The Hidden Library (20 page)

“Sweetheart, were you not arrested tonight for beating up an innocent boy?” When I said nothing, she added, “We are obviously quite aware of who he resembles.”

One of my tutors had told me about some guy called Hammurabi. An eye for an eye, he said. I liked that, because Sawyer needed to pay for what he had done. And since Sawyer wasn’t in front of me, and some punk kid who was picking on some small-for-his-age kid simply because he was black was, my fists wanted justice.

“You’re not going,” Katrina eventually insisted. “It will solve nothing.”

The Institute was put on lockdown for the following month. My parents took no chances with me—I was never left in the position to edit anywhere. Instead, I got to visit my shrink on an every-other-day basis. He asked me even more questions about my childhood, my good-for-nothing Pap, about Tom Sawyer and all the illusions and pedestals I assigned him, and about Jim. At first I said nothing, because he kept asking stupid questions like, “How does Jim’s death make you feel?”

In the end, he told me I suffered from survivors’ guilt, whatever the hell that meant.

1876/96TWA-TS became something poisonous to me, much to the confusion of my parents. Instead of accepting my past, it became repugnant. Everything about it felt wrong. The people. The racism. The slavery. The backwater mentality. The forced morality and civility that thinly veiled prejudice, misogyny, and snobbery. The longer I lived in New York City, the more I despised everything about my childhood. I resented I was born into such a place. Loathed that I even associated myself with anyone who lived there, especially those who lived in their misguided, blissed-out existences that thought it was okay to devalue the life of somebody as wonderful as Jim. I came to hate Twain and his goddamn books.

I hated that he put those things in print.

I thought of all that time Jim and I spent together, when we both ran away from a society that persecuted the both of us. He was kind, and funny, and loyal, and his heart was too big for those assholes.

Katrina won in the end. Eventually, I lost any kind of urge to go back to 1876/96TWA-TS. I wanted nothing more to do with it, even when Brom eventually came to believe it would do more good than harm to set this all behind me.

And yet, here I am. In a jail cell, no less, having done exactly what my mother feared I would have done all those years before.

I swear, Katrina, I did my best to forget 1876/96TWA-TS. I really did.

I force myself to think about other things, lest everything turns red once more. I think about things that will most likely not matter to me soon. Things like finding Todd and extracting payment for what he’s done to my family. I think about who could be in charge, and why they are deleting Timelines. I hope my brother has found whatever miracle drugs I told him about, and that my father will be healed. That my brother might be healed. I think about how funny it is that, after years of searching for her, I actually found Alice—only to fall in love with her.

“Son?”

I tilt my head toward the bars, expecting to see the sheriff but find Judge Thatcher instead.

I nearly laugh. Justice is a funny thing, especially here in the South. People are always complaining about justice in the modern-day world, but they don’t know how good they really have it. And now here is Becky’s father, Sawyer’s father-in-law, and he’s going to make sure I pay for what I did.

I can beat the shit out of a man like Tom Sawyer, and the town goes crazy. Jim is horrifically murdered for no reason other than the color of his skin and nobody says a peep. What the hell kind of world is this?

Purgatory, I think. Hell.

“Son,” he says again, “I’ve had a talk with the sheriff.”

I’m not your son,
I want to tell him.

“We’ve agreed it’s best if you are on your way and leave town immediately.”

That gets my attention. I roll to my side and sit up.

“Becky says it was all a big misunderstanding—”

A big misunderstanding?!

“And Tom has been beating himself up pretty bad all these years, knowing he done wrong by you.”

By
me
?!

“Neither of them want this to be a sore spot between you all anymore. I’m just gonna need you to promise me, son, that when you leave, you won’t be coming back. I know you’re probably worried about following through on the widow’s wishes, but be rest assured I’ll personally take care of it all for you.”

A sore spot?!

I stand up and make my way over to where he’s standing, just beyond the bars. Through the windows on the far side of town, I can see that the sun is rising. There’s no snow, but I can only imagine how cold it is.

“A man died,” I say quietly. Angrily. “More than that, many men died—and are still dying.”

“War is brutal. No doubt about that. We’ve got families who have been gutted, fighting on both sides. People are fighting right now and dying to set these things right. But this anger you have toward Tom—none of this is gonna bring Jim back, son. None of it. All it brings about is sadness and the past and a lifetime of regret.”

He could be my fucking shrink. “You think I should just forget what he’s done?”

The Judge looks tired. “Now, I never said that. Huck, one of the things I’ve always admired about you is that you always knew who you were, and you believed in what you believed and you came to those decisions on your own. Tom ain’t like that. You left, and it’s obvious you got yourself an education. From what I hear, you got yourself a good job and a good lady. You expanded your horizons, son. Tom hasn’t.” He sighs. “Tom is, in many ways, still that boy you once knew. His horizons have remained limited. He’s . . .” The Judge shakes his head. “Now, I love my daughter, and I love her husband, but even I can admit that he ain’t the most selfless creature out there. What he did was wrong. He knows what he did was wrong. Your fists ain’t gonna bring Jim back, Huck. All they’re gonna do is keep you angry and miserable. Moving on will, though. Moving forward and making damn sure things change.”

Before I can say anything, he removes the sheriff’s keys and unlocks the cell.

“I think a wind of change is coming,” he says quietly. “War changes everything.” Glancing down at my hands, he adds, “You’ll want to get that checked out whenever you go to where you’re goin’.”

A coat is passed over to me, alongside my gun and a hat. “People are still angry. You’ll want to keep the hat on.” He extracts a golden pocket watch. “There’s a train leaving, heading north in a little over an hour. Make sure you and your lady friend are on it.”

