A Drop of Night (12 page)

It's a library. Long, dim—a shadowy gallery of books. It's got that
same faint ultraviolet glow that the hall full of razor wires had—just enough to see by, but still somehow pitch-black. The ceiling arches into a map of the heavenly bodies, gold-leaf planets and star creatures against a blue plane. Mahogany bookshelves reach all the way to Cassiopeia's toes, twenty feet above us. At the end of the library is a massive marble fireplace. The floor is thick with pelts and furs.

Gross.
It's like a freaking Narnian battlefield in here. I swear one of them is a polar bear.

“The doors,” Will says, and we huddle around them, trying to get them locked up. A floor peg is jammed into its rut. That's all we've got. All that's standing between us and the outside.

“They're coming!” Jules whispers, high-pitched and
panicked, and Will and Lilly start dragging a massive table toward the doors. The noise is excruciating. I run over to help. We lift it the rest of the way and shove it crosswise against the wood. Jules hooks his fire poker through the handles.

We back up, our hands tight around our weapons. My head feels like it's about to blow off like a firecracker.

I can't hear anything from the other side of the doors. No footsteps. Nothing but that scratchy, almost subliminal whine. It's like they stopped right outside the doors, or kept running. The pale man has turned into a weird statue again, his shoulders tense, fingers curled and posed like he's trying to imitate one of the painted figures in the Sistine Room.

We wait, frozen. Minutes pass. My joints start to feel like chewed-up rubber.

“Are they gone?” Lilly whispers.

Or are they waiting right outside? I imagine them out there, inky figures standing like black pillars, silent and tense.

“I think they kept going,” Will says under his breath. “We should keep barricading the door. In case they come back.”

We break into frantic motion. The wood floor squeaks. Will stacks a few heavy chairs on top of the table. I climb up them and heave an eight-legged bureau with peacock mother-of-pearl reliefs on top. Then a leather-padded stepladder. A footstool. We climb higher, higher, until the entire twelve-foot-high doors are covered with a grid of furniture.

As I'm scrambling down I hear something from outside. An awful rough, grating sound, like claws on wood.

I freeze, clinging precariously to a chair, one foot dangling in the air. My eyes flick frantically toward Lilly on the other side of the stack.

The sound seems to go on forever,
scrrrrtch-scrrrrtch,
echoing in the hallway, so close to the other side of the door. Finally it breaks off. It doesn't pass, doesn't fade into the distance. It's just gone.

I hop the rest of the way down, land quietly on the pelt of a wolf. Jules catches my arm and pulls me upright. Mutters in my ear, his breath hot: “You need to talk to him.” He cuts his eyes toward the pale man. “What was that outside? You need to ask him why they brought us down here.”

I nod. Will gestures toward the back of the library and we move farther in, our group splitting around side tables and sofas like water. My feet sink into fur and bristles, skin-crawlingly crunchy. The pale man stays close to me, still limping along, his wounded arm cradled against his chest.

We reach the huge marble fireplace and press ourselves into the shadows of one of its carved pillars. The library is silent. The pale man stands slightly apart from us, staring at the doors. I inch over to him.

“Hey,” I say. “
Ecoutez-moi
. We've been kidnapped. We're American citizens, and we need to get out of here. We need to know what's going on.”

My heart is pounding, ridiculously loud. The pale man doesn't answer. Doesn't look at me.

New tactic:
“Je m'âppelle Anouk,”
I say.
“Et vous?”
Psychology 101. Treat your subject like he's a human being. Pleasantries before business. Better yet, business disguised as pleasantries.

“Moi?”
the pale man rasps. Still watching the door.
And again, softly:
“Moi. Qui suis-je . . . ?”

Who am I . . . ?

His eyes widen. He looks lucid, frightened, like
someone waking up from a nightmare.
“Je suis perdu,”
he says.
“Perdu dans l'ombre.”

I turn to the others.

“He said he's lost,” I say. “Lost in the shadows.”

