Golem in My Glovebox

by R. L. Naquin

  “Riley told me about it before he went for food. Go shower. He’ll be back soon.”

  * * *

  By the time I stepped out of the shower, Maurice had already been to the house, picked out some clothes for me, and left them on the bathroom counter for me. Ever thoughtful, he’d picked out all the comfiest clothes for me, knowing I had a twelve-hour drive ahead. My old jeans were soft from a million washes, and the oversized Tommy Pickles shirt was usually reserved for sleeping. I threw the clothes on, brushed my teeth, and tossed my wet hair in a loose bun on top of my head.

  Riley and Maurice sat at a table, scarfing down burgers and milkshakes when I came out.

  “That’s breakfast?” I asked.

  Riley slurped through his straw. “It’s two in the afternoon. Nobody’s serving breakfast.”

  I shrugged and joined them, dipping my fries in my chocolate shake. “You coming with us?” I asked, waving a dripping fry at Maurice.

  He wrinkled his nose. “That is so nasty.”

  “It’s delicious.” I shoved it in my mouth and smiled.

  “I’m not going with you this time. I need to get back. Stacy and I have to talk, and I don’t want to risk being away overnight again, either.”

  Riley wiped ketchup from the corner of his mouth. “The place isn’t going to fall apart at night without you, you know.”

  Maurice shook his head. “It’s not that. I usually spend the nights at Sara’s, keeping an eye on her.”

  I froze midbite, then put my burger down on its wrapper. “Is she worse?” I was a terrible friend. I hadn’t thought about Sara’s problem much at all while I’d been gone. Though, to be fair, I’d kind of had a lot going on. “She’s still not sleeping?”

  “She’s sleepwalking. Nothing dangerous. She gets up and takes showers, mostly. Or gets on her treadmill.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You’re kidding. That’s why she’s so tired? She’s up at night working out in her sleep?”

  He nodded. “Mostly, yeah. Then she gets back in bed, tosses and turns for awhile moaning, screams and wakes up.”

  My burger tasted like plastic, and the cheese stuck to my teeth. “We need to get her to a counselor. We have to find someone in the Hidden community or a human with powers.”

  Riley crumpled his garbage and tossed it in the bag. “I’ll see if Art has access to a list.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of her.”

  I gave him a weak smile as he walked to the other end of the room to call Art. “Maurice, thank you for taking care of her.”

  “She’s my friend, too.”

  “I know.”

  We finished eating without talking. Riley hung up and grabbed our mostly empty bags to pack up the car. “Art’s going to see what he can do.”

  I swallowed. “Thanks.”

  Repeatedly through all these Hidden disasters, my best friend was the one who got overlooked while I tried to save everyone else. I made a silent promise to myself that once I made it back home, Sara would be my main priority. She deserved at least as much attention as I gave to strays I picked up off the street.

  We said our goodbyes, and Maurice promised to bring us our clean clothes to wherever we ended up staying in Michigan.

  We settled in, knowing we wouldn’t arrive at our destination until about one in the morning.

  A few minutes into the drive, I accidentally knocked my knee into the glove compartment while trying to flip around in my seat to grab a drink. The compartment door popped open, and Gris peered out.

  The depth of expression on his face was jarring—especially in light of how little he’d had in the way of emotional juice when I’d first met him. He’d been awfully quiet when we’d packed the car at the compound, and he’d declined coming into the hotel room with us. And now, here he was sitting alone in the dark glove compartment, his tiny face morose and despondent. I reached through my filters to check his emotional health and found his emotional campfire reduced to glowing coals—strong and hot, but not the happy blaze he’d had before.

  I frowned in concern. “Gris, what’s wrong?”

  His shoulders sagged. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  Curls of depression spun in slow, lazy circles around him, filling the nearly empty storage area he sat in. My heart ached for him. Without thinking, I sent a tendril of comfort toward him and used it to nudge his banked campfire of emotions into a small flame. His face brightened a bit with it, and he gave me a sad smile.

