The Library at Mount Char

  Steve, who was a plumber, spoke through dry lips. “No. I guess not. When does he turn bright and yellow?”

  Her face fell, a little. “Well…he doesn’t.”

  “What do you mean? He’s going to stay like that? All black, like?”

  “Yeah. It’s a plane-of-anguish thing.”

  “Where will the light come from?”

  She frowned. “There, ah, won’t be quite as much. Light, I mean. Plenty of heat—anguish is very hot—and gamma radiation, and all of that, but there’s not much for the visible spectrum.”

  “It’s going to be dark all the time? Even when the sun’s up? Forever?”

  “It’ll be warm enough,” she said defensively. “No one will freeze. And people will adjust.”

  “Adjust.”

  She nodded. “You can adjust to almost anything.”

  Steve looked, but he couldn’t find an answer in himself for that.

  After a long time, Carolyn spoke again. “Well…that brings me to the other reason I brought you up here.”

  “The food?”

  “No. Well, yeah. That too. But the bigger reason is…I want to make a gift to you, Steve. I know you don’t understand—I’m still getting to that part—but I owe you a great deal. It really wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I owe you everything. I’ve thought about this day for a very long time and, I…I wanted to say that…well, it would make me very happy if I could pay you back in some small way. I brought you up here so that you’d see David’s ascension.” She watched him, smiling and serious.

  “OK. Why?”

  “The next time you see the sun rise you’ll believe that I mean it when I say that I will give you anything—absolutely anything—you can think to ask for.”

  “You mean like a Maserati, or—”

  “Sure, if you like. But more than that.” She leaned in close. “I can make you immortal. Invincible. Both, if you like. There are things in the apothecary that will make you smarter than the smartest man who ever lived.”

  “Uh…” The moment dragged out. “Right now I just want some barbecue.”

  He noticed for the first time that Carolyn was sort of pretty when she laughed.

  —

  “PRETTY GOOD,” STEVE said. He licked his fingers. There had been steaks in the cooler, but also some things that looked like a giant scorpion and tasted a bit like pork. Carolyn said it had died out in the Pleistocene era, but it was one of her favorites. Steve didn’t ask. It was good, though, if a lot of food. Naga ate three of the things by herself, plus two steaks and eight hamburgers. Then she curled up like a housecat and went to sleep. Steve debated giving her his leftovers but decided not to wake her. Poor kitty. She’s had a tough day.

  “Glad you like it,” Carolyn said. “Thanks for cooking.”

  “De nada.” Whatever other skills she might possess, it was pretty obvious that Carolyn was a lousy cook. After she’d burned two sets of burgers Steve took over behind the grill. Now he settled back into his lawn chair with a contented sigh. At first he hadn’t been crazy about sitting this close to the edge, but with a couple of beers in him he relaxed a little. It really is a fantastic view. The universe spun above them, casting a warm glow on the labyrinthine shelves below.

  Carolyn fished around in the ice chest and came up with a wine cooler. “Another beer?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll get to it eventually.” He took a couple of swallows of Bud Light and burped softly, tasting extinct scorpion meat. “So…about this gift. Could you make me be president?”

  “Of what?”

  “The United States.”

  “Sure, if you like. I can’t imagine why you’d want to be, though.”

  “Good point. How about Emperor of the Earth?”

  “Easy-peasy.”

  “Hmm.” He thought about it for a minute. “Could I be faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings in a single bound? And be able to shoot lasers out of my eyes?”

  “Lasers?”

  “Well, I think it’s technically heat vision. And freeze breath. Could you do freeze breath?”

  She nodded. “Sure. It would take me a couple of weeks, but I could put all that together. Is that what you’d like?”

  “Uh…no. I was kidding.”

  “Well. OK. You can’t help yourself, I get that. Just so that you know I’m serious. Absolutely anything at all. When we were kids, sometimes Father would play a game where he’d ask us to make up some impossible thing for him to do. If we stumped him, we got a prize.” She looked at him. “No one ever did, though. Not ever. Not once.”

