A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  Did you dream about that too? I wanted to ask her. About giving up?

  In my gray-and-green jacket, and my black-and-blue backpack, and even the relatively subdued brick-red-and-black windbreaker that Johnny had swapped for her wool coat in Lima, we looked, I thought, like a sideshow attraction... like posters begging for attention, pasted onto a plain wall. Though I didn’t want to, the only place we had seen unattended material to at least cover our clothes was the black cathedral, where we looked away from Namru’s cage and scavenged the lightest of the fallen tapestries to tie around our shoulders and cover the bright colours and synthetic fabrics.

  Akhmetov had been able to give us vague directions to the library, though without either directions or street names he had had to resort to landmarks, and had done a poor job of describing them. “You’d think for someone with so many books…” I muttered as we walked.

  “He’s not super into the... contents of books,” Johnny said. “Just having the books themselves.”

  “How did he end up with Celestial Observations, anyway?”

  “He never said. I suppose the same way Dr. Huxley got that book of numbers. We can ask him when we get back.”

  I didn’t mean the book, I meant the desert of black sand, I meant the trapped Namru, but I didn’t want to think about it any more.

  The path led uphill, some slopes so steep we had to walk on the sides of the muddy paths, clinging to buildings whose stone crumbled in our hands, whose covering of plants wrapped tendrils around our wrists. Corpses had collected at the bases of the steepest hills, picked over by the small rat-crow scavengers, and bigger things, like pigs but with large, insectile eyes. They turned to watch us, but, perhaps leery of live prey, let us go.

  As we went, the structure of the city changed, becoming higher, sturdier somehow, even with attempts at ornamentation; we passed under reasonably robust arches, saw larger structures with domes and columns, some topped with symmetrical spires instead of the sharply peaked, broken roofs, and strange smooth things that looked like apartment blocks carved all in one piece, as if from the black stone monoliths we had spotted stabbing out of the plains in the distance. Some buildings were connected with stone causeways or catwalks, populated with slumped things that watched us pass and drooled visibly into the breeze; other buildings seemed weirdly fused, as if a blast of heat had joined them. Not a single light shone from the windows or doors, only from the pulsating backs, sometimes, of the few creatures we saw.

  At the top of one of the highest hills we’d encountered, we paused to catch our breaths, white dots dancing in front of our eyes, and looked down into the next valley, or what would have been if it had not been recently excavated and levelled. Instant regret: the soil around the perimeter was as raw and wet as a wound, exposing bedrock, and creatures carpeted the ground. Between the big shapeless bodies, the tiny dots of humans darted around like ants. “So that’s where they all went,” I said, unable to stop myself. “Looks like Big Valley Jamboree.”

  “Lilith Fair.”

  “Lollapalooza.”

  They’re going to kill everyone we love if anyone is still alive on the other side, was the rest of the statement, but we both, I knew, pushed that away, and pretended for just a second that the crowd was something else. Something ordinary and good.

  THE LIBRARY, UNLIKE most of the buildings, was white stone—not just white, but impossibly white, like blackboard chalk, hugely domed in the centre and encircled with narrow columns. No plants clung to the slightly porous-looking surface, nor grew in the wide shallow bowl of blasted-looking red soil around it. The contrast between the white stone and the gray and black buildings around it was so startling that I actually stopped in the middle of the street to stare.

  Johnny tugged at my tapestry cape, and we retreated to a broken column to look at the library properly. Blocky, clean. Something vaguely repulsive about that bareness though, now that our eyes had got adjusted to the squirming, abundant life on every other building. The sterility of it. Where were its worms, its snapping vines? Worse yet, it possessed its own sun, or something that looked uncannily like one—a sun seemingly mid-eclipse, black, surrounded with a red ring that threw off an awful crimson light. No windows, no doors. A rim of bones and teeth around it like bleached driftwood and shells at a high tide line. I couldn’t even see a path. How did you get inside?

