Evil Librarian

by Michelle Knudsen

  Like his brother, he’s got a poster of some sports figure I don’t recognize, but he’s also got a framed Empire Strikes Back movie poster over his bed and a series of Playbill covers from various Broadway shows tacked to one wall. A program from last fall’s school musical — signed across the front by the other cast members — occupies a place of honor on a shelf above his desk, flanked by rugby trophies and a couple of photos of Ryan and his brother, one of them when they were little kids, the other taken two or three years ago at what appears to be his brother’s graduation. (His brother is kind of hot, too, but in a different, distant way that doesn’t really do anything for me.) There’s a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall and some nice-looking speakers hung in the corners of the room and a pile of dirty laundry in the corner near the closet, and I have to forcibly remove my eyes from a pair of cherry-red boxer briefs tossed atop the white T-shirts and jeans and gray sweatpants and socks and whatever else he’s worn in the past few days.

  And now I have to forcibly prevent my eyes from darting to his general pelvic region and trying to see through his jeans to whatever tantalizing color boxer briefs he might be wearing today.

  Maybe he’s going commando today, my brain whispers, and I walk abruptly over to stare at the Playbill collection.

  “Have you seen all of these?” I ask.

  “Yeah.” He comes over to stand beside me. “My aunt takes me to a show every year for my birthday. It’s kind of our thing.”

  “That’s awesome,” I say, because it is. My aunt doesn’t even send me a card on my birthday.

  “Yeah, she’s pretty cool.” He walks back over to the door and closes it, and then he sits on the floor, setting the plate of banana bread and bottles of water in front of him. I notice the lack of chairs, notice that he did not invite me to sit on his bed, and plant myself on the floor a little ways away, facing him. I arrange myself so I can lean back against the edge of his bed, though.

  I can’t be in his bedroom and not touch his bed. I mean, come on.

  One edge of a dark-blue sheet barely brushes the back of my neck as I settle into place. I allow my brain exactly two seconds of thinking about what parts of Ryan that edge of sheet might have come into contact with while he was last wrapped up in it. Then I force myself to focus on what we’re supposed to be doing.

  “So, uh . . .” Ryan looks at the floor, looks around, meets my eyes.

  Right. Time to get down to business.

  “Okay,” I say. “So . . . the new librarian is some kind of evil demon, huh?”

  Ryan looks at me a second longer and then laughs suddenly. And briefly. He rubs the back of his hand against his forehead. “Jesus, Cyn. This is really happening, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” I take in the room around me, which seems perfectly real and there and normal. The navy-and-crimson sisal rug beneath me is rough and gritty where my hand rests on it, and I can tell it is in severe need of vacuuming. Ryan’s chemistry textbook is propped open on his desk. There’s a crumpled-up energy bar wrapper lying on the floor next to a small wastebasket bearing a sticker that says Ryan in bright-green puffy letters that looks like something he stuck there when he was about six years old. This is clearly the real world we’re in.

  And yet.

  Ryan nods. Then he blows out his breath, sits up and leans forward, and grabs one of the banana bread pieces.

  “All right, then,” he says. “What are we going to do about it?”

  I could kiss him.

  Well, okay, yes, this is not a new desire, the kissing. But in this moment, I feel my lust and longing and liking swirl themselves together into something much more like love. He’s not running away from this crazy and terrible impossible thing. He’s still here. He’s going to help me. We’re going to do this together.

  I hadn’t realized how afraid I was of facing this alone, afraid that Ryan would find a way to deny what was happening after all. But he’s not, he didn’t, he’s sitting right there ripping off giant, boy-size bites of banana bread with his almost-perfect teeth and looking at me expectantly, ready to go, ready to make a plan and take action and get things done.

  My relief is immense.

  Except, of course, I still have no idea what we can do.

  “Okay,” I say for about the millionth time. “What do we know so far? We know that Mr. Gabriel is some kind of demon.”

  “Check.”