  “Ride a flying alligator through a flying doughnut made of chorizo?”

  “Body modification is on the pearl floor, radial three, branch seven. Gravity is radial two, branch three. That covers antigravity as well. Charcuterie is somewhere on turquoise,” she said, searching his face with her eyes. “I’d have to look it up.”

  “Anything.” All joking was gone from his voice. “Anything at all.”

  She nodded.

  “That’s…wow. That’s a really nice gift, Carolyn. Thank you.” He drained his beer, picked up the next one.

  “You’re welcome. I’m glad you like it. Are you overwhelmed yet?”

  “For days now. Why?”

  “If you’d like, I can go into a little more detail. About what’s been going on, I mean. Answer your questions, if you have any. Why you…and all of that.”

  Steve cracked his beer, spraying himself with cold foam. “That’d be great. But won’t it break you, or something?”

  “What?”

  “If you stop being really, really confusing all the time. Won’t it hurt?”

  She held up her second-smallest finger.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I think it’s called ‘flipping the bird.’ Am I not doing it right?”

  “Middle finger.”

  She adjusted. “Better?”

  “Yeah, you got it.” He paused, thinking. “OK, I’ve got one. It seems like you know all about, y’know, the regular world—who’s president, how to use a phone, all that—except when you don’t. I mean, that first night you were having trouble getting the car door open. How does that work?”

  She smiled. “Well…sometimes I might have been playacting a little bit—pretending to be more helpless than I really was. In case someone was watching, or whatever. They all think—thought—that I’m very sheltered. I’m not supposed to know much about anything except languages. But there were also some genuine gaps. I figured maybe ‘Mr. Cell’ was some guy who made the phone you plug into the wall, you know? They didn’t have the portable ones when I was a kid.” She rolled her eyes. “And I don’t think I’ll ever get you guys’ idea of clothes.”

  “So, you were an actual kid? You’re not from outer space?”

  “Yeah, um, no. That’s ridiculous. Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “I dunno. TV, or something. Well…are you guys all possessed by demons? Or maybe something magical?”

  “Oh God. Shut up before you embarrass yourself.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it. “I just…Carolyn, I can’t begin to imagine something that would explain…all this.”

  “No. Not a demon. And, like I said, there’s no such thing as magic.”

  “What, then?”

  “I’m…it’s like I told you that first night. I wasn’t lying. I’m a librarian.”

  Steve considered this. “I think we’re using that word in different ways.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Probably.”

  “When I say librarian, I think…”

  “ ‘Tea and cozy mysteries’?”

  “Right. Exactly. See? You do understand.”

  “Not really. I like tea well enough, but…I don’t really know what a ‘cozy mystery’ is. That’s just what you said, the first night, at Warwick Hall. That’s what you think of when you say ‘librarian.’ ” She looked at him the way a small animal might look up, hiding in
its burrow. “But it wasn’t like that,” she whispered. “Not at all.”

  “Yeah,” Steve said, leaning back. “I’m starting to get that. But maybe you should tell me what it was like. So I won’t ask so many dumb questions?”

  She hesitated for a long time, looking into the middle distance. But eventually she nodded. “Yeah. Part of me wants to. Really.” She opened her mouth, frowned, shut it.

  “But…?”

  “It’s just…I always had to hide what I was thinking, planning. I had to hide everything, even from myself. Always. Do you understand?” There was a pleading quality to her voice that he’d never heard before.

  “I don’t think that I do,” Steve said softly.

  “No. Of course not. How could you?” She nodded to herself one more time. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “The beginning?”

