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The question “Is it wrong to punch a Nazi?” raises a range of ethical dilemmas over the use of violence in a good cause. For many people however, the true question is simply how hard should one punch them?

Deplorable , by Helen Clintoff

Anne

Anne stood trembling. The thing had been some sort of unholy alliance of bear and ape, fashioned by the city’s hate out of the tarry blood that now pooled before her. In the face of her defiance, the monster had lost cohesion and fallen apart. The black puddle at her feet seemed too small to have contained such horror.

The library’s neatly arrayed shelves lay toppled and broken, books scattered everywhere. Out in the foyer, Kerrol levered himself up, groaning. He got to his knees and inspected Yute, who lay beside him.

“Is he…” Anne had been going to say “hurt?” but of course he was hurt—the monster’s blow had thrown him through the air and Yute had never struck her as sturdy.

“I don’t think he’s broken any bones.” Kerrol sounded as if he might have a few broken ribs himself, speaking with the wheezy delicacy of someone unwilling to test the limits of their own ability to inhale. “Can’t see any blood…except…” He wiped at the trickles from the librarian’s nose and mouth. The man’s blood wasn’t even red but something closer to a mix of crimson and silver with both colours trying to separate at every opportunity.

Anne picked her way through the wreckage and knelt beside Yute. “He’s breathing.” She looked up at Kerrol, tall as a man even when kneeling, his chestnut mane, the muscle and the bone of his chest and shoulders not those of a human. The face, that she had first seen as nothing out of the ordinary, shared similarities with that of a lion and that of a dog, his mouth and nose closer to a muzzle, whiskered, almost without lips. He looked at times regal, adorable, and scary, though now he was none of those, merely concerned, the face of a friend worried about another friend. “We just fought a monster made out of oil.” The strangeness of it crowded her vision. She felt faint, breathless, as if she were the one whose chest had nearly been staved in.

“Breathe,” Kerrol advised. “Deep breaths.” He waited while she took a few. “And yes. Well, you fought it. Yute and I mainly got thrown around.”

At the mention of his name, Yute inhaled sharply and began to stir.

“Wait…how am I understanding you?” Anne realised she’d been talking to Kerrol for a while without Yute translating. “It’s like it was before…”

Kerrol looked puzzled. “Yute would know. But we’re connected to the library here—the real library. It’s bleeding into this place. Literally. So, that must be it. Somehow.”

“But what—” Lights moving in the blackness out beyond the foyer doors seized Anne’s attention. “People are coming!”

“That’s not good.” Kerrol stood up, wincing.

“What should we do?”

“My first instincts would be to talk my way out of the problem, or failing that, ask Yute, even though I really haven’t known him that long.” With a deep groan Kerrol lifted Yute in both arms. “But something about this place has set me knocking heads together and trying to punch monsters.” He started to retreat into the library as outside flaming torches drew closer. “And even if I can suddenly speak the language again, I’m not sure I can talk down an angry mob. So…I suppose we hide?”

Anne could hear voices outside now, muted by the intervening glass and wood but still carrying an angry edge. Glass broke. Shouts. Shoving. Splintering. The first of the torchbearers pushed in through the front doors, alien in the light of flames, as monstrous as the creature Anne had just defeated, though they were neighbours, people who lived in the same streets as her family, worked in the same places. Some of them might have held cards to this very library, and come here in the daylight, respectable citizens, looking to be enlightened or entertained or even educated. Now they bayed like hounds.

“Quick!” Anne beckoned. “We’ll take the back door. Lose them in the night.”

Her plan lasted only as long as it took to open the door to the corridor. The rear exit had already been opened. The first men through it brushed her aside and brought Kerrol down, tackling his legs while Yute encumbered his arms. More people poured in from behind, piling on top of Kerrol as he struggled to rise.

A woman carrying an electric flashlight took painful hold of Anne’s arm, nails digging in. “This one’s a Jew!”

“Whore!” someone shouted from the back without even seeing her.

The main lights went on, suddenly painting the scene in full detail. The burning torches looked pale now, the people holding them more ordinary, the destruction more shocking.

“Oil!” someone shouted, discovering the remains of the Escape. “The Jews were going to burn the library!”

Anne tore herself free of the woman, but two new people seized her, one a large man with an unbreakable grip.

