Nothing But Blackened Teeth(19)

“Jesus.” Lin stared out the door. I followed his gaze to where blind eyes, bulbous and luminous as fresh grapes, clustered in the gap. They blinked, skin frothing up from inside the mass, and, for a moment, they became scrotal-like. “Jesus, it’s the whole fucking house, Cat.”

“They don’t need to stay if they don’t want to,” said Phillip.

I dampened my lips, licked the sour from the cracked flesh. “People die when they split up. We gotta stay together. Besides, it can’t be that far away—”

“Next room.”

“See?” A smile twitched feebly. “Not far away.”

“Did you just literally say we should stay? Cat.” Lin’s voice, coming up from behind me, nails shoveling into my collarbone. “What the fuck? What the fuck are you doing?”

I whirled on him, all teeth. “We’re not splitting up.”

“Fuck.”

“Jesus, you fucking pieces of—” Phillip roared into the clamor, shutting us all up. “Just—just fucking stop. I’m so sick of you fucking idiots. Single file. Let’s just fucking get to the library. If there’s no book, you two leave. We’ll go on ahead.”

“Always the hero, aren’t you?” Lin giggled, but no one’d look at him twice, not that he cared, content with his lunacy. Through all of it, Faiz said nothing, watched the door like his true love stood in the slit, bubbling with eyes, so many of them now, bubbles spilling from the mouth of a Coke bottle. “Bet Faiz loves it. Bet Faiz loves the idea you’d be the one who has his back. Bet it’d turn out great for you.”

“Shut up, Lin,” I said.

“We’re going to regret this.”

I ignored him. “Let’s go.”





7



It wasn’t so much a library as much as it was an archive of corpses, manuscripts chewed up by the centuries, edges winnowed by insects. Their leather festered with mold, with mushrooms, wide-brimmed with fluting bodies, tiered like cheap apartments and blanched by the half-light. Some could barely be labeled as books anymore, their paper digested then regurgitated as building material. There were so many of them. Wasp nests, almost intestinal in look, built atop the remains of a termitarium, its inhabitants long dead. Suddenly, I was reminded of dried alveoli, pressed and preserved between glass, something an old girlfriend had shown off between kisses in the classroom.

“There’s a book here.”

“Yes,” I said, voice hoarse. I thought the same things that Lin and Phillip must have been thinking, the two exchanging uncertain expressions, Lin’s madness receded to a jouncing energy, Phillip’s face closed up like a casket as he set candles through the room. There was certainly a book here. There were countless books here, adrift in dead insects and wriggling ivory larvae.

The yokai had followed us, a conga line of myths, repeating between themselves hello. Hello. Hello. Like infants or parrots, or maybe something fresh-born and wetly glistening, amazed to have larynx and lips, the zygote of a vocabulary. Hello, the kitsune sang to each other. Hello, said the kappa, the red-faced oni, the gashadokuro, bent low and crawling on its knuckles. Hello.

“I—” Faiz fluttered his hands before sweeping a stack of mouldering books into the cradle of an arm. “Why are you all just standing around? Let’s look.”

Phillip plunged into the labour, both hands, no doubts at all, and dug into the refuse like a dog, his mouth chewing through prayers or curses, I couldn’t tell which. Couldn’t tell if it mattered, not with the fever of his articulation. Lin and I exchanged a look, anxious.

“This is bullshit.” Lin put to the voice what we’d both been thinking, but we all knew there wouldn’t be follow-through. The only way out was through a door teeming with yokai, their fingers clenched all around the doorway. Hello, they whispered. Hello, hello. “There is no way we’re going to find anything in here. There’s no way there’s anything to find. This is a fool’s errand. And how the fuck are you even sure that Talia—”

“Ah-hah!”

Lin startled, stumbled back. Faiz staggered to us in a kind of bowlegged trot, no bend to his joints, no cadence. His palm bookmarked a massive ledger, the vellum spidered with black characters. He slapped the page, once, twice, four times, arrhythmic yet with intent, like he was freestyling a new argot of Morse code. Jabbed a finger at the crosshatching of lines, face shining with triumph.

“Everything we need,” he said.

I flicked a look down. The lines regarded me in return: ink-stroke eyes between the characters, mouths in the logograms. I swallowed. “Faiz.”

“It says—” He tapped the opened page. Silverfish writhed across the paper over and around and between the web of his fingers, antennae slick with light. The iconography on the pages made no sense, black scratches imposed by an alien hand. They bloomed beneath Faiz’s fingers and the pages went black, and through the glass of the ink, something grinned. “That this place is consecrated to the Four Kings, and each of them requires a different sacrifice.”

“There’s nothing on the fucking page,” Phillip said, quiet, in that way he did when he was genuinely angry, a hum in the backbeat of his voice. “It’s just mould.”

“A bit of blood, a bit of bone, a bit of cum,” Faiz retorted, his cheeks blotching red. “A bit of organ. Four cardinal directions. Four Kings. That’s what it says. Cat?”