Chapter Text
The library was quiet today.
No one seemed to need help finding anything; the only people who came to the desk were those who needed simple things—renewals, returns, loans, and such—which left Jon plenty of time to himself. On one side he had his course notebook open to the appropriate notes; on the other, he sketched out a rough essay outline on the back of an old flyer scavenged from the recycle bin.
A particularly long lull in customers—(patrons, his coworkers were fond of reminding him) left Jon fully absorbed in his task, marking down possible commentary points as he struggled to piece together a thesis. He was so absorbed, in fact, that he failed to notice there was someone in front of him until they made themself known.
Jon startled, dropping his pencil with a clatter, when a pale hand was thrust under his nose and waved about. “I beg your pardon!” he spluttered. The patron took his hand back with a snort of laughter, and Jon’s vision came back into focus as he raised his head to look at him.
He was tall, was the first thing Jon noticed. Of course, Jon was sitting down, but even if he were standing, the man in front of him would have towered over him. He didn’t have much size going for him in any other way; his long dark coat was loose enough to hang off his shoulders, and where the sleeves slipped back, his wrists were skinny and sharp. Piercings lined his ears, a barbell glinted in his left eyebrow, and the rest of his face was done up in what looked like two-day-old makeup, smudged eyeliner and all. His nails were inexpertly painted, the black polish chipped and peeling.
“Thank you for your patience,” Jon said, taking in all of this in the space of a second or two. “Can I help you find something?”
“Looking for Alice in Wonderland, ” the young man replied, voice light but slightly raspy.
Jon was already bringing up the catalog. “Lewis Carroll, correct?”
One eyebrow quirked upward, taking the barbell with it. It was incredibly distracting. “Is there any other Alice in Wonderland you can think of?”
“There are texts related to the original work,” Jon replied distractedly. “Right—the section you’re looking for is—”
“I know where that is,” he cut him off. “Already looked. I’m looking for a specific copy.”
Jon nodded, turning back to the catalog. “Alright. What year?” The patron hissed awkwardly, which didn’t raise his confidence very much. “Publisher?”
“None you’d have ever have heard of,” he said, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.
“Do you know what edition you’re looking for or not?” Jon asked, a little impatiently. “Is there anything you can tell me about the specific copy you want?”
The patron offered an innocent smile. “It’s got a blue cover?”
Somehow, Jon managed not to bang his forehead on the desk surface.
Eventually, after almost ten minutes of exhausted questions and searching, Jon finally struck gold. “Found it,” he announced, and the patron stood up a little straighter. “Unfortunately, it’s in the closed stacks—off-site storage.”
“Oh, that’s no problem.” The patron waved a hand, and for the second time Jon caught sight of the tiny tattoos on his knuckles. Eyes—how charming. “Tell me where that is, and I’ll find it.”
“That’s not how it works,” Jon informed him. “I can request it for you, and you’ll receive an e-mail when it’s delivered here.”
The man hissed through his teeth. “That’s… not gonna work, actually,” he said. “Really, if you just give me the address or something, I can handle it myself.”
Jon blinked at him, faintly baffled. “I... really don’t think I can do that,” he said, trying to sound firm even as he shot a quick glance at his desk partner for confirmation. It was Ren today, who shook their head before turning back to their game of Solitaire. “It’ll only take around four business days. If this is time-sensitive then you really should give yourself a larger window in the future.”
“It’s not that it’s time-sensitive, it’s just—” The man paused, clearly fighting agitation. “With old books like this, it’s best if as few people handle it as possible. So I’d rather just look at it wherever it is now, than have someone pick it up and—and bring it here.”
“I assure you, we exercise the utmost care when handling our materials,” Jon informed him. Not that he knew for sure—whatever went on in off-site storage had nothing to do with him. But this was an old and highly respected academic library, and he doubted it would be either of those things if they didn’t know how to handle old books. “We have materials far more delicate than a children’s book printed in the last century.”
This didn’t have the reassuring effect that he’d hoped. But instead of putting up a fight about it, the patron simply looked resigned. “No, no, it’s…God. Fine.” His voice trailed off, and he slid his reader card out of his pocket and placed it on the desk. “Sure. Request it for me.”
The book was set to arrive within the remainder of the week. Jon knew to watch for it, because the patron—whose card identified him as Gerard Keay—was watching for it.
Every day, in fact.
He hadn’t come up to talk to him since requesting the book, but Jon spotted him from the circulation desk at least once a day. And, every now and then, Gerard would turn at just the right angle and meet his eyes. Sometimes it was a quick, passing thing, so brief that Jon wasn’t sure Gerard had noticed at all. Other times, Gerard caught his eye and held it for a good few seconds, like he was measuring something in Jon’s face from across the room.
Once in a while he’d wait until Jon was looking at him before pulling a ridiculous face and then smirking when Jon rolled his eyes.
“Damn, Jon,” one of his coworkers remarked, a few seconds after Jon caught Gerard staring at him again. “You had me thinking you didn’t have a type, and then I turn around and it’s that .”
With half his attention on the book in front of him, Jon barely registered that someone was speaking to him at all. “What?” he said, after too long if the look on her face was any indication.
