Chapter 24 Still Faye

She had planned to run but Faye found she couldn't. Davey's roar turned into a whimper the moment he got the blade all the way down and Mary's body, detached from her rolling head, continued to twitch in the dim light. Faye planned to run, but her terror made it so the electrical signal from her spinal cord to her muscles, telling them to contract, telling them to move, failed somewhere along the way.

The room was lit only by that one phone. The phone had an attachment it wore like a backpack, an extra battery. It had to be Mary's. Who but Mary would need such a device, would exhibit such forethought about her device? For the rest of them, it was just a phone; for Mary it was a window to the outside world, a window for the outside world to see into her. That flashlight could shine for hours longer. It could shine until morning, though Mary no longer had any need of its light.

If anyone saw Mary's face, just her face, not her neck or the strands of her hair that were sticky with blood, but her pretty features, they might think she had been surprised by a birthday party in her honor or by the sound of a popping balloon. It wasn't horror, it wasn't pain, but her lips were parted and shaped into an O. If one couldn't go peacefully, then surprise wasn't the worst outcome. Faye supposed that Mary had never seen the blade of the paper cutter coming. She'd been wearing a delicate gold necklace with a cross on it. Faye wouldn't have guessed her as religious. It stayed with Mary's head. Intact, clinging to what remained of her neck.

Davey was on his knees over Mary's body, which was finally, mercifully, lifeless. Her head had rolled some distance, and her face was turned to Faye so he couldn't see her expression of happy surprise. If he was imagining anything, it was sure to be a snarl of horror.

"Faye?" he whispered across the room. The alarm continued its work and when it paused, he said it again. "Faye?"

She shook her head. What could he possibly have to say to her? Was there a speech he planned to make? An admittance of his guilt and his intentions, the way a villain might speechify in a film before carrying out his last terrible deed? The alarm blared. It probably hadn't grown louder since Faye first pulled it, but it felt that way. She didn't answer him, but she did meet his eye. She wasn't sure what she expected, but it wasn't tears. His face was wet with them.

Davey put his hands up. Like she was the firing squad rather than him. "It was self-defense," he said. "You know that, right? That I wouldn't have hurt her, but she would have killed me?"

If there was a wilder claim he could have made at the moment, she couldn't think of it. Self-defense was a matter of proportional response, and Mary's head was rolling across the floor. Entirely unproportional, she would say.

"She was going to strangle me," he said. "She had her full weight on my throat and I was starting to see spots. Faye. Faye? You have to believe me."

Had Mary been in any position to speak in her own defense, she might have pointed out that she was half Davey's size and that all he had to do to subdue the threat of being strangled was to get out from under her arms, which he'd done successfully before chopping off her lovely head.

"You have to believe me," he said again. He lowered his hands, slowly, to make clear he was no threat, and rested them on his thighs.

"Tell me the truth, okay, Davey?" This cursed library had seen so much bloodshed. The place would need to be burned. That was the only image that gave her any comfort, the idea of the whole place up in smoke. "It doesn't make any difference now anyway." The subtext—because he was surely about to kill her. "Why did you poison Kip?"

She could begin to understand Soraya. That Davey felt ill will toward her. While Kip was hardly a lovable character, his death had been so ugly that it could only have been inspired by a deep hate. The alternative, the one she hardly dared consider, was that Kip's death was incidental. That any of them, including her, could have been the recipient of the poison. That it had started as a game.

"I didn't poison Kip," he said. "I didn't poison anyone!" He added that as though he were following her line of thought. That he needed a body for his ritual and Kip hadn't been guilty of anything, only unlucky.

The scissors Davey had asked her to grab for him were still in Umu's chest, and she was ashamed to find herself considering them. When Davey had asked for them, the idea of disturbing Umu was abhorrent, but for the sake of self-preservation, it didn't seem so terrible.

"Then tell me the truth about Soraya," she said. Every second she kept talking was a second he wasn't upon her; it was the second before the next terrible event. "Did you plan it, with Soraya? Or was it in the heat of the moment? You were high, there was so much emotion…"

"She was climbing the stack and it collapsed. Accidentally. That must be what happened. I didn't kill anyone!"

