The Library at Mount Char

by Scott Hawkins

  “No. That was me. That’s her name.”

  “Oh.” Steve paused. “I don’t think I can pronounce that right.”

  “Probably not. Theoretically I can’t either.”

  “What do you mean, ‘theoretically’? I just—”

  “Never mind. It takes practice. And minor surgery, to really get it right. But…you might call her Nagasaki. Naga for short. That was what the guy who kidnapped them did. They don’t like those names, but they’d recognize them. They’d know who you meant.”

  “Dresden and Nagasaki, huh? Cute. Are they married, or whatever you call it?”

  “No. Naga’s his cub.”

  “Pretty big for a cub.”

  “Well, his child. But she’ll get bigger. She won’t be full-grown for another couple of years.”

  “If she makes it that long.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like I said, she’s lost a lot of blood. And I can’t go anywhere because of the dogs. There’s at least a couple hundred of them out there. How are you planning to get me out of here?”

  “We’ll walk. But it won’t be until tomorrow, at the earliest.”

  “She—Naga—she’s not going to make it that long. And what the hell do you mean ‘we’ll’ walk? I thought you couldn’t—”

  “We’ll talk about it when I get there. Maybe I can—”

  “Can’t you alter your schedule or something? This lion…I mean, she saved my life.” For a moment he saw Jack’s face through the hole in the roof of the pharmacy, trapped in a darkness he would never leave. Go. I’ll catch up.

  “I’m sorry, Steve. I just can’t. But the lion isn’t important.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe she’s important to me.” He hung up. “And fuck you.” She called back, then called back again. After the third time he turned the phone off.

  II

  When he hung up, the female lion—Naga, Steve thought, her name is Naga—was still conscious, but only just. Despite his best efforts and admirable patience on her part, blood was still leaking out from under the bandage. More important, she seemed to be getting worse. Putting on the pressure bandage had obviously hurt her, but she hadn’t mauled him, hadn’t even growled.

  Talked with the lions, did they? He could almost believe it. Not quite, but almost.

  But maybe on some level he did believe it, because when he lifted the thick flesh of Naga’s muzzle to check her capillary response, he really wasn’t afraid at all. Steve wasn’t a veterinarian, but he’d had a lot of dogs over the years, including one who got run over. He knew that one way to check for blood loss in animals was to push your thumb into the gums and watch how fast the color returns. If it comes back fast, that’s a good sign. If it takes a while, like it had on Angie after she got hit by the car, not so much.

  He didn’t think Naga was quite as far gone as Angie had been, not yet, but she was getting there fast.

  So, as an experiment, he shook one of the suppositories out of the little clay jug that Carolyn left for him and took it into the bathroom. There he bent over and used one trembling finger to cram it up his own ass. When he turned on the tap to wash his hands afterward, nothing came out. He used a couple of bottles of Dasani instead, lathering up a dry, ancient bar of Ivory soap gathering dust in a dish over the sink. By the time he got the stink off his index finger he felt better. A lot better, actually. Even the slurring in his voice was gone. But he was really thirsty. He guzzled two more bottles of water and half of a third before he stopped feeling parched.

  Then, with a sigh, he pulled the cork out of the little clay jug and shook out another suppository. “Heeere, kitty-kitty,” he whispered under his breath.

  Dresden looked at him quizzically.

  “Sorry, big guy,” Steve said. “Bad joke.” He limped across the room. Naga lay in a fairly sizable pool of her own blood. He didn’t want to sit in it and soak his pants, and with the way his ankle and calf were torn up he couldn’t squat. Naga herself was no longer conscious, but Steve felt the eyes of her father on him, yellow and alien in the dim light of the overhead.

  When he was ready, he bent at the waist and lifted her tail, exposing her rectum. She gave no response at first, but when Steve placed the small white globe against the puckered flesh and pushed it in, she trembled in her sleep. Dresden’s brow furrowed. He took a step forward and showed Steve a flash of teeth.

  Steve stood up rapidly, held his palms out to Dresden. “All done,” he said. “Sorry.” He took a step back. Dresden, to his relief, didn’t follow. “I’m gonna go see if I can find a bowl,” he said. “If this works, she’s liable to be awfully thirsty.”

