Page 35

We tore into the library without even the barest grasp of its floor plan, pelting wild-eyed down its shadowed aisles, the Librarian surging behind us like the ocean.

It was laughing. Like a little kid. Like this was a child’s game and we were all its pubescent friends being brought together for play in summer: nothing to see here, nope, nothing dire at all, no threat of being consumed by a monstrosity aching to die anywhere to be seen.

In retrospect, from its perspective, this probably was just play, a moment of levity to be chased by light refreshments before it noped out of the mortal coil at long last: a perfect program for a perfect day.

“I could be a decoy, I guess,” said Rowan without much enthusiasm as we zigzagged deeper into the library.

“It’ll be better than dying of lung failure.

I bet she’d make it quick.” The years of precocious lung damage were taking its toll on him.

Despite his longer stride, Rowan lagged about two steps behind me and four behind Gracelynn, who proved an admirable sprinter despite their wedding cake of a dress.

Rowan was wheezing so hard he’d begun to whistle with every breath.

“We’re not sacrificing you,” Gracelynn shouted over a shoulder.

“Where the hell did you last see your spouse, anyway?” I howled.

If we were being forced through the building, we could at least procure the catalysis of our predicament. Behind us, laughing, the Librarian brought a shelf brimming with leather-bound gold-inscribed texts crashing onto the carpeted floor.

“Oopsies.” It giggled.

Rowan lost his footing, slipped, pinwheeling backward with a flail of his arms. I heard the wet snap of an ankle torquing out of alignment as he snarled in pain and without looking back, I reached out with a thread of magic, felt the frayed tendon, and pulled, glueing it to the mortise: it was a slipshod job but it kept him lurching forward, cursing but in limping motion.

“Kevin’s area is penumbral anthropology—”

Rowan, irreverent until death: “Has anyone told you how weird it is that Hellebore has someone named Kevin walking—”

“Did we pass the P s yet?”

“Oh,” came the librarian’s voice from above. “A long time ago.”

It descended on us like judgment, an alabaster delusion of grasping arms, its hands socketing around our faces, our shoulders, catching us; they positioned us to look up at it, like it was a solar god and us petitioners come to seek its favor.

If I had had any doubts whether it was truly immune to death, that it needed what it claimed to need, I lost them then as the Librarian stroked Rowan’s cheek with the ceramic back of one pale hand.

The lamps lit the creature’s profile in gold, plunging Rowan’s terrified face into darkness. And briefly: silence.

Briefly: time to consider our repellent predicament.

Briefly: an opportunity to study our environment in invasive detail because there was nothing else to do, no immediate hope for recourse.

I glanced at Gracelynn, considering the morals of turning someone we’d agreed—tacitly, I suppose—to help into raw material for an escape plan, but even my rather minimalist sense of ethics balked at that level of villainy.

There was cold pragmatism and then there was being an asshole.

“I promise it will not hurt. I don’t hunger for your pain.

I don’t lust for it,” said the Librarian, practically in a stage whisper, as it spiraled down like some nightmare serpent, curling around Rowan, coils tightening.

In a second, surely, that would be that.

“I only want to die. We will go into the dark together. We will be nothing together. We will die together. Just you and I, you and I, you and I.”

I saw Rowan close his eyes and I recall thinking with a diamond clarity that this was, in fact, it.

What surprised me was the utter absence of terror, every thought of self-preservation forgotten: it was with relief that I looked on the Librarian distending its jaw; relief as I watched each and every one of its blazing eyes open in excited witness; relief and maybe a tinge of apology as I looked over to Gracelynn, who was arguably the most unfortunate of our pathetic lot.

They were pink from their exertions, their hair so soaked with sweat that it clung to their shoulders in a damp web, and they were staring for some reason at a point on the carved frieze wrapping around the balcony above us.

I followed their gaze to the lintel and to my surprise I saw, among the skull-headed stags and disemboweled knights, a very ordinary human face gazing right back at us.

“Sorry,” said the face in a soft tenor, the vowels honeyed with a Dixieland twang. “This is probably going to feel very weird.”

