20 January 2008
Chapter 8: Lore
Jake’s eyes opened, though he found it difficult to see clearly. Something in his eyes—some kind of thick, translucent film—was blurring his vision. It wasn’t until he blinked several times and felt something hot on his cheeks that he recognized what was the matter: his eyes were brimming with tears. He blinked, and the fallen tears ran down his face to splash onto his hand, which he found clenched around Matt’s.
The two were sitting together, slumped against the cinderblock wall outside the coffeehouse next to the dark green Dumpster. Matt seemed equally disoriented and his eyes looked red and raw. Claude and Cat were nowhere to be seen.
“We…” Jake began, looking into Matt’s eyes. The feeling of cold pavement against his legs felt strange. The discarded cola cans and cigarette butts strewn around the Dumpster looked bizarre and alien. Jake’s head was swirling with new memories and throughts that he didn’t understand, and he didn’t know how to reconcile them with his old ones. The look on Matt’s face told him much the same, and so Jake stopped trying to talk. The two sat quietly together, regaining their equilibrium.
Claude poked his head abruptly out of the back door, startling Jake, reminding him oddly of a target in a “whack-a-mole” game. He glanced quickly at the pair with a look of concern; when he saw them turn to look up at him, his face lit up.
“Cancel that!” Claude yelled, ducking his head back inside the door. “They’re coming around.” He then came out and knelt next to Jake, resting a hand gently on his shoulder. Before long, Cat appeared as well, tending to Matt similarly. To Jake and Matt, everything seemed surreal, dreamlike, and it was hard to follow exactly what was going on and who was coming from where.
“Tilt your head back,” Cat whispered to Matt, uncapping a small plastic bottle and holding it over his head. Matt did as he was told, unsure of what was about to happen until a few drops of cool water dropped into his eyes, making him blink. Eyedrops. Right. Cat handed the bottle to Claude.
“You really freaked me out,” Cat continued, her voice quavering a bit. She looked into his eyes, searching for something… Matt wasn’t sure what. “I was about to call an ambulance. You two have been staring straight ahead for at least ten minutes with your eyes wide open. And you were—” She looked down and stopped mid-sentence when she saw that the two had their hands clasped together.
“She was reading that story,” Claude cut in, after dropping some saline into Jake’s eyes as well, “when all of a sudden, you two were all zombied out. We tried talking to you, shaking you out of it… nothing worked.” Claude sat back on the cold, oily pavement, his worries about the dirty parking lot long forgotten with the current situation. Questionable oil stains and dirt smudged his shorts.
Although he was still unsteady, Jake rose to his feet, pulling Matt up by the hand he still clung to. When they were both standing, they unclasped their hands; for a moment, Matt looked at his big, empty hand as if he expected to see something there—something small.
“Whoa,” Claude said. “Maybe you ought to sit down for a while?” He reached out to steady Jake, who waved him away. “I mean, fuck, you were just in some kind of trance or something…”
“Come on,” Jake said. “Nothing’s changed. We still have to get to a safer place.” With a surprising amount of strength for someone who’d been incapacitated just moments earlier, Jake herded the others back through the coffeehouse. Matt went along willingly, and Claude and Cat were swept away not only by Jake’s physical strength, but by a sudden, overwhelming persuasion that Jake seemed to summon. Just like earlier, in the coffeehouse, he seemed able to command attention when he needed to.
“I’m taking a personal day,” Cat managed to call out as they headed out the front door. She barely had time to remove her apron and toss it back through the door and onto an unoccupied table.
Jake’s apartment was a good argument for the fact that chaos can take many forms.
While it evidenced considerably more forethought than Cat’s place did—all of his furniture looked like it had been bought outright rather than stumbled upon or inherited—it still managed to assault the senses. Nearly every interior wall was lined with dark wood bookshelves, filled with heavy volumes of all shapes and sizes. A large Eastern European tapestry depicting a serpentine, dragonlike figure hung in the entry hallway. Display shelves in the dining room and kitchen showcased some small historic artifacts and replicas: plates, coins, figurines, and other knickknacks. The rooms were modestly lit with yellowy-orangish light from lamps with stained glass shades. All in all, not too shocking a surprise for the lair of a history teacher.
In the living room, on a dark brown leather sofa, Matt, Cat and Claude sat expectantly while Jake browsed a particular wall of bookshelves with singleminded determination, scanning the spines of each book and occasionally removing it from the shelf for further examination.