  “Akhmetov didn’t know the way in,” Johnny murmured. “We’ll have to watch till someone goes first... but who uses a library in wartime?”

  “People looking up battle tactics or something, I guess,” I murmured. “Monster Julius Caesar. Monster Tacitus. Monster Hannibal...”

  “Mm. No guards. Alarmed, I bet. Somehow.”

  “I don’t think it needs one,” I said uneasily. “I think it just... doesn’t let you in and doesn’t worry about it. Let’s go see what it looks like from the other side.”

  The other side was the same, though more exposed, and after seeing no way in or indication of foot traffic, we hurried back to our original vantage point and kept watching. “Weird,” I said. “It’s the like... roundest thing I’ve seen here. I think it might be the only actually symmetrical thing I’ve seen. Like one single monster gave a shit about the blueprints.”

  “Symmetry,” Johnny said slowly, and her pupils dilated, startling me. “Mm. You’re right.”

  As the light waned and no one came, the reddish light of the library’s sun became more and more prominent, giving me an immense headache. Johnny fretted, but said nothing. She didn’t need to. What was happening back home? What did it look like, who remained human, who had sickened and turned? Who had not even survived the turning, but died in the prion’s attempt to copy itself? The worst thing was to not know. The two moons came slowly into prominence, not rising but developing in the dark and starless sky, apparently connected to each other by a long streak of aurora, the same familiar green and violet as home.

  Next to me, Johnny hissed; I glanced back at the library (no, remember: They call it a tomb. Why?): as night fell, strange shapes were appearing on the bare dirt surrounding the white building, now a dark, saturated red under the light of its sun. Not just shapes, patterns. Shadows. Cast by what? They were swooping arabesques, curves and lines, sharp angles, and nothing was casting them.

  At last, someone approached the edge of the library’s grounds, as if they too had been watching for this. Moving with extraordinary caution, in a long ragged robe that swept the dust up into clouds around it, they stepped over the bones and onto one of the shadows. There was a tremor, a hum: but the creature kept going, their three long horns shining for a moment as the light fell on them, then returning to darkness, almost invisibility. I held my breath as they shuffled along, wondering if they would make it inside.

  The tremor grew stronger, till my teeth chattered, and we looked up to see if there was anything above the column that might fall on us, a roof or an ornament. Nothing, only a great skeletal-looking flying thing that looked down at us in silence, having landed silently while we watched, two bluish fires flaring in the long, razor-beaked skull. I froze; Johnny did too, but after a moment it rose into the air and silently fled to the distant hills, still just visible in the last of the light. Lightning flashed once in the distance, illuminating a sky filled with immense clouds, swirls and spirals of them, like eyes.

  Below, the horned creature was still moving, and had almost reached the wall of the library, then disappeared into a pool of darkness. As they did so, the shadows on the ground shimmered, shifted, and moved into a new pattern. Johnny glanced at me in alarm; but there was nothing else for it. That was what writing was for, after all: to tell people things when the knower of the things wasn’t there. Or wouldn’t say; no one here, human or otherwise, would tell us how to go home again, even if tortured. But something in there would know, and it was all we had.

  “Let’s go,” Johnny whispered, and I nodded and followed her towards the great white building.

  CHAPTER SEVENT
EEN

  WHETHER FROM THE library’s black sun, or some poisonous thing in the dust around it (spores? chemicals? something emitted from the corpses of monsters?), my eyes began to water as we reached the perimeter of bones, and I could barely see, no matter how much I blinked and wiped. The same thing was happening to Johnny, who flinched and grimaced with pain as she touched the still-healing bridge of her bruised nose.

  We had been further away from the library than we had thought, or we were having problems with scale—mainly, the problem of possessing human brains that demanded scale, in a place whose makers had not even known the word—and the building was enormous, horizon-filling, and its sun seemed a thousand times bigger than our actual sun. It hung menacing and inert and perfectly black as a cannonball, surrounded by that poisonous red ring from any angle.