Tina jerked her head in Gerard’s direction, which considering the distance between them, wasn’t terribly precise. “Are you gonna make a move on your sexy goth or what?”
“ What? ” It was all Jon could do to keep his voice down.
His coworker rolled her eyes. “Come on, we’re all adults here. Every time I see him in here, you two make eyes at each other. You’re not exactly subtle.”
“Um,” Jon said helplessly.
“Not that I blame you, ‘cause I mean, damn . You just don’t… you know.” She waved vaguely. “You don’t seem like the type to go for guys like that. Not that it’s a bad thing! You’re full of surprises, I guess.”
There were probably many ways to respond to that. Still gaping at her, Jon settled on, “I don’t even know him.”
Eyebrow raised, she shot an appreciative glance across the room at the patron in question. “I mean, me neither, but. It’s not like you’d need to.”
“I think,” Jon said with forced calm, “that I am entirely uncomfortable with this line of questioning. If you don’t mind.”
She held up her hands in a gesture that was vaguely placating. “Got it, my bad. Have fun ogling each other, I guess.”
“We are not—” Jon turned away from her, resigned, and found Gerard looking at him curiously again. When their eyes locked, Gerard arched an eyebrow at him and looked away first.
He seemed awfully concerned over one book. The problem was, at some point over the few days spent waiting, Jon started worrying, too. And that didn’t make any sense at all—he’d made dozens of requests like this for countless patrons, many of them almost as restless about waiting as this one. So why was Gerard Keay any different?
(He knew what his coworkers would say if he were to ask them about it, which was precisely why he didn’t bother.)
Four days after he put in the request, Gerard was in the building by the time Jon’s shift started. Jon spotted him the moment he took up his seat behind the desk, slouching at one of the many tables in the reading room, one arm hooked over the back of his chair, the other playing with some small item from his pocket, the very picture of nonchalance. He wasn’t even pretending to be busy, just sitting and waiting.
Then he glanced up and met Jon’s eyes, and the change was so abrupt that Jon fully expected him to lurch to his feet and run to the desk. It was fascinating how a person’s stance could change from relaxed to ramrod-straight in a single motion.
Thankfully he stayed where he was. But as Jon got settled in and logged onto the computer, he was sharply aware of eyes burning into the back of his head. It was incredibly distracting, and not at all helped by his coworker’s frequent pointed looks. Tina again, just his luck.
“Heads up,” she murmured, which was all the warning Jon got before Gerard appeared in his line of vision.
“It’s been four days,” Gerard said. It was the sort of sentence that was usually spoken with impatience, or even accusation, but it rolled smoothly off Gerard’s tongue like a neutral but obvious fact.
Jon blinked at him, still in the process of bringing up the circulation software. “That it has,” he said after a moment.
Arms crossed, Gerard leaned forward to rest his elbows on the desk across from Jon. Up close, Jon was alarmed to find that the object he’d been playing with before was a black cigarette lighter. “Can’t help but remember you saying it would take four days for the book to get here,” he said.
“I said about four days,” Jon said more testily than he intended, finally tearing his eyes from the lighter. “Meaning four days, give or take. Potentially more than four days.”
“But potentially less, as well,” said Gerard. “Is it here yet?”
“Have you received an e-mail?” Jon asked.
Gerard stared at him. Jon considered bringing up his patron account and checking to see if he even had an e-mail address on file.
He sighed, pressing the tips of his fingers together. “Mr. Keay.”
Gerard pulled a face. “Try again.”
Jon raised an eyebrow at him. “Gerard?”
A thin smile. “It’ll do for now.”
“Right. Anyway. Your book is coming soon, and you seem to be in here most days anyway. Regardless of whether or not you’re receiving e-mails from the library, I’m sure we’ll be able to let you know when your book is in. Unfortunately, right now, it is not.”
Gerard held up his hands, giving Jon another brief flash of chipped black nail polish and tattooed knuckles. “Fine, just thought I’d ask.”
“If it helps,” Jon went on, taking pity on him. “We usually get books delivered from offsite in the evenings.”
“That does help,” said Gerard, stepping back. “More than you know.”
“Good,” said Jon. “Also, I would ask you to put the lighter away while you’re in the library—ignition sources, you know.”
With a lopsided grin, Gerard made a show of slipping the lighter carefully back into one of the many pockets of his coat, and zipping it up for good measure. He turned around, apparently changed his mind, and continued turning until he faced the desk again. “Quick question,” he said, and in spite of the words themselves, there was a strange intensity to the way he spoke them. “When do you get off work?”
Jon blinked, bewildered by the question, before Gerard’s meaning dawned on him. “I have a four-hour shift, with an evening class right after. I probably won’t be here when it arrives. If it arrives, that is.”
Gerard nodded once, satisfied, and went back to his seat.
“Oh my God.” Without warning, Tina almost let her forehead fall right onto her keyboard. “I cannot believe you, Jon.”
Jon started, suddenly alarmed. Had he mishandled that interaction somehow? Did he miss something? “What? What did I do?”
