Page 28

“Flesh-maker, dark-song, food-animals, ” sang out the Librarian as it spiraled down from the ceiling, a vortex of luminous scales, all wide-mouthed smiles, as its faces blinked shining tears down on us, like an Ophanim from the Bible.

More of that gold splattered down: a drop hit my cheek, scalding me.

I hissed from the pain. “I can hear them through the walls, talking about how they want to eat up, drink you up, devour you.”

The Librarian lowered farther, becoming illuminated.

“When I say,” whispered Gracelynn, “you run.”

I shot them an incredulous look.

As if their words were a cue the Librarian had been anticipating, it accelerated.

There was no time. No time to think, no time to breathe, to parse the thing’s monstrous speed, its reaching hands, the sheer number of them, there were hundreds, gold-tipped, etiolated; all I could see was a centipede grown to a size of myth, with human faces where scales should have sat, lunging for Gracelynn, folding itself around them, cocooning them: a chrysalis opening in reverse, the insect swallowed up by its reconstituting pupa.

With Gracelynn in its grip, the Librarian, terrible and beautiful, almost human if you could force yourself to only regard it from the neck up, catapulted back upward. I heard them scream, a wet, thin noise.

“For before,” sang the Librarian. “For when I asked and you said stop, for when I begged and you told me no—”

Through the dark of the shelves, I saw Rowan skidding toward us, then stopping.

And I heard Gracelynn singing in their voice once again, that clarion silver voice that was as beautiful as the end of days and as terrible as creation.

I couldn’t tell you how they did it but their voice fractured into a madrigal, into a choir.

Warmth oozed from my ears, my nostrils, my eyes: a liquid heat I recognized immediately as blood.

I blinked twice, trying to un-gum my eyes as my tear ducts became clotted, but soon all I could see was a smear of crimson and blurred silhouettes.

Run, I thought I heard them scream through their song.

I was tired of running. Since arriving, that had seemed to be all I was doing but it felt worse to stay, to waste Gracelynn’s literal swan song, and if I was going to be honest with myself, it seemed a waste to die there when I’d survived for so long.

And besides, for once, I knew where I was going.

It was the wet hiss of television static seeping down a corridor that stopped me in my tracks.

Hellebore abhorred technology. Classes were taught with blackboards, lessons scraped painfully onto porcelain enamel.

What Hellebore could duplicate with magic, it did, regardless of the cost. I had thought the library would be similar and for the most part, that guess had been right.

Most of its knowledge was preserved the old-fashioned way, computers and other accessory technologies relegated to mentions in dust-covered encyclopedias like they were the ones who were relics of a bygone time.

To hear the sound of electronics, that familiar whine, that surprised me more than I expected.

Light fed through a half-opened door in the darkened corridor.

The walls were finned from ceiling to floor with shelves.

On each shelf were video tapes. Hundreds of them.

Thousands of them. Crammed into a little room was what felt like every production made for viewing on a home video system, all neatly labeled and alphabetically filed.

It’d have felt quaint if not for the fact I could not stop imagining the Librarian here, snuggled into the interior, raptly watching old Westerns while the rest of us slept or died.

A single television radiated static at the otherwise unlit room.

The cathode light from the vintage machine sheened the walls with an unwholesome pallor that made me think immediately of old horror movies.

It was loud but it wasn’t enough to disguise Gracelynn’s song, which filled the halls: Run, Alessa, run, run.

The couch had its color obliterated by the television’s flickering glow, the palette of the room somehow flattened to the same eerie greenish gray.

“Alessa?” said a voice.

“Minji?” I said to the silhouette atop the couch. “Is that you?”

“Did you know the Librarian has an extensive collection of horror movies? Bad ones, good ones. It hoarded everything,” came Minji’s voice. “And it made notes.”

My vision adjusted to the murk. Under different circumstances, I might have found the tableau before me hilarious.

She wasn’t sitting on the couch but was perched instead on the top of its central back cushion, straddling Ford’s shoulders.

