It had been a bad night.
We have those here, as you know. Unless you don’t know, in which case you should start from the beginning. Or if you just missed my last post about the green-blooded prehistoric animatronic monstrosity, here’s that one.
Anyway, we’re prone to bad nights. But this was a bad night. Wiley had accidentally Unlocked A Door™ (rule 5), I’d been incapacitated by the coffee pot (rule 8; I’ll elaborate on this one eventually), and we’d been hit with a midwinter blizzard that had knocked the power out cold. We had a generator running to do things like keep us from freezing to death while we were snowed into the building, and as I’ve mentioned before we’re so used to losing power that we’ve got a whole system for checking people in and out offline, but there’s just something extra eerie about the place with nothing but the dingy emergency lights on.
I’m not afraid of the dark, but I’m not a complete numbskull either, so I am afraid of the Library when I ought to be, and that night was teeming with reasons.
It was just the three of us: me, Wiley, and Matt, all huddled behind the circulation desk together. There weren’t any patrons coming in, because nobody could get out of their houses, and although there was plenty we technically could’ve kept busy with, we’d come to an unspoken agreement that splitting up would be B-movie stupid. So there was nothing left for us to do but wait it out. And talk.
Matt isn’t a particularly conversational guy unless he’s in the right mood to be, but I guess that night had been enough to bring it out of him. The borderline functional alcoholism, too (that’s borderline alcoholism, not borderline functional). I’d never seen him drink on the job before, but there was no way we’d see a single other person before we made it out of there, so it didn’t really matter. Also, his establishment, his business. Above my pay grade to question.
He wasn’t drunk yet, but he’d been nursing a tumbler of bourbon for the better part of the night and he was clearly a little less inhibited than usual. “This fuckin’ place,” he muttered, raising his glass to me in question.
I shook my head. I don’t drink, which Matt knows and knew then, but it was the only solace he had to offer in the moment. “Do you think it’ll always be…worth it?” I asked him. “Keeping it open?”
Wiley tried to swipe Matt’s glass while he wasn’t watching, earning them a swat to the back of the head. I’m fairly sure they were of the legal drinking age, but Matt’s always looked at them way too much like his kid to be cool with instilling any bad habits in them. “I don’t know if it’s ever been worth it,” he admitted. “But it’s—it’s my responsibility now.”
I stood from my seat, pushing myself up onto the desk so that I’d be fully facing him. “What do you mean now?”
Matt hesitated. “Jesus, I need a smoke,” he sighed. “It’s complicated. This building can’t just fall into anybody’s lap. The man who owned it before me, he didn’t run it as a library, but he did run it with the same understanding of it that we have today. Before I took it over, it was a dry cleaners.”
“So close,” I muttered under my breath.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I just thought it was probably a laundromat ‘cause—never mind. Go on.”
Matt went on. “His name was Jung Hiroschi. He and his father migrated here from Osaka when he was in his teens, after his mother passed away, and his father bought it from a commercial real estate agency for next to nothing. There wasn’t anything wrong with it fundamentally; no issues with the foundation, nothing electrical, nothing the inspectors could find. He knew it didn’t make sense that they were selling it so cheap, but he just chalked it up to wanting it out of their hair. It wasn’t being used for anything at the time, which meant it was easy enough to renovate, and the Hiroschis had run a drycleaning service back in Japan, so they knew what they were doing. Made a decent living pretty quick.
“Everything was going smoothly at first. They were adjusting well, fitting into the community. Jung was in his sophomore year of high school, so unsurprisingly there was some racist bullshit to be had, but for the most part it was pretty smooth sailing. He made some friends. Met a girl. Graduated, married her.”
Matt paused, knocking back the last of his current drink and refilling his glass halfway.
“They started trying for kids about five years later, but it never took. They both had all the tests run, and the doctors said everything seemed to be in working order. My opinion, the universe was looking out for some poor sucker who would’ve inherited this place one day.”
“So wait, how did you end up with it?” Wiley asked. “How’d you even meet? You don’t seem like the kind of guy who’s ever had something dry cleaned.”
Matt lazily held up a hand, signaling that Wiley wait. “I’ll get there,” he said. “Anyway, not only could they not get pregnant, but around that same time, Jung found out his father was sick. Cancer. It had spread to his lymph nodes before they’d caught it, and it was so aggressive that none of the oncologists they spoke to recommended that they even try treatment. They said it would just cause him more pain. Put his body under more stress.