  “You know, I can feel you do that,” he said. “Thank you. It helps.”

  I felt my face grow hot with embarrassment. Influencing another person’s emotions was something I tried not to do, but here I’d done it with Gris without thinking. And I’d been caught.

  “I’m sorry, Gris.” I dropped my gaze to my hands, ashamed to make eye contact. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “No!” he said. The word was so emphatic that it startled me. “You’ve already done so much for me. I feel so much more now. I wanted that. I wanted more than knowledge and self-awareness. I knew there was more. I just didn’t know what it was until you gave it to me.”

  I leaned toward him. “Gris, the very fact that you wanted something shows you already had that ‘something more’ inside you. I just sped up the process.”

  He nodded, “Still, I value what you’ve given me. And I value the friendship you’ve both given me.”

  I frowned. “We value you, too, Gris. So, what’s wrong?”

  He sighed. “I’m afraid that if I tell you, you’ll cease to trust me. Even I don’t entirely trust myself, in fact.”

  Riley reached across the car and pinched Gris between two fingers, then placed him on the dashboard between us. “I can’t drive and look at you all the way over there at the same time.”

  Gris settled himself on the dash. He didn’t swing his legs the way he usually did.

  “Gris,” I said. “Just tell us. It won’t change how we feel. You have to trust us, too.”

  He nodded. “Very well.” He sighed again, steeling himself for the big reveal that he thought would make us hate him. “I did some eavesdropping on Mother while we were home.”

  Riley and I exchanged a quick glance. If I’d thought of it, I’d have sent Gris in to spy on Bernice. It was genius, really. He was small and quick, and she was dismissive of him and distracted by the mess that was going on. Of course, he considered her his mother, so the thought never crossed my mind.

  He shifted on the dashboard, sending a patter of guilt through my filters. “I also eavesdropped on you, Zoey.”

  I raised an eyebrow, Sara-style. “Oh?” I sat up straighter.

  He nodded. “I followed you to the prison and listened to you speak to the Gremlin. It upset me. In all the time I’d been reading everything I could find in the library, I never knew about him. How could I? I wasn’t allowed outside the main building. I put it all together and realized the prisoner was the very reason Mother... Bernice wanted me inside.”

  I relaxed against my seat. “You weren’t eavesdropping on me. Not really. I’d have taken you with me if I’d known you wanted to listen.”

  He gave me a weak smile. “Thank you.” He cleared his throat. “So, I decided I needed to follow Bernice to see what she was up to. Maybe I could confront her. Demand answers. She didn’t like being alone with me, usually, but I’m more, now, you know? I thought maybe she might accept me, now that I’m more like her and even less like my brothers and sisters.”

  My heart hurt for him. I knew this story couldn’t have a happy ending, not with the unhappiness he was leaking all over the inside of Mabel, and the way he’d stopped calling Bernice “Mother.”

  I tilted my head toward him, and my voice was quiet. “What did you hear, Gris?”

  He examined
his hands for a long moment before he spoke. “After you rescued the gremlin, I ran back to the house. It was early, so I went to Bernice’s room to wait. I wanted answers, and I wanted them the minute she woke up.”

  “She wasn’t asleep, was she,” Riley said.

  Gris shook his head. “No. Yes. She was on the phone. I hid from her and listened. She told the person on the other end that your car was parked out front and that you’d arrived sometime in the night. Then she laughed. It didn’t sound like her laugh at all. If I had skin, it would have chilled me. After she hung up the phone, she climbed back into bed and started snoring. A few minutes later, the alarm went off and she stretched, as if she hadn’t been up five minutes earlier.”

  “Did she see you?” I asked.

  “No. I hid behind the door and watched. She looked out the window and saw your car. I’d swear she was surprised to see it, even though she’d obviously called someone to tell them it was there.”

  “That’s messed up,” Riley said.

