The Library at Mount Char Part 9

"None that I know of. Why?"

"Well," Carolyn said, "it occurs to me that the dead ones still get packages delivered most days. Also, there's always somebody driving in to deliver those big round cheese-bread things that David's fond of."

"Pizza?" Peter said. "I like that too. It's a good point. If the reissak worked on Americans, there'd be piles of them dead in the street by now."

"Yeah," Carolyn said. "That crossed my mind as well. You said that the token can be anything, but the field of effect is a sphere. If that's the case, we can just map the outline of the effects and we'll know pretty much where the token is. Right?"

Peter was grinning. "And if we know where it is-"

"We can find someone to move it," Alicia finished. She was grinning. "Carolyn, you're a genius! Library, here we come."

"Yeah, well, it's a little early to start celebrating. Among other things, we still need an American. Do you guys know anybody?"

They shook their heads in unison. "That's going to have to be on you, Carolyn. None of us even speaks the language."

"Yeah," she said. "OK. Fair enough. I'll come up with something. Also there are the sentinels to think about."

They plotted together until well after dark. Carolyn pretended to resist at first, but eventually she let them convince her that David would have to be involved as well.

INTERLUDE II.

UZAN-IYA.

I.

By the third year of her apprenticeship, Carolyn had mostly forgotten the outside world. Most of the others supplemented their studies with outings, or at least vacations. Michael went to the woods or the ocean. David killed scores of men on every continent. Margaret followed them down to the forgotten lands. Jennifer called some of them back.

Carolyn's studies did not require travel. Native speakers were brought to her when she needed practice, and after the summer with Isha and Asha she no longer cared to take vacations. So her world was only the Library, her studies the only escape. She spent her childhood in a circle of golden lamplight, bounded on all sides by teetering stacks of books; folios; dusty, crumbling parchment. One day when she was about eleven years old-in calendar terms, at least-it occurred to her that she no longer remembered what her actual parents looked like. Time was different in the Library.

She lost track of the exact count of languages she was fluent in at around fifty-trophies were never her thing-but she thought that whatever the count was, it was probably pretty high. One of the more challenging was the language of the Atul, a tribe of the Himalayan steppe that had died out about six thousand years ago. The Atul had been linguistically isolated. Their grammar was nearly impenetrable, and they had some exotic cultural norms. One such was the notion of uzan-iya, which was what they called the moment when an innocent heart first contemplated the act of murder. To the Atul, the crime itself was secondary to this initial corruption. Carolyn found that idea-and its implications-fascinating. She was turning this over in her mind one dry summer afternoon when she realized, with a bit of irritation, that her stomach was rumbling. When had she last eaten? The day before? The day before that?

She went down to the larder, but it was bare. She called out for Peter, whose catalog included the preparation of food. No answer. She walked to the front door and went out into Garrison Oaks.

Jennifer was sitting on the porch, studying. "Hey, Carolyn! Good to see you outside for a change."

"Is there any food?"

Jennifer laughed. "Driven out by hunger? I might have known. Yeah, I think some of the dead ones got a grocery dump last week."

"Which ones?"

"Third house down."

"Thanks. Want me to get you anything?"

"Nah, I'm good. But"-Jennifer looked up and down the street furtively-"you might want to swing by my room tonight."

"Why, what's up?"

"Michael brought this back from his last trip." She held up a little baggie with green leaves in it.

"What is it?"

"It's called marijuana. Supposedly if you smoke it, it makes you feel good. We're going to try it tonight."

Carolyn considered. "Can't. I've got a test tomorrow." The last time she missed a question, Father gave her ten lashes.

"Oh, OK. Next time?"

"Love to." Carolyn paused. "You might ask Margaret, though. I think she could use a little fun." Margaret was no longer screaming herself awake every night, which was a relief, but she'd developed a nervous giggle that was at least as bad.

Jennifer made a sour face. "I'll ask." She didn't sound happy about it.

"What's the problem? You two used to be buddies."

"Margaret stinks, Carolyn. And she and I haven't hung out in ages. You really need to get out of your room more."

