by D V Wolfe
I raised an arm and pointed down at Noah’s head as we walked behind her. Noah grabbed my arm and shoved me. I bounced off the fender of a Lincoln we were passing and she turned to look at us. Her mascara was running and she’d eaten off most of her tangerine lipstick.
“How awful,” Stacks said, looking at her car and trying to seem sincere as he shoved Noah and me from behind towards the exit. We hit the main floor of the library and took a moment to get our bearings. “The Private Collection is down that hall,” Stacks said, nodding ahead and to our left. We followed him down the hall, me right behind Stacks and Noah following me. Stacks got in line to accept a pair of gloves.
I turned to Noah. “You alright?”
Noah nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”
“We passed that fake living room with the fireplace. Do you want to go camp out in there until we’re done?”
Noah shook his head. “Nah, I’m ok. Maybe I’ll go later.”
Stacks came back wearing white gloves.
“Wanna do some Billie Jean or a quick moonwalk before we get down to it?” I asked, trying to keep my face straight.
“Bite me,” he said.
We followed him to another counter and he rattled off a number to the woman standing behind it. She looked at him suspiciously and then turned away.
“I get the feeling they might remember you,” I said.
“No, it’s just not a very popular book in their collection. I’m probably the last person who looked at it.”
She returned with a disintegrating, leather-bound book. The leather was worn to nothing on most of the cover and spine but in some of the cracks and crevices, the memory of the dark brown leather could still be seen.
Noah and I followed Stacks to a high table and climbed onto the stools. Stacks set the book down and carefully opened it under the LED lamp that was shaded and sitting in the middle of the table. He looked at the bare table in front of me.
“Aren’t you going to take notes?”
I shrugged. “Is there that much to note?”
Stacks looked up at me, bewildered. “I thought you wanted to kill these motherfuckers.”
A library worker passing behind us paused and gave Stacks a dirty look before putting a finger to his lips. “Shhhhh!”
“Sorry,” Stacks whispered to the man and then turned to glare at me. “This is in Latin, and Old Italian. I can translate some of it but I know there are going to be passages we have to just copy and work out later.”
“Fine.” I stood up, looking around for some form of paper and writing utensils. There was nothing in the room that looked helpful.
“Stay here, I’ll be back.”
I left the Private Collections room and went back down the hall. I found the information desk and got into line. I was waiting behind two girls wearing matching braces and passing an adult romance novel back and forth between them when a familiar scent caught my nose.
I couldn’t place it. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I looked around to see if it was coming from someone or something around me. The smell was fainter now. I collected a stack of scratch paper and a handful of golf pencils from the tray and hustled back to Private Collections. I let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding when I saw Stacks and Noah still sitting at our table, looking at me.
We worked for the next two hours. Stacks would read a passage out, translating it as best he could, and then we’d copy it down. It turns out, the monk used a pike he’d made from a Cypress tree growing in the monastery’s cemetery.
“And he licked….” Stacks flipped a page back and then forward, looking for context.
“I’m drawing the line at tonguing cemetery trees,” I said, sticking the pencil stub in my mouth. I shuffled the papers in front of me, trying to find a clean one to copy more notes onto. Most of them were full of scribbles and cross-outs from Stacks second-guessing himself and Noah and I not having erasers.
“How sure are you about this translation, Stacks?” Noah asked.
Stacks narrowed his eyes at Noah and me. “Everyone who can read Latin and Old Italian, raise your hand.”
I started to raise my hand, and Noah turned to me and smacked it down.
“Right,” Stacks said, looking back down at the book. “And he ...bathed... the...end of the sacred pike with….”
“That sounds much better than licking it,” Noah said.
“With the urine of…”
“Makes you wonder,” I said to Noah. “How many other things did people try before urine?”
“Sorry, with the tears…”
“Great,” Noah said, “Now you have to make someone cry. What are the odds it’s the tears of a nerd who speaks Latin and Old Italian?”
“I heard that. There! Tears of the Blessed Father and the gift given to the Peacemaker.”
“Tears of the Blessed Father,” Noah repeated.
“God? We have to make God cry?” I asked. I grinned at Noah and Stacks. “I think I could just leave you two alone with Stacks’ collection of Penthouse magazines and you could make God cry for us.”
“And the gift given to the Peacemaker,” Stacks finished, ignoring me.
“Oh this should be a piece of cake,” I said. “Is there any more?”
Stacks shrugged. “Son of a Beloved Father and pantry...wait that’s not right.”
