Evil Librarian

by Michelle Knudsen

  He’s not dancing around, at least. So that’s something.

  After an eternity of standing there in the doorway, trying to take this in, I hear Ryan’s voice speaking from what seems a great distance.

  “You were right. I was able to tell right away.”

  Mr. Gabriel slowly turns, raising his head. The amount of blood spattered across his light-blue button-down shirt makes me gasp. Whose blood is that? Where did it come from? There is blood on the floor, too, I realize. A lot of it. There is so much that I think there cannot be very much left at all inside whomever it came out of.

  “Oops,” Mr. Gabriel says. “Thought I locked those.” Then he grins. It is not a comforting expression. Especially because of the fangs.

  “You’re —” Ryan appears to be trying to think of something appropriate to say.

  “John Gabriel, the new librarian,” Mr. Gabriel says brightly. “Pleased to meet you!”

  “But you’re — you’re not —” Ryan stops, swallows, starts again. “You’re not human,” he says. He seems to feel it is very important to point this out. Perhaps in case Mr. Gabriel was not aware.

  Mr. Gabriel’s terrifying grin grows even larger, stretching impossibly across his face. He begins to laugh. Then he stops laughing and winks at us.

  “Strangely, the job description did not specify that as a requirement.”

  “Time to go,” I hear myself say. My hand reaches out for Ryan’s and grips it tightly. “Time to go right now.”

  For some reason Mr. Gabriel has not moved from where he is standing. Something about this fact seems significant, but the most immediate thing it seems to suggest is that we should run away, very fast, while we still have the chance.

  Ryan is still staring in horrified fascination. I pull on his hand as hard as I can, trying to make the running away start happening. He stumbles, looks at my hand holding his, looks up at my face. Then he looks once more back at the librarian.

  That is a mistake.

  Mr. Gabriel’s eyes go big and dark and Ryan freezes, staring back into those eyes with a suddenly slack expression. I yank again on his hand, but it’s like I’m not even there.

  Then Mr. Gabriel turns to look at me and I forget everything else.

  His eyes. His eyes are enormous, they are impossible black holes of nothing, they are so big that I start to fall into them. I can feel the floor shifting and tilting and I am going to plummet right into those gaping holes filled with darkness and disappear forever and I can still feel Ryan’s fingers laced with mine and —

  wait

  what?

  I shake my head, blinking, stumbling a step backward and trying to clear the fog that seems to be filling my head. When I’m able to focus again I see that Mr. Gabriel is still staring at me, but the giant black holes are gone and he just looks — surprised.

  Then his eyebrows draw down with renewed determination, and his eyes start to go black again.

  I rip my gaze away. “Stop that!”

  There is a moment of silence in which I keep my eyes firmly fixed upon the New Fiction shelf.

  “Huh,” Mr. Gabriel says finally. Then something in his voice suddenly changes. “Oh. Oh, wow. That explains — wow.”

  My gaze flicks back to him before I can stop it, and I see that his giant evil eyes of blackness are gone. He’s still looking at me, but now he just seems kind of — fascinated. I wait for whatever he is going to do next, but he just keeps standing there, staring at me.

  “What?” I ask finally, starting to feel uncomfortable.

  “You’re —” He shakes his head. “Huh.”

  “What? I’m what? What are you talking about?”

  “You’re a —” He says a word here that isn’t a word, just a jumble of harsh syllables and consonants that hurt my ears.

  He sees me flinch and shrugs. “Sorry. There’s not really a word for it in English. Or any human language. It translates roughly as super-roach.”

  This is such an unexpected thing to hear that when I try to respond, it takes me a moment to make words come out. Finally I manage: “I — excuse me?”

  He smiles. “I know. Not the most flattering of terms. Don’t take it personally. All humans are like insects, really — there are so many of you, and you get everywhere, crawling busily all about, intent on your tiny insect goals. Annoying and plentiful and easy to kill, at least in reasonably sized batches. But there are some of you, a very small number, who have an extra . . . resistance. Who don’t succumb to the usual methods of pest control. Super-roach is kind of the shorthand. It doesn’t come up that often, because there aren’t too many. You’re actually the first one I’ve ever encountered.”

