Not Blogging Today. Working on Book.

Instead of throwing together my usual fevered stew of random observations I'm taking the day off to go and look at the Lambertville Free Public Library up close. I'm trying to write a scary thriller set in that building, an old mansion that used to belong to the first mayor of Lambertville. Doctor Lilly.


Much of the book takes place there. Being an old building, rumored to be haunted, it can be creepy at times. I'll tell you the title of the book later. Here are the first few paragraphs. They scared the children's librarian:


On the night when I first discovered Thora in the library, I thought I was alone. All the lights in the building were out but the one in my office. The old building was quiet except for the creak of the heating system, the slow tick of my office clock, the far-off scurrying of mice, and the hiss of freezing rain falling on the crust of the snow piled up outside.

I never believed the stories about the Wetherford Public Library being haunted, even though they say a man was found dead of an overdose in a bathtub upstairs, back before I was born, back before the borough took the Beasley mansion for taxes and turned it into a library, way back in the days when some slumlord rented it out for apartments. No haunts had ever troubled me in my years as library director.

And yet, a sound like someone moving around in the reading room reminded me of the rumored haunt. Could someone besides me be in the library? Had the clerks left one of the doors unlocked again? I called out: "Is someone there?"

The noise stopped.