The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Ah,” I said. “As to that, I, um . . . ”

  “Fiske, sir,” he said, without any trace of surprise or resentment. I wondered in miserable distracted panic how many times he had faced that blank look from men who saw him every day.

  “Fiske, yes. I, er, I’m going to need your help. I need to get into Dr. Starkweather’s office.”

  “Oh,” said Fiske. “Oh dear.”

  Most of the books from Miss Parrington’s crate were readily accessible to me. The commonplace book was still in my office; the others were languishing in the communal office of the junior archivists. But the valuable one, Carolus Albinus’ De Spiritu et Morte, Prague 1588, was immured in Dr. Starkweather’s office against the alleged depredations of Mr. Browne and the Department of Restoration and Repairs.

  Mr. Fiske had the key to Dr. Starkweather’s office, of course, but he balked at letting me in to appropriate something I had already confessed I intended to burn. His position was entirely reasonable and understandable, and it made me so frustrated that I wanted to sit down and howl at the ceiling. Finally, in desperation, I said, “This will get rid of the, er, the rats that aren’t rats.”

  Fiske’s eyebrows rose. But he said, “Well, nothing else has, true enough. All right. But when he asks, I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Absolutely. I’ll tell him I picked the lock.”

  “Can you?”

  “No, but I doubt Dr. Starkweather will, er, ask for a demonstration.”

  “Fair enough,” Fiske said, and he escorted me—and my increasingly unwieldy stack of books—to Dr. Starkweather’s office. It took me only a moment to find the De Spiritu et Morte, for unlike my own, Dr. Starkweather’s office was immaculately tidy and oppressively well-organized. Fiske watched from the doorway, and he locked the door again when I came out.

  “That it?” he said.

  “Yes. This is all of them.” I thought it likely that the only book it was necessary to destroy was the De Spiritu et Morte, but I was not prepared to gamble.

  Hobden was waiting in the doorway of the boiler room, and he was not alone. For a moment, in bad light and panic, I thought the other person was White Charles, but then he shifted a little, and I realized it was Achitophel Bates, the colored man who maintained the boilers and other machinery of the museum’s infrastructure. I had thought—assumed—hoped—that he had already gone home.

  “Good evening, Mr. Booth,” he said. He was Southern by birth, and spoke with a slow unhurriable dignity even to Dr. Starkweather.

  “Er . . . good evening. I . . . that is . . . ” I looked at Hobden, who merely shook his head.

  “Mr. Hobden says you’re wanting to burn some books.” Achitophel Bates was a tall, thin man, as tall as I, and when he looked into my eyes, he did not have to crane to do so. “Seems like a funny thing for an archivist like yourself to want, Mr. Booth.”

  I was unaccustomed to have anyone identify my profession correctly, much less a colored mechanic, and my surprise must have shown, for he said, “Not all colored men are ignoramuses, Mr. Booth. Some of us can even read.”

  “I . . . I didn’t mean . . . ” But I could not take back words I had not said, words I would never have said aloud.

  Achitophel Bates waved the matter aside with one long hand. “But tell me, why are you burning books at this time of night?”

  I did think of lying, but it was hopeless. Even if I had had any gift for deception, I had no story I could tell. I had nothing but the truth, and so that was what I told Achitophel Bates and the listening Hobden and Fiske. Achitophel Bates’ eyebrows climbed higher and higher as I spoke, and when I had finished—or, at least, had run out of words—there was a long silence. In it I could see Achitophel Bates trying to decide if this was some sort of elaborate and cruel hoax. Certainly, it was a more plausible explanation than my lame and faltering truth.

  “You remember the trouble we had with Mingus,” said Hobden or Fiske.

  “I do,” said Achitophel Bates, and he looked thoughtfully from me to the watchmen and back again. “You think this is part of that same trouble, Hob?”

  “Mr. Booth thinks so,” said the watchman, and therefore he was Hobden and surely I could remember that if I tried. “And he’s a learned man.”

