Page 19

In what was half a lunge and half just looming, he injected himself into my path. I drew up, avoiding collision, but close enough to smell the rankness of him. A whole lot closer than I wanted to be. He stood well over a head taller than me, skinny in his ragged trench coat, fixing me with his singular eye. The wrongness about him wasn’t one big thing but a host of small things, ranging from the violent twitchiness of his body to the tear of discolored…sludge…that had descended beneath his eye patch to describe a path across his cheek to the corner of his wet mouth. He craned his neck as if seeking to dislodge an intrepid spider.

“Spare any change, young sir?”

A hundred miles would be a comfortable distance, ten too few. Arm’s reach was way too close, but the social bonds that hamstring our self-preservation held me there when every fiber of me said “run away screaming.”

“I…uh…” I patted my pockets apologetically. “Sorry.”

“Humanity is an engine of want,” he said, staring. “Each human being a thread from which the fabric of desire is woven. That cycle of wanting and then of growing dissatisfied with what has been gained, that is the pumping heart of purpose. We were built to want, not to be satisfied.”

“Uh huh.” I tried stepping around him and, with the crowded high street just a few paces behind me, this should have been enough to circumvent him. But the man spread his arms as if corralling an errant calf, and a grin exposed yellowed teeth.

“You might be wondering why a third party would intrude when the Library wars so effectively against itself?”

“I…uh…really don’t.” I considered heading back to the street, but something warned me against showing this man my back. I could retreat, still facing him, but the remnants of my pride wouldn’t let me.

“Some might think the Library is all there is, but it’s a small infinity. One of the countable ones.”

“OK…” I did take a step back at that. The man had one hand in his pocket now. And that’s seldom a good thing. He could as easily be rubbing himself as holding a knife at the ready, but that was just frying pan to fire. “Whatever you say.” I added another step to my retreat.

“Why concern yourself with Adam’s great-grandsons?”

“I really don’t!” I reached the corner and the safety of the wider street, the traffic, the CCTV.

“You think that I wanted to do that to those babies?” For a moment his voice faltered. “You think I wanted blood on my hands? You think that any of us has a choice? We’re puppets, all of us. The Smith pulls the strings, and we dance, dance…” He sketched a pirouette. “Dance.” His eye found me again, full of madness and so pale that it almost seemed to glow. “We are as we are written…”

“I have to go.” Somehow politeness still shackled me when clearly any need for it had left the building.

“I am the snake in Eden!” the man roared suddenly, pounding one fist to his chest.

I ran at that. Bugger safety in numbers. I’ll take safety in speed every day. We outnumbered my mother, and that never helped.

I ran all the way back to the Togetherness Trust. Well…actually that’s a lie. I ran as far as I could, then jogged, then finally managed a kind of stagger while heaving in the breath I couldn’t get enough of and repeatedly looking over my shoulder.

For the first time ever, I was glad to go through the front door of our group home and clatter upstairs to my tiny room on the second floor. With that door closed too, I could finally let my heart slow down and take stock. And of course, everything looked a bit silly in retrospect. A homeless man with mental health issues had ranted nonsense at me. So what? Werton didn’t even have a library, and when he started on the religious path, his diagnosis just underlined itself.

Lying back on my bed, I wondered why the perfectly rational explanation wasn’t helping much. I closed my eyes, opened them again, and for a moment a clear blue sky framed with broken branches replaced the water-stained paint and aging light fitting. I startled up, but it was already back to normal before I got halfway.

“What the hell?” I wrung my hands together for comfort and found them oddly sticky. I must have touched the tabletop at the café, I guessed. For some reason I thought of Mademoiselle Lefevre and her shouts as Mum had pulled me out of her tacky little fortune-teller tent.

Going crazy is a fear of mine. Yeah, I know we don’t call it that, but people do crack, and the stuff that spills out of them is the same sort of nonsense that’s stirred into bad dreams. Our mum broke, and that shit’s hereditary. I mean, it’s not a guarantee, but like red hair, it can lie dormant for a generation or two and then spring back into the line, or just follow on one to the other, grandfather to father to son, bang-bang-bang, dominoes falling. So yes, I watch myself. I try not to give strange thoughts any more head room than they can steal from me. It’s a slippery slope, and I don’t want to look in the mirror one day and realize I’ve been sliding down it for months or even years.

The ceiling was the ceiling, the homeless man was the homeless man. I should get on with my evening, currently planned to be a thrill-packed extravaganza consisting primarily of playing on my phone and then helping Greg make the night’s dinner before fighting for my allotted ten minutes in the shower.

—

I normally don’t mind making dinner. It’s a job with clear parameters. Three tins of this, two tablespoons of that, open the packet, boil. I pretend I’m making a magic potion. A slip of the hand, too much salt, and someone’s going to grow two heads rather than fall in love with the next person they see. And at the end of it all, the other kids are actually grateful—well, almost. They say, “At least Jason didn’t make it” or “Well done, Red, it’s not actually on fire—I guess it’ll be charcoal briquettes again from Sophie tomorrow.”

And I normally don’t mind making it with Greg. In fact, he’s the best one to be paired with, normally. He’s careful. Unlike Jason, who’ll add all the pepper and then say, “What? It says ‘pepper’ right here, dickwad.” Or Sophie, who isn’t really a pyromaniac, except in the kitchen, where everything burns. Or Cole, who zombies his way around, half-arsing everything like it just doesn’t matter.

Plus, Greg’s the only other reader—proper reader who likes good books, SFF stuff, though his tastes are way too modern for me. I like a book to have a decade or two to mature. Like a fine wine. But it gives us something to talk about. If I have to pretend to know or care about sportball with Devon again I might just try to end myself with the cheese grater. It’d be less painful.

But Greg came down to the kitchen late, still clutching a book and rubbing distractedly at his eye. For the next half hour, he helped out in slo-mo, as if the kitchen were underwater, seeming even more glazed and silent than Cole normally was. I’d seen him in town earlier, walking past the Blue Flag with a local boy I didn’t know. He’d looked all right then. I would have asked if he was drunk, but there was nothing to smell, and he wasn’t a rulebreaker.

“Do you know Rose?” It was the first thing he’d said the whole time other than a grunt or two. We were nearly finished. Potatoes needed mashing. Gravy needed twenty-eight heaped spoons and boiling water.

“Who?” I reached for the masher. Mashing potatoes is good therapy in my opinion.

“…Rose arose I suppose…” More of a mumble than an answer. He stared at me, one eye bloodshot as if something on his fingers had got into it.