Page 45 of The Library at Hellebore

She patted Ford on the skull like he was a puppy. It felt hypocritical to pass judgment, to be dismayed by this admission. Given what I was and given the place we were in, the company we kept and the cruelties we inflicted on one another, how could I hold any prejudice against monsters? Still, my stomach turned and I tried not to picture Fordscreamingin his own head.

“At the end of the day, you’re all just meat.”

It’s not the same,I wanted to say, but even there in the shelter of my own mind, the words sounded infantile, stupid, arrogant. Demands were made when there was a power differential in your favor, not when you were nothing more than steak in the freezer. I was livestock chatting up a rancher.

“And you? What areyou?” I said, forgetting the urgency of the tableau outside, just for a little while, struck by the strange feeling I’d found something worse.

“What areyou?” countered Minji, more convincingly a person, her eyes flashing with humor. She cocked her head at me as her hair spread to line the walls, the shelves, the floor, until I was standing on the very edge of a black box of pulsating keratin. “Can you tell us what’s inside you?”

Outside, Gracelynn’s song stuttered.

“Bones, muscle, organ—”

“What are those? How do they make youyou?”

I eyed her distrustfully. “What do you mean?”

“Whatarebones?” said Minji, the air itself sheened with her hair, like the television had bled outward, filling our world with static. “Whatareorgans? Whatismuscle? How does it all relate to the miracle of your consciousness?”

I was acutely aware I stood with my back exposed, and there was a thing outside with Gracelynn, a thing that could not die and only wanted to die, would do anything to die. And I wasn’t sure anymore if there was time to run out of.

At that moment, Ford rose, swaying closer, first going down on one knee and then the other, head still bent at that eye-watering angle. Minji took his face in her hands, kissing him perfunctorily, tongue flitting into his open mouth. When she pulled away, a string of drool shone between their lips. Laughing again, she kissed him on his brow, his nose.

“If it helps, we suspect Gracelynn will be one of the lucky ones,” she said. “They at least will justdie.They will not be trapped in that mass of flesh outside screaming and screaming and screaming forever. Not like you. Not like Ford. Poor man. Shall we give her a show, darling?”

Ford moaned. He dug fingers into his solar plexus, clawing at the steeple of his ribs until the flesh tore and a wound like a mouth yawned open. He dug until the wealth of his entrails slopped onto the carpet, prying at the membranous tangle, pulling, pulling. I couldn’t understand how he was standing upright still. Minji had made him carve his abdominal cavity clean. Ford was nothing but blood-greased bone and bare muscle, nothing but skin and a haunted stare.

“If it helps, we don’t think the facultywantedthis to happen. We think they’d have been happy if their work with Fordhad succeeded. If they could have just filled him to the brim with their bodies and let him carry them out, none of this would have happened. This wasn’t personal.”

Down went Ford on his hands and knees, improbably alive, sifting through the still-steaming heap of his organs like a dog questing through the tall grass for a lost toy. He raised his liver to me, his heart, the desiccated sac of his stomach, his kidneys in succession. Then at last, the long coils of his intestine, which he nuzzled with his cheek, moaning. He had the soft dull eyes of a cow, like something that had never been taught to speak.

“We’re afraid you were right. The universe does bend toward cruelty. For something to live, something else must die,” said Minji. “Think of the school as the fig. Something must be done to extract value from the corpse.”

“I don’t understand any of this.” I hesitated. This was torture. This was hell and one of its demons hard at work on a sinner. “Or whatever the fuck you’re doing to him.”

“Only what we need,” said Minji primly, smoothing down her skirts. “Rude of you to think we would not take advantage of this gift, this eternally renewing source of magic.”

With that cryptic statement offered up, Minji turned then to Ford and I saw her hair close over him like a funerary shroud, like flies settling on carrion. He vanished under the seething blackness. Before I could ask Minji what she meant, I heard the sharpcrackof bone snapped along the lineation of a joint, heard muscle peeled into half, heard Ford gasp softly, as though surprised, and from that writhing mass of hair came a neat panel of calcium and flesh, raised up by a tendril of hair. Minji’s face warmed with adoration.

“Tell me something.” I said.

Crack.“Yes?”

“If you’re like the faculty”—I knew the answer. I knew it like I knew the soft treasures of the human body, the wrinkled frightened edifice of the brain. I knew it like blood, like the roar of it in my ears—“why are you doing this to Ford? Can’t you just walk out there?”

“Oh, yes. Most likely.”Schlorp.

“Then why are you doing this to him?”

“Because. We hate him.” Minji did not look at me, only at the meat her hair had now carefully set on her shoulder like a fragment of a pauldron. “And because we thought they’d like a gift.”

Her hair was becoming more frenzied. Once again, that crack, that wet noise of human tissue shearing apart, the sounds increasing in volume, building in tempo. I took a step back. I could practicallyfeelwhat she was doing, the excruciating dismantlement. Bone by bone, tendon by tendon. How Minji’s hair was levering Ford apart, sectioning him, so it can reconstruct him as armor for her. I could feel his heart, panicked, seizing, wanting to die, wanting to stop, but being coerced to beat on.

“Adam would have kept him by his side until the last moment. The faculty deserve their toy back, don’t you think?” said Minji very reasonably. The pieces were being attached to her more quickly now, and her hair was beginning to grout what spaces there were with clots of his entrails, packing it all down, tight as they could. “And besides, it’s funny.”

“You can’t just walk out wearing him like a suit of armor.”

“We can, actually.”

---