Double Life - Book 1 of the Vaiya Series by Vaiya Books Page A

rid of his anxiety. However,
what he felt only intensified his fear. Not only was the doorknob
unnaturally cold to his touch, it was also very dirty from the dust
that had accumulated on it. It felt like something out of a murder
mystery.
    Shuddering at that last thought, Ian
hesitated to open the door, intimidation creeping through him like
a spider, as he questioned whether this was really such a great
idea after all. One thing was sure, though--nobody had been in this
room for a long time, and that definitely made him
uncomfortable.
    Putting his ear up to the door to listen for
any noises, he waited in silence for something, anything
ghost-like, morbid, or bone-chilling. When he’d been listening for
over a minute though, and had heard nothing, he chastised himself,
feeling extremely foolish. For somebody who wasn’t superstitious,
he sure wasn’t living up to his title.
    Annoyed by his childish fear, he wasted no
more time and pushed open the creaky wooden door, wiping his left
hand on his jeans to get off the dust, while anxiously peering
inside the room. His eyes immediately fastened themselves onto the
many large towering bookshelves scattered throughout the room as a
damp, musty smell swept into his nostrils.
    As his nose twitched at the unpleasant odor,
he breathed a sigh of relief. Though it looked as if nobody had
been in here for decades, the place looked just like an old private
library. It was nothing like the horrid image he’d had in his mind
of dangling nooses, rattling skeletons, werewolf statues, and
grotesque paintings.
    Confidence awakened, he cautiously took one
step into the room. Then another. Before long, he found himself
gazing outside of the only window in the old library, a
wooden-framed circular opening that shed the faintest light into
this dark place, the only other light coming into this room being
the dim lights from the staircase. And the lighting wasn’t likely
going to change, as there were no light switches anywhere in the
room, at least from what he could see.
    Peering out the window, only slightly
unnerved by the dull lighting, he saw many lit-up pine trees
shimmering with white and orange lights below him. Fascinated, he
stared at them through the pouring rain; they were beautiful.
    After half a minute, he eventually took his
eyes off the dazzling lights and scanned further, his eyes falling
on Kenn’s shiny black Ford Fusion. Instantly his mind spun back
into a state of wrath, Kenn being at the focal point of his
vengeful thoughts.
    Lost in a wild state of imagining various
ways of getting even with Kenn, he was suddenly thrown back to
reality, as a purple lightning bolt tore across the night sky like
a jaguar on a hunt, causing him to jump back reflexively and crash
into a writing table, knocking over a rusty metal jar of pens and
pencils.
    Frantic, completely unsettled by the flash
that seemed to have come out of nowhere, Ian instinctively
scrambled to pick up the writing instruments as they spilled onto
the floor and rolled into various areas, some of which were nearly
inaccessible to him.
    As he stretched out his arm and grabbed a
couple of short stubby pencils, a deafening boom shook the house to
its foundation, rattling the bookshelves, causing various books to
slide out of their places and plunge down from as high as eight
feet, thumping noisily as they struck the wooden floor.
    Terror-stricken, as he deftly evaded a
falling tome that nearly landed on his head, Ian flung the pencils
away from him as if they were cursed and darted towards the door,
no longer caring about cleaning up the mess or about proving the
previous homeowner wrong. Ghosts or not, this attic was definitely
not a place he wanted to spend any more time in, especially not
during a fierce thunderstorm that had developed so swiftly and
unexpectedly.
    Racing towards the door, his heart like
molten wax, Ian abruptly halted as an even brighter flash of
lightning blazed across the sky, lighting up the whole