“You know I’m going to have to make fun of you about this, right?”
“You won’t be the first one,” I said.
“I’m going to make fun of you about it, but I still want you to read me some of it aloud.”
“As soon as we get back to phone signal,” I promised.
God, my wiring was all kinds of fucked up. For the rest of the hike, going crazy from lack of sleep, I was happier than I’d been in months.
The tree house was a beautiful little witch shack held a full thirty feet aloft between four narrow pines. Its siding had been blowtorched to black during the finishing process, and there was one porch on the side of the house and another on the roof. The windows were mix-matched and erratically placed. A rope-and-wood ladder dangled down, inviting us up. A black stovepipe thrust out and up from the side, and on the east slope of the hill like that I knew it got a full view of dawn. I was in love.
“Rebecca!” Brynn had her tattooed hands up over her mouth to project her voice. “Rebecca!”
“Maybe she’s in town?” I asked, after another few fruitless minutes.
“You heard Vulture. She’s not going anywhere for a while. There’s a ward stone, there. Keeps Uliksi out.” Brynn pointed to a single white stone, the size of my head, a circle subtly etched into its face. “Not sure why the ladder is down, though.”
She tested the ladder. It held her weight, so she made her way up. I followed.
The house was even more gorgeous up close. Rebecca had done an amazing job, down to details like filigree carved into the door frame and an ouroboros painted on the door.
Brynn knocked. No answer.
“Rebecca!” she shouted.
“I don’t think she’s here,” I said, pointing to a padlock that held the door shut.
“Shit!” Brynn said, stomping her foot on the porch and shaking the trees we were attached to. She went to the nearest window, peered in. She fell back, trembling. If it weren’t for the railing she might have fallen off the porch.
I looked. The sun lit the floor in big squares where it came in through the windows, and in one of those squares was a dead woman. She lay on her side with her eyes open, her mouth open. She was so small, almost childlike, but I could see in the lines on her face she’d lived at least a decade longer than me.
I knew the hard way that when faced with a corpse, it’s up to the person who didn’t know the now-dead person to handle things. Clay had done it for me, once, when we found Agnes OD’d. I’d done it for him, a year later, when it’d been Sammy with his guts on the wrong side of a knife wound.
“Can you pick the lock?” Brynn asked. “Clay always said you were good at shit like that.”
“Probably,” I said. I pulled a screwdriver from my pack, a large Phillips head with a rubber grip. I took my shirt off, wrapped it around my good hand, and jabbed at the corner of the window to break the glass. It broke with that strange thud that surprises me every time. Nothing like the sound you hear in movies. You’ve got to break glass against glass to get a noise like that.
I reached through and unlocked the window. Opened it, stepped inside. Brynn came in directly after. Some people respond to crisis by shutting down or running. Some people respond to crisis emotionally, which is probably the healthiest way. Myself, I handled crisis by shoving fear and sadness and worry down as far in my gut as I could. It’s never nice when all that nasty shit comes up as trauma later, but the practice has kept me alive.
Brynn, she was made of the same stuff as me, maybe sterner. She went directly to the corpse, started searching her friend for wounds.
They weren’t hard to find. Four bullet holes marked her sleeveless white blouse. All were on her torso—two on her chest, one near her hip, one in between.
“Do you know anything about forensics?” Brynn asked.
“No,” I said.
“Neither do I. But I know enough about shooting to tell you that’s a pretty fuck-off bad shot grouping.”
While Brynn saw to Rebecca, I scoured the rest of the one-room shack. A mattress lay on the floor in the corner. A bookshelf was filled to overfull with dried and tinctured herbs in jars and dropper bottles. Plantain and ragwort and feverfew, plus flowers and leaves I couldn’t recognize, hung drying from lines stretched across the space. The wood-burning stove was cold. Since it was June, that didn’t tell me much.
