I stood there, staring stupidly at the closed door. What emergency? Even though I knew Aunt Lyssa wasn’t there, I felt like I needed desperately to go inside. I’m not sure why, but I just had that feeling. Could I locate Fred, the janitor, and ask him to open it? Could I open it with a credit card like people do all the time in corny detective shows on television? Then I remembered the key ring in my hip pack and felt even more stupid. Not only did I have the keys to our house’s front and back doors on it, I had Aunt Lyssa’s spare key to her office. I fumbled with the lock, the fingers of my right hand almost as wooden and stupid as those on my left.

Finally the key turned. Roger and I burst in through the door.

Of course there was nothing unusual to be seen in the office. No movie cliche “signs of a struggle” or bodies on the floor. No broken windows, no bloody handprints, no strange primitive statues of winged and tentacled monsters, no trails of alien slime on the walls. Just the usual friendly clutter of books and catalogs piled on just about every available flat surface.

Then something caught my eye. In the midst of all her clutter, my aunt always keeps the top of her desk neat. So I immediately noticed another piece of yellow lined paper with my aunt’s writing on it in the middle of her desk by the phone.

Aunt Lyssa has never been one to record messages word for word. She has this sort of shorthand method, taking down every tenth word or so. In this case she’d written:

M

trouble

not bad

resting

Come home

Roger leaned over my shoulder and slowly read the note aloud.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

I studied the note. There was the letter M at the top of the sheet. M for Maddy. It could only mean that my aunt had been told by someone that I was in trouble. But how could that be?

I suddenly realized, like a punch in the gut, that someone—or something—could have called my aunt and deceived her, convinced her that she needed to come right home.

Aunt Lyssa’s phone is a direct line to her desk. It doesn’t come through the library switchboard. I grabbed the receiver and stabbed in *69 so hard that I broke the nail on my index finger.

“The number of your last incoming call was . . .” the pleasant mechanical voice began.

Then it said the number. My home number. The number of our house, where the Whisperer in the Dark was waiting.

18

THE LAST CALL

ROGER,” I SAID, the tone of my voice just short of panic, “we’ve got to get to my house. My number, the last call Aunt Lyssa answered, was from my house. Get it?”