A ceiling.
What had been a rope-bridge setup of rooms and stairs and countless bookcases was now becoming confined. Narrow.
The bell took on a different tone, now. Not so loud, but each toll seemed to pass us like so much wind, just piercing enough to make people wince, angling their heads to reduce the blow of it.
“Where’s Milly!?” a Behaim said, eyes wide.
“Couldn’t-” I started.
“You left her behind!?”
I shook my head.
“He tried,” Evan said.
“Says his friend?”
“Tut tut,” the teacher cut in, flowing forward to put herself between the two of us and the Behaims. “Arguing. Arguing has to be punished.”
The children that accompanied her cringed.
“No,” Rose said, her voice sharp. “We’ll take Evan’s word for it. And you…”
She pointed at the teacher-Other.
“Shut up. I don’t know what you are, I don’t care, you don’t scare me, and I refuse to let you waste our time.”
The teacher blinked, a little put off by that.
The kids were cowering even more, now.
“March,” Rose said.
“Barber’s coming,” I said. “Twenty seconds to a minute away, I’d guess.”
“Then march faster,” Rose said.
The others started to head up the stairwell. The walls were so close on either side that they had to go single-file.
By some signal I didn’t catch, the teacher sicced her children on us. They ran forward. The ones that had flashlights were winging the lights left and right, and it made for something of a strobe effect. Tricks on the eyes.
Again, the uneven number of kids, from one moment to the next. All gaunt, all hollowed out, the color sucked away.
The Knights fired their guns. The muzzle flashes only made for more bursts of light. The Knight aimed at one, fired, and in the moment of the flash, was hitting open air between two children.
“Stop shooting!” Nick called out. Too late.
When their number crashed into us, there were two dead Other-kids on the ground, and ten kids clutching and clawing at us.
I put the Hyena to one’s throat. I’d hoped to stop it, but it only continued to press forward, until it ran itself through on the blade.
Ellie, for her part, displayed a remarkable enthusiasm in kicking one child down the stairs. Not surprising, but remarkable.
Kathryn, for her part, despite being stronger, was struggling.
Rose gestured, her palm already bloody, and sent two kids sprawling. She stepped on one’s throat, then stepped on one hand when it tried to claw at her calf.
The newsprint man fought, tearing apart and getting torn apart in turn. The teacher reached out to him and dug claws into the underside of his chin, penetrating the softer tissue there. He dropped, flesh sizzling around the wound.
The teacher moved while we dealt with the kids. It felt like every time I turned around, they’d found some excuse or occasion to multiply. Not a lot, but there were roughly thirteen here, and that was four more than before, if we ignored the one that had been kicked down the stairs.
“Books,” the teacher said. “Oh, how I have missed a good book. I do think I’ll enjoy this relocation.”
“Do you?” Rose asked.
The teacher hugged a book to her dangerously pointed breasts. “Heaven.”
“Hell,” Rose said. “At least for certain types. Look inside.”
I could see concern on the teacher’s face.
“Rose,” I said. “Barber.”
“I know,” she said. “But-”
The teacher shrieked. She dropped the book.
I saw Rose lean forward, peering down, squinting against the poor, mottled candlelight.
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. Very few books in here are readable. The ink runs, or it’s in a lost language, or something. The rest, near as I can figure, are filled with things you want to avoid.”
The teacher’s mouth gaped. She turned, clutching for more books, pulling them from shelves, dropping them on the floor so they landed open.
I approached the teacher from behind.
The children didn’t stop me. Whatever control the teacher exerted, be it fear or some kind of puppeteering, she wasn’t exerting it now.
I cut her throat with the Hyena.
“Did you think it would be any different?” I asked.
“Go!” Rose said. “Go, go! Careful, don’t get jammed in!”
The children were gone when I turned around.
Rose and I lingered, Alister standing off to one side.
“I need time,” Alister told me. “Rose knows, but… I’ve been taught things we might be able to use to block Barbatorem. We just need, I don’t know, five minutes? Ten?”
“You have-” I started to say.
I stopped short as the air that passed through my lips came with a taste, one that was filling the room.
The rank smell of the Barber, soup-thick in the air.
I heard his footsteps.
“-Seconds,” I finished.
“Avert your eyes!” Rose called up the stairs. “Try not to look back!”
She gave Alister a push. He headed up the stairs.
“Go,” she told me.
I didn’t waste time.
For her part, she was right behind me. Holding her rifle, she aimed it at the ceiling.
Glass shattered. The candle fell, and the light nearly went out.
Reaching into her coat, she pulled out a string of pouches. She tossed one into the middle of the room.
The flame erupted. Oil, or some kind of accelerant. Filling a room that was all wood and books.
“Won’t work,” I said.
“I know!” she said.
I turned, pushing Alister lightly, but there was a jam, and the single-file line had halted.
I could see the Barber appear in the doorway, lit from below by fire.
The flesh burned, and it smelled like rancid meat and burning hair, but he didn’t react with pain. He didn’t slow or stagger.
He was dragging someone or something with him. A body, held not with his hand, but skewered with the shears.
Using both hands, he held the body as he waded through the flames, so it wouldn’t burn.
The boy Ellie had kicked down the stairs.
The barber cut him in half.
One half almost disappeared before it touched fire. It screamed and thrashed for a moment before it disappeared like the other children had.
The other thrashed too, but it was a gibbering, screaming, violent thrashing. Bloody, flayed, rasping, almost breaking itself in a struggle to reach down and get at the Barber. Its expression was wide, and the expression so twisted and manic that I thought its skin might split, pulled back and away as far as it was.
A girl, dressed in a scorched, ripped private school uniform, drenched in blood. No longer a half, but a broken whole.
The jam further up cleared. I grabbed Rose, and gave her a push, squeezing past her, and I grabbed a book.
“What are you doing?”
“We already decided I would die tonight,” I said. “Run!”
The barber threw the child, over the flames and at the stairs.
There was nothing to her but fury and violence. Pain and viciousness.
The child grappled me, clutching, tearing. Her own fingernails tore free of the beds as she scrabbled, scratched, and clawed. She found a grip on one of the bones of my forearm, and I felt something crack as she pulled.
Only one of her own fingers. But she’d clawed away wood and twigs, too.