  Gris nodded.

  Of all the options I’d thought of for how Bernice and Katy were communicating, I hadn’t thought of the phone. I mentally slapped my forward. “So, now we know. Good work.”

  “Good work? I was dishonest. I was ashamed to tell you about it. And now, I don’t know if I can be trusted, since I’m connected to Bernice, and she’s connected to Kathleen Valentine.”

  I frowned. “Gris, no. You did exactly right. And I’m pretty sure you’ve severed your connections to Bernice.”

  “We can’t know that. I should have stayed there. I’m endangering the entire mission by being here.” He folded his arms and gazed out the window.

  To be fair, I was concerned myself. As far as we knew, he could turn into a zombie and start making phone calls to Katy, too. But I doubted it.

  “How about I check, Gris? I’m sorry I pried before—I didn’t really think of it as prying, since you were new at having emotions. But now, I want you to know I won’t press anything on you or dig around in there without your permission. If you’re concerned about connections to Bernice or Katy, I think I’ll be able to see it if I’m looking, since Katy would be using similar mojo to mine.”

  Gris’s face brightened. “Would you? That would be such a relief.”

  I nodded. “My pleasure.” I probed his emotional campfire, but this time I spread out and really felt my way around his psyche. Most people are a jumble of emotions outside the core, immediate feelings—petty resentments left over from earlier in the day, ancient baggage from when they were children, nagging problems accumulating depth, and learned, automated emotional responses to their immediate surroundings. Not so with Gris. His outer layer was clean and orderly. He’d come so recently to the emotional arena, he had no learned responses or accumulated baggage.

  The exception to this orderly, pristine outer circle was a thin thread, pulled taut and leading behind us in the direction of headquarters. I touched it with a tendril of my own emotions, and it vibrated like a guitar string. I smelled Bernice’s hairspray and tasted oatmeal cookies.

  “Well,” I said. “I have good news and bad news.”

  Gris blinked at me, silent.

  Riley drew his eyebrows together and glanced at me. “Good news first, please.”

  “The good news is there are no raisins in the oatmeal cookies Bernice is currently eating.”

  “I like raisins,” Riley said.

  I made a face.

  “You felt her,” Gris said, sounding as if he would cry if he had tear ducts. “I am connected.”

  “Yes.” I hesitated. There was an enormous risk involved in what I was about to offer him, and I wasn’t crazy about the options. “You have a choice now. And you need to know, this is your choice. I will stand by your decision, no matter which way you go.”

  “You can sever the connection?”

  I nodded. “I think so. There’s no evidence, though, that Katy can control you through that connection.”

  “Even if she can’t control me, Bernice can probably see and hear through me if she thinks of it. Then she can tell her mistress.”

  “Maybe.” I said. “If that’s the case, we can just be more careful until this is over.”

  “Or you can just cut her off,” Riley said.

  “Yes.” I gave Gris the most serious face I could. “But we don’t know what that will do to you. It could be what keeps you alive. If I cut that cord, it might be that I unplug you from your power source.”

  “That would be problematic,” Gris said, his expression unchanged. “May I think about it?”

  Relief washed over me. “I would rather you did. It’s a big decision.”

  Without a word, he climbed down the dash, over the heater vent, across the radio dials, and hopped into the glove compartment. He gave me a brave smile, nodded and closed the door.

  * * *

  We drove past a hundred tiny towns, farms, and fields. I tried to make a game of counting how many times I spotted the Golden Arches, but I grew bored with it. We stopped to fill the tank, and I drove for a while until we needed gas again. Then Riley took another turn at the wheel.

  Did I really say I wanted to get away? Had I really wanted a break from my house?

  “Worst vacation ever,” I said, somewhere in Indiana. The sun had gone down a while ago, and the lights of an anonymous small town twinkled in the distance. “I haven’t had a single churro or funnel cake.”

  “I’m waiting for my first mai tai with an umbrella in it.”

