A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  “Yes’m.” I lowered my face into my cup; all the same, I felt two alarmingly hot spots on my forehead where her eyes were drilling into me. She glanced between us, clearly aware we were lying, unsure about what, and unsure what to do about it. I knew that feeling. Curiosity, out of everything you ever felt, was the hardest to push down, file away. It was the one thing that had gotten not just us but the entire human race, I was pretty sure, in more trouble than any other trait, and there was nothing we could do about it. Finally, she sighed, ending in a growl that sounded like resignation as well as anger.

  “…You’ve lost a day. It’s Sunday evening. The eighth. Come with me.”

  Johnny took her mug; I left mine on the table, not wanting to drop it on the obviously old, grubby, but intricately mosaic’d floors. We trailed Huxley down a short hallway, turning into a small bedroom, all dark wood panels and tumbled piles of clothes; it smelled powerfully of Vicks VapoRub and stale cigarette smoke. A small, ancient TV perched on the dresser opposite the bed; flipped on, the sound took several seconds to arrive, as if traveling at the real speed of sound rather than the airwaves or cables. “It’s late, but there should be something still. There’s nothing else on the news, that’s all they’re showing. You, go on.”

  Half-hypnotized, Johnny pressing so close that her malted-milk breath fell on my wrist, I turned the dial, heavy clonks that reminded me of the TV in my uncle’s house in Toronto, so old it had been in a wood frame too heavy to move.

  Every channel was the same. A monster movie: a Godzilla production. Skies not dark but brilliantly lit, like the terror of radiation, unseen poison, brighter than a thousand suns. With each clonk of the dial, the pale image rippled before settling, and in some cases did not stop, because it was the world that was out of focus.

  Tattered skylines like burning lace, wings and claws battening leechlike on them; cargo ships toppling with startling speed for their bulk, crushed by the embrace of translucent tentacles, full shipping containers flying like spilled rice; some city unfurling a huge white flag in a field, rippling like silk, as if They would know (or care) what it meant.

  Americans in Confederate t-shirts firing variously at the oncoming creatures and into the sky, spurts of slime jetting up before they fell, trigger-fingers twitching, transforming. The chaos of crowds, a mass of people plunging into the sea from a collapsing island, many swimming to the surface as something else. The air full of burning oil or broken gas lines, lakes and rivers burning under a thin slick of hydrocarbons. Oil tankers going up in darkness, streaming liquid fire. A beach somewhere in grainy grayscale security footage, palm trees twisting like snakes, opening mouths, pulling themselves from the white sand. A thousand people, perhaps half looking not quite right, still clawing and trampling each other to get away from something that didn’t show up on the camera.

  Wobbly aerial footage of empty streets—locked down, or everyone dead or gone?—shivering, changing, things bursting from roofs and driveways like fungus. A contagion, ripping through the world like the plague that had come after the Anomaly. Or perhaps it hadn’t ended, perhaps this was its resurgence, a tumour lying in wait for some signal or chemical or moment of radiation…

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I heard myself say, though my lips were numb and I thought I hadn’t spoken. “In one day? All this...”

  “They can be killed,” Huxley said, and dialed down the volume. “Supposedly. Except it seems when you kill ’em, you catch it.”

  “It?”

  She shrugged.

  Johnny whispered, “Chevauchée.”

  “What?”

  “Old idea. I mean, old word. You… you’re attacking a fortified place. Maybe a castle. The gates are locked, you can’t get in. So you make your army back off, then you go raid the countryside around the castle, kill villagers, loot and plunder and torch the fields. So then your adversary is forced to leave their fortifications and come out to defend their people.” She sounded as if she were reading off a page, her voice high and steady. “Old idea. Still clever. Still works. And this, see.” She tapped the glass. “Like… panicking a herd of something so it stampedes off a cliff. If you know it’ll stampede, and not just turn and attack you. If you know the gates will never, ever, ever be unlocked. You lure the other side outside.”