Then the ground opened up beneath us and something pulled us through.

We landed elsewhere, in a narrow corridor barely wide enough for one of us to stretch out in full, legs akimbo, arms flung everywhere, piled on one another in a jigsaw of elbows, cursing, and some panic about whose exposed skin was in contact with whose.

It took us a minute to separate, longer to orient.

The space we were in was pitch-black, and the air was silted with dust. I palmed the walls: on one side, I felt rough, unhewn stone and on the other, cold polished wood.

“Kevin?” Gracelynn’s voice, raised up like a banner, a searchlight.

In answer came the click of a lighter and a small flame whoosh ed up to illuminate the face I’d seen earlier.

Gracelynn’s spouse was softly built in that way academics often were: kind-looking, their hair disheveled and their expression tottering between relief and for some reason, indignity. They had great nails.

“I said I’d be all right.” Most of their weight seemed to be supported by a wolf-headed cane that looked like it’d been carved from the same block of polished birch. “Why did you come back? You could have gotten yourself killed.”

Gracelynn didn’t answer at first, rushing to embrace their spouse, and as palpable as the latter’s ire was, it wasn’t enough; it didn’t seem to keep them from returning the ferocious embrace, albeit one-armed with a lighter still in hand.

Kevin buried their face into the flower-colored wealth of Gracelynn’s hair, the two clutching at each other like it’d been a year, a lifetime since they’d been together.

“I thought it was going to kill you,” wailed Gracelynn into Kevin’s shoulder, crying without remorse or care for the fact the lovely paisley shirt that the latter wore was getting soaked black from the tears.

“I think it just wanted to watch some shadow puppetry. The headmaster said I wouldn’t have to—”

“The Librarian said you were its—wait, the headmaster?”

“I was going to tell you but I didn’t have time.

Everything was suddenly happening all at once.

Regardless, I swear it was going to be fine.

The Librarian’s actually quite sweet once you get it to stop showing off,” Kevin mumbled.

“I’m pretty sure we could have worked something out.

Admittedly, it was very abrupt, what happened, but—”

“Ahem,” I said.

The two separated immediately, Kevin rather subtly crowding their beleaguered, still-snuffling partner behind them, the cane re-angled into a light warning. They inclined their head.

“Who are you?” they said, their tone warm but somehow also affectless.

“Your rescue team, I suppose.” I flicked my eyes over to Gracelynn. “Although it looks like you didn’t need rescuing.”

“In my defense,” Gracelynn began, then stopped; they let out a breathless, giddy laugh that had as much to do with humor as their partner’s voice had to do with friendliness.

Their shoulders dropped, and they wrung a handful of their skirts in their hands.

“In my defense, I was worried. The Librarian, it’s… ”

“A lot,” finished Kevin. “Thank you for coming to help.”

“I like getting undeserved credit for things,” said Rowan amiably, striding forward, shooting out a gloved hand for Kevin to take.

Kevin, still holding on to their cane and lighter both, studied Rowan’s hand for a minute before nodding, curt. “Glad to be of service.”

“Thank you for saving us, by the way. We’d have been dead without you,” I said and some of Kevin’s reserve grudgingly thawed into real warmth.

“It was nothing. I wish the three of y’all hadn’t come.” They touched their cheek to Gracelynn’s as they said this. “But you were clearly trying to help my darlin’ here, so.”

“They lured me with the promise of escaping Snake Island,” I said.

Kevin’s gaze flicked to Gracelynn. “You told them I could do that?”

“I’m sorry! I know I shouldn’t have!”

“It’s all right,” said Kevin and they looked over to me then, guarded in their subsequent explanation.

“I can’t. I don’t think I can, at least. And you should know it isn’t without risk.

The shadows don’t mind me. Other people, on the other hand, they take them sometimes.

I couldn’t promise you’d make it through, and that’s too high a risk to take. ”

“But maybe it’s better than nothing,” I said. No, no, no. My hopes of escaping Hellebore were running through my fingers like so much sand. I was willing to be unmade, shredded by the shadows, at just the smallest chance of getting out of here.

