It takes a person like Gertrude Miller, it turns out.
“Where you headed?” she asked after the other four got in the back and I climbed in shotgun.
I’d been designated “driver-dealer-wither” by a rather hasty consensus decision, with the caveat that Thursday be ready to step in if the driver was a creep or just a bro looking to bro down. Gertrude Miller wasn’t either of those things. She was a white woman, probably fifty, with a vacant look in her eyes and a cold but somehow genuine smile on her face. She had that tired look of a woman who’d done service-class work her entire life, and the self-confidence of the same.
“Out to Glacier,” I said. “You?”
It’s good practice to ask where a ride is going. Probably more important when you’ve got reason to be skeptical—like when I’m hitching alone and a man picks me up. If they can’t give a clear answer, I don’t get in their car.
“Pendleton,” she said. “That’ll get you close to Glacier, but I’m afraid the sun’ll be down before we get there.”
“That’s fine,” I said, “we’ll figure it out from there. Thanks for the ride.”
“Anytime,” she said. “Know why I picked you up?”
Probably: Jesus told her to pick us up. Or maybe I reminded her of her daughter or her granddaughter. Or she was worried about me in the company I kept.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“God told me to,” she said. “There’re some young folks who look just like y’all in Pendleton. They run the library, ever since the county gave up on it, and they still run it for free. Never would have thought I’d make friends with someone with a face tattoo, no I didn’t, but these kids are alright. Figured you’re alright too.”
The smile dropped off her face for a moment as she squinted at the road ahead.
“Plus,” she went on, “I’ve already died once. Ain’t got nothing left to fear.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t. Instead, she put the radio on, pop country filled the car, and we drove back off into the sunset.
TWO
Staring out a windshield again at the low sun. I wasn’t in my body, but just above it. Or was I in the driver’s seat again?
I wasn’t. I was in the passenger seat of a stranger’s car. Not a stranger. Gertrude.
Maybe I was concussed. What did the doctor ask me, when I was a kid and I hit my head super hard on the playground? What year is it? What’s my name? Count backward from one hundred by sevens. One hundred.
Ninety-three.
I should have just pulled over earlier, as soon as I’d been tired. Why hadn’t I?
Eighty-six.
It had felt good, driving. I’d felt useful. No, it hadn’t been for other people. Driving west, away from Iowa, I’d felt in control of my own life and destiny. That’s half of why I travel.
Seventy-nine.
I hadn’t felt in control for months. It wasn’t the magic-and-demons thing. It was Clay’s death. He’d been such a, I don’t know . . . not a cornerstone. A keystone. His existence, somewhere in the world, had been keeping me together. He was gone, and ever since I hadn’t felt like I was in control. Maybe it wasn’t him specifically; maybe I would have felt that way if any of my close friends had died. Did I have close friends anymore?
Seventy-two.
Traveling with others is always a trade-off. Being close with other people is always a trade-off. Do we give up pieces of our autonomy to be with others? Is it worth it?
Eighty-five.
No, that wasn’t right. Fifty-five? What number was I on?
I couldn’t be concussed, for the simple reason that I didn’t want to be and I wasn’t sure there was anything to do about it even if I was. I probably couldn’t count backward from one hundred by sevens if I was fine.
It was fine. I was fine. I could breathe.
Thankfully, blissfully, the sun made its way below the horizon and stopped reminding me of that time I flipped a car and almost killed everyone.
I even let myself doze off.
* * *
It was about a three-hour drive, and we discussed our plans as best we could in someone else’s car. We’d try the library. If the folks there were as similar to us as Gertrude figured, then they’d put us up at least for the night. Anarchists stick together. Well, except when we get at mad at one another over small details.
Also I guess I kind of fed an anarchist to a deer a couple days ago but that’s beside the point. It was collective self-defense. He was trying to get the deer to eat my friends.
No matter. We’d try the library, then see what we could do about getting a new vehicle.
Pendleton goes from rural road to downtown in less than a block, which is kind of impressive. Nothing, nothing, pasture, nothing, trees, nothing, then a speed trap and a tourist trap right in a row—the latter even had a concrete tyrannosaurus out front, that kind of awesome place you don’t see much of until you get to the part of the country people write road trip movies about.
Then a Western-style tourist downtown, complete with boardwalk and old-timey-looking lampposts.
“This town has seen better days,” I said, as we drove past a broken chunk of wooden fence that lined the boardwalk.
“Ain’t no jobs now that the tourists are gone.”
“Why are the tourists gone?”
“Budget cuts,” Gertrude said. “I don’t know the whole ways of it, but a lot of public land went private and there’s not so much outdoor recreation like there was. It was okay for a while, there was still work for the gas companies. But I guess this area wasn’t so good after all, so all the jobs are a couple too many hours east of here and no one young sticks around.”
“That’s a shame,” I said, because it was.
“Everything ends,” she said. “That’s just God’s way.”
I didn’t believe much in God, but she wasn’t wrong.
“People are staring,” I said. We were stopped at a light—probably the only light in town—and an old white man was glaring from behind the curtains of some kind of knickknack store.
