Poison Most Vial

by Benedict Carey

  “I look OK to you?”

  Rex rolled over and practically hugged the solid floor. Pushed to his feet.

  Ruby looked around. The dark eased, barely, and she saw rows and rows, big rows, of something extending to the ceiling. Walls? She reached up and touched one—and it moved slightly.

  “What are these stupid . . . ,” she said, moving in front of one of the huge things, reaching up to feel it—and felt a heavy thump on her head.

  “Aaaagh!”

  “Ruby! Fight him off, fight him off! There’re bodies everywhere!”

  “Be quiet already. I got it on the floor,” said Ruby. “It’s a book, not a zombie, you lunatic. You’re screaming like a girl.”

  “You screamed first, also like a girl,” said Rex. She could see the wide whites of his eyes bobbing in the darkness. “Books? Oh, don’t do that to me again, false alarm like that. I been traumatized ever since The Toolbox Murderer.”

  The smell, the weight, the very size of the room: It was a submerged storehouse, an underground graveyard for dead books. Stacks and stacks, row upon row.

  “The morgue,” Ruby said. “This has to be it. Stacks of books, not bodies. We’re here, in the land of legend.”

  “And we best be outta here soon,” Rex said. “We made too much noise already.”

  They zigzagged into one stack and out the other side. Into another and out again, and another and another.

  Ruby stopped midstride. “Oh no.” The ceiling panel—had she replaced it? “Rex,” she said.

  “Ruby, how we ever gonna get outta here?” he said.

  “I don’t know, but we gotta keep moving, just like you said up there in the pipes.”

  “OK, I got a little more left. But we need to look for something to tell us where we are.”

  The morgue was dark and looked the same in all directions. Pick a direction and go to the nearest wall: That was the only plan Ruby could muster. She heard Rex’s breathing behind her and timed her steps, three and one, three plus one, as if she were on her way to school and everything was all right. The light never changed; neither did the stacks. And then they did.

  “What this?” Rex said.

  “It’s—I don’t know. Like a clearing.” Stacks radiated outward at angles. “Can you see anything?”

  “Yeah, I see a combination wig and milkshake shop. What you think? I’m looking at the same thing as you.”

  “I thought if we just followed the stacks till we hit a wall . . . But now, which way?”

  “Place is a maze, not a morgue. Pretty soon the bodies gonna come to life, and then it’s Toolbox Murderer all over again.”

  “Forget the zombies. We’re gonna need something to eat and drink. I’m starving, and we’re getting nowhere.”

  “Just don’t cannibalize me, all right? Must be some rodents down here we can catch.”

  “Rex, this is serious. Unless someone turns the lights on, I don’t know how we’re getting outta here.”

  “I know, Ruby. I’m trying to lighten it up. Mrs. Patterson’s always talking about how wonderful it is to get lost in books; I don’t think this is what she means. Let’s just try another row and see where it goes.”

  It led to yet another clearing, again with rows of movable shelves angling off in all directions.

  Rex threw up his hands. “OK, I give up, this isn’t working. I’m done wandering. How we gonna make this place go away and not come back?”

  “We’re not,” Ruby heard herself say. Her subconscious brain must have been working. “Not tonight. Nobody’s about to find us down here, either. The place is too big.”

  “What are you saying exactly?”

  “Sleep.”

  “Here, in this spooky ole place?”

  “You want to go back up in those pipes? I don’t.”

  Rex only nodded, dropped his garbage bag, and sank to the floor. Ruby pulled down a bunch of books and placed them around their spot like land mines, to trip up anyone who might approach.

  Rex balled up the garbage bag and offered it to her as a pillow. She took it. He arranged two soft, moldy tomes for himself, put his head down, and was out.

  Ruby wished vaguely that she had an alarm clock. That she could call her dad. And Rex’s parents. That she could . . . could . . .

  And then all was dark.

  Later Ruby jerked her head up, eyes blinking, her brain still trying to match the dark swaying shapes of the book stacks with something in her memory.

  It came back slowly, and with it the recognition that her eyes were now more adjusted to the darkness. She could make out books, even some titles (On the Principles of Physiology in Crime Investigation) and saw Rex fast asleep next to her.

