—1—
MAY 30TH, 2020 / IRUSU, JAPAN
Bakugo Katsuki got out of the cab at the intersection of Ori And Ukiyo Park road, and Sero dismissed it at the top of Up-Mile Hill. The driver was the same foul-mouthed cabbie that had driven Deku to The House of Blue Leaves but neither Bakugo nor Sero knew it: Yoichi had lapsed into a morose silence. Sero could have gotten off with Bakugo, he supposed, but it seemed better somehow that they all start off alone.
He stood in the front yard of the Irusu community home underneath a large birch watching the cab pull back into traffic, hands stuffed deep into his pockets, trying to get the lunch's hideous conclusion out of his mind. He couldn't do it; his thoughts kept returning to that black-gray fly crawling out of the manju bun on Deku's plate, the feeling of the rotted teeth in his mouth, and the horrid 'crunch' noise that had rocketed through his head when he bit into his dessert. He would try to divert his mind from this unhealthy memory, think he had succeeded, only to discover five minutes later that his mind was back at it.
'I'm trying to justify it somehow,' he thought, meaning it not in the moral sense but rather in the mathematical one- laughing a little as he remembered how terrible he used to be at the subject that he now used in some of its most advanced forms on the daily. 'Buildings are built by observing certain natural laws; natural laws may be expressed by equations; equations must be justified.' Where was the justification in what had happened less than half an hour ago?
'Leave it alone, he told himself, not for the first time. 'You can't justify it, so let it go.'
Very good advice; the problem was that he couldn't take it. He remembered that the day after he had seen the logic-defying balloons on the iced-up bridge, his life had gone on as usual. He had known that whatever it had been had come very close to getting him, but his life had gone on: he had attended school, nearly failed a history test, holed up in one of the libraries private reading rooms until closing time, gotten called worthless by his very drunk mother, and had gone to bed without dinner. He had simply incorporated the thing he had seen on the bridge into his life, and if he had almost been killed by it... well, kids were always almost getting killed. They dashed across streets without looking, they got horsing around in the lake and suddenly realized they had floated far past their depth on their rubber rafts and had to paddle back, they fell off monkey-bars on their asses and out of trees on their heads... kids were always in danger of dying, even without some supernatural clown demon hunting them for dinner.
Now, standing here under this birch looking down the street at what had been 'The Ori Road Trade' in 2005 and was now a fitness center advertising MIND-EASING HOT YOGA: FIRST CLASS FREE IF YOU BRING A FRIEND, it occurred to him that kids were better at almost dying, and they were also better at incorporating the inexplicable into their lives. They believed implicitly in the invisible world. Miracles both bright and dark were to be taken into consideration, oh yes, most certainly, but they by no means stopped the world. A sudden upheaval of beauty or terror at eleven did not preclude an extra helping of Katsudon or two for dinner that same night.
...But when you grew up... all that changed. You no longer lay awake in your bed, tears prickling at your eyes, sure something was crouching in the closet or scratching at the window... but when something did happen, something beyond rational explanation, the circuits overloaded. Your mind turned to static. Your chest began to hitch and sob. Your hands began to shake so hard you'd spill your drink all over your lap. You couldn't just incorporate what had happened into your life experience. It didn't digest. Your mind kept coming back to it, pawing it lightly like a kitten with a ball of string... until eventually, of course, you either went crazy or got to a place where it was impossible for you to function.
'And if that happens,' Sero thought, 'It's got me- No... No If that happens, it's got all of us. Dead. Just like that.'
Sero bit his thumb harshly, and leaned against the tree's trunk. A bar that had not been there in 2005 stood across the street from him, and he was suddenly thinking of Mina. He felt a sharp pang in his chest and sighed, feeling selfish for wondering what she was doing right now and wishing he was there in Kyoto with her instead of in Irusu with tooth-filled manju. He thought of Mihara, a good friend of his that he had scared the ever loving shit out of two nights ago, how concerned he had looked, how hesitant he had been to take that silver dollar...
'...What did we do with that dollar back in '05?' Sero thought to himself for what felt like the thousandth time since Kaminari had called him. That had been the first fuzzy memory fragment to come back to him after he'd hung up the phone... they had done something with it- something important... something that had saved his life. But what was it?
