Page 19

One day, Cartilage made us descend into the bowels of Hellebore for class.

From the roof to its grandiose main hall, the school was three stories in height.

It’d been intimated that there was a basement and though we weren’t expressly forbidden from exploring the subterranean levels, those few who’d ventured bathyal-ward in the first few months of our enrollment did not come back.

So we left it alone. We were already learning there were too many ways to die in Hellebore.

Thus, when Professor Cartilage gave his instructions several days ahead of our next class, we all railed against them, suspicious of his intent.

“Could be a test,” said a pale, fox-featured Russian girl, wringing the ends of her hair, which fell long and straight, a shade of blond only fractionally deeper than her skin. “Back home, one of the rehabilitation centers would do it too.”

“Do what?” asked Johanna, all na?veté and wide eyes.

The girl rolled her eyes in answer. All twenty of us were sprawled in our usual classroom, a carbon copy of every other: glossy dark wood, an omnipresent scent of pine resin, uncomfortable chairs. Twin oak-skinned boys, taller than the rest of us, exchanged looks.

“See who complies. See who doesn’t,” said one of them.

“The ones who don’t,” said the other, tone as clipped as their companion’s, “die.”

“We could just ask the professor, you know,” said a beautiful older woman who looked for all the world like she’d survived a bad marriage and single parenthood and now was pursuing second chances through an education in something new.

Except, of course, this was Hellebore, and I had to wonder why she was here.

It was a reasonable enough proposition and we went en masse to his office, an ordeal that took nearly all day to complete due to Hellebore’s spatial inconsistencies.

Hellebore kept changing: slowly, illogically, expanding in places, narrowing in others.

Facilities moved, the professors’ wing especially.

We’d nearly given up when a door presented itself, a brass placard announcing the name of its occupant: CARTILAGE .

Entering, unfortunately, we found nothing but a note that stated in his swooping calligraphic writing, Latecomers will be punished.

We took the warning to heart.

Getting to the basement proved as difficult as locating Professor Cartilage’s office.

On the ground floor, we discovered more doors than were reasonable.

One yielded a path to the gardens, although it was placed on the opposite end of the building to them; one opened to darkness and the sound of a girl sobbing rhythmically; one to a pool in which a thing with no face swam; one to a rock face.

We tried eight doors next. Two hid a masked, shrieking thing that leapt out and dragged a student inside.

The first time it happened, Johanna wailed until an older student slapped her with military efficacy: teeth clattered out of her mouth as she slumped on the gray concrete, clutching at her jaw.

“I heard stories about Cartilage,” said the woman heartlessly. The weak light grayed her face, made her look older still, and tinged her eye sockets green. “If we’re late, we’re going to wish it’d been us instead.”

The second time a student was taken, no one even looked back.

The ninth door we opened spilled into a stairwell that helixed down into a deep apricot-tinged darkness. Someone sang softly at the bottom.

It was Ford.

“If this is another of his weird-ass performances, I’m going to stab myself in the eye,” said Johanna, uncharacteristically mean, as she walked past me to go down the steps, vanguard for our now spooked group.

For the first three floors down, there were nothing but half-rotted steps, landings that went nowhere, and wrought iron rails so old they’d completely oxidized.

Naked bulbs coughed from the walls, their presence a surprise given Hellebore’s animosity toward technology.

Then again, this was probably less taxing to maintain than an armada of oil lamps.

The light was pus-colored and gave a jaundiced shine to the flooring.

It was also useless, only really pooling where it was unneeded.

I tripped twice within the first ten minutes of our excursion.

“I wouldn’t hurry to my death like that,” said a short, leonine-looking girl with a mass of black braids, even as I caught myself. “Being dead isn’t that fun.”

“How do you know?”

She smiled thinly and kept walking.

There was debris throughout the landing and while I could have tried to identify it, something in how it crunched—chalklike, brittle, familiar—under our shoes made me decide against it.

The air was still and soundless save for our footsteps.

Ford’s singing continued on, amateurish but not unpleasant: it was a dirge he was singing in a language none of us recognized, though we seemed to represent every continent and country.

Doors began appearing by the fourth floor: twelve at first, each too slim for even the boniest waif to inch through, and they rattled hopefully when we neared; on the fifth floor, there were eleven; on the sixth, ten.

And it continued like that for a time, the air growing clotted with humidity, the doors increasing in size and lessening in number.

Once in a while, I thought I heard footsteps that weren’t ours.

By the twelfth, the doors were large enough to use comfortably if we so wanted but we sorely did not.

For one, we’d seen what lived behind some of them.

For another, someone seemed to be sobbing from behind all four of the doors at once.

The crying had an artificial quality, a wrongness, a crackling that made it seem like it might have come from a recording, which begged the unfortunate question of why.

What was even more unfortunate was how quickly my brain answered:

Lure, it told me. This is a lure.

The fifteenth floor held a single French door: enormous, gothic, beautifully ornamented with the school’s symbols, the fig trees and the wasps.

