The Library at Hellebore

by Cassandra Khaw

Cruelty was like riding a bike: it became ingrained in you, became muscle memory. There was no losing the trick of it. You never forgot how to drive a knife in and twist.

“What did you do?” We turned in tandem to see a figure stumbling fawn-legged toward us, pausing at intervals to flinch at the charnel, the color bleeding from a face already arctic in its complexion. Most people would call her a beauty and they’d be right any other day. There and then, however, she was a car crash in slow motion, that long, drawn-out, honeyed second before an explosion. She was a corpse that hadn’t caught up to the fact that her heart had been dug out and eaten, dripping like a fruit.

“Children.” Her voice when she wasn’t orating was high and breathy, a bad idea away from being babyish, like a sorority girl courting the quarterback’s attention.

In movies, it is always clear when the villain slips up with a double entendre. The music score changes; the camera pans in on their faces. It is a narrative design, a conspiratorial glance at the audience: here is the signage marking the descent into mayhem and here too, the strategically positioned lighting, placed just so to ensure no one ignores the moment.

“You can’t make us go,” said Rowan. “Actually,” said the headmistress, voice losing its chirping lilt. She spoke the next words in what I’d come to think of as her real voice: smooth and bored, unsettlingly anodyne save when her amusement knifed through the surface like a fin moving through dark water. “I can.”

The first time I learned I had powers was when my stepdaddy decided that the ring on his finger was the master key to every entrance in our household. He slapped me when I said no, unable to contend with the notion that my sense of autonomy precluded his need to be inside where he damn well shouldn’t be. I remember my ears ringing, and his hands locked around my wrists, raising my arms above my head. I remember his mouth along the nubs of my spine, his knee trying to spread my legs wide, and thinking, I need you to hurt. So I rent him in half: lengthwise and real fucking slow, suspending him in the air so his guts sheeted down on me like a porridgy red rain. I didn’t let him go gentle into that good velvet night, and I took as much time as I’m sure he’d wanted to with me.

According to her, what we did was natural instinct, a response engendered by a lifetime spent being waterboarded with systemic misogyny: we were angry and we were acting out.

It was her eyes, I decided, that had so thoroughly upset me. They were wide and green where they weren’t dilated pupil, a noxious and effulgent shade of absinthe. Paired with the docile smile she wore, her eyes made her look like a wolf serving time in the brain of a fawn, a wolf so starved it would eat through its own belly if only it could reach.

I strung an arm over the back of my chair, looking over as Portia seated herself, her smile languid and slightly animal. A challenge lounged in her expression, one that the boy didn’t take, only met with a cool stare: her charms washed over him like rainwater.

Spoiler: they ate him.

Ear lobes, bellies, wattled joints, prolapsed vulvas, dicks long past their use-by date, they all clotted together first into something like a mealy stew before smoothing into blousy, billowing sheets of finger-bone-scaffolded skin. Gristle unspooled from groping hands, macrame-ing with the fat runneling from our faculty’s grinning faces. Offal tasseled the gory lump of their conjoined bodies, slicked the floorboards with pancreatic fluid and synovia.

The first one to speak was Adam, who was, to give credit where credit is due, a work of technical perfection: six feet three, a body that could have been—and was, actually, repeatedly and with considerable enthusiasm—used in anatomy studies. Radioactive blue eyes, Ken-doll features, a singular dimple indenting his right cheek, a soft cleft bisecting his chin, and so much blond hair it looked like he was wearing a gold-plated sheep rug for a hat.

No, Portia was gnawing a flap through the skin around her wrist, tugging at the flesh with her fingers even as she chewed more of it free. I saw the wet shine of bone as it came undone like a ribbon. Portia then delicately wadded up her work and laid it on the red tip of her tongue, sighing, eyelids fluttering. I watched as she swallowed it whole, shuddering with a voluptuous, almost masturbatory relish, and it felt almost voyeuristic to witness this act of autophagy.

“Back the fuck up.” “Or what?” “This,” I said. My response, I’ll admit, was disproportionate to the situation. I raised a finger-gun at Adam, lifting my hand so the tip of my index finger bumped against his perfect nose. As his smile widened, I traced a path across his chest, down the long path to his wrist. I tapped it thrice, bent my thumb, and mouthed the word bang. His right wrist exploded into a bloom of red sinew and bone shrapnel, little gore-stained chips of scaphoid going everywhere. His hand, bereft of support save for one rapidly fraying tatter of skin, plopped onto the ground a second later.

You could call the thing on Adam’s face a smile if you wanted to: it had the right curvature, an appropriate number of teeth on display. It even reached his eyes. But I wouldn’t. It had that certain je ne sais quoi I’d come to associate with people about to lose their fucking shit.

If the universe had any mercy in it, the swarm would have blanketed him, obscured his death from view, but it didn’t. His death was a spectacle. We saw him denuded of skin, saw them burrow through the spongy tissue of his bones, and gnaw through heart and lung, liver and stomach. In seconds, he went from boy to Swiss cheese monument, a juddering colander trellised by strings of crawling, jewel-shelled insects.

Something about his shit-eating smile said he couldn’t be much older than me, but his skin was precociously weathered and there was something equally ancient about his eyes, which were almost the white-blue of a flame save for a drip of hazel like spilled petroleum.

“Sense,” Portia repeated with a laugh that had as much to do with humor as a gut wound with comfort.

You could describe it as kind if you wanted to, but only if you were willing to ignore how practiced it was.

