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Her friends ran toward them from the other end of the room, and Izzy hoped it wasn’t too late. She hoped Lund would be okay.
The Last Act of Hugo Barbary (2002)
In the past, the man who had for many years been known as Dr. Hugo Barbary was sitting on the edge of the reflecting pool opposite Radio City Music Hall on Sixth Avenue. It was nighttime in the city, warm and humid and angry, and Hugo Barbary was an argument of a man.
He had been thrown back to the past again by Cassie, through a door from the ballroom. As best he could work out, when he wasn’t distracted by the storm in his mind, it was many years ago. Maybe twenty years. Not as far as the last time, but the past for sure.
He shuddered and grunted, feeling the writhing pain in his skull.
That Bookseller woman had done something to him, he knew. She had used the Book of Pain and she had dislodged something. He hadn’t felt right since. He had walked aimlessly when he had first arrived in the past and he knew that he would have looked like just another mad old man on the streets of Manhattan. He had found himself on Sixth Avenue and had stopped at the pool, trying to calm himself.
He felt alternately furious and elated, in agony and delight. He was two people fighting. The Book of Pain had released all of his turmoil, the memories and experiences of his childhood that had made him into the monstrous man he had become. The Book of Pain hadcreatedhis pain anew, giving it a life and an intent of its own, and now it was wrestling with him.
The rest of Hugo, the other parts of him that were no longer in pain, felt as if they had been asleep for decades. He had all of his memories, all of his experiences, but he was a different person, a man horrified and terrified by the things he had done before that woman had changed him with the Book of Pain.
In the noisy night of New York City, his eyes dazzled by the bright lights and headlights, Barbary threw back his head and grunted, and a couple of tourists sitting near him on the edge of the pool threw him a nervous look and shuffled surreptitiously away.
The pain was alive and trying to recapture Hugo, but he did not want that. The part of him that had once been a boy, that had been innocent before injury, resisted.
He screamed through gritted teeth, gripping the concrete edge of the pool with both hands, his neck straining. His scream died in the sky above him, swallowed by the honking of traffic and the rumble of the subway trains beneath Sixth Avenue.
He thought it was over, he thought he felt better for a moment, and he started to relax, but then the pain came back. This pain was a physical thing, and Hugo Barbary was carrying the Book of Health, which was working to remove it from him like poison from a wound, or a long-buried splinter, and suddenly the pain punched its way out of Hugo, a tenebrous, intangible thing that erupted from Hugo’s mouth and swam in the air, hiding in the pollution and darkness of the night.
Hugo was suddenly, immediately released. His mind was clear, his agonies gone, and he looked around with wide and wondrous eyes. For the first time in his life he really saw the world around him, the colors, the life, the activity, and it was marvelous to him.
He stood up abruptly, suddenly seized with opportunity and possibility. He was an old man, but he was carrying with him the Book of Health and the Book of Faces. He had many years before him, and many ways to spend his time. As he walked south along Sixth Avenue, his eyes glinting and a smile on his face, he decided that he was no longer Dr. Hugo Barbary. That was a name that another man had chosen for himself to convey certain ideas. It had never been his real name. Theman that had been Hugo Barbary for most of his life decided that he would take another name for himself now. He didn’t know what, but he had plenty of time to decide.
Hugo Barbary’s pain hung in the air in the hot New York night. It floated above the traffic and the people, unnoticed. But this pain had been created by a special book, pain that if not quite alive nonetheless had intent and a will.
The pain waited, but not aware of what it was waiting for.
Waited until a young family wandered past, the Belrose family on holiday in New York for the first time, enjoying the sights and the bright lights. They sat by the side of the pool and shared some M&Ms and a Coke they had just bought, and then the young daughter, Rachel, left her mom and dad as they spoke about boring adult things and wandered along the edge of the pool, trying to balance herself, teasing herself that she might fall in and get wet.
She stood there on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street, gazing up at Rockefeller Center, the other towering buildings all around. Rachel was so excited to be away from the countryside, the cabin where they lived. She didn’t think she was going to sleep when they got back to the hotel; she was going to stay awake at the window all night watching the people and the traffic. At home she couldn’t see anything from her bedroom, just darkness and trees. It was so boring.
She looked at her parents now, as they stood up and checked they hadn’t left anything behind.
“Come on, Rachel!” her dad called, smiling.
She took one last look around and then jumped off the edge of the pool, and when she jumped, she was taken by the pain of Hugo Barbary. It swallowed her, or she swallowed it, and she landed on her hands and knees on the sidewalk.
For a few moments she was still, just staring at the concrete between her fingers.
She suddenly felt full,unpleasantlyfull, and her head felt funny.
And she felt... different.
“Honey! Rachel?”
It was her dad, she knew, and the sound of his voice annoyed her immediately in a way it never had before.
She stood up and saw them looking for her, like she couldn’t do anything by herself.
She went to them and saw the relief on their faces, and she despised them for it.
Then another part of her—the part of her that had been Rachel before she had jumped a few moments earlier—asked herself why she was thinking such things.
The Rachel part of her shrugged off the strange feelings and hurried after her parents.
