by Sam Starbuck
The days are very short in winter, and darkness was already starting to creep up the horizon by the time we left the boy at his crossroads, heading south, and turned our own faces west. In a soft gray hat he'd bought in the village and the gray coat he'd bought with his masks, Lucas looked as though at any minute he might disappear into the snow and sky.
"You wanted to talk, I think," I said, as we walked.
"I wanted to," he agreed.
"Finding it kind of hard now?" I asked with a grin. He ducked his head.
"You..." he began, then stopped and started again. "You don't go to church."
"No," I said. "I like to sleep in."
"And you told Christopher the storyteller you don't believe in superstition," he continued.
"It's nothing he didn't know," I answered. "Nothing you didn’t know, come to think of it. I don't think people are fools to believe in it, particularly, but I don't."
"Would you believe in it if you saw it?" he asked.
I considered it, and took the coward's way out. "I don't think we can know how to answer that until we're faced with it."
"But you can't outright say that you'd always think it was a sham."
"Well, I like to think I have at least a little bit of an open mind. Why?"
He shrugged.
"You're not angry at me for being a skeptic, are you?" I asked. "You told me yourself that your help with the twins was a trick. I don't think you go to church, either, do you?"
"No, not usually," he agreed. He was walking with shoulders hunched and head down, watching our feet crunch through the frost on the road. "I'm trying to decide how to say things, that's all. I'm not good at saying things, you know that."
"I think you're fine at saying things."
"Not...not in ways most people understand, though," he said. "You're different."
"So you've said. And, well, thank you, but I don't know how true that is."
"It's just difficult to know where to start."
I put my hands in my pockets, idling along at the slow pace he'd set. "All right, that's fair. Can I tell you something that might help?"
"Sure, if you think it will."
"You know I used to live in Chicago."
"Sure."
"But I didn't own a bookstore there. I worked in business – I made a lot of money, actually," I said, remembering the sixty-hour weeks I had put in, hating every second of it. I sure did like the money though, and I'd liked what it bought me. "I wouldn't be able to keep Dusk Books if I hadn't. Most years I barely break even, after taxes."
"This is a very weird way of reassuring me," he said.
"Sorry, I wandered. I studied economics at school – what's so funny?" I asked, when he laughed.
"I just pictured you as the English Major type. Maybe History."
"Well, my parents were paying for college, they wanted a businessman. Then around the time I realized it wasn't for me, my mother died and I didn't want to stress my dad out, and the pay would be good. Still not the point," I added. "The point is that I had this internship during school at a big office building. Filing. Dad thought it'd get me a foot in the door. There was a huge room full of files and cabinets, and a bunch of us spent most of the day reading and sorting them."
"That really doesn't sound like you, Christopher."
"It isn't. Not anymore. Anyway, I was working with this one woman – I think she was fond of me. We talked a lot, as we filed, because it wasn't really a job two intelligent people need all their brainpower for."
"What did you talk about?"
"This and that, I suppose. She was religious, she knew I wasn't – I didn't tell her, someone else probably did. One day she asked me if I believed in God."
"What did you say?"
"I remember it because it seemed like such a good answer at the time," I said, smiling ruefully. "I told her that I'd never really needed to believe in God."
"What?"
"I said I'd depended on myself instead, and if I could get by without His help I didn't see why I should ask for it."
"Oh, Christopher," he sighed. "Even I know better than that."
"I know! How arrogant could I be? I managed to dismiss her entire faith and imply that she needed an emotional crutch all at once. I feel like an asshole about it now. What I mean, though, is that it's still kind of true, but these days I just think everyone has a crutch. Some people believe in God, some believe in magic, some believe in science...we all have something to get us through the day."
"What do you believe in?" he asked.
I shrugged. "Books, I suppose."
"That's good news for me. You trust books."
"I trust books to always be what they are," I qualified cautiously. "I don't always believe what they say, but I believe in their power to speak. The nice thing about books is that the same book will always show you the same words. It's up to you to figure out what they mean."
"A constant," Lucas suggested.
"Within reason. Until the ideas or the words become unintelligible with time."
Lucas fell silent and we continued on with the comfortable crunch of the snow in our ears. Finally, he cleared his throat and spoke again.