'The silver dollar, Hanta... Sho saved your life with it. Yours... maybe all the others... for sure Deku's. It... It almost ripped my guts out before... before Shouto did... what? What did he do? And how was it able to work? He backed it off, and we all helped him. But how?'
A word came to him suddenly, a word that meant nothing at all but which made his blood run cold and his heart stop beating momentarily: Chüd.
He looked at the sidewalk a few paces ahead of him and for a moment saw the shape of a turtle chalked there, and the world seemed to swim before his eyes, and the palms of his hands- where the scarred flesh of the wound Iida Tenya had slashed into them nearly fifteen years prior was- began to burn. Burnt so fiery hot he was almost certain he could hear the sizzle of the rain water evaporating instantaneously on his skin- He shut his eyes tightly, letting out a loud cry of pain, and when he opened them saw that it was not a turtle drawn on the sidewalk, only a hopscotch grid half-erased by the light rain. His palms stopped burning soon after.
Chüd.
What did that mean?
"I don't know," he said aloud, and when he looked around quickly to see if anyone had heard him talking to himself, his eyes finally landed on the Irusu Public Library. At lunch he had told the others that the Barrens and the Kaminari's old farm were the only places in Irusu where he had felt happy as a kid... but that wasn't quite true, was it? There had been another place- and accidentally or unconsciously, he had ended up right next to it.
He stood in front of it for a minute or two, hands still in his pockets. It hadn't changed; he admired its lines as much now as he had as a child. Like so many stone buildings that had been well-designed, it succeeded in confounding the closely observing eye with contradictions: its stone solidity was somehow balanced by the delicacy of its arches and slim columns; and the windows, ginormous and crisscrossed with narrow strips of iron, were graceful and rounded. It was absolutely gorgeous, and he was not entirely surprised to feel a wave of love for the place.
He walked across the library lawn, barely noticing that his steel-toed engineer boots were getting wet and muddy, to have a look at that glassed-in passageway between the grownups library and the Children's Library. It was also unchanged, and from here, standing just outside the bowed branches of a cherry blossom tree raining pink petals into the spring shower, he could see people passing back and forth. The old delight flooded him, and he really forgot what had happened at the end of the reunion lunch for the first time. He could remember walking around to this very same spot as a kid, only in the winter, plowing his way through snow that was almost hip-deep, and then standing for as long as fifteen minutes. He would come at dusk, he remembered, and again it was the contrasts that drew him and held him there with the tips of his fingers going numb and snow melting inside his hole-littered green gumrubber boots. It would be drawing-down-dark out where he was, the world going purple with early winter shadows, the sky the color of ashes in the east and embers in the west. It would be cold where he was, ten degrees perhaps, and chillier than that if the wind was blowing across from the frozen Barrens, as it so often did.
But there, less than forty yards from where he stood, people walked back and forth in their shirtsleeves. There, less than forty yards from where he stood, was a tubeway of bright white light, thrown by the overhead fluorescents. Little kids giggled together, high-school sweethearts held hands (and if the librarian saw them, she would make them stop). It was somehow magical, magical in a good way that he had been too young to account for with such mundane things as electric power and oil heat. The magic was that glowing cylinder of light and life connecting those two dark buildings like a lifeline, the magic was in watching people walk through it across the dark snowfield, untouched by either the dark or the cold. It made them lovely and Godlike.
Eventually he would walk away (as he was doing now) and circle the building to the large double door at the front (as he was doing now), but he would always pause and look back once (as he was doing now) before the bulking stone shoulder of the adult library cut off the sight-line to that delicate umbilicus.
Ruefully amused at the ache of nostalgia around his heart, Sero went up the large steps to the doors of the adult library, paused for a moment just inside the granite pillars, always so high and cool no matter how hot the day was. Then he pulled open the cast-iron door with the book-drop slot in it and went into the quiet, delicate pink petals sticking to his messy hair that he didn't bother to shake out.