  Achitophel Bates snorted. “Learned men. Haven’t you been working here long enough to know about learned men, Hob?”

  “Mr. Booth ain’t like Dr. Starkweather,” said Fiske mildly. “Or like that crazy man—what was his name?—who came down here and tried to get you to sabotage the boilers.”

  “Mr. Clarence Clyde Blessington,” Achitophel Bates said, rolling the name out with a certain degree of relish.

  “Oh dear,” I said involuntarily. “Mr. Blessington is, er . . . ”

  “A committed Marxist and a card-carrying member of the Communist Party,” Achitophel Bates finished. “Yes, I know. He told me. He showed me the card, even, when he was trying to persuade me that he knew what being oppressed by the bourgeoisie was like better than I did. Tell you the truth, I prefer Mr. Vanderhoef. He won’t admit I exist, but at least he doesn’t try to improve me.” His sigh was a mixture of exasperation and contempt. “So just because he’s a learned man, Fiske, doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.”

  “I . . . I wouldn’t . . . ” But what was it, exactly, that I would not do? I settled on, “I wouldn’t tell a lie like that,” even though that was not, exactly, the point at issue.

  “I admit,” said Achitophel Bates, “that I would expect a liar to have a better story—and to tell it better, too. And I do remember the trouble you had with your dog, Hob, and that’s not behavior I’ve ever seen out of a ratter. So, all right. Let’s say it’s true. Let’s say there’s some sort of monster wandering around the museum. I still don’t see why you need to burn those books.”

  “I told you,” I said despairingly. Had he not understood? “It’s the only way I can think of to destroy it.”

  “And destroying it has to be the answer?”

  “It tried to kill me!”

  “Well, what choice did it have?” Achitophel Bates said reasonably, and I stared at him, abruptly and utterly bereft of words. “It doesn’t want to be your slave.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “I know. And I believe you. For one thing, I figure if that’s what you wanted, you could manage it for yourself, you being a learned man and all.” And I winced at the derision in his voice. “But how is White Charles supposed to know that?”

  And when I floundered, he pressed his point: “You’ll forgive me if I have some sympathy for a slave who wants to be free.”

  He was not old enough to have been a slave—but of course, I realized, flushing hot with my own failure to think the matter through, his parents would have been.

  “I . . . I don’t want to enslave anyone. But I also don’t want to be killed so that White Charles can be free of the slavery I’m not trying to . . . that is . . . ” I became hopelessly muddled in my own syntax and fell silent.

  “That’s a reasonable position,” Achitophel Bates said, so gravely that I suspected he was mocking me. “So what you need isn’t to burn it. You need to talk to it.”

  “You, er, you are assuming that it is an entity with whom one can have a reasoned conversation.”

  “You said it had self-volition. And that it spoke to you. So what other conclusion should I draw?”

  “And if you’re wrong?” I said and hated how near to sullen I sounded.

  “Then I’ll throw the damn books in the furnace myself. But I’m not wrong. The only question is, how do you convince it to talk to you?”

  “It is not necessary,” said a new voice, and even if it had not spoken in Latin, I would have known it to be White Charles, for it was a new voice in the most fundamental sense of the word, harsh and dull and not in the slightest human. It had spoken from inside the boiler room; Achitophel Bates turned and pushed the door all the way open and I saw why.

  White Charles had a
bandoned its first body and built itself a second one out of newspaper and scrap lumber and an assortment of Achitophel Bates’ tools. Where I had gathered only impressions of that first body, I saw this one all too clearly, slumped and strange, as if it could not quite remember what a human body felt like. Its hands were enormous, with screwdrivers and socket wrenches for fingers, its head no more than a suggestion, a lump between the hulking shoulders.

  I thought, distantly and quite calmly, that if it did intend evil, we were all doomed.

  But, “Audivi,” it said. I heard. “You do not wish to command me?”

