The Library at Mount Char

by Scott Hawkins

  Steve waved back. “Hi, Mr. Sopaski!”

  “Daddy, can I go play with Steve?”

  “Oh, honey, Steve doesn’t want—”

  “It’s fine, sir,” Steve said, and Carolyn’s eight-year-old heart soared. “Wanna go over to Scabby Flats and shoot a few?”

  “Sure!” Carolyn said.

  “Go where?” said her dad.

  “The basketball court,” she said. “That’s just what we call it.” She and Steve had made-up names for a bunch of stuff in the neighborhood. The basketball court, paved with a mixture of black asphalt and rough gravel, was Scabby Flats. In her room there was a map, hand-drawn in crayon, with these and other names. The woods at the end of the road were Missing Muttland. The stream in the woods was Cat Splash Creek after an amusing accident. And so on.

  “Oh,” her dad said. “Right. Well…you guys have fun.”

  They walked together over to the basketball court. Steve bounced a ball as they walked.

  “How are you?” she asked, a little apprehensively. She hadn’t seen him in months. The day after school ended, Steve’s dad had been in a car accident. Mr. Hodgson was in the hospital for a week, and then he died. Steve and his mom had spent the summer with his grandparents in Wisconsin.

  “I’m OK. It’s good to be back.” He bounced the ball on the asphalt. “Good old Scabby Flats.”

  He didn’t sound OK. Carolyn didn’t blame him. Having her dad die was about the worst thing she could imagine. When she tried to picture something similar happening to her it felt like a bottomless hole opened up in her mind. “Really?”

  “Yeah. I mean, it sucks. But you adjust.”

  She looked up at him, awed. To Carolyn, eight years old, that one sentence seemed to contain all that might ever be known of courage. “You do?”

  He nodded.

  “How?”

  “You just do. You can adjust to anything if you don’t give up.” He smiled wanly. “That’s what my dad used to say, anyway.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hey, do you mind if we talk about something else?”

  “Sure.” She tried to think of something to say, but anything that might have come was swallowed by the bottomless hole. After a long pause, she said, “Like what?” in a small voice.

  Steve chuckled. “What have you been reading?”

  Steve was the only kid in the neighborhood who was as bookish as she was. They didn’t read much of the same stuff—he liked spaceships and superheroes; she was more into animal stories and Beverly Cleary—but they both enjoyed talking about what they’d read, and every so often there was some overlap. “A Wrinkle in Time,” she said. “Have you read it?”

  “Yeah! It was really good. Did you know there’s another one after that?”

  “What, like with the same characters?”

  “Pretty much, yeah. I’ll bring it if you want.”

  “Thanks!”

  “Sure,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “But meantime, I brought you this one. I think you’ll like it.”

  She examined the cover. “Black Beauty. It’s the one about the horse, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it sad? Margaret said it was sad.”

  “A little. Well, sort of. At the end—”

  “Don’t tell me!”

  “Sorry.” Steve raised the ball to shoot, then froze and cocked his head, listening. “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear what? I don’t—” She broke off then, because she did hear it, a whistling in the sky that grew louder, an approaching sound. She looked up and saw a long, thin, arch-shaped contrail. When she first saw it, it was very high in the sky, but it drew closer as she watched, then closer still.

  “I think it’s coming towards us,” Steve said.

  She saw that he was right, and for some reason that made her afraid. She reached out to take his hand and—

  …everything…

  …stopped…

  I have wrought the Crafte of alshaq shabboleth, Carolyn thought now, which maketh the slow things swifte. To the children it seemed as if the world had frozen in place. She saw her dad talking to Mr. Craig from down the street. Dad’s mouth was frozen open, midsentence. Mr. Craig was blowing out a puff of cigarette smoke. It hung in the air, motionless.

  The leading point of the contrail was frozen above them. It hovered motionless about a hundred feet over their heads. Well, not quite motionless. As she watched, it moved down an inch or so, then another.