An antique desk—the only piece of furniture in the room not hand-built from scrap lumber—took up most of one wall, under a bank of windows. A ladder led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Something like a dozen well-carved wooden figurines of deer littered the desktop, each no larger than my palm. They were stained bloodred. A piece of cardboard ripped from a case of beer served as a cutting mat and a staining mat, it looked like, with silhouettes of dark stain and gathered chips of wood. The carving tools themselves were scattered all over the floor.
Rebecca’s corpse was close to where I stood. My mind wouldn’t forget that fact for long enough to concentrate on anything else.
Bullet holes pierced the plywood along the back wall. “The bullets went out the back,” I said, running my fingers along the splintered wood.
“Who the fuck?” Brynn said.
“Eric,” I said.
“We don’t know that.”
“Yeah we do,” I said. “Who the hell else? Kestrel, maybe. But I bet it was Eric.”
Brynn closed Rebecca’s eyes, then kept searching the body. “She has a knife in her hand. A carving knife.”
Tears welled up, catching me by surprise. Here was a woman, cut down by a man afraid of her power. She’d fought back, knife versus gun.
“I never got to meet her,” I said. “I’ve got the feeling I really missed out.”
“Yeah,” Brynn said.
“I want to kill him,” I said. It was true. A simple thing. A clear epiphany. I wanted to kill Eric for killing this woman. Even though it could have been Kestrel. I wanted to kill Eric for killing her.
“Uliksi might do it for you,” Brynn said.
“Imagine his thinking,” I said. “He’s got to have thought this through. Killing Rebecca means saving Uliksi, means he’s doomed himself to be killed by Uliksi. Imagine being so sure of the righteousness of your cause that you’re willing to sacrifice your own ideals to achieve them.”
“Every politician ever,” Brynn said. “Every authoritarian communist.”
“He killed her in cold blood,” I said. I couldn’t think straight. “He killed her.”
She came up and wrapped her arms around me, and I buried my head in her chest and my anger turned into something like sorrow. I cried. Standing over the body of her friend, she supported me.
“We’ve got to get back,” I said, pulling away.
I stepped out of the tree house. The air outside was fresh, cleansing. Brynn joined me, and I went to the ladder and looked down.
Uliksi stood silent, staring up at us from the ground.
* * *
There was a hammock on the porch on the roof. Thick cotton rope held our weight and our feet dangled over the edge like we were teenagers on a date instead of squatters hiding from a demon and a corpse.
“It can’t stay there all day,” I said.
“I had a friend in town, about six months back. You know how you think you know somebody and then they just do something awful? Beat their partner, abuse someone, something like that?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So this guy I lived with, my friend Greg. I liked him alright. He was friendly, hardworking. Really polite. His partner, Sam, no one liked her. She used to throw shit-fits at general assembly, hoard booze from the Everything for Everyone, that kind of thing. She worked hard too, I guess, but I don’t know, she just rubbed everyone the wrong way. She and Greg had been together maybe three months, when one night they were drunk and he raped her. I don’t know if he thought he raped her, but that never really matters. She didn’t want to have sex with him that night, but he did it anyway.”
“The next day, the very next day, before she’s even told anyone, Greg walks outside our house and there’s Uliksi, just standing on the porch. Just looking at him. He goes the fuck back inside and he waits. Uliksi’s out there, not moving, until sunset. The rest of us come and go, but that fucking deer was just waiting for him, watching him.”
“What happened?”
“As soon as night fell, Sam drove him up to Minneapolis. Kicked him out of the car and said if she ever saw him again she’d kill him herself.”
I whistled.
“Moral of the story is that Uliksi most definitely can stay there all day.”
“We’re not predators,” I said.
“No, but we’re hunting for a way to dismiss it, aren’t we?”
“I can see why you all kind of like having it around, though, with a story like that.”
“I’m not going to tell you it hasn’t been nice,” Brynn said. “Up until the point where it wasn’t.”
“I’m always so quick to resort to violence,” I said. “I’m not ashamed of that. I think it’s necessary sometimes. But damn, it’d be nice to be able to just quit violence cold turkey. Let a spell take care of it for me.”