  She sat up abruptly, wide-eyed. They’d been there the whole night. It was morning. Her dad must be terrified. And Rex’s parents.

  “Rex,” she whispered. Nothing. “Rex, T. Rex, Theodore Rexford, Esquire.” She shook his shoulder.

  “Huh,” he said. “Stop.”

  Ruby cleared the area and explored a little. It was a cavernous underground space. The shelf structures were on rollers so that, heavy and creaking, one could move against another, like giant sliding dominoes.

  “Did you hear that?” Ruby asked.

  “What?”

  Both were silent, listening. A soft snap, crackle, and pop; the place was like the woods. Then—something. Was it a door? Hard to say for sure. No other sound came for minutes.

  Ruby put up a hand for more silence. Now they both heard it, barely audible beneath the creaking heartbeat of the stacks: breathing. Labored breathing.

  Someone else was in the morgue.

  Rex reached down to pick up the garbage bag and the two poised to run—but where? Running would be foolish if they had no idea where the other person was. Ruby again held up a hand. Stay down.

  The breathing came closer. Now movement—a clumsy sound, seemingly only a few stacks away.

  Ruby eased a book out of the stack to her left and peeked through in the direction of the sound. No view. Rex did the same from another angle. He shook his head. Ruby crept forward. The breathing, now a wheezing sound, was very close. Ruby slipped out another large book. This time she saw him: a man, tall, in a uniform, or was it a suit? He was turning into the space next to theirs, so close she felt dizzy.

  And down he went, tripped by one of the land mines. Rex sprang to his feet. He took two steps back and threw himself against the stacks between them and the visitor. The great old bookcase lurched, books cascaded down on all sides, and it rolled forward.

  “Dammit!” said the man on the other side.

  Ruby and Rex backed up, counted to three, and rammed again. The great metal panel shuddered and groaned like some dying animal.

  More books crashed down on the other side, and the tall man was struggling to get up, it looked like. Ruby grabbed the garbage bag and turned to run. Rex put a hand on her shoulder. “Wait,” he said.

  He led her around to the aisle on the other side of where the man was trapped, and Rex bull-rushed again. More books crashed to the floor, accompanied by yelling and cursing. The man was caught in a landslide.

  Rex moved to the next stack, and the next, ramming one against another, burying the intruder as if in a deck of giant cards.

  “OK, that’s enough,” he said, and the two fled down the aisle, in and out of stacks, again looking for some way out. And again the underground library seemed to have neither beginning nor end, neither north nor south.

  “Stop,” said Ruby, out of breath. Their pursuer would push himself out soon; maybe had already. “We need to think. Think. Look at the stacks; what do they say?”

  Wildly, Rex looked at the numbers on each stack. “M456–M897, N76–N890 . . . What on earth do they mean?”

  “There’re dates, too,” Ruby said. In parentheses, below the codes it said (1900–1910).

  “So what, Ruby? This place is too huge.”

  “No, I’m saying let’s go upward in dates—which
way is 1920? Do you see any?”

  “No—I mean, yeah. I think through there it says 1920–1930. See it?”

  Cutting between more stacks, out the other side, Ruby saw it was 1950–1960, and they charged ahead. “We got to get to the present! Run!” said Ruby.

  When they reached 1990, they saw a wall, but no door. “There’s got to be one, or we’re done,” Ruby said. She went one way in the great hall and Rex the other.

  “Here!” said Rex, trying to whisper. A door. He yanked it open, Ruby behind him.

  Finally. Back in hallways. But where?

  “I should have snagged that stupid map from Simon,” Ruby said. “Now what?”

  “More thinking, that’s what,” Rex said. “There’re numbers over all these doors. I say we do the same thing we just did to get out—to the smaller ones.”

  “Why smaller?”

  “Why not?”

  Down the hall they went—LL245, LL240—and the hallway soon dead-ended into another hall, and to the right Ruby saw a change in the light. A window.

  “Rex, c’mon, look over here,” she said. She had no interest in wandering under DeWitt if there was a shortcut out.