The handles were a bisected deer skull, with its antlers shorn to a usable length.

Unlike the landing, the doors looked clean, even glossy.

As I neared, I heard the low hum of machinery behind it, like a hundred air conditioners operating in concert.

More inconsistencies, more weirdness; it’d be more disarming if the school as a rule wasn’t so unwholesomely eldritch.

Johanna marched straight up to the doors, hypnotized somehow by the sight.

“There’s something,” she told me, urgent, a child warning of the thing hiding under the bed.

“It used to be there were so many more of us,” said Professor Cartilage from a plain door—a door I was sure hadn’t been there before—behind us.

He was equally plain, with thinning hair and deeply recessed eyes, skin softly yellowed in a way that suggested extensive damage.

“We’d come and go as we pleased, but the Ministry sealed the doors.

No matter, every door opens in the end.”

“Professor?” I ventured.

His mouth cracked into a curve. “Come along.”

There wasn’t anything inside save for a basalt altar, a black plastic bucket, a single bulb dangling from the ceiling.

And Ford, of course, laid out on the polished black surface like a corpse, still humming.

He’d been opened up, skin delicately pinned back at aesthetic intervals.

We were all acquainted with the sight of his insides.

When he wasn’t being consulted by the faculty, Ford would host readings in the gymnasium.

With the help of a pretty assistant, he would vivisect himself as the audience barraged him with questions.

It was always the same routine too. She (always a girl, always with the same straight-cut bangs that Minji wore) would dramatically pass him an assortment of instruments: bone saw, scalpel, rib shears, sternal saw, and more varieties of scissors than I knew existed.

Then he’d extract one organ after another, studying them in turn, dispensing koans instead of real answers.

But none of us were there for guidance, not really.

We just wanted to see if this would be the day he slumped over dead.

“Each of you should select an organ,” said Professor Cartilage, gesturing for us to arrange ourselves in a uniform circle. “No fighting over the good bits. No pushing. The intestines earn you additional credit.”

I looked down at the pulsating tableau, barely resisting the impulse to ask if there were any good bits. Instead, I noted, “What are the extra credits good for?”

Professor Cartilage extended a ghastly smile. “Painkillers.”

Before I could press him on that frankly disturbing clarification, he raised his voice over the murmur of us deciding between organs, some gravitating toward the more vigorous specimens, others to their quieter peers.

Johanna and I ended up sharing a lung, both of us marking our claim with a single finger touched to the fluttering pink tissue.

“Now,” said Professor Cartilage once we’d quieted. “There is a field of human science—”

I glanced at Johanna, who nodded obliquely. She’d heard it too. Human.

“—called forensic entomology, which is the study of arthropods in association with violent crime, among other things. Specialists within the field can tell you many things about a cadaver based on what insects are present: its age, its time of death, any post-mortem movement. But Ford is alive.” He chuckled, palming the haruspex’s cheek.

“So we are unfortunately unable to do that.”

“Why bring it up then?” said the older woman, cagey.

Professor Cartilage stared at her until she dropped her eyes before he chuckled again, a sound like dust blowing through an abandoned room.

“Because I enjoy the knowledge that such a thing exists. And because occasionally, forensic entomology will review the consequences of myiasis, which is what we will study today.”

“Myia,” began one of the oak-skinned boys.

“Fancy word for maggots colonizing living tissue,” I said.

Ford stopped his singing.

“Wh-what? Wait, ” he whimpered.

“Correct,” said our teacher monotonously, hands swimming down to Ford’s neck.

“There’s a bucket with live dipteran larvae just behind you.

The scoop is inside. Be generous with your application of the larvae.

Today’s research involves understanding what occurs when undying tissue is subjected to myiasis.

Will the rate of consumption be outpaced by the rate of healing?

How much oxygenation do the dipteran larvae require in order to continue growth? ”

“Please,” said Ford. “I don’t want this.”

“Why?” I said. “This is—”

Someone retched. This felt like unmerited grotesquerie, even for Hellebore. I stared down at Ford, repulsed by our mandate, sick to my bowels at the idea of us systematically introducing maggots into a man’s living tissue, all for irrelevant hypotheticals.

“Science,” said Professor Cartilage.

“Bullshit,” I snapped.

“In the same way pig carcasses are used in lieu of human cadavers,” he said, unmoved, “we must use alternatives where necessary in order to continue our studies. If it helps, Miss Li, this is important work you will be doing. You’ll be ensuring the survival of species outside our own.”

There it was again. He’d called it human science.

“What species?”

Ford was trying to eel free of the altar, kicking at the air for leverage.

Skin tore as Ford writhed, begging, and if not for the professor’s hands around the haruspex’s throat, the man might have escaped.

But for all Professor Cartilage’s featherlight appearance, his grip on Ford was steel.

When Ford opened his mouth to scream again, our professor, with the expression of someone waiting his turn at the post office, broke his neck.

“Begin,” said Professor Cartilage.