  “We know that he killed someone. Or at least, he probably killed someone. I don’t know where else all that blood could have come from.” Ryan nods. I think we’re both trying not to think too much about whom he might have killed. Someone from school? Someone we know? I keep talking. “We know that he was at least temporarily stuck inside that shape he’d drawn on the floor, or he would have killed us.”

  “What — what did he do to us? He did something . . . I remember . . . and you, uh —” He blinks and looks at me with sudden surprise. “Did you slap me?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sorry. I had to! He was hypnotizing you or something.”

  “With his crazy giant eyes,” Ryan says.

  “Yeah.”

  “But why didn’t it work on you, too?”

  I explain what Mr. Gabriel said about the super-roach thing. Ryan listens with fascinated interest.

  “Cool,” he says. “So he can’t hurt you?”

  “No, he can, just not — not so easily, I guess. I mean, if he was even telling the truth. Because, you know, evil demon librarians, not so much known for the honesty policy, I bet.”

  Ryan waves this away. “He obviously was trying to hypnotize you, or whatever, and not managing to. And I can’t really think of why he’d bother to lie to you about it. I mean, it would make more sense to lie in the other direction. You know, not tell you that you had this resistance thing.”

  “That’s a good point.” I consider this. “I guess he figures it won’t matter. He’ll be able to kill me anyway. It will just be a little harder.”

  Ryan jumps on this. “But why hasn’t he killed us already? Surely he could have gotten out of his chalk thing by now, right? How come he’s not here right now, slicing our throats open or whatever?”

  I turn involuntarily to look at the window, sure that I’m going to see Mr. Gabriel’s leering face hanging there outside the glass, just waiting for the perfect cue to pounce. But there’s nothing. Just trees and sky and houses and normal everyday world.

  “I don’t know,” I say. I pick up the other piece of banana bread and take a bite. (It’s really good.) I chew, swallow, then go on, thinking out loud: “Maybe he can’t just go wherever he wants?” I’m just throwing things out there, but as soon as I say this, it feels right. “Maybe he’s stuck in the library. Well, no, not the library. I’ve seen him in the halls. But maybe the school. I’ve never seen him out in the parking lot or anything like that. And he seems to be at school all the time, no matter what time it is. . . .”

  “Maybe,” Ryan says. “We can use that as a working hypothesis, anyway.”

  I feel the smallest tinge of hope. “So, if we assume that’s true, then as long as we don’t go back to school —”

  He stares at me. “What? We have to go back.”

  I stare back. “What? Hello? Evil demon librarian wants to kill us . . . ?”

  “But — we have rehearsal tomorrow.”

  And my heart contorts into even greater paroxysms of love, while my brain tries to convince my hands, which are still full of banana bread, to shake some sense into his idiotic head.

  “But we will never make it to rehearsal, because we will be dead on the library floor by first period!”

  His idiotic head shakes itself back and forth. “No. Think about it, Cyn. He’s not going to kill us with everyone there. He’s obviously got some kind of limits on what he can do and not do. Otherwise, what’s he doing pretending to be a librarian? He might as well just walk right in and suck everyone’s souls out, or whatever, and then be on his way. There must be, like, rules
or something.”

  This actually does seem to make some sense. If he were all-powerful and able to just do whatever he wanted, surely he would be just doing whatever he wanted, not seducing Annie in gradual increments and stealing whatever he is stealing from students in small doses, a few at a time, in secret. The need for secrecy means that there must be consequences if the secret is revealed. Maybe — maybe if he is discovered too soon, it is possible he could be stopped.

  “I wish there were someone we could tell,” I say. “I mean, someone who would believe us. And who other people would believe.”

  “A teacher or someone.”

  “Right. A responsible adult, who other adults would take seriously.” Only, any adult who would believe us, if any exist, could hardly be someone that other adults would take seriously.

  But Ryan is nodding as though I have put forth a plausible next step. “Okay, so that’s our goal for tomorrow. Find a teacher or some other adult who will believe us.”