  I hold up my free hand. “Wait. Just — wait. What —?” There are so many questions that could go here. I pick the most obvious. “What are you? I mean . . .” I gesture helplessly at his leathery black wings. “Seriously?”

  He stands up a little straighter, stretching his wings to their full impressive width behind him. “You like?” His expression is somehow both proud and a little sheepish.

  I stare at him, standing there with his gigantic goddamn wings in the middle of the library, shelves of books and desks and computers and other completely and totally normal everyday pieces of high-school existence all around him. “No! No, I don’t frickin’ like! What — Why —” My hands try to go up to my forehead, perhaps to try to soothe my struggling brains and convince them to stay inside my skull and not explode with the impossibleness of everything that is happening here, and I realize I’m still holding Ryan’s hand, and that he is still staring vacantly at Mr. Gabriel. “What did you do to him?”

  “Oh, he’s fine,” Mr. Gabriel says dismissively. “Just mesmerized. You would be, too, except for the whole super-roach thing.”

  “Stop calling me that!” I know it is ridiculous to feel insulted when there are far more important things going on, but I can’t help it.

  “You should be glad,” he goes on. “It makes you much harder to kill than the other bugs. Although, of course, still squashable when one puts his mind to it.” Something in his playful expression shifts here, and he gives me a level and considering look that makes my stomach try to crawl out through my spine. I remember that we need to run away. That whatever Mr. Gabriel is, he is obviously not filled with happy good intentions toward my companion and myself.

  And Annie? What are his intentions toward her?

  Dammit.

  “Where’s Annie? Is she here?”

  He smiles again, a disgusting, knowing smile that my fingers ache to scratch right off his face. “Ah, Annie,” he says, speaking her name like a caress. It makes me want to throw up. “No, no. She’s safe at home. My task here was not one that required her assistance. Not yet.”

  His task. His task, which is — what? I stare at him, at the chalk symbol, at the blood on his shirt and all around the floor. Whose blood is that? my brain whispers again. He must have killed someone. He’s doing some kind of demony witchcraft (demoncraft?), and there is someone’s blood all over the place, and do evil murdering demon librarians generally let witnesses to their crimes go running off into the late afternoon to tattle to the world? No. No, they do not. Why hasn’t Mr. Gabriel killed us already?

  Oh, right. Because I’m a super-roach, and it’s not so easy.

  But still possible, my brain reminds me.

  Right. Thanks. Shut up. But Ryan —

  “Aaaaanyway,” Mr. Gabriel says, breaking into my spiraling thoughts. “I’m kind of in the middle of something. So I’m afraid I’m going to have to —” He takes a step forward.

  I take a step back, but Ryan doesn’t step with me.

  Dammit!

  I yank again on his hand, but he’s clearly still lost in the paralyzing memory of Mr. Gabriel’s gaping black-hole eyes. He’s not here with me, not able to help or even to move. I pull my hand from his and step in front of him. I am horribly conscious of Mr. Gabrie
l still standing a few feet away, but at the same time I finally register that his step forward was only a single step. I think about the chalk-drawn symbol on the floor. A million half-remembered movies and TV shows and horror novels race through my mind, and I think about pentagrams and portals and containment fields, and I start to believe that Mr. Gabriel can’t actually leave the lines of the shape he’s standing inside. Not right now. Which is why he went for the mesmerizing thing. Possibly to keep us standing there oblivious and helpless until he was able to move more freely and kill us at his leisure.

  “Ryan!” I scream at him, the same way I did to Leticia earlier. Then I raise my hand and slap him across the face as hard as I can.

  He staggers backward. He blinks and shakes his head and seems to be coming back to himself, finally. He looks at me, confused. “Cyn? What the hell —?” His eyes go wide and I see him start to remember, and then I see him start to shift his gaze over my shoulder to where Mr. Gabriel is and I grab his head with both hands.

