The Library at Mount Char

by Scott Hawkins

  But Margaret wasn’t really the point. When she was dead she’d usually spend a day or two in the forgotten lands practicing whatever lesson was next in her catalog. Then Father would resurrect her. By this point Carolyn had seen enough of the resurrections to gather that they were a two-stage process.

  First, Father—or, lately, Jennifer—would heal whatever wound had done it for her in the first place. Then he would call her back into her body. Once, though, he’d taken a break in the middle of all this to go use the bathroom. That time Margaret’s healed body had gotten up and wandered around the room, picking up random objects and saying “Oh no” over and over again. She seemed to be not all there.

  Carolyn suspected that was where the dead ones came from. They had been reanimated but not resurrected. They looked fairly normal, at least from a distance. They wandered the green lawns and grocery stores convincingly enough, but in every way that really mattered they were still in the forgotten lands. They could interact with one another and even with Americans—they exchanged casseroles, filled the cars up with gas, ordered pizza, painted the house. They did these things automatically. It was useful and, she supposed, easier than hiring a lawn service. They could also follow orders if it was something they knew how to do already, which could be handy as well. But they could not take instruction, could not learn new things.

  Perhaps most important, they served as a security system. Every so often a stranger would stumble into Garrison Oaks and go about knocking on doors—salesmen, lost FedEx drivers, missionaries. For the most part these outsiders noticed nothing terribly out of the ordinary. Once, though, a burglar actually made it into one of the houses. After he saw what was inside he couldn’t be allowed to return to the outside world. When he tried to sneak out the window, the dead ones were waiting for him. They fell upon him and tore him to bits. Father did to him whatever he’d done to the others and the erstwhile burglar took his place in one of the houses as someone’s cousin Ed. Or whomever.

  Carolyn and the other librarians could come and go as they pleased, though. Hungry, she opened the door of the house Jennifer had pointed at and went in. There were three of them inside: a little girl of about eight, a teenage boy, and an adult woman.

  “Make me some food,” she said to the woman.

  Lately she had been focusing on mythical languages. The English felt strange on her tongue. Evidently it sounded as bad as it felt. She had to repeat herself twice before what was left of the woman understood her. Then it nodded and began pulling things from here and there—a can of fish, white stuff from a jar, some sort of green goo that smelled like vinegar.

  Carolyn sat down at the table next to the little girl. It was drawing a family: mother, father, two daughters, a dog. The family stood in a park. Something that might have been the sun but wasn’t blazed down on them, huge in both the sky and what passed for the little girl’s memory. It was far too hot, far too close. As Carolyn watched, the little girl took a yellow crayon and added some flames to the father’s back. The red O of his mouth, she suddenly realized, was a scream.

  Carolyn stood up fast, the wooden chair scraping across the linoleum. She didn’t want to be there anymore. She fled to the family room. There a teenage boy sat slack-jawed in front of a lighted box. Do they still grow up, or will he be like this always? She couldn’t figure out what he was doing at first, then it came to her. Television. She smiled a little. I remember television. She sat down on the couch next to the dead boy. He didn’t seem to notice. She waved her hand up and down in his field of vision.

  He turned his head, looked at her without much interest, and pointed at the television. “It’s time for Transformers.” A trickle of drool ran out the side of his mouth.

  On the screen, giant robots were shooting each other with rays.

  A few minutes later the woman drifted in and handed her a plate of food and a red can that said Coke. Carolyn fell on it, ravenous. The soda was sweet, delicious. She drank it too quickly and it burned in her throat. She had forgotten about Coke. The woman watched her eat, a flicker of disquiet crossing her face. “Hello,” she said. “You must be…” She—it—trailed off. “Are you one of Dennis’s friends? Dennis, is this…” she said to the boy. She broke off. “You’re not Dennis,” she—it—said to the boy. “Where is Dennis?”

  Carolyn knew what this meant. When Father reanimated the neighbors he had assigned them to houses more or less at random. The boy on the couch was not actually the woman’s son. Probably the girl wasn’t her daughter. The man she laid down with at night wouldn’t be her—

  “Dennis?”

  Carolyn stood up, grabbed the sandwich, and handed the plate back to the woman. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, dear,” she said absently. “Dennis?”

  On the television, a robot screamed. Carolyn strode back to the front door and out into the summer sunlight, slamming the door behind her. They would settle down once she was gone.

  But when she saw what was waiting for her, she wished she had stayed among the dead. Halfway back to the Library black clouds boiled over the face of the sun. The pressure dropped enough to make her ears pop. The tips of the trees bent nearly double in the sudden wind. Here and there she heard flat wooden cracks as the weaker branches gave way.

  Father was home.

  II

  They all knew from the thunder that he had returned. It was expected that they would meet him at the Library. They trickled in and gathered on the lawn—Michael from the forest, Jennifer from the meadow, and so on—all except Margaret. She was with him already.

  “Look,” Father said. They all did. Margaret’s left arm was badly broken. It hung limp, a spur of bone poking out of her skin. Jennifer moved to help her, but Father waved her away. “Why does she not cry out?” he spoke lightly, as if talking only to the breeze.

