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

read another word, she heard the
clump
of Mr. Carson’s cane clunking across the floor.
    He was on his way back to the archives room.
    Jenna didn’t even think. She acted entirely on instinct as she hid the journal in her notebook and fitted them into her backpack.

Many hours later, pecking away at the keyboard while the rest of her family watched TV across the room, Jenna stretched and yawned. It felt fake to her—sounded fake, even—but must have been convincing enough, since Dr. Walker glanced at the clock on the DVD player and said, “It’s getting late, Jenna. Will you be able to finish in fifteen minutes?”
    Jenna knew she had to argue—at least a little—to be convincing. “Mom, it’s not even nine o’clock!”
    Dr. Walker sighed. “Yes. And fifteen more minutes on the computer, fifteen minutes getting ready for bed, fifteen minutes figuring out what you’re going to wear tomorrow—it will be past nine thirty before you know it. Let’s not have this argument again, please.”
    â€œFine,” Jenna said.
    But secretly, she smiled to herself.
    Never before in her life had Jenna rushed off to bed as quickly as she did that night. Alone at last in the solitude of her bedroom, she turned off all the lights and crawled into bed with a flashlight and the mysterious journal she’d smuggled out of the library.
    It was just as she’d remembered.
    The smooth grain of the leather cover.
    The tear ripped across it.
    Those suspicious, sickening splatters across the first page.
    And, of course, the inscription:
    THE DIARY OF IMOGEN LEWIS
    AGED 15 YEARS, 4 MONTHS
    IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1767
    Jenna’s excitement at finding the diary of Imogen Lewis—from the very year in which Lewisville was founded; from the very year in which Imogen herself had disappeared—wasn’t strong enough to overshadow her creeping sense of guilt. She could still hardly believethat she’d just
taken
the book like that. She had never done anything like that before in her life, and the more she thought about it, the worse she felt.
It’s a library
, she told herself.
The whole point of that entire building is for people to borrow books. That’s all I did—borrow a book. And I’ll bring it back as soon as I’m done with it
.
    But in her heart, Jenna knew that she was just making excuses. She hadn’t borrowed the diary. She’d stolen it. And promising to bring it back didn’t change the fact that she didn’t have the right to take it in the first place. So she quickly pushed the thought from her mind, because she was obsessed with finding out whatever secrets Imogen might have recorded in her diary.
    Jenna scrunched down under the covers and turned the page.
    June 1, 1767
    We have arrived at our new home! My eyes filled with tears of joy today as Papa planted the flag and announced in a most solemn voice: “I hereby proclaim these lands incorporated as the Town of Lewisville, and by the blessing of God may we prosper here as is only fitting for a people dedicated to hard work and the Holy Word as it is writ in the Bible.” But I must be honest in this diary, if nowhere else, and confess that my tears were also for Mother and James and Mary and little Teddy. Never did I dream that they would not be standing with us on this day, and though Papa never speaks of them, never, I could tell he felt their absence as keenly as I did. When we first set out for
    Jenna started flipping the pages. Not that she wasn’t
interested
in the earliest days of Lewisville’s founding … but a pressing sense of urgency forced her to skip ahead. In the middle of the diary, she came to several blank pages, and her heart sank.
    Had Imogen stopped writing in her diary before the attack?
    Some force compelled Jenna to keep turning the blank pages, and then, nearly three-quarters of the way through the journal, she found another entry,