"Oh." Come to think of it, Margaret actually had smelled pretty bad the last couple of times Carolyn had seen her. "Well...it's not really her fault."

"No. It's not. But she still stinks."

Carolyn's stomach rumbled, audible to both of them. "I've got to go get something to eat," she said apologetically. "I'll catch up with you later."

She hurried off down the street. The houses of Garrison Oaks belonged to Father now, as did the things that lived in them. Most of the homes had dead ones inside as camouflage. These were what remained of the children's actual parents, and some other neighbors who hadn't been vaporized on Adoption Day. Carolyn wasn't entirely sure how they had been transformed into dead ones, but she had a guess.

For a year or so Father had been murdering Margaret two or three times a week. He did this in various ways. The first time he snuck up behind her with an ax at dinner, startling everyone, not least Margaret herself. After that it was gunshots, poison, hanging, whatever. Sometimes it was a surprise, sometimes not. Another time Father pierced her heart with a stiletto, but only after telling her what he would do, setting the knife before her on a silver tray, and letting her contemplate it for three full days and nights. Carolyn would have supposed that the ax would be the worse of the two, but Margaret seemed to take that one in stride. After a day or so of looking at the knife, though, she started to do that giggle of hers. And after that, she never really stopped. Carolyn sighed. Poor Margaret.

But Margaret wasn't really the point. When she was dead she'd usually spend a day or two in the forgotten lands practicing whatever lesson was next in her catalog. Then Father would resurrect her. By this point Carolyn had seen enough of the resurrections to gather that they were a two-stage process.

First, Father-or, lately, Jennifer-would heal whatever wound had done it for her in the first place. Then he would call her back into her body. Once, though, he'd taken a break in the middle of all this to go use the bathroom. That time Margaret's healed body had gotten up and wandered around the room, picking up random objects and saying "Oh no" over and over again. She seemed to be not all there.

Carolyn suspected that was where the dead ones came from. They had been reanimated but not resurrected. They looked fairly normal, at least from a distance. They wandered the green lawns and grocery stores convincingly enough, but in every way that really mattered they were still in the forgotten lands. They could interact with one another and even with Americans-they exchanged ca.s.seroles, filled the cars up with gas, ordered pizza, painted the house. They did these things automatically. It was useful and, she supposed, easier than hiring a lawn service. They could also follow orders if it was something they knew how to do already, which could be handy as well. But they could not take instruction, could not learn new things.

Perhaps most important, they served as a security system. Every so often a stranger would stumble into Garrison Oaks and go about knocking on doors-salesmen, lost FedEx drivers, missionaries. For the most part these outsiders noticed nothing terribly out of the ordinary. Once, though, a burglar actually made it into one of the houses. After he saw what was inside he couldn't be allowed to return to the outside world. When he tried to sneak out the window, the dead ones were waiting for him. They fell upon him and tore him to bits. Father did to him whatever he'd done to the others and the erstwhile burglar took his place in one of the houses as someone's cousin Ed. Or whomever.

Carolyn and the other librarians could come and go as they pleased, though. Hungry, she opened the door of the house Jennifer had pointed at and went in. There were three of them inside: a little girl of about eight, a teenage boy, and an adult woman.

"Make me some food," she said to the woman.

Lately she had been focusing on mythical languages. The English felt strange on her tongue. Evidently it sounded as bad as it felt. She had to repeat herself twice before what was left of the woman understood her. Then it nodded and began pulling things from here and there-a can of fish, white stuff from a jar, some sort of green goo that smelled like vinegar.

Carolyn sat down at the table next to the little girl. It was drawing a family: mother, father, two daughters, a dog. The family stood in a park. Something that might have been the sun but wasn't blazed down on them, huge in both the sky and what pa.s.sed for the little girl's memory. It was far too hot, far too close. As Carolyn watched, the little girl took a yellow crayon and added some flames to the father's back. The red O of his mouth, she suddenly realized, was a scream.