  No one answered.

  “Why does she not cry out?” he asked again. This time his tone was more menacing. “Will no one answer me? Surely one of you must know.”

  David mumbled something.

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “I said, ‘gahn ayrial.’ ”

  Carolyn’s mind whirled. The words “gahn ayrial” meant, in a literal sense, the denial of suffering. The phrase itself was kind of meaningless—suffering existed, just look around you—but the way he pronounced the words suggested that it was the name for a skill set. Some sort of self-anesthesia? Carolyn knew that Father knew all sorts of things about that, and about staunching your own wounds, and healing. But he only teaches that sort of thing to David. With a kind of slow-boiling horror she realized what all this was about. If Margaret knows about gahn ayrial, then…

  “Someone has been reading outside of her catalog.”

  The young librarians made a sound like dead leaves rustling.

  “I don’t really blame Margaret,” Father said meditatively. “Her studies are often painful. Who could fault her for wanting to alleviate that? No. Not Margaret.” He tapped his teeth with a fingernail. “Who, then?”

  “Me,” David whispered. “It was me.”

  “You?” Father spoke with mock surprise. “You? Really. Interesting. Tell me, David, why do you think that I did not teach Margaret of gahn ayrial myself?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “Because I did not wish for her to learn it!” Father thundered. All of them flinched at this—all but David. He was Father’s favorite, and knew it. “Still…if you have chosen to teach the craft of gahn ayrial, then surely you have mastered it. I had no idea you were so far along in your studies. I will admit that I am impressed.” He waved his arm, beckoning. “Come with me.”

  They all followed, afraid not to. Together they trailed Father and David down the main street of the neighborhood, past the houses of the dead, and oh how Carolyn wished then that she had died with them. She had never seen Father so angry. Whatever came next was sure to be very bad. They followed him across the road, and up the rough steps cut into the e
arth.

  There, in the clearing at the top of the hill, they found Father’s barbecue grill. Carolyn remembered the thing existed, but had never thought much of it. It was a hollow bronze cast in the shape of a cow or, rather, a bull. It was a bit larger than life-sized, made of yellowish metal about half an inch thick. When Father had been pretending to be an American he kept it in his backyard. Sometimes, at neighborhood picnics or whatever, he would cook in it, “hamburgers,” or sometimes pork. He seemed pretty normal back then. She vaguely remembered people—maybe even her parents?—commenting on the unusual grill, but it hadn’t been a big deal.

  Not long after Father took them in he had the grill moved up to the clearing. She never found out why, but there must have been some sort of reason. The grill was phenomenally heavy. The dead ones gathered around it and heaved as one, sweating and straining in the summer sun. It surrendered a few slow, painful inches at a time, its hooves cutting trenches in the grass as it moved. Moving it took days, and at least a couple of reanimations.

  Looking at it for the first time in years, suddenly Carolyn’s only real thought was Oh, right. That thing. She associated it mostly with the parties of her childhood, hamburgers and barbecue. The pork sandwiches, she remembered, were especially good.

  Then a darker memory surfaced. Actually, she thought, the last time I saw it was at the feast of my homecoming. She remembered seeing the hatch in the side of the grill opened, how the thick hickory smoke poured out. She remembered clamping down on her scream when the smoke cleared and she saw the meat in there, recognized the delicate curve of Asha’s hindquarters, saw Isha’s severed head staring back at her, skinned and sightless. It occurred to her that that moment had probably been her own uzan-iya. Yup, she thought, that was probably it. Up until then I was still in shock.

  It also occurred to her that the bull could be used to cook things other than pork. She looked at David. The same thought must have occurred to him. He was staring at the bull with wide, horrified eyes.

  David was brave, though. He brought himself under control, grinned at Father. “C’mon,” he said. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I didn’t mean anything by it.” He shadowboxed, the way they did sometimes.

  Father walked to the bull and opened the hatch in its side. The outside was polished bronze—the dead ones kept it shiny—but inside it was black, black. David, a boy of at most thirteen years, held up his hands in surrender. Father pointed inside. David did not kneel, but he trembled. “Oh. Oh no.”

  Father raised his eyebrows, waiting for more, but David fell silent.

  Carolyn’s hatred of David was second only to her hatred of Father, but in that moment she could almost have felt sorry for him. The look in his eyes as he climbed inside the bull brought to mind another Atul phrase, “wazin nyata,” which was the moment when the last hope dies.

  The bolts Father threw to lock the hatch shut were not bronze, but thick iron, ancient and pitted. Before that moment it had never occurred to her to wonder what purpose they served. Now she understood. Meat, she realized, doesn’t try to climb out.

  For the next hour or so the rest of them brought cut wood up from the stockpiles around the neighborhood houses, an armful at a time. Father called out a few of the dead ones—Mother and “Dennis” among them—and they helped as well. He even pitched in himself.

