Evil Librarian

by Michelle Knudsen

  Mr. Gabriel looks at me steadily for a moment, then turns to look at Ryan, who is now, along with the apparently mostly recovered Gina, entertaining everyone else with “A Little Priest,” in which they sing about all the delicious flavors of meat pies one might bake using people of various (former) professions as ingredients.

  I notice the intensity of Mr. Gabriel’s gaze and my heart lurches to a stop.

  “Please,” I whisper, knowing it is stupid, and pointless, and that there’s no way I can stop him from doing anything he wants to do. “Please don’t hurt him.”

  Mr. Gabriel swings his head back around to look at me in surprise. “Are you kidding? He’s incredible. Oh, sweetheart, I’m not touching him until the show is over, no matter how much you piss me off. All demons love Sweeney Todd, you know. It’s kind of a given. And your Ryan may be one of the best Sweeneys I’ve ever seen, high-school production values notwithstanding.”

  I gape at him. I can’t even get past my surprise enough to feel insulted by his dig at high-school production values.

  “No, seriously,” he goes on, apparently entirely in earnest. “The whole cast and crew is safe, at least through opening night. I expect that will be all the time I need, in any case.”

  “Time for what?” I shout at him, infuriated and starting to completely lose my grip on the whole conversation. “What are you doing? What do you want?”

  “I want a lot of things,” he says, and his eyes go dark and huge but not in the same swirly-black-hole way from yesterday in the library. He is somehow looking at something far away and elsewhere but also at me and through me. The force of his gaze is like a knife in my gut and I can’t breathe and his eyes are kind of burning deep inside the pupils with black and twisty flames and suddenly I am very sure that I don’t want to know what most of those things that he wants actually are. But he keeps talking. “There are some things here that I need in order to get what I want. And I am going to have them. And one of them is your lovely friend Annie, and one of them involves the souls of pretty much all the students in the school.”

  He looks at me again and the flames vanish and the knife is gone and his voice goes light and breezy and all coffee-shop conversational, as if he wasn’t just one second ago impaling me with fiery eyes and discussing the dark fate of my best friend and the souls of all my classmates. “I tried a women’s gym first, you know. I thought that would be an excellent place to find a bride. I mean, right? It seems so logical. Someone lithe and flexible with good strong thighs and nice triceps. And while I was looking, I would have all those other souls to taste.” He leans in as if about to impart some valuable words of wisdom. “The souls of women are more — more exquisite than the souls of men. Like the best wine you’ve ever tasted. Or for you, my underage friend, maybe melted chocolate. The best melted chocolate you’ve ever had, warm and thick and so unbelievably sweet as it slides slowly down inside you, filling you with syrupy hot delicious goodness as you suck out every last . . .” He blinks and clears his throat.

  I say nothing. This is clearly a monologue, not a conversation, and I’m too appalled and freaked out to even attempt to try to speak. Also: bride? He wants Annie to be his bride?

  “Anyway, it didn’t work out as I’d hoped. I set myself up as a personal trainer, and the ladies all flocked to me like flies to honey because they could not possibly do otherwise, but . . .” He shakes his head, still apparently dismayed by his miscalculation. “They were all too hard, too tired; they came before work or after work or to escape their husbands and children and their stunted frustrating lives, and they channeled all their heat and fire into the elliptical machines and there was nothing left for me. It was very disappointing. But then I got this one girl, a teenage client, young and hungry and so full of life and energy . . .” His face brightens horribly at the memory. “I drained her little by little, mostly while stretching her out after a session, and while I was savoring the final remnants of her on what became my last night there, I thanked her for reminding me. Teenagers have more fire than anyone. Their souls are burning with life and youth and hormones and desire and all the things they want and need and hate and love. And no one would miss those pieces of them that I took away at first; no one pays attention to teenagers except other teenagers, who of course don’t matter either. And I knew I’d be able to take my fill, take my time, gathering what I needed . . . and by the time enough people finally caught on, it would be too late.”