Carolyn stood up fast, the wooden chair sc.r.a.ping across the linoleum. She didn't want to be there anymore. She fled to the family room. There a teenage boy sat slack-jawed in front of a lighted box. Do they still grow up, or will he be like this always? She couldn't figure out what he was doing at first, then it came to her. Television. She smiled a little. I remember television. She sat down on the couch next to the dead boy. He didn't seem to notice. She waved her hand up and down in his field of vision.

He turned his head, looked at her without much interest, and pointed at the television. "It's time for Transformers." A trickle of drool ran out the side of his mouth.

On the screen, giant robots were shooting each other with rays.

A few minutes later the woman drifted in and handed her a plate of food and a red can that said c.o.ke. Carolyn fell on it, ravenous. The soda was sweet, delicious. She drank it too quickly and it burned in her throat. She had forgotten about c.o.ke. The woman watched her eat, a flicker of disquiet crossing her face. "h.e.l.lo," she said. "You must be..." She-it-trailed off. "Are you one of Dennis's friends? Dennis, is this..." she said to the boy. She broke off. "You're not Dennis," she-it-said to the boy. "Where is Dennis?"

Carolyn knew what this meant. When Father reanimated the neighbors he had a.s.signed them to houses more or less at random. The boy on the couch was not actually the woman's son. Probably the girl wasn't her daughter. The man she laid down with at night wouldn't be her- "Dennis?"

Carolyn stood up, grabbed the sandwich, and handed the plate back to the woman. "Thank you."

"You're welcome, dear," she said absently. "Dennis?"

On the television, a robot screamed. Carolyn strode back to the front door and out into the summer sunlight, slamming the door behind her. They would settle down once she was gone.

But when she saw what was waiting for her, she wished she had stayed among the dead. Halfway back to the Library black clouds boiled over the face of the sun. The pressure dropped enough to make her ears pop. The tips of the trees bent nearly double in the sudden wind. Here and there she heard flat wooden cracks as the weaker branches gave way.

Father was home.

II.

They all knew from the thunder that he had returned. It was expected that they would meet him at the Library. They trickled in and gathered on the lawn-Michael from the forest, Jennifer from the meadow, and so on-all except Margaret. She was with him already.

"Look," Father said. They all did. Margaret's left arm was badly broken. It hung limp, a spur of bone poking out of her skin. Jennifer moved to help her, but Father waved her away. "Why does she not cry out?" he spoke lightly, as if talking only to the breeze.

No one answered.

"Why does she not cry out?" he asked again. This time his tone was more menacing. "Will no one answer me? Surely one of you must know."

David mumbled something.

"What? I can't hear you."

"I said, 'gahn ayrial.'"

Carolyn's mind whirled. The words "gahn ayrial" meant, in a literal sense, the denial of suffering. The phrase itself was kind of meaningless-suffering existed, just look around you-but the way he p.r.o.nounced the words suggested that it was the name for a skill set. Some sort of self-anesthesia? Carolyn knew that Father knew all sorts of things about that, and about staunching your own wounds, and healing. But he only teaches that sort of thing to David. With a kind of slow-boiling horror she realized what all this was about. If Margaret knows about gahn ayrial, then...

"Someone has been reading outside of her catalog."

The young librarians made a sound like dead leaves rustling.

"I don't really blame Margaret," Father said meditatively. "Her studies are often painful. Who could fault her for wanting to alleviate that? No. Not Margaret." He tapped his teeth with a fingernail. "Who, then?"

"Me," David whispered. "It was me."

"You?" Father spoke with mock surprise. "You? Really. Interesting. Tell me, David, why do you think that I did not teach Margaret of gahn ayrial myself?"

"I...I don't know."

"Because I did not wish for her to learn it!" Father thundered. All of them flinched at this-all but David. He was Father's favorite, and knew it. "Still...if you have chosen to teach the craft of gahn ayrial, then surely you have mastered it. I had no idea you were so far along in your studies. I will admit that I am impressed." He waved his arm, beckoning. "Come with me."

They all followed, afraid not to. Together they trailed Father and David down the main street of the neighborhood, past the houses of the dead, and oh how Carolyn wished then that she had died with them. She had never seen Father so angry. Whatever came next was sure to be very bad. They followed him across the road, and up the rough steps cut into the earth.