“You don’t say,” I said.
“Helping or hurting, Bane?”
Noah slid off his stool. “While you two are debating this one, I’m going to the bathroom.”
Stacks nodded without looking up and I waved Noah off. “Hurry up. We need to get back on the road soon. It sounds like we’re going to have quite the shopping list.”
Noah left and Stacks tried again. “No, Son of a Beloved Father and Mother of...pulchritudo... pulchritudo...I know...I know this one.”
“Mother of Pulchritudo,” I said, dully. I’d had hope this morning when we were heading to the library. All we needed from this monk was a “do-it-yourself” recipe for slaying demons. Was that too much to ask? But no, he had to go all flowery and poetic. I pushed back from the table and checked the clock.
“He’s pretty long-winded for a monk,” I said, flicking a wadded up paper at Stacks.
“Well monks, I mean what have they got to do all day.” He buried his head further into the text and I looked around the room at the other occupants. There were what had to be strung out grad students in wrinkled, button-down shirts and hooded sweatshirts that rivaled Stacks’ shirt for pizza stains. There was an older man in a pressed suit and half-moon spectacles reading a large text with tiny print at the table next to us. He breathed through his nose and every time he exhaled, his nose whistled, softly. Between Stacks’ muttering and the nose whistling, the feel of the room was almost hypnotic.
“Bane!” Stacks barked. I looked back at him. “Write this down.” I sat up straight and pulled the cleanest sheet of scratch paper towards me. “This gift, given by the Queen to the Peacemaker on the occasion of … relations….no… friendship… or something like it. It has the right root word.”
“So glad I got that down. Where does that get us?”
Stacks shrugged. “It’s something about the gift. It came from a queen. And she gave it to the Peacemaker, whoever he is.”
“Isn’t that part kind of obvious? I mean he has his own holiday and everything.”
Stacks shook his head. “The text says ‘of a Beloved Father and mother of …..beauty’! And there’s a word here for lust. And I think this one means taken.”
“The plot….curdles...,” I said. I looked up at the clock. Noah had been gone for about twenty minutes.
I stood up. “I’m going to see if young Noah has gotten lost.”
Stacks waved me off without looking up from the text. I went back down the hall and took a left, following the signs for the restrooms. The hallway was empty and there was a side door leading out onto the lawn, directly across from the restroom
s. The exterior door was open a crack, and there was a rock wedged in it to keep it from closing all the way. Someone was probably out sneaking a smoke. The place seemed fairly clean. I could even see the vacuum tracks in the dark carpet outside the restroom doors. It was immaculate, well, almost. A scrap of something by the men’s room door caught my eye. I took a step closer and looked down.
It was tie-dyed. And obviously ripped. I felt my stomach drop somewhere around my toes. It was Noah’s. That stupid shirt he’d been wearing since he got in the truck with me.
I opened the men’s room door and called in. “Noah!” Silence. There was a wad of something lying on the tile floor just inside the bathroom door. Hair. Orange and curly. And bloody. It looked like it had been ripped out by the roots.
Stacks looked up when I pounded back into the Private Collections room.
“What’s wrong with you...” Stacks started.
“Something’s got Noah,” I said. Stacks looked at me, horror head-butting realization behind his eyes. “Put the book in your pocket. We’ve got to go."
15
Stacks just looked at me. I grabbed him by the scruff of his t-shirt and lifted him off his seat.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Stacks said, fighting to get out of my grasp. “How do you know he’s been taken? I mean he could be just wandering ar….” I held up the scrap of Noah’s torn shirt. It looked like part of his sleeve. “That could be anyone’s.” Stacks said. “And even if it is his, maybe he just got it caught on something.” I held up the bloody wad of hair. “Oh...ok. Maybe someone does have him.”
“Or something,” I said. A school group in matching uniforms had just flooded into the Private Collections room and the woman working the counter was in the middle of answering questions.
“Now,” I said. Stacks looked at me, confused. I grabbed the monk’s journal and stuffed it down the front of Stacks’ pants. “Let’s go.”
I dragged Stacks towards the bathrooms and the side door. If I was snatching someone, I sure as hell wouldn’t walk them back through the rest of the library and try to make them act natural. We banged out the side door that was still propped open. We were on a sidewalk that twisted out of sight around the corner of the library. About ten yards in front of us was a side street. I let go of Stacks and ran toward it, trying to look in every direction at once. I was trying not to think about Gary and the bloody trail the Bunyip had left after taking him. God. Not again. And Gary had even volunteered for this suicide mission. He’d actually been a hunter. Noah was just an innocent with bad luck.
