“Why,” Juniper said. “Why did you do that?”
Blood pooled around the bodies, and merged, like the shadows that spread at dusk. Sarin avoided the blood when approaching them, kicking them each softly. When one moaned, she fired another round into his head.
She flipped the pistol and handed it to Juniper butt-first. “I don’t like it when people tell me what to do.”
Babs backed up his scooter, shifted gears, and rolled away from them. “Good night, folks,” he said over his shoulder. “Pleasure as always. If it’s any consolation, I would have done the same.”
Juniper’s ears whined in the aftermath of the gunfire. So he wasn’t sure he could trust his hearing. What sounded like a fire slowly catching or insects chewing their way through something. It came off the bodies, and he noticed then their skin was darkening, cracking, and from those cracks leaked a gray dust. In no more than a minute, they were gone. Nothing remained but the scorched outline of where they once lay.
“What are you people?”
Sarin smiled and pinched another cigarette out of a pack and popped it between her lips and spoke around it when she said, “I already told you. We’re the good guys.”
Chapter 8
EVERYONE HAS A PLACE—a listening place, Lela calls it—where they feel most connected and thoughtful, almost transcendent. For some people, it’s an alpine lake ringed by pines. For others, it’s a gray stone church with light streaming through the stained glass. For Lela, it was here among the stacks of books and maze of shelves at Powell’s.
The store took up a whole city block. Its books and its layout were not neatly arranged, but pleasantly cluttered, matching her mind. She always knew where she was, but she wasn’t sure how, since the building encouraged misdirection. The lighting was sometimes dim and sometimes bright, and the shelves were mismatched, and the split-level floor plan narrowed and widened and shot up or down into staircases surprisingly.
Sometimes, when she was looking for inspiration—an angle on a story, a shot of lyricism to the jugular, or just space to think—she’d come here. The smell of ink and paper made her mind buzz, and the mild funk of mold caused her nose to run. She would buy a short cup of coffee and wander, pulling books off the shelves, seeing what leaped out at her.
Tonight she comes with a clear purpose. She needs help. This happens every now and then. She stumbles upon some mystery—usually troublesome—that bothers her mind. She knows it’s important even if she doesn’t know why. She makes inquiries, and someone says or does something that makes it clear she’s moving in the right direction. She discovers a clue, what she calls a happy accident, and then moves with a more dogged intentionality toward an answer, seeking out those who can help her get there more quickly.
That’s how she feels now. She has her mystery. She’s found her right direction. She’s got a handful of happy accidents. But she has no narrative, no frame that holds it all together. That’s where Daniel comes in. She bothers him for answers with the regularity that others consult Google. He’s better than Google. And fuzzier.
She enters the bookstore at ten to eleven. Over the loudspeakers she hears the announcement warning shoppers Powell’s will soon close and they ought to take their selections to the register now. Her feet squelch and rain drips off her as she works her way through and around and up and then up again to the rare books section, the crown of the building. Powell’s was once the site of a used car dealership and the architecture is rather industrial, but the Rare Book Room feels like something out of an English library, decorated with antique furniture and tidily organized and dark-wooded and glowing with lamplight. Here she finds Daniel.
He’s an owlish man with a head that is bald except for a half-circle of gray puffy hair. He wears sweaters and slacks year-round. Rather than bifocals, he perches one set of glasses on his head and another on his nose, trading them out. He calls them his cheaters, and he keeps extras all around because he constantly misplaces them. His voice always comes across as uncertain, stammering, rising in pitch as if every sentence ended in a question mark. On occasion he slips into a British accent, though he is originally from Corvallis.
His desk is an antique, like all of the furniture in the room, and she catches him standing up from his chair and pulling on his jacket. “Not so fast,” she says, and he says, “Oh!” and fumbles the correct set of glasses into place, so that he might see her.
“Oh,” he says again. “Lela?”
“I need your help.”
“But it’s late? It’s time to close?” He pulls out a golden pocket watch and unlatches its cover. “Isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
“Of course you wouldn’t.” He winds the watch and tucks it away. “Would you?”
Again, the voice sounds over the loudspeakers—announcing that the store has closed, that all customers must depart immediately—and Daniel winces as if he’s been caught doing something indecent. Then he sighs and begins to peel off his jacket. “Well, if it’s important, I suppose we’d better sit down for a chat?”
She reaches into her purse and withdraws the skull and sets it delicately on the desk before him. “Tell me about these symbols.”
?
An hour later, the store is dark and she sits alone in an oasis of light thrown from a lamp with a stained-glass shade. A pile of books sits before her on the desk. Daniel fetched them for her—most from the Purple Room, where they keep the occult books—and set them in a neat stack that she immediately disarranged.
“This’ll be great,” she said. “You’re the best.” She convinced Daniel to leave her here—it’s not the first time—so long as she promised not to cause, as he put it, “any disorder that I shall come to regret, yes?”
She promised.
She takes notes in a yellow legal tablet. First replicating the designs on the skull and indicating the different vectors they come from—snout, left and right cheekbone, forehead, cranium. There are circles and crescents and triangles and stars and what looks like a whirlpool design.