The Library at Mount Char

by Scott Hawkins

  Aliane turned toward him. Her expression was dreamlike. “Tell Mae that I—”

  Dresden sprang. The two of them went to the ground together, wrapped in a cloud of dust and small rocks. Aliane’s head bounced off the ground. She squirmed a bit, but the lion gripped her with forepaws the size of shovel blades. Then it had its jaws around her neck. The angle at which it held her was such that she was looking directly at Marcus. She seemed resigned, even peaceful.

  A few moments later Marcus was a member of a fairly exclusive club. He had no idea how many people had been firsthand witnesses to not one but two lion attacks, but he thought that the number would be very, very small. Gangsta, baby, he thought, and wet himself.

  About two hundred yards away he could hear the party going on. Some chick with a thick Bronx accent was saying “Oh. My. Gawd” over and over. The sound of her voice was like ice picks in his ears. I fucking HATE my friends, he thought. Fuck it. I quit. No more rap-star bullshit for me. Starting tomorrow I’m going to flight school. The rapper thing had never been his first love. He sort of fell into it after a talent show in high school. If David Lee Roth can be a paramedic, I can be a pilot.

  The lion, his muzzle bloodied, looked up from Aliane’s body. He roared.

  Marcus screamed. He felt sudden weight in his boxers. He squeezed off three quick shots from his nine, kicking up dirt high and wide of the lion. The stink of his shit hung in the warm night air.

  Marcus moaned, thinking about the Husbandry Room. The entrance was on the far side of the lion pits, a closet-sized cinder-block building built to keep the rain off the stairs. The door to this stair house was thick steel. No lion could claw through it.

  I’ll be safe in there.

  Marcus turned his back on Aliane without a second thought. He sprinted off the path and into the dark. The small, tasteful lights lining the path blinked off. The stair house entrance was well off the path, hidden behind a tall hedge, surrounded by undergrowth. Marcus didn’t quite see it in time. He crashed into the metal door, splitting his lip open. He didn’t even notice. The pain in his mouth was eclipsed by a terrible vision—his key ring, hanging from a peg in the kitchen.

  “Ah no,” he said. “No, no, no, no.”

  He fumbled at the door handle, sure that it would be locked. But the handle turned easily in his hand. “Thank you, Jesus,” he whispered, yanking it open. “Thank you, thank—”

  Then he screamed, as much from surprise as terror.

  There was a man just inside the door, standing on the top stair. He’s blocking my waaaay, Marcus thought. Even his thoughts were moans now. Time seemed very slow. The guy was enormous, both in height and muscle, but—what the fuck?—he was wearing a lavender tutu.

  How the hell did he get in there? Marcus wondered. Then, on the heels of that, A tutu? Marcus briefly entertained the idea that he was dreaming. It doesn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was in the way. Marcus lifted his left hand to push the man aside, simultaneously raising his right to threaten him with the gun. Threaten my ass, Marcus thought. I’ll shoot him if I—

  There was a sudden, bright explosion of motion. He felt a sort of pressure on the fingers of his gun hand, then found himself sitting on his ass in the dirt. He looked down and saw that his two smallest fingers were dangling at an odd angle. A splinter of bone poked out of his pinkie. Seeing this, he felt the first twinge of pain.

  He looked up. The man in the tutu was examining Marcus’s pistol. He ejected the magazine and twirled it between his fingers like the flourish at the end of a magician’s trick.

  He flashed Marcus a grin. His teeth were very dark, almost black. He stepped out of the stairwell and circled around behind Marcus, dropping the unloaded pistol in his lap as he passed.

  Another man, this one completely naked, climbed up out of the dark stairwell.

  “Are y’all with the party?” It occurred to Marcus that someone might have spiked his wine cooler. That’s it! I bet Wilson slipped some of that PCP in my Bayberry fizz. Good old Wilson. They would laugh about this later. “You best not be butt-fucking down there! I don’t want no faggot shit around up in my—”

  “Shhh,” said a woman’s voice from the darkness. “Out there. Lions.”

  Marcus opened his mouth, then shut it. It wasn’t an unreasonable point. When he spoke again his tone was softer. “Who the fuck are you?”