  “All right,” she said. She drew in a deep breath, and when she spoke the iron was back in her voice. “The beginning, then. When I was a little girl, about nine or ten years old, I spent a summer living in the forest. This was about a year after Father took us in, just after our parents died. I made friends with two deer, Isha and Asha, they were called, and…”

  —

  CAROLYN TALKED FOR hours. Steve thought she might have glossed over some stuff—what, exactly, did she mean by “heart coal”?—but she told him a great deal. She told him about David and the bull. She told him how Margaret’s madness ate away at her little by little until one day licking tears from the cheeks of dead men was fun. She talked a little about how Michael came to look at indoor things with feral, haunted eyes. Speaking in detached, clinical terms, she told him the things David had done, showed him the ink spots on her forearms where he had nailed her to the desk with her pens.

  In the small hours of the morning she came at last to Erwin, who had been her thunder of the east.

  “Well,” she said, downing the last of her wine, “aren’t you going to tell me what an asshole I am?”

  Steve shook his head. “No. I’m not. Other people might, but I’m not.”

  She waited for a beat, then two. “But?”

  “But nothing. I’m kind of a shitty, bush-league Buddhist, Carolyn, but one of the first things they tell you is to try to look at other people with compassion. Not ‘pity’—that can be sort of a tough distinction to make, at least at first—but compassion. In your case that’s not hard. I probably would have shot myself about five minutes after I saw that kid get roasted alive. I literally cannot imagine what that must have been like.”

  “Peter did,” Carolyn said softly. “Jennifer too, I think.”

  “What?”

  “Shot themselves. After the bull. Well, Jennifer used poison.” She looked up at him, lost. “Father brought them back. Then he punished them—fifty lashes or something. I forget.”

  “But not you.”

  “Not me what?”

  “You never tried killing yourself? Or running away some other way?”

  “No. Never.” Carolyn’s eyes were like granite, against which soft things might smash and be broken. “My work was still before me, you see.” Right now she isn’t acting, Steve realized. This is what she is when she doesn’t have to pretend. He said “Jesus,” very softly. Roasted the kid alive? He felt numb.

  Carolyn shut her eyes. When she opened them again the shields were back up. “I think it’s time for bed.”

  “No, I didn’t—”

  “It’s OK. I really am tired.” Wan smile. “This was a big day for me. And…I’m just…I don’t talk much. I almost never talk about myself. I feel, I don’t know…”

  “Vulnerable?”

  Long pause. “Yeah. That.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It isn’t your fault. It’s just…I’m not big on…whatever you call it.”

  “Basic human contact?”

  “Whatever. It makes me uncomfortable. But you asked, and I told you, and now you know.”

  Steve nodded.

  “One thing I am sorry for, though, is that I put you through so much,” she said. “It must have been confusing. Upsetting. I probably could have handled your part of this better.”

  “Oh? Do you think so? Do you really?”

  “Steve, I—”

  “Just, y’know, for future reference, I probably would have done your little jog for a small fee. Two hundred bucks, maybe? All that stuff with framing me for murder was overkill.” He nodded his head a couple of times, wide-eyed and exaggerated. “Yup. Overkill. Big-time.”

  “OK, sure, but if you hadn’t been resurrected, the dead ones would have—”

  “Wait. Hold up. If I hadn’t been what?”

  “Um…nothing.”

  “What did you say, Carolyn?”

  She reached out, almost but not quite touching him. “Steve?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I’ll tell you if you want. But you’d be happier not knowing.”

  He considered this for a long moment. “Yeah. OK. Coming from you, I’m prepared to accept that.” He rubbed his temples. “Anyway, I’ve got the mother of all consolation prizes.”

  “Right. Have you got any ideas about what you might want?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “OK. Well, think about it. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

  “Did you bring, like, sleeping bags or something?”

  “What? Oh. No. There are dormitories below the jade floor. I made one up for you, American-style.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well…I sort of borrowed a penthouse. Out of a hotel, I mean. Have you heard of the Al Murjan? It’s supposed to be really nice. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

  IV

  “Good night,” she said. “I’ll be upstairs if you need anything.”

  “You’re not going to bed?”

  “Not just yet. I have a couple of things to take care of first.”

