The next day, I checked the rest of the library, thinking that perhaps it was misplaced. It did not cross my mind to check the computers until I realized, somewhat naively, that someone who supposedly stole a book could have just checked it out. It felt like a last ditch effort to save my failure of protecting the stacks, and so I logged on.

And lo and behold, the book was checked out to Basil. 

In any other world, I would have no right to be angry at him. He was a theology major and the book discussed the history of a kind of religion, a sort of worship. It was the perfect fit. But that’s what scared me - him being perfect for the book. It meant that It would want him in some sense, and I knew Basil wouldn’t be able to handle It. 

I was furious. I was a mix of things, but overall I wanted to grab him by his sweater and shake him. My anger came out in the form of calling out of work for the first time since my employment, fists clenched by my sides as I faked an illness. The librarian did not question me, and so I all but ran out of the library, into the bright sun and fresh air and God, did spring always smell so sweet? 

It was draining me, being in the stacks, so much that I had forgotten what life was like. Beside the sidewalk, flowers grew in patterns of red and white blooms, and from the center of the campus grew an old, wispy willow tree. I had nearly forgotten what it looked like during the day, its white flowers touching down to the ground in low-hanging branches that looked like tendrils. 

And, as if led by fate, stood Basil, his copper hair bright in the sunlight, reflecting oranges and reds that, if I had not been so angry, would have been breathtaking. 

He saw me, his face twisting into a panicked smile that didn’t quite meet his eyes. I approached him before he could escape, though I didn’t grab him for fear that I would falter, for fear that I would look too hard at his lips again and fall into something reckless. Instead, I stood feet from him under the willow tree, watching him clench his backpack strap nervously. 

“You look good in this light-” He began.

I stopped him by cutting to the point. “You checked out the book. Why?”

“Do you ever think of anything besides work?” He asked, exasperated. 

“This isn’t work,” I admitted. He raised a brow. “Answer.”

Basil sighed, taking his backpack off. The strap got caught on his sweater, pulling it down to his freckled collarbones before he fixed it. I was transfixed on that patch of skin there, the same place I had bitten only a day ago. How distant we were already. 

He pulled out the book with ease, and it looked wrong outside of its home, the sunlight glistening on the gilded pages just a bit too brightly, the aged cover suddenly far more frail than before. It was a heart ripped out of a chest cavity, still beating. I could feel how It longed to have it back, and so I reached for it.

Basil jerked his hand away. I could have snarled at him and I’m certain I did something close to it. “Answer me first. Why do you care?” 

“Because-!” A moment’s loss of temper, causing me to raise my voice. I stopped, brushing dark locks of hair away from my face, trying to collect myself. This was precarious work, and Basil was not one to listen easily. One wrong move and he would keep the book - perhaps forever. “Because it’s a rare edition, and it needs to be in the library. Whoever checked it out to you did so mistakenly.”

“What makes it rare?” Basil asked, ignoring most of my words. He turned to the title page, squinting at it as if It would reveal It’s secrets. “It was published in 1962. It’s old, but hardly old enough to matter. I’ve seen older books outside of the stacks.”

“Why do you need it?” I asked, aware that I was doing the same thing to him and ignoring his questions. I tried to not sound desperate. 

Basil paused for a moment, conflicted. I saw the way his brows furrowed over his eyes, the way the golden gleam of the pages reflected yellow in his eyes. “I … just want it,” he finally decided. “Yes. I just saw it, and I wanted to read it.”

Again I felt my temper rise, though this time, it was replaced by something worse - utter helplessness. I couldn’t cause a scene over a book, no matter how important it was. Instead, I let out a hard breath, my nostrils flaring just briefly. And before I could stop myself, I was damning him with my words. “Then read it.” 

As I stormed away, ignoring Basil’s pleas, I could hear It for the first time, its voice garbled, sounding of record static and backwards phrases - only barely enough to be understood, though I know It wasn’t speaking English. It wasn’t speaking anything at all, but I understood with clarity.

And from the depths of wherever It rose, It said to me, “He will rot.”