“Nothing!” Tina hissed back, looking of all things, frustrated. “You’ve been making eyes at that guy all week. And he just asked you out!”
Jon blinked. That… was not what he’d been expecting at all. “Why in God’s name would he do that?”
“Well…” Tina tilted her head, considering him. “I mean don’t sell yourself short, you’ve got a lot going for you.”
“He was—I—” Jon stopped just short of spluttering, shooting a quick look at Gerard to make sure he wasn’t looking. “He just wants his book .”
Tina gave him a genuinely pitying look, and didn’t reply.
Jon did his best to put that out of his mind, but instead it compounded with his extant worries about the book’s arrival.
And then, about five minutes before Jon’s shift ended, it arrived.
Jon had been periodically checking throughout his shift, and at the end of his shift he found the materials requested from offsite waiting on their usual cart. He hurried back out to the circulation desk, scanning the library for the familiar long dark hair and longer, darker coat. But Gerard was gone for the day, it seemed. And Jon, who had to run to an evening class as soon as his shift was over, had no time to take care of it for tomorrow.
It was for that reason that the thought of it stuck with him over the next hour. Evening lectures could be difficult on the best of days, and tonight, with the errant copy of Alice in Wonderland hanging over his head, he could barely focus on what his professor was talking about. He shouldn’t worry about it, not when his coworkers were perfectly capable of taking care of it in his absence, but still. What if it wasn’t on the cart? What if there was some error in the request, and the wrong copy had been delivered? What if there was a delay at some point, and it never left the storage facility? What if it was damaged on the way, like Gerard had feared? Or worse, lost? He hadn’t had the time to check.
It was dark by the time he left class. Most weeks, he’d be heading straight home for a quick dinner and a last-minute study session before bed. But tonight, with Gerard Keay and Alice in Wonderland still fresh in his mind, he made his way back to the library at an intermittent jog.
There were still a few lights on when he slipped inside; some of the faculty stayed on later than patrons and lower-level employees. Jon paused at the front desk, listening, but could hear no one. No voices, no footsteps. That was probably for the best; he technically had no reason to be here this late anyway.
As he passed the circulation desk and ventured further into the lower reading room, he caught sight of something on one of the desks near the front. It wasn’t uncommon for students to leave things behind accidentally, anything from jackets to electronics. But when Jon went to retrieve it, he was shocked to find a black cigarette lighter lying on the desk. Was it Gerard’s? It must have been; the stylized eye engraved in the case nearly matched his tattoos. Besides, how many people had the audacity to play with ignition sources in a library?
With a sigh, Jon picked it up and slipped it into his pocket, then moved on.
The door to the restricted stacks was marked with an “Authorized Personnel Only” door, and the crack beneath it revealed lights on within. Lights meant the room was in use; Jon braced himself for the inevitable awkward questions as to what a low-level student assistant was doing in the library after hours, and pushed it open.
He stepped inside, and his foot came down with a faint but unmistakably wet smack.
Jon looked down, scowling. There were fragile and old books stored back here, for heaven’s sake. He barely knew how the library functioned beyond the circulation desk, and even he knew that spills in a place like this would be incredibly irresponsible.
The color was… worrying. A dark red spatter on the floor certainly looked like blood. It might not be! He was certainly no expert. For all he knew, some irresponsible employee had brought a beverage back here. It was possible.
Jon slipped his phone from his pocket, dialed 999, and ventured onward with his thumb hovering over the call button.
There was little need for him to worry; as he made his way to the carts designated for book requests, the floor remained pristine. There were no more tiny puddles or spatters, and certainly no ominous trails of the stuff. It seemed as if his initial guess had been close to the truth.
It didn’t account for the odd smell in the air, though. Jon had passed through these rooms many times, enough to grow used to the ever-present smell of old paper and wood and dust, but now they were wholly overpowered by a distinct coppery tang.
Memories stirred, crawling toward the surface on many legs, no matter how many times he tried to brush them back down.
By the time he approached the book trucks designated for off-site requests, the smell was nearly overpowering, and Jon was deeply regretting his decision to come back here. He hadn’t even met any other staff members; in all likelihood no one was going to touch the books, and he could deal with all of this in the morning. Nervousness only sharpened his irritation with himself, as he scanned the book trucks and tried to remember which of them held Gerard Keay’s desired book.
In the end, he didn’t have to.
He heard it before he saw it, an almost musical drip-drip-drip, as steady as a leaking faucet. Another puddle shone faintly on the floor at the foot of one of the carts, rippling with the impact of each droplet that fell.
His first instinct was to run to the cart, not sure where the spill had come from and whether or not the books had been caught up in it. But he had barely made it halfway when he realized that the falling liquid was coming from one of the books themselves. As he approached, he tracked the trickle of dark red back to a single book that lay on the top of the cart, bound in a battered blue cover.
Alice in Wonderland, the title read, as more red liquid dripped from the pages and down into the puddle below.
Instinctively Jon snatched it off the cart, holding it carefully away from the other books as he frantically checked them for damage. Puddles of red were congealing on the surface of the cart, and one of the adjacent books had a smear on the cover, but those on the lower shelves of the book truck had avoided the mess.
