The Last Writer Adriane Leigh (story reading TXT) 📖

PAST

Zara - Spring 1964

The New York Public Library

“Carnegie!” Yara’s shrill voice carried down the hallway. Tiny white hands clutched the doorframe as she hurled herself around the corner of the sitting room, a crazed look in her eyes. “Bad dog!”

She hurried down the hall to me, one bony hand clasping mine when she was near enough. “He won’t stop following me.”

“He looks at you like he wants to eat you.” I laughed.

Her fear-filled gaze caught mine. “I hate that dog.”

“Just kick him, he thinks he’s the boss of you,” I spit, shaking my older but much smaller half-sister off.

“It feels like everyone is the boss of me.” Yara pouted.

“Maybe because you act like a baby all the time.”

“I’m older than you, Zara, stop acting like you’re smarter than me.” It was true, on both counts. Yara and Yarrow, my identical twin siblings, had just turned fourteen and I was freakishly smarter than both of them.

“Stop acting stupid all the time.” I glared down at her, her already diminutive form shrinking by the moment. It may be true that her and Yarrow were eighteen months older than me but what they lacked in strength I made up for tenfold in smarts.

There were countless family photos showing Yara and Yarrow cuddling me and helping Mother take care of me as a newborn, but by the age of three I was towering over them and often mistaken for the oldest child. I was only thirteen but my form had filled out early compared to the frail skeletons of Yara and Yarrow. They were a year and a half older, and half my size in height and stature.

The skin on their faces was like stretched glue, chalky and smooth with faint blue veins visible just under the membrane. They looked every part the sickly, weak children they were—Mother complained often that being cooped up in the library all day left them with rickets and a pitiful immune system.

I, on the other hand, was strong and robust. My father often calling on me to help him rearrange the stacks in the basement or dust the wooden moldings throughout the private apartments. Mother often said I took after her people: dark and imposing; while and Yara and Yarrow took after the Thornberry family: lean and frail, like the family tree hadn’t seen sunshine in three generations.

For years I’d endured the torture their neediness required, my mother’s kind eyes worn dull as the needs of the demanding twins took their toll. By the time I was six I helped her prepare the special, mostly liquid and vitamin-fortified meals the twins required, while father worked in the stacks of The New York Public Library. Our existence behind the walls of its secret apartments was humble, the silence that rained down over our household like a cavern of loneliness.

William Thornberry, the library’s latest live-in caretaker, and my father.

I had respect for him, even though I didn’t feel like I knew him in the same way my siblings did. Maybe it was because their mother died in childbirth, my mother's patrician gaze and hard-edged eyes always second to Emilia Thornberry, a dozen years dead and yet her ghost remained, haunting the chambers of my father’s heart.

The reason my father had never married my mother after nearly fourteen years together wasn’t that the library system frowned upon employee relationships, but because the ghost of his dead wife still lingered in the halls.

Carnegie yapped up at Zara then, eager for her attention and clearing the haze from my mind.

“Oh, shut up you mutt,” I hissed. “You’ve just got to kick him, like this.” I swept a patent-leather toe at Yara’s ankle, a satisfying thunk bringing a smile to my face.

“Ow! That’s me, Zara!” Yara hopped on her foot, holding it and yowling as she did.

“See?” I grinned. “Works every time.”

“Hey!” Yarrow turned the corner down the hallway, complete works of Byron clutched at his feeble chest. “Leave my sister alone!”

“She’s my sister too.”

“Half-sister,” Yarrow spit, beady dark eyes on mine.

“Ugh, you two couldn’t be more pathetic.” I assessed their long, angel-white hair, Yarrow’s wisping at his shoulders and tucked neatly behind his ears and Yara’s in tightly woven plaits that made me want to yank. “Or creepy.”

I turned, lifting the tiny yapping Maltese in my arms and heading in the opposite direction of the two of them.

“I’m going to tell Mom!”

“She’s not your mom, is she?” I halted at my doorway, feeling an anger bubble inside of me.

“Dad said we should call her Mom—”

“I don't care what that mealy-brained excuse for a father told you, she’s my mother, she’ll never be yours.”

“Then why does she tell me secrets?” Yarrow shouted, tears hovering in his brackish eyes.

“I don’t believe you.”

“She told me just last night before bed that we’re all going to move to a big house on the ocean and be healthy again. She promised. She said there are cliffs and gardens and dolphins at dawn.”

“She’s lying to you.”

“She’s not!” Yara shouted up at me. “She told me too!”

“Told you what, that we’re going to escape this dark Hell someday? Nice try, maybe me—but you’ll be here forever. Your dad will die in the stacks, that’s what my mom says.”

Tears waged a war with anger in their eyes. I smiled, petting Carnegie before placing a kiss on his nose and setting him at their feet on the floor. “Get ‘em, Carnegie.”

The little dog wagged his tail, looking up at me with excitement shining in his little irises. He yapped repeatedly before a twin version of his furry self came around the corner of the hall. Yara and Yarrow shrieked and ran, the octave in their terrified voices enough to shatter stained glass.

“I hate those little rats.” I winked at Astor, the Maltese that hadn’t chased after my half-siblings. “Someone should call an exterminator.”

TWO

Ryn

“I don’t remember her being so creepy in her author pictures.”

Thax laughed, throwing