Page 44 of The Library at Hellebore

DAY TWO

“Flesh-maker, dark-song,food-animals,” sang out the Librarian as it spiraled down from the ceiling, a vortex of luminous scales, all wide-mouthed smiles, as its faces blinked shining tears down on us, like an Ophanim from the Bible. More of that gold splattered down: a drop hit my cheek, scalding me. I hissed from the pain. “I can hear them through the walls, talking about how they want to eat up, drink you up, devour you.”

The Librarian lowered farther, becoming illuminated.

“When I say,” whispered Gracelynn, “you run.”

I shot them an incredulous look.

As if their words were a cue the Librarian had been anticipating, it accelerated. There was no time. No time to think, no time to breathe, to parse the thing’s monstrous speed, its reaching hands, the sheer number of them, there were hundreds, gold-tipped, etiolated; all I could see was a centipede grown to a size of myth, with human faces where scales should have sat, lunging for Gracelynn, folding itself around them, cocooning them: a chrysalis opening in reverse, the insect swallowed up by its reconstituting pupa.

With Gracelynn in its grip, the Librarian, terrible and beautiful, almost human if you could force yourself to onlyregard it from the neck up, catapulted back upward. I heard them scream, a wet, thin noise.

“For before,” sang the Librarian. “For when I asked and you said stop, for when I begged and you told me no—”

Through the dark of the shelves, I saw Rowan skidding toward us, then stopping. And I heard Gracelynn singing in their voice once again, that clarion silver voice that was as beautiful as the end of days and as terrible as creation. I couldn’t tell you how they did it but their voice fractured into a madrigal, into a choir. Warmth oozed from my ears, my nostrils, my eyes: a liquid heat I recognized immediately as blood. I blinked twice, trying to un-gum my eyes as my tear ducts became clotted, but soon all I could see was a smear of crimson and blurred silhouettes.

Run,I thought I heard them scream through their song.

I was tired of running. Since arriving, that had seemed to be all I was doing but it felt worse to stay, to waste Gracelynn’s literal swan song, and if I was going to be honest with myself, it seemed a waste to die there when I’d survived for so long.

And besides, for once, I knew where I was going.

It was the wet hiss of television static seeping down a corridor that stopped me in my tracks. Hellebore abhorred technology. Classes were taught with blackboards, lessons scraped painfully onto porcelain enamel. What Hellebore could duplicate with magic, it did, regardless of the cost. I had thought the library would be similar and for the most part, that guess had been right. Most of its knowledge was preserved the old-fashioned way, computers and other accessory technologiesrelegated to mentions in dust-covered encyclopedias like they were the ones who were relics of a bygone time.

To hear the sound of electronics, that familiar whine, that surprised me more than I expected. Light fed through a half-opened door in the darkened corridor. The walls were finned from ceiling to floor with shelves. On each shelf were video tapes. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Crammed into a little room was what felt like every production made for viewing on a home video system, all neatly labeled and alphabetically filed. It’d have felt quaint if not for the fact I could not stop imagining the Librarian here, snuggled into the interior, raptly watching old Westerns while the rest of us slept or died.

A single television radiated static at the otherwise unlit room. The cathode light from the vintage machine sheened the walls with an unwholesome pallor that made me think immediately of old horror movies. It was loud but it wasn’t enough to disguise Gracelynn’s song, which filled the halls:Run, Alessa, run, run.The couch had its color obliterated by the television’s flickering glow, the palette of the room somehow flattened to the same eerie greenish gray.

“Alessa?” said a voice.

“Minji?” I said to the silhouette atop the couch. “Is that you?”

“Did you know the Librarian has an extensive collection of horror movies? Bad ones, good ones. It hoarded everything,” came Minji’s voice. “And it made notes.”

My vision adjusted to the murk. Under different circumstances, I might have found the tableau before me hilarious. She wasn’t sitting on the couch but was perched instead on the top of its central back cushion, straddling Ford’s shoulders.Her hair floated out from her in a nimbus, some of it cozied around the blades of the fan above her, some of it more ambulatory. I watched black tendrils feel their way over archipelagos of throw pillows stacked on each end of the couch; over armrests and across his shoulders, twinning around his neck like they were a lover drawing his throat close for a kiss; spilling down and over the carpet.They look like they are searching for something,I thought. I did not want to figure out what for.

Her voice grew fond. “Do you want to know what kind of notes?”

“I’m afraid to ask. Minji, I need your help. Gracelynn—”

“It’s a good answer.”

“Fine,” I said, digging nails into my palms, wishing for different, wishing we’d all gotten better, her and I and them and every digested sob in the faculty’s belly. “What kind of notes?”

“On dying,” said Minji, patting Ford on the cheek. His head lolled away from her touch and settled at an upsetting angle.

“What did you do to him, Minji?” I asked, wincing. He wasn’t dead. His heart still shuddered in its cavity, his lungs moved. But his neck. That was so broken I was surprised his head sat somehow still attached to his shoulders.

“You could say we made things easier for him. He was in pain before and it didn’t seem right to keep him that way, you know?” She seemed to sift through her thoughts. “Life is a bitch and then you die. That’s the promise most are given. You get to die eventually. You get to make the pain stop. But then there are entities like the Librarian, like the faculty, like me. We don’t die. Not in any meaningful way. We dream about doing so, though.”

“Maybe you can help with the Librarian then.” I swallowed. “It has Gracelynn.”

“No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because we have more in common with the faculty than we do with you,” said Minji with a gauzy, unselfconscious laugh, confirming what Rowan and I had suspected. “And because we made a promise to her. We’d protect her. The rest of you, well…”

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