  “Hey!” I shout. “Eyes on me. Do not look anywhere else. I mean it.”

  “But —”

  “Ryan goddammit just do what I say and keep your eyes right here on mine or I will kill you!” He is a little startled by this rather harsh directive, but it does the trick. For the moment. Slowly I start to move to the side, drawing Ryan’s gaze with me, making him turn as I do, until he is facing the door.

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay. Listen. I am going to let go of your head, and you are going to keep looking right there at the door, okay? Okay?”

  He nods. “Okay. Yes, okay.”

  “Okay. I don’t know what you remember, but I will explain it all later. We just need to get out of here.”

  There is a dark chuckle from behind Ryan, and I see him wanting to turn around.

  “Hey!” I shout at him. “Don’t you dare turn around. What did I say?”

  “Okay,” he says again. He looks scared. I don’t blame him. I am feeling somewhat terrified myself. Except there’s no time for that now, and so I will just have to be terrified later.

  “Okay,” I say. “Here we go.” I take a breath and then I move, simultaneously releasing Ryan’s head and turning around to face the door and grabbing his hand again and pulling him forward with me toward the exit. I am certain as I reach for them that the doors will suddenly be locked as they were the other night, but they push open instantly, releasing us into the dim hallway. Mr. Gabriel is letting us go. For now.

  With every step Ryan seems to come more back to himself, and together we tear down the hall and the stairs and outside and away, away, away, away, away, running and running and not looking back.

  Before too long he is the one pulling me forward, and I curse myself for not having had the foresight to start doing track or something years ago so that I’d be ready for situations like this. But terror is a pretty good substitute for athletic fitness, it turns out, and I’m able to keep going even though my lungs are about to disintegrate and my legs feel like they weigh a million pounds each.

  Eventually Ryan slows down, looks behind us, and finally stops.

  “Oh, thank God,” I say, stopping beside him and bending over with my hands on my thighs. I am trying to remember how to breathe.

  Ryan whips out his phone.

  “Who — are you — calling?” I manage between gasps.

  “911,” he says, his tone suggesting that this should be obvious.

  I straighten and snatch the phone from his hand.

  “Hey!”

  “And what are you going to tell them, exactly?”

  “The librarian is a demon! We have to tell someone!”

  “And how well do you think that will go?”

  “I —” Ryan frowns at me. “Well, maybe I could say something else, like that we saw blood in the library, and then they can go and see for themselves.”

  “Ryan, think about it. Mr. Gabriel will probably be long gone. The police will show up and find all that blood, and they’ll want to ask us all kinds of questions, and we won’t have any answers, and for all you know they’ll think we did it! And we don’t have time to be murder suspects right now. We have to — have to —”

  “Have to what?”

  “Stop him! We have to find a way to stop him.”

  Ryan runs his hand through his hair and lets out a strange, shaky sound that’s part laugh, part sigh, with maybe a touch of barely suppressed scream. “Jesus, Cyn. What . . . what was that? What did we just see? I mean, he actually was some kind of demon, wasn’t he? For real. That’s . . . not possible.”

  Right. I’ve already had a nice slow buildup to this confirmation of my suspicions. Ryan is only just joining us.

  He’s holding up rather well, I think, all things considered.

  “Yeah. Not possible, I know. Except,” I add carefully, “I guess it must be, because that’s what he is. You saw it.”

  “Did I? Maybe we just . . . imagined it. Or, I don’t know, maybe we’re having hallucinations.” He begins to get excited at this possible out. “Maybe it’s related to what’s been happening to everyone else, and there’s, like, some kind of chemical in the air or something, and it makes some kids into zombies and gives some of us crazy hallucinations . . .”

  “No. Ryan, you are not going to talk yourself out of what’s going on. We saw it. It’s real.”

  “But —”

  “No!” I yell at him. He blinks and tries to take a step back from me, but I clutch the front of his shirt and hold him there, looking up at him. “Ryan, please. Please don’t. You can’t leave me alone with this thing. I can’t handle it all by myself. I need you to help me.”

