The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford

there.”
    â€œGet out,” I said.
    â€œProbably Mason and his horrible dumpling sisters found him and took him to the lake. They’re always back here in the woods,” he said. “We should have had Mary predict where Mr. Blah-Blah would be.”
    â€œBut then where’s Charlie?” I asked.
    He brushed past me and jumped the stream.
    I followed him and stayed close as we ran through the Halloways’ backyard and around the house to the street.
    When we got home, I was relieved to find that my mother wasn’t sitting at the dining-room table. The door to Nan and Pop’s was open. I could hear Pop in there figuring his system out loud, and, without looking, I knew that Mary was beside him. Jim took the camera and binoculars upstairs, and I walked down the hallway toward my parents’ room to see if my mother was up yet. She wasn’t in her bed, but when I passed by the bathroom door, I heard her in there retching.
    I knocked once. “Are you all right?” I called.
    â€œI’ll be out in a second,” she said.

You’ll Need This
    It had been obvious since the start of the school year that Mr. Rogers, the librarian, had been losing his mind. During his lunch break, when we were usually laboring over math in Krapp’s class, the old man would be out on the baseball diamond walking the bases in his rumpled suit, hunched over, talking to himself as if he were reliving some game from the distant past. That loose dirt that collected around the bases, the soft brown powder that Pinky Steinmacher ate with a spoon, would lift up in a strong wind, circling Rogers, and he’d clap as if the natural commotion were really the roar of the crowd. Krapp would look over his shoulder from where he stood at the blackboard and see us all staring out the window, shake his head, and then go and lower the blinds.
    The loss of his giant dictionary seemed to be the last straw for Rogers, as if it had been an anchor that kept him from floating away. With that gone, as my father would say, “he dipped out.” Each week we would be delivered to the library by Krapp and spend a half hour there with Rogers. Of late the old man had been smiling a lot, like a dog on a hot day, and his eyes were always busy, shifting back and forth. Sometimes he’d stand for minutes on end, staring into a beam of light shining in through the window, and sometimes he’d be frantic, movinghere and there, pulling books off the shelves and shoving them into kids’ hands.
    Bobby Harweed was brutal to him, making gestures behind the librarian’s back, coaxing everyone to laugh (and you had to laugh if Bobby wanted you to). Bobby would knock books off the shelf onto the floor and just leave them there. For Rogers to see a book on the floor was a heartache, and one day Harweed had him nearly in tears. I secretly liked Rogers, because he loved books, but he was beginning to put off even me with his weirdness.
    On the Monday morning following the dredging, we had library. Rogers sat in his little office nearly the entire time we were there, bent over his desk with his face in his hands. Harweed started the rumor that he kept Playboy magazines in there. When the half hour was almost up, Rogers came out to stamp the books kids had chosen to borrow. Before he sat down at the table with his stamp, he walked up behind me, put one hand on my shoulder, and reached up over my head to the top shelf, from which he pulled a thin volume.
    â€œYou’ll need this,” he said, and handed it to me. He walked away to the table then and began stamping books.
    I glanced down at the book. On the cover, behind the library plastic, was a drawing of a mean-looking black dog; above the creature, in serif type, The Hound of the Baskervilles. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but I never got the chance. News spread quickly through the school the next day that he had been fired because he went nuts.
    Having the