Evil Librarian

by Michelle Knudsen

  I’m so taken aback by this outpouring of secret pain that I can’t even speak at first. “Annie,” I manage finally, “you can be whoever you want to be. You don’t need Mr. Gabriel for that.”

  She shakes her head again, dropping her eyes. “What if what I want is to leave here forever, to get to live the kind of fairy-tale adventure I’d never otherwise have a chance to have? I love him, and he loves me, and I don’t care if that means I have to leave.”

  And you don’t care if he kills everyone you care about, I think but don’t say. It’s pointless; she won’t hear that part. I can’t reach her. I can’t talk her out of what she’s feeling, or thinks she’s feeling, or whatever. The only thing I can do is find a way to destroy the librarian. And hope that Annie will come back to herself when he’s gone.

  “I love you, Cyn,” she says. “But I don’t think I can be around you when I know you can’t support me in this. I just — I just wanted to let you know that I wasn’t mad anymore. But please stay away from me from now on, okay? I won’t be coming to classes anymore, so that will help. Mr. Gabriel has arranged for me to do independent study in the library for the rest of the semester. And very soon, of course, it won’t matter anyway.”

  Because you’ll be gone and we’ll all be dead.

  “Because I’ll be gone. And I hope you can find a way to be happy for me, Cyn. In the end.”

  “Annie —”

  “Good-bye, Cyn.” She looks me once more in the eyes, and then she walks away.

  I could run after her. But what would be the point? I’d just ruin her nice exit, and it wouldn’t change anything.

  The only way to change anything is to kill Mr. Gabriel.

  So that is what I will do.

  Somehow.

  After school, Ryan and I head to his place to do a little Internet research.

  I lean my head against the car window, staring blindly at the blur of passing roadway. I am still replaying my conversation with Annie in my head, trying to figure out what else I could have said or done to get through to her.

  “You okay over there?” Ryan asks, glancing at me from the driver’s seat.

  “No,” I say.

  “Still thinking about Annie?” I’d filled him in earlier about seeing her.

  “Yeah.” I sit up, sighing. “I can’t stand seeing her so . . . smitten. With him. I mean, I know it’s not real, he’s cast some kind of spell on her, but . . . still.”

  He’s quiet for a moment, then says, “Well, that’s why we’re doing this, right? Trying to stop him? We’ll figure something out, and before you know it he’ll be gone and she’ll be back to her old self.”

  “Right,” I say back, trying to be heartened. And I am, at least a little. “No giving up.”

  “Right on.” He turns the corner onto his street.

  We head right upstairs to his bedroom. Ryan grabs his laptop from the desk and then flops stomach-first onto the bed. He flips the computer open in front of him.

  He has left plenty of room beside him. It seems very clear that I am supposed to lie there.

  Next to him.

  On his bed.

  “So what are we looking for exactly?” he asks, fingers poised above the keyboard.

  “Um . . .” I drop my bag on the floor and sit sideways on the bed, kicking off my shoes. LIE DOWN LIE DOWN LIE DOWN! My brain is shrieking at me. BEFORE HE MOVES BEFORE HE DECIDES TO SIT UP LIE DOWN LIE DOWN NOW!

  I lower myself down next to him.

  “We could just start searching demons and stuff,” I say, trying to focus, “but I already tried some of that, and there’s so much crap and nonsense out there . . . I was thinking maybe we should look for a good source of information, instead of looking for the information itself, you know? Like an occult bookstore or something. There must be something like that around here somewhere.”

  Ryan starts typing. I try to catch a glimpse of what comes up in the auto-complete window of the search engine, but he’s too fast. Thwarted, my brain shifts its attention back to the fact that his left hip is gently pressing against my right. I can feel all of my nerve endings straining toward him. More, they are chanting in creepy unison. More more more.

  Quiet, I think at them. Now is not the time.

  They fall silent, sulking. But they continue to strain. I feel them trying to force me to lean into him. My brain, unhelpfully, supplies a full-blown predictive scenario of what might happen if I do lean into him, and he leans back, and then we look at each other and all at once he thrusts the laptop off the bed and grabs me with those strong, rugged hands and pulls me close and closer until his mouth is soft-yet-firm on mine and the rest of him is not-at-all-soft against the rest of me . . .

  Is it wrong to be feeling this warm and tingly and suffused with want when all these terrible, serious things are happening?

  Yes. Pull it together, Cyn, goddammit.

  I pull it together.

  My nerve endings weep quietly, but I ignore them.

  “Huh,” Ryan says. “Well, it doesn’t look like there’s anything right here in town, but there’s one on the other side of the lake. ‘Books of Darkness: Your One-Stop Shop for Magic, Mystery, Hidden Secrets of the Universe.’” He glances over and smiles crookedly at me. “They also have Dungeons & Dragons tournaments and gaming supplies.”

  I grin back at him. “Sounds like just the place we need. You up for heading over there now?”

  “The sooner the better, right?”

  “All righty, then,” I say, resisting the urge to shout to drown out my wailing nerve endings, who realize I am about to break what little physical contact they have been able to enjoy. “Let’s go.”