The force of memory almost dizzied him for a moment as he stepped into the mild light of the hanging glass globes. The force was not physical-not like a shot to the jaw or a slap. It was more akin to that queer feeling of time doubling back on itself that people call, for lack of a better term, deja vu. Sero had had the feeling before, but it had never struck him with such disorienting power; for the moment or two he stood inside the door, he felt literally lost in time, not really sure how old he was. Was he really twenty-seven? Only three years shy of thirty? or was he eleven? One year away from middle school?
Here was the same murmuring quiet, broken only by an occasional whisper, the faint thud of a librarian stamping books or overdue notices, the hushed riffle of manga or magazine pages being turned. He loved the quality of the light as much now as then. It slanted through the tall, round-topped, windows, gray as a pigeon's wing on this rainy afternoon, a light that was somehow calm and dozey.
He walked across the wide granite flooring reflecting grey light prettily in the dull afternoon, trying as he had always tried back then to hush the sound of his footfalls- the adult libraries tall ceilings seemed to go up for miles, it's exposed wooden beams as beautiful as ever, all sounds magnified.
He saw that the circular iron staircases leading to the private rooms were still there, one on either side of the horseshoe-shaped main desk, but he also saw that a tiny cagework elevator had been added at some point in the fifteen years since he had left. It was something of a relief-it drove a wedge into that suffocating feeling of deja-vu.
He felt like an interloper crossing the wide floor, a spy from another country. He kept expecting the librarian at the desk to raise her head, look at him, and then challenge him in clear, ringing tones that would shatter the concentration of every reader here and focus every eye upon him: "You! Yes, you! What are you doing here? You have no business here! You're from Outside! You're from Before! Go back where you came from! Go back right now, before I call the police!"
She did look up, a young girl, pretty, and for one absurd moment it seemed to Sero that the fantasy was really going to come true, and his heart rose into his throat as her pale-blue eyes touched his, questioning him. Judging him. Hating him. Then they passed on indifferently, and Sero found his stone-heavy legs could walk again. If he was a spy, he hadn't been found out.
He passed under the coil of one of the narrow and almost suicidally steep wrought-iron staircases on his way to the corridor leading to the Children's Library, and was amused to realize (only after he had done it) that he had run down another old track of his childhood behavior. He had reached up and brushed his fingers along the bottom of one of the stairs (he had had to jump to do this fifteen years ago), and had cheered quietly in his head as he had done it, as if accomplishing a great feat.
He walked slowly down the glassed-in passageway, noticing other changes now: Yellow decals that said OPEC LOVES IT WHEN YOU WASTE ENERGY, SO SAVE A WATT! had been plastered over the switchplates. The framed picture on the far wall when he entered this scaled-down world of darkwood tables and small darkwood chairs, this world where the drinking fountain was only four feet high, was not of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (who had served as the countries leader from 2001-2006) but instead was of their current leader, Yoshihide Suga.
But-
That feeling of deja vu swept him again. He was helpless before it, and this time he felt the numb horror of a man who finally realizes, after half an hour of helpless splashing, that the shore is growing no closer and he is drowning.
It was story hour, and over in the corner a group of roughly a dozen little ones sat solemnly on their tiny chairs in a semicircle, listening. A high school aged girl was reading, putting on a character voice, through Guri and Gura. And though Sero had not registered it then, he registered now that this had been the very story that the high school volunteer had been reading on that day school let out in 2005. The day he had come to pick up his summer reading book.
And then Sero thought, grey eyes shifting towards the librarian at the front desk typing furiously away on her computer: 'When the librarian at the front desk raises her head I'll see that it's Nemuri, yes, it'll be Nemuri and she won't look a day older-'
-But when she did raise her head, he saw a much younger woman than Nemuri had been even then.
He looked back over as the children giggled at the high school volunteers silly, high-pitched, voice as she read some of Guri's lines. He swallowed thickly, and ran nervous fingers through his thick locks, a couple petals fluttered towards the ground.
'How can it be the same story? The very same story? Am I supposed to believe that's just coincidence? Because I don't... goddammit, I just don't!'
He bent to the drinking fountain, bending so far that, if his throat wasn't so damn dry, he would have felt ridiculous.
'I ought to talk to someone,' he thought, panicked. Denki... Deku... someone. Is something really stapling the past and present together here, or am I only imagining it? Because if I'm not, I'm not sure I bargained for this much. I-'
He looked at the children's sides own double-doors, and his heart seemed to stop in his chest for a moment before beginning to race doubletime. The poster was simple, stark... and familiar. Written in sharpie, it said simply:
REMEMBER THE CURFEW.