“Obviously, Jung and his wife put the idea of starting a family on the back burner. His father declined alarmingly quickly, and one evening, he called Jung to his bedside for a talk. About the business, of all things. Jung tried to tell him it wasn’t important, that he would handle all the technicalities himself when the time came, but his father was insistent. There were things Jung didn’t know, he said. Things he had to be prepared for.
“Jung had spent his fair share of time in the shop, especially in the few years since he’d graduated high school, but not nearly to the capacity that his father had. And not ever alone. His father made sure of that.
“The largest difference between then and now is that their hours of operation were typical for a business. They were open during the day. Nine to seven through the week, nine to five on the weekends. Things are…calmer during the day. Wiley can attest to that, yeah?”
“Oh, yeah,” Wiley agreed. “I mean, it’s not like everything just stops, but it’s a whole lot different. If you’d only ever been here during the day you could totally write everything off as something innocent.”
“Exactly,” Matt concurred. “So having never been inside past closing time, Jung didn’t know to be weary. And the most dangerous thing you can do in this building is be oblivious to it. His father had to be sure that he was ready for what was to come. So Jung sat down at his father’s bedside, and his father began to tell him a story. One that Jung eventually told me. It went like this.
“Once upon a time, there was an herbalist. She worked quietly and discreetly from her home for many years, but eventually her clientele grew so large that she’d outgrown her small space and sought out a local landowner for an opportunity to lease a property from him. He had just one open, he told her, but she was welcome to it if she could pay the price.
“She was shocked. She’d expected protest, if not flat-out refusal. It was far past the age of true witch trials, but still, men didn’t tend to take too kindly to women in medicine, not to mention ones who opened their own honest businesses to practice it. But he was wholly uninterested in her operations as long as they brought him money each month, so she signed the contract on the spot, and that was it. The building was hers.
“A fair few years passed and all went swimmingly. The woman never married, nor did she bear children, but she was successful and fruitful and a pillar of her community. She healed the sick, soothed the restless, and helped those on their way out of this life through to the other side.
“Until the unthinkable happened.
“Of course, health is fickle. There were plenty of occasions on which she was unable to cure an ailment. But this was different. One evening, a mother bustled into the apothecary, holding her son to her chest. He was wrapped in a blanket, and the herbalist expected to see an infant, but when his mother lay him down on the worktable in the shop, she saw that he was a young boy, perhaps five or six years old.
“What troubles him?” the herbalist asked, rushing to his side.
“A fever,” the boy’s mother replied. “I’ve bathed him in ice, kept him from food, given him plenty of water. Nothing will bring it down. Please, help him.”
“Of course,” said the herbalist. “A bit of willow tincture and he should be good as new.”
The boy’s mother gripped the herbalist’s hand. “Thank you,” she said. “I haven’t much, but I’ll pay what I can.”
The herbalist waved her off. “I won’t hear of it,” she insisted. “The work is payment enough.”
Once she had fetched the tincture, she turned the boy onto his back and wet his lips with a sponge to encourage them to part. He wasn’t conscious, but his frail body complied, his tongue darting out to catch the moisture. “Very good,” the herbalist encouraged, though she was sure the boy couldn’t hear her. Swiftly, she unscrewed the tincture’s dropper cap and squeezed the top to fill the syringe, lifting it to the boy’s open mouth and releasing it at a gradual but steady pace.
“Is that it?” his mother asked after a moment.
“It is,” the herbalist confirmed. “He should wake improved in a couple of hours. If his fever rises again, bring him back to me.”
The mother and son took their leave. They had only been gone less than an hour, however, when they returned, the mother frantic, the boy convulsing in her arms, and…”
Matt shook himself out of the retelling, eyes downcast, and chugged down another few fingers of bourbon. “Well,” he said. “You can probably gather the rest. Anyway, turned out the son was deathly allergic to salicin, which is the active ingredient in willow bark. Killed him as soon as it set in.”
“Shit,” Wiley whispered, fist pressed to their mouth.
“Yeah,” Matt laughed humorlessly. “Shit. Now, the woman, his mother, didn’t seek persecution against the herbalist. She was devastated, obviously, but she knew no intentional harm had been done.”
“How?” I asked. “Why didn’t she think her son had been poisoned or something?”
