Speaker 1: Full Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to It Could Happen Here Book Club. I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: This is a podcast about things falling apart, and this
Speaker 2: is our special weekend edition of It Could Happen Here,
Speaker 2: where Margaret Killjoy and myself sit down and read a story. Well,
Speaker 2: Margaret reads the story at this point, I am listening
Speaker 2: to it. Presumably the format we'll switch up at some point,
Speaker 2: but right now, Margaret, how are we? I'm excited for
Speaker 2: part three of the first Daniel Kine book. Are you
Speaker 2: excited to give it to me?
Speaker 3: I am excited to give it to you, Robert. And
Speaker 3: you know, when we switch up the format, you'll just
Speaker 3: make up a story as we go, well, like at
Speaker 3: the stop in the middle of the chapter, and then
Speaker 3: you just make up what happens. Yeah, I guess that's
Speaker 3: just called Dungeons and Dragons. Actually, oh yeah, we could
Speaker 3: call it Dungeons and Dragons. I was just gonna read
Speaker 3: from one of my Thomas Pension books because no one
Speaker 3: else is act no one's no one has actually ever
Speaker 3: finished one, so it'll it'll be as if I'm I'm
Speaker 3: just making up a story. I admit I've never finished
Speaker 3: a Thomas Bench no.
Speaker 2: No, of course not why there's things to do in
Speaker 2: the world. Markret you gotta finish at Thomas Pinsion book.
Speaker 3: As I get older, I have more interest in, like
Speaker 3: finally sitting down and reading War and Peace and all
Speaker 3: that shit.
Speaker 2: But I just keep looking at my copy of Alan
Speaker 2: Moore's Jerusalem and going one day.
Speaker 3: One day exactly, that'll be like when we're finally and
Speaker 3: we'll do the book club version, will be like a
Speaker 3: book club presents War and Peace followed by Jerusalem followed
Speaker 3: by infinite jest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, finally. Or we'll get Jamie loftus On for
Speaker 2: that one. She loves reading infinitsh jest.
Speaker 3: Or we'll read novella's by I once ran my I
Speaker 3: won't tell people I once ran one of my books through.
Speaker 3: What grade level is this adult book that I wrote?
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: And I was very proud to say that one of
Speaker 3: my books was written at a fifth or sixth grade
Speaker 3: reading level.
Speaker 2: Oh you need baby, I did all my real important
Speaker 2: reading by the time I was six.
Speaker 3: Great.
Speaker 2: I've actually been I'm friends with this baby now, so
Speaker 2: I've been reading some uh Doctor Seuss with her, and man,
Speaker 2: those are good books. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of the human human condition contained with an hop
Speaker 2: on pop. I hadn't realized.
Speaker 3: Once you move up to shel Silverstein m oh now, yeah,
Speaker 3: directly from there to Danielle Kine.
Speaker 2: That's right, the Shell Silverstein of Vaguely Lovecrafty and Horror,
Speaker 2: the action Punk.
Speaker 3: I'd say Shell silver wrote that Scooby Doo. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I I gave up on asterisk punk.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I uh, that's that's the next AI generated thing
Speaker 2: I would like to see Shelf Silverstein's Scooby do.
Speaker 3: So where we last left our heroes, We're starting with
Speaker 3: chapter five. Everyone else will have just heard, presumably like
Speaker 3: a week ago, chapter four, but we haven't heard it
Speaker 3: in a moment because there was a break between recordings.
Speaker 3: And so Daniel Caine is showed up to a town.
Speaker 3: There's a three antler deer that's goring people, and some
Speaker 3: people in the town love it, and some people in
Speaker 3: the town hate it, and the town is gearing up
Speaker 3: for some conflict. Chapter five, My second night in Freedom
Speaker 3: began more somberly than my first. It was well after
Speaker 3: dark by the time Vulture showed up with potatoes and
Speaker 3: onions and spring greens to be cooked before heading back
Speaker 3: to the lookout rock. The days in Brn were in
Speaker 3: the living room working through plans, which left me alone
Speaker 3: to cook. I was happy to spend some time in
Speaker 3: the kitchen. It had been a long time since I've
Speaker 3: been surrounded by people living the way I wanted to live,
Speaker 3: and I was almost able to convince myself that things
Speaker 3: were going to be fine. I've got a long history
Speaker 3: of scraping together little moments of peace in the midst
Speaker 3: of hardship, and cooking is a great way to do that.
Speaker 3: I cubed the potatoes, and, alongside lots of garlic and oil,
Speaker 3: set them in a pan in the oven. I went
Speaker 3: through their spice rack and realized half of what they
Speaker 3: had had been grown, dried, and chopped here in town.