7 P.M.
IRUSU POLICE DEPARTMENT.
In that instant it all seemed to come clear to him-it came in a grisly flash of light, and he realized that the vote they had taken was a joke. There was no turning back, never had been. They were on a track as preordained as the memory-track which had caused him to reach up when he passed under the stairway leading to the stacks. There was an echo here in Irusu, a deadly echo, and all they could hope for was that the echo could be changed enough in their favor to allow them to escape with their lives.
He felt sick. Dangerously sick- he had been feeling that way since lunch, but it was only now that he connected the feeling with a memory- and pinpointed what it really was. It wasn't nausea, it was shame.
Dinnerless nights and his own self-inflicted disorder flashed through his mind. He straightened quickly, remembering countless hours spent bent over a toilet bowl, index and forefinger shoved harshly down his throat-
"-Fuck," he muttered, and scrubbed a palm up one cheek, hard. It'd been a long time since he'd thought about that.
"Can I help you, sir?" a voice at his elbow asked, and he jumped a little. It was a girl of perhaps seventeen, her dark-blonde hair held back from her pretty high-schooler's face with barrettes. Another volunteer; they'd had them in 2005 too, high-school girls and boys who shelved books, showed kids how to use the card catalogue, discussed book reports and school papers, helped bewildered scholars with their footnotes and bibliographies, run the story hours. The pay was a pittance, but there were always kids willing to do it. It was agreeable work. Good for college credits too.
On the heels of this, reading the girl's pleasant but questioning look a little more closely, he remembered that he no longer really belonged here- he was a giant in the land of little people. An intruder. In the adults library he had felt uneasy about the possibility of being looked at or spoken to, but here it was something of a relief. It proved he was still an adult, and the fact that the girl had referred to him as "sir" was proof that this was 2020 and not 2005. Proof that he was an adult and not a child.
"No thank you," he said, and then, for no reason at all that he could understand, he heard himself add: "I was looking for my son."
"Oh? What's his name? Maybe I've seen him." She smiled. "I know most of the kids."
"His name is Sero Hanta," he said. "But I don't see him here."
"Tell me what he looks like and I'll give him a message, if there is one."
"Well," Sero said, uncomfortable now and beginning to wish he had never started this, he tried to subtly look for an escape. "he's thin as rail, and he looks a little bit like me. But it's no big deal, miss. If you see him, just tell him his dad popped by on his way home."
"I will," she said, and smiled, but the smile didn't reach her eyes, and Sero suddenly realized that she hadn't come over and spoken to him out of simple politeness and a wish to help. She happened to be a volunteer in the Children's Library in a town where nine children had been slain over a span of eight months. You see a strange man in this scaled-down world where adults rarely come except to drop their kids off or pick them up. You're suspicious... of course.
"Thank you," he said, gave her a smile he hoped was reassuring, and then got the hell out.
He walked back through the corridor to the adults library and went to the desk on an impulse he didn't understand... but of course they were supposed to follow their impulses this afternoon, weren't they? Follow their impulses and see where they led.
The name plate on the circulation desk identified the pretty, young, dark-haired librarian as Hano Kiku. Behind her, Sero could see a door with a frosted-glass panel; lettered on this panel was TOKOYAMI FUMIKAGE: HEAD LIBRARIAN.
"May I help you?" Ms. Hano asked.
"I think so," Sero said, smiling politely. "That is, I hope so. I'd like to get a library card."
"Very good," she returned his smile with a sunshine-y beam and took out a form. "Are you a resident of Irusu?"
"No."
"Home address, then?"
"157-029 Torimicho lane, Kyoto, Honshu" He paused for a moment, a little amused by her stare, "My name's Sero Hanta."
She blinked "Sero... Hanta?... the architect?..."
"Sadly."
"Is this a joke?"
"Not at all."
"Are you moving to Irusu, then?"
"I have no plans to, no."
"This is a long way to come to borrow books, isn't it? Don't they have libraries in Kyoto?"
