Page 9 of The Library at Hellebore

“For the next year, you will be trained, you will be taught how to comport yourself, to function as people instead of monsters.”

“I thought you said you did three years here, Miss du Lac,” muttered Sullivan. “When did they change the policies?”

“I’ve no clue. Maybe they found a more efficient way of dealing with us miscreants.”

“All of you, shut up,” hissed the Korean girl. “I’m trying to listen.”

The headmistress went on and on and on. Her speech was an ouroborosian affair: a tide of promises feeding into denouncements of our characters and then assurances that we could be better than we are, that we could be refined, improved upon,cleansed.Over and over, she tore us apart and stitched us up with hope, dragging us under until we were drowning in the sweetness of her voice. Wouldn’t it be lovely, she said to the enraptured crowd, her words boring deeper into us, to be wanted by the world, welcomed by it? All our sins forgotten, the error of our conception forgiven. With great vehemence, she read out a list of names: alumni, she said, who’d gone on to be taxonomized as heroes, ministers, leaders, people who could come and go as desired, be allowed mortgages and mistakes, picket-fenced dreams of families and legacies that wouldn’t upset the world.

“You could be like that too,” she said. “You could be loved. You could beuseful.”

Here’s what they don’t tell you about little boy lucifers and girls who won’t stay dead: being needed is all any of us really wanted.

So, yeah. Fuck that bitch for knowing the right words.

Because if she hadn’t, well, maybe Sullivan would be alive right now.

BEFORE

Spoiler:they ate him.

We were all there, in fact, when the faculty ate Sullivan Rivers alive. And byate him alive,I mean,ateate. This isn’t at all the colloquial use of the word. They digested him. You ever watch that old movieSociety? The one with rich people who could turn themselves into flesh taffy for the purpose of absorbing nutrients from the unsuspecting proletariat?

It went exactly like that.

The professors writhed out of their clothing as they swarmed Sullivan on the podium, their bodies losing cohesion as they did. Ear lobes, bellies, wattled joints, prolapsed vulvas, dicks long past their use-by date, they all clotted together first into something like a mealy stew before smoothing into blousy, billowing sheets of finger-bone-scaffolded skin. Gristle unspooled from groping hands, macrame-ing with the fat runneling from our faculty’s grinning faces. Offal tasseled the gory lump of their conjoined bodies, slicked the floorboards with pancreatic fluid and synovia. What I remember most though was their shoulder blades carving through that sea of meat, the fins of suddenly naked bone—impossibly clean despite all that effluvium—making me think of sharks. Sullivan didn’t stand a fucking chance.

I wonder if he knew he was one of the lucky ones.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Let’s walk that back a little. Bring it back to the moment we barricaded the library, pressed our backs and our shoulders to the carved rosewood doors, adding our meager weights to the ancient barrier, hoping to the hells and back that it’d hold under the tsunami of carnivorous flesh outside. The faculty tried everything: they gouged at the hinges, pulled at the screws, peeled the bracing from the ancient timber, shoved, pressed, gnawed at the wood until it splintered. Unfortunately, and I do mean unfortunately, as it’d have been easier for all of us if they’d just eaten us whole, ending the story there and bloody then, the library at Hellebore was older than their appetite. Their vandalism wouldn’t take, no matter how enthusiastic. The door repaired itself, over and again, regrowing whatever the faculty had destroyed, reassembling whatever they had dismembered with impossibly violent speed.

After several futile hours, the faculty retreated, and we listened as they oiled away, the wet, sticky squelching of their myriad appendages becoming quieter and quieter, until there wasn’t anything to listen to except our own thundering hearts.

We’ll start here.

DAY ONE

The first one to speak was Adam, who was, to give credit where credit is due, a work of technical perfection: six feet three, a body that could have been—and was,actually,repeatedly and with considerable enthusiasm—used in anatomy studies. Radioactive blue eyes, Ken-doll features, a singular dimple indenting his right cheek, a soft cleft bisecting his chin, and so much blond hair it looked like he was wearing a gold-plated sheep rug for a hat. He was gorgeous in a very airbrushed way, which would have been fine if not for the fact this was real life and no one in real life should lookliterallyairbrushed.

Adam ran a hand through that ridiculous overgrowth of golden curls, and sank down onto the floor with a jangle of iron chains.

“Well,” he said, the beginning of a laugh collecting in his rich, French-inflected voice. “That was exciting.”

Portia impaled him with a withering stare.

“People get cavalier in life-or-death situations,” he said before jauntily adding, in a way that suggested he was not only amenable to being wrong but rather hoped he was, “It’s not a crime.”

“A hundred and seventeen dead,” came the phlegmatic rejoinder. Portia’s voice, in contrast, was more muffled, lessmellifluous. It warbled. It soundedmealy.Like she was trying to talk through a mouth crammed with sharp hairs. “Wasted.”

“But not us.”

“No,” said Portia. “Thank the Mother.”

Adam shrugged. “Thankme,you mean.”

Portia bared her teeth at him. The damp, grayish dark made the threat display look almost like a human expression. Almost but not quite as from between her teeth protruded the furred and dichroic points of a jumping spider’s chelicerae grown overly large. Her eyes went from his face to mine, and I mouthed a tiredWhat do you want me to do about it?,earning me a not insignificant rolling of the eyes, which unnerved me more than I cared to admit, the conspiratorial playfulness at odds with her physical circumstance.

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