Page 2 of The Library at Hellebore
“Please,” said Rowan.
Before I could say anything, another voice broke through the air.
“Whatdid youdo?”
We turned in tandem to see a figure stumbling fawn-legged toward us, pausing at intervals to flinch at the charnel, the color bleeding from a face already arctic in its complexion. Most people would call her a beauty and they’d be right any other day. There and then, however, she was a car crash in slow motion, that long, drawn-out, honeyed second beforean explosion. She was a corpse that hadn’t caught up to the fact that her heart had been dug out and eaten, dripping like a fruit. In her face, a kind of obstinate hope somehow. Like if she lived in this incredulous grief for a little longer, it’d grant Johanna a Schrödinger’s immortality: keep her not necessarily alive, but not dead either.
“What did youdo?” Stefania screamed.
A little to my surprise if not Rowan’s, she arrowed straight toward him, literally serrating as she did: every limb began to split into outcroppings of teeth, skin becoming stubbled with molars, speared through with expanding incisors. Her face bisected and then quartered, petaling, each flap lined like the inside of a lamprey’s mouth. When she screamed again, it was with a laryngeal configuration that had no business existing even here in the halls of Hellebore: it was a choir, a horror, a nightmare of sound.
“You,” she said in all the voices those new mouths afforded her. Tongues waved from every joint. “You fucking bastard.”
Rowan threw his hands up, backing away, even though I was the one smeared with a frosting-thick coat of gore. “First of all: fuck you. Second: how dare you?The visual evidence alone,Stefania. It’s clear—”
Whatever else he might have said was swallowed by an obliterating white light. The incandescence lasted only for a second but it filled the room, burning away all features. Then it winked out and as our sight returned, we discovered collectively there was now a fourth member of our little tableau.
Standing before us was the headmaster herself, bonneted and in a cotton nightdress ornamented with smiling deer. Though the style was cartoonish, it did little to dull the absolute horror of the sight: ungulate faces were never meant to stretch that way. The headmistress blinked owlishly at us, hereyes magnified by the lenses of her horn-rimmed spectacles. I froze at the sight of her. I knew what was behind that doddering facade.
“Children.” Her voice when she wasn’t orating was high and breathy, a bad idea away from being babyish, like a sorority girl courting the quarterback’s attention. It was particularly weird coming from someone who looked and acted the way the headmistress did: namely,old.“What are you doing?”
“What,” said Stefania, devolving back to her usual shape, a process that involved more slurping noises than I would have preferred. “Headmaster?”
“This is terrible behavior.”
“Theykilledmy friend,” exhaled Stefania, and the helplessness in her voice was worse than her rage, a note of keening under those panted words. “Headmistress, please—”
“There is asoireewaiting for you,” continued the headmaster, putting undue emphasis on the wordsoiree,dragging out the vowels, turning them nasal, exaggeratedly French. “You should be dressing up. You should be putting on makeup.” Her eyes darted to Rowan. “Better clothes. Why aren’t you working to look delicious?”
In movies, it is always clear when the villain slips up with a double entendre. The music score changes; the camera pans in on their faces. It is a narrative design, a conspiratorial glance at the audience: here is the signage marking the descent into mayhem and here too, the strategically positioned lighting, placed just so to ensure no one ignores the moment. But with the headmaster, it was clear the use of those words was deliberate. She did not speak them in error. This wasn’t Freudian. This was hertellingus that sheexpectedus to look pretty on a plate. The audacity left me speechless, but not Rowan.
“I’m afraid I taste terrible,” he said, flapping his hands.“Like, absolutely rancid. Between all the smoking and drinking, it’d probably be awful. Just awful. Can I help with the drinks instead?”
“You’re insane,” said Stefania. “I refuse to be part of this.”
The headmaster didn’t even look at her. Instead, she said sweetly, “In that case, I suggest you hang yourself.”
“You mean it,” I said after a drawn-out moment. “You’re actually planning to eat us.”
“I said make yourself look delicious,” trilled the headmaster, twirling a mauve-veined hand at me. “You’re the one coming up with questionable conjecture.”
But the look in her eyes said everything, as did her delicate smile. Rowan swallowed the rest of his rambling excuses, his jaws clenched so hard I heard the scrape of enamel as they ground together, and Stefania stared at the floor with a furious, indiscriminate hate. I studied the headmaster, wishing I had a rejoinder that didn’t make me sound petulant. My only consolation was that the epiphany of this impending cannibal feast had both Rowan and Stefania at least temporarily distracted from the ugly business of our dearly deceased mutual friend.
Her smile deepened. She knew as well as the three of us did that there wouldn’t be opting out of the situation.
“You can’t make us go,” said Rowan.
“Actually,” said the headmistress, voice losing its chirping lilt. She spoke the next words in what I’d come to think of as her real voice: smooth and bored, unsettlingly anodyne save when her amusement knifed through the surface like a fin moving through dark water. “I can.”
Before any of us could object, the world spun and, sudden as anything, we were in the gymnasium. Each and every one of us were in formal raiment, a mortarboard jauntily set atan angle on each of our heads. We were as pristine as if we’d spent the day in frenzied ablution: hair shining like it’d been oiled individually, faces beautiful. We looked like we were waiting backstage for our turn on the catwalk—like sacrifices, or saints waiting for the lions.
The air had an odd crystalline shine to it like it had been greased somehow. That or I was in the throes of a migraine. It was hard to be sure. I’d been plopped next to Gracelynn, who was sat between Sullivan and me, with Kevin on my opposite side. Bracketing us was a pair of twins I’d only seen occasionally but knew by reputation, the two notorious for the ease with which they procured reagents for whoever had the money to pay: they could get anything so long as what you wanted came from something with a pulse. A few familiar faces were past them to the right: Stefania, Minji, Eoan, and Adam, who slouched almost entirely out of his seat.
“What is going on?” Kevin hissed to me.
“We have to go,” I said in lieu of an answer, standing.
The world stuttered.