"It's kind of a sentimental thing," Sero said, leaning coolly on the check-out desk, lips turned up in an easy-going smile. He would have thought telling a stranger this would be embarrassing, but he found it wasn't. "I grew up in Irusu, you see. This is the first time I've been back since I was a kid... sort of an impromptu reunion with my friends... long story, it wouldn't interest you- I've been walking around, seeing what's changed and what hasn't. And all of a sudden it occurred to me that I spent thirteen years of my life here and I don't have a single thing to remember those years by. Not so much as a postcard. I had some silver dollars, but... eh, well.. I lost one of them and gave the rest to a friend. I guess what I want is a souvenir of my childhood. It's late, but you know what they say: better late then never."
Hano smiled, and the smile changed her pretty face into one that was beautiful. She had a faint flush on the apples of her cheeks as leaned forward across the desk, her elbow brushing Sero's own, eyes sparkling. "I think that's very sweet," she said. "If you'd like to browse for ten or fifteen minutes, I'll have the card made up for you when you come back to the desk... and then, maybe after that you can show me around town?... tell me what changed?..."
"Sounds fun," Sero said grin widened a little, not at all entertaining the idea of taking the librarian out. "I guess there'll be a fee," he said. "Out-of-towner and all."
"Did you have a card when you were a kid?"
"Mhm, sure did." Sero smiled. "Except for my friends, I guess that library card was the most important-"
"-HANTA, WOULD YOU COME UP HERE!?" a voice screeched suddenly, cutting across the library hush like a scalpel.
He whipped around, jumping in his skin in the guilty way people do when someone shouts in a library. He saw no one he knew... and realized a moment later that no one had looked up or shown any sign of surprise or annoyance. The old men still read their copies of the Irusu Weekly News, the middle-aged women still read and whispered and gossiped quietly about the latest issue of "Friday". At the tables in the Reference Room, two high-school girls still had their heads together over a stack of papers and a pile of file-cards. Several browsers went on looking through the books on the shelves marked CURRENT FICTION-SEVEN-DAY-LOAN. An old man with a wad of gum clenched between his teeth, went on leafing through a portfolio of Luis de Vargas sketches.
He turned back to the young woman, who was looking at him, puzzled.
"...Is... something wrong?..."
"No," Sero said, smiling. "I thought I heard something. I guess I'm more tired than I thought I was... heh... You were saying?..."
"...Well, actually you were saying... But- erm... I was about to add that if you had a card when you were a resident, your name will still be in the files," she said. "We still keep everything on computers... technology has gotten a little better and a little faster from when you were a kid, but other then that not much has changed."
"Yes," he said, sounding somewhat absent even to his own ears. "A lot of things have changed in Irusu... but a lot of things also seem to have remained the same."
"...Anyway, I can just look you up and give you a renewal card. No charge."
"That's great," Sero said, and before he could add thanks the voice cut through the library's sacramental silence again, louder now, ominously jolly: "COME ON UP, HANTA! Come on up, you bulimic little fuck! This is your life, Hanta! Now come on up and see me!"
Sero cleared his throat. His hands were shaking- noticeably so. "I appreciate it," he swallowed.
"Don't mention it." She cocked her head at him, dark, thin, eyebrows knitting with concern. "Has it gotten warm outside?"
"A little," he said, tugging absentmindedly at his shirt collar. "Why?"
"You're-"
"-SERO HANTA DID IT!" the voice screamed. It was coming from above-coming from one of the private reading rooms. "Sero Hanta killed the children! Get him! Grab him!-"
"-sweating," she finished.
"Am I?" he asked intelligently, his voice cracking.
"I'll have this made up right away," she said.
"Thank you."
She turned back towards the HP duel monitor set-up to the left, and began to type at a rapid, almost super-sonic, speed.
Sero walked slowly away, his heart a thudding drum in his chest. Yes, he was sweating; he could feel it trickling down his forehead and chest, could feel it matting his hair- flattening it. With a growing sense of dread, Sero Hanta looked up and saw Pennywise the Clown standing at the top of the lefthand staircase, looking down at him. His face was white with greasepaint. His mouth bled lipstick in a murderous grin. There were empty sockets where his eyes should have been. He held a bunch of balloons in one hand and a book in the other.
