Page 43 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“So,” said Anne, trying to sound braver and less out of her depth than she felt, “why do you still sound as if there’s a problem?”

Yute stopped advancing. “Because I’m terrified.”

Kerrol growled again, a more muted sound with something of a yelp init. Anne didn’t ask what he’d said, because she imagined it was the same question as her own. “What have you made?”

A crashing, the source unseen. The splintering fall of one shelf into another, spilling books in a thudding rain. “A demon. My fear’s made a demon.” Yute started to turn, clutching his umbrella. “I think we should run.”

Kerrol placed himself between the shelves and Anne, snarling out a challenge that would send a pack of wolves running with their tails between their legs.

“Yes, you’ve fought them before.” Yute hesitated, seeing that Kerrol was making a stand. “But this is different. In the library, the blood’s only source for inspiration is you. Oh, it can take some form from books too, but the raw power behind it is all you.”

Kerrol growled out another comment. Anne was starting to feel the shape of the words inside these utterances where first she’d heard only an animal’s complaints.

“We’re out in the world,” Yute replied. “And not a good one. The Escape’s drinking it all in. All the poison of a sick city. The wilful ignorance of a people who know in their secret hearts that they’re being lied to and listen anyway because to them the lies are sweet.” His hands moved through the air as if he could feel the emotions he described, flowing around his bloodless fingers, drawn in by the unseen gyre that was the demon being built from the black blood of the library.

The nearest shelf fell towards them, spilling books, and the monster stood behind it, revealed in silhouette, sucking down the electric light and returning nothing. If it had been drawn from Anne’s nightmares it would have worn a uniform and borne a swastika. Yute’s fear had crafted something blind and shambling. It swayed towards them, reaching with strangling hands, bleeding anger. Its presence deadened Anne’s internal voice, pushing back her intelligence to expose primitive emotion of the sort immune to reason, driven by primal hungers, the logic of selfishness, the justice of the mob.

It brought with it a blindness, not of the eyes but of the mind. A blindness and a darkness more profound than the one from which Helen Keller so marvellously escaped, and one that was not inflicted as a wound on theinnocent, as hers had been, but required a degree of complicity to enter. Anne could feel Yute’s fear of it, and in that moment knew her own.

Kerrol moved with inhuman swiftness, wrenching up an entire reading bench and wielding the weight of wood as Anne would swing a stick. He brought his impromptu weapon down on the Escape’s head with such force that it splintered into two halves.

Incredibly, the monster barely flinched. Instead, it surged past Kerrol as though he were unworthy of its attention. Even with this turn of speed added to the Escape’s formerly sluggish approach, there should have been enough time to run. Somehow there wasn’t. Anne remained mired in the horror of its advance, and a moment later found herself swept up in a hand the colour of midnight and larger than the paws of the stuffed bear in the burgermeister’s hall.

Yute saw her plight and turned from his retreat towards the main doors. With the desperate expression of a man braving his own worst fears for someone else, the librarian seemed to draw on the books scattered all around his feet. Even as Anne was hoisted aloft and felt the awful pressure of the Escape’s fingers close around her throat, she tried to scream at the others to run.

Yute stood amidst a whirlwind that touched the visible only briefly here and there. It seemed as if the books were smoking and that smoke, pulled into the invisible gyre, wrapped around him, weaving an ethereal armour. And thus armoured, he flung himself at the Escape.

Anne hung, choking, while for a moment the two combatants came together with a sizzling like meat hitting a hot skillet. Yute didn’t fight, but hung on to his foe, while the aura around him seared the dark flesh, smoking it away to dissipate in the air. Even as Anne’s vision filled with black spots, she thought she could see lines of text orbiting Yute’s limbs, as if the words had risen from the fallen books and joined his service, trying to burn their way through the thick layers of ignorance that protected the Escape from the self-awareness that would surely tear it apart.

With an angry shrug, the Escape sent Yute staggering back. A swing of its arm launched him into the air on an arc leading towards the foyer. The sort of blow that shatters ribs and breaks spines.

The Escape strode after Yute like a dog pursuing a toy. Anne foundherself dangling, an afterthought, still cut off from the next breath as her heels trailed the ground. Kerrol had found another weapon, a plank that had been a shelf, but his strength proved useful only in producing splinters. The Escape hardly noticed his efforts. Its stomping advance on Yute’s sprawled form placed the lectern squarely between them. As it drew near the book set in that place of honour, the monster seemed to draw strength from it, pulling barely seen threads of power towards itself in much the same way as Yute had gathered his own from the wider library.

Kerrol threw himself forward, seizing the arm that had hold of Anne, trying to free her without breaking her in the process. A heavy backhander sent him to the floor with sickening force.

Anne drew in a long-denied breath in a gasp. “Stop it!”

The Escape tossed her down as if stung. She scrambled to her feet, coughing, and—mostly on purpose—knocked the chancellor’s book to the floor as she did so. Quite how she had managed to steal a lungful of air past the Escape’s grip she couldn’t say, but, as it loomed above her fallen companions, the mismatch between her strength and its mattered less and less to her.

Out in the harshness of the night a different calculus was at work. There were monsters there too and interposing herself between them and her grandfather would have earned her a jackboot in the face, achieving nothing, but Anne refused to believe the same rules held sway here in the library. This was magic—she couldn’t deny that any longer—and if magic danced to the same tune as the rest of the world, then the library, and her grandfather’s own bookshop, had lied to her for her whole life.

The Escape’s huge hands descended towards her, and Anne raised her own to intercept them.

“I know you.” She caught its wrists. The monster that had so haunted Yute, the one that had defeated his enchantments, was one Anne had grown up with. Nothing scared the librarian more than a wilful refusal to acknowledge facts, the elevation of ignorance to a virtue, the casting of curiosity and intellect as defects of character. But Anne had swum from childhood to the shores of her majority through such toxic waters. She had read the book that lay behind her on the floor. Not out of any appetite for its contents but out of an honest desire to understand the mind andmotivation behind its crudely written screed. And although she knew that anger and hate were valid responses to its message, she had felt pity for those poisoned by it.

“I know you.” She knew why they hated her kind. They hated because humans are tinder waiting for the flame. The chancellor had given them an excuse to hate, the relief of having someone to blame. It was a selfish, rambling, poorly worded excuse, but they had taken it. Not because this country, this people, were inherently evil, but because they were weak, like all men. Their morality a fragile thing, a flower to be cherished and grown, too easily corrupted.

The strain nearly buckled her. But where Kerrol’s strength had been knocked aside with contempt, Anne’s frailty somehow endured. Midnight flesh bubbled and ran and smoked beneath her grip with a ferocity Yute’s attack had been unable to match.

“I know you,” Anne repeated.

The Escape started to lose form.

“You’re clay.” She released its arms and stepped forward to place her palms upon its torso. “I’m the potter.”

And, like falling water, the blood of the library was all around her, once more merely a puddle.

Embarrassment is an anaesthetic allowing us to laugh off all but the worst of injuries to save face. An audience inhibits. So much of what we do is guided by the notion that we are being observed, be it by random strangers or the divine eye.

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