  It was a garden window, no bars this time, still too dark to tell what was on the other side. Rex rattled the frame and pushed it up. She slipped through first. Rex handed up the garbage bag and squeezed himself through, turning to close the window behind him.

  A deep window well. Ruby pulled herself up just enough to see over the lip of the well—and groaned.

  “Oh no, I don’t believe this,” she said.

  A low, smoky sky leaked just enough light to reveal the courtyard behind the forensics lab, where it all began.

  The window was directly across the yard from the lab, and for a while Ruby and Rex stood in the window well side by side, their heads just above ground level, staring at Rama’s office. A desk lamp was on, though nothing moved inside.

  “This is the way it would have looked to the killer,” Ruby said.

  More than that, she thought. Maybe the person hid right here in the well. Completely out of sight, a short stroll to the office, no windows in the lab faced the yard except Rama’s. In through the veranda and gone. Then what?

  “Got to be another way out,” she said. “The person had to have a way out that didn’t go through the back of the lab.”

  “And not through that fire door, either, or you end up running into Mr. Rama coming back from the bushes.”

  Probably not back through the window, either, Ruby thought. The corridor was too risky, the chance of being seen in there. “You’d want to get out without going through any of these buildings, if you could,” she said.

  The shadows in the courtyard were gradually melting away in the dull dawn light. The early shift of staffers would be arriving soon, Ruby knew. The pair squinted out into the yard and saw nothing. No other doors, no unbarred windows, no secret passageways.

  “We’re gonna need to climb out and look, Ruby.”

  “No. We’ll be seen out there. Too many windows . . . that man back inside.” He had to be up and on their trail again by now. She felt something change; something slight. The light in the hallway on the other side of the window—it was brighter. Was someone down in there now?

  “You want to get trapped here?” Rex said. “We’ve gotta take the chance.”

  “No, no. I just want to look for a few more minutes, that’s all.”

  “Naw, not me. Look who’s the one waiting around now. I need to move, Ruby. I’m about ready to lose my mind standing round here.”

  “Not yet,” she said—but it was too late. Rex pulled himself up, turned to sit on the lip of the window well.

  He smiled. “’Scuse me, but what about that ladder right up there?” She turned around to see a steel ladder built into the wall, running straight up behind them.

  “The escape route! Has to be,” she said. “You still got your bag, right?”

  “No, I left it in there so we could come back one more time. Course I do.” Rex pulled out the corner of the white bag from inside his jacket. “Now, let’s go.”

  Dead quiet, and the ladder rungs so cold, the sound of their sneakers squeaking over those steel bars: Ruby felt more exposed than she had the entire previous evening. Anyone who glanced out into the courtyard would see her bright blond hair and Rex’s huge form.

  “Quicker,” she said to the sneakers above.

  “You go quicker, if you want to. I’m just trying not to slip.”

  “But it’s getting lighter.”

  “Well, this here bag ain’t getting no lighter. Don’t you be wigging on me, now.”

  “You’re moving like a slug.”

  Up and up, three stories, four, and finally the seventh floor. One last push, up and over the small knee-high parapet that ringed the roof, the height making them tighten their grips so that it took time to let go.

  “This body’s not made for heights, is one true fact,” Rex said, collapsing onto the roof, which angled upward gently; the spires of the library rose black behind him. “I’ll be taking a short rest, personally, so I don’t have a heart attack.”

  “I’m gonna go look around, then.”

  Under a pale sky now, Ruby followed the parapet around to the front of the building, above the main gate. There, kneeling and braced against the short wall, she watched morning break over their entire world: the lab building down to her left, the lab school just beyond it. Out front and directly below, the sharp black outline of the iron fence separating the order of DeWitt from the chaos of College Avenue, the grimy asphalt snake. And of course the Terraces, looking at this distance like a pair of abandoned grain silos.

  For a second, Ruby imagined that she could see her window, a light in there. Where was her dad?

  “He must be panicked,” she said to Rex as he made his way over. “Oh, how did we not bring a phone?”

  “We did. It’s right here in my hand. I’m calling now.”

