The eye was shut tight, hidden behind a veiny lid. It even had eyelashes. The details were all so eerily realistic that on closer inspection, Emrys thought the leather binding of the book—warm to the touch and strangely supple—well, it could almost be … skin.
The book was like a living thing. Alive and fragile … and asleep.
Emrys drew a shaky breath. He tried to fight against the tremor in his arms. “What … the …”
“Open it,” Hazel whispered.
“I don’t know, you guys,” said Serena, looking properly spooked for once. “That thing looks … it feels … does … does anyone else feel that?”
“I’m going to put it back,” said Emrys, and his hands shook more severely than ever. “I’ll … I’ll just—”
At that moment, the book seemed to shudder.
The eye set within its cover wrenched open.
It looked right at them.
It saw them.
Then Emrys felt a pain so intense, it left him no breath with which to scream.
The Doomsday Archives
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The Doomsday Archives is the hidden place in New Rotterdam where all the weird stuff that happens here gets cataloged.[citation needed] Strange figures have appeared around town, at the sites of hauntings or unexplained deaths, and they always leave with an object from the scene.[citation needed] They might even be the cause of all these problems, like the Illuminati.[speculation?] Sometimes witnesses try to follow them, but the strangers always disappear before anyone can find out where they go.
Watch the doors.[clarification needed]
5
The pain was like a flower: a bud that unfolded, petal by petal, into an exquisite blossom of agony. It swelled just behind Emrys’s right eye. He scratched at his face, howling wordlessly, and heard his friends doing much the same.
But Emrys had little consideration to spare for Hazel or Serena. His own torment was so demanding that he could think of nothing else. If his eye wasn’t already squeezed shut, he might have clawed it out just to end this suffering. Whatever living ember had somehow burrowed into his face was sharp and hot, angry and wriggling.
And then, miraculously … it was gone.
Just as quickly as it had come, the pain dulled. The chorus of wails that had surrounded Emrys quieted into low, shocked whimpers.
He heard his own breath coming out as a wheezing percussion. Beside him, Hazel moaned, and Serena let out a sob. Emrys blinked against his tears, saw the fuzzy shapes of the others. They were both clutching their right eyes.
“What …?” Hazel asked thickly. “What was that?”
“Dad!” Serena bawled. “I want my dads!”
Emrys thought she might very well get her wish. The whole building must have heard them shrieking bloody murder from the open penthouse apartment. Emrys’s own throat was raw from screaming. Any moment now, his parents would burst upward, finding the three kids groaning and crying.
“You guys … where are we?”
The shock in Hazel’s voice drew Emrys from his thoughts. He wiped furiously at his eyes, focusing his vision on the ransacked penthouse. Only—it wasn’t.
The room that surrounded them was massive—far bigger than even Van Stavern’s spacious loft apartment. The ceiling stretched upward in a series of decorative arches, culminating dozens of feet from the floor.
And speaking of the floor, Emrys realized that the surface pressing painfully into his hip was neither the ancient vinyl flooring shared by most of the apartments in the building, nor the planks Van Stavern had covered his loft with. Instead, marble tiles stretched from wall to wall, polished and gleaming. The stone was cool against his palm.
He pushed himself up, standing shakily, as did Serena and Hazel. Somehow, impossibly, the world had shifted around Emrys and his friends, depositing them from Van Stavern’s apartment into this new place.
“No,” Serena said. “No, this isn’t real. This is a dream.”
“There are so many books,” Hazel noted with awe.
The walls were covered in them, in fact. Far more even than in Van Stavern’s apartment. Shelves that were three times as tall as Emrys climbed the edges of the chamber, each laden with heavy tomes. Some of the books looked ancient, their leather bindings brittle and peeling. Others were clearly new, with spines wrapped in colorful paper and stamped with foil titles.
But strangest by far were the displays. All around the room—set artfully across plinths, cabinets, and in gleaming glass cases—was a gallery of curios straight out of a horror movie. There were grinning masks and vacant-eyed dolls. A dagger’s curved blade seemed to drip with dark ichor when Emrys saw it from the corner of his eye, but was clean and polished when he glanced directly at it. In one display, an iron lantern housed a single bulbous candle, the wax of which had melted into a configuration that looked startlingly like a screaming face.
The chamber also contained chairs, sofas, and sumptuous carpets, all arranged around what appeared to be a functional fireplace. Skulls of various alarming shapes and sizes lined the mantel above it. There were doors, too, half a dozen of them leading who-knew-where, though they were all dwarfed by what Emrys could only think of as the main door—a colossal spire of dark wood that crested into several menacing points. Its antique knob was cast in bronze—except for the blue-and-white enamel eye at its center.
Serena stepped up to a standing mirror. It was a flat pane of silver, wreathed by sharp metal leaves. The mirror reflected the room back at her, but with one important difference.
“Whoa …” she breathed.
