Evil Librarian

by Michelle Knudsen

  I see Annie, who I somehow didn’t guess would be sitting right next to Mr. Gabriel (stupid), just as one of the tentacles loops around her. She looks shocked and confused and afraid, and she screams as she’s pulled in and down after Mr. Gabriel. A second later I see Danielle, also screaming, her eyes and mouth huge in her white, white face, her hands clawing at the dirty carpet, being pulled in as well. By Kingston? Which makes the inappropriate whistling during Danielle’s curtain call suddenly seem way less creepy in comparison to what he is doing now.

  I shove the textbook as far as it will go down the back of my pants (uncomfortable but practical) and wrap the fingers of my right hand through the middle of the protractor and then I jump off the stage and go running toward the vortex. The fact that I am terrified and really, really don’t want to do this is lost in the central line of thought streaming steadily through my brain, that I need to go with them, I need to be there, I need to get down there if I’m going to save Annie. I hurl myself at the center but I only fall forward and smash into the broken auditorium chair behind it. I get up and throw myself at it again, but it still won’t work, it’s not working, it won’t take me and I don’t have a way to get in and I have to get in and I think my forehead is bleeding and they’re getting away and it can’t all be for nothing, it can’t, it can’t, the demoness was a liar and she’s just running away with the rest of them and this is it I’m losing her I’ll never see Annie again.

  I look back in panic toward the stage and instantly lock eyes with Ryan, who is trying to push his way toward me through the throng. And then something circles my waist and I look down to see a tendril-tentacle that somehow I can tell belongs to Ms. Královna. It tightens and I yelp and I can feel the edge of the textbook, caught between me and the demoness’s boa constrictor–like grip, gouging at the skin of my back and I can barely breathe as she drags me painfully forward and down and down and —

  and then stops.

  I’m at the brink of the vortex, and now it wants me. Now it’s trying to suck me down, and the tentacle around me is pulling and pulling but Ryan has hold of my wrist and he is pulling me back.

  “Let me go!” I scream at him. I have to go, I have to go now, or it’s going to be too late. “Let me go, you promised!”

  “I don’t care!” he shouts back. “I can’t let you do it!” He forces himself closer and grabs my other wrist, too, trying to hold on. I see him brace his legs against a pair of seats, anchoring himself in place, but I still don’t really get how he has the strength to hold me there against the demoness’s opposing effort. They’re both strong, pulling in their opposite directions, and I am the rope in the worst game of tug-of-war ever, and it feels entirely possible they might very soon literally tear me apart.

  His face is very close to mine now, and he can talk without shouting but he’s still kind of shouting because he’s angry and sad and scared but I think angry most of all. “You can’t really believe I’m just going to stand here and watch you get sucked down by some messed-up demon vortex into hell knowing that you probably won’t ever come back!”

  “I have to! Annie’s already down there!”

  The demoness suddenly wrenches me toward her with new urgency and I slide backward a few feet toward the vortex, my right wrist pulling free of Ryan’s grip. He immediately clamps his newly freed hand next to the other, both of them now crushing my left wrist in desperate overlapping circles, his thumbs pressing together white with the force of his effort.

  “Fuck Annie!” he screams at me. “She chose her own fate, and I’m not letting you go down there after her. I don’t care what you think you want, Cynthia Rothschild! Fuck her, and fuck you, too! I’m falling in love with you, goddammit —” And his voice breaks there and he closes his eyes for a second and then opens them again, and he is trying to hold on to me that way, too, staring into my eyes and not letting me look away. “I don’t care what I promised, I just don’t care, we don’t have a deal, deal over, canceled, I am not doing this, I am not letting you go.”

  He’s killing me.

  I’m in physical agony from the impatient and increasingly insistent yanking on my midsection from the other side of the vortex, but of course it’s not just that. It’s because this is what I have always wanted, always, more than anything, more than the moon: for someone to love me, like this, like in a story, fiercely and completely, and yeah I know it’s crazy and ridiculous and we’re only sixteen and barely know each other even after all of this but then all of this is exactly the kind of experience that accelerates emotional connection, and we both know in this moment that there is something real and true between us. There really is. It’s like musical-theater love, condensed and intense and with music and power, and I look at him standing there, still in full makeup, his mouth set in a determined line, fingers digging into the skin of my wrist, fighting to make me stay, to not disappear, to stay, with him, and screw the cost and screw the consequences.

  And oh, I want to.

  My mind is broadcasting emergency renditions of every applicable musical-theater song at full volume, trying to drown me out with “I Will Never Leave You” from Side Show and “All I Ask of You” from The Phantom of the Opera and “Stay with Me” from Into the Woods (damn you, Sondheim) and all the nerve endings in my entire body are trying to squeeze themselves into my wrist at the point of contact with Ryan’s hands and I know that if they could they would jump ship entirely because I am not following the script I am making the wrong choice and taking the stupid path and going against the music and screwing up the ending.

  I’m sorry, I tell them.

  I want to stay.

  Oh, God, do I want to stay.

  But I can’t.