“Because,” Matt explained, “the herbalist took some of the tincture in front of her to prove that nothing in it was toxic, and when that still wasn’t enough to completely convince her, she asked to take some herself. Apparently she said at least she’d be with her boy if it killed her. But it didn’t, of course. And as fucked up as she was about the whole thing, she wasn’t willing to cast blame where it wasn’t due.
“But it was a village. A small one, at that. Word traveled quickly, and soon there wasn’t a person within earshot who didn’t know the woman’s son had died at the hands of the herbalist. So, of course, she was ostracized from the community as a whole. Which meant what?”
“No income,” Wiley guessed.
Matt shook a finger at them pointedly. “That’s right. No income. Nobody was paying or trading for her tinctures or balms or teas anymore, and there was only so much she could forage, especially in winter. She was on her way to starving to death quick, and she’d made her peace with that fact. In her eyes, it was her penance. She knew she hadn’t killed the kid on purpose, but she still believed she deserved her suffering for taking the life of an innocent. So she resigned herself to her fate. But then…
“As the herbalist slept, she dreamed. And in her dream, there was a figure—tall and lean and shadowy black. It approached her as she was in reality, lying on her side in her bed, and brushed a lock of her fragile hair away from her ear.
“I am the Scorekeeper,” it rasped, hot breath tickling her neck. “I was called to pay you a visit. Do you wish to settle a debt?”
The herbalist watched her own unmoving body from above, well aware that she wasn’t awake, but wishing still that she could communicate somehow. Because she did wish to settle a debt, and she thought that maybe it would help her make peace with her passing if she said so, even to a dream.
When the Scorekeeper spoke again, she was startled at its words. “Worry not. What you mean to speak aloud, speak instead within your soul. I will understand.”
The herbalist wasn’t sure if she believed this, but then again, it was a dream. Her dream. Why shouldn’t it be able to read her thoughts? So, she opened her heart to the Scorekeeper, letting the torment and turmoil and anguish of the death of the child overtake her spirit so intensely she feared she may never reel it in. She agonized for the boy; for the unfairness of all the years she had inadvertently robbed him of, for the suffering she’d been entrusted to ease, for the hollow, empty life of his mother. She ached for what she had done, intentional or not. She felt as though whatever made her human, whatever made her her, might split in two.
“Enough,” the Scorekeeper said finally. “I have what I need. My only question left for you is this: Are you willing to trade places with the boy?”
The herbalist, had she been asked beforehand, may have said she would’ve expected herself to need a moment to think. At least one. But when she said yes, it was with such instantaneous and absolute certainty that she knew without a shadow of a doubt that she meant it.
And, evidently, so did the Scorekeeper.
“You will have from sunrise until sunset to assure that your deal isn’t for naught,” it told her, wrapping its icy fingers around her wrist. “The boy will need to be unburied if he isn’t to suffocate when the exchange is made. Luck be with you.”
The herbalist woke.
Dead, frostbitten tissue encircled her arm.
She knew what she had to do.”
“Wait,” I interrupted, “so it was real? Did she literally go dig this kid up?”
Matt polished off his glass again. “Yeah,” he said. “He’d just barely started decomposing, thankfully. Still totally intact. So she dug him out, wrote a letter to his mom detailing everything that had happened, took him home in a wagon and left it outside the door. When she went to sleep that night, she didn’t wake up.”
“But he did,” Wiley guessed.
“Bingo.”
“Damn.” A particularly strong gust of frigid wind howled past the windows, and I looked up to a confirmation that the snow didn’t plan to ease anytime soon. “Damn. I mean, this is, like. Weird. Even for here. Even for us. A dead kid just coming back to life? I don’t know, man.”
Matt shrugged his shoulders. “Believe it or not. It happened. And the reason Jung’s father told him the whole story was because it was about to happen again. See, he’d met the Scorekeeper. And he was ready to make his own deal.
“He’d ended up eventually talking to the realtor who’d sold him the building, and he found out a thing or two about its prior tenants. Namely, nobody ever stayed. It took the right kind of person to put up with the goings on here, and usually the people in commercial business weren’t it. It had been sold to him for so little, he learned, because it had been vacant for so long that the company was about to cut their losses and have it bulldozed, historical value be damned. ‘Course all the realtors in the agency had started spreading their own little ghost stories, but they didn’t know anything. Not really.