“That's a terrible name,” Jules says, and almost simultaneously Lilly twists her hands together and whispers, “Uh, fantastic, so are we.”

I turn back to the pale man. “Fine. You're Perdu. Pleased to meet you. Were you kidnapped too? How do we get out of here?”

Perdu starts to giggle, his head tipping back. An ugly sound crawls out, like his throat is full of broken glass.

“You cannot leave,” he says. “You cannot leave!”

“Why is he laughing?” Jules says, eyes wide. “Shut him up!”

I feel sick. “We had a deal—” I start to say.

“Shhh,” Perdu whispers, and places a long thin finger to his lips. “He is close.”

Will stiffens. I look over my shoulder at the doors, my heart squeezing up into my throat.

“Who?” I prompt. “Dorf?”

“Non.”
Perdu wraps his arms around his bony shoulders. He seems to shrink, twisting. And as he turns,
he points down the length of the library to the closed doors, silent behind their cage of furniture.
“L'homme papillon,”
he says, in a guttural, piercing croak
. “L'homme papillon!”

“What's he saying?” Lilly hisses.

“The butterfly man.”

“Who?”

“I don't know.”

“Ask him what we're supposed to do!”

“Perdu?” I whisper fiercely, and he jerks upright, jittering. “Perdu, what do you know? Who are you?”

Perdu rises slowly, facing us. “I crawl through the dark,” he says.
“Through forests of gilt and crystal I wander. Friend to the friendless, rescuer of dead and broken things. I am
the watcher in the treetops.”

I turn to the others. “He's crazy.”

“Great,” Jules says. “No, really, that's good to know now that we're
locked
in here with him
.”

I spin back to Perdu. “You said you would help us,” I say in French. “Does this room have another exit? Do you know the way out?”

Perdu's watching me, wheezing. I can't read his gaze. Usually I feel like all those books about deranged folk paid off and I have a really good idea of the depths of people's depravity, but I can't tell with him. I don't know if that gaze is dangerous or imploring.

“If you leave now,” he says, and saliva flies between his
lips with each breath, “you will die. You will step through those doors and he will see you. His eyes shall eat you like mouths, and you will lie on the floor, and ants and wasps and nits will crawl from your wounds like drops of night. Four little plums, all chewed up.”

He says that last sentence so casually that for a second I swear he's sane. And now his hand swings around, smacking Will right in the temple, and he scuttles away, cramming himself into the space between a chair and the wall, like he's trying to hide. He looks out at me from under the armrest, eyes glinting. “I am the only one you can trust,” he hisses.

I look over at Will. “You okay?”

He nods quickly, like he didn't even feel it. “What was he saying?” he asks. “
Prunes m
â
ché
, what does that mean?”

“That if we leave now we die.”

“All those words meant ‘You're going to die'?” Jules says.

“Basically. Also, he seems to think there's just one person out there now. And it's a he.”

Lilly nudges me in the ribs. “He's moving. What's he doing?”

Perdu is out from behind the chair, standing up. Will
is about to dive after him. I grab Will's shoulder. “Wait.”

The shadows swallow Perdu. He's just a slight variation now, another shade in the dark-to-black spectrum. It sounds like he's pawing through a drawer. He's coming back toward us, and he's holding something tightly in his fingers. He walks up to me. Opens his fist. It's a compass, the surface scratched and pockmarked in a million places, like a pirate's.

“A token,” he says, and his voice is human again, gentle. “A token of my loyalty. I will lead you to safety. There is a secret way. A way they cannot know. Due north as the wren flies, straight as an arrow and straight as string.”

I don't take the compass. “Then why are you still down here? You said you don't want to stay, so go. What's stopping you?”

“Everything,” he says, looking terrified again. “Fire and blade and bolt and poison. The palace is not easily breached, neither from within nor from without. But my time here is coming to an end. My usefulness is spent. He will kill me soon. But you will help me.” His gaze flicks from me to the others, and he smiles that awful, limp-lipped grin. “You will take me with you,
oui
? You will not leave me behind.”