Speaker 3: I let myself get lost in the smell of fresh
Speaker 3: and dried herbs. The Brussels sprouts were from the food bank,
Speaker 3: but were going to taste amazing regardless. I cut them up,
Speaker 3: drizzled them with oil and salt, put them in the
Speaker 3: second tray. I've made fancier meals in my life, but
Speaker 3: it still felt good. I set the old fashioned kitchen
Speaker 3: timer and went to join everyone else. You can't figure
Speaker 3: it out, Brune asked, she was pacing. She didn't strike
Speaker 3: me as the typoo worried much, but she was worried.
Speaker 3: Even Doomsday looked paler than usual. She leaned back in
Speaker 3: her easy chair, feigning nonchalance, but her teacup trembled in
Speaker 3: her hand. I didn't leave the ritual. I was blindfolded.
Speaker 3: I've spent and all day pouring over my books and
Speaker 3: there's nothing there. Nothing, nothing about dismissing a spirit, Brene asked,
Speaker 3: Or nothing about you, Lyxi. Nothing. Thursday was standing statuesque
Speaker 3: at his partner's side. There was certainly more to their
Speaker 3: relationship than him trying his hardest to guard her. I
Speaker 3: was sure, but times call for us to fulfill certain roles.
Speaker 3: Will Rebecca know how, Burne asked. I don't think so,
Speaker 3: Doomsday said. Vulture went to warn her last night, and
Speaker 3: how did he put it? She's gone paranoid. Jet fuel
Speaker 3: can't melt steel beams. Level paranoid made him show her
Speaker 3: his ribs, Vulture said, And I agree that you only
Speaker 3: get that kind of paranoid when you've just got no
Speaker 3: agency at all, when you wish you had control over
Speaker 3: your life, but you just don't. She and Clay planned
Speaker 3: the ritual together. I don't know that either of them
Speaker 3: wouldn't know how to do it alone. What are our options,
Speaker 3: Bern asked, If we leave town take Rebecca with us,
Speaker 3: will it come after us? Thursday asked it probably can't,
Speaker 3: Doomsday said, but it's a moot point. I won't leave
Speaker 3: without cleaning up my own mess. Rebecca's place is warded, too,
Speaker 3: Thursday asked, Eulyxie can't get her if you and Rebecca
Speaker 3: stay inside, what's it going to do? Nothing? Attack the
Speaker 3: people close to you. I have no idea, Doomsday said.
Speaker 3: She set down her tee untouched, then pulled her feet
Speaker 3: up onto the chair and hugged her knees. Where are
Speaker 3: Clay's notebooks? I asked? People turned to me, realizing for
Speaker 3: the first time I was in the room. The only
Speaker 3: thing he liked more than the sound of his own
Speaker 3: voice was the sight of his own handwriting, I said.
Speaker 3: When he died, he didn't have any of his journals
Speaker 3: on him. They lived with Anchor for a while. Brynn said.
Speaker 3: They broke up last winter, and Clay took it kind
Speaker 3: of badly. No one knows what they were fighting about
Speaker 3: though for a year and a half they were inseparable.
Speaker 3: Then a week of quarreling and it was over. They
Speaker 3: were fighting about Ulixe. Doomsday said anchor, worshiped it as
Speaker 3: it was, didn't need to know anything more about it.
Speaker 3: Clay wanted to understand it, so he moved into the
Speaker 3: basement of that gas station down by the bridge where
Speaker 3: it lives. He moved in with it. I asked, Doomsday nodded,
Speaker 3: So if Clay left notebooks, they'd be there. Doomsday nodded.
Speaker 3: We have to go get them, bring them to Rebecca.
Speaker 3: Doomsday was lost in thought. Slowly she nodded the dear thing.
Speaker 3: I said, it's only up during the day, right, powerless
Speaker 3: at night.
Speaker 1: I'll go.
Speaker 3: Now, when you know you're going to do something anyway,
Speaker 3: it's better not to overthink it. Definitely better not to
Speaker 3: let your mind linger on the cost benefit analysis. But
Speaker 3: going to find his notebooks got me closer to solving
Speaker 3: both my problems all at once. I could find out
Speaker 3: what happened to Clay, and I could help this Rebecca person.