“Hey Bane,” Stacks panted, coming up next to me. “We should call Walter. He would know if something was roaming around here that might snatch Noah.”
I nodded and reached into my pocket for my cell phone. I’d flipped it open when Stacks elbowed me. “What!?” I barked, fumbling on the phone’s keypad.
“Look!” Stacks said.
I jerked my head up in time to see the beat-up Scout that had been parked next to Lucy in the garage, whiz by. The windows were rolled down and the car was veering all over the road. The reason why was clear. The Scout was full of smoke. And through the smoke, I saw orange, frizzy hair.
“Son of a bitch!” I shouted as realization smacked me in the face. I took off along the sidewalk back towards the parking garage.
“Bane! Wait up!” Stacks called behind me. I already had the key in Lucy’s ignition and was backing out by the time Stacks opened the door and climbed in.
“You almost didn’t make it, Stacks,” I said as we roared out of the garage. “It’s probably all that pizza.”
“No, it’s the desire to not let a priceless piece of history touch my….”
“Delicates?” I asked as I turned the corner onto the side street with enough force to put Stacks in my lap.
He winced. “Yeah, you grabbed more than the front of my jeans when you shoved it in my pants.”
I saw the Scout two lights ahead of us as we came down a hill. “Well, it’s probably more action than that monk ever saw while he was alive,” I said.
Stacks had his pants unbuttoned and was trying to extricate the book as gently as possible. He still had the gloves on.
“Stacks, I’m driving. I don’t want to go blind because of what you’re doing over there.”
He fished the book out, took off his gloves, and attempted to wrap the book in them.
“Is there any place in this junk heap I can safely store this?” He asked.
I slammed on Lucy’s brakes at an intersection and tapped the clutch to keep us from stalling out as a semi crossed in front of us.
“I think there’s some room under the spare tire in the toolbox,” I said. We took a corner on two wheels and I muscled my way through traffic until we were only two cars behind the Scout.
“Shit, Bane!” Stacks screeched, bracing an arm on the dashboard, “I didn’t really feel like dying today.”
The Scout made a sharp left into the big lot of a truck stop. The Scout’s windshield and back window were black with smoke. Lucy jumped the curb and I gunned it to get behind the Scout. The Scout had rolled to a stop, bumping the chain-link fence that separated it from a row of trees and someone’s yard behind the truck stop. I had the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip when I saw the driver stumble out, bent over, and coughing.
He wore a ratty baseball cap and a salt and pepper beard and he had on an oil-stained flannel shirt over a t-shirt and jeans, both full of holes. I knew that ratty hat. It was advertising Taggert’s Tire Shop. The asshole I was staring at was Tags himself.
“Well if he’s a monster, it’s a pretty good disguise,” I heard Stacks say beside me. My attention had shifted to the passenger side door. The smoke was starting to clear. I saw the door swing open and Noah emerged a moment later. His face was smoke-smudged and smoke was still rising from the top of his curly mop, but otherwise, he looked ok. We heard sirens somewhere in the distance, getting louder.
“Oh hell,” I muttered and kicked Lucy’s door open. After a second, I heard Lucy’s passenger side door open and Stacks followed me.
“Tags!” I bellowed.
“This ain’t the moment, Bane,” Tags choked, waving an arm towards the road.
“Stacks, Noah!” I called getting their attention. “Damage control.”
Stacks looked around and took off for the gas tanks shelter, Noah just looked at me.
“Burlap in Lucy’s toolbox!” I yelled at him. “Go grab it!”
Noah stumbled past me, heading back to Lucy. Tags and I hurried over to the back wall of the truck stop where a hose was coiled, used for rinsing the sidewalks and parking lot off. I grabbed the hose and Tags turned it on. By the time we got back to the Scout, Stacks had emptied one of the windshield washing reservoirs from the gas tanks onto the seat. Noah was standing next to him, soaking wet, blue water running down his face. Apparently Stacks had emptied the first reservoir over Noah’s head. Noah was holding the old burlap sacks I kept in Lucy’s toolbox but Stacks was in his way. I pointed the hose in the driver’s window and soaked both of them and the seat. Stacks shrieked and backed up, knocking into Noah. The smoke was clearing out now and the sirens and flashing lights were approaching fast.
“Pop the hood!” I yelled to Tags. Tags released the Scout’s hood and stepped back. I moved the hose to hit the Scout’s engine and steam filled the air.