The crowd at the front parted, shouts falling silent, as someone new arrived. A tall man in a black leather coat and military cap strode in. Four other men in black uniform followed, all of them bearing the swastika in black and white on a red armband. “Secret police,” he announced unnecessarily.

Anne fought a hysterical urge to ask how they could be secret if they marched in and told everyone who they were.

The officer hooked leather-gloved fingers into the collar of a beefy fellow with an old-fashioned lantern who was leaning curiously over the “oil” pool. “Do not.” He hauled the man back roughly and strode past. He glanced Anne’s way but walked past her to come to a halt in front of the pile of people beneath which Kerrol had disappeared. “Get them up!”

People had already been disentangling themselves from the heap. Now, with the secret police looking on, they leapt clear, not wanting to be confused for one of the suspects.

Gasps went up as the last few men removed themselves and Kerrol was exposed. A few of the more stupid among the crowd muttered “Russian,” a few of the more imaginative muttered “werewolf,” most just took a couple of steps backwards and looked shocked. The lead officer drew his pistol and levelled it at Kerrol, who lay where he was, teeth bloody, watching with his overlarge, liquid-dark eyes. Two of the man’s subordinates also drew their pistols and trained them on the canith. Yute, seemingly not worthy of a weapon pointing his way, sat up, rubbing his forehead with both hands.

“Secure this one.” The officer flicked the muzzle of his handgun towards Yute. “Commissar Jung will wish to interrogate him at headquarters. Turn the Jew out into the streets. Let her take her chances there. This one”—he returned his aim to Kerrol—“is an abomination, and I am torn between shooting him between the eyes, or letting the German people exact their own justice.” He looked around. “If they can find a streetlamp tall enough to hang him from!”

A cheer went up at that, as if the officer had suddenly handed them back their right to be a mob rather than a collection of scared individuals.

Yute stood as the first of the crowd moved in to take hold of the battered canith. Something in his strangeness gave the men pause. Perhaps they thought his paleness a contagion that might spread by touch. None made to lay hands on him. A new hush spread.

“I appeal for calm,” Yute said in perfectly accented German, not raising his voice but somehow being heard. He turned his pink eyes on the pistol-carrying officer. “You serve the laws of this land? What crime are we accused of? To whom will we be given an opportunity to state our case?”

The captain—Anne could see he was a captain now—manufactured an ugly smile, showing small white teeth behind bloodless lips. He leaned in as if about to share a confidence but didn’t lower his voice. “Commissar Jung employs men who will enjoy breaking you. Communist, Jew, spy, all of them break, and broken men are so much more agreeable.”

“I’m sure we don’t need to—”

The captain’s fist landed in Yute’s stomach, doubling him over. Laughter spread through the crowd. The woman who had first grabbed Anne sneered and called out to ask how “Whitey” liked that?

Among the jeering, the larger of the two men holding Anne leaned forward and hissed into her ear, “I don’t think you’re even going to make it to the streets, little Jew-rat.” His breath smelled of sour beer and he twisted her arm behind her, making her cry out.

Somehow Kerrol seemed to hear her amid the laughing and catcalls. But when he tried to get up, ignoring the guns trained on him, the men around him started to kick him on all sides, heavy work-boots thudding in. Already injured, he seemed unable to rise.

The captain, warming to his audience, folded his arms and waited for Yute to finish retching. When Yute straightened, wiping his oddly pearlescent blood from his mouth, his eyes held a dazed look. His wandering gaze fixed on one of the few sets of shelves that remained standing. His eyes widened and a look of resignation entered them that was so profound that Anne followed the line of his stare.

Incongruously, a large cat had somehow found its way onto the top of the unit and was busy washing itself, licking a paw then rubbing behind its ear with the paw. Anne had never seen a cat so big. More than twice the size of Mrs. Schreiber’s tom. Almost three times.

In the rowdy throng within the now-smoky library, not one other person had seen the animal, though now with both Yute and Anne staring, several other people exclaimed above the thuds of the kicking being delivered to Kerrol and the jeering.

At last, the captain glanced back.