“Where did that book come from?” Jake asked Cat, not stopping in his search to glance behind him. “Who brought it in? When did you first notice it?”
“I don’t know how long it’s been on the shelf,” Cat replied, checking out the book. It looked pretty ordinary, like any oversized mass-market paperback that had gotten years of good use.“I only noticed it today, maybe because of what you guys were talking about last night. We get people in and out all the time. Anyone could have left it.” Jake continued looking.
“Since our hostess doesn’t seem to remember how,” Claude said, turning to Matt and Cat with an mock-apologetic tone, “I guess I’d better play the host. Can I offer either of you something to drink?” Jake managed to avert his eyes from the bookshelf for a moment to mumble an apology over his shoulder, but quickly returned to his search.
“He’s usually Martha Stewart when he has company,” Claude assured them with a stage whisper, “when he doesn’t have a scholastic bug up his butt, of course. I’m going to make some… tea or something. You want a cup?”
“That sounds great,” Cat said.
Claude looked to Matt, but realized instantly that his mind was elsewhere, looking around the apartment, drinking in all of the Eastern European flavors. Matt stood up and headed over to a curio cabinet to check out some ceramic bowls that, for some reason, particularly fascinated him.
“Probably just some water for him?” Claude suggested, and Cat nodded. They looked at Matt silently as he wandered around the room, trading glances as if they were sharing an unspoken secret, or checking him for warning signs of another catatonic episode. Finally, Claude stood up and headed into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
Cat sat by herself while Matt roamed about, and waited for Claude to return with refreshments. She tried to muster some interest in her surroundings, but didn’t find it nearly as engaging as Matt seemed to. She’d never acquired a taste for decorating, or for collecting things; buying and arranging lots of little finds on shelves would have put her in direct conflict with her major enemy: dusting. Cat couldn’t remember Matt ever being interested in bric-a-brac before, either, but she’d never been to a museum or anything with him. Maybe he’d always been a closet history junkie. She seemed to be discovering a lot of new things about him that she’d never known before.
“So what is so special about this particular book?” Cat asked after a few minutes of watching Jake’s back as he dug through his bookshelves. She set down the paperback and picked up a copy of “History Buff” that lay on the coffee table. She hoped for a moment it might feature sexy professors in the nude, but was quickly disappointed and set it back down again. “It looks like you have every book ever written about people with hard-to-pronounce names. How could the stuff in this book possibly be new to you?”
“That book—” Jake replied, standing up quickly after searching to the bottom of yet another bookshelf without any success. He got wobbly all of a sudden and sagged, catching himself on the arm of an upholstered reading chair before twisting backwards. Matt appeared by his side, reaching out to steady him. He guided Jake to a spot on the sofa next to Cat.
“Don’t go all catatonic on us again,” Cat admonished him. “Jesus Christ.”
“It’s not like before, nothing that dramatic,” Jake said, “I’m just dehydrated. Stood up too fast.” The leather sofa made soft squeaking noises as he leaned back into it.
On cue, Claude returned with a pewter tray carrying a pot of steeping tea, some ceramic teacups, and two glasses of water, setting them down on the coffee table in front of the sofa. Matt handed one of the glasses to Jake immediately.
“Thanks,” Jake said to Matt, accepting the glass with a little flash of a smile and taking a long drink.
“You’re welcome,” Claude interjected, irritated, and settled down into one of the armchairs heavily. “All the thanks I need is the smiling faces of the children.”
“I’m sorry,” Jake said, giving Claude a truly baleful look that made the latter feel immediately guilty. With all that was going on, he was upset about something as trivial as a thank you for drinks. Claude squirmed.
“It’s just been a crazy couple of days,” Jake admitted, finishing the rest of the water in short order. Matt took the empty glass and handed him the second one. “I’m just not myself.”
“Join the club,” Matt murmured, and headed into the kitchen with his empty glass.
“That book shouldn’t exist,” Jake continued. He studied the cover with weary eyes, the cartoonish vampire figure on the front belying the horrors he’d seen in the vision of Lucia and Costin. “The author, the publisher, the stories in there. I’ve never heard of any of them before, and—yes, you’re right—I do tend to read a lot of books like this.”
“Then,” Cat said, hesitantly, “…elemental demons, magic talismans, Biule and Dracul… These aren’t real folktales? This book is a fake?”
“They’re no folktales I’ve ever heard,” Jake said, “but I think they’re real.”
“What happened at the end?” Matt asked Cat, returning with his own glass of water. “After Lucia and Costin died?”