"The book you helped me find," he began hesitantly, "It has information in it. Things people have forgotten or don't believe in anymore. It...definitely speaks to me."
"Oh, like myths and stuff?" I said. "I'm glad you're enjoying it."
"More than that. I believe in it. I think there aren't just myths. They aren't just myths. They're...processes. Ways of changing things. Like in the Metamorphoses you gave me."
"Well, I have to admit I thought you'd be a little too sensible for that kind of thing, but it's no business if mine if you believe in them," I said.
"More than believe. I've tried some. They work."
"Oh, Lucas, come on now."
"I have. When my circuits flipped and I blew out the pilot light and my phone died, remember? That was because I was trying something – it went wrong, but it still happened, Christopher. I know, because there's that burn mark in the ceiling. And – other things. I'm going to try again when I can. That's why I need to tell you, because if it – " he swallowed, hesitating.
"The telephones go out all the time around these parts," I said. "And I'm sure the wiring in that cottage wasn't really very professionally done. The kinds of things you're talking about don't really work, you know that."
"I think they do."
"Lucas, they're as good a way to be religious as any, but you can't expect me to think magic spells actually produce results. Not the kind of thing you can hold in your hand."
He looked resolutely forward. "But they do. I know they do. I told you – these are things we've forgotten, that's why we don't believe."
"Now you're worrying me."
"I'm sorry, Christopher. I don't mean to do that, I really don't. It's just that it's true, and I want to tell you. I'm working now on something really big – the biggest thing. I think I can do it," he added.
"You're alone too much out here," I said.
"I haven't been – the boy's always around for tutoring and the Friendly were here, they came to see me every day. They believe," he added. "I said I was learning things that hadn't existed in a long time, and they believed me."
"They're country folk – they come from a different way of seeing the world."
"You mean they're primitive, and don't know any better," he replied.
"That's not what I said, Lucas."
"No," he answered bitterly, the single time I've ever seen him truly bitter. "It certainly was not what you said."
"Listen, really, it's not healthy for you. Come stay in the village for a little while. You can sleep at my place or I'll pay for a few days at the hotel – if you're out among normal people for a week or two you'll see what kind of madness you're talking."
"I'm not crazy," he said. "I grew up in Chicago too, I can be just as cynical and sensible as you can. But this is real, Christop
her, it exists and I've got to try it."
"What are you talking about, anyway?" I demanded. "What's real? What do you think you're going to do?"
"I think...if it works...there are ways of changing. Being something new – an animal, maybe, like a totem or something. Anyway, I'm sure it works, it's just a question of making it work."
I stopped, standing still against the wind, my shoes covered in mud and snow. The world felt more real, in an odd way, standing there listening to what I thought – knew – to be ridiculous superstition.
"You're absolutely insane," I said. "People don't turn into animals, Lucas!"
"Plenty have," he said. "Look at all the stories – werewolves, Greek gods, all those Egyptian paintings of men with animal heads – just because nobody's done it recently...and maybe they have, for all I know. I think you're proving just why nobody would talk about it if they had."
"I'm not going to argue about myths and people turning into animals with you," I retorted. "For God's sake, Lucas, you're talking about werewolves! "
"Well, just because they've been in horror movies doesn't mean they're any less mythical than Zeus turning into a swan," Lucas replied. There was a defensive tone in his voice that should have been a warning to me, but I plowed on ahead.
"And you don't think that isn't ridiculous too? You're not a god, Lucas. You're just afraid of everyone and so you lock yourself up in some shack in the middle of nowhere. It's not good for you to be alone like that."
He was standing very still by then, his breath hardly even misting the air in front of him.
"I suppose I should be like all the normal people," he said, and to this day I'm uncertain whether there was more rage or more sadness in his tone. "Live in a crowded city with everyone else close enough to bump elbows and spend all my time in the middle of it, even if I'm alone in my head all the time anyway. At least then people wouldn't be able to fling my solitude at me as a reason to dismiss what I say."
"If you had any distance on this, Lucas, you'd welcome company more," I said. "Be alone, then, if that's what you want. When you've come to your senses, come by sometime."
