Page 25 of The Library at Hellebore
“They do? Where the hell is it?”
“It’s that burnt-up-looking building next to the green house,” said Johanna, sliding forward to the frilled edge of her bed, nail polish brush waggled for emphasis, the bristles slicked with a bright electric blue.
I knew what she was talking about. I’d walked past it several times, bewildered by its condition: it had the look of a barn taken by an inferno and allowed to burn down to the bones. As far as I recalled, the windows and doors were boarded up, admitting neither entry nor exit.
“Peoplelivein there?”
Johanna shrugged. “That’s what they say.”
Under different circumstances, I might have gone to Sullivan for answers, but he’d gone the way of the popular kid. He drifted through those first strange days on a cloud of lackeys, a king with his wandering court, perpetually hand in hand with that pretty, coal-eyed girlfriend of his who looked far too kind to belong in Hellebore, although really, who the fuck knew. I was the last person who could pass judgment. At twenty-one, I still looked about fourteen in bad lighting, which had been the delight of several men’s days and unequivocally the reason they were dead.
I could have asked Portia herself, I suppose, but I did not. Mostly for fear Johanna was right and I would be subjected to a full-frontal attempt at recruitment but partially because some animal part of me was afraid I’d find out what was inside the alleged sorority house. After my conversation with Johanna, I found myself dreaming of girls with smoke for hair walking noiselessly through an unbroken darkness, up and down, up and down along the ceiling of an empty house. It didn’t help that once Portia shyly handed me an invitation to a soiree they were holding, but no one else I knew had received similar invites. It’d been handwritten, overly eager in tone, and to this day, I believe the signatures emblazoned across the card were all hers. I’d declined. Portia never brought it up again. But the damage was done. She was no longer even my last port of call.
There was the library, of course. Unfortunately, while a reservoir of information both eldritch and mundane, it too wasn’t an option, much as I might have liked it to be. Which might sound strange, given the very function of such institutions, but we’ll get to that.
The one bright spot of those first few weeks was finding out I would share four classes with Minji, who was becoming the closest thing to a friend I had at Hellebore. She was slyly funny in private: prone to dad jokes, puns, long spiraling critiques of capitalism and Western interpersonal dynamics, but only if first lubricated with vast amounts ofmakgeolli. The rest of the time, she was the archetypal example of the model minority: quiet, obedient, academic. Once, I’d asked her if she ever worried that she was reinforcing racist beliefs and in answer, Minji had only shrugged.
“It’s better when they underestimate me.”
We became friends after that, though Minji continued to keep her own counsel on most things, which I might have taken offense to if I wasn’t so relieved to be in the company of someone as incurious as I was. Sure, a part of me wished we had more of a rapport at times or at least enough of one for us to discuss the matter of her stalker.
Not that she called him such or even acknowledged his existence. It was Ford, of course, one of the few haruspices to walk the halls of Hellebore. We saw him rarely enough. The school made regular and rough use of his abilities. But when he wasn’t otherwise being gutted to tell the future, Ford spent his time in dogged pursuit of Minji, begging for her love, her time, whatever else she’d give. And miraculously, Minji never spoke an unkind word to him. Then again, she did not speak to him at all, only ever stared at him in silence as he told her of the life he foresaw for them, one where she birthed daughter after daughter for him, each more beautiful than the last.
“I see you inside me,” he said once, trailing us between classes. “I see you beneath my skin. I see you standing in the church of my lungs and you are there, holding my bones like a wedding bouquet.”
“That is the weirdest way to say you want to get pegged,” I shouted over my shoulder, eliciting nervous glances from passersby. Ford had no aptitude for violence but his power meant he was beloved by more than Hellebore’s administration. In particular, one Adam Kingsley, who was alleged to be the forerunner in the race to become the definitive Antichrist.
“And you,” Ford said, eyes like the light radiating from a crematorium, “you will get what you want. But it won’t be what they deserve.”
It was the first time he’d acknowledged my existence. His gaze flayed me, stripped me down to the muscle and my tired heart, and if I was anyone else, I might have been unnerved at being so disrobed, but I was angry instead. I whirled around and stalked up to him. He wasn’t the only one who could see under the surface, who could look and find the library of one’s tendons, the archive of soft organs and softer veins: I reached both my hands outward, fingers splayed, spreading my arms. In answer, his flesh did the same, unseaming gladly for me as all flesh did when I asked, and I would have had him in two halves a second later if not for the small hand settling on my left wrist.
“No,” said Minji, her expression incomprehensible.
I resisted for a moment. “But—”
“He’s mine,” said Minji. There was such a concussive possessiveness in her voice, such warning in her face, that there was nothing to be done but relent. I stopped what I was doing and Ford fell onto the corridor in a soup of exposed viscera. Minji went to him, blotting his blood-gummed lips with a lavender handkerchief, coiffed and beautiful next to the mess I’d made of Ford. She was so tender in her ministrations I found myself stunned. Maybe his attention was welcomedand this was a love affair—just one alien to my world view. Who was I to judge?
Regardless, of the things I saw in Hellebore, even considering what came after, Sullivan’s death and ours and all those that took place in between, little came close to unnerving me as much as that moment and the memory of Minji’s eyes, the light such that I couldn’t tell if she was looking at him with love or something worse.
Which, again, is saying a whole damn lot.
DAY ONE
With the Librarian allegedly fed by Eoan, we had time to reconvene, to think. It took a while, of course, to gather the scattered eight. Were it not for Minji, we probably shouldn’t have been able to but somehow, she found us, corralled us into one of the reading rooms. This one was muraled with pastel depictions of happy children engrossed in picture books, the dusty shelves filled with content for that demographic; it’d have been cute if not for the fact that there weren’t any kids on the grounds. I wondered if those books were meant for the masked servitors or if they brought comfort to the meat men: neither of those possibilities sat particularly well with me.
Rowan wanted us to come clean; I wanted Eoan to owe us. And Eoan, who became numbly docile once he stopped puking meat down a funnel, regarded us with hollow eyes as we bickered about how much we would say, the light seeming to melt the flesh from his skull so when I looked over to him, all I saw was a corpse. In the end, we agreed there was no need to tell the others about what Eoan had done.
Not yet, at least.
When we were all assembled, Eoan said, in a trembling voice, he could make us some hors d’oeuvres, having allegedlyfound a cache of ingredients. I don’t know what surprised me more: that Eoan offered or that the group accepted, knowing what we did about the library, the school, and everything beside. But I said nothing and Rowan averted his eyes as Eoan kindled a small fire. Neither of us acknowledged him emptying a small gunny of its bloody contents, nor did we have anything to say when he impaled its oily white contents to roast them slowly.
“It’smeat,I suppose,” said Gracelynn with a tremulous smile.
“It’s notnotmeat,” said Rowan diplomatically.
I elbowed him in the side.
The floor-to-ceiling paintings of little kids were obscured at intervals by framed portraits of men and women who had been captured mostly in shadow, almost entirely silhouette save for where light gilded a nose, a cheekbone, a too-long finger crooked at the artist. Above us, a fat chandelier pouted from the ceiling, its wooden frame crowned with melted candles.