Anne couldn’t give a proper account of the events that followed. Not even a few minutes later when Kerrol was back on his feet, hunched around his injuries, and the cat was sitting peaceably at Yute’s feet licking blood from its paws. The key moment. The moment that would stay with her for the whole of her life, however much was left to her, was that the cat had bitten off a man’s head. And not just any man—the captain who had struck Yute. She could see it in her mind’s eye: the captain’s head, complete with his black captain’s hat, framed by many sharp teeth, almost seeming to look back at her with those pale blue eyes in the instant it was swallowed away. But ask her how a cat, even one almost as big as three normal cats, could bite the head off a grown man, and she had no answer.

Similarly, she had no idea how the animal had clawed officers of the secret police from face to foot with single swipes of its paws, or pursued half a hundred previously bloodthirsty citizens from the library while yowling like all the souls of the damned. The cat hadn’t simply grown bigger. It had somehow been all manner of different sizes at once, even in different places at once, before somehow collapsing back into one single, big cat.

“That was unfortunate.” Yute looked out across the fallen shelves, now blood-spattered, with three corpses and an unclaimed arm strewn across them. An injured officer was dragging himself slowly away, focused on nothing but the distant exit.

“They’ll come back.” Kerrol spat crimson onto the headless body by his feet.

“They will,” Anne said, aware that her voice was an octave higher than normal and quavering. Several shots had gone off during the chaos and her ears still rang with them.

“You’ll have to come with us,” Yute said.

“Come where?” Anne looked around again in case some other miracle had presented itself.

“I thought if we followed the library’s currents it might wash us up on the shores of an answer.” Yute bowed his head.

“I don’t think this place is an answer.” Kerrol wiggled one of his teeth. “Or at least not an answer either of us wanted to hear.”

“I thought…” Yute looked at the blood on his hands. “I thought there was something. The corner of something.” He slumped. “We’d better go.”

Rather than repeat her question, Anne stood silently and waited, trying not to see the dead, or track the agonizing progress of the young officer as he painted a broad blood-trail towards the main doors.

Yute went to the black pool that had been the Escape. “I don’t suppose either of you have a needle?”

Anne shook her head. Kerrol snorted.

With a shudder, Yute picked up a shard of splintered wood and, trembling, jabbed it into the pad of his index finger. He held his hand out over the pool and let a drop of his curious blood fall into it. Another followed, and another.

The pool, so black as to have resembled a well filled with darkness, shimmered into life, glowing from within.

“It’s a doorway,” Yute said. “I think perhaps we should be talking to those who disagree with us rather than hunting for some solution to them and their ideas. Coming here was a mistake.”

Kerrol grunted and limped across to join him. “I rather liked the place while I could speak to people. The bookshops and their owners…” He looked towards the windows. A fire glow lit the sky to the east. “I wish we could save them.”

“I’m surprised we saved ourselves,” Yute said. “Well, we didn’t, did we?” He reached down to ruffle the fur of the cat-monster currently butting its head against his legs. “Wentworth did that. And it’s not the first time I’ve owed my life to his intervention.”

Kerrol beckoned Anne. “You need to come with us.”

Anne backed away. “They said I could go.”

“That was before”—Yute swept an arm at the carnage—“this.”

“This whole town, and who knows how far beyond, was on a knife’s edge, and tonight was the cut. A night of broken glass,” Kerrol said seriously. “There’s something burrowing into the minds of these people. They’ve tasted blood now. It will get worse, not better.”

Anne knew he was right. Both of them understood her world in a way that she did not, despite seeming to have arrived around lunchtime. But she also understood it in ways that they didn’t. Parts of it at least. She wanted to leave. A year earlier she might have knocked her own brother down to get to the exit that Yute appeared to have made. To see new worlds, filled with different possibilities, to share the wonders that had brought Yute and Kerrol to her doorstep.

“Come with us.” Yute reached out a hand, an urgency in his voice she’d not heard before, a pleading almost.

“I belong here.”

“What would your father—”

“Don’t.” Yute cut across Kerrol. “It should be her choice. Don’t manipulate her.”

“What are rational arguments if not manipulation?” Kerrol growled.

“Playing her emotions is not the same, and you know it.”

Part of Anne wanted to ask what it was that Kerrol knew about her father. She took another two steps back. “I have to go. This is my place. I can’t run away.” She turned and hurried to the corridor at the rear before pausing and looking back. Both Yute and Kerrol were watching her from the edge of the glowing pool. “Thank you. Thank you both. Whatever happens, I’ll never see the world the same again.” And without giving them a chance to reply, she ran.