  “Ryan,” I say, and I’m crying, and it hurts to say his name because I’m afraid it’s the last time I’m ever going to get to say it to him, “I’m so sorry.”

  I stab him in the side with the corner of the protractor as hard as I can.

  He jerks backward in surprise and pain, losing his grip, and in that instant I fly backward and down into the vortex. Ryan’s angry, horrified, wounded eyes are the last thing I see before the swirling darkness takes me in completely and everything goes black and I am gone.

  There is darkness, and falling, and pain.

  My brain isn’t speaking to me anymore, and there is no more music, and everything is black and there is nothing to see except the lingering afterimage of Ryan’s eyes. I don’t want to see them, but closing my own eyes doesn’t make them go away, and so apparently there is nothing I can really do about that.

  The tendril of the demoness is still around me, a different black in the blackness, and I understand instinctively that if she were to let go of me now, I would be trapped here in this nothingness forever.

  Which would totally, totally suck.

  I try to use that, to remind myself that as afraid as I am of what is about to happen, there are always worse things.

  It doesn’t really make me feel any better.

  My head is stinging, and when I touch it I can feel what is probably blood; I think I gashed my forehead on the seats while trying to throw myself into the vortex those first few times. The more I think about it, the more it seems to be hurting, and then I realize that it’s not just my head. The quality of the blackness is changing, becoming different, thicker, harder, somehow, and it’s like a fine web of pain has begun to settle over the entire surface of my skin. My heart is beating faster and faster and I am starting to get even more afraid. Because the darkness around me now feels like something else, something sharper, like instead of air or nothing or whatever it was before, it is starting to be made of sandpaper or jagged rocks, scratching and piercing. I open my mouth to scream because now it’s more like knives, and I can’t get enough breath to scream but I can feel my nerve endings screaming and then suddenly the darkness is filled with light and there is air and I do suck enough in to start to scream but something forces itself into my mouth and I can’t make a
ny sound and then I crash to the — ground?— and something is holding me down and silent and I try to thrash my way free but I can hardly move at all.

  Slowly I start to realize that the knives are gone. And that leads to the ability to start to think again, and to remember where I was on my way to, and that the fact that I am no longer moving or falling might mean that I have arrived there.

  As soon as I think this I stop fighting, and then the thing holding me down lets me go. As it slides free of my mouth I get a glimpse of ghostly tendril and realize it was the demoness. And I try to think of why she would do that, and I realize it must have been important for me to be quiet and still. So I stay quiet and still. But I listen, and I look, and I try to get my bearings.

  This is harder than I expect. I’m not moving, but everything around me still feels shifty and unstable. Flickery. It’s like watching several channels of TV on the same screen at the same time.

  One channel shows a vast barren plane surrounded by enormous spiky towering forms that could be mountains or giant stalagmites (stalactites? I can never remember which is which, up or down) or some kind of unnatural structures that just resemble those other things. Another channel looks for all the world like a New York City street, except that all the buildings are taller than they should be and tilted and the street is about ten times wider and there aren’t any hot-dog vendors or taxis and the surface of the blacktop occasionally undulates like something is pushing up against it from below. Another looks like a boiling orange sea, and another looks like an alien football stadium, where the seats are filled with moving shapes that hurt my eyes and the cheap sections are so far up that I can’t actually even see them.

  It’s like all of these things together and so not really any of them, but the one constant is a group of figures facing a central structure that alternately looks like an enormous judge’s bench, a concert stage, a satanic temple, and the Washington Monument. Each of the figures is a demon, which I can tell because of the red auras above them but also because of how their shapes are wrong and terrifying and too big and with too many parts. And also because superimposed or lurking underneath or something I can still see the human aspects of Mr. Gabriel and Principal Kingston and Ms. Královna among them.

  And each of the demons is accompanied by a smaller figure, and those don’t change at all.

  And one of them is Aaron and one of them is Danielle and one of them is Annie.

  The humans are standing very still. I think they are in some kind of stasis or something, because none of them are showing any kind of expression. I am not super close to them, in my position tucked away behind what is sometimes a rock and sometimes a burning bush and sometimes a weird, alien blue thing that is still somehow entirely recognizable as almost being a street-side mailbox, but I am close enough to see their faces. I am also, I realize slowly, as I am still trying to process the unstable environment around me, able to hear that the demons are still arguing.

  It’s like when they say the word for super-roach and I can understand that’s what they mean but I can also hear that the actual syllables being spoken are not anything close to human, let alone English, speech.

  The gist of things seems to be that Gabriel and Kingston are pissed.

  Good old Ms. Královna did exactly what she promised, apparently. She created the vortex before Kingston and Gabriel had a chance to stage their final, massive soul-sucking massacre in the auditorium and drain the life force out of everyone at once. The two men had their deal, of course, which included the sharing of the final spoils before heading back for the final battle, but they’d forgotten to account for the possible actions of Ms. K. Once the gateway was open, they had to go through. She dragged them away, and now they aren’t nearly as strong as they’d planned to be. Which, of course, is just fine with her. But they are still, they assure her, strong enough to defeat her. Blah, blah, blah, lots of evil feather-fluffing and posturing. I don’t understand most of what they actually say, there are too many demon words in there that don’t seem to have human meanings, but I definitely get the overall picture.

