Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Randall slipped the second-to-last book in his arms into its proper place on the shelf and nudged down his glasses so he could pinch the bridge of his nose with his now-free hand. He closed his eyes just as the bell on the library door sounded, signaling a customer’s arrival. Then he took a deep breath through his nose and let it out between his teeth. Maybe he should close early today.

  He glanced down at the last remaining book he had to re-shelf and read the title. “The Redhead Murders: A Case Study of the Infamous Unsolved Serial Killings.”

  He dropped the book.

  At the end of the aisle, two patrons stopped and peeked around the stack in his direction. “Oh, hi,” said the woman, who was clearly mother to the young boy whose hand she held. “Forgive me, but do you work here?”

  Randall blinked, pushed his glasses back up his nose, and reminding himself that the customers couldn’t see his pain, he pulled himself together. “Yes. Yes, sorry.” He bent and retrieved the dropped book, which made his head feel as though it would explode. But he winced and weathered it, then stood and made his way to the end of the aisle to join the newcomers. “What can I help you with today?”

  The woman smiled. “I was wondering if you could maybe track down a specific book? I came earlier today and looked through the catalog on the computer, but I think I was searching for the wrong thing and my lunch break ended before I could get help.” She laughed a little sheepishly and dropped her head. Randall had that effect on women sometimes. He knew it was his eyes; they were green, which was rare. The glasses amplified their size and color, and his gaze was sharp.

  “So I figured I’d come back once I got off work,” she finished with a shrug.

  Randall smiled back, then broke eye contact to spare a little of the smile for the child, who ducked behind his mother’s body as if to hide. Randall knew all about that behavior. People hid a lot of things from strangers.

  “It’s no problem,” he assured the woman. “Let me just re-shelf this one, and we’ll see if we can’t find your missing volume.” He brushed past her to head to the True Crime area of the library. The woman and her son followed a few steps behind.

  When he’d finished replacing the last of his misplaced inventory, he turned and clapped his hands together in a well-practiced but utterly fake show of considerate customer service. “Now then, what’s the name of the book?”

  “It’s a medical book called ‘Cutaneous Scarring: A Clinical Methodology.’” She smiled sheepishly at the lengthy title. “Do you think you might have it? I know it’s a longshot but I already checked the library at the medical school, and they said I’d probably have to get it online but to check with you first because you actually have a pretty good sized medical section… for a private library, that is.” Another nervous smile.

  But Randall nodded as he led the way to the library’s computers. “We do have a comparatively large selection as a matter of fact, as many of the school’s medical students live in an apartment complex along the same bus route.” The only section larger in the library was the art section. Most of that was his personal collection, however.

  Randall stopped and typed the name of the book she was looking for into the database’s search field on the nearest PC.

  He already knew he didn’t have that particular book. If he did, he would have remembered it because he would have read it. He had read all of the medical books in the library. But people didn’t appreciate answers that appeared like guesses when it came to something they felt desperately about. They wanted cold, hard evidence that you were doing all you could to help them. Even though he knew the book wasn’t in the library, he went through the motions of a search anyway. Which of course came up empty.

  “I’m afraid it’s as I suspected,” he said shaking his head and gesturing to the screen. “That edition is out of print and not currently on the shelves, but I can certainly have it special ordered for you if you’d like—”

  He never finished his sentence. The world warped around him on a shockwave of sorts and the air became monstrous in that moment. It ate up his words, sucking them free of his mouth and lungs before they had a chance to be heard. At the same time, wood from the French double doors at the front of the library imploded to become splinters of all sizes that shot through the room like a thousand spears.

  Inaudible over the deafening blast, the stained glass along the top of all four walls of the large room shattered noiselessly into dust. All around Randall, the library transformed into a sudden mish-mash of every color and shape, so destroyed in its mixing it was reminiscent of ash-brown paint.

  There may have been screams; he would never know. He had the sudden sensation of falling. The woman and child that had been standing beside him became figments of the past, no longer of absolute importance. He couldn’t tell what was up or down; there was no sensation but that of a slight pull on his body and the distant, thankfully numb thunking of objects banging into him.

  In short order, everything went black… which then faded into white.

  The white had a miasma of rainbow colors interwoven throughout its fabric. At the same time, it wasn’t there. There was no white, there was no rainbow, there was nothing. Except music? In the background of the white, miasmic nothing, a song played. Au Claire de la Lune. It was an old French folk song, one he somehow remembered now, soft and echoing on an unseen piano.

  It was the song sung by the first human voice ever recorded. Randall had a copy of the recording from 1860 in the art section of his library. Now he floated, recalling the words even though he had no physical body and therefore no brain with which to recall them. He sang wordlessly despite the impossible-ness of it, a whisper of a thought that sounded clearly in the multi-hued nothingness…

  "Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot, prête-moi ta lume pour écrire un mot. Ma chandelle est morte, je n'ai plus de feu. Ouvre-moi ta porte pour l'amour de Dieu.”

  “By the light of the moon, my friend Pierrot, lend me a light so I can continue to write? My own light has gone out… I have no fire…. Open the door, for the love of God.”