A lie. Mary's body there to prove it. His swollen eyelid looked like it was throbbing. They were still apart. She, by the door, he, by the back of the room. She didn't dare even look at Umu, should he follow her eyes to the scissors.

"But you knew about the job? That she was hired over you?"

That swollen eyelid, throbbing in time with his heartbeat.

That alarm, giving him a moment to consider his answer.

"No," he said after a time. "No. I thought the job was mine until Umu told us otherwise tonight. I didn't know anything until after Soraya was dead."

They were all liars. How could she know if anything he said was true?

"Faye," he said. "Faye." Like saying her name over and over would get her on his side. When they'd worked together in the library, while the rest of them chatted over coffees in the break room or gathered around a desk to look at a recent acquisition one of them was working on, she'd longed to be invited in. She'd longed to hear her name spoken. She could go days, weeks in a row without hearing it. Sometimes when she called her mother, she asked specifically to hear her name said aloud. And now he said it, over and over, now that she didn't want to hear it from him anymore. "I didn't kill Soraya. I didn't kill Kip. I didn't kill anyone."

Except Mary. Again, the elision. She didn't say that though. She wouldn't dare anger him.

"You think she did it?" Faye asked, turning her attention to Mary's body. "Kip, I mean?"

He shook his head and wiped a fresh tear from his nose. "I have to think that, don't I?" In wiping his tear he'd smeared blood on his face. His swollen eye, his bloody face. More and more he looked like he'd been in a battle. "If I didn't believe she did it, I'd never sleep again. I killed a killer. I need that to be true."

If he hadn't moved they might have coexisted that way through to the morning, but from that stillness, he moved quickly to get to his feet and every ounce of adrenaline left in Faye's body screamed at her to flee. She had her back to him before he was fully on his feet, and after a split-second consideration of the scissors, it was her body that ultimately decided for her what she needed. Why was Davey rising? To kill her? To embrace her? It didn't matter. Faye ran. She was finally able to run the way she should have as soon as Mary was killed, the way she should have when Davey invited her here in the first place.

When she ran into the arena, she was greeted by her own ghost. It was perfectly dark—there was no time for candles and she didn't dare turn on her light, but she didn't need it because she could see her own specter, she could see all of them, pushing the shelves out of the way, dancing, chanting, full of anticipation for the night ahead of them. The people they'd been only a few hours ago weren't yet monsters, and she wished she could stay here and remember how they sang and laughed.

She was out of breath by the time she got to the arena, but she couldn't stop there. Of all the places in the basement, she'd least like Davey to kill her here. She couldn't bear to have to look at Ro's body in her final moments of life. "I killed a killer. I need that to be true." That was what Davey had said of Mary and that was what Faye had thought of Ro, but she knew now she'd taken a life for no reason.

"I'm sorry," she whispered to Ro. There wasn't any light, she couldn't see him, but she knew he was there. The screaming of the siren made it impossible to know whether Davey was right behind her. If there were footsteps, she'd never hear them; if he was panting, she was deaf to it. She felt something against her foot and reared back, terrified she'd misjudged the distance and done Ro even more disrespect by walking into him. But no, this wasn't the fleshy firmness of a human thigh. It was the corn, the corn! She had to flee but before she did, she took that blessed fruit. She held it to her chest and she ran away from the evidence of her own crime.

"Faye!" Davey screamed for her during a pause in the siren. She stopped her running and crouched right where she was, pulling her knees into her chest and daring not even to breathe, lest he hear her. "Faye, I only want to talk. Where are you?"

Hadn't he only wanted to "talk" to Mary? Hadn't he called for her in that exact same tone? Hadn't he hunted for her in the basement with that exact same urgency? They were all liars, there was no doubt of that now, but only Davey was alive to continue lying.

"It's safe," he called. "For the first time tonight, it's safe!" She let the siren drown him out. He would come to the arena looking for her, but she refused to be his prey. She didn't rise to her feet; she stayed on her hands and knees so that her eyes wouldn't reflect in his flashlight if he swept it across a section of the basement as she was crossing. She shoved the ear of corn into her tank top for safekeeping, and she crawled only when the siren was screaming. When the noise paused, so did Faye, and she listened for breath or steps or any clue to where he was during those second-long reprieves.