  Her young eyes saw what was coming for them. She thought at first it was a space capsule, like the kind she had seen on TV. But as she examined it a bit closer, she realized that wasn’t right. It was too small, for one thing, too small to hold a man. And there were no windows. But it was shaped a bit like a space capsule, a plain cone of metal. It had an American flag and some writing on the side. USAF-11807-A1. Below that, hand-painted in bright red, was a smiley face and the words “Hi ‘Adam’!”

  She remembered thinking, They sent it for him. It’s for Adam Black. But what is it? She knew now. David explained it to her some years later. “It’s called a Pershing missile,” he said. “It’s a weapon. It holds a lot of things called ‘kilotons.’ Mostly it’s for blowing up cities. The Americans thought it might be strong enough to kill Father.”

  At the time, though, Carolyn had no idea what she was looking at—fireworks, perhaps?—but, whatever sort of show this was, she thought it was rather pretty. She remembered how a small crack had appeared in the thing hovering over their heads, how it glowed inside as if it were an egg about to hatch something magical.

  She looked at Steve. He was saying something, or his lips were moving at any rate, but she could hear nothing. We were too fast, she realized now. The alshaq shabboleth made us too fast for sound.

  The crack grew as she watched. The light inside spilled out like the sunrise breaking over the mountains. It ate away the metal on which the letters USA were written.

  Steve clapped his hands over his ears and looked up the hill. A moment later she heard it too. The inside of her head rang with the voice of Adam Black. No, Carolyn thought. He’s not Adam Black anymore. He’s Father now.

  “Those of you who would live may take shelter behind me,” he said, not in the mild and amused old-man tones he had affected for her dad, but in his true voice, the voice that cracked mountains and called light out of darkness. It rolled through the children’s minds like thunder.

  At the sound of it Carolyn moved instinctively toward Steve for protection. That was when she noticed that something was different. When she moved, the parts of her skin that were exposed to the air felt hot, like the time she had held her hand over the outflow nozzle on a hair dryer and burned her fingers.

  Now, today, she understood what was happening. Friction, she thought. Friction with the air. Under the influence of the alshaq their speed was such that even the air burned.

  At the time, though, she knew only pain. She and Steve gaped at each other in soundless terror. Fifty meters over their heads a small bright sun was flaring into life.

  She cried out to her dad, lips moving soundlessly. She took a step toward him, feeling that strange warmth on her cheeks again as she moved. Her dad was still as a statue, the beer Adam Black had given him held to his mouth.

  He was directly under the fireball.

  Later, when she learned to make the alshaq shabboleth for herself she understood why it worked on her but not him. The effects of the alshaq are felt first by the dead, then by the young, and last by the old. Her father was beyond help. Even today she could think of nothing that might have saved him.

  She herself was in only slightly less danger, although she didn’t realize it yet.

  Steve figured it out, though. He shook her shoulder and pointed at the fireball overhead, eyes wide. Then he pointed at Adam Black—Father—waiting for them on the hillside.

  Carolyn looked up at the ball of fire in the sky. It was growing. She nodded understanding and she and Steve set out
toward the hill.

  The real problem became apparent to them immediately. They set out together at a slow jog. She stopped after only two steps with a soundless cry.

  Steve was gritting his teeth, but he did not cry out. He looked up in the sky. She followed his gaze. If the fire doesn’t stop getting bigger, it could swallow us up.

  She could see from his face that Steve understood this as well. His face was very red, and his hair was smoking a little. He looked back at her, eyes wide with fear and pain, then took a half-step forward, moving slow and languorous in air that had turned cruel.

  She imitated him. When she moved in this way it was still warm, but not so hot as it had been when she ran, certainly not so hot that she cried out.

  On the crest of the hill Father watched this. He said nothing.