  The woman stepped forward. “I am Carolyn. This is Michael. That is my brother David.”

  “Yeah, hi, pleezdameetcha, now gimme a goddamn hand so we can get down in—”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?” Something occurred to him. “Heyyyy…are y’all the ones who let my lions out?”

  “We are.”

  “Why the hell would you—Are you crazy? Are you with PETA?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what that is. No.”

  “Never fucking mind. Just get out of my way.”

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself.” He put his left hand on the ground, prepared to stand. If that bitch gets in my way, I will knock her on her—

  A shadow fell over him. Marcus looked up.

  “If you try to go downstairs, David will hurt you,” she said. “Maybe just a little, maybe a great deal. You should not try.”

  Marcus looked the big man up and down, gauging his chances. His shoulders slumped. “What do you want?” All the fight was gone from his voice.

  David smiled.

  “I am to give you a message,” the woman said.

  “From who?”

  “The message is from Dresden.”

  For a moment, he thought she meant the city. “You talking about the lion? That Dresden?”

  “Yes. Why do you call them that?”

  “Dresden and Nagasaki? From, like, in the war…”

  Off to his side he heard laughter. He turned. The big man, David, made a ka-boom sound. He held his hands up in the air and drew them out as if there were a fireball between them.

  “Yeah,” Marcus said. “Ka-boom.”

  Still chuckling, the big guy patted him on the shoulder. Marcus answered him with a small but sincere smile. Finally. Someone gets it. That moment ended up being the high point of his day.

  The woman squatted down to be at eye level with him. “Do you watch television?”

  The question took a moment to sink in. “Why the fuck you care?”

  She repeated herself, patiently enough. “Do you watch television?”

  “I…” Marcus’s eyes darted around, looking for safety. All around him the jungle pressed in. Humor the crazy people. “Yeah, man, I watch TV.”

  “You have seen it when the television shows the hunt? In Africa? When a lion brings down a zebra, or a wildebeest?”

  Marcus didn’t like where this was going. “I…yeah…I guess so.” It wasn’t a zebra that he had seen, but a gazelle. Close enough.

  “Good. What you saw was called”—she twittered something at the naked guy, and he rumbled deep in his chest. He sounded exactly like a lion. The hair on the back of Marcus’s neck rose.

  “In the language of the hunt, that word describes a specific way of killing,” the woman said. “It is a thing of respect. Most times, the hunter has no wish to hurt his prey. It is only that he is hungry, that this is the way of things. When you were watching television, did you notice that past a certain moment, the zebra doesn’t resist?”

  Marcus had not seen that, exactly, but he remembered seeing the gazelle with three lions burrowing around in its guts. He’d thought it was dead. Then it lifted its head, looked down at what was being done to it, and looked away. He’d been smoked-up when he saw this, and it freaked him out enough that he had to change the channel.

  “Good. You do know. The prey doesn’t move because it feels no pain. The lion touches it in a certain way, and unbinds it from the plane of anguish. This is part of the craft of hunters. When the kill is this way, the lions say…” She nodded at the
naked man.

  He rumbled again, eerily lionlike.

  “Your woman died in this way, if it matters to you. She didn’t suffer at all.”

  Marcus thought of the gazelle, staring into the camera, thought of the light receding from Aliane’s green eyes.

  “But there is another way of killing. This is done when the lion hunts out of hate, rather than hunger. For such times the big cats have a touch that enhances suffering rather than relieves it. Under this touch the prey’s spirit is bound to the plane of anguish. The pain is like drowning. Often the damage to their spirit is such that there is not enough left of them to return to the forgotten lands. Those killed in this way are ruined forever. It is as if they were never born.” Her eyes crinkled. “I saw this done once. It was a terrible thing.” She touched his arm with real sympathy. “The lion wishes me to inform you that this is how you will die.”

  Marcus’s eyes flicked back and forth among the three of them, looking for some sign that this was a joke. The woman’s face was grave. The guy in the tutu watched him avidly, his eyes cruel and alive. Marcus wasn’t sure what was worse.

  “So…you’re just going to feed me to that thing?”

  “We are, yes.”