Grimacing, he turned to the book in his hands, nearly dropping it with a noise of disgust when some of it got on his hands. It was slightly warm to the touch, thick and sticky, and he held it at arms length to keep it from dripping on his clothes.
The book was in abysmal shape, even without the mess. Pages clung to each other when he tried to open it, some of them soaked clear through. The cover was a mess, faded and worn until nothing but the title remained. Most alarmingly, the top left corner of the book was missing, a full inch of the spine completely gone, leaving only a ragged crescent-shaped hole, as if—
—as if someone had bitten it off.
The smell was overpowering. Jon lifted his dripping hand to his face, not close enough to touch, and gave it a cautious sniff. He almost retched at the overpowering tang of—
— blood, his mind supplied.
Only, he couldn’t have thought that on his own. He had no way of knowing what blood was supposed to smell like.
It was that single thought that tipped the scales, that the reek of blood was unmistakable in spite of the fact that he’d never smelled it before, in this quantity. All at once he realized where he was, and what he was holding.
A book. More to the point, a book that was doing things that it should not have.
With dripping, shaking hands, he opened the cover. Stared at the stained bookplate, at the words nearly obscured beneath dark red flecks. At the looping J and L that remained clear.
A heavy spurt poured from between the pages—from one spot in the book specifically, barely a third of the way through. There was no way the pages should have held up beneath that much liquid, but they parted easily when Jon opened them.
If there was text on the page, it was impossible to see beneath the fresh, wine-red stains. But at last, Jon could see where the liquid was coming from. An illustration took up most of the page he had opened to, of a crystal decanter fallen on its side, the stopper nowhere to be seen. The bottle looked to be half full, and the level never seemed to drop, no matter how much real liquid continued to pour from it.
In fact, the only legible text on the page was in the illustration: a tag tied around the neck of the bottle with string. The edges were stained, more brown than red, but the words were perfectly readable in elegant calligraphy.
Drink me
In an instant, Jon’s mouth was dry. It wasn’t fear that caused it; it was an itch and a burn and an overwhelming want, as if he’d crawled for miles through a desert and come upon an oasis. Saliva gathered in his mouth, thick and viscous with dehydration, and his breath grew short as the growing thirst consumed him.
The liquid continued to spill freely from the bottle, red and wet and inviting. It would be the easiest thing in the world to simply lift the book, tip his head back, and—
Warm liquid ran down his face, and for a wild moment he thought that the blood was leaking out of him, now. But when it reached his lips it was salty but not metallic. Tears, not blood. Somewhere within him, nearly drowned out by overwhelming thirst, a scream was building in strength.
He tore his eyes away from the page, stomach churning with revulsion even as his parched tongue cried out for relief. The blood on the floor was spreading, staining his shoes, creeping toward the walls and the bookshelves, lapping at the wheels of the book trucks.
He was holding a Leitner again—a Leitner had him again, and this time no one was there to knock it out of his hands. He was on his own. It could kill him, just like the last one tried, and then—
A patron. Jon struggled to remember, struggled just to breathe while his throat dried and cracked like bare earth. Someone would be back in the morning, back for the book, like they always were, and the book would go to—it would go to—
Gerard Keay. The name came back to him. Gerard Keay, he’d seen him earlier, he’d been playing with a lighter and
The lighter.
The book was warm and moist in his hands, the cover soft and resilient as he gripped it. Jon turned his eyes toward it again, half-expecting to see it about to fall apart from all the liquid soaking it.
But—
No.
It hadn’t looked like that before, had it? He could have sworn—the cover had been blue, that was what he’d said, what Gerard Keay had asked for. The pages had been soaked in red but they had been paper nonetheless, yellowed with age wherever the stains hadn’t yet reached.
But the book that he now held was none of those things. The cloth-covered paperboard of the cover was gone, the paper itself was gone, even the steady pour of blood had slowed. It looked—
Jon had heard of books bound in human skin before. The book in his hands was not bound in anything at all. It looked as if someone had cut a slab from a fresh corpse and carved it into the shape of one, thinly slicing the meat into pages. It sagged and dripped in his hands, and when it fell open again, every page—such as it had them—was nearly identical.
The illustration of the bottle was gone. The calligraphy was gone. Even most of the bloodstains were gone, though it still oozed sluggishly from the corners. On every page, scrawled in letters that ran and blurred with one another, were the same words, over and over again.
EAT ME
Jon’s teeth ached with longing, wet and sharp and ready to sink into soft, yielding meat. The yawning emptiness in his stomach screamed to be filled. The book was so heavy in his hand. Surely it would fill him.
Wait. His hand. What was in his other hand? His stomach twisted, devouring itself in its emptiness, but he might need both hands to eat, so he could look—just one look, and then he would free his hand and eat his fill.
A black lighter sat in his blood-smeared palm, the engraved eye staring up at him. His thumb pressed against the sparkwheel.
Right.
Right.
His thumb slipped as he spun the sparkwheel, catching the edge of the flame that ignited. The burn cleared his head, and just for a split second he could look at the book without giving in to the hunger.
EAT ME, the book begged.