“Oh, they’re not staring at you,” Gertrude said. The light turned green, and she turned left off the main drag. The town was only about three, maybe four blocks wide. Maybe ten blocks long. Lots of small houses with forest and plains just beyond. “People here ain’t prejudiced, got nothing against black folks or even folks who dress like, I don’t know what you call that . . .”
“Punks?” I asked. We weren’t what most people think of when you think of punks. None of us had Mohawks, and I don’t think a one of us besides maybe Thursday or Brynn listened to the Sex Pistols. But we were punks.
“Sure, yeah.”
“What about trans people?” Vulture asked.
Gertrude looked up into the rearview, probably looking at Vulture to see if she could tell he was trans.
“Oh, honey, this is Montana, not North Dakota,” she said.
“Does that mean yes or no?” Vulture asked.
“We read the news, we’ve seen people like you online, and people around here are willing to let people be people.”
“That’s cool,” Vulture said. He didn’t sound incredibly reassured.
“You know,” Gertrude said, “I never would have noticed. You pass really well.”
“So that’s the kind of thing that probably sounds like it’s going to be a compliment but turns out not to be,” Vulture said.
“Have you had, you know . . .”
I think three of us tried to cut her off at once.
“Not a real polite topic of conversation,” I said.
“Got it.”
She genuinely seemed to take it well, but telling her not to ask the questions she so clearly wanted to ask still managed to kind of silence the car for a moment.
“So why are people staring?” I asked at last, as we stopped at a stop sign.
“Folks have been staring at me ever since I came back.”
>
“Back to town?”
“Back from the dead.” She said it so casually, like it was something no one would raise an eyebrow at.
“About that,” I asked. “You mean, like, they had to put those paddles on you and shock you back to life after a car accident or something? If that’s not, I don’t know, also the kind of question that’s rude to ask?”
“No, no, it’s okay.” Gertrude turned right, onto an unlit street. Maybe the library was this way. Maybe something worse was happening.
For the first time in the whole interaction—hey, I may be slow, but I’d had a rough day—I was getting uneasy. Sitting on the edge of my seat, eying the locks on the doors.
“I died of cancer. Last Christmas Eve. I was dead six months.”
“God bring you back?” I’d dealt with crazy folks all my life. It was fine. We’d be fine. I turned over my shoulder, to see if my friends were paying attention. They were. Brynn had her hand on her knife. Thursday had his hand in the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie, probably on his gun.
“Someone like that,” Gertrude said.
I had a feeling it wasn’t God who’d told Gertrude to pick us up after all. We’d asked for the dead to guard us.
She stopped the car.
It wasn’t sudden—she’d been slowing down—but it caught me off-guard and I reflexively flicked off my seat belt, ready to fight or run.
“Well,” she said, turning to smile with her cold smile. “We’re here. Been a pleasure meeting you ‘punks,’ and God bless!”
* * *
The library was in the old post office building on a darkened side street. Greek-style columns supported the front of the stone building, and a single flickering bulb in a sconce illuminated the door. A hand-lettered wooden sign read:
PENDLETON LIBRARY. STILL FREE. STILL OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. 10 A.M.–4 P.M. RUN BY ANARCHISTS.
Beneath it, someone had tacked a piece of paper that read:
WE DO NOT CARRY THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK. GET YOUR BAD POLITICS AND BAD SCIENCE RECIPES OFF THE INTERNET, NOT FROM US.
Yeah, okay. We could find friends here.
“What’s our cover story?” I asked.
Thursday shrugged. “Play it by ear. Back up whatever someone else comes up with.”
Thursday knocked. He broke up the rhythm of his knock, presumably to sound friendly and less like we might be cops. No one likes a cop-knocker.
It started raining, out of the blue. There’d been a few drops on the windshield in the last hour, but nothing serious. As soon as we stood under the awning of the library, the sky opened up.
“We’re closed,” a voice said, sleepily, from the other side of the door.
“We’re travelers, heard there were good people here.”
The door opened a slit. The white man peering through the crack looked to be a bit older than us, maybe in his midthirties. Gray streaked his thick black beard, and one half of his mustache was stark white. A spade was tattooed in faded blue on his cheek. “Who told you that?”
“Gertrude Miller,” I said. “She picked us up hitchhiking.”
There was fear in his face. His eyes darted to each of us in turn.
Another face appeared behind his. A woman closer to my age, with pitch black hair cut into baby bangs that continued into an undercut on the side of her head. Feral bangs, I’d sometimes heard the style called. They went well with her septum clicker and immaculate makeup. Sometimes I’m jealous of people who pull off high femme so well.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Vasilis,” she said, “let them in.”
“Sorry,” the man, presumably Vasilis, mumbled. He opened the door and we went inside.
I’m used to anarchist spaces being a little bit . . . humble might be the polite word for it. Scrappy. DIY. But this place still looked like a library. A small one, sure, but also one inside a beautiful old post office building. Rows and rows of books on thick wooden shelves filled the downstairs.
The only thing they’d done differently, it seemed, was try to kill the sterility one usually sees in small-town libraries. Tasteful sconces set into the wall lit the place, and a slightly ragtag assortment of comfortable chairs and couches were everywhere.