  All the same, we hadn’t been spotted yet, and hadn’t been killed or captured yet, and that was something. Maybe we would be overlooked a little longer by the creatures who did such things. Drozanoth, Akhmetov had confirmed, had placed a bounty on Johnny not long ago, but with war preparations no one had time to occupy themselves with a single human, interloper or no; and she had not, after all, insulted one of the great and powerful Ancient Ones, not a god.

  Did your Master tell everyone what she was? What it had given her?

  I don’t think so. No.

  So our secret weapon, I thought, might still be secret. Two years ago I had thought: How they deserve one another! These two. A walking ego and a hovering one, a faced and a faceless one; and those are the only differences between them. So preoccupied with their pride and their image and the winning of the private games they play. But maybe that pride had spared us so far.

  And what would they do to Drozanoth, I wondered, if they found it had not just created but engineered and even fueled the one enemy soldier who could win the war... These were not gods, I thought, known for mercy. More the Old Testament type. It must have been Drozanoth who had suggested to Nyarlathotep that Earth be disarmed somehow, that there was a very easy way to do it, just the removal of one person… and nary a mention of its damaged pride.

  We moved along the shadowed paths, still alive, as far as I could tell, pausing often to shake tears from our eyes. Everywhere the moisture hit, a small black tendril rose from the red dirt, and looked around, furiously questing, a sharp string as wide as a nail. I pictured it hammering into our feet or knees, sending us into the dust where we would die.

  “You have to ask yourself,” Johnny whispered behind me, “why anybody goes to war. Why humans do it. Lines on a map, royal marriages falling apart... you look at history and it’s just the most fucking stupid things sometimes.”

  “Human history. What about these things? They’ve never done it before. Or so they say.”

  “Or so they say. But they’re doing it now. They looked and realized: a single invasion is like a bunch of drunken Vikings washing up on the beach to raid a single village. Good fun, till you get killed or kicked out. But now: what if everybody came to the beach? What if they raided everything and just kept going? Till it was all theirs, till everything was theirs, and the homeland didn’t matter except as just another territory? Now they have... will, direction, organization. A general. A plan.”

  “We underestimated Them.” I stopped, trying to soak some of the tears into the hem of my sweater. “Didn’t take Them seriously, because it had been so long since the last incursion. I wonder if They intended that.”

  We kept moving, and I thought for a few minutes that Johnny hadn’t heard my last comment, till she finally said, “Pantograph.”

  “Oh, shut up about that thing. Gives me the creeps.”

  “I just think... if there is an intelligence directing all of this, then it’s ancient, and powerful enough to create universes. But there’s one even worse than that: the one from the original. The far end of the device, the one holding it on the original. And what’s that one? An engineer? An architect? An artist? Something else? It must be as different from us as we are from a stone or a star. And what must it think of us?”

  I wiped my face again. “Look, if we survive this, you can... I don’t know. Hire a postdoc to look into it or whatever.”

  “Very fun—” she began, then hesitated, unmoving next to me. I looked down instinctively and despite the blur saw that one of the black things had done exactly what I had imagined, and wrapped itself around her boot. For a moment there was no sound except her breath. Carefully, she took another step, snapping the black tendril, which retracted out of sight.

  The ground under our feet began to tremble, the hum I had felt earlier so drastic now that I began to sway, nearly losing my balance. “Run!” Johnny whispered.

  But we couldn’t; all I knew was that I didn’t dare lose my balance, and let my hands touch even the shadowed parts of the pattern we walked. Those black things would burrow into flesh, and I had been invaded by enough questionable magic for one lifetime. We shuffled quickly, coughing in the fine dust that flew up, through a red cloud. Worse yet, with the diffused light, the shadows had vanished. “Stop, stop,” I whispered, and grabbed Johnny’s shoulders, the tapestry bagging under my fists. Something wrapped around my shin, and tugged; I jerked my leg away, feeling the thread snap. Another one encircled the other shin.

  “We can’t,” she whispered, and nearly fell. “We can’t stay still, they’ll...”

  “We can’t leave the path either!”