  Huxley said, “You think that’s what They’re doin’, eh? Because They tried to invade a couple years ago, and got Their wrists slapped? And now They’re trying tactics? Bullshit, Chambers. They’re not that bright. Never have been, or They’d have succeeded by now.”

  Right, I thought. That was true; we’d already said it. So what had changed? What?

  I barely heard them arguing about tactics; I was still staring at the text crawler at the bottom of the news channel, moving so fast I couldn’t read it. Nothing about Canada, about St. Albert, but no news didn’t mean nothing was happening. Mom. The kids. The house.

  As I fumbled for my cell phone, Huxley grabbed my wrist; mud flaked onto the floor.

  “You’ll never get a mobile call out from here. This ain’t a place, understand.”

  “You still haven’t said where we actually are! And—”

  “Oh boy.” Johnny turned up the volume, a little too late; I looked up just in time to see a moment’s footage of the big familiar man, dark coat flapping gracefully behind him, lit by lightning or flashbulbs. Rutger: walking into a prominently signposted police station. Had he been handcuffed? I couldn’t tell. I looked down at Johnny, her face calculating, not yet panicking. The face of one of the twins, trying to get away with something.

  “If They can’t get in, how are They doing this?” I turned the dial one last time, landing on another bit of footage, wobbly and high up, slimy sheets racing over a high stony slope and flowing down the far side, crashing like an avalanche into a village, as people flooded out the other end. It all looked strangely fluid, boneless. A mountain become flesh.

  The question landed with a thud. They exchanged glances that to me seemed out of all proportion to what I had said: Johnny looked cagy, Huxley irritated. We trooped back to the kitchen, leaving the TV on. By way of explanation, Huxley said over her shoulder, “I ain’t supposed to, and I’m not gonna. I’m throwing you out of here as soon as I figure out how. End of story.”

  “Which is absolutely fair, and I get that,” Johnny said sweetly, “but can we talk to the books first?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  Huxley laughed, and turned to look at us; I piled into both of them in the hallway, Johnny juggling her cup to keep it from spilling. “You’ve got some nerve, Chambers,” she said, sounding honestly delighted. “After all those years of volunteering for them out of the goodness of your golden little heart, you’re going to look me in the eye and say you’re not with them at last? You? Look at you, got a face like a weasel. A nice weasel,” she conceded, seeing Johnny’s affronted pout, “one of them pet-store, maybe purebred weasels; but up to no good. You think, Oh, she can’t keep me out’n the archives just for my face, can she, but you bet I can.

  “Nobody’s saying anything, but everybody’s talking. And you know that, bein’ what you are. Some coincidence, it goes—that an outsider, a non-member, starts callin’ around saying the world’s gonna end, and while everybody’s trying to figure out what’s happening and how you’d know, you run off with a boy, simply vanish into thin air, get a reward put on your head, and a couple of days later, what do we get? Eh? The Event, the Invasion.”

  Huxley looked up sharply at me, and I braced myself for a similar tirade, but she was just reading my face, I thought—like a book left on a desk, opened to an incriminating page.

  “Collusion,” Johnny said. “Is that what they’re accusing me of?”

  “Nobody’s saying anything,” Huxley repeated. “Drink your drink. I have to look up how to get you two out of here.”

  WHILE HUXLEY ROAMED the stacks, we were allowed to wait near the front door, which had vanished back into a smoot
h wall of gray stone. Johnny and I sat on the bottom steps of the middle of the three staircases, covered in threadbare red carpeting tacked down with small brass nails. The nailheads clinked against the rivets of my jeans as I shifted.

  “You mean read the books,” I said. “Not talk to them.”

  Johnny rocked her hand in the air: sorta. “They say the books here do talk. Some of them. And more than that, they can talk to books that aren’t here—not just in other libraries, I mean, but other dimensions. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it’s not true, there’s about five thousand years of stories about it. People asking the books what other books know. Getting answers they couldn’t possibly get.”

  “She’s looking after this place for the Society. Right? Like, that’s her job.”