  The old woman was in the kitchen. Her husband, done with his mowing, was milling around on the porch with a couple of dogs. He seemed lost, bumping here and there among the dogs like a pinball, jiggling the locked door handle every so often. Inside, his wife stood at the kitchen sink dry-washing ancient, dusty dishes with a rotting sponge.

  “Um…excuse me?”

  “Supper isn’t quite ready, dear. Why don’t you go watch the game?”

  “Do you have a bowl I could borrow? A biggish one? A mixing bowl, maybe?”

  She blinked. “Why…yes. Yes I do.” She sounded almost as surprised as Steve was. She pointed at a cabinet under the stove. “There.”

  “Thanks.” Steve opened the cabinet door and rummaged around inside. There was a stack of bowls—ceramic, stainless steel, plastic. With a clatter he slipped a good-sized one out of the pile.

  “Supper isn’t quite ready, dear.”

  “I’ll go watch the game.”

  She smiled, nodded. He limped back into the living room. To his amazement, Naga was standing. As Steve watched, she took a single step. She wobbled but did not fall. Dresden moved to her hindquarters and sniffed at her butt with a quizzical look on his face.

  “Feeling better?” Steve heard real relief in his own voice. “Awesome.”

  Probably the lions heard it too. They swished their tails, accidentally and amusingly in sync. Steve went to the supply pile and emptied half a dozen bottles of water into the bowl. Naga’s nostrils flared as he did this, and she took another step. This time when she lost her balance she did fall.

  “Don’t try to do too much,” Steve said. “I’ll bring it to you.” He set the bowl down in front of her. She lapped at it greedily until more than half was gone, then lay on her side.

  Hesitantly, Steve touched her muzzle. She pulled away, causing Steve to jerk his hand back. You could call it overreaction, but if ever there was a good time to be jumpy, it’s when fiddling around with a lion’s mouth. Then she leaned forward and licked his knuckles. Dresden, watching this, swished his tail again.

  “Do you mind if I…?” Tentatively, he touched her muzzle again. When she didn’t draw back, he lifted her lip and pressed his thumb into the gum just behind her left incisor. He tested twice, comparing it against the same test done on his own fingernail. He judged her to be better, but not quite well.

  He slid around to her hindquarters and inspected the pressure bandages on her hip. The bandage was bloated and dripping blood, saturated. Steve debated changing it, then settled for tying a third one, his last, over the first two. He pressed down on this, hoping that the direct pressure would help. It seemed like the sort of thing they did on doctor shows.

  III

  An hour later he was still pressing down. Naga’s bleeding was better, but it hadn’t completely stopped. There was one more suppository left in the little clay jug. He went back and forth about when to use it. Now? Or at the last minute? He had no idea how the thing worked, so he couldn’t begin to guess. Was it like a video game where if you drink your health potion too soon you waste some of the benefit? Or was it like sharpening a knife, where it was best to put forth a little effort to whet the edge every time you used it rather than waiting until it got really dull before you trotted out the sharpening stone? He didn’t know.

  What he did know was that if he couldn’t g
et the bleeding to stop, Naga was unlikely to be around for Carolyn’s return. “And you won’t want to miss that,” Steve whispered. “It’s bound to be weird.”

  As he waited, his mind drifted back to Jack, who had also been kind to him, and to whom he had brought ruin. Thinking this, looking down at Naga’s wounded body, it came to him that there might be a new way to say the nothing that had weighed on his heart for so very long. He touched Naga’s neck, gently. She lifted her head a little, looked at him.

  “I’m going to get you out of here.”

  His words hung in the dusty silence of the living room. Dresden turned at the sound, golden eyes solemn over his blood-caked muzzle. Carolyn’s words echoed in his mind. He is still king. His word for ‘promise’ also means ‘a bone that cannot be cracked.’ Steve met the lion’s gaze. “Yeah. I’m going to get her out of here if it fucking kills me.”