Her hair floated out from her in a nimbus, some of it cozied around the blades of the fan above her, some of it more ambulatory.

I watched black tendrils feel their way over archipelagos of throw pillows stacked on each end of the couch; over armrests and across his shoulders, twinning around his neck like they were a lover drawing his throat close for a kiss; spilling down and over the carpet.

They look like they are searching for something, I thought. I did not want to figure out what for.

Her voice grew fond. “Do you want to know what kind of notes?”

“I’m afraid to ask. Minji, I need your help. Gracelynn—”

“It’s a good answer.”

“Fine,” I said, digging nails into my palms, wishing for different, wishing we’d all gotten better, her and I and them and every digested sob in the faculty’s belly. “What kind of notes?”

“On dying,” said Minji, patting Ford on the cheek. His head lolled away from her touch and settled at an upsetting angle.

“What did you do to him, Minji?” I asked, wincing. He wasn’t dead. His heart still shuddered in its cavity, his lungs moved. But his neck. That was so broken I was surprised his head sat somehow still attached to his shoulders.

“You could say we made things easier for him. He was in pain before and it didn’t seem right to keep him that way, you know?

” She seemed to sift through her thoughts.

“Life is a bitch and then you die. That’s the promise most are given.

You get to die eventually. You get to make the pain stop.

But then there are entities like the Librarian, like the faculty, like me.

We don’t die. Not in any meaningful way. We dream about doing so, though.”

“Maybe you can help with the Librarian then.” I swallowed. “It has Gracelynn.”

“No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because we have more in common with the faculty than we do with you,” said Minji with a gauzy, unselfconscious laugh, confirming what Rowan and I had suspected. “And because we made a promise to her. We’d protect her. The rest of you, well…”

She patted Ford on the skull like he was a puppy.

It felt hypocritical to pass judgment, to be dismayed by this admission.

Given what I was and given the place we were in, the company we kept and the cruelties we inflicted on one another, how could I hold any prejudice against monsters?

Still, my stomach turned and I tried not to picture Ford screaming in his own head.

“At the end of the day, you’re all just meat.”

It’s not the same, I wanted to say, but even there in the shelter of my own mind, the words sounded infantile, stupid, arrogant. Demands were made when there was a power differential in your favor, not when you were nothing more than steak in the freezer. I was livestock chatting up a rancher.

“And you? What are you ?” I said, forgetting the urgency of the tableau outside, just for a little while, struck by the strange feeling I’d found something worse.

“What are you ?” countered Minji, more convincingly a person, her eyes flashing with humor. She cocked her head at me as her hair spread to line the walls, the shelves, the floor, until I was standing on the very edge of a black box of pulsating keratin. “Can you tell us what’s inside you?”

Outside, Gracelynn’s song stuttered.

“Bones, muscle, organ—”

“What are those? How do they make you you ?”

I eyed her distrustfully. “What do you mean?”

“What are bones?” said Minji, the air itself sheened with her hair, like the television had bled outward, filling our world with static. “What are organs? What is muscle? How does it all relate to the miracle of your consciousness?”

I was acutely aware I stood with my back exposed, and there was a thing outside with Gracelynn, a thing that could not die and only wanted to die, would do anything to die. And I wasn’t sure anymore if there was time to run out of.

At that moment, Ford rose, swaying closer, first going down on one knee and then the other, head still bent at that eye-watering angle.

Minji took his face in her hands, kissing him perfunctorily, tongue flitting into his open mouth.

When she pulled away, a string of drool shone between their lips.

Laughing again, she kissed him on his brow, his nose.

“If it helps, we suspect Gracelynn will be one of the lucky ones,” she said. “They at least will just die. They will not be trapped in that mass of flesh outside screaming and screaming and screaming forever. Not like you. Not like Ford. Poor man. Shall we give her a show, darling?”

Ford moaned. He dug fingers into his solar plexus, clawing at the steeple of his ribs until the flesh tore and a wound like a mouth yawned open.