  My light has gone out. I have no fire. Open the door.

  For the love of God, open the door.

  Randall, open the goddamn door! WAKE UP!

  Randall opened his eyes.

  A blur greeted him, but not the nothing miasma he’d been in moments before. It was a solid and real blur, and he knew he was no longer floating because he could feel things pressing into his body from all sides. It hurt. This was real and he was conscious.

  Sound was a strange thing to him now because it didn’t match what he was seeing. Several seconds after he’d opened his eyes, he realized his world was strangely silent. The piano music was gone. In its place was a thick, cotton-like muffling of something else, something indistinct.

  The blur around him solidified enough for him to see that he was on the ground; the asphalt of a city street slashed vertical through his vision. He tried to push himself up, to clear himself away from the chaos of the blur and muffle and regain his bearings, but he couldn’t move his arms.

  They’re trapped, he realized. He blinked several times and the area around him began to come into focus. He was absolutely in the middle of the street. He was on his side, and his body was the weight that trapped his left arm, squeezing it beneath him between his chest and the tarmac. Something was also indeed laying on top of him, trapping his other arm. It was brown, probably wood, but it was covered in a layer of dust or ash and there were other things laying on top of the object, obscuring its identity.

  He frowned and looked closer, concentrating on the shape of it in an attempt to find something familiar. It’s a shelf, he finally realized. It’s part of one of the library shelves. He peered at it a little longer, his gaze skirting the line of its closest edge until he could barely make the outline of what appeared to be a label. A library label.

  This is one of the shelves from the psychology section, he thought as he recognized the “ychol” l
etters from the label. That was all he could see. But it was enough to let him rebuild the shelf in his head based on where he knew the label was normally located. Once he’d done that, he knew where to lean, how far to lean, and which direction to lean in so that he could get out from underneath the shelf.

  He tried to lean in that direction and lift his arm even just a little to help leverage him out from beneath the wooden weight. But it hurt. And he had no control over his fingers; he attempted to wiggle them and failed. It’s broken, he realized hopelessly. When the shelf had fallen and trapped him, it had broken his arm. He knew the ledge had fallen perpendicular to his bone, and it was most likely snapped in half. That was the real reason he couldn’t move it.

  But he could still lean, and if he didn’t mind a serious case of road rash, he could slide inch by inch out from beneath the shelf.

  Randall closed his eyes and listened to the sound of his blood pulsing past his eardrums. He couldn’t hear any sirens. He couldn’t hear anything but the crackling of a fire somewhere nearby, and the zapping of some kind of electrical wiring that had most likely been severed. He didn’t know where either were, and he couldn’t see anything beyond the shelf, the street under his head, and the dust that filled the air. He had no idea whether help was on its way.

  It’s up to me, he realized. He tried to mentally prepare himself for the painful task ahead and then gave up and just gritted his teeth. He began to lean, pulling hard on his legs to curl them under him so he could try to grip the street with the soles of his boots. But suddenly, when he leaned, he was simultaneously moving his right arm – fingers and all.

  What the hell?

  He frowned and turned his head to look down at his arm. Blood soaked the sleeve of his shirt; he couldn’t tell what was going on under the material, but if he wasn’t imagining things, his arm wasn’t broken after all. In fact… it didn’t even hurt.

  “Impossible,” he whispered as he angled his right arm to grip the ledge of the shelf with his now movable fingers. He managed a grip and shoved with all his strength into the bulk of the wood. It shifted slightly, scraping against the street. He growled low, feeling the blood fill his head, and continued to push.

  He was sweating with effort by the time he managed to dislodge himself enough to roll out from under the destroyed fixture. He sustained scrapes and bruises along both arms and his side where his shirt had come free of his pants, but he was right about his initial assessment about his arm being wrong. It wasn’t broken after all. It must have been shock alone that kept him from moving it at first. The blood was most likely from a deep cut and nothing more.

  Randall sat up, steadied himself past dizziness, and then got to his feet. He slowly looked around.

  “No fucking way,” he muttered as his surroundings became clear. His library was in ruins, only two of its four walls still standing. His books were destroyed, their covers and pages disassembled and scattered in every direction. He could barely make them out beneath the rubble of the destruction. But that wasn’t what had him staring open-mouthed in fascination.

  It was the airplane less than half a block away, its nose buried in the core of the power substation building at the end of the street. Its main body had torn in half at some point, but whether it was before or after it had been dismantled by the impact, it was impossible for Randall to tell. The aircraft was a jetliner, possibly capable of carrying around two hundred passengers. Given the way it had fractured, its remains were reminiscent of the Titanic.

  He scanned the wreckage, not at all surprised that he could see no signs of life. He began to roll up the sleeve of his bloodied arm and considered what to do next when against all odds, he heard the sound of voices.

  Female voices.

  Randall turned slowly, trying to pinpoint the direction from which they came. When he was sure he had, he began stumbling slowly toward them. They came and went, their clarity made sporadic by distance, wind, smoke, and the sounds of fire and electricity. But he caught a few phrases here and there.

