Page 68 of The Library at Hellebore
Ford’s prophecy from so long ago drifted through my head. I got what I wanted. But it definitely wasn’t what any of them deserved.
I stood with considerable difficulty, my right leg having gone numb in a way that suggested the nerves were mostly rotted away, a needling chill trespassing up my side. I didn’t have much time left, which I somewhat resented, but I had no one to blame but myself. This was the gamble I’d chosen and the cards I’d played. “I think mostly it’s because I’ve spent my whole life with this little voice in my head telling me that I never had any agency in the first place, that I’m collared and leashed to a hundred people, none of whom have even thought about offering compensation for partial ownership of me. And I hate it. You can’t imagine how much.”
Adam didn’t answer, racked by sudden paroxysms, eyes rolling to whites. As he bucked and writhed, fire sheeted over his body in brilliant waves, like it was trying to burn out the infection, this death of mine I’d shared with him.
“Then again, maybe you can. It must be such a weight knowing your only hope for supplanting your bastard status is bringing about the end of the world. Nothing else. You’re nothing but an implement, and I’m nothing but a thing to possess.” I clasped both hands around the bone of his upper right arm and pulled, ignoring how the fire ate through the skin of my palm, how it glued the fat paddings to his raw tendons. It didn’t hurt. You’d think it would but it didn’t. “Actually, now that I think about it. Maybe you’re right. We are the same kind of monster. All we’ve ever wanted wascontrol.”
I could hear the faculty coming down the hall to the library, the oily noise of their flesh thudding over the floorboards, the procession of their many feet, their gnarled hands. Nailsclicking.Not too long ago, that cacophony had made me shudder. But now it was banal, mundane. I pressed my shoulder to the doors, these too gory with our past days, and pushed; the heavy wood screeched over the tiles and splintered. An eager murmur rose on the other side: the faculty must have seen me.
Like us, they must also relish the perfect joy of absolute control. Especially now that they were nothing but a wet mess of sinew and skin, threaded through one another like cords tangled in the bottom of a drawer. I couldn’t imagine happiness in such a mélange. But they’d smiled, hadn’t they? As they’d expunged every fluid from Sullivan’s body, as they drank him down. And laughed. Some inflection of memory told me that they laughed, and it’d been in the timbre of good-natured grandparents, loud enough even to be heard over our valedictorian’s screams. I think I remember those things, at least. Trauma has a knack for macerating the past so all that remains are the sharp edges of the agony you sustained.
It was hard work, maneuvering Adam’s body through the four-inch crack I’d opened. I let the skin slough from my torso,what cushions of fat I still possessed; my hair, which loosened in rivulets along with the soft tissue of my scalp. Anything that wasn’t immediately necessary, I surrendered, and I was glad I’d never really exalted vanity. Though both Adam and I were rotting by degrees, rotting with such speed that we smelled sweetly of what was coming, the air outside the library still cut through the putrefaction: it smelled like rain, likeice,like frost come too early to a world still dizzy with life. And I could have wept from my loneliness for the uninterrupted sky if not for the fact I was, well,dying.
There in the vestibule, the floor utterly eradicated of stains, was the cancerously lumpy silhouette of the faculty. Theystood,I suppose, for lack of better terminology (because really how else do you describe that clamor of appendages seething under their mass?) in silence as I staggered toward them, burning and decaying in turn.
Upon seeing them, I thought there’d be some last confrontation, an opportunity for an exchange, for them to declaim their villainy and for me to tell them to go fuck themselves. Instead: the tense quiet of a hospital waiting room. Starlight flecked what little of the night I could see. For some reason, that and nothing else I’d experienced in my time at Hellebore had me wanting to sob for a father long deceased and a mother who might as well be the same, but doing so would require resources I no longer had: lungs that weren’t mostly sludge, eyes that weren’t losing their sight.
“All yours,” I said when Adam’s seizure had dwindled to a rabbiting pulse. The world grayed to a promise of sleep. Timing was going to be everything. “We’re all yours.”
I don’t know if they heard or if they took their cue from my posture, my crumpling over Adam’s body, the two of us now just wounds with faces. I closed my eyes, the tremblinganimal folded into my brain stemscreaming.An atavistic terror nearly had me pissing myself as I bent over Adam, steepled hands pressed to my mouth like I was praying. But truth was I was counting instead.
One.The faculty reared up in preparation of the feast and I smelled them then: a greasy pungency like the windowless interior of an airless retirement home, sweat, and the stink of leftover student decaying away.
Two.They weresofast. I’d seen them come for us, of course, that first terrible night but somehow, I had since shed the memory of the specifics. That or my mind looked at the image scarified onto it and hid itself away, whispering,We will process this later if we are ever safe again.