  He looks at me then, looks at me stricken into silence with my horror at what he is describing, and for a second flickers of black flames dance again in his eyes. “I didn’t expect someone like you, dear Cynthia. You are very . . . inconvenient. If you are smart, and I think you can be, you will not push me. If you stay out of my way, I may decide to let you live at the end of things. You and your Sweeney both. Think about it.”

  And then he is gone, and the world rushes back in around me. “A Little Priest” is just finishing and everyone is applauding and shouting out compliments, and Mr. Henry struggles to make himself heard long enough to call a break before we start the next scene. Mr. Gabriel is clearly insane, evil and dangerous and insane (and, let’s not forget, you know, a demon), and even though I still really have no idea what he’s doing and why, it is all the more evident that we have to find a way to stop him.

  But how?

  Ryan accepts the congratulations of everyone near enough to say something or smile or high-five him as he goes by. Mr. Henry beams radiantly at him, then goes back to scribbling enthusiastically on his legal pad. Ryan is glowing when he reaches me. The stage lights have made him kind of sweaty in (of course) a very sexy way, and he’s breathing a little hard, and despite everything, I feel an extra surge of want as I take in the sight of him. But then I hear Mr. Gabriel’s voice in my head, observing my wanting in that gross and disturbing way he did, and most of the pleasure drains out of it.

  Something must show in my face, because Ryan’s smile fades as he looks at me. “What?” he asks.

  I tell him. As well as I can, anyway; some of it is kind of hard to explain, and I don’t want to repeat the part about Mr. Gabriel calling Ryan my boyfriend and certain related statements. But I tell him the rest, modifying the deal offer slightly to be just about letting me and Ryan survive, not letting me “have that” in the sense that Mr. Gabriel seemed to mean, and by the end of it Ryan is sitting on the dirty carpet of the aisle beside my seat, looking up at me with evident and reasonable dismay.

  “Jesus,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  Mr. Henry calls five minutes. Ryan and I look at each other.

  “I think the fact that he wanted to make a deal means something,” Ryan says finally. “He’s obviously got some limits on his abilities, and if he was trying to bribe you to back off, that must mean that you are capable of messing up his plans somehow.”

  “Do you think . . .” Visions of swarming insects fill my mind. “Maybe if we really can find someone who will believe us, that could be the start of, I don’t know, some kind of formal resistance. If we got enough people to fight him . . .”

  Ryan is nodding. “I think that’s still the best plan. If we can find someone.” He looks over his shoulder, then back. “What about Mr. Henry?”

  “Maybe,” I say doubtfully. Mr. Henry would seem to be a great choice; he’s pretty laid-back as far as teachers go, and he likes me, and he loves Ryan. But somehow I’m not feeling it. Maybe just because I don’t want Mr. Henry to think we’re crazy. Or morons. Or that we’re trying to play some mean trick on him or something. Mr. Henry has always struck me as kind of the tenderhearted type. And he’s not . . . I try to put my feelings into words. “I don’t know if Mr. Henry is — powerful enough.” I look beseechingly at Ryan. “Do you know what I mean? He’s super nice, and everyone likes him, but he’s not the guy I would necessarily pick out to follow into battle. He’s more dreamy than deadly. I think we need someone a little . . . meaner. Capable of serious ass-kicking.�
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  “Which is probably exactly the kind of person who would never believe us in a million years.” Ryan sighs. “I can still hardly believe us. I know, I know —” He puts up a hand defensively. “I know it’s really happening. I get it. I’m in. I’m not trying to jump ship. But still . . . it’s nuts. You know that, right?”

  I give him my best eyebrow raise. “What do you mean? This kind of thing happens to me all the time. It’s getting so old I can hardly stand it.”

  “Okay, okay. You are equally as freaked out as I am. You just seem to be handling it so much better.”

  I laugh. “I’m not handling it better. I’m just — I’m just not letting myself fall apart. Because then we automatically lose, right? And you seem to be in about the same place, I thought. Are you not? How are you not handling it?”