  “Why?” Marcus whispered. “Why would you do something like that?”

  “Because that is what the hunter wants,” she said. “We came to an arrangement, you see. This is his price.”

  The big man in the tutu smiled at him. Moonlight glinted off the blade of his spear.

  “If we free his daughter and give him the time to kill you as he wishes, he will help us. He will protect our agent as if he were his own cub.” She shrugged, stood. “What he asks isn’t so much. It is fair, even.”

  “Fair?…I…”

  “You what?” She looked down, her face mostly in shadow. The compassion he had seen before was gone. “You invaded the lion’s home. You murdered his mate, the mother of his cub. You kidnapped him and his daughter here and cast them down in a pit. Is that about right?”

  “Yeah, but…I mean…”

  “And why did you do this? To what purpose? You were going to steal their lives so they could growl and roar for the amusement of your whores?”

  “Sort of…I guess. But I mean, you saw Scarface, right? It was—”

  “Stop talking.” She spoke to the naked man in a language he did not understand. He said something back to her, then made a sound amazingly like a lion’s roar. “Please excuse me,” she said. “I’d rather not watch.”

  “Hang on!” Marcus said. “I got a lot of money! We could—”

  She and the naked man faded back into the stairwell and started down to the Husbandry Room. They shut the door behind them. The big man in the tutu smiled down at him. “Hey, man,” Marcus said. “Help me out, here. You want to get into show business? I could—”

  The big man smiled wider. He pointed over Marcus’s shoulder, back into the woods.

  Not wanting to, Marcus turned to look. Dresden and his daughter stood just behind him, closer than he would have thought possible. Somewhere out in the impossible distances of the night he heard the Bronx chick saying “Oh. My. Gawd.”

  Down in the pit, safe and comfortable, the chicken squawked.

  Chapter 6

  About Half a Fuckton of Lying-Ass Lies

  I

  Steve woke up in 1987, more or less.

  It was a teenager’s bedroom. He was pretty sure about that part. The walls were covered with posters of singers—Wham!, the B-52’s, Boy George, others—that he vaguely remembered from high school. A rack of cassette tapes hung across from the bed and, next to it, a collage of Polaroids. Teenage boys in acid-wash jeans and parachute pants mugged for the camera—fake-singing, flexing their muscles, that sort of thing. In one of the Polaroids two boys were kissing.

  Steve blinked. Where the hell am I? He remembered being in the jail chapel, remembered the stinky dude in the tutu killing Dorn and the guard. Thinking of the tutu and the two guys kissing in the Polaroid, a horrible thought bubbled up: Maybe Tutu Guy kidnapped me as some sort of sex slave? Like that guy in Pulp Fiction?

  But that was too terrible to contemplate. Think, think. He remembered getting slugged in the chapel. A few seconds later he was moving down the tile corridor, slung over the guy’s shoulder, watching guts and severed limbs roll by like he was on the Horrible Shit ride at a high-end amusement park.

  Someone’s arm had been lying on the floor—just the arm, nothing else. It looked surprisingly un-gross—not much blood, and muscles like a medical drawing. A few paces farther down most of another guard came into view. He was an older dude, fiftyish, cut neatly in half just above the belly button. What did that? Steve remembered wondering. Giant scissors? The half of his face that Steve could see was bloodless and unmarked, eyes open. Steve remembered recognizing him, remembered squirming, and…

  And then I woke up here.

  The alarm clock on the nightstand pretty much had to be from 1987 as well. No one makes stuff out of wood-grain plastic anymore, right? The clock didn’t work, though. Someone had stomped a crater in it, then drawn a circle around it in what looked like corn flour.

  Steve blinked at this for a few seconds, trying to imagine a remotely plausible reason why someone might do such a thing.

  Steve sat up and peeped out through the venetian blinds at the foot of the bed, wincing at the metal rattle they made. His head hurt. The sun was either just coming up or about to go down. At first he wasn’t sure which, but then a couple of houses down some guy came home from work and got the mail. Kids were playing ball in the dude’s backyard. Not dawn, then. I slept through the day.

  Questions answered, Steve let the blinds fall closed. If he had known that this sunset would be the last he would ever see, he probably would have taken a couple of seconds to savor it.