“There’s no magic bullet though,” Brynn said.
“Never was, never will be,” I agreed.
It should have been a beautiful day. It was warm enough that the breeze felt good, but not hot enough to be uncomfortable.
“Fuck,” I said, “how’re we going to dismiss it now?”
“I guess it’s up to Doomsday.”
“Yeah.”
We were halfway up to the canopy, and I could see forest and river and prairie in the distance. More herbs hung drying all around us, and their scents combined to be just short of overwhelming. More important, Brynn sat next to me, all worked up to sweating from everything, and her smell was overwhelming.
She had her arm around the small of my waist, mine was around her back.
“Let me see your hand,” she said.
“No, it’s fine.” The bandanna was still wrapped tight around the wound. My palm still hurt, but I wasn’t ready to look at it. There was an awful lot of shit going on just then that I wasn’t ready to let myself think too much about.
“God, I wish you’d shown up a month ago or something,” Brynn said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’d be nice to get to know you proper,” Brynn said. “Instead of like this.”
“You don’t like demon-hunting with me?” I asked.
Brynn giggled. I looked at her, and she must have gotten self-conscious about giggling, because she started giggling harder, covering her face and laughing. She fell onto her side in the hammock, and I had my arms around her, and I started laughing too.
“What a fucking day,” I said.
“What a fucking day,” she agreed.
* * *
We both fell asleep like that, curled up on the hammock. I dreamt about jail.
A few hours later, I broke out of dream jail by waking up, but I was still trapped. I peered over the edge of the tree house roof, and Uliksi peered right back at me. The bull was beside him. That woke me up all the way, and I looked to the trees around me.
Squirrels and birds, all undead, sat silent on the branches not ten feet from my head. All staring at me with their glossy eyes. Like as not, they’d been there for hours already, and they didn’t seem to want to attack me. Just watch me. Just bore into me.
Brynn was snoring, her head craned back. I trusted her, I realized. Everything around me was terrifying, and none of it made sense. But Brynn seemed to accept it, and I was learning to accept her. Freedom ran on trust. I needed to trust someone.
I flipped through Clay’s notebook. His handwriting only graced twelve pages. On each he’d written the same single line:
The only way out is through.
The last page had another line, underneath the first:
What hand dare seize the fire?
He’d always been saying shit like that. When you needed advice, he was always there, saying something needlessly cryptic but reasonably wise. I wish he’d listened to his own advice, though. I wish he’d kept going. I wish he’d found his way through.
Sitting there then, with the sun dappled through the leaves and needles of the forest, I tried to piece out what had happened to him.
At his funeral, I’d thought he’d given up because there wasn’t any future in riding the rails. But that wasn’t it. It couldn’t be it. That was me seeing more of me in him than there really was. Motherfucker had spent fifteen years looking for the hobo utopia, the big rock candy mountain, until he just gave up and made the place. Then he’d defended it, with the witchcraft he knew. Then he’d run away. Then he’d done Uliksi’s work all on his own and ended his own life. Why?
Maybe because he’d been exiled from paradise by a beast of his own making. Because he’d decided Freedom was home, and he couldn’t come back. That’s what having a home will do to you. Maybe.
I dropped the notebook onto the hammock. Brynn woke up.
“‘The only way out is through,”” I said.
“Pardon?”
I showed Brynn the pages.
“We did all this, and we’ve got nothing. Nothing from Clay, nothing from Rebecca, and we can’t get home to warn anyone there’s a killer on the loose.”
“That’s funny,” Brynn said. “That’s not the quote.”
“Quote?”
“‘He says the best way out is always through. / And I agree to that, or in so far / As that I can see no way out but through—’ It’s from a Robert Frost poem. ‘A Servant to Servants.’”
“It’s a true statement I guess,” I said. “But doesn’t do us any good.”