Speaker 3: Dismiss Youlxy and hope Doomsday wasn't going to summon something worse,
Speaker 3: something that lived up to her name. I'll take you,
Speaker 3: Brynn said, I'll lend you my gun in case the
Speaker 3: ghouls are out, Doomsday said. She crossed the room and
Speaker 3: went up the stairs. I didn't want the rules to
Speaker 3: be out, neither of we have to do this. Thursday said, yeah,
Speaker 3: we do, Brynn said. Doomsday came down the stairs two
Speaker 3: at a time, her hand on the banister. It's gone,
Speaker 3: she said, my gun's gone. Anyone else would have asked
Speaker 3: Thursday if he'd put it away the night before, But
Speaker 3: Doomsday didn't even entertain the possibility that our partner would
Speaker 3: have handled the fire army responsibly. Eric, Brynn said during
Speaker 3: the funeral. Now, Doomsday said, we saw him the entire time,
Speaker 3: except maybe the ten minutes we stepped away. He stayed
Speaker 3: there the whole time. I said, Eric, wouldn't know we
Speaker 3: had a gun, wouldn't know where it would be. He's
Speaker 3: never in the house, Kestrol, I said, wasn't it at
Speaker 3: the funeral the whole time too? Thursday asked, I knew
Speaker 3: I was the most likely third suspect, and what I
Speaker 3: was about to tell them wasn't gonna help. No, I said,
Speaker 3: Kestrel wasn't there. At the end, I told them about
Speaker 3: meeting Eric, about our conversation in the park, about how
Speaker 3: Kestrel showed up late. He'd had plenty of time to
Speaker 3: steal the gun. It's not nice to wrap people out
Speaker 3: like that, but it's also not nice to steal people's guns.
Speaker 3: Doom Thursday said, can we keep you away from the windows?
Speaker 3: Maybe take Brinn's room. He climbed up on the couch
Speaker 3: to lock the window. Likely there were bars ready to
Speaker 3: go over the doors. There's not a squatter alive who
Speaker 3: hasn't been through their house and analyzed all the ways
Speaker 3: the police might break in. Hell, usually we've already broken
Speaker 3: in once ourselves. Thursday left to secure the house against
Speaker 3: human intruders, and Doomsday made her way, defeated up the stairs.
Speaker 3: Brenn and I stood in the living room, facing one another,
Speaker 3: getting ready to head into the night. The kitchen timer
Speaker 3: went off, dinner was ready, no one was in the
Speaker 3: mood to enjoy it. We walked down the middle of
Speaker 3: the street and I was calmer than I thought i'd be,
Speaker 3: probably because I had a plan. I had something I
Speaker 3: was going to do. I wore my pack emptied, but
Speaker 3: for some essentials we had no idea how many books
Speaker 3: we'd be trying to bring with us, so the extra
Speaker 3: storage was important. It had been dark for hours, and
Speaker 3: I scanned the power lines with those creepy ghoul birds.
Speaker 3: Either they weren't there or I couldn't see them. What
Speaker 3: I did see were torches below us, coming up from
Speaker 3: the river. People were walking with torches. I counted a
Speaker 3: dozen specks of flame dancing through the night. Brynn saw
Speaker 3: them too, mourners, she said, people celebrating Eulyxe. What it's
Speaker 3: a tradition, Brynn said, any other night, it wouldn't be
Speaker 3: something sinister. Hell, two days ago, I would have been
Speaker 3: with them. But tonight it can't be good. She led
Speaker 3: the way off the street through a front yard sculpture
Speaker 3: garden of rusted reebar animals Eulyxe and as ghouls I
Speaker 3: recognize now. We took shelter in an ivy covered roofless
Speaker 3: house and peered back out at the street through what
Speaker 3: was left of a window and what was left of
Speaker 3: a kitchen. The torches came around the bend. Nine adults
Speaker 3: and three children bore them, each with a homemade animal mask.
Speaker 3: Goats and geese, sparrows and sheep. One of the figures
Speaker 3: stood head and shoulders above the crowd. They marched past
Speaker 3: us in silence. When they turned the next bend in
Speaker 3: the road, we left our shelter and started back down
Speaker 3: the hill. The basement door, I learned, was just off
Speaker 3: the river, near the base of the bridge. We scrambled
Speaker 3: down a steep path, then hopped from rock to rock
Speaker 3: along the edge of the water. The trees were thick
Speaker 3: down here. The gibbus moon cast enough light that we
Speaker 3: could make our way without turning on our headlamps. A
Speaker 3: breeze brought the earthy smell of the forest, and the
Speaker 3: river was a white noise that drowned out all other
Speaker 3: ambient sound. What's in it for you, Berne asked, as
Speaker 3: she clambered over a fallen tree. Why aren't you skipping town?
Speaker 3: For some of the last months of Clay's life, he'd
Speaker 3: walked this path every morning and night. You know there's
Speaker 3: a part of me that hates this place, I asked.
