There's Something Out There by P.J. Night Page A

awake all night, wild-eyed with fear, claiming to hear sounds that no one else heard and raving about monsters. In her delirium, Imogen scratched at the walls until her fingers bled.”
    Jenna’s mouth was so dry she had to swallow twice before she could speak. “What—what happened to her?” she asked again.
    â€œOne night Lewis was called away to settle a dispute,” Mr. Carson said quietly. “When he returned to the cabin that he’d built, the door was hanging from its hinges, and Imogen had vanished. A search party banded togetherimmediately, but Imogen was never found.”
    â€œShe disappeared?” Jenna asked. “Without a trace?”
    Mr. Carson looked uncomfortable. “Well, there was one trace,” he replied. “Winter had come to Lewisville, and there were several inches of snow on the ground. The snow in the clearing—the one where Lewis had attacked the Marked Monster—was freshly soaked with blood. A great deal of
red
blood, not the black blood of the Marked Monster. At that time, there was no way for the settlers to know if it was human blood, but if it was, it’s safe to assume that, if the blood belonged to Imogen, the young girl had exsanguinated.”
    â€œEx-
what
?”
    â€œBled to death.”
    Mr. Carson took one look at Jenna’s face and immediately changed his tone. “Now, now, don’t be frightened!” he said. “This is just a story. Manfred Lewis wrote
nothing
about it in his diary, except that Imogen disappeared in the night and was not found, despite many searches.”
    â€œThen how do you know about it?”
    â€œRumors. Stories, as I said, passed down through generations. For example, the area where the Marked Monster was attacked by Lewis and Chief Onongahkan—andwhere all the blood was found after Imogen disappeared—earned a nickname. Settlers called it the Sacred Square. You can see here, on this old map, where it was. Lewis forbade anyone to use it for any purpose. Curiously, it was reported that nothing grew there, even many years after the earth had been soaked with blood. Of course, that wouldn’t have surprised the Q’ippicut; they always maintained that every part of the Keuhkkituh was poison.
    â€œThere was even a rumor that Imogen herself kept a diary … but it was never found. As the decades passed, sightings of the Marked Monster became far less common, you know. There have been no reports of anyone seeing it for nearly fifty years.”
    Just then a librarian poked her head into the archives room. “Mr. Carson? The copier’s jammed. Would you mind taking a look?”
    â€œI’ll be back,” Mr. Carson told Jenna as he eased himself off the chair. “And I’ll copy some materials you can use in your research.”
    â€œThank you,” she said gratefully, her mind still whirling as she tried to process what the archivist had told her.
    As soon as he was out of the room, she remembered something—the soft
thud
she’d heard inside ManfredLewis’s desk when the lid banged down. With a quick glance toward the door, Jenna hurried back to the desk.
    The lid still wouldn’t open more than two inches, but it was wide enough for her to slip her hand inside. She wiggled her fingers around, trying to find …
    Well. She wasn’t sure what, exactly, she might find. But she wanted to know what was in the desk;
what
had fallen and made that noise.
    Then Jenna’s fingers brushed against something solid—something that inched across the wooden panel when she pushed it. It was smooth, small, and rectangular in shape; she could tell without even looking.
    Slowly, carefully, she pulled her hand out of the desk and discovered that she was holding a small journal.
    Jenna opened the book. On the first brown-spotted page she found an inscription that made her heart pound so hard she could hear it in her ears. But before she could