Page 40 of The Library at Hellebore

The stacks were quiet when we crept back into the main hall and stayed so despite our paranoia. Hours passed in a fugue of surreptitious research. Despite our certainty the Librarian would find us, we remained undisturbed. Not that it mattered. None of the books, at least none of the ones in reach, yielded anything useful. And as night at last absorbed all color from the sky, it became clear all we’d succeeded at was moving the library’s collection from their appointed shelves to a pile on the floor.

Sighing, I crumpled cross-legged onto the ground. I studied how the shelves sloped away into the darkness. The serried rows that had looked so beautiful when illuminated by the church light now made me think of teeth; the ceiling wasa cavity, a throat leading to the black of an unseen digestive tract. The gold leaf inlaid in the blistered frescos of carnivorous deer and oversized wasps no longer gleamed. Instead, it was now the color and texture of boiling fat. It was almost ironic how absolutely banal half the library’s contents were: it even contained annotated copies of every transaction the school had had with the outside world over the decades. We’re talking hoarder levels of records.

There was still so much to read but we’d run out of time again.

“Alessa?” It was Gracelynn.

“If you’re here to cry at me,” I said, rising to see them standing on the opposite side of the shelf I’d been leaning against. “You can just—”

Gracelynn ignored my vitriol and instead held up what looked like a collection of crumpled, yellowing, coffee stain–mottled notes, all held together by a particularly hubristic paper clip. “I found something.”

“Show me.”

They circled around to where I was, riffling the pages with their thumb. I saw photos there, half-faded Polaroids. “I figured that if we were going to find a way out, we should maybe start by seeing who’d built what in the library. Figure out the bones of the place and all, you know? Fortunately, the school’s kept excellent records. There’s stuff here dating back more than two hundred years. I was looking through them when I found this.”

Gracelynn handed over the hodgepodge of papers: students records, medical files, letters someone had written that the school I assumed had confiscated—but I only had eyes for the photographs, for the girl scowling up at me through the past. “Wait—”

“Uh-huh,” said Gracelynn in a hushed tone.

I flipped through the pages again, checking each in turn. Much of the ink had faded over the years, gray now with time’s passing, but the letters all had the same handwriting, a florid cursive all but extinct in this day and age, yet uncannily familiar.

“That’s her handwriting but that—that isn’t her face. That’s not—how? I don’t understand. It can’t be.” My voice stumbled as I stared down at one photograph in particular, of a woman, older now although not by much, in front of a mirror, painting her own self portrait. I knew the room she was in, had stood in it the night before. I knew the bend of her mouth and the tilt of her jaw, the shadows settled into the sockets of her eyes, knew the long gracile line of her throat: flesh changed but bones were eternal. I couldn’t understand how it’d taken so long for me to realize this. “I can’t believe that’s her.”

“It is.”

My blood chilled to sludge. “Why did she change her face?”

“Maybe, she didn’t do it herself. Maybe, the school made her transform.” said Gracelynn. “Or the Raw Mother. I heard stories about others—they were changed too. Horribly. The Ministry had to take them away. I honestly don’t know, Alessa. What I do know is that people would probably have questions about Bella Khoury not aging.”

“I don’t understand why she’s here or how—” Except thiswasHellebore and the idea that the girl I’d sort of harbored complicated feelings for had been alive for centuries didn’t actually seem improbable. “She always spoke about Bella”—my voice trembled around the name—“like she was someone else. Why hide it?”

My voice died midway through my musings.

“Haven’t you ever noticed that Portia’s a bit… forgetful?I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with her where she’d say one thing and then just not remember she said it. At first, I thought it was stress.” As Gracelynn spoke, their gesticulations grew more animated though their voice did not, their Southern lilt made sweeter by their hushed tones. “But maybe, maybe it’s because they broke her.”

“I remember her asking me to go to a party. There was a card and it’d had a dozen signatures, but I was sure she’d faked all of them,” I said, thinking of that first day when Portia had stood soft-eyed and smiling beside the self-portrait of Bella, and I wondered how you might torture someone to make them forget the work of their own hands. “I wonder…”

I riffled through the letters; they were all addressed to the same person: a lover that would not come to Portia, could not have come to save her even if she had every desire to, not with the missives here. I was struck ill by the thought that somewhere a girl had grown old waiting for Portia to come home. Swallowing, I said, “But what about the Raw Mother? What did she have to do with this? Why is she in the school? Nothing in this fucking place makes sense.”

Gracelynn set the folders down onto the floor.

“Kevin and I, we researched for months before we decided we wanted to enroll here.” They couldn’t meet my gaze, could only stare down at their shoes as they spoke. “They’re—I mean, they were so meticulous about it. By the time we enrolled, we knew just about everything there was to know about Hellebore. Except why all the graduates stay with the Ministry. I remember writing that down. I wanted to ask someone about that. Because that seemed off, you know?” They swallowed.

“But when I walked through the gates, something happened. Suddenly, I remembered seeing the graduates that the headmaster mentioned. In interviews. In person. Graduateswhose names weren’t in my notes. They do something to us here, Alessa. I don’t know what or why. But they do.”

Again, that chill, that feeling of my grave trampled.

“What are you saying, Gracelynn?”

An ichorous substance pearled down from the ceiling, an oversized amber droplet of something incandescently shimmery: like lava, or heated gold. It hung in the air for the moment and then landed on the tiles between with an audiblesplat.

The residue began to sizzle.

“Shit,” I said. “The Librarian’s awake.”

BEFORE

I’m not ashamed to say I slunk back to my dorm room after being dismissed by the headmaster, starving for the comfort of the familiar. Like a child, I wanted to crawl under my blankets and cry until any urge to do so dried up to something more sensible, like maybe a devouring fury at my circumstances.

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