  Johnny nodded. All around us the books fluttered, riffled, which at least this time you could explain with the thin steady breeze that swirled around us, probably to keep the dust off them. It sounded like the whispers of a crowd in a theatre before the movie started.

  “So many books have been destroyed over the years,” Johnny said, looking up at them. “Books specifically about magic, about Them, what happened when They came. Religions and governments of all kinds said: no magic, divination, sorcery, prognostication, witchcraft, necromancy, idolatry. Nothing like that. The Society has always protected what it could, but sometimes there was no way to save things without outing themselves and being killed or exiled. Books, temples, records, tablets, even tombs, art. Statues. Tapestries. Wherever they could hide knowledge, encrypt or encode it, it would be found and destroyed. Finally, they just started trying to put things… entirely out of reach.”

  “Here. In a different dimension.”

  “Pocket universe. Yeah. Now they’re safe.”

  “But no one can read them.”

  “There’s some kind of lending scheme,” Johnny said. “The Society allows limited access. Just to the books, not to the entire place.”

  “She really hates the Society, doesn’t she?” I said quietly, just in case Huxley came unexpectedly around the corner or down the stairs. “But she’s protecting their books, working for them.”

  “People work for people they hate all the time,” Johnny said. “You always do.”

  I got my phone out, unfolded it again, out of habit: the screen was dead, but an ordinary kind of dead, not the way it had looked in the birch wood. I put it away. Somewhere outside of this place was a huge fancy hotel, my room, my little rolling suitcase, my phone charger, my rented tux… my brothers, my sister, my mom, my dad. Waiting for me to fly back tomorrow with stories and souvenirs. And Louis, waiting for me to report back with what I had learned about Johnny’s scheme, if she had one (and, just as Huxley had instantly realized, I knew she did). What was it?

  People work for people they hate all the time. Yes, they do. And in a sense, she had been working not quite for Them, but on Their behalf, the entire time, hadn’t she? Not quite a monkey chained to a typewriter in a closed room, with scientists watching on cameras to rush in and snatch away the sheet of paper on which it had typed some piece of brilliance, but… not very different, I thought. They had made her, and then They had watched her. Knowing something would come out of it that They could steal, twist, corrupt.

  The breeze inside began to pick up, stirring our hair, raising the noise of the fluttering pages into a roar. We looked around, confused. Johnny stood up, clinging to the bannister, then ducked as a book flew off a shelf and nearly hit her.

  I stood too, trying to look into the upper darkness where the chandeliers’ light couldn’t quite reach. The books were trembling, jiggling, more and more leaving their shelves, flapping heavily in agitated circles. A scroll unwrapped itself as it flew, undulating through the air like a kite. In the empty spaces above the remaining books, bats huddled in terror, their tiny eyes winking back at us as if asking for help.

  “Um, Dr. Huxley?” Johnny called, cupping her hands around her mouth.

  Huxley emerged a few minutes later through the storm of books, furiously waving an arm above her head. “What the hell did you do?”

  “We didn’t do anything!” I said. “What’s happening?”

  “Never seen ’em like this. Don’t like it.” She too ducked as a large, heavy book skimmed over the top of her head and crashed into the floor, flopping open with a crack as the spine separated from the pages. This seemed to be a signal, or just too much for the other books to take; the wind died down, and several dozen more books fell to the floor. In the sudden silence, a small, piping voice came from somewhere, in a language I didn’t know; but Johnny and Huxley looked up alertly, staring around the shelves. The room filled with the mouldy smell of magic, making me cough.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “Don’t tell me what’s going on then.”

  “They want to talk to you,” Huxley said tartly. “God only knows why.”

  “Can… you ask them?”

  “They already said they wouldn’t tell us,” Johnny said. Her face had crumpled with jealousy, and I felt a mean thrill to see it. You spend your whole life being the special one, the famous one, the cameras always pointed at you, the face on the newspaper… and suddenly you’re not, and all the lenses are pointed at your shadow instead. There, I thought. Serves you right. Something finally going through the impenetrable layer of ego you wear like a bulletproof vest.