  I stifle a sad sigh of my own as our hips break contact. But we have work to do.

  Thirty minutes later Ryan executes a flawless parallel park down the block from the address we got from the website. We exit the car and walk along the sidewalk. Laundromat, mini-mart, nail salon, pet shop, Books of Darkness.

  The front windows are painted entirely black. The door is black, too, with a red doorknob and splotches that I think are supposed to be blobs of blood dripping down beneath it. I am not entirely certain that this is a place I want to enter.

  Ryan, however, doesn’t hesitate. He grips the bloodred doorknob and turns it and pulls the door open. A black curtain hangs before us, and Ryan pushes through to the inner space beyond. With one last backward glance at the still-sunlit street, I follow him in. We have to try, I guess. Plus, all of my nerve endings are still straining after him with all their might, so it’s not really very hard to step up behind him and emerge on the other side of the black curtain.

  I stop in stunned surprise. Ryan is frozen next to me, similarly taken aback.

  Warm recessed lighting illuminates a long wooden coffee bar and a café area serving cookies and smoothies and little organic sandwiches. A college-age girl with magenta hair and multiple piercings looks up from behind the counter and smiles brightly. Across from the bar, there’s a large seating area with chairs and tables and a sign that says, D&D TOURNAMENTS RIGHT HERE, EVERY THURS. NITE! On the far side of the room, stairs heading down are visible through an archway. Above the archway, hand-painted lettering announces, This way to the books!

  “Hey, welcome,” says the barista. “Can I help you guys with something?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Ryan says after a moment. He gives me a little nudge.

  Apparently it’s my job to do the explaining. I don’t really mind, especially since the counter girl is kind of cute and I’d rather he didn’t speak to her directly anyway.

  “We’re looking for some books. For research. About —”

  The girl holds up her hands to stop me. “Books are Aaron’s department,” she says apologetically. “I only know the coffee and snacks and the D&D stuff. Go on down and find him, and he’ll get you what you need. If he’s not at the desk, he’s wandering around the shelves. Or, you know, in the bathroom.”

  “Oh. Um, okay. Than
ks.”

  Ryan and I exchange puzzled looks as we start down the stairs.

  The book room is less colorful than the café, but it’s still not at all what you’d expect from the blacked-out windows at the entrance. The lighting is still really good. Rows of shelves are packed tightly with books, labeled with little signs that say things like WICCA AND SPELL BOOKS, MAGIC HISTORY, and CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE FICTION. There’s a desk in the back corner, cluttered with piles of paperbacks and legal pads and a few big, thick referency-looking books. There’s also a laptop hooked up to a large flat-screen monitor. The walls are a creamy off-white punctuated with pieces of artwork that appear to have been supplied by some local artist, with little cards by each one listing the title and the asking price. It seems to be a series on angels, from what I can tell at a glance. Pretty, and a little sad, somehow. Before I can examine them further, Ryan calls out beside me, “Uh, hello? Aaron?”

  “One sec!” a voice responds from somewhere among the shelves. In the promised second, a guy appears from around a corner. He’s maybe forty-something, with short, spiky brownish hair that I would say he appears to spend a little too much time on for someone his age. He is wearing a They Might Be Giants T-shirt. He sets down a stack of books on a side table and comes over to shake our hands.

  “Aaron Litske, proprietor. What can I do for you?”

  “We, uh, need some books,” I say.

  He grins at me. “That part I guessed. Any particular topics?”

  I glance at Ryan and he nods encouragingly.

  “Demons, I guess. And maybe their powers and how to stop them.” I add nervously, “It’s for school. You know, a project.”

  He doesn’t seem to care about this last part. As soon as I say demons he takes off toward one of the rows of shelves. “Demon possession, demon summoning, or demon in assumed human form?” he calls back over his shoulder.

  Ryan and I look at each other again. “I guess the third one,” I say, and Ryan concurs.

  Aaron reappears with another stack of books, which he takes back to his desk. He sits and indicates a pair of folding chairs against the wall. “Why don’t you tell me as much as you know, and we’ll try to go from there?”

  We sit and I try to think of how to begin. After a moment, I ask, “Is there a kind of demon who can look human, but then sometimes he’s, uh, clearly not human?”

  “Animal form? Or still mostly humanoid but with wings and fangs and such?”

  “Wings and fangs,” Ryan says.

  “Hmm. Okay.” Aaron starts typing. “What else? Powers? Behavior patterns?”

  “He kind of turns people into zombies,” I say. “Not real zombies. I mean, they’re not dead, just sort of dazed and wandering around aimlessly and stuff. Temporarily. Mostly. We think he’s sucking out bits of their souls.”

  “Or life force or whatever,” Ryan adds. “He touches them and then they get all slow and weird and low-energy.”

  “Sometimes he kills people,” I put in quietly. I don’t want to think about Signor De Luca right now. “At least one looked like a ritual sacrifice kind of thing. There was a lot of blood.”

  Aaron nods, typing away. “Uh-huh, okay. Human aspect, siphons life force, requires at least occasional human sacrifice, probably in order to maintain his human manifestation. Is his ability to revert to demon form limited?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” I say.