  Steve stood and went back into the kitchen. The woman wasn’t doing dishes anymore. Instead she stood at the wall, scraping away the dirt and the paint in lines shaped like a cave man’s image of a dog. “Supper isn’t quite ready, dear.”

  “That’s OK. I need to borrow your car.” He looked around. He was hoping for her purse, or a bowl. Then his eye happened upon a peg with spare keys dangling from it. One of them was a leather tab with the Ford logo on it. “Gotcha.”

  He hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the house when he was outdoors, but he vaguely remembered the garage being on the far end. There was a hall leading in that direction, but it was dark. He found a switch and flipped it, but no light followed. He wandered down the hall in darkness, feeling ahead with his fingers.

  The first room he came to was a bedroom that had been converted into an artist’s studio. Someone—the woman?—had once used it for painting still life in oils—flowers, fruit, a random jumble of costume jewelry. Most of them were rather good. Steve thought of the kindergarten scribbles lining the living-room wall. He shivered as he shut the door behind him.

  The next room was indeed the garage, and the Ford was there, but it sat on four completely flat tires. The dust on the hood was so thick it was difficult to tell what color the car was. Steve tried the key anyway, but it didn’t so much as click.

  “Shit.” He pounded the steering wheel. What, then? He shut the door to the garage and made his way back to the relative brightness of the living room. Dresden stood over Naga. The puddle of her blood was wider. Her sides heaved. Steve rattled the last suppository out of the little clay jug and crammed it up her butt next to the other one. He wiped his finger on the carpet and rinsed it off with half a bottle of Dasani, then drank the rest.

  He limped back into the dim, windowless foyer. Then, from outside, he heard an engine. Carolyn? He ducked into the kitchen and looked out the window over the sink. Not Carolyn, but one of those little white jeeps that the Post Office uses. It was two houses away. Lawn-mower guy was nowhere in sight.

  Uncounted dozens of dogs lay in the yard and nearby on the street. They watched the truck approach. Steve wondered what they would do.

  The mailman was one house away now. He put the mail in the mailbox, but did not continue down the road, only sat there, engine idling. He’s seen them. After a long moment, the mail guy rolled up his window. He turned into the driveway next door, then backed out of it pointing in the opposite direction. He drove off down the street.

  “Shit.” He couldn’t think what help the mailman might conceivably have offered, but he sure did hate to see him go.

  The dogs watched the jeep depart but did not follow. After it turned onto the main road they seemed to lose interest. Also, instead of just sitting on the lawn and staring at the house, now some of them were doing dog stuff—humping each other, playing bite-tag or whatever that was, scratching at fleas. Over the next fifteen minutes or so, more than half of them wandered off. That’s progress.

  Not all, though. Thane and a couple dozen others kept vigil on the yard. As Steve watched, a big dog—Rottweiler, maybe?—trotted up to the porch and sat down. “Fuck.” He went to the door and looked out through the peephole. His ankle was starting to throb. Well, he thought, I guess you could always call 911. They’d probably get you out of here.

  He snapped his fingers and turned Mrs. McGillicutty’s phone back on. When he had a good signal he dialed 411. A computer asked him, “What city?” Steve answered it, careful to enunciate clearly.

  “What listing?”

  “Any taxi service.”

  Behind him, from the porch, came a low deep growl. Steve moved away from the door.

  The mechanical voice recited a nine-digit number, then asked if Steve would like to be connected for an additional charge of fifty cents. Steve said yes.

  The phone rang once, twice, three times. Come on, come on, Steve thought. Four, five. He was just about to hang up and try a different service when someone answered the phone.

  “Yucatan Taxi,” a man said. He spoke with an Indian accent, thick and musical. “Se habla español.”

  “How about English?” Steve asked.

  “Of course,” the man said. He sounded slightly hurt that Steve would ask.

  “Great,” Steve said. “I need a cab. A big one. You got a minivan, something like that?”

  “I have two, but only one driver at the moment. She’s just heading out on a call. Can you wait about an hour?”

  Behind him the Rottweiler barked, scrabbled at the door. Naga’s blood pooled at his feet.