Speaker 3: It was rhetorical, of course, and brendan answer, I'm too
Speaker 3: stubborn to give up traveling. Clay wasn't that same stubbornness
Speaker 3: is going to carry me through I came here to
Speaker 3: find out what happened to him. I'm going to I
Speaker 3: clambered over a fallen log, the bar digging into my hands.
Speaker 3: And also, this is clearly the most important reason. Could
Speaker 3: you imagine just leaving now, never learning what's going to happen?
Speaker 3: The fear of missing out would rip my heart out
Speaker 3: of my chest as surely as that deer. Brynn laughed.
Speaker 3: I like when she laughed. We continued on along the water,
Speaker 3: and I heard the dry heave of gold animals. I
Speaker 3: never would have expected that would be a sound I'd
Speaker 3: come to recognize. We crouched low, peered into the woods.
Speaker 3: We're almost there, Brynn said. She pointed. The base of
Speaker 3: the gas station went all the way down to the water,
Speaker 3: and a chain link fence stood between us and the
Speaker 3: door with a simple unlocked gate. When I focused, I
Speaker 3: could just make out a dozen silhouettes between us and
Speaker 3: where we wanted to go. Goats and geese, squirrels and
Speaker 3: sheep in all respects, but for their lack of organs
Speaker 3: and ribs. They acted like every barnyard animal I'd ever met,
Speaker 3: annoying and fully aware of the sorrow and emptiness of
Speaker 3: their captive lives. They're awake, I said, Should we go
Speaker 3: around in through the front. Bryn shook her head. The
Speaker 3: trap door to the basement is welded shut. Should we,
Speaker 3: I don't know herd them somewhere, get them away from
Speaker 3: the door. Bryn, still crouching, flicked open her extendable baton.
Speaker 3: I sighed, then extended mine. The weight felt good in
Speaker 3: my hand. Most days, a baton made me think I
Speaker 3: could take on the world. That night, though I wasn't
Speaker 3: so sure it was going to be enough. I wouldn't
Speaker 3: fight a single living goat by choice, let alone an
Speaker 3: undead one with all its friends. Brynn stood back up
Speaker 3: straight and walked right toward our destination. Always afraid, never
Speaker 3: a coward, I mumbled to myself. My blood started racing.
Speaker 3: I stood up, tightened all the straps of my pack,
Speaker 3: and followed. Animal eyes turned toward us with mute curiosity,
Speaker 3: which turned to malice as we had to rush past them.
Speaker 3: A silent mess of geese got underfoot and lunged for
Speaker 3: my hands. I started swinging. It was an animal abuse.
Speaker 3: They were dead already. Some of the ones I hit
Speaker 3: didn't get up again. Brynn was almost to the gate.
Speaker 3: When the goat ran at me, someone or something had
Speaker 3: sheared off the beast's horns, presumably before Eulixie had stolen
Speaker 3: the creature's rib cage. Not an easy life, or on
Speaker 3: life or whatever. I pulled back and swung from the
Speaker 3: hip like a one handed batter and hit the goat
Speaker 3: in the skull with all my strength. I must have
Speaker 3: grown up watching too many zombie movies. Hitting that thing's
Speaker 3: skull was like hitting a bowlder, and I probably hurt
Speaker 3: my hand more than I hurt the goat. Still, the
Speaker 3: blow seemed to have stopped its charge. It was still
Speaker 3: in my way. It tried to bleat, but it had
Speaker 3: no lungs. I heard a low rumble, like distant thunder,
Speaker 3: and turned in time to see a demon bull crash
Speaker 3: out of the trees and barrel toward us. Oh fuck,
Speaker 3: I said, or Brynn said. I started thrashing at the
Speaker 3: dumb goat in front of me with the baton. It
Speaker 3: bit my hand and I dropped the weapon. I dove
Speaker 3: over it, but my backpack destroyed my attempts at a
Speaker 3: smooth acrobatic roll, and I landed on my back. Brynn
Speaker 3: helped me to my feet and we were through the gate.
Speaker 3: I swung it shut, dropped the latch, and was knocked
Speaker 3: off my feet as the bowl slammed into the chain length.
Speaker 3: The fence post bent to a forty five degree angle,
Speaker 3: and the beast backed up to charge again. I got
Speaker 3: up again, clutching my bleeding right hand, and we stumbled
Speaker 3: in through the open door to the basement and slammed
Speaker 3: it behind us. As though that pitch dark room offered
Speaker 3: us safety, we switched on our head lamps. It was
Speaker 3: a single, large room, like any basement in any shitty
Speaker 3: house anywhere. A water heater and a furnace and pipe
Speaker 3: stood out from one wall, and a box spring and
Speaker 3: mattress lay on the floor in the near corner, with
Speaker 3: simple gray sheets and a pile of ratty old comforters.