"You're making it harder on yourself!" he called, and she preferred it when his voice dipped into anger. When the pretense of friendship or comradery or whatever he was playing at gave way to his frustration with her, she felt like she was really able to see him for who he was. She made terrible time, crawling that way, but it didn't matter. She had all night. Sometimes his voice drew nearer and sometimes it was further. A couple of times she thought she saw a flicker of a flashlight come across the top of a row of books, but it always disappeared quickly, and then she wasn't sure she had seen it at all. He was never near enough that she could hear him breathe.

As soon as it began to feel easy, this pattern of siren and pause and crawling away from the sound of him, it turned on its head because he stopped calling, and then she had no idea where he was. She managed almost no movement at all then, not daring to move in any of the silent moments, making sure she was perfectly still well before the siren paused for breath.

Then, after he was no longer yelling for her, she began to hear him whisper. "You won't survive me," his voice said in her ear. He dared her to disagree, to answer back, to make a noise, to reveal herself, but she held firm, stayed still during those silences. "You'll die tonight, with blood on your hands."

She found she couldn't crawl any longer, once he got into her head, so she got to her feet and ran through the dark to the one place he wouldn't come to look for her.

***

Soraya's body lay half-covered with books and splintered lumber, just as they had left it. One of the stacks in the collapsed pile was at a diagonal, with just enough space underneath for a person Faye's size to fit under. The shelf had been relieved of its books in the crash, so even if it gave way onto Faye, she didn't think it could do very much harm. In her little crawl space, she was near enough Soraya that if she'd reached out, they could have touched fingertips. It was how she knew Davey would never seek her here. Much as she couldn't risk her last moments being within sight of Ro, she knew Davey wouldn't come anywhere near Soraya's body. Had he pushed the stacks that had fallen and killed her? He swore he hadn't, and Faye didn't think she'd ever know the truth. In the case of Soraya, the truth didn't matter. Even if he hadn't taken her life with his own hands, Faye could tell that Davey would carry Soraya's death forever, whether he died tonight or in sixty years. She took something that was his, or that he believed to be his, but that didn't mean he cared for her any less. No, Davey wouldn't come here. He'd leave a wide berth around Soraya's broken bones.

When Faye came to rest in the crawl space, she was reminded of the needs of her mortal body. She waited for the siren to wail, and then she shifted position to lay her weary head on the concrete. In the short silence she paused, listened, heard nothing, and during the next wail, she removed the ear of corn from inside her shirt. She needed rest and she needed food. It was easy to forget her body when she'd been running for her life but now, with just the tiniest bit of safety, her body remembered.

The siren blared and she tore off one part of the husk. This wasn't the ear of corn she started earlier; this was the second one, the one that had tumbled out of Davey's basket of secrets. She was grateful. It meant one more mouthful of food than she would otherwise have. In four or five turns of that siren, she got the husk off, but still she didn't begin to eat. It was only about four thirty; that left so much time in the basement. She removed one single kernel with her fingernail and while the siren was blaring, she placed it in her mouth and began to count to one hundred. Only when she finished her count did she allow herself another.

She didn't keep count of the kernels; that wasn't the point. She didn't need to know how much or how little food she was consuming. All she knew was that it was bliss. The sweet corn on her tongue and between her teeth for one hundred perfect seconds at a time. It was time when she felt safe, time when she didn't feel hunted, time when she had control, and she kept at it, not daring to break the cycle until she found she had no corn kernels left, and still, it was not morning.

Faye didn't reach for her phone. She didn't dare shine any light, she didn't dare exhaust the battery and, besides, what was the point? If she had eighty minutes left in the basement or two minutes, did it make a difference? It would take Davey only seconds to kill her if he came upon her.