Three.Of all the things I’d expected, tenderness wasn’t one of them. Their fingers trailed softly over the back of my neck, nails grazing skin, worshipful in their movements. Their mouths traced the cord of my spine and if their lips were dry, their touch was at least ephemeral and I could almost pretend it didn’t make me want to scream. I cradled Adam closer to me nonetheless, his poor heart, so recently re-formed, straining against its failing prison. There is a much misused, much misattributed line from the Bible that talks about how the spirit might be willing but the flesh is weak. With Adam, I suspect that was entirely literal. Whatever numinosity he’d inherited from his father would burn even at the end of the end of everything, but the rest of him would molder with everyone else. I pressed my cheek to his forehead, felt the bone soften,break.
Teeth sank into my back. I almost didn’t notice, focused instead on what I had to do next.
What remained of my ribs bloomed ecstatically into a maw, into arms of shining bone. I enfolded Adam, covered him asthe faculty covered us, held him to my bared organs, pulled him close until he was entombed in me, and briefly, I thought I could hear Rowan’s shrill laughter brush my ear. He would have found this whole tableau hilarious. The pain worsened, keening through me, until it became the whole of me and it was difficult to imagine there’d ever been a me undefiled by this agony, this sensation of fingers burrowing through me like I was no more substantial than water, of being opened up and hollowed out. And gods, it hurt. I’m not ashamed to say I screamed.
Still, with the furnace of Adam’s soul and the poison of Rowan’s existence both interred in me, it’d have been a waste to give up there. I comforted myself with the thought that if there was an after, if some purgatory existed for little boy devils and brokenhearted girls, I’d find everyone who’d left me behind and I could go to them reciting the way Adam sobbed for reprieve. Maybe I’d find Kevin there too and be able to tell them how sorry I was I couldn’t keep Gracelynn from watching them die. But that was for later. Now was for holding on.
Here’s the thing: eaten without the intermediary of my flesh, Rowan would have simply been absorbed, disassembled too quickly for the malignancy of his nature to take effect. But allowed to incubate, to fester, to spread while the faculty was distracted with, say, an infinitely regenerating feast, a screaming thing they could gorge on in a thousand ways and know there’d always be more to eat? Well, that would change everything. With what I’d stolen from Adam, I made myself into a fucking horn of plenty, plying them with muscle, with marrow, with the myriad offerings of liver and lung, brain and bone. Whatever they slavered for, I fed them. And deathgrew in them like every cancer does, slowly and by degrees, until finally…
“Wait,” came the headmistress’s voice, scraped of its usual bubbling secret humor.
“Don’t you love it?” I said with what I had left of a throat. “When the wrong person wins?”
DAY THREE
“That took far too long,” I said tiredly as the doors heaved apart. The vestibule was tacky with the remnants of the faculty, no longer a tide of flesh-colored appetite but just meat, like everyone else was. I’d thought I’d be dead already but with so much flesh, so much meat around me, I could move my death around: store my soul where it couldn’t reach and watch as it ate the faculty, emptied them, made them scream.
All said and done, I was proud. We’d done something historic: Hellebore was empty, its halls hollowed, its hopes ended. No longer would it feed magic to the starving world. No longer would eat it through generations of kids whose only sin was being born with a reservoir of latent power. Hellebore was over and the slow decomposition of our society, stunted by those brilliant governmental minds, would resume; it’d be a fucking catastrophe, I’m sure, but they started it: those bastards should have left me alone.
Because dear god, can I hold a grudge.
Sunlight blasted through the corridor, white and searing. The Ministry agents—I knew the symbol embossed on their chest way too well, seeing as Sullivan had been practically monogramed from head to toe with it—in their blue hazmat suits, faces occluded by their tinted masks, looked almost comical. Their shoulders were disproportionatelywidened by the plastic. Inversely, their feet, stuffed into black rubber boots, seemed hilariously petite. Maybe I was just tired. At that point I’d gone without sleep for three days. My perception had become glutinous; everything was softer now around the edges. I couldn’t tell if the voices murmuring at the periphery of my consciousness were projects of my exhausted mind or the teachers chastising me for what I’d done. They were laughing then: lowly, like the sound of applause from an adjacent room.
“What happened to the school?” said one of the agents, inching forward. He, for reasons I couldn’t conjecture, raised a handgun at me.
I blinked stupidly at the weapon, an animal faced with an unfamiliar death. Surely, they must have been informed about what Hellebore was. Or perhaps they were just that confident in the supremacy of firearms. I decided then this vanguard was American and suddenly, the world made more sense again.
“I happened.”
BEFORE
The world spun and sudden as anything, we were in the gymnasium. Each and every one of us was in formal raiment, a mortarboard jauntily set at an angle on each of our heads. We were as pristine as if we’d spent the day in frenzied ablution: hair shining like it’d been oiled individually, faces beautiful. We looked like we were waiting backstage for our turn on the catwalk—like sacrifices, or saints waiting for the lions.