  “I’m terrified, Cyn. All day I was so sure he was just going to jump out and rip my throat open or something. And yesterday — when he had me frozen there, hypnotized . . . that was awful. I mean, once I realized what was happening, after you shook me out of it. To be trapped there, helpless, just waiting for him to kill me . . .”

  “You do a good job of hiding it,” I say. “I screamed so loud when he showed up here next to me; I swear my heart stopped completely. And all day, waiting and wondering . . . it was horrible. And, oh, my God, when that kid came to get you in Italian, and you just sauntered out, like nothing was wrong . . .”

  “What else could I do? Tell De Luca I just didn’t feel like talking to the AP?”

  “Well, still. You didn’t look scared. And you didn’t seem at all distracted just now on stage — my God, Ryan, you were so amazing. . . .” I feel the want suffusing my voice and clamp my jaw closed, but it is too late. Ryan’s mouth has curved up in a very pleased-looking twisty half smile, his expression suddenly focused in a way it hadn’t been a moment before.

  “Oh, yeah? Amazing, you say?” He’s looking at me very intently, eyes unblinking.

  My face flushes with heat. “Shut up,” I mutter, looking down, then back up, unable to resist soaking up more of the way he’s looking at me. I can’t help twisty-smiling back. My lips have gone rogue and will no longer obey my commands. “You know you’re amazing. Jesus, even the evil librarian was impressed.”

  That kills the moment a little, which is probably for the best. Must. Focus.

  “He really said the whole cast and crew was safe?”

  I shrug. “Yeah. But . . .” I leave the rest unsaid. It’s obvious we can’t actually trust anything he tells us.

  Mr. Henry calls time, and Ryan rises lithely from the floor and jogs back to the stage. Rehearsal resumes, and Ryan continues to be awesome, and I head backstage to supervise what remains of set construction (other than the chair, of course, which no one is working on because I have yet to come up with a new plan, and I absolutely must figure out said new plan very seriously soon, because tech week starts in a week and a half, dammit) in between sneaking little glances sidewise to make sure that Mr. Gabriel has not appeared again beside me.

  After, Ryan walks out with me into the nearly empty parking lot. We are still trying to think of teachers we might be able to talk to. Suddenly Ryan nudges me and points.

  A few rows over, a solitary navy-blue Nissan Sentra sits beneath one of the parking lot’s dim streetlights. Signor De Luca is sitting in the driver’s seat. He hasn’t started the ignition or turned on the interior lights. He’s just sitting there, hands on the steering wheel, talking. To himself. At least, his mouth is moving, and no one else is in the car.

  “What’s he doing?” Ryan asks me.

  “Preparing tomorrow’s lesson?” I have no idea.

  As we watch, he nods, then shakes his head, then takes one fist and pounds it against the dashboard.

  “Is he having an argument with himself?” I ask.

  “I think he is.”

  “That’s — weird.”

  “Yeah. I wonder who’s winning.”

  We continue to watch him. He continues to argue with himself. I can’t tell for sure, but I think he is arguing with himself in Italian. I remember how he was in class today, surprisingly decent and temporarily not an asshole. I remember how he avoided looking at Annie.

  “I think he knows that something is going on in the school,” I say.

  “Really?”

  I start to tell him how De Luca had been acting, then realize that I never told him what I’d seen Annie do to him. And to Leticia. Quickly, I fill him in.

  “Wait.” Ryan holds his hands up in front of him as if to ward off the new crazy of this additional information. “Annie was doing — doing whatever Mr. Gabriel can do? He’s, like, turned her? Into . . .?”

  He doesn’t quite say it. I hurry on. “No. At least, not all the way. He’s done something to her, obviously, but De Luca and Leticia seemed to recover faster than the students Mr. Gabriel got to. Annie’s not like him. She’s still human.” I say this very firmly, to make sure I believe it. It can’t be too late already. It can’t.

  “What is it that she — that he is taking, anyway? Souls? I mean, for real?”