  “Do you really think that’s going to happen?” I do not think so, myself. My tiny tinge of hope has abandoned me again. I want to console myself with more banana bread, but I seem to have eaten it all.

  But Ryan is nodding again. “We’ll find someone. Adults aren’t incapable of believing things that are hard to believe. I mean, most people our age wouldn’t believe this either, right? But we believe it. I mean, you convinced me, right?”

  I laugh. “I did not. Do you not remember how it actually went down? You told me I was nuts.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  I give him my best raised eyebrows and skeptical twist of the lips. “It was certainly implied, if not stated outright. You only ran after me because I got mad, and you”— you cared that I was mad and wanted to fix it —“I don’t know, you wanted to be there to show me that I was being ridiculous.”

  He shrugs. “Maybe. Okay, yes. I did not believe you. But then I saw him. I mean, there’s no not believing something like that when you see it, right in front of you.” He shakes his head, and I suspect some part of him is still trying to find a way to not believe it. “I have never been that terrified in my entire life.”

  He looks at me again, and I can’t quite decipher his expression. “You didn’t seem scared at all.”

  “What? Are you crazy?”

  “I don’t know, Cyn. I was frozen —”

  “You were mesmerized —”

  “But first I froze,” he insists. “I just stood there staring at him like an idiot. And you — you got me out of there.”

  “Only by smacking you around until you came back to your senses. . . .”

  “You could have left me. You could have run while he was distracted.”

  “I would never —!”

  He rolls his eyes. “I know. That’s my point, moron.” I am somewhat taken aback by being called a moron by the object of my affection, but also disarmed by the actual content of his words, which, upon reflection, I suppose are true. It never occurred to me to run away without him. Could anyone really do something like that? Just run off and leave someone else to die?

  His eyes stay on mine for another second, and I want to say something back but my brain refuses to cooperate. Then he shakes his head again and pushes himself up off the floor.

  “So, okay. Tomorrow we find an ally. A respectable, serious-minded, one-hundred-percent-credible, and ideally over-age-forty person to believe our story and help us mobilize forces, or whatever. Deal?” He reaches down and I take his hand, which is large and warm and feels really nice wrapped around mine, and I simultaneously seal the deal and let him pull me away from the touch of his sheet and up from his gritty rug.

  This appears to be my cue to go away. We exchange cell numbers. I manage (I think) to not grin like an idiot while I type “Ryan Halsey!!!!” into my contacts, and then he walks me to the door and I head home.

  It has been a very, very strange day.

  Back at my house, I grab some of tonight’s takeout feast from the refrigerator and head upstairs to work some more on the design adjustments for Sweeney’s chair. Well, what am I supposed to do? Just sit here freaking out about Mr. Gabriel? And anyway, if we’re going back to school, that means the show will (as they say) go on, and that means I have to figure out this chair situation. (And if I don’t focus on something, I really am going to just sit here freaking out, and I don’t think I can handle that right now.)

  So: the chair. The problem is that I don’t just want it to be functional; I want it to be the best Sweeney Todd chair ever, and that has turned out to be difficult to manage while still upholding certain safety considerations that are apparently nonnegotiable. I know we could fairly easily do the upside-down flip that they did in the movie version with Johnny Depp, which does look impressive, but (a) I have a lot of issues with the movie and so don’t really want to use that chair design, and (b) I want to do something different and special that people won’t forget. Something I can point to on my upcoming college applications and use to help me get positions doing set design for whatever student or community theater I can get involved with after graduation.

  Later that evening, while I am brushing my teeth for bed and not-thinking about Mr. Gabriel by envisioning very impractical chair designs with moving robotic arms that wouldn’t even make sense in the context of the play but would otherwise be very cool, my dad calls up to me. I go downstairs and find him watching a local special report that has interrupted whatever other news show he has been watching. I sit beside him on the couch, alarmed by his expression. I’m even more alarmed when he puts his arm around my shoulders. Then I start to watch and listen, and my alarm blossoms into horrified shock and dismay.