There were only so many species of girl once you got down to it. Some breeds ran and some breeds fought and then some took to gutting themselves for their wolves, because if you were going to get eaten, you might as well choose how.

“I see you inside me,” he said once, trailing us between classes. “I see you beneath my skin. I see you standing in the church of my lungs and you are there, holding my bones like a wedding bouquet.” “That is the weirdest way to say you want to get pegged,” I shouted over my shoulder, eliciting nervous glances from passersby.

“You’re a fucking bastard, Adam. You’re a monster,” came Gracelynn’s bellowing rejoinder, and I could chart in the inflection of Adam’s smile, her transmutation in his mind, how she went from risible novelty to an insult that required addressing.

Surprisingly, Adam was right. Chelicerae scythed out from the ruins of Portia’s face as pedipalps reached from her throat, all said appendages coming to close gently over Eoan’s cheeks. And while spiders had no tongues, Portia seemed to have no knowledge of that: a red stem of muscle wormed out of her mouth and between the boy’s lips. “Is it weird I find this kinda hot?” said Rowan.

Foam bubbled from the corners of Eoan’s mouth, his eyes like a frightened animal’s; they were framed by white as they rolled to stare at me. His throat was distended from its invasion: it throbbed as Portia crept up onto his torso, his own body flat and prone on the beautiful floor. Rowan wasn’t wrong. There was a terrible intimacy to this, to Portia straddling him, her legs coming to cup his head, press him to her chest: she looked like a bride ready to slough her innocence. He gagged, spasming under Portia’s body.

I was actually concerned when Ford made his prophecy originally. Without Rowan, there’s only seven of us. It made no sense. Half live? How would that work?

I held the fruit up to the gray light and turned it one way and then another, recalling some apocrypha about wasps and their role in the pollination of the plant: I’d avoided figs for that reason. There was a hole at the very base of the fruit, wide enough to admit an insect, something Rowan discovered seemingly at the same time, much to the horror of everyone in his immediate vicinity. “Do you think some wasps have death cult suicide orgies—” “When you see the fig,” began Professor Fleur in her quavering voice. “When you taste it, when you crack it in half in your hands and lick the sweet florets, you do not think of the wasp. Although you should. Without it, we wouldn’t have this bounty.” She gestured at us to halve our figs, splitting hers with just her hands. Juice ran down her fingers like plasma, dripping onto the grass. The air stank of a heady sweetness. “It is important we honor the wasp.” From across the garden, Minji asked, “Is it true that there are dead wasps inside every fruit?” “Dead?” gurgled Professor Fleur. It’d take me another eight weeks before understanding that was how she laughed. “No. Made holy. Sainted.” “Holy,” Minji repeated after a moment. “What a choice of words.” The inside of my fig was vulvic red, soft and flushed, whorled with yellow seeds that at certain angles almost looked like eyes but at others resembled the walls of a lamprey’s mouth, but instead of teeth there was only flesh.

Down went Ford on his hands and knees, improbably alive, sifting through the still-steaming heap of his organs like a dog questing through the tall grass for a lost toy. He raised his liver to me, his heart, the desiccated sac of his stomach, his kidneys in succession. Then at last, the long coils of his intestine, which he nuzzled with his cheek, moaning. He had the soft dull eyes of a cow, like something that had never been taught to speak.

Picture a woman. Actually, picture one of those supermodels from the nineties, who embodied the fashion world’s belief that the body was just a hanger to drape fabric from. Picture the way their skin canyons where bone meets their socket, their exaggerated clavicles, the long ropes of their spines. Their faces, ghostly with malnutrition. But lovely, nonetheless, in that way a near-death experience can be, everything human starved away.

Adam’s smile collapsed. It wasn’t a secret that he, like every good Patrick Bateman wannabe, hated his mother.

And there’s only so long you can put off the Wolf. Eventually, you get too old for him.”

And it might have been the wind, the low keening that blew up to our window, a sound like howling but something else too: older, crueler, more eager. At the sound, whatever light remained in Johanna’s gaze extinguished. “Please,” she said as the door blew in. A thing like heat haze, that my brain could acknowledge as quadrupedal but would not otherwise describe in any way that memory would capture, could only flinch from like it was a flame, like it was teeth, crawled in through the hallway. It growled. The Skinless Wolf. All at once, I was struck by the sense that it existed not just in multiple dimensions but in multiple times, in multiple bodies, in fur and fang, as a long-boned man, grinning with more teeth than there ever should have been; as with a forest erupted from the corpse of a screaming girl, which is all to say, it looked like a migraine.

“She’s dead.” My voice sounded like an ache. “You can’t touch her anymore.” Something like a man’s laughter rumbled into my ear; almost a wolf’s chortling growl. I felt hands reach past me, and it was then I realized I was clutching Johanna’s body, skin warm enough still to be mistaken for living. I don’t need her alive. It began to peel her from my arms. Tried to, at any rate. Laughter clawed out of me, a rasp of noise that broke then into shrieking. I tightened my grip. Teeth sunk into my shoulder, a warning. Pain rippled across me like a grease fire. Mine. My body to use. My body to bury in the orchard. Mine. I saw again the wolf’s forests and the bodies beneath its branches; the wolf as a long-legged man, sitting on the soil, teeth digging into the white flesh of a girl’s leg as she kicked, screamed. We were meat to them, I remember thinking. Just meat. To the wolf, to you, to everyone else. “Hope you have a bucket then.” While I had no idea if I could stop the Wolf from doing what he wanted, I certainly could keep it from being easy.

I hope you’ve been paying attention, by the way. This wasn’t a lie but some of the rest is.