  “No,” I said. And then I realized that by speaking in English, the language in which White Charles had been given the name it hated, I was belying myself. I groped after my Latin; I read it fluently, but had not had to attempt composition since I graduated from Brockstone School. “I do not,” I said finally, haltingly—although at least in these circumstances I had an excuse for my habitual hesitations and stammers. “I want no one to be hurt.” Clumsy, but my meaning should be clear.

  There was a silence long enough that I began to believe that self-assessment had been rankest hubris, but then White Charles said, “I do not want to hurt.”

  I thought, suddenly and painfully, of the creature in Mary Shelley’s novel, which had not done evil until it was taught that evil was all it could expect, and which had yet been so horrible of aspect and origin that it was never offered anything else. Certainly, White Charles was horrible—the ghost of a Hand of Glory—but that horribleness was not the fault of the intelligence which animated its scavenged bodies. Like Frankenstein’s creature, it had not asked for the parody of life it had been given, and although, whatever my sins, I was not Victor Frankenstein, I had an obligation not to perpetuate evil for its own sake.

  “What do you want?” I asked it, as I had asked it before, but this time I asked in awkward Latin, and this time White Charles stood and answered me, if not face to face—for indeed it did not exactly have a face—openly. “I want freedom.” It made a strange gesture with the massive armatures of its hands and said, “I want freedom from this.” Iste. This itself, and very emphatically.

  “The body?” I said, guessing both at its meaning and at the right word.

  “It is not correct,” said White Charles.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That a ghost of a Hand of Glory should exist. It is not correct. It is not right. I do not want to be this thing.”

  “What is it saying?” Achitophel Bates said in an undertone.

  “It says it wants to be free of being what it is,” I said, which was a syntactic nightmare but—I thought—substantially accurate.

  “It wants you to kill it? That’s awfully convenient.”

  The irony and skepticism in his voice made me flinch, but I swallowed hard and said, “It understands English. If I were lying, it would know.” And I looked, rather desperately, to White Charles.

  “Verax,” it said. And then slowly, and as if it were actually painful to it, “Truthful.”

  “But how can you want that?” Achitophel Bates demanded, almost angrily. “How can you want to die?”

  “I was not meant to live,” White Charles said in Latin, and I translated. “I am not a living thing enslaved, but a dead thing . . . ” Another of its strange gestures, which I thought perhaps meant it could not find a word to express its meaning. “A dead thing called into life to be a slave. It is not the same.”

  “Frankenstein’s creature was a new life created out of death,” I said, half to myself, “but that’s a poet’s conceit.”

  “Sum mors vetus,” said White Charles. I am old death. “I am death that was never alive.”

  “The ghost of a Hand of Glory,” I said. “Not even the ghost of the man whose hand was cut off.”

  “You understand,” said White Charles.

  “The ghost of a book,” I said, and only then realized that I was still carrying the entire unwieldy stack of books from Miss Parrington’s crate.

  “So that means we’re burning the books after all?” Fiske said doubtfully.

  “No,” I said, purely on instinct, and was echoed by White Charles’ clamorous voice. There was silence for a moment, as Fiske and Hobden carefully did not ask the next obvious question, and Achitophel Bates stood with his arms folded, waiting to see what I would do.

  “He brought you out of the book,” I said, thinking of that paper body, of the name the creature bore and hated. Then I remembered something else and fell into English because I could not think of the Latin words quickly enough. “No. He called you out of the book. Called you and bound you and feared you so greatly that no binding could ever be enough.”

  “He bound me to murder at his command,” said White Charles, “and he was not wrong to fear what I would do if the binding failed.”

  I did not, I decided, want to know anything more about the antiquarian or his death. I found my Latin again and said, “If you were called out of the book, you must go back into the book.”

  White Charles said again, “You understand,” and although its voice was not expressive, I thought the emotion in it was relief.

  Achitophel Bates was still angry, although I could not tell whether his anger was directed at me or at White Charles or at something else entirely. But he came with us to the rotunda, as did Fiske and Hobden, and watched disapprovingly as I opened the antiquarian’s books and used them to lay out a rough circle, with the Carolus Albinus in the center. White Charles also watched, its low-slung head turning minutely to follow my progress.