  “Can he do it anywhere, anytime? Or only sometimes, or only in certain places?”

  “I think — I think only sometimes. I’m not sure about places. There was a symbol on the floor, though. When we saw him with the wings and fangs. The rest of the time he’s a librarian.”

  We seem to have given up all pretense of school-project research. But I don’t think Aaron really cares why we’re asking. He’s all business.

  “Oh, good,” Aaron says. “Always a good sign.”

  “That he’s a librarian?” Ryan asks, sounding confused.

  “That there was a containment circle — that symbol you saw on the floor. Usually that means the demon can only assume partial demon form by accessing his home dimension. If there was a drawing on the floor, he probably created a portal that existed only within the symbol. Meaning he couldn’t just step out and be a demon all over the place.”

  We were right. That’s why he hadn’t chased us that day. But —

  “But how does he get back out, then? I mean, when he wants to be human again? If he can’t leave the symbol . . .?”

  “Human accomplice, most likely,” Aaron says. “Someone he can trust to draw the right diagram and then to let him out again when he’s finished.”

  “Someone — someone he’s got under his influence?” He totally lied to me, that jerk. Annie must have still been there. Unless he arranged to have her come back later, I guess.

  “Probably,” Aaron agrees. “Or someone who just gets off on helping demons, maybe in exchange for money or power. Demons can promise all kinds of things, of course. They don’t always deliver, but by then it’s usually too late anyway.”

  “Too late?”

  Aaron nods, still typing and clicking away at the computer. “Demons aren’t particularly trustworthy. Or loyal. Once they’ve got what they want, they often just kill their accomplices, unless there’s still more they’re going to need from them in the future.”

  Oh, Annie.

  It’s okay, my brain reminds me. He’s not going to kill her. He’s going to make her his demon bride and take her away forever.

  Right. Thanks. So much better.

  Ryan and I share another glance.

  “So, how can we stop one of these demons?” I ask. “We can stop him, right? I mean, it’s possible?”

  “Well, let’s see.” Aaron starts scrolling through whatever information his typing and searching has retrieved. I try not to bounce impatiently in my seat.

  “Okeydokey,” Aaron says finally, looking up at us. “I think what you’ve got is a middle-grade demon; serious but not one of the big evil superstars or anything. It should be possible to destroy him. That’s what you want, right? To kill him?”

  “Yes.” We say it together.

  “Okay.” Aaron resumes his clicking and typing. “Give me just a second here . . .”

  We sit, striving for patience and calm. After a moment Ryan asks, “Will all the spaced-out people come back to themselves? I mean, once he’s dead? Will they come back to normal?”

  That’s a good question. De Luca had thought so, but . . . he was wrong about at least some things, obviously.

  Aaron holds up a finger in a just a moment gesture without looking up. From somewhere under the desk we hear the soft whirring sound of a printer coming out of sleep mode. Aaron clicks and types for another few seconds, studies the screen again, then grabs one of the books from his stack and flips through the pages.

  “Okay. So the dazed thing is a side effect of having your life force siphoned away.”

  “Is it their souls?” I ask. “Is that what he’s taking?”

  “Eh.” Aaron makes a seesaw gesture with his hand. “I don’t know if I’d say souls, exactly. Maybe, but I think ‘life force’ is better.” He perks up. “You kids play video games? You know how some of them have that life-indicator thing for each player? A red bar or something, showing how much life you’ve got left, or how many hit points, or whatever it’s called in that particular game. And you can lose some of it and then gain more later and be okay, but if it ever gets down to zero, you’re toast. That’s more like what this is like, I think.”

  “So as long as he’s only taken a little bit from each person, they can be okay after a while?” asks Ryan.

  “Yes, I think so. I mean, hey, no guarantees, this is all just theoretical, right?” He laughs a little, and we laugh a little, too — ha-ha, of course, we’re not actually serious here. “Anyway,” he goes on, “I think anyone who’s just lost a bit of life force to him should be fine eventually. But if he’
s got anyone directly connected to him, that’s a different story.”

  I lean forward. “What do you mean, connected?”

  “Some demons like to make themselves little, uh, helpers. Kind of like deputies with very limited demonic powers. People to help do their bidding, since sometimes the demons themselves are limited as to what they can do while they’re pretending to be human.”

  “So would one of these deputies, for example, maybe be able to help him take people’s life forces?”

  Aaron thinks for a second. “Could be. Don’t really know what all the variations are, but that certainly sounds possible. Anyway, anyone he’s turned into a deputy will need to be severed from his control before he’s destroyed, or they’ll be destroyed right along with him.”

  “Oh,” I say, sitting back in dismay. Ryan gives me a sympathetic look. “How — how do we break that connection?”

  “I’d say you’re looking at a three-step process. Step one is to bind the demon so that you can do the rest of it without him getting away. Or, you know, killing you. For this, you will need . . .”

  He lays a book open before us on the table.

  “. . . this diagram,” he continues. “You’ve got to either draw it first and then summon him into it, or draw it around him while he’s standing still.”