  Together they inched their way toward the hill. The other children had been affected by the call of alshaq in the same way, and were dealing with the same problems. Some of them had frozen with terror, or fallen to their knees weeping. A skinny boy about age eight panicked. His name is Jimmy, she remembered. He’s not very bright. Jimmy took off running toward his mother—actually running, not just the light jog she had tried. After a few steps his skin blistered. He screamed, but apparently it didn’t occur to him to stop. After three more steps his shirt was in flames. She looked away then.

  She and Steve moved as quickly as they could without pain, but that wasn’t very fast. They had a lead on the expanding ball of superheated plasma behind them, but it wasn’t a large lead.

  Some of the others were luckier. David and Michael’s impromptu game of tag had carried them to the base of the hill. She thought they would reach safety well before the fireball reached them. She and Steve, on the other hand, had started out directly under the missile. They might arrive quickly enough to take Adam Black up on his promise of safety, but then again they might not.

  The ball of light grew quickly, and it was gaining on them. By the time they reached the base of the hill it had touched the ground. There it claimed another victim, a sixteen-year-old girl who had started in a reasonably good position but, because of her age, had been a bit late to hear the call of alshaq. She was about to become the first person who Carolyn ever saw die. As the light drew near her skin boiled away. Her eyes widened in agony; her mouth opened in a silent scream.

  It was this moment that would haunt Carolyn’s nightmares in years to come. She notched up her speed a little bit, then a little more, her terror overriding the pain.

  Now she was moving almost at a jog, heedless of the burning agony. Her shirt was smoking. She could smell burning hair, but she wasn’t sure whether it was her own or Steve’s. But the top of the hill was close. I’m going to make it!

  Then she tripped.

  A loose rock slid away beneath her foot. She put her hands out to break her fall and the rock cut her palm. Worse, she lost ground, slipping a few precious inches back down the hill.

  Steve had reached the summit. He was safe. He turned, almost smiling, but the smile faded when he saw her. His mouth moved, but she couldn’t make out the words. He waved for her to come on. She read his lips saying, Get up.

  But she couldn’t. She had scraped up her hands, her knees. She wanted her mother. She was afraid. Her chin trembled. She remembered thinking, It’s too hard, remembered thinking, I give up.

  Seeing this, Steve jumped back down the hill. His face was impossibly bright, lit by the approaching fireball now only five yards or so behind her. He reached where she had fallen with two giant, bouncing steps, grabbed her by the wrist, and yanked her to her feet. As she stood she saw that his hair and shirt had both caught fire, tiny tongues of flame beginning to grow.

  Burning, he grabbed her by the waist and lifted her. The fireball was only a few scant feet behind them now. Her shoulder socket stung with the jolt, but she didn’t feel the fire; Steve was holding her in his wake. The burn was all on him. The left side of his shirt burned off his skin in a puff…but now they were at the top of the hill.

  They rushed into the crowd of children a few precious inches ahead of the fireball. They were the faces of her future—David and Margaret, Michael, Lisa, Peter, Richard, others she didn’t know then. They milled around behind Father, mouths wide O’s of terror, screaming too fast for sound.

  When the ball of energy reached the crest of the hill, Father held out his hand. When the light touched him he winced…but he did not burn. David later told her that there were thirty of the “kilotons” in that explosion. He seemed to think this was an impressive number. Probably it was. But when the four-hundred-kiloton blast reached the finger of Adam Black it stopped…quivered for a moment…then began to shrink.

  The receding fireball left a perfectly round crater where the park and most of the houses had been. The edges of the crater glowed red. She traced the arc with her eyes until it came to something she recognized; a mailbox with “305” and “Lafayette” stenciled in gold. The Lafayettes had been her next-door neighbors. Half their house was still standing, snipped neatly open by the explosion. She could see into the bedroom of Diane Lafayette, who had a Barbie Dream House that Carolyn coveted. Her own house, where she and her mother had made potato salad, had been located a few yards inside the crater.

  Only then did she think to look where her parents had been.

  When she last saw them they were standing in the park. Now that spot was a hole one hundred feet deep. Molten sand glowed like lava in its depths. Mom and Dad would have been among the first to be swallowed by the fireball. Carolyn understood that she was now an orphan.