  “Thanks.” Steve shut the door with a small measure of relief. The “hall” below the jade floor was like being inside the metal artery of some giant beast. But she was right—the penthouse, wherever she had gotten it, was really nice, if perhaps a trifle exotic for his taste. The couch alone is probably worth more than my apartment. It was comfy, though—Naga fell asleep on it immediately. Steve made himself a drink and explored a little, then plopped down next to her. Naga stopped snoring, then raised her head and showed him a fang.

  He rubbed her between the ears. “Go back to sleep, grumpypants.”

  All of the writing on the remote was in Arabic, but On buttons aren’t hard to figure out. The TV also had a split-screen feature. After a bit of fumbling he set it up to watch CNN, Fox, and Al Jazeera all at once.

  David’s damnation had progressed, it seemed. Now he was visible to the naked eye. It was still night in Virginia, but in places like Sydney, Beijing, and Fiji crowds of commuters drifted slack-jawed and motionless through city streets, watching the black dawn of this new age. As promised, David was warm enough and about sun-sized. But even at his brightest he was very faint, a dark gray disk against the backdrop of stars.

  CNN had a bunch of astrophysicists on teleconference. Anderson Cooper was polling them about why the sun was black all of a sudden. What, pray tell, was up with that? Some guy from Harvard was going on about dark matter, how poorly understood it was.

  Steve listened to him for a few minutes, then saluted him with his scotch. “A valiant effort.”

  He flipped channels for an hour or so, increasingly drunk but too wound-up to sleep. MTV was doing a Beavis and Butt-Head revival, complete with videos. There was, of course, endless footage of the fire at the White House, the explosion at the Capitol. There had been a small earthquake in California—nothing to get excited about, really! They had some footage of the black sun filmed from the little cupola thing on the International Space Station, which was pretty. The vice president was governing from a secure, undisclosed location. A couple of Norwegian snowboarders claimed that the
y saw part of a glacier get up and walk away. That was obviously ridiculous, but before and after photos showed that a big chunk of the glacier in question had indeed gone missing. Also the moon might be just a bit wobbly. Gravitational anomalies, perhaps caused by the solar incident, were suspected—

  “Yeah,” Steve said. “Fuck this.” He went out the double doors of the penthouse, leaving them open in case Naga got restless. “Carolyn?” he called.

  The metal hall of the dormitories was rounded, arterial, maybe a hundred yards long. It was very dark.

  “Carolyn?”

  No answer. He went anyway, padding down the uneven metal in his socks. He was much drunker than he had realized, it seemed, but he found that if he moved at a deliberate pace he didn’t stumble too badly. At the far end of the hall oak stairs, rounded and smoothed by the passage of uncounted bare feet, floated in midair. Steve climbed them to stand among the stacks of the Library.

  He had worried about how he might find her in that vast space, but it wasn’t hard. Carolyn hovered a couple hundred yards above the floor, spinning in place like a figure skater doing a pirouette. Her arms were thrust above her in a V. The loose, oversized sleeves of her robe fluttered as she spun. She was shouting at the top of her lungs, babbling in a language Steve didn’t recognize, still covered in David’s blood, now dry and clotted. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Steve couldn’t tell whether she was sobbing or laughing. Maybe both? Beneath her, the jade floor glowed. Looking up, Steve saw the universe he knew, hanging suspended in the center of the Library. Carolyn’s shadow lay over it like black wings.

  Steve watched this for a time. He had come out there meaning to speak with her, to explain to her how bad things were outside, explain her mistake. They would have a laugh, after. But seeing her like this he could think of nothing at all that he might say. Eventually he turned, fled back down the metal hall to the “penthouse,” and slammed the door behind him. Naga raised her head at the sound.

  He went into the bathroom, slamming that door behind him as well, then bent double over the toilet and threw up—once, twice, again. He spat thick drool into the bowl. Oily sweat beaded his forehead. He thought of Carolyn spinning, cackling, thought of the dispassionate, just-relaying-information tone in which she told of ax murders at dinner, told of children roasted alive.