  He still had on the jail coveralls. That was sort of a relief, in light of his fears about becoming a butt slave, but still not ideal. The closet turned out to be full of things like parachute pants and acid-wash jeans. After a brief rummage he put on some black sweatpants—tightish, but serviceable—and a gray concert T-shirt. The logo of the band Heart was stenciled across the chest in bright-orange letters, glowing like a coal.

  He followed the sound of voices out into the hall. Out there it was warmer than in the bedroom. It smelled good, like freshly baked something-or-other—bread, maybe, or sweet rolls? His stomach rumbled.

  But under that was a bad smell, something he didn’t quite recognize. There was a metallic sound as well. Clink. Scratch. Click. It was vaguely familiar. Clink. Scratch. Click.

  Steve peeped around the corner into the living room. The big guy in the tutu was asleep on the floor in front of the TV. The sound was off, but Nazi artillery rumbled across North Africa on the History Channel. Steve wondered at this for a minute. TV? He doesn’t speak English, does he? On-screen Rommel held binoculars to his face. I bet he does like tanks, though. Next to the tutu guy a halfway demolished pile of brownies rested on a white plate. Brown crumbs stuck to the dried blood in his mustache and on his chest. His bronze sword thingy with the chain lay at his fingertips.

  Half a dozen other people, some almost as weird, sat here and there in the living room as well. They glanced at Steve without much interest as he walked in.

  Next to the couch stood a man in brown business slacks, cut off ragged at the knees, one pant leg a couple of inches higher than the other. His bare chest was tattooed with dozens of triangles, the smaller ones inscribed in the larger, down to a black dot at the midpoint of his breastbone.

  Seeing Steve, he put his hand on the shoulder of a woman sitting on the couch. She had dirty-blond hair, hacked short and carelessly. She wore what looked like the top half of a black one-piece bathing suit, cut into a sort of sports bra. She put her hand over the man’s, laced her fingers in his.

  Clink. Scratch. Click. In the darkest corner of the room a woman sat on the floor, knees huddled up to her chin. Skeletal a
rms poked out from the remains of an apocalyptically filthy gray dress. Half a dozen flies buzzed around her head. As Steve watched, she flipped open a Zippo. Clink. Lit it. Scratch. Closed it up again. Click.

  Her eyes never wavered from the place of the flame. Unsettled now, Steve jerked when a new person entered the room. He recognized the Christmas sweater and bicycle shorts immediately.

  “You.” Small knuckle pops as his hands clenched into fists.

  Carolyn held her finger to her lips. “Shh.” She pointed at the bloody man in the tutu sleeping on the floor between the knife and the brownies. She jerked her thumb back over her shoulder toward the kitchen.

  Steve opened his mouth to yell at her, then, with a glance at the napping murderer, nodded instead. He tiptoed around the couch as quietly as he was able. The couple stood up and followed in his wake. The woman with the lighter went clink, scratch, click.

  There was another person in the kitchen, an older woman, kneading dough. To Steve’s mild surprise she was dressed normally; floor-length fleece housecoat, a bit faded but clean, and slippers.

  “Hello, there!” She spoke in a half-whisper. “I’m Eunice McGillicutty. Would you like a cinnamon roll? They’re just out of the oven.”

  “Steve Hodgson. Uh, pleased to meet you.” Somewhat to his surprise, he realized this was true. Unlike the others, she didn’t seem like the sort of person who might keep a guy chained up in her basement. He briefly considered thanking her for this, but gave up when he couldn’t think of a delicate way to phrase it. “Sure. A cinnamon roll would be great.”

  The old lady smiled, pleased. She pointed at a baking dish. “Coffee over there,” she said. Steve grabbed a mug off a wooden peg and helped himself to a cup.

  “Hello, Steve,” Carolyn said, her voice not quite a whisper.

  “Hi!” he said, a little too brightly.

  “That’s Mrs. McGillicutty. She speaks English.”

  “Yes. Yes, she certainly does.”

  Carolyn jerked her thumb at the couple behind her. “These are Peter and Alicia. They don’t speak English. Not much, anyway.”