  My circle was somewhat cramped because of the Foucault’s pendulum, but this was the largest open space in the museum that did not also contain a host of valuable objects. It would have to do.

  Abruptly, Achitophel Bates blocked my path. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “More or less,” I said. “Education is, er, not without value.”

  “I never said it was. But my experience has been that the value is in the man, not in what he knows.”

  I was assailed by examples confirming his contention. Learned men—learned persons, I corrected myself, thinking of my colleague Miss Coburn—were just as prone to be selfish, short-sighted, and stupid as anyone else. Or even more so, as the evidence of White Charles itself suggested. It took a learned man to make such a terrible and complicated mistake.

  “ . . . I do know what I’m doing. And I, er . . . that is, it’s the right thing to do.”

  “I want freedom,” White Charles said thunderously from the other side of the circle, and Achitophel Bates raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  “That word it keeps using. Libertas. Is that liberty?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” said Achitophel Bates. “I guess from where he’s standing, liberty and death are the same thing. Not like Patrick Henry.”

  “It, er, is dead. The state it’s in . . . there isn’t a word for it, but it isn’t alive. ‘Awake’ is closer. Maybe.”

  Achitophel Bates was frowning, but it seemed more concentration than anger. “Well, I can’t argue a creature has free will and then argue it can’t choose for itself. As long as you’re sure what you’re doing is going to do what it wants.”

  “As sure as I can be,” I said.

  He looked at me searchingly, but seemed to accept that I was telling the truth. “All right,” he said and stepped aside.

  I picked up the de Winter and closed it to create a door in the circle and said in Latin, “Step inside.”

  White Charles did not hesitate. Its groaning, grinding body shambled past me to stand over the book in the center of the circle. I stepped into the circle myself, then opened the de Winter again and put it back in its place. I knelt in front of White Charles and opened the Albinus at random. It fell open, as books will, to a page that had been often consulted, adorned in this instance with a Vermeulen woodcut of a grave-robber—not inappropriate in a ghoulish Sortes Vergilianae fashion. I reminded
myself not to wonder how the antiquarian had come by his materials.

  I looked up at White Charles. It was still horrific in aspect, a crude approximation of the human form built by something that did not wish to be human, but I was no longer frightened of it. Achitophel Bates was right. When given the chance, it did not choose evil.

  The longest part of my preparations had been working out the Latin; while awkwardness did not matter, imprecision might matter a great deal, and the consequences of using the wrong word could be rather worse than fatal. My words were inelegant, but I knew their meaning was correct.

  “You were called from this book,” I said in simple, careful Latin, “and now I call you back to it. Relinquish this unnatural existence. Rest.” And, although even now I cringed from touching the creature, I reached out and guided one of its screwdriver-fingers to touch the page.

  Around the circle, one by one, the books snapped shut.

  The edifice that was White Charles was perfectly still for a moment; I saw—or thought I saw—something depart from it, and it went from being a constructed body to being simply an amalgamation of metal and wood. It swayed and sagged, and at the same time I realized what was going to happen, the entire thing came down on my head.

  I regained consciousness on the sofa in the Curators’ Lounge with the doubled bulldog visages of Hobden and Fiske staring down at me.

  “You all right there, Mr. Booth?” said one. And I still could not tell one from the other.

  “I, er . . . did it work?”

  “As best any of us can tell,” said the other.

  Everything hurt. My right wrist was made of broken glass. My head was pounding; I felt that if I could observe it from the outside, I would see my temples pulsing like the gills of a fish. “Oh God, the books!”

  I started to get up, but sagged and failed halfway.

  “D’you reckon you ought to have a doctor, Mr. Booth? You’ve got a lump on your forehead like a goose-egg, and you’re not a good color.”

  “I’m never a good color,” I said. “But we can’t leave the books in the rotunda—not to mention the, er, the tools and whatnot. It must be nearly dawn.”