  “… take mine. Go ahead and put it on.”

  “Please just… going to be okay? He isn’t… god please don’t leave me….”

  “… need you to trust me. I’m going to help him, I promise. But you need… interfere, no matter what.”

  Randall began to circle a final mound of smoking debris when the speakers came into view. For some reason, his instinct forced him back behind the bulk of the debris, where he knelt and watched from a hidden distance.

  They were kneeling on the ground amidst the rubble, two women. There was a boy too, but he was on his back between them, and unmoving. The boy and his mother, Randall recognized from the library, though they were both covered in layers of dust and ash, and the mother had blood on her head that caked a lock of her hair to the side of her face. There was more blood on her hands.

  But there was none on the little boy.

  Randall couldn’t tell exactly where the kid had been hurt, but he must have been harmed by the crash because his color was decidedly pale, and his lips were purple. He was either dead or fast on his way.

  The mother began sobbing, but impressively, she remained where she was as the other woman, whom Randall could only see from behind, repositioned herself next to the boy’s unmoving form. From his vantage, he couldn’t really see much of her but her hair, which was decidedly beautiful. It was dark blonde maybe, somewhat gold, and with unique rose-gold and strawberry highlights running through it. Though it had been tied up into some kind of bun, he could tell there was a copious amount of it; the bun was thick, and long strands had come loose, probably during the commotion, to curl down her back and over her shoulders.

  He admired it for a moment, but then he went still, and his mind went a little blank when she turned, offering him her profile.

  There was something prophetically volatile about the way she looked in profile. There was an air about her that made her appear the muse, posing to be captured by a painter’s expert hand.

  Her eyes were downcast as she gave her attention to the unconscious child. He took in her lashes, so long and thick he could see them even from where he crouched, despite the dust in the air. His eyes grazed over the rise of the apple of her cheek, dusted randomly with copper colored freckles, her small slightly upturned nose, the pink curve of her full lips, parted now as she grit her teeth in concentration.

  He looked at those teeth, just a little bit crooked at the canines, giving her a youthful air, and wondered what it would feel like if she were to clamp them down on him in defense. In frustration, in anger… in pleasure. Suddenly, he wanted her to make him bleed with them.

  But it was a passing thought, one of those that enters a man’s mind and is gone in the next instant, as if it were never there.

  And then he saw her arms. Beneath the jacket she must have given to the child’s mother, who shivered and muttered frantically despite the layers she now wore over her, the woman with rose-gold highlights in her hair had only been wearing a short-sleeved suit top, one meant to be covered by a suit jacket. It was cold out here; her breath frosted before her lips. But she’d given away her protection anyway, revealing what had once been hidden beneath those now missing sleeves.

  Randall’s eyes trailed over the sculpted shape of her arms. There were so many of them – so many scars. They were almost like pencil marks, the charcoal sketch strokes of some cosmic master of the arts. They were all nearly exactly the same size, the same width, the same length and color. They stood out in stark contrast against the tanned skin of her otherwise unmarred flesh.

  Dozens. Dozens of scars marked the angel with the freckles and crooked teeth. He wondered if there were more under what clothing remained.

  Randall stood transfixed as something new washed over him. He could do nothing but stare open-mouthed as the angel lowered her hands to the boy’s chest, palms-down. She muttered something under her breath, something he could not hear, but he saw her lips move.

  Beside her, t
he mother gasped and stopped muttering. Randall saw a light begin to form beneath the red-head’s touch. It was bluish, or maybe yellow, perhaps shifting back and forth through the spectrum. It looked warm.

  He imagined it was warm.

  The light spread across the boy’s chest, climbing ever further outward until it had enveloped his torso completely. It then spread down his arms and legs, until the entire small body was encased in a warm, steady glow.

  It remained like this for several impossible, mind-boggling beats.

  And then the woman’s head dropped as if she were exhausted. The light died out like a dimmer switch being slowly turned to the off position. In the next tense moment in that debris-filled scene with dust and the sound of sirens floating around them, the boy’s chest heaved upward with an enormous intake of air.

  The mother cried out in rapturous shock and what Randall imagined was the kind of wonder he, himself, was experiencing in that moment.

  But his rapture and shock was not only due to the miracle the red-haired angel had performed on the little boy. It was because at the very same time that the boy took his life-saving breath, a line of red appeared across the side of the woman’s forearm. She winced slightly as it split open, blood welling to the same dimensions as the other lines marking the woman’s skin. But she did nothing to stop it, and didn’t even take the time to look at it. She simply remained where she was, head down, eyes closed, teeth bared silently against the pain.

  A few moments later, as the emergency vehicles began arriving and parking on the outskirts of the disaster and the mother hugged her now coughing child to her chest and bawled openly with relief, the single slash on the woman’s forearm began to close. Within seconds, it had sealed completely, and even the blood disappeared.

  Leaving only a scar in its wake.

  Another scar. Like all the others.

  “Oh my God,” Randall whispered as he realized what he was witnessing. The angel really was an angel. Those scars on her body… they were what was left when she saved someone. And not just saved them, but brought them back to life.