“When does he want to go?” Will asks. “If it's up to him, when would we leave the library?”

“Perdu,” I say.
“
Combien du temps voulez-vous que nous restions ici
?”

He holds out the compass, trying to get me to take it. “In the morning,” he whispers. “Tomorrow is a new day, a bright day.”

“How do we know when morning is?”

“The hands will tell you. Seven times they will turn, round and round. On the eighth it will be morning.”

“You mean in eight hours? We're supposed to stay in here eight hours? What makes you think we'll be safe that long?”

“I will keep you safe,” he says. “I will hide you in the shadow of my wings.”

That's not comforting at all. Perdu's eyes are alight, fingers squirming along the edges of the compass, leaving a greasy film. I grab it and turn to the others, translating as fast as I can. They listen, their faces getting darker by the word.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Jules says. “What if he's lying? What if he just wants to keep us in one spot until the trackers can get here?”

“I don't know,” I say. “Look, it's up to us. We can either wait with him, or go and risk whatever's out there. They're both worst-case scenarios, so pick your favorite.”

I already know my answer. There's no telling what Perdu would do if we dragged him out there now. We'd have to leave him behind and then we'd be running blind, pushing off into the palace on a teeny-tiny slice of
hey-let's-hope-we-don't-die.
We'll be doing that either way, but the slice seems bigger with Perdu. We
need
to trust him. We need to trust something down here, even if it's just an insane bleeding guy.

“If we wait, someone's going to have to be awake,” Lilly says. “The whole time.”

“We can take turns keeping watch. Two hours each.”

“I'm not sleeping anyway,” Jules says.

And so we wait.

We've built our own personal bubble of warm light and coziness
in front of the fireplace. Will found a light switch behind a panel next to the mantel. Jules and Lilly have constructed a fort—possibly a full-on mansion—out of chairs, pillows, carpets. It's kind of morbid if you think about it, setting up camp down here in the palace of your psycho captors. Like a zombie-murder-sleepover. But the alternative is cowering in the dark, so we might as well make the most of it. Also, there's some satisfaction to be had from using the Sapanis' stuff. I'm assuming this is their library, if the Sapanis are real people. I'm also assuming this place is
not
a two-hundred-year-old archaeological site. It's their house. Their huge, pristine, underground home, which just so happens to have an infestation of bleeding men, traps, and general weirdness. I bet they really don't want their murder-victims-to-be
pawing through their books and using their furs and lounging in their chairs.

I grab a pillow and mush it up behind my neck, leaning against a desk leg.

Will has wandered off to scout out the library. Lilly and Jules are busy with home-improvement matters. Perdu's hiding behind the chair again, eyes pinched shut. His velvet bandages are black and crackly.

“Perdu,” I say quietly. His mouth twitches open. Wet, gray teeth flick into view, squeezed together, haphazard and gross. He winces, as if the word hurt him. “Where are you from?”

“Péronne,”
he breathes.

I'm trying to unstick my pant leg from my ankle. The blood has started to cake where the wire caught it.

“And how did you get down here?”

“C'est ma maison,”
he whispers.
“Il me garde.”

“This is my home,” I translate for Jules, who is looking over at us suspiciously from behind his wall of chairs. “He keeps me.”

“Who keeps him?” Jules asks. “Is he like the house pet?”

“Hey,” Lilly says, frowning at Jules. “You don't know
what he's been through. He might have been down here way longer than us. It's probably messed with his mind.”

“Below,” Perdu mumbles, and I raise my hand, signaling Lilly and Jules to shut up. “Down,” Perdu says. “Far into the earth. To good luck and safety and everlasting peace, they brought me. But I will be leaving soon. When the war is done, that is what they told me, when the war is done you may go. But it stretches on and on. It never ends.”

“What war?” I ask.

“That war.” He uncurls a finger toward the ceiling. “Up there. They are cutting off heads in the Rue du Fauconnier. Can you not hear the screaming?”