  The demoness just smiles at them and radiates self-satisfaction.

  Have I mentioned that she is my favorite demon ever?

  There is a klaxon sound, loud and long and piercing, and the arguing ceases instantly. All the demons turn their attention to that central structure, which now seems to be occupied by another demon, or maybe more than one — it’s hard to look directly at it. They are apparently ready to get down to business.

  Which means that pretty soon I am going to have to stop crouching here behind my rock-mailbox-fiery-foliage-whatever and do what I came here to do.

  I’d been feeling kind of okay once the pain stopped and I was distracted by trying to figure out the lay of the land and stuff. But now my terror is back with a vengeance. My legs don’t seem to want to hold me up anymore all of a sudden. I pull back from my peeking position and sit down hard on the ground. Something pokes me painfully in the back, and I remember that I’d stuffed the textbook down the back of my pants when everything started happening in the auditorium. I also remember that I’ve still got my right hand clenched tightly around the protractor.

  Except it’s not a protractor anymore. It looks more like an Alaskan ulu knife, with a bone handle I can curl my hand around and a very wicked-looking curved blade.

  I reach back with my other hand and pull out the textbook, which of course is no longer a textbook, either. It’s not as impressive as the ulu knife, though. It’s just kind of a flat rectangle of some kind of flexible plasticky material, and it still has the biology cover art on the front of it. The back, though, now sports a strap that’s connected to the plastic at both ends with some slack in the middle, which is very convenient. I loop my arm through it and slide it up around my shoulder. Much easier than trying to keep it stuffed in my pants.

  Okay. So: magic protractor / ulu knife? Check.

  Magic shieldy thing that is hopefully more impressive in function than form? Check.

  That was a really short checklist. I wish I had more things to count. I miss my prop table.

  I should probably keep an eye on what’s happening. I should probably have a plan. I don’t really have a plan. I know I need to use the ulu-protractor to sever the connection between Mr. Gabriel and Annie, and then I guess I will need to use the bio textbook / shield to stop Mr. Gabriel from killing us. But the demoness said I will only get to use it once, which seems kind of insufficient given that I can’t imagine he will give up after one attempt.

  Plus, there are a whole bunch of other demons here. There are maybe twenty or so in the row of what I take to be the contenders. And then there are unfathomable multitudes in the audience. I can really only see those clearly sometimes, depending on what form the arena is taking at any given moment. But I have no doubt they are always there, whether I can see them or not, and if any of them see me, that might be bad. What had Ms. Královna said? Meat and prey. I am meat and prey to them. I should probably try very hard to find a way to carry out my tasks without drawing too much attention to myself.

  So that’s kind of a plan, right? Save Annie, remain inconspicuous.

  I get up into an awkward crouch again and peek back around my rock-mailbox-burning-bush.

  All of the demon contenders are in a neat line now, facing whoever or whatever that central authority figure or figures may be. I think they are presenting their human consorts, proving they’ve met the requirements of the competition. They step forward one at a time, and I feel more than hear a deafening roar from the audience in response. There is a pause, and then a decisive movement from the center, and the roar becomes a million times what it was and I have to fight not to cower behind my rock.

  The demons turn and move outward, toward the edges of what has become a fixed great circular arena. What had been the central structure has now somehow moved itself to be far to one end and slightly above one edge of the circle. The demons set their h
umans against the enclosing wall, appearing to tether them there with some of their own tendril-energy material. Then they turn toward the center. There is another klaxon. And then . . . well, then, of course, all hell breaks loose.

  The demons launch themselves toward the center of the arena and, necessarily, one another. They have all taken mostly fixed forms now, all different, but all about equally horrifying. Principal Kingston resembles what I can only think of as some kind of bear-lion hybrid with eight enormous spider legs sprouting awkwardly from a matted, filthy, furry abdomen. Ms. Královna seems to have a nautical theme going on: she has real tentacles now, plus a series of spiky fins, several long tendrils that look like sea anemone or jellyfish stingers, and a long eel-like head with rows and rows of very sharp-looking teeth. Mr. Gabriel looks a lot like the Minotaur from Greek mythology — giant bull’s head with sweeping horns curving up into cruelly sharp points, barrelly fur-covered chest, flashing red eyes, even a shiny golden nose ring — only with gargantuan black wings and a lower half that morphs gradually into some kind of monstrous bird, with hooked talons bigger than my head. His huge, muscular arms are almost human-looking, except for the giant clawlike hands at the end of them. I can’t help wondering whether the Minotaur thing is a nod to Annie’s one-time obsession with mythology or just a weird coincidence.

  The demoness’s head swivels toward me, and as we make eye contact I feel her take hold of me, like she’s reached right into the essence of what I am, the swirly cocktail of molecules and atoms and particles and whatever else that combine to make me me, and stretched it, pulling it thin and wide and wrapping it around herself like a blanket.