His eyes widened fearfully. "Christopher – "
"Go home, Lucas," I said. "This is as far as I go."
I turned and began the walk back to the village before he could stop me, and either out of shock or shyness he didn't try. I shouldn't have said some of the things I did, and I don't think that ordinarily I would have, but he was so calm about it all. Like nothing he was saying was out of the ordinary. Like he just expected me to believe him – and maybe on some level I did, which didn't help my anger any.
The wind picked up as I walked, whipping across the flat ground and threatening to knock me off my feet, but I struggled through it and stomped my way back to the village without once turning around.
***
The wind that fought me as I walked home turned out to be an early herald of a blizzard, which blew up out of nowhere and into the startled village later that evening. I swore a lot about this.
It wasn't just a constant snowfall, which we'd already had a few times that winter, but a full-blown storm, the kind that sends down power lines and breaks windows if the wind blows the wrong way. It caught us all by surprise. The schools closed and business came to a standstill. When I looked out the upstairs window, in the rare moments the snow didn't block out everything, the street below looked like a ghost town.
The first day of the storm, I kept a fire going downstairs and the lights on, though I knew it would be insane for anyone to try and push through the weather just to get to the bookshop. On the other hand, if someone did try to go out in this and got stuck, they might conceivably see the light and find safe haven. All of Low Ferry left its doors unlocked in a storm like that, just in case. I kept myself busy, cleaning and taking inventory, for a while.
The second day, I started to worry.
Most of the people in the village had weathered storms as bad as this one, or worse, in the past few years. My very first winter in the village it had been so cold that my doors had frozen shut and Paula had been forced to come rescue me, skidding her way over the thick sheets of ice on the street with a blowtorch in one hand and an ice pick in the other. Jacob lost half his chickens that year when they froze solid in the hen-house.
But Lucas hadn't. If he'd been raised in Chicago he'd know a little bit about harsh winters, but not the kind Low Ferry dished out and not the kind you could face outside of town in a shoddily-built cottage on a windswept hillside.
Perhaps I overdramatized it a little.
Still, I worried about him. Knowing that I couldn't do anything even after the storm blew itself out, until the plow came through (if the plow could get through) didn't help at all. At least I knew that even Lucas, with his incomplete grasp of how to cope with rough weather, would know not to go out in this, and stay home until help came to him. We'd lost people before when they'd gotten turned around in a blizzard while trying to go the ten feet from their front door to their mailbox.
On the other hand...well, it was a relief that we couldn't speak. The awkwardness bound to follow the fight – or I suppose it was more of a lecture, given how little he fought back – had been postponed by the storm. I wouldn't have to think about what I'd said too much, or be ashamed of it. I couldn't help but think Lucas would see the blizzard as a welcome intervention as well.
On the second day of the storm I had no power, but I did have customers. There was a momentary lull in the afternoon, with another huge cloud already ballooning on the horizon, and people scrambled to get out of the house – to the grocery store and the hardware store, to the cafe for a hot meal and to my place to see if I had any news to share. Some had found themselves caught by the storm and spent the night at the hotel or on cots in the cafe, their cars immobilized on the main street. They came and went, hanging gloves and hats by the fire to dry, asking me if I'd seen this person or if I'd pass on a message to that one of they came by. The last customer left ten minutes before the wind picked up again.
I was quite content to remain in the shop, sleeping near the hearth that night so that I could feed the fire and not be bothered with restarting it. I had long since hung my Dottore mask above the fireplace, and it gazed down on me with foolish benevolence as I slept. Lucas used to say that seeing a mask on a wall could frighten people, but to me it wasn't exactly a mask. It was a sculpture an artist had given to me, and it had something of him in it – in a strictly non-literal sense it was halfway to being a photograph. It held the same general function, anyway.
On the morning of the third day of the storm, with the snow still pelting down, Charles came into the shop and stomped the snow off his boots into the puddle of melting ice on my welcome mat.
"Hi," he said. "Got any batteries?"
I lifted my eyebrows. "Get lost on the way to the hardware store, did you?"
"No," he scowled. "They're at ground level. It's all snowed over. Looked outside lately?"
"Paula must be stuck at home, or she'd have the blowtorch out," I said, rummaging in my desk.