  Principal Morse is dead.

  A reporter wearing an appropriately sympathetic expression is interviewing Assistant Principal Jensen on the street outside the school. Jensen is insisting in a tear-choked voice that school will be open tomorrow and all clubs in session as usual, because “that’s what Principal Morse would have wanted.”

  He’d been found by a janitor. In his office, slumped over his desk. Heart attack, they are saying. There is no mention of the library, or the librarian, or chalk symbols or possible witnesses or a suspicious absence of blood in the principal’s body. But I know. It can’t be a coincidence. Mr. Gabriel must have done this.

  My dad looks over at me, takes in my expression, looks concerned. “Did you know him well? The principal?”

  “No. Not really. I mean, he was always around and stuff, you know. He was nice.” He was nice. I think of his waggly eyebrows. He didn’t deserve to die.

  “You can stay home tomorrow if you want to, honey,” Dad says. “Do you want to?”

  Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes.

  “No, that’s okay,” I say softly. I can’t look at him, can’t take my eyes off the screen. The camera has pulled back to show the whole school, which seems alien and unfamiliar from this angle and at this time of night. “I want to go. I think I’d feel worse staying home, by myself, you know?”

  He says this is fine, says it’s also fine if I change my mind later, or tomorrow, whatever I want. Anything I need is okay with him. I nod and make noises of assent and keep my eyes on the television.

  For a second, I was sure I saw the flash of a face in one of the third-floor windows.

  It is very hard to walk through the front doors of the school the next morning. I can feel the wrongness of what has happened all around.

  High school has always felt like a relatively safe place to me. I know it’s not that way for everyone; I know some kids have to deal with all kinds of awful things in high school — sadistic bullies and mean girls and abusive teachers and unspeakably bad experiences in gym locker rooms and bathrooms and worse, things that make them dread coming to school each and every day, things that maybe make them stop coming altogether. I’ve been lucky; not enough on any of the mean kids’ radars to be a target, a large enough circle of friends and acquaintances that I�
�m rarely stuck completely on my own when I don’t want to be, not even any truly horrible teacher experiences. Signor De Luca is a pain, but he’s not mean like some teachers can be, doesn’t have it in for me in that relentless way that I have seen some teachers go after students they don’t like. No one has ever jumped me in the stairwell or started a vicious rumor about me or even stolen my lunch money. School has always just been the place where I go every day to see my friends and go to my classes and get out of my house and, in recent times, stare at Ryan and indulge in delightful distracting imaginings.

  Obviously, it does not feel like a very safe place anymore.

  I expect Mr. Gabriel to jump out from behind every corner, to be lurking in every shadow. I am careful to stay in areas where there are other people, lots of people, but still my pulse is pounding and my eyes cannot stop darting in all directions, trying to see the danger I am sure is going to come flying at me any moment.

  Everywhere, students are gathered in little groups, talking about what happened. Principal Morse was a relatively young guy, really. And seemed to be in pretty decent shape and stuff. Not what you would think of as heart-attack material. And he really was nice. Everyone liked him. Teachers are standing together in doorways, hushed voices absolutely failing to hide how freaked out they are. Some of them are teary eyed. Two sophomore girls sit on the floor by their lockers, holding hands and crying outright.

  And here and there, leaning against a wall or walking slowly along the thick black line that bisects the hallway floor, there are other, less-expressive expressions. Students who don’t seem to be thinking about Principal Morse or sudden unexpected deaths or really much of anything at all. It almost could pass for shock, those empty eyes and vacant faces.

  Almost.

  Annie, of course, did not come over this morning to walk to school with me. She shows up in Italian, but I can feel her anger like a physical barrier, pushing me away. She won’t look at me, let alone talk to me.

  Ryan looks at me when he comes in, though, looks at me and gives me a little wave hello, giving me the first spot of non-awfulness so far today. We both made it to first period, at least. That’s something.