  “I’m afraid that’s not convenient,” Steve said, struggling to sound natural. “Tell you what. I’ll make it worth your while. How about a hundred bucks? We’re not going far.” He had no money, but there was the gun. He would apologize later. “You’ll be a couple minutes late for your other call, that’s all.”

  “Sorry sir, but I cannot—”

  “I’m really in a rush. Me and the kids are meeting my in-laws. My car won’t start. There’ll be hell to pay if I’m late. Tell you what—five hundred.”

  “Five hundred dollars?” the man asked. “Ah. Now I understand. In my village we called people like yourself the ‘shepherds of the shit mountain.’ Such men were often caned. Good-b—”

  “No, wait!” Steve said. “Five hundred dollars, cash! Really. Solemn promise. Plus whatever the fare costs. It won’t be even a five-minute ride, I swear.”

  The man thought about it. “Possibly. What is the address, please?”

  That was a tough one. Steve thought frantically. He limped to the kitchen window, peeked out at the mailbox. “Two-eleven Garrison Drive,” he said. “In the Garrison Oaks subdivision. Do you know it?”

  “Garrison Oaks…” the man said. His voice sounded distant.

  “Yeah,” Steve said. “Smallish neighborhood, just off Highway 78. Do you know it?”

  “Oh, right,” he said vaguely. “You know, I do not think I’ve ever been in there before.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Steve said.

  On the other side of the door the dog gave off a low, throaty bark. Another joined in, then another. Soon they were all barking.

  “What is that noise?” the cabbie asked.

  “Nothing, just my dog.”

  “He sounds like a very big dog indeed.”

  “Yeah,” Steve said. “He’s pretty big. He has separation anxiety. He hates it when I leave him alone.”

  “You cannot bring this dog in my cab, you understand.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Steve said.

  “All right,” the guy said. “For five hundred, I will come myself. I will be there in ten minutes.”

  “Look, there’s one other thing. My, ah, friend is coming with me. He’s sort of agoraphobic and—”

  “What? He’s sick? I do not want a sick man in my taxi, sir.”

  “No, no. He’s not sick. Agoraphobic means he doesn’t like being outside. When you get here, pull up as close as you can get, open the door, and honk. Can you do that?”

  Long silence. “I do not think I like this, sir.
”

  “What’s not to like?” Steve said, eyes squeezed shut, brow furrowed. “Five hundred dollars is a pretty good tip.” He forced himself to stop talking, gripped the phone with white knuckles.

  The dispatcher thought about it for a while. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. “Make sure you have the money.”

  “It’s a white-brick house.”

  “I’m sure it is a very nice one. Make sure you have the money.”

  The cab pulled up eleven minutes later, a white minivan with a photograph of the Mayan pyramid at Chichén Itzá on the side. The driver honked. He didn’t pull around to the front door, though. Of course not, Steve thought. That would have been too easy. The dogs lounging in the yard watched all this, but they didn’t bark, didn’t growl.

  Steve, desperate, scrabbled for an idea. Even with just six dogs on the lawn, the thirty feet or so might as well have been a thousand miles. He wouldn’t have tried to run for it even if he had been able to run. Limping, carrying a half-grown lion, he would stand absolutely no chance whatsoever.

  The cabdriver honked again. Dresden padded over to the front door, sniffed, rumbled. He looked at Steve.

  “I’m thinking, dammit!” Seconds dragged out. He looked out the kitchen window. Maybe we could go out through the garage. There was an electric door opener, and—

  The cabdriver knocked at the door.

  Steve and Dresden looked at each other. Steve grinned. “Coming!”

  “Sir, please can you hurry? I need to return to my office quickly.”

  Steve hobbled to the front door and looked out the peephole. The Rottweiler was the only dog on the porch. Thane and five others stood on the lawn, watchful, under sunny blue autumn sky. Steve took the gun out of the holster, put his hand on the doorknob, did a mental count. Three, two,…

  Steve, bloody and bandaged, yanked the door open with his right hand and shot the Rottweiler. The dog’s head exploded in a crash of blood and thunder. Steve grabbed the cabdriver by the shirt. “Get in!”

  Out on the lawn Thane barked, furious.