I shrug into the coat, wincing slightly as my knuckles brush against the wool. Just before I get to the door, he says, “Huck?”

I turn around.

“Keep expanding those horizons.”

I tip my hat and make my way outside. This early, there aren’t many people milling about. Wagons trundle up and down the road, their drivers lethargic as they make their deliveries. I take the Judge’s advice and tilt the hat, keeping my head lowered as I make my way through town. The inn itself is fairly quiet, a man dozing behind the counter that I don’t recognize.

I need to get the hell out of here already.

Upstairs, though, our room is empty. The bed is still made, as if nobody slept in it. Bandages and a bowl of water rest near a dead fire, untouched from the night before.

Alice is nowhere to be found.

Would she have edited back to the Institute? Perhaps she did as I requested and reclaimed Sawyer’s equipment and then took it back. But . . . no. Alice isn’t the sort who would leave anyone behind, even if it were the smart thing to do. Alice doesn’t run away from fights.

Alice pushes herself straight into the middle of them.

I’m halfway down the hallway when I hear a voice coming from one of the rooms. “I think it’s time we had a chat, Huckleberry Finn Van Brunt, don’t you?”

I
WOKE UP IN a room I did not recognize to S. Todd’s face leering over me. When he whispered, his rancid breath left me literally gagging. “Good morning! Are you ready to play?”

I attempted to shove him off, to retrieve my daggers, but I couldn’t move.

He’d giggled when he saw my panicked understanding. And then he laid his body on top of mine, belly to belly, hips to hips, legs on legs until breathing became laborious.

“Don’t try to move, gel.” And then he laughed and laughed, and I did my best to bite off his nose or ear, but I was unable to even move my mouth much.

Dread I’d never felt before consumed me.

He pressed his cracked and peeling lips against my cheek, and I gagged some more. This only served to amuse the fiend. He kissed the other cheek, and for a moment, I wanted to cry, I felt such utter and desolate frustration. In all my years, in all my battles and struggles, I had never been at such a disadvantage.

Why couldn’t I move?

But then a name came to me. One that left me astoundingly even more alarmed than before.

Finn.

I fought harder, willed myself to move, struggled under the weights Todd had somehow trapped me beneath, and yet still couldn’t shift a singular inch. Panic turned me wild—every last nerve ending in my body was on alert, every muscle was ordered to move, and all that resulted was more of Todd’s laughter and a shortness of breath that had me gasping beneath his weight.

I could only pray Becky had followed through and convinced her father to free Finn. If something were to happen to him, whilst I was trapped in here with his mother’s murderer . . .

The more I struggled, though, the greater he delighted in my plight. Eventually, the sharp, disgusting stab against my hip of arousal left me as emotionally paralyzed as I was physically.

The cad dropped his head, his nose digging into the base of my neck. “I can see why he favors you so.”

This cannot be real. This cannot be real.

Todd shifted his body so that it spooned the side of mine, leaving me gasping for air. A dirty hand drifted across my cheek and then across my still lips.

Rage, beautiful, searing rage exploded within me.

The rough hand took its time drifting lower and then lower still. I imagined in fervent detail the joy and painstaking time I’d take carving him into little pieces and then gutting him.

My hoop skirt, I discovered, had already been removed, as had the voluminous amounts of clothing excepting my chemise.

I imagined slicing his penis the way a mother would cut up sausages for her children.

As he dragged the chemise higher and higher up my legs, Todd gleefully took his time informing me I’d been drugged, yet conveniently left out naming said drug. It was no use to fight the effects, he claimed. Each struggle would only hasten the inevitable—which, naturally, he did not see fit to elaborate upon, either.

His fingers brushed the skin just above my knee. I thought about how I’d feed him the small slices of his penis shortly before I allowed him to die. “You’re not so dangerous now, are you, Miss Alice in Wonderland?”

But then he’d sighed regretfully and rolled himself to his back. My eyelids I could move, thank God, and when he began pleasuring himself next to me, his grunts and groans only heightening the fury pulsing within me, I closed my eyes tight and visualized even more ways I would make him suffer. And suffer he would, for all of the heinousness he has inflicted upon so many.

Once sated, he stood and pulled his pants up. “I have it on good authority your partner will be out of jail shortly.”

I’d wanted to cry again—but this time from relief. What made him stop? Not that I was complaining—far from it—but a fiend such as this does not seem to have the best of impulse control.

He buttoned his vest and slipped on a filthy coat. “We shall have a meeting with him.” Several switchblades were tucked into various pockets. “That was quite a show he put on yesterday, was it not? I rather enjoyed seeing the infamous Finn Van Brunt losing his temper like that.”

Todd had been there, watching?
And then:
he knows Finn’s name?

“I imagine he’ll lose his temper today, don’t you think? Should I tell him I took some peeks underneath that chemise while you slept?” Todd came over and lifted me up like I was a rag doll. Somewhere down the hall, a door slammed. “Ah. Perhaps he’s already been released! Are you ready for some fun, Alice?”

My damn head lolled and fell upon his shoulder as he hoisted me next to him.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Todd called out, “I think it’s time we had a chat, Huckleberry Finn Van Brunt, don’t you?”

And now here I am, my breath shallow from more than the constant struggle to move as I wait for the door to open.

No further footsteps sound. All I can hear is my heartbeat, loud and strong and fast.

Todd slips out one of his switchblades, and in one of his grandiose yet pathetic shows, twirls it until it opens. The tip is pressed against my jugular. Thoughts of Van Brunt in the hospital fill my mind, and it only adds fuel to my bonfire of rage.

Suddenly, the door explodes into the room in a hail of splinters and broken bits. Standing there, wearing a coat I do not recognize, is Finn.