And that’s what really brought Simon here, today, hoping that Gram wasn’t at home watching him right now with her third eye.

The library was old, and nobody used it and everybody wished it would go away. It wasn’t even a real library. It didn’t get funds from the town or county. There’d been several attempts to close it, all failures. You couldn’t zone against it, couldn’t get it declared a nuisance, couldn’t do anything.

Not that the town hadn’t tried. But when the town tried, bad things happened. Mysterious deaths, frogs, locusts, the river flooding half the town—and the river was ten miles away. One winter, a town commissioner named Sprodt had been especially devoted to destroying the library, and that was why you could find “Sprodt’s Monster” in some encyclopedias of cryptozoology. Poor man.

Simon knew about the library because Gram used it. Gram told him he was never to go there by himself. It was alright for her to check out a book for his training, because her third eye was open all the way.