  His eyes dart up, around, seeking escape. I dig my fingers even more deeply into the fabric of his shirt.

  “Ryan. We have to stop whatever he’s doing to Annie and everyone else before anything else terrible happens!” Please, please don’t let anything else terrible have happened already. Where is Annie right now? Is she okay? Is she really safe at home like he said? Or is she still there, in the library somewhere, with him? I can hardly bear to even think it.

  Maybe that was her blood you saw, my brain suggests quietly.

  For a second my heart just stops. But no, that can’t be — he’s clearly interested in her for some reason. He wouldn’t — I’m sure he wouldn’t just kill her. He couldn’t.

  Ryan looks back at me, clearly not wanting to give up on the possibility that none of this is real.

  I force myself to focus on convincing him. Annie is okay. He wouldn’t kill her. He wouldn’t. “Think about Jorge,” I say. “Think about your other friends. Not to mention all the teachers and everyone else. Think about all that blood, Ryan. He must have killed someone! Who knows what else he’s capable of!”

  “But — but what can we even do? How can we possibly . . .?”

  That is, I have to admit, a valid question. I hand him back his phone. “I don’t know. We need to . . . we need to think.”

  Ryan nods, tucking his phone back into his jeans. “Okay. But not here, out in the street. Let’s go to my house.” He looks back toward the school, mutters something about getting his car tomorrow, then starts off down the street in the other direction. I hurry along beside him.

  On the way, I call Annie. The call goes to voice mail the first two times, which could be because she’s busy or because her brother stole her phone again or because she’s not speaking to me or because she’s lying dead or dying in the school library. I try again. The third time her stupid brother picks up. When I ask to speak to Annie, he says she’s not home. Which could be true, or could be what she told him to say to me. But the fact that he has her phone means that she must have come home after school, at least. She’s probably still there. She probably just still hates me right now and doesn’t want to talk to me. Which is okay. I mean, it’s not okay, it sucks, but I’ll take it over that being her blood splattered all over the library and the librarian. I try to ask him w
here she is but he hangs up on me midsentence. I hate that kid.

  Ryan’s house is one of three well-kept two-story houses arranged around the end of a cul-de-sac about two miles from school. Neither of us said much on the walk over, lost in our own impossible thoughts, but I pull myself out of my brain as we approach and try to come back to the present so I can look around properly. It seems like a nice place to live. Large leafy trees cast friendly shade over everything, and the mailboxes are uniformly white and shiny with recent painting. The houses aren’t as close together as they are in my neighborhood, where most of the homes are attached on one side and share a yard fence on the other. There’s a basketball hoop in a small paved area between two of the houses, and Ryan steers us toward the one on the right of it.

  We go up to the porch and then he unlocks the door and steps inside, holding it open for me behind him. The house is dark and quiet. I follow him down a short hallway into the kitchen. Ryan grabs a plate and two pieces of what looks like banana bread from the counter and tucks two bottles of water under his arm and then leads me up the stairs. We pass an open door that gives me a glimpse of a neatly made bed and a poster of some sports figure I don’t recognize. (“My brother’s room,” Ryan explains over his shoulder. “He’s at college.”) And then Ryan opens the door at the end of the hall and we step inside. My heart does a stupid little fluttery thing inside me as my brain needlessly whispers with barely contained excitement: We’re in Ryan Halsey’s bedroom! His bedroom! Where his bed is! The room where he sleeps and does his homework and surfs the Internet and does whatever else boys do in their bedrooms! And then it tries to start calling up a very non-PG collection of images of what boys might do in their bedrooms, and I cut it off before it makes me blush uncontrollably.

  Yes, thanks, I almost didn’t realize, I tell my brain. Now shut up.

  Ryan’s bedroom is both like and unlike the few other boys’ bedrooms I have seen thus far. It falls somewhere happily toward the neater end of the spectrum, but there’s still plenty of stuff everywhere; stuff that gives a very full and abundant sense of Ryan-ness, complete with all his lovely contradictions.