“The Scorekeeper, as it turned out, only showed itself to the people who were contractually responsible for the building and who it knew it could proposition with a deal. So when it approached Jung’s father, it told him the story of the last deal it had made what felt like lifetimes ago. Well, showed him, more like. When the Scorekeeper got close enough, it put its hand on his forehead and projected its exchange with the herbalist almost like a movie into his mind’s eye. That, and everything that had followed.
“Once a certain kind of sacrifice has been made in any given spot, something about it changes. The Scorekeeper showed Jung’s father the evolution of this place; the renovations and the partial demos and the reconstructions and all the nasty, nightmarish shit that’s been drawn here since the first time somebody willingly gave their life inside.
“When it was over, he knew what his own deal would be, and that he was going to take it. As long as his son complied with his ultimatum. What the Scorekeeper offered him was a grandchild. One that he would never meet. His life in exchange for his son’s ability to have a baby. He was dying already, but even if he hadn’t been, he said he’d have taken it. All he asked in return was that Jung promise to get away. Sell the building. Leave the state—or, hell, the country if he wanted to. Just go somewhere that the baby could never be exposed to this place.
“Jung still didn’t believe it. Still thought his dad was just on the brink of death and delusional. But he agreed just to humor the old man and that was that. Until he spent his first and only night here alone.
“I don’t know exactly what happened. What he saw. I didn’t ask. But I know he was here later than he ever had been running reports, and after whatever happened, he never set foot inside again.
“The next week, his father passed. The week after that, his wife got a positive pregnancy test. He listed the building the same day. Had all the equipment cleared out, locks changed, the whole nine. And I just happened to be the first unlucky fucker looking for a spot.
“Before he signed the title over to me, he asked me a bunch of weird ass questions. If I had a family. If I ever planned to. If anybody was dependent on me. Kept saying he didn’t want to do this; that he wouldn’t if he had any other choice, but he had to have the money. And then he…he told me everything. I thought he was off his rocker, of course. Or just trying to fuck with me. I basically told him to stick it where the sun don’t shine and gave him his check.
“Didn’t take me long to realize I’d fucked up. He gave me his number when we met and told me to call if I had any questions, but warned me that the deal was final. I don’t know what made me keep it, but I thank my lucky fuckin’ stars every day that I did. He didn’t have a lot of advice for me, seeing as how he hadn’t actually experienced much of what went on firsthand, but at the very least he could assure me I wasn’t on my last marble, and that was more comfort than I could’ve asked for at the time.
“He tried to talk me into just letting the place rot, but I knew I couldn’t. Somebody would’ve come sniffing around eventually, and I’m not broke, but I’m not impervious to a high enough offer either, which I knew I’d get eventually if I just let it sit here. Believe it or not, I’ve got one or two morals, and they wouldn’t let me pawn this bullshit off on anybody else.
“Jung’s situation was different; if I’d been in his shoes, I would’ve done the same. He had a wife to look out for. And a baby. And a future. But I just had me. So I kept it. And now it’s just, like. People need this place, y’know? So. Here we are. And I’ve dragged you into it with me because—I don’t know, maybe I’m a pussy, or maybe I was lonely, or maybe I’m just a bad fuckin’ person. But you don’t leave. None of you ever leaves, even when it gets bad. And I think maybe that’s because I do an okay job of keeping you safe, so. I’ll keep at it as long as you will, and when we’ve all decided we can’t take it anymore then we’ll reevaluate, I guess.”
Matt was beginning to slur a little now, and he took one last long drink before sliding his glass down the counter. “We still talk from time to time. Jung pretends it’s just to catch up, but he’s really checking in. Keeping tabs. Making sure I haven’t died. I ask him how the family is, he asks how work’s going, I tell him everything’s fine, and that’s just understood code for ‘I’m alive. We’re all still alive.’ Feels like it ought to count for something.”
“It does.” Wiley’s voice was slightly strained, and they cleared their throat, clapping a hand gently on Matt’s shoulder. “It counts for a lot. And, hey, if we didn’t want to be here, we wouldn’t. Okay? None of us. Right, Adam?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Yeah, that’s right. Hate to break it to you, but I think you’re pretty well stuck with all of us at this point.”
The corner of Matt’s lips tilted up. He blew a breath of laughter out his nose. “Well, that’s good to hear,” he said, “because one of these days, the Scorekeeper’s coming for me. And when it does, when it’s time to make my deal, it better be worth it. It better be for one of you.”