Page 48 of The Library at Hellebore

I watched as Minji, enveloped now in Ford’s carcass, walked into the corridor and the gloom, horror fluttering in my chest, like a dying sparrow beating itself against the glass of a window. I felt like a guitar string wound too tight, like a garrote tensed for use, or a hare in its burrow, knowing there wasn’t anywhere else to go. My head hurt, my heart too. I’d crawled so far past fear and exhaustion, the world seemed differently luminated: the colors too saturated, the light cold and tinged with blues. And Gracelynn’s song was ebbing, slowing,dying.

Half live if Rowan dies.

As if on cue, I heard him scream.

BEFORE

As you know, most libraries are meant for the unrestricted use of whomever is in need of their facilities: refuges for the shy and the unprivileged, the impoverished student. Reservoirs of knowledge staffed by the excessively curious and the professionally methodical. Libraries, as a collective, are where you go if you are looking for a place that can’t conceive turning you away, especially not if you’re eager for education. In my experience, most libraries were basically perpetually at the verge of kidnapping passersby, handing them a catalog, and breathily going, “What can we convince you to readtoday?”

The library at Hellebore, however, was different. Appendage to the main campus, it acted only in the faculty’s interest, which seemed to revolve exclusively around fucking us students over. It disdained visitors. It delighted in being impermeable and I suspect in the knowledge that we all knew it contained every book ever written or that would be written, work we’d never be able to make use of as the library was a vault with no door. Access required navigating a byzantine amount of nonsensical paperwork: applications and forms that were often in contradiction with one another, often demanding a student go speak with a teacher no longer on the payroll, or report toan office on a floor that did not exist. Most of us, we didn’t bother. The effort didn’t seem worth it.

Plus, there was the question of the library’s warden.

“If the Librarian’s taken your spouse, there really isn’t anything much we can do for you, I’m afraid,” I said. “They’re gone. You—what’s your name, anyway?”

“Gracelynn. Gracelynn Wilder,” said our new acquaintance, knuckling at their mascara-smudged eyes.

“Gracelynn, you should know as well as the rest of us that if the Librarian has them, your spouse is as good as dead.”

“Please help me,” they said anyway.

Rowan lit his fourth cigarette of the evening, eeling around us to gently rap his knuckles against the plain metal of the service door, its hinges, testing the lineaments with intense curiosity. The cold hadn’t improved remotely.

“Is this a trap?” asked Rowan.

“Test me,” Gracelynn said immediately, a sleeve rolled to bare a soft forearm. “Trap? No. Look. Bleed me. Ensorcell me. Put me under. Dig in my brain. I don’tcare.Do whatever. Just help me. I need to save Kevin.”

They inhaled, sharp, like the name had cut their tongue, like they’d stuff it back down their throat anyway if they could even if it gashed them in the process. Gracelynn’s eyes were wild with a terror of calculations. But then, with a noiseless sob and a sudden loosening of their shoulders, they said, with a shame I didn’t entirely understand, “Kevin can get you out of here.”

That had me careening to a stop.

“Does everyone know about that?” I demanded. “Did a school newsletter go out? The hell’s going on?”

“You were gone fordays.Either you had died, which wouldhave been so sad.” He made a jerk-off motion with his hand at this. “Or, you’d done something to piss off the school and generally, Hellebore doesn’t give a shit unless you’re trying a jailbreak,” said Rowan.

I didn’t like the thought that the whole of Hellebore was potentially aware I’d failed at escaping, or how it might adjust the school’s esteem of me. I wondered how many people now saw me as weak, asprey.

“Keep talking,” I said, outwardly ignoring Rowan.

“Kevin—they work with shadows.” Gracelynn swallowed. “They can use them to let you travel anywhere. It’s quite easy for them.”

It was no secret that half the campus had enrolled out of desperation, hopeful that Hellebore might illuminate some technique for domesticating the terrible things inside them; to quiet the voices, calm their hungers; to stop the brood of ancient gods they’d been involuntarily nursing in their ribs from waking up and flossing with adjacent cartilage. But three months in, I couldn’t imagine most not regretting those innocent hopes. The school didn’t care what we did to one another. I was poleaxed, unable to reify the idea of someone like Gracelynn choosing to stay when escape was an option.

“Why are you two even here then?” I exhaled and there was hurt there that I wasn’t expecting, a rawness in the question. Gracelynn’s throat, I saw, leprous with scars: claw marks and knife wounds, fingerprint-sized indentations like someone had tried, at a loss for better weapons, tried to sink their hands through Gracelynn’s skin andtear.“If I could get out of here, I’d have run ages ago.”

“This is the only place where the shadows can’t…” The hyphen of skin between their very straight brows ruckedwith concentration. “Well, let’s just say it’s safer for them at Hellebore than it is for them outside. They can sleep here. They can rest.”

“What do youmeanthey can sleep here?” said Rowan, his investigation of the door concluded. He trotted back up to us, looking quizzical.

Gracelynn smiled, if you could call it that. It had the stretched idiotic quality of a skeleton’s grin, an accident of biology, and so displaced from actual humor, even Rowan shuddered a little to witness it. The smile didn’t last, thank god, brought down by a grief that seemed so old and familiar now, it might as well be a friend. Though their skin was unfretted with crow’s-feet or laugh lines, buoyant enough to be called babyish, there was nonetheless a terrible sense of age, of Gracelynn having grown old before their time in the way people did when they’d kept vigil by a deathbed for too long.

“When we’re elsewhere, when we’re outside these walls, the shadows keep trying to get Kevin to go home,” Gracelynn said with far too little inflection, a telling neutrality in their resonant singer’s voice. Never had I been more convinced of someone’s ability to belt out an aria with negative effort; never had I shuddered at the way someone said the wordhome.“And they badly do not want to.”

Having offered that cryptic explanation, they turned to me again, a terrible dignity in their face.

“We’re wasting time. Please help me get them back.”

“I’m sorry, but we—”

---