Odd, how the moist flesh could catch as easily as old, dry paper.
His other hand continued to hold the book up as it burned. No matter how hard he tried to uncurl his fingers, he couldn’t simply drop it. Even as the book went up like a torch, as the flames crept closer to his fingers, as heat seared his skin until he was grinding his aching teeth down to the gums, the book would not let him go.
As if, in its last moments, the thing hoped to take him with it.
When the book was ashes, Jon sucked in a harsh gasp of air, choking on pain as he clutched his wrist and waited for the burning to fade just enough to think again. The skin on his left hand was reddened and slightly peeling in some places. Not a terrible burn, not even blistering just yet, but it hurt.
Pools of blood remained. Not the overflowing tide he’d seen after opening the book, but enough to be noticeable. Jon dithered for a moment, then shoved the lighter back in his pocket and made to leave.
As he turned away, something caught his eye. Further down the stacks, where the path curved around a corner in the wall, more dark stains stood out on the floor—not the rich crimson that had come from the book, but the rusty brown of dried, congealed blood. More alarming, as he approached it, was that it was not a pool or puddle. It was a smear on the ground, broken by the treaded pattern of a shoe print.
In his last mistake of the night, Jon turned the corner.
He did not know the name of the man that sat there, back resting against a bookshelf. But he had seen him often enough to know that he was one of the subject librarians—which subjects, he could not remember.
The corpse stared at him in grotesque confusion. Its head was tilted slightly back, mouth wedged open by a mass of crumpled, yellowed paper. The throat bulged, and the paper that spilled from his mouth was soaked in blood from being forced down. In spite of this, the text was visible on the one space that wasn’t covered by blood or teeth.
“Well, I’ll eat him,” said Alice, the paper read.
The call came early in the morning, waking Jon from troubled, fitful sleep. He picked it up fully expecting to be fired, but instead his supervisor merely informed him that the library would be closed for the day. No mention of why, no suggestion that they knew he was involved. Apparently his anonymous call to the police had done its work.
He didn’t mind having the day to himself, though. It left time for a trip to the nearest abandoned lot to burn his slacks.
When Jon went in for his next shift, things went smoothly enough to be genuinely suspicious. Tina was his desk partner again, and she greeted him with the same cordiality as always. No one official-looking ever came by to speak with him.
The only hint that anything had happened that night was a campus-wide e-mail paying respects to Daniel Lattimer, one of the subject librarians, who was reported as having “passed unexpectedly”. The message held all of the usual official platitudes and nothing else; Jon had read it word for word several times to be sure.
Someone should have known, shouldn’t they? It wasn’t as if he had been careful about covering his tracks, beyond making his tip anonymous. The library had cameras. He was sure he’d left at least a few shoe prints in all the blood.
But nothing came of it. The first hour passed peacefully, with nothing more exciting than a couple of patrons he had to inform of overdue books.
Jon spotted the familiar dark figure out of the corner of his eye, even before Tina hissed a warning at him. He raised his head to watch Gerard Keay’s approach, chest suddenly tight with nervousness.
How on earth was he supposed to explain this?
“Hey.” Gerard was in front of him already, leaning his elbows on the desk as usual. “Any word on that book? I tried to come in yesterday, but you were closed.”
“R-right.” Jon hesitated. There were several ways he could answer this. He could, of course, be utterly truthful and tell him that he’d burned the thing on account of it being made of meat and possibly killing one of the librarians. He almost laughed at the thought. At worst, Gerard would complain to someone about Jon being unhelpful; at best, he’d find it funny, but he’d demand a real answer once he was done laughing about it.
He could lie and stall by saying that the book was still on its way. But that was a temporary fix at best, and it would only lead Gerard to keep coming in and asking.
And would that really be so bad? Jon shook his head to clear away the thought.
“Right,” he said again. “A-about that. Unfortunately—” He slipped his bandaged hand behind the desk, out of sight. “—we were unable to find the book in storage. It seems to have been marked incorrectly. It happens sometimes. Though not very often, I assure you,” he added hastily. “But it’s been marked down as missing, I’m afraid.”
“Oh.” Gerard’s face was the very picture of disappointment. “That’s a shame. Really did need that one.”
“Terribly sorry for the inconvenience.” Jon tried to sound like he meant it.
It was hard to force down the sheer, overwhelming relief. Just last night he’d regretted his own paranoia, but now? If he hadn’t gone back, if he hadn’t checked the book…
Well, the library might not have been closed yesterday. And he didn’t have the first shift at the circulation desk. And whoever did would have been someone who didn’t know, someone who wasn’t haunted by the name Jurgen Leitner, who would have taken the book from the cart and handed it straight over—
The unwelcome memory of Mr. Lattimer’s body rose up behind his eyes, juxtaposed over the young man standing before him.
As a child, he’d doomed someone else to a gruesome death that should have been his. So maybe this time… maybe he’d actually…
“Well then,” said Gerard, shaking him out of his bubble of thoughts. “Guess that’s—er, guess I’ll look elsewhere…”
“Right,” said Jon. “Unless there was anything else you needed…?” He tried not to sound too hopeful.