“Lucia cast a—” Cat said, then paused a moment. She hadn’t read the rest of the story aloud. Neither Matt nor Jake had never seen the book before, or heard these stories. “She cast some kind of spell to bind their souls together, and to concentrate the magic power they had. I guess they were supposed to live on after death or… something.” Or something. “That story ended there, though.”
Jake paged through the book, lingering for a moment on the last page of the Lucia and Costin’s story, reading the description of their deaths, morbidly fascinated.
“We started hunting through there while you guys were taking your siesta,” Claude offered, “and found more about the bad guy. He callled himself Biule: kinda a corporate ladder-climber, demon-wise. Wasn’t satisfied to lurk around and take bites out of random people who got lost in the woods.” Claude poured some tea for Cat and himself. “He had a plan for a quick promotion using the lovebirds.”
“He did human sacrifices,” Cat said. “He did them all the time, to call up more servants, different kinds of those creepy, slimy things, but there wasn’t enough power in regular people for what he wanted to do.”
“And what did he want to do?” Matt asked, sitting in the chair across from Claude. He shivered a bit.
“The book is pretty vague on exactly what,” Claude shrugged. “Your usual hell-on-earth, I guess. Making things really bad for people up here so it feels more like home for demons. Apocalyptic redecoration? He needed magic to do that, and he thought Lucia and Costin would be good Duracells.”
“It said something in there about Biule also wanting virgins,” Cat said drily, “but I think whoever wrote this is a little naive to think that two teenagers secretly hanging out in the woods at night for months aren’t going to get it on.”
“So,” Matt said doubtfully. “They cast a spell that destroyed the bad guys who were attacking them. They died. It’s all over? Biule doesn’t get his sacrifice and doesn’t get the corner office and that’s that?”
“Pretty much,” Claude said. “Over the years, people forgot how to do magic…” He gave Matt a strange look at that point, before continuing. “…and Biule’s big plan was pretty much useless without a good power source. He hung out for another hundred years or so, whining about it, then gave up and went back where he came from. The end.”
“Except Jake didn’t tell you what he and Matt saw last night,” Cat said. “The big gray thing that looked like something out of those creepy Japanese animated porn cartoons?”
“Like something out of that book,” Jake said.
Claude coughed after swallowing a sip of tea the wrong way, and set his cup down on the coffee table. He made as if to speak, but couldn’t get his coughing under control.
“This morning, too,” Matt chimed in. “And we get the feeling that there’s more of them out there.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait,” Claude croaked. “You’re actually seeing these things? Seeing them in Seattle? Both of you?” Claude turned to Cat, who returned his incredulous look with a sheepish smile. “What about you?”
“Not me,” Cat said, shaking her head. “Last night, I thought they were on drugs. And when I found the book, today, I thought Jake had read these stories to him while he was tripping, or asleep, or something. Some kind of subliminal thing. I don’t even know why someone would do something like that, it just made more sense than it being true.” She sighed.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of that right away?” Claude said, poking Matt in the arm urgently. “Don’t just sit there, do a hocus pocus thing and put a ring of fire around us, or something! Shit!” Matt looked at Claude, puzzled. He looked to Jake, but he seemed as lost as Matt was.
“While you were… asleep or whatever,” Cat explained hesitantly. “Matt, you were moving your hands in this funny way, and there was a glow, little blue flames. Like you were casting spells in your sleep. Like Costin and Lucia did in the story.”
“Do something!” Claude yelled, panic rising in his voice.
“There aren’t any of them around here!” Matt snapped back. “Get a grip!”
“Calm down, Claude,” Jake said, giving him a stern look. “Matt’s right. When they’re around, we get this kind of… feeling. Like an early-warning system or something.”
“Well… good,” Claude said, embarrassed, settling back into his chair. It was a surreal thing to be scared about, and and even more surreal way to be comforted. “As soon as your spider-sense starts tingling, though, make sure you let me know.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve seen those Japanese animated movies and I know what those tentacle things do.”
“When have you ever?” Jake asked. Claude was hardly a connoisseur of pop counter-culture.
“In a Madonna video,” Claude countered, then picked up his cup of tea, trying to regain his dignity.
“So,” Matt said, “if we’re seeing these things now, and I’ve got magic powers like Costin and Lucia, then what does that tell us?”
“Biule’s… not gone?” Cat suggested.
“Fuck tea,” Claude said abruptly, setting his cup down again and heading into the kitchen. “I need a cocktail.”
Hurry up and post another chapter lazy bones! ^_^