She wasn't a person who had ever struggled to sleep, but no level of fatigue would have allowed her to close her eyes that night. Once the corn was done, she played with the cob, stroking it like it was a doll, and still the night wasn't over. What would she say to her mother, she thought, if she lived. She could think of nothing. She hadn't learned anything; she wouldn't emerge from here a changed person. The best she could think of was to never tell her mother or any other soul any of the things she'd experienced. It was as she pondered that, the possibility of forgetting, that the impossible happened.

The lights came on. It was morning.

However much blood Faye had imagined or expected, she had vastly underestimated it. Her only experience of a crime scene, a death scene, was from movies and television, and the scene in the library basement under the glare of fluorescent lights was too much for any rating board or decency panel to ever put on-screen. There were ugly smears of blood across the floor from where the dying or injured had tried to drag themselves to safety, there were footsteps, large ones and small ones, since it seemed that since Kip's death early in the evening, no one had taken a step without blood on the soles of their shoes or bare feet. There were abandoned garments, destroyed books.

Faye took her phone from her pocket. There was 4 percent battery remaining. It was seven o'clock in the morning. She might have been more relieved at the time of day, at the idea that there was someone else in the building, if not for the chaotic scene around her. It was like waking up from a nightmare only to find yourself in a nightmare. The light hurt her eyes, and the brightness somehow made the alarm sound louder. That was the opposite of what was supposed to happen. The loss of one sense was supposed to sharpen the others. Now that there was light and she had full vision, she would have expected her hearing to have dulled, but there was no such relief.

Still, the horror of the scene and the volume of the siren didn't matter, not now. If there was someone who had turned on the lights, then there was someone in the building. If there was someone in the building, then they had heard the alarm. The help she'd thought she'd be able to summon all those hours ago was finally coming. Faye slid herself out of her crawl space. She still used the sound of the siren to conceal the sound of her movements. Help was in the building, but it wasn't downstairs yet.

When she got to her feet, the room spun and tilted sideways, but she wouldn't let herself succumb to the sensation. She put her hands on her knees to take a breath, and then she began to tiptoe forward, toward the door she'd come through the night before. Her tank top was stained yellow from the corn, and as she moved forward, she tried to brush off any kernels or pieces of husk that might have remained on her clothes or her face. It was embarrassing that she'd taken the time to eat while others lay dead.

***

Wherever Davey had spent the last couple of hours, it was closer to the door than Faye's crawl space. Or maybe not. Maybe he'd arrived at the door more quickly because he hadn't bothered to tiptoe. If he'd moved quickly and unafraid once the lights turned on, then his position in the basement didn't matter at all. Because she was slow and cautious, Faye saw him before he saw her.

He had his back to the gate, facing not the elevator that would be their salvation but the direction he thought Faye would greet him from. He had his arms stretched up, palms facing her. He surrendered.

"I didn't hurt Kip or Soraya," he said to Faye when he saw her. The condition of his face, like the condition of the basement, had been concealed by the darkness. He'd smeared blood from his hands onto his mouth and cheek, sure, but it mingled with his own blood from the gashes he'd torn out of grief or theatricality. His eye was swollen all the way shut. He was a monster. "You have to believe me," he said.

Faye laughed. How pathetic she must seem to him, that even now he was still asking for something from her.

"I don't have to do anything," she said. "Those doors are about to open and the fire department or the police or the fire department and the police are going to come get us out of here and they can decide who you did or didn't hurt." She wanted to say more: how she thought they'd be friends by the end of the night. How she felt tricked into coming. How he could have done the ugly things he did without trapping her in the basement to witness them. "Get away from the gate," she said.

He looked behind him, surprised, but then he did as he was told and moved a good distance from the exit. The alarm sounded even louder right by the door, but Faye didn't let herself appear bothered by it. When Davey was a sufficient distance from the gate, she went to stand by it.

"I didn't hurt anyone," he said again.

"Tell me this," Faye said, and then waited for a pause in the alarm. She wanted to ask him again what she'd already asked him. She wanted to know if he was capable of telling her something true. "The job. Did you know Soraya was getting the job and not you?"

The alarm gave him the opportunity to think about his answer, but she saw it in his face before he said a word. And he knew that he'd hidden it poorly, that he didn't have the dark as a mask any longer so he didn't bother to lie. Not this time.

