Page 34 of The Library at Hellebore
“You will put that cigarette out,” repeated Professor Fleur, her voice wobbling with each effortful word, arrowing toward him. Other students were beginning to notice my meanderings to the garden’s very edge, their expressions that of cats surveilling an interloper in their territory. Lucky for me, they were still in the process of evaluating if my movements could be construed as misdeeds and whether, in an environment fickle as this, there was more value in tattling or ransoming my secret. We weren’t yet elbows-deep in each other’s guts yet, you understand. Outside of a few earnest killings, most of us were still hopeful for absolution, for atonement. Murder tended to complicate receiving either. “You will take off your gloves. You will put your hands to the grass, and you will tell my garden you are sorry.”
Rowan sucked on his cigarette until he rendered it to a stub. When he spoke, it was through a gargle of smoke. “You don’t know. You really don’t know.”
“I will not say it again: put out the cigarette.”
“N,” said Rowan. “O.”
As casually as I could, I strolled in the direction of the roses.
The other students were melting from where Fleur and Rowan were having their confrontation. Though the murdering in the school was still unenthused, the atmosphere in Hellebore was such that everyone understood an increasing body count was inevitable. Sullivan’s actions the first day had been illustrative. Absolutely fuck-all happened after he murdered the boy, whoever the hell he was. Not a single member of the faculty remarked on what he’d done. The masked janitors—the servitors—simply mopped away the slaughter and that was the extent of it. No investigation, no ostracization. Nothing. So as Rowan continued mouthing off, our classmates provided him an increasingly wider berth.
“Put your hands on the grass.”
Rowan considered this. His eyes trailed over the garden until they reached mine, at which point he winked, a stage magician about to perform his favorite trick.
“You know what? Since you asked so nicely, I’ll do as you say,” he declared, cigarette hanging from the pout of his thin mouth. “I’ll put my hands on the grass.”
He shucked his gloves, making a big show of liberating his fingers, wiggling them at first as if to say,Look, I have nothing hidden.Theatrics concluded, his face shuttered, Rowan then set both very ordinary-seeming palms on the grass outside the borders of his picnic blanket.
And Ifeltit. I felt the innumerable microbial bodies, the vascular systems of the greenery, the tiny, half-awake saplings still in the soil, the beetles, the worms, the nameless worlds in the dark beneath the earth begin to die. Softly, at first. Stutteringly, then in progressively more violent fits: death rolling across the patch of land. The other students shrieked, clutching at one another, trying to avoid the brown rippling outward, the grass crisping, turning black, disintegrating.
“You’re a deathworker,” said Professor Fleur, withdrawing a step.
“Mmm.”
“How is he doing that?” A girl’s voice from somewhere behind me.
“Law of Contagion, I’m told,” said Rowan with far too much cheer. “If two things have been in contact with each other, a link forms. Saints make shit holy and, well, deathworkers make things dead.”
Fleur, her face entirely blanched of color, said, “Stop it.”
“I thought you told me to touch grass and apologize to the garden.” He bent his face to the dying green. “Sorry, garden.”
“Yes,” said Professor Fleur, her teeth gritted. “But now I need you to stop.”
“But I’menjoyingmyself.”
I didn’t hear what Professor Fleur said in return because I saw my opportunity, and had slipped away as the fig trees were shriveling, and the students were beginning to realize those thin barriers of fabric would do little to shield them from Rowan’s power. It was a gamble, but what wasn’t? I was still calculating my options when I saw Rowan look up to me and mouth the wordrun.
So I did.
DAY TWO
A pall of tension hung over that following morning, suffocating any attempt at conversation. The seven of us separated quietly. I thought about hunting Ford down to demand a more complete picture of what was to come but that felt too much like submitting to one of those tests where they diagnose your potential for developing any variety of deadly ailments. Knowing what hereditary cancers were advancing in your direction always seems like a strategic move until you realize there’s no actual stopping them.
So instead, I found an alcove in which to hide, somewhere that felt halfway defensible, removed from the main corridor. The light that wept through the stained-glass windows of the library was blistering, molten. I was exhausted. Enough to pour myself into a piebald armchair the color of tanning vellum and stay there. I think I dozed. I must have. But between the temperature and the grime crusting my skin, the knowledge the Librarian was somewhere in here with us, I did not sleep. But I dreamt nonetheless of its faces, its laughter—or hallucinated such things, at least. I’m not sure if it mattered.
“You look like shit,” came Minji’s voice at some point, waking me from those half dreams.
As the story went, Hellebore found Minji in the basement of a concert hall, the building staved in, beaten into rubble bya series of freak automobile accidents: like a skull, masonry could only take so much trauma before it broke. Depending on who you asked, the school wasn’t even looking for Minji in the beginning. They were there investigating the crashes, and what might have possessed stockbrokers and suburbanajummasto run their vehicles into the concert hall in a mass suicide event of unparalleled scale. The answer was Minji, of course. In each of the drivers, they found an overgrowth of papillae in the meningeal stratum, foreign cells livid with what looked like villi. The doctors said it was symptomatic of parasitic worms, but our experts in Hellebore knew better.
It was Minji’s hair.
No one knew why her hair did what it allegedly did or how those people came to be infested by it. What was known was that it took Hellebore eighteen days to extract Minji from under the floorboards, and another week to pry open the teratoma in which she was encysted. When she woke, she’d asked the medical team about her twin, except there was no trace of anyone else, nothing save for a swathe of corpses she admitted to having no knowledge of making.
“I feel like shit,” I said, blinking, trying and failing to augur the hour from the slant of the light. “Could be worse, though.”
“How so?”