  “I don’t know. He mentioned souls, but — can you take part of a soul? Isn’t it kind of all or nothing? He seems to be siphoning off little amounts of whatever he’s taking at a time. Life force? Psychic energy? Internal battery power?” I suddenly remember that I never did ask Ryan about his friends. “Is Jorge okay? Does he seem back to normal?”

  Ryan shrugs. “Seems to be. Normal as he ever is, anyway.”

  “Do you think — would he believe us if we tried to tell him what’s going on?”

  Ryan looks startled for a moment, then shakes his head. “I don’t think so. I’m trying to imagine how that conversation might go, and I just — can’t. And . . . I’m not sure I want to drag him into this. I mean, if Mr. Gabriel found out that Jorge knew about him, that would probably be very bad. And Jorge wouldn’t have the Sweeney Todd thing to protect him. Assuming that’s even true.”

  “I could give him a job painting or something,” I offer halfheartedly. But really, I know he’s right. It’s the same reason I haven’t thought seriously about trying to tell Diane or Leticia. Either they’d think I was crazy, which at best would make them avoid me and at worst would lead them to try to get me committed for psychological evaluation, or they would believe me, which at best would force them to face the horrible things going on at school and, at worst, would get them killed.

  “We do need help,” Ryan says. “But I still think finding a teacher or something is the best option.”

  The sound of a car engine starting up cuts through the quiet parking lot, making us both jump. Signor De Luca has concluded his private debate, it appears.

  “Quick! Get in the car!” I say.

  “You really want to —”

  I give him a little push. “We can discuss on the way. But unless you happen to know where he lives, we need to follow him. Now.”

  “Now?” But he obediently breaks into a run beside me. We reach his car and he digs out the keys and drops into the driver’s seat, leaning over to unlock the passenger door just as I reach it.

  “Go, go, go!” I shout as I pull the door shut.

  He goes, peeling out of the spot like a maniac. And then slams on the brakes to avoid hitting the Sentra, which has paused at the parking lot exit. We wait, breath caught, for the Italian teacher to come storming out of the car to scream at us for nearly denting his shiny back bumper.

  But nothing happens. After a moment, he turns right out of the lot and drives off down the street. Ryan waits what seems like a reasonable amount of time, then follows cautiously after.

  The caution, it turns out, is not really necessary. Following Signor De Luca proves to be ridiculously easy. He drives slowly, and we can see that he has not, in fact, concluded his argument after all. It rages on, clearly distracting, as evidenced by the way he sits at every stop sign and forgets to start driving aga
in for several minutes.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to wait until the morning?” Ryan asks for at least the third time as we wait behind the Sentra at another intersection.

  I don’t bother answering him again. I’m sure. Maybe De Luca is struggling with whether or not to leave his wife or quit his job or give someone an A- or something else that has nothing at all to do with Annie and Mr. Gabriel. But I don’t think so. I watch his movements in the car up ahead. It’s getting harder to see him; the sky is dark, but it’s that incomplete evening-dark of midautumn, and the world has that in-between feeling like it’s holding its breath, almost but not quite ready to give up the last remnants of day to the darkness. This seems like a much better time to try to convince someone of something hard to believe. It’s easy to pretend that things are okay in the morning, with the bright, shiny sun winking happily down at everything and birds chirping and people heading off to work and dropping off kids at school and radiating normalcy in every direction. At night, impossible things are a lot easier to swallow.

  Signor De Luca turns onto a side street and then another, and we stop at the corner, headlights off, and watch him pull into the driveway of a very regular-looking yellow house with a neat little rectangle of lawn out front and a wooden slat fence marking off the edge of a small backyard.

  He turns off the ignition but doesn’t get out of the car.

  Ryan looks at me. “Should we go over there now, catch him in the driveway? Or do you want to wait until he goes inside?”

  Both options have their drawbacks. And I haven’t really figured out what we’re going to say, exactly. This strikes me as one of those situations where making a plan is just going to bite you in the ass, anyway. Everything depends on everything else. There’s no way to predict what his reactions are going to be.