  The bull shone golden and polished under the light of the afternoon sun. One by one they deposited their armfuls of wood around the base of it—pine, mostly, fat and sticky with sap. Once Jennifer dropped to her knees, sobbing. She was always the kindest of them. Michael, by this point more accustomed to the thinking of beasts than that of men, watched the wood pile up without understanding its implications. Margaret just looked interested.

  Not long before sundown, Father struck a match. They had kindled well. The pile of wood caught quickly, going from a few tongues of flame to a full-on bonfire in a matter of minutes. Smoke came from the bull’s nostrils—first a trickle, then a stream.

  They continued feeding the fire through sunset, expecting all the while to hear him cry out, but David was so very strong. The heat was such that by dark Carolyn could approach the bull no closer than ten feet or so. From there she pitched her logs into the flame as best she could. Even then, the heat scorched the hairs on her arm. The dead ones continued their slow slog to the fire, oblivious, their skin reddening and blistering.

  But David was so very strong. It was not until full dark, when the bronze belly of the bull began to glow a dull orange, that he began to shriek.

  Whenever she thought of Father’s face, it was by the light of that fire.

  How rare it was to see him smile.

  III

  Just before dawn the next day there were still small sounds coming from the bull, mostly from the head and neck. Carolyn wondered at this until she noticed that the bull’s nostrils were actual openings; flues for those times the coals lay inside. The air from those openings must have seemed relatively cool, the only hint of mercy in all David’s world.

  How is he not dead by now?

  But of course, it was his catalog. Father had trained him to survive grievous wounds and fight on. Also there were potions, tonics, injections. Like all of them, David was what Father had made. So however badly he might need to die, he could not.

  Even so, by noon he had gone mercifully silent. Father kept them feeding the fire until just before dark. David, he said, was still alive. Carolyn didn’t doubt that he really could tell somehow.

  Father told them to stop feeding the fire shortly after twilight of the second day. It was out by midnight. By morning of the third day the bull had cooled enough to open, though the metal was still hot enough to leave a blister on Carolyn’s forearm when she brushed against it.

  What was left inside wasn’t as bad to look at as she had feared. More than most of them, David was a devoted pupil. His craft was already very strong, second only to Father’s.

  He had cooked away almost to the bone before he died.

  She and Michael helped Jennifer take him out. What was left was surprisingly light, dry and brittle. They put him on a makeshift stretcher made from an ironing board and hauled him down to one of the empty houses. There they laid him out in a large room on the main floor with dusty, moldering furniture piled in one corner. This is what Americans call the “living room,” Carolyn thought, and giggled. Margaret smiled too. The others looked at her strangely.

  Margaret examined the charred remains of David’s skull, his arms pulled up into a boxer’s stance by the heat of the fire, his mouth still open in his last scream. “He will be very deep.” She turned to Father. “May I join him? Help him find his way back?”

  Father shook his head. “Let him wander.”

  Carolyn wondered at this. She thought that Margaret meant David would be deep in the “forgotten lands,” which, she’d gathered, was where you were both before you were born and after you died. But would he be deep because he had never died before, or because he had died so horribly? Or perhaps—

  Father was glaring at her. When he saw that he had her attention he glanced significantly. She followed his gaze back up the hill, to the bull. The question, of course, was outside her catalog. He knows, she thought, despairing. How can he know what I am thinking? She put the thought aside, but Father still glared. The pupils of his eyes reminded her of the greasy blackness of the bull’s interior. Pinned by his stare, for a moment she imagined herself inside the thing, her ears ringing from the clang as the door swung shut. The only light would be a faint or orange glow visible through the nostrils as the heat began to rise. It would be warm at first, then a little uncomfortable, and then—

  “Never!” she hissed, desperate. I’ll never think of it again! Never, never!

  Only then did Father look away. She felt his gaze fall from her as if it were a physical thing. This is how the field mouse feels, when the shadow of the hawk passes him by.

  “Jennifer. Attend me,” Father said.

>   Jennifer, whose catalog was healing, bustled to her feet, stood before him.

  “You will bring him back. Make him whole again.”

  Up until then Jennifer had worked the craft of resurrection mostly with animals, and those only slightly dead—roadkill and the like. “I’ll try,” she said, casting a doubtful glance at the corpse. “But I—”

  “Try hard.” He said it with an edge in his voice. “The rest of you help. Bring her what she asks for.”

  Jennifer set to work. She dug three big bags of colored powder from her kit and set them around David’s body. The rest of them fetched for her—mostly water, but other things as well; salt, honey, a goat penis, several feet of eight-track tape. Jennifer chewed the tape in her mouth until it came away clear, then spat brownish stuff into David’s eye sockets. Carolyn had no idea what this might be in aid of. Remembering Father’s glare, she forbade herself to wonder.

  Jennifer worked all through the night. Margaret sat up with her, though Carolyn and the others rested.

  When she woke the next morning, David had begun to fill back in. The withered flesh of his torso had inflated a bit. A hint of pink was now discernible here and there in all the black. By the afternoon of the fourth day this was true of the skin of his arms, then his legs. That evening his lungs became distinguishable, then his heart, though it did not yet beat. By the fifth day he had flesh over most of his body, though it was still black and charred.