  “What, you waited till—?”

  “No reception down under, Ruby—Pa! Yes, hello—Course it’s Rex, who else—I been—No, no, I’m with Ruby—Stop yelling, Pa, let me finish—no—yes—OK—We’re coming home soon, you can tell Mr. Rose, too—He’s there? Tell him Ruby’s right here with me. We all fine.”

  Rex nodded, nodded some more, held the phone away from his ear, and made his Mr. Jeffrey face. “OK, I said OK. We’ll meet you at, uh”—he looked up at Ruby; she mouthed an answer—“at Paulette’s. OK? Yes, I’ll explain everything.” He hung up.

  “Mad?”

  “Man speaks about three words a month until he gets angry, then he raves in Jamaican so bad, no one can understand him.”

  “Uh, Rex? If they’re going over to Paulette’s to meet us, we should maybe think about getting off the roof.”

  “You make a fine argument, Ruby. Very High Honors. But we can see right down College from here. Let’s watch and see when they come out.”

  In minutes, the whole group trickled out of the Terraces: Mr. Rose, Mr. and Mrs. Rexford, a few Travises . . . and Mrs. Whitmore! “Look who’s with them,” said Ruby.

  “Mrs. W. in the house—I mean, outta the house. Taking to the streets and all. Next thing, she’s gonna be parked in the Orbit Room by the jukebox.”

  “Which reminds me.”

  “What?”

  “The streets. My High Honors argument from before. Shouldn’t we be down there?”

  “Let’s go find one of those ladders. Got to be another one. On the other side, behind.”

  On their way back, staying low past the ladder from the courtyard, Ruby stopped to look down—and pulled back. “Oh no.”

  “On the ladder?”

  “Looks like someone coming—doesn’t matter—move it, will you, we need another way down and fast.”

  Around the back, there it was, same as the one from the courtyard, this one dropping from the main roof down to the roof on one of the library’s wings, three floors down.

/>   “Another roof, and no place to hide down there,” Ruby said.

  “Nah, I don’t care, we going down,” Rex said. “We need to break out of this haunted castle. I don’t care if I have to break a window.”

  Which he did. Down on the lower roof they found three large windows, all locked. Wrapping the top of the trash bag around his fist, Rex punched out a small pane in one and flipped the latch. Seconds later the two of them were inside the main science library on a landing near the fourth floor. A mumble of activity came from below.

  “Hear that?” Ruby said.

  “I do, and it don’t sound like much. I’m walking out; they can arrest me if they want to.”

  Filthy, their clothes torn, the pair shuffled down the stairs, and Ruby was sure the whole way that they’d be caught, the way it always happened on TV. You think you’re safe and—boom—the bloody hatchet crashes through the door.

  “Walk on through like we own the place, that what it’s about,” Rex said.

  A few heads turned as they strode through the main library, but it was still early; no one said a word. Three steps and one, three plus one, the door was getting closer, and Ruby couldn’t help it: She ran. Put a shoulder down and pushed through the big door, flew down the steps.

  Rex flew out right behind.

  “Justin, you get yourself inside outta the street!” Rex yelled.

  The little boy stopped and stared. “Ooh, T. Rex, you’s in trouble!” He dashed into Sister Paulette’s.

  The place was all shouts, loud even for a Saturday morning. “Looka what cat drug in, big ole bear and a little tweety bird!” one of the older men called out.

  “You hush up, Neville, or we gonna cut you off!” came another voice.

  “Plenty about time, young man—and Ruby.” Rex’s mom rushed to hug them from the table where all the parents had gathered. “Ooh, now, you come here and tell what you been into.”

  Mr. Rose was angry. “Ruby! What happened to you?”

  Anxious now, he hugged her. “Sit down, sit down, you both got some talking to do.”

  “Dad, could we first—”

  “Pudding cakes,” Rex was saying, “P-cakes. Someone needs to order up a pile, ’cuz we very ready to talk long as we can eat breakfast, and bring some of that—” He stopped. “Mrs. Whitmore, well, lookit you, all out at Paulette’s to meet us.”