–

I was called into work by the police a week later, for someone had broken into the stacks. I knew who it was before I got there, though Basil had escaped before the police arrived. 

It was seeping into his mind already, it seemed. 

The stacks was a mess. Books were strewn about and thrown from their shelves - some first editions were irreparably damaged - and mud caked the floors in the shape of footprints. Mud and something else, something tinged with red. I dared not think about it too much. Instead, I turned my attentions to the center of the room, where the police had overlooked a key detail.

They were not meant to see it, but I was. Their human eyes grazed over it as though it didn’t exist, but with a squint I could see through It’s glamour, gazing upon a record player in the floor, unplugged. 

Still spinning a silent song. 

There were no screams this time, but I knew that, in the dead of night, surrounded by the Others, It would scream proudly. Maybe that was the job of the Others - to coax a song out of their god - perhaps for no reason at all than to just listen to It’s voice. 

Basil had stolen the record player from the Others, somehow. He was lost to society if he was already committing such acts. The book had taken him, had eaten his mind until nothing remained but desperation to get close to It. This was the damnation I tried to save him from. 

My vision blurred and, upon touching my face, I realized that I was crying. For what? For a boy I didn’t know? 

Whose grief am I borrowing?

I dried my eyes as quickly as I could, feeling all the more foolish for it, and I turned away from the record player. I gave the police my statement since I was the only person with a key to the stacks, and then I was dismissed.

I did not go home. Instead, I waited, for I knew that when night came, when the Others met, Basil would be among them. He would have either joined, or he would sneak in. Either way, I would have my - what, vengeance? Justice? Does It crave retribution in the slightest?

Night came quickly and the mess was cleaned by someone else - a janitor with no ties to the stacks. It felt wrong, like letting an untrained surgeon go into a wound. The stacks was a wounded animal, whimpering and trodden on - only I could fix it. 

As always, the Others came in a single file line from the back of the building, covering their tracks as if they were doing something far worse than trespassing. Their robes gleamed white in the light of the full moon, and I hurried to let them in, counting them. There should be eleven - not including the dead boy. 

This time, there were twelve. 

I followed slowly, stalking Basil as if he were my prey, though I couldn’t tell which one was him. As always, the leader turned to me once inside, asking me to join.

This time, I accepted. 

Someone in the crowd tensed upon my acceptance, and I shut the doors behind me with a ceremonious thud, locking us inside. I only smiled, scanning over the crowd until I spotted freckles barely covered by a too-big hood. “You have someone new,” I commented, staring at him all the while.

“Yes, and he is brilliant,” the leader said, pulling Basil closer against his will. I could see how he pressed his heels into the floor, as if trying desperately to escape me. I had to hold my tongue to keep from screaming at him. Thief, thief, thief. 

“What makes him brilliant?” I tested. He winced under my gaze.

“He has located our book, Groundskeeper,” the leader said, his voice raspy, speaking the words too fast. He was manic with excitement, near trembling. “It has been lost for so long to us.”

“It had never been lost,” I argued, furrowing my brows. “It was always on the shelf.”

“It was visible to you, but not to us. Not until now.” As if on cue, Basil opened the book to the back pages, where Its name was spelled. I felt dread rising in my stomach, up to my throat. Nothing good could come to this. “And now that we have it, we can meet It.”

Basil approached me slowly, still holding the book. His eyes were golden once more, though I knew it was not from the dim lighting of the room. This was something else. Something wrong. In my time in the stacks, as whatever the Groundskeeper was, my eyes never burned away to acid. 

With one hand, he caressed my jaw. And in a whisper, he said, “I’m sorry, Dante,” before slamming the book into the back of my head. In an instant, my vision went black, and I hit the floor with a dull thud, the same as the dead boy a week before. 

–

I awoke to the smell of fire, the screams of the burned. My eyes opened against the instinct to keep them shut from the smoke, and I looked around, my head aching, to find that the stacks was in ruin. The Others swarmed the record player, protecting it from the flames as though it were a holy relic. And from the center of the room stood Basil, his mask off, surrounded by the flames that I knew he created.