'Not he,' Sero thought stubbornly. 'It. I am standing here in the middle of the Irusu Public Library on a late-spring afternoon in 2020, I am a grown man, and I am face to face with my childhood's greatest nightmare. I am face to face with It.'
"Come on up, Hanta," Pennywise called down. "I won't hurt you... I've got a book for you! A book... and a balloon! Come on up!"
Sero opened his mouth to call back, 'You're insane if you think I'm going up there!' and suddenly realized that if he did that, everyone here would be looking at him, everyone here would be thinking, 'Who is that crazyman?' And then they might start to think that he was insane, and that he really did kill the kids.
"Oh, I know you can't answer," Pennywise called down, and giggled. "Almost fooled you there for a minute, though, didn't I? "Pardon me, sir, do you have Prince Albert in a can?... You do?... Better let the poor guy out!" "Pardon me, ma'am, is your refrigerator running?... It is?... Then hadn't you better go catch it?'..."
The clown on the landing threw its head back and shrieked laughter. It roared and echoed in the towers of the adults library like a flight of black bats, and Sero was only able to keep from clapping his hands over his ears with a tremendous effort of will.
"Come on up, Hanta," Pennywise called down. "We'll talk. Neutral ground. What do you say?"
'I'm not coming up there,' Sero thought. He could feel hot, fearful, tears pricking at the back of his eyes. He could feel the rotten teeth in his mouth. 'When I finally come to you, you won't want to see me. We're going to kill you.'
The clown shrieked laughter again. "Kill me? Kill me?" And suddenly, horribly, the voice morphed into Kaminari Denki's voice: "Don't kill me Hanta, I'm a good little faggot, I swear! Don't kill me, Ana!" Then that shrieking laughter again.
Trembling, white-faced, Sero walked across the echoing center of the adults library. He was going to throw-up soon- just as coach Tetsuya had said all those years ago, he was accustomed to the feeling- He stood in front of a shelf of books and took one down at random with a hand that trembled badly. His cold fingers flittered the pages.
"This is your one chance, Ana!" the voice called from behind and above him. "Get out of Irusu. Get out before it gets dark tonight. I'll be after you tonight... you and the others. You're too old to stop me, Hanta. You're all too old. Too old to do anything but get yourselves killed. Get out, Hanta. Do you want to see this tonight?"
He turned slowly, still holding the book in his icy hands. He didn't want to look, but it were as if there were an invisible hand under his chin, tilting his head up and up and up...
The clown was gone. Dracula was standing at the top of the lefthand stairway, but it was no movie Dracula; it was not Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee or Frank Langella or Francis Lederer or Reggie Nalder. An ancient man-thing with a face like a twisted root stood there. Its face was deadly pale, its eyes purplish-red, the color of bloodclots. Its mouth dropped open, revealing a mouthful of BIC razor Blades that had been set in the gums at angles; it was like looking into a deadly mirror-maze where a single misstep could get you cut in half.
"KEEE-RUNCH!" it screamed, and its jaws snapped closed. Blood gouted from its mouth in a red-black flood. Chunks of its severed lips fell to the glowing white silk of its formal shirt and slid down its front, leaving snail-trails of blood behind.
"WHAT DID IIDA TENYA SEE BEFORE HE DIED?!" the vampire on the landing screamed down at him, laughing through the bloody hole of its mouth. "Was it Prince Albert in a can? Was it Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier? What did he see, Hanta? Do you want to see it too? What did he see? What did he see?" Then that shrieking laughter again, and Sero knew that he would scream now himself, yes, there was no way to stop the scream, it was going to come. Blood was pattering down from the landing in a grisly shower. It ruined the page of The Irusu Weekly News an older gentleman was reading, and splattered onto his forehead, and then the lens of his thick-rimmed glasses, unseen and unfelt.
The vampire up above ripped a BIC razor blade from its shredded mess of a mouth and tossed it at Sero's feet. It bounced twice with a seemingly deafening 'clink!' 'clink!'- splattering the steel-toe of Sero Hanta's left boot with blood. "Do you want to see what four-eyes saw, Hanta? Do you? Because you will tonight if you don't leave now- this is your last chance! Leave now or you'll wish you'd had Tenya's intuition! Leave now or you'll see what was in those sewers! Leave now or you'll wish you had been the one to slice open your wrists in the bathtub, Hanta! I promise you that! I PROMISE YOU THAT!"