"I found out tonight," Davey said. He paused for the alarm. "Soraya told me herself, just before she died."

They were all liars. She couldn't decide whether telling the truth now, after everything that had happened, made him less culpable.

"You found out just before you killed her?" Faye said, though his woe looked so real, she was beginning to doubt.

"It was after Kip was dead," Davey said. "I didn't come down here with any motive…"

The alarm drowned out the rest of what he was trying to say and, behind it, another noise. The ding of the arriving elevator. While they'd been speaking, the orange light indicating that the elevator had reached the basement flicked on. Davey lowered his arms and they both turned to see the old elevator door clatter open.

Faye saw Ronald first. Rumpled and concerned, he wasn't wearing a sport coat, he hadn't shaved, and there were thumbprints on his glasses. Behind him in the elevator were men she didn't recognize, but they were dressed in navy and had gleaming bronze badges pinned to their chests. Her nightmare was over. Help was here.

She would have wept with relief if there was time to do such a thing. Instead, things began to happen quickly. Ronald ran to the gate and unlocked it, and Faye pushed through, desperate to get out, and Davey followed right behind her. Ronald and the police eyed them with horror, and before she could get into the elevator, one of the officers had the wherewithal to stop her. "You're bleeding," he said.

She had to shout to make herself heard over the screaming of the alarm, so she did. She screamed, "the blood isn't mine," at the top of her lungs, but as she did so, the alarm went quiet, so it was only her words that rang through the now-quiet basement.

"Did someone hear the alarm?" Davey said. An officer had taken him by the arm and he, too, was getting a once-over to try to identify the source of the blood on his hands and face and clothing. "Is that why you brought the police?"

Faye caught his eye and she felt vindicated. That screaming alarm that had been such a part of their torture that evening, could it have been the thing that summoned the police? If the alarm had brought them to the library even fifteen minutes earlier than they might have come otherwise, then it was worth all the noise.

"The police came with me," Ronald said. He touched a smudge of blood on Faye's shoulder and then pulled his hand back, horrified.

"I don't understand," Faye said. "Did someone tell you we were down here, so you brought the police to look for us?" There were three officers with Ronald, but they were still all standing between the elevator and the gate. There were more bodies than there was help. "You're going to need more resources," she said.

"We're not here looking for you," Ronald said. "The police and I…" He finally moved past the others and went through the gate. He looked at the concrete floor, at the bloody footsteps. Too many, too great a variety, to have been made by only Faye and Davey. "The police are looking for Kip," Ronald said. "They have reason to think he's in some danger."

***

Faye told them where to find Kip's body, and then the locations of the others came tumbling out, too. She said they thought Kip had been poisoned, and Davey blurted out that they hadn't done it, that he hadn't hurt Kip. Ronald put a gentle hand on a part of Davey's back that wasn't stained with blood, and he told Davey he knew that no one had hurt Kip. The apparatus of law enforcement came into place so quickly that there was no time to ask questions. They had done so much damage, to each other, to the library, but they weren't treated as suspects in anything.

"We didn't get to do it," Davey said. He was talking to himself. The police were too occupied to concern themselves with him. "Demeter didn't show us her secrets, and now we'll never get to do it."

"People are dead," Faye said.

"The whole point was to emerge free from fear," Davey said. "Now we'll be terrified for the rest of our lives."

Someone from the fire department, because it turned out the fire department had also arrived, was summoned to the basement with two blankets to escort Davey and Faye out. Riding up in the elevator, an itchy gray blanket covering her stained tank top, Faye couldn't stop shaking. In the elevator she had to stand almost shoulder to shoulder with Davey and what was worse, when they got upstairs, the firefighter took them to the coatroom to wait together.

"They're going to have questions for you," he said. "But you'll want to be out of the way as they start to carry out the…" He didn't want to say "bodies" to a couple of blood-soaked kids barely old enough to buy their own beer, so he let their imaginations fill in the rest. He turned to leave, but Faye grabbed his arm. She couldn't be left here alone with Davey. Any danger he posed to her in the basement still existed here if they were left alone. The firefighter put a hand on hers, kindly, but then he peeled her fingers back. "I'm sure you've seen some stuff, kid, and we'll find someone for you to talk to about it. But there's a lot to clear up down there. So wait here with your friend and try to get some rest until the police are ready for you, okay?"