“If you didn’t need rescuing, though,” Rowan said, “why are you here instead of out there?”

“Ah, well. I’m going to let the reason for that explain herself.”

The reason in question stepped meekly out of the darkness from behind Kevin: Johanna.

“Jo,” said Kevin, earning my instant fondness, “was caught sneaking into the library without permission. Obviously, the Librarian took offense to that.”

“Listen, I did absolutely nothing wrong. I came here to research an assignment!”

“Without permission,” said Kevin levelly.

At this, Johanna crumpled. She’d been lithe once.

These days, she was just emaciated, eaten up by the rigors of our curriculum, by what was increasingly looking like a rigged game.

Shadows—bruises or something worse, I couldn’t tell then—flowered along her arms, filled the undersides of her eyes.

No faculty member would give an assignment that needed access to the library, not even Cartilage.

The fact she was here said everything. Johanna was just behind, like the rest of us.

Underwater, with no oxygen left in the tank.

“You’re lucky I was there,” said Kevin.

“I wasn’t expecting secret passages for some reason. How did you know this was here?” I asked.

Kevin shrugged a shoulder. “I didn’t. There was every chance that Jo and I would have found ourselves inside a rock face.”

“If you were wrong, wouldn’t you two have been…” Rowan drew a line with his thumb over his throat, finishing with a little choked noise, as though it wasn’t clear what he was alluding to.

“Big time,” said Kevin, kissing the top of Gracelynn’s head.

“ Anyway, ” said Jo loudly. She extricated a prettily filigreed wireframe from a jacket pocket, put it together, and set it down on the dust-smeared floor: a smokeless flame leapt into life a second after, radiating a pleasant bronze warmth and enough light to show that the ceiling was about eighteen feet high.

The corridor in which we stood seemed to go forever in both directions, a narrow channel of space barely wide enough for us to traverse it single file.

Johanna picked up the lantern, its light casting a fan of multi-jointed shadows over one wall.

“Can you please just use the shadows already? The Librarian’s going to look in here at some point and I’d rather not be here when it arrives. ”

I scanned the path in both directions as the others argued about how to get out of here.

I couldn’t fathom the purpose of this space: it was too narrow to be an escape route, too ill-lit and too badly engineered to expedite the movement of staff or servants.

I couldn’t imagine the Librarian needing this crawlspace either.

Worryingly, the passage reminded me of when I was eight; my mother, in a weird fit of charity, had taken me to a farm to see its myriad livestock.

We petted horses and doe-eyed calves, fed the ducklings at their algae-thatched pool before finishing the day with a trip to the abattoir, where we watched cows urged down a killing chute to their deaths on the other side; the owners had promised us steak to take home.

I cried. My mother had chuckled, not unkindly, reminding me that life was eat or be eaten.

The surfaced memory left me cold to the marrow.

“Okay,” said Kevin, loud enough to make me jump. “Okay, if anything happens, that’s on you. Y’all are lovely company, but I don’t want to keep you any longer. We can all go. If you’re open to it, anyway.”

“Open as a—” began Rowan gleefully.

“Don’t finish that sentence,” I said.

“Finally,” sighed Johanna.

“Ready,” said Gracelynn, softer than the rest of us, their fingers twining with Kevin’s.

Kevin gestured for all of us to link hands, then pressed a hand to their sternum and the world was bending in eye-watering ways.

I thought I saw their hand reach through strata of realities, passing through bone to where their lungs nested; I thought I saw a wrought iron edifice of chains and barbed spires suspended in nothing; I thought I heard something scream just out of sight; thought I felt something brush my cheek, something with teeth and too many fingers; and I thought I felt a mouth close over the pane of my right shoulder, curious.

It was like dying of the cold and burning alive at the same time, my tongue molten in my jaw.

I felt past and future concatenated. I listened as the syllabary of time expanded into a thousand dead languages and then shrink into a single word and that word was now.