AllFreeNovel
Share Us
In the opposite corner of the basement, cemented into the floor, was an old iron safe. It had been her mother’s when she had been alive. The woman’s mother had been a vet and had kept certain drugs in the safe. The woman had never understood why, and no longer cared. The drugs had long since been discarded and the safe now held only the woman’s own belongings: the books she had gathered over the years of hunting.
She opened the safe and placed three of her books alongside their three siblings, six books of the seven she owned in total. She held on to the Book of Despair because she’d had a thought on the flight back from London, an idea of something she could try with the book. She meant to work on that in the coming days.
The woman closed the safe and returned to her room, where she slept for many hours, the Book of Despair in the bed next to her. She slept a dreamless sleep of the dead.
On the day after her return from London the woman started researching other books to hunt. It was what she did. She existed, and she searched for books. She had an insatiable hunger for the books, a hole inside her that could only be filled by acquiring more of them. Sometimes, when she had to, she ate and she slept, but eating in particular was a chore to her.
The woman started her research by trawling the various secret message boards known to book hunters and collectors. The books were becoming rarer, she knew, and that made the hunt more enjoyable for her. The fewer books there were out in the world, the more she possessed.
Sometimes, on rare occasions when she actually reflected on what she was doing and who she was, she wondered what she would do once she had all of the books. The drive, the insistent need to find and collect books, was everything she was. But once she had them all, what would she do with them?
She didn’t like to think about these sorts of questions, because it was at such moments when she felt at her most vulnerable, when she felt the girl whom she had once been watching her from deep inside. That girl despaired at the woman. That girl screamed and shouted at all that hadbeen done. Like a prisoner in a windowless room the girl banged and thumped and pushed at the walls, and only in those quiet moments when the woman asked questions of herself could she hear the girl.
Better not to think, she knew. Better to focus on the task.
There were more books out there, more owners to track down and destroy.
And there was the Fox Library.
She had seen the Librarian once, many years ago. But she had been younger then, distracted by her enjoyment of killing and using the books, and the Librarian had gone, disappearing into the air before she could take him. It had been a good night, rewarding her efforts with three books, but she still felt disappointment whenever she thought about how he had escaped her. Such a missed opportunity. Everywhere she had been, every book hunter she had met and interrogated and tortured since that night, she had asked the same question:Where is Drummond Fox? Where is the Fox Library?
He would be the prize, she knew. He would be the key to the Fox Library, wherever it was.
“Drummond Fox.”
She spoke rarely, almost never. Speaking was a function of engaging with other humans, and she had no interest in that. But she spoke the man’s name now, as a promise to herself.
“Drummond. Fox.”
That evening, after completing her research, and doing some work with the Book of Despair, she retrieved the Book of Destruction from the safe in the basement and walked out into the woods in the darkness, navigating by memory and by moonlight. She found the place where she had buried her father after killing him. She had been sixteen, only a few years after the moment she thought of as her change, when she had shifted from being Rachel Belrose to what she now was. Her mother had lived for seven months after her father had died, only because the woman had experimented with how long a person could survive. She had been impressed by what her mother had endured. The loss of fingers and toes, limbs, her eyes. The woman had loved inflicting pain on her mother,even more so than upon her father. She loved the sensation of the suffering of others. It made her feel alive. It was when she had tortured her mother that the woman had come to appreciate that this was her purpose in life: to bring pain into the world, to make other living things suffer.
Her mother’s last words, before the woman had taken her tongue and lips, had been: “What did we do to make you like this?” It was a question of exhaustion and defeat, a question that hadn’t really sought an answer and the woman hadn’t given one. Her parents had done nothing to make her the way she was. Except maybe to take her on holiday to New York, to take their girl to where she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, to bechanged.
The woman—or perhaps some residual remnant of the girl, in those early years—had buried her mother next to her father, as if thinking they could keep each other company in the afterlife.
The other seventeen bodies scattered around the woods were not so blessed with company. They were alone in their miserable eternity. But the woman remembered them. She remembered how each of them had suffered, the sound of their pain. She thought about them often. Them and the other people she would make suffer in the future, the pain she would inflict.
Out in the darkness by the graves of her parents, the woman stood in silence and felt the air brush her skin. She heard the rustling of the leaves. At a different time in the year the woods would be alive with the buzz of insects, but it was winter, and life was hiding and hibernating. It felt to the woman as if she were alone, but she knew there was still life out there. Not everything was asleep.
The woman closed her eyes and gripped the Book of Destruction, stretching her feelings out into the world in a wide circle. Her mind was like creeping fingers, finding the insects and vermin, the birds in the trees with their feathers puffed up to keep them warm. She held all of these things in her mind, and in her hands the Book of Destruction glowed in the darkness, illuminating her face from below.
Then the woman sneered, a sudden burst of fury, of need, and the Book of Destruction pulsed once, an angry eruption of light with the woman at its center, stretching out wider and wider like ripples in apond, and everything alive that it touched died suddenly. The insects in the undergrowth, the spiders spinning their webs. They all stopped, destroyed instantly by the woman and the book.
There were no screams, there was no yell of agony, but the womanfeltall the pain, the sudden absence of life, the moment of terror in each and every living thing as it knew it would be no more.
As the light dissipated through the darkness, as the Book of Destruction fell silent, the woman hummed to herself happily, like a dinner guest full after an excellent meal, and she opened her eyes to the darkness.
She had used the Book of Destruction in this way, once before, in the autumn, when the forest had been livelier. That time it had been even more pleasurable. That time she had heard some of the mammals scream and yelp, squeaking their agony as they trembled and expired. There were fewer mammals now, though, in the cold of winter.
Sometimes the woman thought about using the book in a town or a city, where there were more than just insects and animals. She imagined what the screams would be like, but she wondered if it would all be too sudden, too quick. She wondered how to make the people know what was coming, so that she could feel their terror as she moved among them.
These were the things she thought about when she wasn’t looking for books: how to make the world sing to her in pain.
The woman turned around and walked back through the quiet, dead darkness to the house, stroking the book she carried as if it were a pet.
And all around her, nothing stirred.
Part 2