“Kill the Groundskeeper, set It free,” he muttered under his breath, his eyes wide and darting around frantically. He was looking for his God, and he was finding himself alone. “We did it, but It - where is It?”

“You failed,” I said, standing amidst the flames - the flames that refused to touch my body. It was protecting me even now, even as my nose bled from having spent too long hearing the screams of It. The madness was coming, and soon my brain would be fried beyond any help, and then I would be just like Basil. Another monster dedicated to monsters. An abomination in human flesh. 

This was the cost of worship - flames and screams. 

My head felt heavy as I steadied myself, and I could feel a wetness from the back of my head, bloodied from the impact of the fall. I would not make it out alive. 

I could ensure Basil didn’t, either. 

“It does not love you,” I said. From behind Basil, the screams intensified. From Basil’s mouth came a desperate sound, an animalistic plea for me to be silent, to not speak the heresy of the truth. It did not love him. It did not love any of us. Love was something distant to It, too human to matter. Fragile little emotions. 

“It doesn’t love you, either!” Basil retorted, closing the book with a hard, angry snap. 

“I know,” I said. “I do not crave love like you do. I do not need It’s approval for me to know I’m on the right path. You were too fragile to ever survive this.”

“Shut up!” Basil cried out, and then he began to read again. “Take this devil from my hands, O’ Kl-”

The screams stopped. I ran for Basil, covering his mouth and tackling him to the ground. It was too late. The record player popped once before it too began to smoke, though it was not on fire. It had merely exhausted its purpose. 

From around me: the screams of the burning Others, the flames too hot to handle. The key to the stacks was in my pocket. They began to bang on the door desperately. 

From outside, distantly: Sirens. They would not arrive in time. 

From below me: Basil. And he was crying. Blood poured from a wound on the back of his head, a stigmata that matched my own, only I caused it. We had hurt each other. We could have never saved each other from It. 

“You should have never spoken Its name,” I scolded, watching as his nose began to bleed. He let out a guttural sob before his tears began to run red with blood. “Now It’s come to kill you.”

“Stop It,” he pleaded. 

“I cannot.” 

We were interrupted by a pained gasp from someone thought long dead - the leader of the Others. Unable to stand due to the way the Others clutched his lower half in agony, dragging him to the ground and perhaps also to Hell, he spoke fervently. It did not take me long to realize that he was praying. “And Lo, the Groundskeeper and the Others stand at each other’s throats. And by the grace of our God, we kill one another. And if one surviveth, so comes Its arrival on Earth.” 

Now I understood. This was what Basil caused - our descent and Its arrival, perhaps without ever realizing that he was lighting the match in the first place. I must have looked angry for Basil whimpered below me, and only then did I realize how close he was to the flames.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a whisper.

And, despite my anger, I kissed him. “I am too.”

In another life, on another campus, on another world, he and I-

The shelf beside us popped and groaned under its own weight, burned from the bottom up. Top-heavy, it fell, and before it hit us, I closed my eyes and laid my head on Basil’s chest. Neither of us screamed.

–

I awoke groggily, just as the paramedics were listening to the beat of my heart. 

Or, well, what had once been unbeating. 

When I opened my eyes and gasped my first breath of life, the team visibly startled. One woman, wielding a clipboard with purple gloves, looked sharply at the man with a stethoscope. “I thought you said he was dead!”

“He was.”

“Clearly, I’m not,” I said, sitting up and finding that my leg would not move. The team scrambled to support me, and from the hallway, I could see the still-smoking room of the stacks, its collection ruined. One by one, bodies were carted out of the room, white robes now grey and burned onto the skin in a sickening plaster. 

One body without a mask - I saw just a glimpse of red hair before a sheet was draped over him. The sight alone was greater than any bodily ache I carried.

Do you think I could summon God? He had asked me.

Yes, Basil, I do. And, listening to the screamless tune of a record player that was once scorched - now spinning as if unscathed - I think you did. 

I am the Groundskeeper. I am the Others. I am what remains of humanity. And I will find It, and It will know my name.