The Library at Mount Char

by Scott Hawkins

“Doesn’t it ever get to you? Serious question.” “What?” Jennifer waved her arm, a gesture that took in the grave, Garrison Oaks, the bull. “All of it.” Carolyn thought about it for a minute. “No. Not really. Not anymore.” She looked at Jennifer’s hair and picked a maggot out. It squirmed on the end of her finger. “It used to, but I adjusted.” She crushed the maggot. “You can adjust to almost anything.”

“When he disappeared he was working on something called regression completeness,” Peter said. “It’s the notion that the universe is structured in such a way that no matter how many mysteries you solve, there is always a deeper mystery behind it.

She knew every word that had ever been spoken, but she could think of nothing to say that might ease his grief.

Father said something to him in the language of murder, which Carolyn did not yet speak.

Uzan-iya, they called it on the Himalayan steppe six thousand years ago. Uzan-iya—the moment when the heart turned first to murder.

Getting apocalyptically drunk by yourself was just the sort of thing bachelors did around Christmas. Also, he wasn’t thinking of the shotgun in the corner of his closet. At all.

“It’s not a ‘land mine,’ ” Carolyn said. “It’s absolutely nothing at all like a land mine. What it is, is a kind of, um…do you know what a gravity well is? It’s kind of like that, except in reverse, and it only works on certain people.”

In his language the word for ‘promise’ is the same as the word for ‘a bone that cannot be cracked.’ He will do as he says.”

Steve sighed, wishing for a cigarette. “The Buddha teaches respect for all life.” “Oh.” She considered this. “Are you a Buddhist?” “No. I’m an asshole. But I keep trying.”

Oh steve

“She’s got a—it’s called a reality virus. It’s not actually that dangerous, it just looks bad.

Quoth. It’s the language of storms. They’re great poets, some of them.” The open page was a snippet of a decades-old squall from Jupiter, the gloomiest stanza of a larger work. Now, she read, is hell’s blackest pit.

Somewhere in his belly fear squirted, bright and cold.

Ew

David turned. He was crusted in blood from head to toe, mostly dried. The lace of his tutu was stiff with it. It jutted out like knives. Here and there little bits of meat stuck to his skin.

EW

Carolyn felt a little squirt of horror at that but squelched it. Just get this over with.

Stop describing fear as squirts omg

“That’s the risk in working to be a dangerous person,” she said. “There’s always the chance you’ll run into someone who’s better at it than you.”

“I mean…the universe is, like, big? Right?” “Yes and no. Size is notional. It has to do with the structure of space.

“Admit it,” saying, “You don’t know any more than I do. Our understanding is a bad joke. It always has been.”

“Are you familiar with the notion of regression completeness?” She had heard the term somewhere, but couldn’t quite call up the meaning. “No.” “It’s the idea that however deeply you understand the universe, however many mysteries you solve, there will always be another, deeper mystery behind it.”

SOB

“It has a price, though. In the service of my will, I have emptied myself.”