  Gris tried to be helpful. “You had a few beers back in Idaho.”

  I blinked. “We were in Idaho? That seems so long ago.”

  Riley scratched his chin, as if thinking back over the distant past. “Yes. We had onion rings. But the beer didn’t have tiny umbrellas. I definitely remember that.”

  “Good times,” I said, gazing out the window. “Good times.”

  My phone rang, interrupting my daydreams of my own bed, favorite coffee mug, and lack of imminent danger. Mina had already arrived in Michigan.

  “How much longer till you get here?”

  I looked at the clock on the dashboard. “We’re almost to the border, so we’re another hour, hour and a half out.”

  “No you’re not. You’re almost here.”

  “Did she move Rob to another location?”

  “No. As far as I can tell, Rob’s okay for the moment. We have another problem to deal with first.” Mina’s voice was sharp, and filled with urgency.

  I groaned. “Of course we do.”

  “You’ll see a sign in a few minutes for Coldwater Lake State Park. That’s where I need you to go.”

  “It’s the middle of the night. Will we be able to get in?”

  “Just turn off when you see the signs. You’ll know exactly where to go. Just follow the news vans and RVs.”

  “News vans? Shit. What happened?”

  “The last thing the Hidden community needs. They’ve trapped a lake monster in a fishing net. Humans finally have concrete proof.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mina hadn’t exaggerated. We turned into the park entrance and followed a line of cars past a golf course to an area along the side of the lake. Huge spotlights shone on the water from truck beds and the roofs of Jeeps and SUVs on the shore, and from helicopters circling above the water. This sort of attention had to be the worst possible scenario when it came to keeping the Covenant intact. The situation had to be fixed fast or we’d have to start hoarding bottled water and cans of chili for our future apocalyptic survival.

  A raspy, echoing howl reverberated against the surrounding trees. Something enormous slapped the surface and churned the water. The low murmur of the crowd grew louder, and the bodies lining the shore moved closer to the edge. People shoved each
other and craned their necks to see.

  Despite the time being a few minutes after midnight, the place was bright as daylight, and far busier than I imagined the area would be even on the fourth of July. The space wasn’t exactly meant for cars, but we’d all driven in anyway. My old VW would never have made it, but Mabel didn’t complain too much.

  We hopped out and started toward the commotion. Mina separated from the rear of the crowd and met us halfway.

  “This is horrible.” I said.

  The lake monster splashed again and let loose a heartbreaking, mournful cry.

  Mina’s face was grim. “I’ve never had to deal with damage control this severe. I have no idea how we’re going to cover it up.”

  “How are they keeping it there?” Riley squinted, trying to look over the heads of the onlookers. “I can’t make out any barriers.”

  Mina scowled. “They’ve surrounded her with fishing nets. And she’s still caught in the net that caused this in the first place, so she can’t jump over and escape.”

  Riley frowned. “I’m going down there to get a closer look. Are you coming?”

  I shook my head. “In a minute. I want to talk to Mina first.”

  He hurried into the mass of bodies, eager to get a look.

  The excitement from the crowd dripped through my filters like hot wax. Sweat beaded along my hairline, and my palms itched. “So, we have two problems. This is a rescue mission, as well as a cover-up.”

  She nodded. “And this isn’t my territory, so I don’t have all the connections I’d normally have with local law enforcement and the media.”

  I had no idea the Board had its claws so deep in human affairs. “So, what do we do?”

  “First, we talk to the person who does have those connections.” She pointed at a tall, slim man, leaning against a nearby tree with his arms folded.

  The man paid no attention to us as we came toward him. His dark eyes watched the lake with an intense stare, as if calculating a million different ways to remedy the situation if only someone would ask. He wore his soft, blue shirt unbuttoned about two buttons more than what was socially comfortable. His stance made him seem like a cowboy out of the old west and the lack of hat and spurs was a mere oversight.