“No, thanks, that’s it,” said Gerard, already turning away. “Thanks for all the help.”
“Oh, I hardly—I mean, I didn’t really do much, in the end.”
Gerard regarded him for a moment, head tilted to one side with a thoughtful look. Then, quite without warning, he smiled at him. “Don’t sell yourself short. You were great.”
“O-of course,” Jon stammered as Gerard turned to leave again. “Oh, wait—wait a moment.”
Gerard looked back. “Yeah?”
Jon dug into his pocket, pulling out the lighter. “Is this yours?” he asked, placing it on the desk. “I found it on one of the tables in the reading room, and I remembered you had it the other day…”
Instead of taking it, Gerard simply flashed him one last grin. “Keep it,” he said. “I’ve got loads.”
“It’s really not good to keep ignition sources in a library,” Jon protested, feeling inordinately flustered.
Gerard laughed, a brief, bright thing, and—
“D’you want to get coffee?” Jon blurted out.
The smile froze on Gerard’s face, before giving way to surprise. “What?”
A stab of terror nearly robbed Jon of his words, before he found his voice again and forged ahead. “Do you—I mean. Do you want to get coffee sometime?” he repeated. Shit. Shit, he was doing this, how was he already doing this? “With me?” He wanted to kick himself, of course he’d know he meant it that way. “I—my shift ends at noon today. If you’re free. I-if you want to, I mean.”
Gerard blinked at him, so utterly bewildered that it might have been funny if Jon’s heart weren’t currently climbing into his throat. “You—wait. Is this… are you asking me on a date?”
He said it so incredulously, as if the idea that Jon would ask him on a date were utterly incomprehensible to him. Rapidly, Jon’s heart sank back down.
“Yes,” Tina leapt in helpfully. “He is. Aren’t you, Jon?”
She nudged him none too gently. “Y-yes,” he said, because it wasn’t as if he could dig himself any deeper. “That—that was the intention.”
“Huh.” Gerard shrugged. “Sure.”
The whiplash made Jon dizzy for a moment. “Really?”
“Yeah. Noon, right? See you then.” With that, he turned and walked out of the library.
Once he was out of sight, Jon slumped over onto the surface of the desk like a marionette with its strings cut.
Tina patted his back. “Proud of you. Go get that goth D.”
It wasn’t that Gerry didn’t know it was a terrible idea—just that he’d had worse ones before. He was still breathing after years of them, in fact. So what was one more?
Jon the librarian was far from the first scarred survivor he’d ever met. They weren’t common, precisely, but nor were they unheard of. Technically he was one, and Mum had been as well, deep down, before she carved herself into something new and monstrous.
But Gerry knew he was an outlier, and as rare as surviving one brush with the Fears was, meeting two of the things and escaping both uneaten was on a level of its own. But against all odds, when he looked at the wispy little librarian who’d spent the past week being so divertingly helpful, Gerry could see two separate, distinct marks on him, where there had previously been only one. The Flesh was like a shark sometimes, content to take one good bite before losing interest and wandering off, while the wisps of the Web still clung jealously. A scar like that could have been left years ago or the day before they met. You could never tell with the Web.
That added to the risk, of course. For all he knew, this was some ploy from the Mother of Puppets to catch him and draw him in. A little cliche, maybe, but Gerry couldn’t fault it for its efficacy.
He’d said yes, after all.
In his defense, it wasn’t every day he met someone with a nice face, a taste for burning Leitners, and enough luck or fortitude to walk away from two different Powers. Nor was it every day a person like that asked him to… well…
People didn’t flirt with him, was the thing. Anyone who knew enough to be worth talking to either wised up and ran the other way, or turned around and tried to take a chunk out of him.
So, yeah. Might as well give it a shot. See what it was like, while he had the chance.
He had until noon to brace himself, anyway. Not enough time to go back to Mum’s and freshen up, which was a shame. She’d just faded out a couple of days ago, so he knew he’d have the place to himself.
Ah, well.
In spite of himself, Gerry turned his face upward with a grin and an excited spring in his step. It’d be a bit like traveling abroad, or visiting tourist traps, or all the other things he indulged in when Mum was gone. See as much of the world beyond his own as he could, before she finally fucked up and got him killed.
A date! Who would have thought he’d get to check that one off the bucket list?
Jon technically had two minutes left on his shift, but when the next student assistant showed up early, Tina gently bullied him off his computer and shooed him out the door. The protests he offered weren’t just for show—it would’ve been nice to have two extra minutes to brace himself—but Tina was cheerfully, relentlessly insistent, and Ren didn’t know what was going on and didn’t care enough to ask.
When he finally slung his messenger bag over his shoulder and walked out of the library, his heart was roughly level with his collarbone. He glanced around, but it was mostly for show, and a bit of last-minute stalling. He’d spotted Gerard the moment he walked out.
Gerard sat waiting on one of the benches, one leg crossed over the other, leaning his elbow on the arm of the bench so that his head could rest on his curled hand. The pose was almost picturesque; Jon had to wonder if he was doing it on purpose.
He glanced up at Jon’s approach, chin lifting from his knuckles with a faint smile. Jon took that as a good sign and did his best to match it.
