Page 12 of The Library at Hellebore
Eoan made a frightened noise somewhere behind me.
“You know, she has a point,” I said before anyone else could interject. “We should probably start thinking about food, water. A plan for escape.”
“The faculty saidto finish the job,” said Eoan, slumping partway into view. “What’s the fuckin’ point? We’re all going to be dead in a day or two, anyway.”
“Or later tonight. I bet we could all die tonight too,” said Rowan, who could always be trusted to know the worst thing to say.
“Look, I’m the furthest thing from an optimist you’re going to find, but murder doesn’t have to be our first option,” I countered.
“I guess we could kill ourselves in protest. Make it stop and they don’t get what they want,” said Eoan morosely.
Gracelynn mopped at their eyes with the heel of a hand. Their mascara was ruined with all the recent hysterics; their cheeks were just faded tributaries of ink. Gingerly, they held out a hand to me. When I refused to take it, Gracelynn closed their fingers into a fist and rested them against their heart. Their expression was one of defeat and I was sorry to have been the cause of it, sorrier still that we’d ended up here. They’d been kind to me. They and their spouse, Kevin, had saved me over and over again. If there was justice in the world, Kevin wouldn’t be dead and the two would have a house with a dog and a good-natured cat. They’d live long, boring suburban lives, dying in their sleep at ninety with their hands entwined.
If there was justice in the world, anyway.
“Tell me why you lied about killing Johanna. Please. It’s okay. We’ll make it okay. You don’t have to hide,” said Gracelynn haltingly.
“I didn’t lie,” I said. “I killed her.”
“But I don’tunderstand.I can see you’re kind. This conversation alone proves it. Why would you—”
“Sometimes, you do terrible things to survive,” I said and before they could answer, before any of this circus could interject, I left the foyer. The Librarian was likely still in the building somewhere but if I had to choose between a confrontation with that creature and this endless wailing melodrama, it’d be the former every time.
Rowan called: “Alessa,wait.”
I didn’t.
The library of Hellebore was a rank and unrepentant replica of the one in Dublin’s Trinity College, at least in terms of aesthetics. It shared much of the same dimensions: it was over two hundred feet in length, barrel-ceilinged with towering windows, oaken partitions and recessed shelves, gorgeous pilasters and the obligatory marble busts (which looked decorative enough if you weren’t paying attention). They were very beautifully carved. From one angle, they were hyperrealistic monuments to past geniuses: philosophers, poets, the odd politician, anyone who had contributed to the edification of society. But from another, the lines warped, peeling away to an extraneous dimension. Faces swam, becoming something neither brain nor eye could agree upon, but instinct recognized enough to scream at. Their shadows moved if you regarded them too long, and other things threatened to come to focus. Fortunately, we were all cautioned early to avoidsuch mistakes. Hellebore’s statuary wasn’t for observing, not unless you wanted to be observed in return, something that could have fatal consequences.
Half live if Rowan dies.I turned the prophecy around in my head as I walked, wishing there’d been more to it. What did half evenmeanwhen losing Rowan would leave seven of us? Was one of us fated to become a ghoul? Like seriously, what the fuck? Would Rowan’s death catalyze an irreversible transition to undeadness? Worse, what kind of undead were we talking about? The thought of deliquescing into one of Hellebore’s meat men was worse than the idea of being eaten alive. My mouth filled with an old-penny taste; I paused, realizing I had chewed straight through my lower lip.
The problem with prophecies really was how fucking oblique they were. What I wouldn’t have given for clarity. Still, I wasn’t completely without options. The last time I was here, I discovered the library was honeycombed with secret passages. Of course, access to them was through someone the faculty had just digested. Nonetheless, there had to be an entrance somewhere. If I could find one, I might be able to wait out the inevitable slaughter.
Maybe. So many goddamned maybes.
Despite everything that happened in the school, there was a stillness to the library. The air smelled of old books, rust, old wood, and dust, all intermingled with an herbaceoussomething,a medicinal scent that wasn’t unpleasant but was nonetheless unsettling. Above, the ceiling was bronze and glass. It felt like I was walking through a jewel box, an art installation, someone’s over-ornamented fantasy of their favorite place. It was almost peaceful. My drifting gaze snagged on signage riveted to the wall: a simple brass plaque on which was engraved the wordARCHIVES.
I followed the arrows until I found a small room stuffed with traditional card catalogs. Serried rows of wooden cabinetry filled what was left. Everything in the space was cabriole-legged, rococo-souled: over-decorated behemoths with giltwork on the drawers and embossed metal rings.
Somethingbleatedas I walked deeper inside. I jumped, startled. The noise was horrible: a meaty, wet-lunged honking that reminded me terrifyingly of the school’s own skinless attendants. What I saw was actually worse: it was the very squashed remains of a rat, largely limbless, seeping maggots from now-dried wounds. It lolled its head so I could see each of its eye sockets before it brayed moistly again.
I began to back away.
“He won’t hurt you, promise,” came a familiar voice from behind me. “He’s just trying to say hi.”
I turned to see Rowan standing in silhouette, a scarecrow figure with an even thinner shadow. The low light cragged his face unnaturally, made him look older than he was.
“Did you follow me?”
“What answer would make you happier?” said Rowan, splaying fingers over the hollow of his throat, an absolutely scandalized expression on his face, the feathery stubs of his eyebrows raised as high as they’d go. “It’s okay to admit you’ve always had the hots for me.”
Against my will, I recalled how he’d looked that night in the dark: how his upper lip crooked at its rightmost edge, the corner fletched with the ghost of a scar. “Fuck off into the sun.”
He dropped his hand, a thumb hooking into a pocket. “I think I’m going to name this little guy Tim,” Without apparent revulsion for the worms spilling from every wound, Rowan stroked the back of a finger along the rat’s swollenthroat. It leaned into his touch. “There was a kid who tried to be friends with me in the hospital. I had to tell him to go away, of course. But he was cool.”
“Not here to walk down Memory Lane with you, Rowan.”
“Kind of wish I could have given Tim a hug,” Rowan nodded at the rodent, who was still actively decomposing and whose effluvium was beginning to stain the shelf on which it was perched, and was somehow now on its back, writhing like a happy cat in a puddle of its secretions. “But I guess they will do.”