  Farther out, where the volleyball game had been, other adults lay dead as well, their flesh blasted away, their chromosomes in shreds. She recognized them as well. The dead ones.

  Father did something and the alshaq fell away. Time returned to normal. The children were speaking, it seemed. Their voices rose as if someone had turned up the volume on a silent radio. But she heard only Steve.

  “—n’t know what you were thinking,” Steve said. “You can’t ever give up, Carolyn. You can’t quit. Not ever.”

  She looked at him, wide-eyed.

  Then, kicking down the first stone of an avalanche, Steve said, “You have to be strong.”

  IV

  Adam Black turned to the children and regarded them with eyes that were calm and dark.

  “Your parents are dead,” he said. Some of them wept. Others looked up at him, dazed and uncomprehending. “Most of you had no other family. In America, this means you would be taken away. You would live in an orphanage. You are too old. You are too ugly. You could not find new homes. No one would love you. No one would want you.

  “But this is not America,” Adam Black said. “Things are here as they were in the old age. I will take you into my home. I will raise you as I was raised. You will be Pelapi.”

  “We’ll be what?” Carolyn remembered asking.

  “Pelapi. It is an old word. There is no single word like it in English. It means ‘librarian,’ but also ‘apprentice,’ or perhaps ‘student.’ ”

  “Pelapi.” She tested the sound of it for the first time. At the time they had thought he was speaking to all of them. Now Carolyn understood he meant only her. Alone in the Library at the other end of her life, she mouthed the words again. “What do you want us to study?”

  “We will start with the language. It is called Pelapi as well. All of you will learn that first.”

  “Why?”

  “It is the language that your lessons are written in, for the most part. You can hardly do without it.”

  “What kind of lessons?” Carolyn asked.

  “For you, I think it will be the other languages.”

  “Like what? French and stuff?”

  “Yes. Those and others.”

  “How many?”

  “All of them.”

  She made a face. “What if I don’t want to?”

  “It won’t matter. I’ll make you do it anyway.”
r />   She said nothing to that—she was starting to realize that Adam Black frightened her—but she remembered how his words kindled the first, faint flicker of rebellion in her gut. Now, today, that same flame burned high and black over all the mountains and valleys of the Earth.

  “And what about me?” David asked.

  “You? Hmm.” Father squatted down in front of David and felt his forearm. “You seem like a strong little fellow. You remind me of myself at your age. Would you like to learn how to fight?”

  David grinned. “Yeah! That’d be cool.”

  Father spoke again, very quickly, not in English. At the time she could make no sense of what he said. It was only gibberish, quickly forgotten. Today, though, remembering it, she recognized the Pelapi for what it was. It will be as if you are there again in the flesh, the instructions on the elixir said, experiencing it with fresh eyes.

  “You shall be the thing she fears above all others, and conquers,” Father said in Pelapi. He touched David gently, with real love. “Your way shall be very hard, very cruel. I must do terrible things to you, that you may become a monster. I am sorry, my son. I had thought you might be my heir, but the strength is not in you. It must be her.”

  At the time, they all thought David was the biological son of the Craigs, who had been chatting with Carolyn’s own parents when the fireball hit. Now, today, Carolyn was thinking, His son? He did that to his actual son? Then, on the heels of that but worse, He did it for me?

  “And me?” Margaret asked.

  Father turned to her. “Hello, Margaret.”

  “How did you know my name?”

  “I know lots of things about you. I’ve been watching you for a long time. Tell me, do you like exploring?”

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Good. There’s a very special place I know of. Almost no one knows about it but me. I could send you there. You could learn your way around.”

  “Is it a fun place to go?”

  Father pursed his lips. “More of an adventure, I should say. Would you like that? It would make you very special.” Then, at Carolyn, in rapid-fire Pelapi. “When the time comes, Margaret will serve as your final warning.”