“Afternoon,” he said, without a single stammer or voice crack. It was going well so far.
Gerard nodded in answer. “So, where are we headed?”
“Oh, well, there’s a cafe not far from here,” Jon replied. “Just on the high street. It’s not too bad of a walk. It’s a decent place for lunch, I’ve found.”
“Well then.” Gerard stood up—more like unfolded, given his height. “Lead the way.”
Nervousness made Jon’s steps unusually quick, but in this case it was sort of a boon. Now that they were properly standing alongside each other, rather than separated by a desk with Gerard standing and Jon sitting on a raised chair, he could see how much height Gerard had over him. Jon’s forehead only just reached his chin.
He told himself, rather strenuously, that this revelation didn’t make a difference.
“So, er, what do you do?” Jon asked, grasping for the first topic of conversation he could think of. “I don’t believe I ever asked. Are you a student, or…?”
“Ha. No.” Gerard wrinkled his nose in amusement, as if the idea of being a student was some kind of inside joke. “More of a hobbyist. Independent researcher.”
Jon brightened. Researcher—he liked the sound of that. “Oh, in what area?”
“Old books.”
“Ah,” Jon said. “I suppose that makes sense.” Come to think of it, that edition of Alice in Wonderland—or at least, the book that it was supposed to be—hadn’t been all that old. Books published in 1906 were hardly ancient.
Not that he was any great expert.
“How’d you get into it?” he asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
Gerard’s face remained politely blank for the most part, though the slight tightening at the corners of his eyes suggested that he very much did mind. “Family business,” he said, and did not elaborate.
Jon pursed his lips, abruptly and uncomfortably aware that he’d crossed an unseen boundary. He’d been trying to be careful. “Right, sorry.”
“For what?”
“For—oh, never mind.” Eager for a change of subject, Jon mentally dug around for one of his usual options.
“What about you?” Gerard asked, with a slight sigh. “Been in the library business long?”
Jon’s mind snagged on that sigh for a moment—was he only asking out of grudging politeness, or out of obligation?—before he mentally shook himself and answered. “Oh, well... no, not exactly. It’s not my area of study. But I’m hoping to stay in academia after I graduate. It suits me better than anything else I’ve tried, and since it’s my last year, I thought I’d get started. And to be honest, I needed the distraction...” He hesitated, wondering how much detail he ought to go into. Silence threatened to fall. Gerard seemed to be waiting for him to continue, but You met me at a job I started in the wake of a breakup probably wasn’t a vein worth exploring. “So, anyway—do you live around here, out of curiosity? Or are you just here on, ah, research business?”
To Jon’s relief, that brought a grin to Gerard’s face. “Nah, I’m from London. I travel a lot, though.”
“Oh? Like where?”
“Oh… all over,” Gerard answered slowly. “I was in Istanbul last year—”
“Not Constantinople,” Jon muttered, and immediately wanted to punch himself.
“What?”
“Hm, what? Nothing, sorry. Here we are, then.” To Jon’s immense relief, the cafe was before them, and Gerard seemed duly distracted.
He could only enjoy it briefly before nervousness set in. Truth be told, he hadn’t thought this date through as much as he should have. Lunch and coffee-or-tea had seemed like a good, easy idea, but now he wasn’t sure. Were cafes like this Gerard’s scene? This place enjoyed a steady traffic of university students, which Jon had sort of assumed Gerard was; now that he knew he wasn’t, Jon couldn’t help but second-guess himself. It wasn’t exactly romantic, with its usual crowd of twenty-somethings staving off burnout or tapping away at laptops in various corners. But this was just a first date, and that meant casual was better than romantic, right?
Good Lord, he’d forgotten what first dates were like. How on earth had he managed it with Georgie?
He breathed a silent sigh of relief when they found a table open, and spent the few seconds it took them to sit down to remember what they had been talking about. “I’ve hardly ever left England,” he admitted, with a quick glance at the menu on the wall. “I went on a school trip to France when I was in secondary school, but that’s about it.”
Gerard shrugged, “My mum’s been dragging me around on work trips since I was a kid,” he said with a wry twist of his mouth.
They ordered food, and Jon couldn’t help but notice that Gerard didn’t ask for any suggestions, and barely glanced at the menu beforehand. And, aside from a cursory glance around while they sought out a table, Gerard didn’t seem too curious about the place, either. He’d been here before, Jon realized. Which was a relief, to be honest. Neither an advantage nor a strike against him. Utterly innocuous.
“So, um.” Gerard pursed his lips thoughtfully. “What’d you see? In France?” The words stumbled slightly on the way out of his mouth, and it occurred to Jon that Gerard seemed just as uncertain about moving the conversation along as he was.
Was it bad that he found that comforting? At least he wasn’t alone in feeling awkward and off-balance.
“Paris, mostly,” he replied with what he hoped was an encouraging smile. “ The Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, a bit of the Louvre—the usual highlights.”
“Standard tourist stuff, then,” Gerard replied, returning it with his own slight smile. “Did you see the catacombs?”
