Page 21 of The Library at Hellebore

“I cantellyou don’t mean it.”

“No, I don’t,” I said, eyes going to the door. “But can I grovel later? We should be trying to get out of here.”

Rowan hesitated, but self-preservation won over self-pity. He straightened his smile and touched two fingers to the edge of his right brow bone, where a pale white scar feathered the skin. I had to wonder if he’d done it to himself on purpose.

“What’s your plan then?”

I ran my tongue over chapped lips. The thought of the Librarian undulating through the stacks unnerved me in a way I wasn’t prepared to address; not then, not in the near future, not ever. I was fully prepared to shelve every memory of the creature away in therepressedfolder, damn the consequences of having more unresolved trauma. As a result,outdidn’t feel like an option. I scanned the room hopefully and, to my relief, spotted a narrow passage with stairs leading into a grayish murk.

“Up?” said Rowan, following my gaze.

We heard athunkoutside the room as though an enormous weight was setting itself onto the mosaiced floor, the scratching of nails against wood, fingers tapping tunelessly along the walls; it could have been anything, a trick of the space, our exhausted imaginations. Nonetheless, Rowan and I both exchanged looks and without saying much more, slunk single-file up the steps, our breath held tight in case something was listening to see if we were there.

One set of stairs became a dozen more, a spiraling assortment: some were wood and others wrought iron, the former sleekly oiled and the latter so rusted, ochre flaked away at the touch of our hands.

“I didn’t know the library even went this high,” whispered Rowan.

I glanced over the rails. The world below flickered, fractalizing: it lost depth, gained it the next breath, seemingly adjusting to whatever (I realized as nausea welled) I thought it should be.

“It doesn’t,” I said. “Don’t look down.”

Eventually, there were no more stairs to climb, ending at a single windowless corridor that led us to a cul-de-sac.The wall before us showed a canopied autumnal glade, the shadowed ground soaked in the gory light of a dying day. Through the trees, I could see antlered shapes that seemed to shift position each time my attention drifted, advancing closer until I could almost see leering bone. I ignored them as best as I could.

“I did not do all that cardio for a dead end,” sighed Rowan, both hands on his thighs as he bent over, dry-heaving from exertion.

“That’s because this probably isn’t a dead end.” I trailed my fingers over the carved stone, feeling my way through the bas-reliefs, the bronze and blood foliage. Whoever had made them had taken care to engrave the veins of the leaves too. “This thing’s way too obvious. It can’tjustbe a wall—”

“Well, Occam’s razor—”

One of the branches let out a click as I pulled on it.

“Point made. Carry on,” said Rowan, straightening.

Stone warped and wood shuddered as unseen mechanisms woke behind the wall. Dust fountained through the stale, varnish-smelling air and a door appeared where there was none before, swinging inward, allowing access to a flight of stone stairs.

“More stairs?” groaned Rowan, looking behind us. “Maybe I’ll just go and let the Librarian eat—”

Wordless, I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and dragged him along. We went up the stairs, the narrowest we’d had to navigate yet. There was no light source, just whatever seeped through the door we’d entered and that didn’t last, thinning to near nonexistence by the time we reached the final step, thready and gray and unnatural.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if we walk straight into the Librarian’s mouth?” said Rowan as we reached the top.

I ignored him. The room we eventually found ourselves in was barely larger than a broom closet. Its walls and floor were scratched with so many tally marks, they gave the room a lenticular effect, undulating whenever I moved. I wondered who’d carved them onto the bare stone and how long they had spent time here, trapped. I could have counted the tally marks, I suppose, but that seemed churlish somehow, cruel even. There was something peculiarly vulnerable about the gloomy confined space; it had the air of a forgotten child, one hidden away out of shame. A single slit window let in almost no light from the world outside and standing there, breathing that dust, I felt a jolt of recognition—like I’d put weight on a bone I had not realized I’d broken. Somehow, I knew this place. I had no idea how or why, but I knew it the way a child knows to be scared of the dark.

In the center of this barren claustrophobic space was a familiar pulpit: the headmistress had given her speech during orientation from here, I was sure of that. I recognized the belled roof and its excess of gothic ornamentation. At the time, I’d sat too far away to see what else it was decorated with and, of course, there were wasps, split-open figs, the carnivorous deer that seemed common to Hellebore’s aesthetic but instead of the knights, there were slender, lissome youth of varying genders, like what you might see in the paintings of the old masters. They laid prone under the insects and stags, eyes closed, faces calm: a pyre of bodies, an offering.

“Pretty on the nose,” I said.

“Well, to be on the nose, they’d need to be eating…”

I ignored Rowan. The carved rosewood of the pulpit held a sheen of fresh lacquer, its panels scratched in places by claw marks. As I strode closer, I realized something unexpected: inside the pulpit, curled up fetally, was a person.

“Eoan?”

The Scottish boy raised a bleak frightened stare.

“No more,” he whimpered. “I know you’re hungry but no more, not right now.”

“Eoan, what are you talking about?” I asked, gingerly approaching him. His eyes were a perfect smoldering white, smoke wisping from under their lids. I touched a hand to his shoulder only to flinch away: he was hot, scalding hot. Steam boiled from his collar and his rolled-up sleeves, his miserable mouth: he smelled of blood and a tang of something bitter.

---