He dug until the wealth of his entrails slopped onto the carpet, prying at the membranous tangle, pulling, pulling.

I couldn’t understand how he was standing upright still.

Minji had made him carve his abdominal cavity clean.

Ford was nothing but blood-greased bone and bare muscle, nothing but skin and a haunted stare.

“If it helps, we don’t think the faculty wanted this to happen. We think they’d have been happy if their work with Ford had succeeded. If they could have just filled him to the brim with their bodies and let him carry them out, none of this would have happened. This wasn’t personal.”

Down went Ford on his hands and knees, improbably alive, sifting through the still-steaming heap of his organs like a dog questing through the tall grass for a lost toy.

He raised his liver to me, his heart, the desiccated sac of his stomach, his kidneys in succession.

Then at last, the long coils of his intestine, which he nuzzled with his cheek, moaning.

He had the soft dull eyes of a cow, like something that had never been taught to speak.

“We’re afraid you were right. The universe does bend toward cruelty. For something to live, something else must die,” said Minji. “Think of the school as the fig. Something must be done to extract value from the corpse.”

“I don’t understand any of this.” I hesitated. This was torture. This was hell and one of its demons hard at work on a sinner. “Or whatever the fuck you’re doing to him.”

“Only what we need,” said Minji primly, smoothing down her skirts. “Rude of you to think we would not take advantage of this gift, this eternally renewing source of magic.”

With that cryptic statement offered up, Minji turned then to Ford and I saw her hair close over him like a funerary shroud, like flies settling on carrion.

He vanished under the seething blackness.

Before I could ask Minji what she meant, I heard the sharp crack of bone snapped along the lineation of a joint, heard muscle peeled into half, heard Ford gasp softly, as though surprised, and from that writhing mass of hair came a neat panel of calcium and flesh, raised up by a tendril of hair. Minji’s face warmed with adoration.

“Tell me something.” I said.

Crack. “Yes?”

“If you’re like the faculty”—I knew the answer. I knew it like I knew the soft treasures of the human body, the wrinkled frightened edifice of the brain. I knew it like blood, like the roar of it in my ears—“why are you doing this to Ford? Can’t you just walk out there?”

“Oh, yes. Most likely.” Schlorp.

“Then why are you doing this to him?”

“Because. We hate him.” Minji did not look at me, only at the meat her hair had now carefully set on her shoulder like a fragment of a pauldron. “And because we thought they’d like a gift.”

Her hair was becoming more frenzied. Once again, that crack, that wet noise of human tissue shearing apart, the sounds increasing in volume, building in tempo.

I took a step back. I could practically feel what she was doing, the excruciating dismantlement.

Bone by bone, tendon by tendon. How Minji’s hair was levering Ford apart, sectioning him, so it can reconstruct him as armor for her.

I could feel his heart, panicked, seizing, wanting to die, wanting to stop, but being coerced to beat on.

“Adam would have kept him by his side until the last moment. The faculty deserve their toy back, don’t you think?

” said Minji very reasonably. The pieces were being attached to her more quickly now, and her hair was beginning to grout what spaces there were with clots of his entrails, packing it all down, tight as they could. “And besides, it’s funny.”

“You can’t just walk out wearing him like a suit of armor.”

“We can, actually.”

She said this as the plates of Ford’s skull closed over her face, his own meticulously flayed from the bone so it could be draped over Minji’s like a visor.

She stared at me through the sockets, her half-lidded gaze serene, and if there was any mercy in the world, the haruspex would be dead now but he wasn’t.

I tried to ignore the latter, the writhing evidence of his survival glistening redly in the light, keeping my eyes instead on Minji as she examined first one arm and then the other, the whole of her now entombed in Ford’s remains.

An unsteady laugh shook itself loose from my mouth: it was that or scream.

“Why are you making me witness all this, anyway?”

“Because when this is over, you’re the only one we’ll think fondly of.” Then with a chuckle, she added, “Tell Adam we hope he dies screaming.”