There, in the clearing at the top of the hill, they found Father's barbecue grill. Carolyn remembered the thing existed, but had never thought much of it. It was a hollow bronze cast in the shape of a cow or, rather, a bull. It was a bit larger than life-sized, made of yellowish metal about half an inch thick. When Father had been pretending to be an American he kept it in his backyard. Sometimes, at neighborhood picnics or whatever, he would cook in it, "hamburgers," or sometimes pork. He seemed pretty normal back then. She vaguely remembered people-maybe even her parents?-commenting on the unusual grill, but it hadn't been a big deal.

Not long after Father took them in he had the grill moved up to the clearing. She never found out why, but there must have been some sort of reason. The grill was phenomenally heavy. The dead ones gathered around it and heaved as one, sweating and straining in the summer sun. It surrendered a few slow, painful inches at a time, its hooves cutting trenches in the gra.s.s as it moved. Moving it took days, and at least a couple of reanimations.

Looking at it for the first time in years, suddenly Carolyn's only real thought was Oh, right. That thing. She a.s.sociated it mostly with the parties of her childhood, hamburgers and barbecue. The pork sandwiches, she remembered, were especially good.

Then a darker memory surfaced. Actually, she thought, the last time I saw it was at the feast of my homecoming. She remembered seeing the hatch in the side of the grill opened, how the thick hickory smoke poured out. She remembered clamping down on her scream when the smoke cleared and she saw the meat in there, recognized the delicate curve of Asha's hindquarters, saw Isha's severed head staring back at her, skinned and sightless. It occurred to her that that moment had probably been her own uzan-iya. Yup, she thought, that was probably it. Up until then I was still in shock.

It also occurred to her that the bull could be used to cook things other than pork. She looked at David. The same thought must have occurred to him. He was staring at the bull with wide, horrified eyes.

David was brave, though. He brought himself under control, grinned at Father. "C'mon," he said. "I'm sorry. I won't do it again. I didn't mean anything by it." He shadowboxed, the way they did sometimes.

Father walked to the bull and opened the hatch in its side. The outside was polished bronze-the dead ones kept it shiny-but inside it was black, black. David, a boy of at most thirteen years, held up his hands in surrender. Father pointed inside. David did not kneel, but he trembled. "Oh. Oh no."

Father raised his eyebrows, waiting for more, but David fell silent.

Carolyn's hatred of David was second only to her hatred of Father, but in that moment she could almost have felt sorry for him. The look in his eyes as he climbed inside the bull brought to mind another Atul phrase, "wazin nyata," which was the moment when the last hope dies.

The bolts Father threw to lock the hatch shut were not bronze, but thick iron, ancient and pitted. Before that moment it had never occurred to her to wonder what purpose they served. Now she understood. Meat, she realized, doesn't try to climb out.

For the next hour or so the rest of them brought cut wood up from the stockpiles around the neighborhood houses, an armful at a time. Father called out a few of the dead ones-Mother and "Dennis" among them-and they helped as well. He even pitched in himself.

The bull shone golden and polished under the light of the afternoon sun. One by one they deposited their armfuls of wood around the base of it-pine, mostly, fat and sticky with sap. Once Jennifer dropped to her knees, sobbing. She was always the kindest of them. Michael, by this point more accustomed to the thinking of beasts than that of men, watched the wood pile up without understanding its implications. Margaret just looked interested.

Not long before sundown, Father struck a match. They had kindled well. The pile of wood caught quickly, going from a few tongues of flame to a full-on bonfire in a matter of minutes. Smoke came from the bull's nostrils-first a trickle, then a stream.

They continued feeding the fire through sunset, expecting all the while to hear him cry out, but David was so very strong. The heat was such that by dark Carolyn could approach the bull no closer than ten feet or so. From there she pitched her logs into the flame as best she could. Even then, the heat scorched the hairs on her arm. The dead ones continued their slow slog to the fire, oblivious, their skin reddening and blistering.