“You live here?” I asked. All my questions about more pressing matters—like the apparently dead woman who’d driven us to town—were lost in my excitement about people having taken over a small-town library and kept it running.
“Yeah,” Vasilis said. He led us through the main room of the library. It’s hard to walk past that many books without stopping to flip through them, but I followed him up the back stairs to the apartment above. It looked a lot more like places I was used to. The living room was still covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, but there was also a dining table and a counter that separated off a small kitchen area. A short hallway led to three other doors, presumably two bedrooms and a bathroom.
“How?” I asked.
“The county left it empty. We moved in.”
“It’s squatted, then?”
“Technically,” Vasilis said. “But even the sheriff’s wife comes here to check out books. I’m not sure anyone knows or even cares that no one legally owns the place. People assume we bought it and we don’t discourage them.”
“I’m Heather,” the woman said, and we did introductions.
“Wait,” Vasilis said, after I introduced myself as Danielle. “What’s your last name?”
“Cain.” I waited, cringing, to hear him call me Dani. He didn’t.
“You knew Clay,” he said. “He talked about you a lot, last time he was through here.”
“You know Clay?” Doomsday asked. At the same time as the ice was broken by knowledge of a mutual friend, a different sort of tension filled the room—the tension of discussing a mutual dead friend. “Knew. Knew Clay.”
None of these assholes had come to his funeral. Everywhere I traveled, people knew Clay. Everyone talked about him like he was a magical gift from the universe to its denizens. Which he was. But not one of them had made it to Denver to drink and mourn with me and his mom. Maybe I’d go out that way too. I’d live on in legend, but no one would feel obliged to actually miss me.
“Sure,” Vasilis said. “He came through a couple times a year. Always wanted to check out whatever new books we had.”
The books up here were, in fact, different from those on the shelves downstairs. A lot of them had blank spines. A lot of them were gold-embossed. Some of them looked older than some people think the Earth is.
“This is an occult library?” I asked.
“Well, what else are you all doing here?” Vasilis asked.
He and I were the only ones still standing, I realized. Everyone else had made themselves comfortable on couches and chairs. Rain lashed against the windows, and thunder rumbled across the plains.
“We, uh . . .” I tried to figure out what to tell him. I tried to figure out what was safe to tell him.
“We’re demon hunters!” Vulture blurted out. He put down a book and his phone—he’d been taking pictures of the pages. “We’re on the run because some stuff went wrong and Uliksi maybe killed a lot of people and some cops too!”
So much for a cover story.
Doomsday and Thursday shot him the same look at the same time. The combined glare would have driven lesser men to silence, or at least to show remorse on their face. Vulture did neither.
“You’re demon hunters?” Vasilis repeated, like the words didn’t make sense in his mouth, like he was speaking some language he didn’t know and was just parroting the phrase back.
“I mean, we are now, I guess.” Vulture gave his best “whoops, sorry” look to the rest of us.
“You’re here because of the disappearances, then?” That was Heather, who was sitting next to Brynn on a love seat.
“No,” Thursday said.
“Yes,” Vulture said, at the same time.
Doomsday’s ritual must have done a hell of a lot more than get us a ride safely.
“What disappearances?” I asked.
“You might want to sit down,” Heather said. “This is weird.”
* * *
I found myself in a large, comfortable chair by the window, and Vasilis brought us all tea. Heather, with a cup in her hand, told us the story.
“There used to be two more of us living here,” she started, punctuating her sentence by blowing across her tea. “Damien and Isola. Then there’s Loki.”
“I know Loki,” I said. It’s a small scene, hitchhiking weirdos. “Queer, kinda small, book thief?” I’d stayed with them (Loki didn’t like being called “he” or “she”) in Oakland for a couple weeks the summer before. They’d been planning a rare book heist. I skipped town before I found out how it went.
“Yeah,” Heather said. “Loki came through with some books for us. Real shit, they said. Then they and Damien and Isola went winter camping in Glacier, and then none of them came back.”
Heather took a tiny sip of her tea, decided that it was cool enough, and took a longer sip.
“Months go by, no word from any of them. Vasilis and I tried to track them down, but never found anything. Not their car, nothing. A record in the backcountry hiking registry at Glacier and that’s it. Then, this spring, Isola shows up in town. She won’t talk to us. Squats an empty bed-and-breakfast at the edge of town. We see her around town, sometimes, but it’s like she looks right through us. She looks right through everyone else too. She’s back, but she’s not back.”
“Where are the books Loki brought?” Doomsday asked.
“Most of them are shelved now,” Vasilis said, gesturing at the walls around us. “Most of them are the same garbage you always find, though. Ninety-nine point nine percent of ‘occult’ books are just trash. Gibberish packaged up all spooky, made to sell for as much money as possible.”
“Most of them are shelved?” Doomsday continued.
Vasilis sighed. “The three of them went to Glacier with one book, one that seemed legit. Loki says they stole it from some Evola-type fascists on the Olympic Peninsula, says those people had stolen it from somewhere in England. The Book of Barrow. Our friends took it to Glacier because they were going to try something out.”
The Barrow Will Send What it May Page 2