the mess and decided it was time for her to go home. She shoved the book back on the shelf quickly, not paying attention to exactly where it went, and then accidentally kicked up a cloud of dust.
A sneezing fit overtook Maya as the dust reached her nose, and she heard another “Shh!” from somewhere behind her. Rude. She couldn’t exactly help it if she needed to sneeze.
As she packed up her belongings and put up the rest of the books she’d been using, a message pinged on her phone loudly. She hadn’t realized the volume was up, but the alert sounded shrill in the quiet of the library.
A man appeared beside Maya, a bearded, bald sort with a stern face. He was wearing a well-fitted tweed vest, paired with a navy-blue suit with brown patches on the elbows and a tie cinched tightly around his neck. Maya had no idea where the man had come from.
He extended his finger inches away from her nose. Petrified, Maya stumbled backward, tripping over her own feet and bumping her back up against one of the bookshelves behind her. She was still clutching one of the books she had been returning between her hands.
“I warned you twice now, so consider this your third offense.” The man’s voice was raspy. “Quiet, please, in my library.”
The man’s face turned grotesque, and it looked like his skin was melting right off him. His pointed finger became warped and bent, and the bone poked out through the rapidly rotting skin. Maya screamed in horror, twisting her head and raising the book in front of her in defense.
The scream only served to make the man angrier, and he reached his bony hand toward Maya’s throat. Whether he meant to choke her or threaten her, Maya didn’t know, because she lifted the book and smashed it into the ghastly ghost’s face. The man turned to dust before her eyes, swirling into a black cloud that dissipated into the air.
No classwork or test score was this important. Maya
dropped the book on the ground, bolted out of the library, and decided once and for all that she was never coming back here to study again. ***