"If you weren't looking for us," Davey said, "then what are you doing here?"

Davey didn't look like he was eager to be left alone with Faye, any more than she wanted solo time with him.

"I really have to get back. The police will be able to answer any questions you have," the firefighter said. "We've been looking for that graduate student, Kip, most of the night."

"For Kip?" Faye asked. "Why were the police looking for Kip?"

"There was some evidence last night that he'd ingested arsenic," the firefighter said. He looked over at the elevator. "Looks like that turned out to be true."

Faye let her hand fall away. "Arsenic?" she repeated.

The firefighter left and Faye was alone with Davey, the two of them wrapped in those blankets that bit at their skin, but it didn't matter: there was no reason to be afraid any longer because the morsel of information the firefighter was able to offer was enough to flip a switch. She knew how Kip had been poisoned, and it hadn't been by Davey's hand.

"Did he say arsenic?"

The answer didn't come to Davey the way it had to Faye. He clutched his blanket around his shoulders and looked to the door for the disappeared fireman for answers. "Where does someone even get arsenic? We're not in an Agatha Christie novel."

The coatroom had a small lost and found box filled with abandoned articles: a scarf left over from the winter that would never be reunited with its owner, a handful of pens, forbidden in the reading room, no fewer than five cell phone chargers. Faye pulled one out and plugged her phone into the wall. Letting Davey stand and shiver, she sank to the ground next to the outlet.

"From the books, Davey. He got arsenic from the books."

There was a clatter from outside. A couple of paramedics wheeled a stretcher past the coatroom to the elevator, with no particular urgency.

"There was arsenic hidden in the books?" Davey said. He didn't understand. He pretended to know so much about this place, his pedantry on display during those tours for graduate students, but he had no idea.

"What is it you think I've been working on here?" she asked. He'd passed by her workstation, seen her protective goggles, gloves, the plastic sheeting draped over the shelves of books, barely twelve hours earlier.

"You're doing X-rays of the books," he said. "What does that have to do with anything? Are you going to talk about physics again?"

"I'm testing the books with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy," she said. "I'm not checking them for broken bones. Aren't you curious at all?" There was no attempt at kindness in her tone. "No wonder Soraya got the job over you."

Faye's phone, fueled by a refreshed battery and connected to the cell service it had sought all night, began to buzz, over and over, as the messages from her mother and push notifications for services she didn't remember signing up for, all that chatter that had eluded her for hours began to arrive. She left it face down.

"Okay," Davey said. "You come here and you do X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. Great. What does that have to do with Kip?"

It wasn't that he thought science was worse or less important than what he did, Faye realized. He just wasn't a curious person. He didn't understand her work because he'd never thought to ask a question about it. She felt sorry for him. It would be terrible being so indifferent. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. She could never be friends with someone who had so little curiosity. He wasn't the type of person she wanted in her life. She deserved someone better.

"I only take samples of the green books to the lab. Have you ever wondered why?" Her work area, surrounded by that protective plastic, had only a single hue. "When you came by with your students last night, did any of them ask? Did you wonder? Why green?"

"I assumed you chose to start there so you could do all the green ones at once," Davey said. "Like those idiots on Instagram who organize their bookshelves by color rather than by subject or author."

"It's called Paris green," she said, and she thought that she really was quite a bit smarter than him. "This library has one of the world's largest collections of books in Paris green. It's one of the things that makes us special—or strange. You should know that if you profess to be an expert on the place."

"I'm an expert on the contents of the books," he said. He didn't like being talked to this way, not by an undergraduate physics student, no matter the circumstances.

"Sometimes the form is more interesting than the content," she said. "Paris green gets its distinctive green hue from arsenic. That's what we're testing. We cut slivers from the book covers and take them to the lab to test for poison to see if it's safe for readers to ever touch those green books again."