Sero hitched in breath, sure the scream would follow, unthinkable in the quiet of this softly drizzling spring afternoon, as shocking as the slash of a knife... or a mouthful of razor-blades.
Instead, what came out in a shaky, uneven rush, spoken instead of screamed, spoken low like a prayer, were these words: "We made slugs out of it, of course. We made the silver dollar into silver slugs."
The gentleman with the giant wad of gum in his mouth who had been perusing the de Vargas sketches looked up sharply. "Nonsense," he said. Now people did look up; someone hissed "shhh!" at the old man in an annoyed tone.
"I'm sorry," Sero said in a low, trembling voice. He was faintly aware that his face was now running with sweat, and that his shirt and hair were now plastered to his skin. Somewhere far off in the deep recesses of his mind he wondered if this was what a panic attack felt like "I was- I was just... I was just think out loud-"
"Nonsense," the old gentleman repeated, in a louder voice. "Can't make silver bullets from silver dollars. Common misconception. Utter fiction. Problem is with specific gravity-"
Suddenly the woman, Ms. Hano, was there. "Mr. Furuta, you'll have to be quiet," she said kindly enough. "People are reading-"
"-Kid's sick," Furuta said abruptly (and Sero did, in fact, jerk his head up in horror at being called "kid"), and went back to his book. "Give him an aspirin, Kiku."
Hano Kiku looked at Sero and her face sharpened with concern. "Are you sick, Mr. Sero? I know it's terribly impolite to say so, but you look terrible."
Sero said, "I... I had-" his voice began to crack, and fizzle out- he had to fight to keep his vocal chords from quitting on him. "I-I had... a-a heavy lunch... don't- don't... think... it's agreed with me... heh... guess I'm- guess I'm not... taking you out after all... heh..."
"Forgot about that," Hano worried, looking him over frantically, "If you need to lie down, there's a cot in Mr. Tokoyami's office, I'm sure he wouldn't mind-"
"-No. Thanks, but no." What Sero Hanta wanted was not to lie down but to get the hell out of the Irusu Public Library. He looked up at the landing. The clown was gone. The vampire was gone. But tied to the low wrought-iron railing which surrounded the landing was a balloon. Written on its bulging skin were the words:
HAVE A GOOD DAY! TONIGHT YOU ALL DIE!
He swallowed thickly, and looked down at his feet. The razor-blade that had been thrown at him was also gone, but the blood was still splattered on the toe of his shoe. He bit back an insane laugh.
"Oh... well... I've got your library card," Hano said, putting a tentative hand on his arm. "...do you still want it?"
He jerked away harshly, and blinked rapidly, he was going to be sick any moment now- he could feel it rising in his throat- taste it-
"-Yes, thanks," Sero choked out, turning away from her. He drew a deep, shuddery breath. "I'm- I'm very sorry about this..."
"Dont apologize!... I just hope it isn't food-poisoning," she said, looking very concerned.
"Wouldn't work," Mr. Furuta said without looking up from de Vargas or removing his gum the left side of his mouth, the slobbering hulk of sugar making his voice slur, "devishe o' pulp fich'shun. Bullet wuh thumble." (Device of pulp fiction. Bullet would tumble)
And speaking again with no foreknowledge that he was going to speak, Sero said: "slugs, not bullets. We realized almost right away that we couldn't make bullets. I mean, we were just kids. It was my idea to-"
"-Shhhh!" someone shushed again.
Furuta gave Sero a slightly startled look, seemed about to speak, then went back to the sketches.
At the desk, Hano Kiku handed him a small, mint-green, card with IRUSU PUBLIC LIBRARY stamped across the top. Bemused, Sero realized it was the first adult library-card he had owned in his whole life. The one he'd had as a kid had been canary-yellow.
"Are you sure you don't want to lie down, Mr. Sero?... I'm very concerned... my shift let's off soon, I could wait with you until someone came to pick you up-"
"-Thank you, Kiku, but... I-I'm feeling a little better..."