“He got the other one closer. ‘What the hand dare seize the fire?’ ‘The Tyger,’ by William Blake.”
“That line mean anything to you?” I asked.
“Hell, it means even less than the Robert Frost.”
“Clay moved into the gas station because he was studying Uliksi, right? Trying to learn how to dismiss it?”
“Yeah.”
“And the only thing he wrote down,” I said, “in all that time, was some misquoted poetry.”
“I guess.”
“Here, come downstairs with me.”
I went to the hatch in the roof, opened it, and climbed down the ladder. The house stank of death, leaving us gagging, and I opened all the windows that could be opened. We tried our best not to stare at the dead woman on the floor. For a few hours more, we just had to keep ourselves from thinking too hard about her.
“These,” I said, pointing to the twelve deer figurines on the desk. “What do you make of these?”
“She was obsessed,” Brynn said. “Half the town is obsessed though.” She held up her hand, showing me her Uliksi tattoo.
I picked up one of the red figures and, on a whim, lined it up to the dark outlines of stain on the cardboard that marked where it’d been painted. I did the same with the rest, a sort of simple jigsaw puzzle. They formed a circle, each facing clockwise. The figure at one o’clock was on its side, and the figure at twelve stood over it, its mouth down by the other’s ribs. Like it was killing it. Like it was eating its heart.
“I don’t know what it means,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence though, Clay writing twelve pages and Rebecca carving twelve figurines.”
“No, I don’t suppose it is.”
“Oh,” I said. “Twelve pages. Twelve figures. Twelve months. Solstice to solstice. It’s just telling us our only chance is tomorrow. Which we already knew.”
“Which we already knew,” she agreed.
“Hooray.”
SEVEN
For an hour at least, Brynn cried in the hammock about the death of her friend as I tried to comfort her. The sun set behind the hill after an interminable day, and Uliksi ran off into the gloaming,
his guardian bull keeping pace alongside. The birds remained, watching us with their dead eyes, but they made no move to follow us as we went down the ladder and headed for town. We were hungry and thirsty, and there weren’t really words left for us to say.
By the time we made it as far as the lookout rock, it was full dark and every light in town was on. The streets below us were swarming with a commotion of lanterns, headlamps, and torches. Brynn broke into a run, and I went after her down the hill, taking the steps two at a time.
The first house we reached was a run-down split level. A pickup truck was idling out front, and a family was loading bags and boxes onto its bed.
“What’s going on?” Brynn asked.
A white woman in her midthirties set down a laundry bag full of clothes and put her hands to her head to rub her temples. “Brynn, where’ve you been?”
“Out in the woods. What’s going on?”
“We’re leaving,” she said. “Everyone’s leaving. The cops are on their way.”
“What?”
“That punk kid, Eric, the tall one. He said he went into town to cool off. Says he saw more cops in the parking lot at Walmart than he could count. The manager at the food bank, that old guy with the ponytail, the one who likes us. He told Eric the cops are setting up to raid.”
“He’s lying,” I said.
“What?” The woman looked at me for the first time.
“He’s fucking lying,” I said. I looked at Brynn. “He’s just trying to get everyone panicked. So that we leave Doomsday alone.”
“I don’t know,” Brynn said.
The next house down was overgrown and covered in graffiti. Vulture and a stranger were walking out of it, each with a sack of concrete over their shoulder.
Brynn and I saw them and started running.
“Brynn! Danielle!” Vulture loped over like he wasn’t holding fifty pounds. “You’re alright!”
“What the fuck?” Brynn asked.
“The cops—” Vulture started.
“We heard,” Brynn said.
“Who’s watching Doomsday?” I asked.
“Thursday is,” Vulture said. “The rest of us are getting ready. Where’s Rebecca?”
“She’s dead,” I said. Doomsday might end up that way too, and soon. She was the only one left who could dismiss Uliksi, and Eric knew it. Brynn stayed behind to help Vulture, but I ran down the hill.
The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion Page 6