#51 Hallowe'en

Dear diary,

Tonight was Hallowe’en at the library, and we put on the best show ever!

Pepper had been organising this for months. She’d put costume design sketches and itinerary documents all around the staffroom, so that it resembled a police incident room. She’d made each of our costumes from scratch, although it was us who were out of pocket – the petty cash jar in the staffroom has seen a lot of use over the past few weeks. I think she felt bad about having missed all the drama that happened last month, and was trying to get all of us (and succeeding in getting herself) excited about this party to bring some cheer back into the library.

I finished my shift at 5:00 and ran to the bathroom to get changed. There wasn’t much room, and I could hear Shannon struggling into her costume in the next cubicle (at least, I hoped that was what she was doing). Pepper had done an amazing job: it looked exactly as I would have imagined a devil-cum-trickster-cum-ghetto-pimp-cum-jazz-club-singer to look like. It took me almost an hour to put the whole thing on, making sure that my bowler hat didn’t cover the horns and that my automated swishing tail didn’t swish where it shouldn’t.

We all assembled at the front desk. Boudecia, dressed in a giant tawny owl costume (quite fitting, considering she can quite literally morph into one), stood beside Pepper, the most awesome-looking witch a library has ever seen. Her hat was crooked to perfection, and I had to duck whenever she came close for fear of losing an eye. Pepper cackled, and set us all to our tasks without breaking character.

Talia walked off towards Junior to set up for the Monster Mash dance. She was a paragon of seduction in her flowing red velvet dress streaked with black. She turned and for a moment I thought she smiled at me, her eyeshadow dark and vampiric fangs glinting. But then TJ, now her boyfriend, ambled past me to join her, stumbling in a zombie-like manner to match his costume. I sighed. Goldie and Ernesto departed together to the meeting room, now the Cave of Scary Stories. It was an unusual sight: Queen Nefertiti being accompanied by a shamanic priest.

We opened the library front doors at 7:30 to let the giddily excitable kids and their reluctant yet secretly impressed parents in. Sylvia and I had rigged the lights so that they emitted only a dim glow. The smoke machine and eerie instrumental music added to the effect. We greeted our guests divided them into four groups of about forty. Sylvia and Shannon – the gothic chick and Death – were hosting a collection of Hallowe’en-themed games in the meeting room; and Pepper and Boudecia roamed the library making sure all was going well, and doing some PR with the parents. That left myself and Bron (a.k.a. ride of Frankenstein) to host the treasure hunt in Non-Fiction.

We had twenty minute rotations so the kids wouldn’t get too bored of one activity. In between them we had five minute breaks so the kids could get drinks and stuff, though to be fair they were more a chance for us to recuperate. Overall the activities went really well. I won’t go into too much detail here as there are heaps of stories up on the library website. You can read all about it there. However, I do have one story which you probably won’t find on there.

THE MISSING GIRL

It was just after the third round, by which time we were stuffed. We’d been running around after the kids making sure they didn’t knock any more books off the shelves – we’d lost a chunk of the 150s when two of the little ones had accidentally head-butted each other and gone sprawling. I was holding Bron’s water bottle to her mouth because she was too exhausted to hold it herself. The bell sounded to signal that the fourth round was about to commence. I heaved Bron to her feet, and as we were psyching ourselves up for the final bout of chaos a girl came running up to us. I can’t find my friend Julie anywhere, she spluttered, she’s six years old, is she still in the maze?

I should explain: it had taken all week to set up, but we’d managed to turn Non-Fiction into a labyrinth. The shelves were naturally designed to lose people in, so all we needed to do to amplify that effect was rearrange them in the space we had and drape a thin black cloth across the top so you couldn’t navigate by following the starward lights. There were neon arrows inside warning kids of where the ‘walls’ were, and the prizes were just glow-sticks.

I dashed inside the maze but could find no sign of Julie. I emerged and immediately notified all the staff. Multiple headcounts and searches revealed nothing about her whereabouts. By this time the girl had become hysterical and was rocking back and forth on one of those tiny plastic chairs from the Junior section.

Bron seemed to have recovered completely from her weariness before. She whipped a radio out of her massive bouffant and told the person on the other end to Go Go Go. Immediately one of the windows by the carrels exploded in a shower of glass. A robot ran in and took cover under a desk chair. The robot looked at a complex-looking device on its wrist, then held it out towards the maze. It ran inside, and after a few seconds of silent suspense it emerged triumphant, a tattered doll held in an iron clasp by an iron clasp..

“JULIE!!!” The young girl jumped off her chair, ran to the pirate and sprang up into his arms. She clutched the doll and cried with joy. The robot removed its helmet to reveal his identity: Bron’s son, Bronson, our shelver. He stood heroic with the young girl around his shoulders for a few seconds, then, slowly, the combined weight of his costume and the damsel in distress took their toll and they crashed to the floor.

We sat around the staffroom after all the parents had dragged their kids home to bed. Everyone was exhausted, but it had definitely been worth it. Can’t wait for next year!

-Jay, shelver explorer