"Are you sure?... because I really don't mind waiting... especially with someone as kind as you are..."
He managed a smile. "I'm sure. Thanks for calling me kind, though... I appreciate it."
"...You do look a little better," she said, but she said it doubtfully, as if understanding that this was the proper thing to say but not really believing it.
Then she scanning a book, dark bangs covering her worried light-eyes, and Sero felt a touch of almost hysterical amusement. 'It's the book I grabbed off the shelf when the clown started to mimic Denki's voice,' he thought. 'She thought I wanted to borrow it. I've made my first withdrawal from the Irusu Public Library in fifteen years, a withdrawal that isn't a manga, graphic novel, or something assigned to me, and I don't even know what the book is. I don't even care. Just let me out of here, okay? That'll be enough.'
"Thank you," he said, putting the book under his arm.
"You're more than welcome, Mr. Sero... Are you sure you wouldn't at least like an aspirin?..."
"Quite sure," he said- and then hesitated. "...You wouldn't by any chance know what happened to Nemuri, would you?... Nemuri Kayama? She used to be the head of the Children's Library?..."
"She died," Hano said, looking quite sad. "Three years ago. It was an aneurysm, I understand. Just- a sudden medical thing, you know?... It was a great shame. She was young... only thirty-eight, I think. Mr. Tokoyami closed the library for the day."
"Oh," Sero said, and heard his voice crack for the third time that day, feeling a hollow place open in his heart. 'That's what happened when you got back to your used-to-be, as the song put it. The frosting on the cake was sweet, but the stuff underneath was bitter. People forgot you, or died on you, or lost their hair and teeth. In some cases you found that they had lost their minds... I feel like I'm losing my mind.'
"I'm sorry," she said. "You liked her, didn't you?"
"All the kids liked Nemuri," Sero said, and was alarmed to realize that tears were now very close.
"Are you-"
'-If she asks me if I'm all right one more time, I really am going to cry, I think. Or scream. Or vomit. Or... something.'
He glanced at his phone and said, "I really have to go. Thanks for being so nice."
"Oh!- um- Have a nice day, Sero!"
'Sure. Because tonight I die.'
He gave her a weak salute and started back across the floor. Mr. Furuta glanced up at him once, sharply and suspiciously.
He looked up at the landing which topped the lefthand staircase. The balloon still floated there, tied by its string to lacy wrought-iron. But now the printing on its side read:
I KILLED NEMURI KAYAMA!
-PENNYWISE THE CLOWN
He looked away, feeling the pulse in his throat starting to run again. He let himself out and was startled by sunlight-the clouds overhead were coming unravelled and a warm late-May sun was shafting down, making the grass look impossibly green and lush. Sero Hanta felt something start to lift from his heart. It seemed to him that he had left some insupportable burden behind in the library... and then he looked down at the book he had inadvertently withdrawn and his teeth clamped together with sudden, painful force.
It was 'God of Bears' by Kawakami Hiromi.
It was the book assigned to the grade fives of Irusu elementary school in the summer of 2005.
It was the book he had left behind on the bridge after falling into the barrens that day- the one Shigaraki Tomura had caused him to drop.
And speaking of Shigaraki, the track of his boot was still on the book's cover.
Shaking, fumbling at the pages, he turned to the back. The library had always had a computer filing system; But there was still a pocket in the back of this book with a card tucked into it that they had insisted you filled out anyways. There was a name written on each line of the card followed by the librarian's return-date stamp. Looking at the card, Sero saw this:
NAME OF BORROWER RETURN BY STAMPED DATE:
JIROU KYOKA MAY-14-05
KENDOU ITSUKA JUN-1-05
AMAJIKI TAMAKI JUN-14-05
And, on the last line of the card, his own childish signature, written in think-lettered pencil-strokes:
SERO HANTA JUN-27-05
Stamped across this card, stamped across the book's flyleaf, stamped across the thickness of the pages, stamped again and again in smeary red ink that looked like blood, was one word: CANCEL.
"Fuck this," Sero murmured. He did not know what else to say; that seemed to cover the entire situation. "Fuck this, Fuck this whole thing."
He stood in the new sunlight, book hanging slack in cold fingers by his side, suddenly wondering what was happening to the others.