  “They want to tell me something?” I said.

  “Sounds like it,” Huxley said. “You’d better not, though. It’s not good for regular people to try it. You have to be trained, experienced. And you have to be able to use magic. Not everybody can, you know. You could end up with your brains all over the floor. Or worse yet, flattened into a book.”

  “See if you can convince them to let me talk to them,” Johnny said, bouncing on her toes. “It’ll be safer.”

  I glanced at Huxley. “No. I’ll do it.”

  She sucked her teeth, then gestured me deeper into the books after her, leaving Johnny silhouetted by the staircases, clinging to the bannister with both hands.

  “Quit looking back at her. Get out of this if you can,” Huxley said quietly as the light faded, blocked by the shelves. “As soon as you get back to the world, wherever you are. Leave her, my lad. Leave.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t? You better. They’re watching her, they’re watching the both of you, I don’t know what she’s got you around for—muscle or whatever, a lookout—it’s clear you’re torturing yourself to be here. Look at your face! You don’t even know what it looks like, do you? Why, I wish you could’ve seen yourself back there in the kitchen. How you must hate her.”

  I stared down at her, into the colourless eyes no longer concealing their urgency and terror in the dim golden light. She grasped my wrist, her fingers cold and far stronger than I had guessed. “Why do you keep her secrets for her? She knows how you feel. Can you live like that? With someone who looks past your hate and doesn’t care?”

  You don’t know us, I wanted to say, and then, You don’t know me. I don’t trust you. But it was so hard to live like this, keeping not just her secrets, but everyone’s, mine, the world’s. I couldn’t tell her the truth. “The world’s ending. She says she can stop it. What the hell kind of friend would I be if I didn’t at least try to help? What kind of person?”

  “The world did end. We’re living in a new one. She thinks she can… what, turn back what’s happening? If she just asks the right questions? Use your damn head.”

  “You think she can’t?”

  “Of course she can’t. And she won’t. You’ll see how it works out, in the end.”

  “Won’t? What do you… why would you say that?”

  “I’m not helping you,” she said, and gave me a push in the small of the back, towards a little hexagonal-shaped alcove lined with the usual bookshelves. Another chandelier, small and hung with crystals, threw off a low, rainbow-spangled glow. I could barely see my hand in front of my face. �
�I’m not allowed to help you. All right? She knows that, she clearly didn’t tell you. All I’m saying is, you can’t live in the hope that you’ll be able to force her to do the right thing. Go, before she ruins your life.”

  “She already did. How did you get out of the Society, Dr. Huxley?”

  “None of your business. But they’ve been as good as their word. As good as gold. Get in there, close your eyes. The light’s bad for you.”

  Before I could speak again, she had swiveled out of the alcove and shut a hidden door behind me, also books, completing the hexagon. I waited in the dark, hands in my pockets so that I wouldn’t clench my fists. Brains all over the floor, she had s—

  We knew you would come here

  We knew you had changed

  Let us introduce ourselves

  IT WAS TRUE, the light burned and stung, I had no eyes to close and the pain built as the brightness built till I could not see with whatever I was using to see, I flew bodiless over the streets of a city made of shadows, and I was hunted by things I could not see, that could not see me, and I hunted things myself, and the books ran with me, not shaped like books, not shaped like anything, only bright points of urgent light. I screamed to let out the pain and they screamed back and it was a song, and they demanded I remember it when I was released, This is what we must give you, they said as we rushed above the patterns of the streets, and we are very sorry, but we knew you would come

  Why not her? I howled. She is here too!

  No

  No

  No

  No

  No, not her, no

  And I knew that my hatred was right, and my hunger for revenge was right, it was better than any other hunger I might ever have in my life (for money, for women, for knowledge, but also for those things it would be noble to starve for, like honour, like duty), if the whole world hated her, if this unseen universe of knowledge had been whispering to itself that if it got the chance to speak to someone, it would not be her—