“There is no war up there,” I say. “At least, not one you'd hear down—”

“There is always war,” Perdu hisses. He's crying again. I can see the tears, glimmering tracks down his cheeks. “Everywhere. Up there. Down here.” He taps the finger against his head. “In here.”

“Uh-huh.” I glance at Jules and roll my eyes. “How old are you, Perdu?”

His hands come up, fingers splayed like twin fans. He closes his fists, opens them, again and again, and I realize
he's showing me—ten fingers, ten years—decade after decade flickering past.

“You're not that old. When were you born? What year?”

“1772.”

Will is back. He makes a sound, a soft bark from somewhere in his chest. I think it was supposed to be a laugh. I wouldn't even have known he was there otherwise. Kid moves like a ghost.

Jules glances at Will. “What? What did he say?”

“That he's over two hundred years old,” I answer. I lean back against the fireplace. Look up at the ceiling, with its network of lines sketching out the Greek figures. I recognize Andromeda, Cygnus. Someone who I think is Capricorn but looks like a minotaur
.
That gets me to thinking about the Theseus myth, young people being thrown into a labyrinth to feed a monster. But if they wanted to reenact that one, they got the numbers wrong: there are supposed to be seven of us. And Dorf didn't sound like he wanted us to be food for that thing. He sounded like we were ruining his plans.

I sigh, still staring up at the ceiling. If this were a proper indie movie moment, I'd be doing my stargazing
next to a spray-painted van, while on a road trip across Montana. I'd have a guitar and a big old happy dog. I'd stare up at the endless night sky and feel small or something. Since this is my actual life, I'm looking at stipples of white paint on a ceiling, thinking about being eaten alive.

I ease my pant leg back over the cut. Glance up at Will. “Did you find anything?”

“No other doors out,” he says. “Lots of books on philosophy. And the chimney's blocked about six feet up. Oh, and I found a clock.”

He hands me a little brass wind-up on two miniature clawed feet. It's awesome looking, like it could run away giggling and ringing furiously every time you really didn't want to wake up in the morning. I start winding it up.

Perdu has turned his back on us again, crouching, head pressed into the corner. He's singing softly, under his breath:

“Four blind mice, oh, four blind mice.

See how they run, oh, see how they run.

They all ran after the farmer's wife,

Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,

Did you ever see such a sight in your life, oh

As four . . . blind . . . mice.”

“He's singing nursery rhymes now,” I say. “Creepy ones. Must be past his bedtime.”

Lilly starts to laugh, but she can't quite decide whether I'm hilarious or not. And now Perdu turns suddenly, staring at us.

“Dance around the edge of the pond and you'll fall in,” he says, soft and urgent, like he's telling us a secret. “But if you leap in the middle, all will be well. You will still get wet, but you chose to, then, don't you see? It is your own fault.”

“Okay, Perdu.” He could just come out and say it: I'm not going to tell you anything helpful, because either I want you to die, or I'm just really clueless.

I stand abruptly and walk quietly over the furs
.
Someone follows me and I think it's Perdu for a second, but it's Will
.

He doesn't say anything. Just lopes down the library beside me. We stop in front of the doors.

I gaze up at the furniture mountain, ears straining to
pick up any blip of sound on the other side. The whirring is gone. Every scratch, creak, whisper, hum noise is gone. A solid white silence is crushing against the library doors, so complete it's like the hallway and the Sistine Room and all the other rooms have vanished. I imagine opening the doors and finding nothingness. Blank space. A vacuum, the library floating like a shoe box in the void.

“It's so quiet,” I say.

He nods. We're breathing in unison. An itch starts crawling up my arms like a million tiny insect feet. I have the overwhelming urge to shove down the furniture, open the doors, run.

“What if this is our chance?” I say. “We're sitting ducks in here. What if we should be running?”

“We'll be okay,” Will says, and rolls his shoulders.

Deep, Will. Logical and well-founded. A layered argument.

We head back to the others.