“I didn’t, but God, I wanted to,” Jon said. “I’d read up before we left, and the catacombs sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. But my school thought it was too risky—which is ridiculous, it’s not like we’d lose anyone on a guided tour.”
Gerard’s smile turned enigmatic. “You’d be surprised.”
“What?”
But Gerard shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Only real way to see them is on your own, anyway.”
“On your own?” Jon echoed. “How so?”
“Nix the guided tour, find your own way in, and try not to die.”
That startled a laugh out of Jon, and he felt some of the nervous tension ease. “Am I to assume you’ve done that?”
Gerard leaned back. “Oh yeah, loads of times. Call it a bit of urban exploration.”
“I don’t suppose you ran into any ghosts.”
Gerard’s teeth flashed in a grin that Jon could only describe as mischievous. “If I said I did, would you believe me?”
“I don’t know,” Jon said, narrowing his eyes. “It would depend on how convincing you are. Run into a lot of ghosts on your travels?”
“Like I said,” Gerard said with another sharp smile. “You’d be surprised. Independent researcher, remember? You wind up in a lot of odd places, chasing after old books.”
Memories threatened to rise to the surface, of blood and meat between the book covers, of terrified horseflies and spiders with writhing legs. Jon mercilessly shoved them down. “I can only imagine.”
“I’d be very impressed if you could.”
Gerard hesitated, then. His eyebrows drew together for a moment, thoughtfully, like he was considering his words carefully before speaking. If Jon didn’t know any better, he would have thought Gerard was bracing himself.
“Rare books go hand in hand with the occult, you know,” he said after a moment. He met Jon’s eyes with a strangely penetrating stare, as if searching for… something. Jon was reminded of himself just a few minutes earlier, checking Gerard’s expression anxiously for a reaction.
“Do they?”
His date nodded, still watching him carefully. “You can’t really dive into one without encountering the other, unless you’re not trying hard enough.”
Gerard needn’t have worried. This was an area Jon understood, well-trodden ground ever since he was old enough to know the first thing about research. The reason behind it might not be something he relished thinking about, but knowledge was always better when it was shared.
A thrill of excitement shot through him, as the sum total of his knowledge on the subject piled up on the back of his tongue. “I’ve read a bit on the occult.”
“Only a bit?”
“Maybe more than a bit,” Jon admitted.
Gerard’s eyebrows rose, not with disdain but with interest. “Do tell.”
Jon was happy to do exactly that.
By the time Gerry got back to Morden, it was well after dark.
That was unexpected. He hadn’t meant for it to go that long. The “date” was supposed to be a way to while away an afternoon, but then he’d gone and lost track of time, somehow. He’d walked into it with expectations, namely embarrassment and stilted, awkward conversation. Gerry didn’t make a habit of chatting with strangers, for two somewhat disparate reasons. Down one path, it led him straight into the infuriating, enviable ignorance of the “real” world. Down the other, to uncomfortable silences when he puzzled out the gaps in his knowledge of something presumably common, and more often than not got it wrong in a way that others found unsettling.
Jon had circumvented both problems entirely, by launching into a detailed explanation of whatever he found interesting enough to talk about. It was impossible to think him ignorant when he held that much eclectic knowledge in his head, and with the level of detail he went into when explaining it, there was no room for Gerry to get lost along the way.
What had they talked about? Gerry could remember quite a few things they’d latched on to, but not how any of it had connected. He’d taken in Jon’s enthusiastic, if adorably skewed thoughts on modern occultism. But at some point the topic had turned to the history of eyeglasses, and at another they’d skipped over a bit of comparative literature into Jon’s thoughts on the contents of the First Folio. He distinctly remembered the conversation taking a brief detour into wombats. Why had they been talking about wombats?
It didn’t matter, probably. In the moment, at least, he had followed along perfectly. And wasn’t that novel?
He passed by Pinhole’s unassuming facade, briefly entertained the thought of sleeping in a bed that night, and decided against it. Once Mum was back, she’d want him in the shop where she could see him. Best stay away for now, enjoy what passed for freedom as much as he could.
Unconsciously he found himself reaching for his phone. It was a battered thing, years old and slow and not much good for anything besides calls and texts. As of today, it had a new contact number in it. Jon had asked to enter it in, and Gerry had let him without really thinking about what it meant.
He had someone to call, mainly. If he was bored, if he wanted to hear another human voice and slipping into a crowd to let the white noise bury him wouldn’t cut it. Even now, hours after Jon had handed the thing back to him with a hopeful look in his eyes, Gerry wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do with it.
As if on cue, it vibrated with a new text.
Did you get home safely ? -Jon
Gerry glanced up, noting that he was about a mile away from the shop. Yeah, thanks .
I had fun today, Jon went on, after typing for far longer than four words would have warranted. Then, after another long pause, I would n’t mind doing this again.
Gerry smiled in the dark. There was only one thing to do: the same thing he did with everything pleasant that fell into his lap.
Enjoy it, for as long as it took him to ruin it beyond repair.
Miles away, Jon lay facedown on his secondhand couch and tried not to scream.
Wombats. Had he actually spent a solid eight minutes talking about wombats?