  Things were approaching through the dust though, indistinct shadows swaying like we were, shouting in a language I half-recognized. Things were twining up my legs too, clinging to my jeans, beginning to squeeze, gleefully, having found their prize. There were guards, I realized through my watering eyes: and they were carrying spears or something like it, bladed weapons. And they were between us and the library.

  But the library was round.

  “Run for it,” I whispered. “Yeah. Back out of the dust. Backwards, and around. Go!”

  We tore ourselves loose from the things and ran, stumbling and catching ourselves, back the way we had come. Behind us, through the dust, more shouting, and then, terrifyingly, the crunch and thud of a spear that came so close to hitting Johnny that I nearly tripped over it as I ran behind her. Instinctively, I grabbed it and kept going.

  Something yanked at my tapestry disguise, jerking me backwards, but the heavy cloth fell slack as I stumbled, and I ducked my head through the neck-hole and kept running. No chance of using my new spear. We pounded towards the white walls, as the tendrils surged and rolled around us like waves, snatching randomly at the air.

  There. The door. Surprisingly small, only twenty or thirty feet high, and open; and hidden entirely in shadow until we raced towards it and through, into a dim gray light and more gigantic structures—as terrifying, for a split second, in the confusion and tears, as dinosaurs or dragons.

  But the way was clear ahead of us, and we kept going, turning randomly, till the shouts faded, and we were surrounded by—not shelves of books, as I had thought, but just stone. Block after block after block of cut dark stone, far over our heads, and the faint gray light provided by translucent, spidery things that hung from the domed ceiling on strands of silk, their abdomens bloated and glowing, something squirming inside them, eyeless and faceless. The floor was the same dark stone as the buildings in the city, tiled, eight-sided. The air was strange too—after we had coughed and spat out the clinging red dust, it was warm and dry, and utterly without scent, unlike anywhere else in the city. All I could smell was the faint mildewy rot of Johnny’s tapestry cape, and my own sweat.

  Johnny looked around. “I’ve never read about this place.”

  “There’s probably a book here that tells you about it,” I said. “In the gift shop. How are we gonna find what we need in here? There aren’t even any books.”

  “Libraries have catalogues,” she said. “And I bet we ran right past it on our way in. But... there could be another way, too.”

  “L
ook, whatever it is, we gotta try it,” I said. “We could get caught any minute.”

  “The books,” she said. “The books themselves. They talked to you in Huxley’s archive.”

  “All those books are dea… I mean, burned.”

  “Yes, but maybe they’ll have spoken to some of the ones here. I mean, it’s a long shot, but… books talk. Wherever they are.”

  “We’ll have to split up then. What’s the goddamn rule in horror movies?”

  “Look, we need a new rule,” she said. “Don’t let the world end.”

  That was a good rule. She couldn’t guarantee that the beetles wouldn’t become disoriented or even ill here (and I agreed: 1779 had been so torpid when I checked that I feared it was dead), but we agreed that we would try to use them to find each other again when one of us found something.

  If we find something, I wanted to say, but didn’t, and instead I watched her go, uneasily, till the gleam of her hair disappeared into the shadows between the stone blocks; then I turned and went the other way.

  I DIDN’T THINK it would be so bad to die in a library, specifically; even though, by now, I had something of a conditioned fear response to the idea of lots of books together, the way Carla had spent about three years screaming and weeping whenever she saw an insect after being stung by a wasp at recess. It only takes once; and books had let me down more than that. I didn’t want to be killed by books, I didn’t think, but as I walked, peering up at the stone blocks, I thought it wouldn’t be so bad if I died here surrounded by them.

  The light-spiders followed me as I walked; and after about half an hour it occurred to me to gesture to them, though faceless: the universal symbol, pretending to write, pretending to open. A long pause: then the biggest one, who, at the unknowable distance to the ceiling, could have been the size of a baseball diamond, slowly extended one long, thickly-furred leg: to my left, down an unlit corridor I hadn’t noticed.