Speaker 3: A milk crate served as a bedside table, and a
Speaker 3: short stack of books stood atop against the far wall.
Speaker 3: A blood red deer with three antlers lay sleeping upon
Speaker 3: a knee high pile of rib bones. As soon as
Speaker 3: my head lamp flashed across Eulyxe, I put my hand
Speaker 3: over my light, but the demon didn't stir. With the
Speaker 3: sun below the horizon, he likely couldn't move at all.
Speaker 3: The bile rose in my throat. The bones Eulyxes slept
Speaker 3: on weren't the pale white of long dead, sun bleached corpses.
Speaker 3: They were gray and yellow and gristly. Some of them,
Speaker 3: I surmised were human. Let me see your hand, Brynn said,
Speaker 3: you're hurt. It's fine, I said. I hadn't really looked
Speaker 3: to tell if that was true, but I didn't want
Speaker 3: to look, not until I was somewhere safe. It wasn't
Speaker 3: bleeding horrendously. I wrapped my wounded hand with the bandana
Speaker 3: from my back pocket, tight enough to keep pressure on
Speaker 3: the bite. Don't want you turning into a wear goat
Speaker 3: or something. Though Brynn laughed, it was a nervous laugh,
Speaker 3: probably because, well, I don't think either of us knew
Speaker 3: for certain if that was an actual possibility. It'll be fine,
Speaker 3: I whispered. I went to the books beside Clay's bed
Speaker 3: while Brent stood watch. There was a copy of twenty
Speaker 3: thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the copy I had given him.
Speaker 3: I opened the front page, saw my own handwriting, Clay,
Speaker 3: maybe you'll get as much out of this as I
Speaker 3: did under it. He'd written back, Danielle, I think at
Speaker 3: the end of it, you're more nemo than I. It
Speaker 3: took all my presence of mind not to drop the book.
Speaker 3: Had he known I would come hunting after his ghost
Speaker 3: and end up looking through his bedside reading. More likely,
Speaker 3: he'd just written a note absent mindedly for Fox's sake.
Speaker 3: What did I know about the world anymore? The next
Speaker 3: book was history, something about the Kronstat Rebellion, obscure Russian history,
Speaker 3: when the Bolsheviks decided to kill all the anarchist sailors.
Speaker 3: I flipped through it. No notes to me, but here
Speaker 3: and there he'd highlighted passages. Last a spiral bound notebook,
Speaker 3: the first couple pages were filled with some college kid's
Speaker 3: English literature notes. A decade back, Clay had shown me
Speaker 3: that trick Punk's Christmas, he called it. When the school
Speaker 3: year ended, college kids threw out everything from unopened food
Speaker 3: to art supplies, to furniture, to computers to well, obviously notebooks.
Speaker 3: Head on over to the dumpsters, pick up anything you need.
Speaker 3: After the wrote transcription of some boring lecture in a
Speaker 3: stranger's hand. However, I saw a page with Clay's handwriting
Speaker 3: on it. I threw the books into my backpack. From
Speaker 3: outside the open door, I heard birds, dawn, shit. Brenn
Speaker 3: and I had the same thought at the same time,
Speaker 3: and we grabbed one another and bolted across the room
Speaker 3: to crouch behind the furnace. A row of small windows
Speaker 3: lined the top of one wall. The first hint of
Speaker 3: color and light came through them a moment later, and
Speaker 3: Eulix stirred. The sheer, unrid reality of the situation took
Speaker 3: off the worst of my anxiety. Brynn held my good
Speaker 3: hands so tight it hurt almost as bad as the
Speaker 3: one the goat had bitten. And we watched you, Lixey
Speaker 3: rise to face the day for all the world. He
Speaker 3: moved like a regular deer, graceful but nervous. If he
Speaker 3: knew we were there, he made no sign. Instead, he
Speaker 3: headed for the door and was gone. We crouched in
Speaker 3: the encroaching dawn, our hands locked together, are breathing as
Speaker 3: quiet as we could make it, for full two minutes
Speaker 3: before we left to find Rebecca's tree house. A squatter's
Speaker 3: life is ruled by darkness, breaking into buildings, digging through trash,
Speaker 3: even just sneaking up onto rooftops to see the city.
Speaker 3: All those things are easier and safer to do after dark.
Speaker 3: But the sun was up as we marched along and
Speaker 3: then away from the river the day before summer solstice.
Speaker 3: It was going to be up for a long while. Still,
Speaker 3: I trained my eyes on the woods for movement. Walking
Speaker 3: in the forest, you don't see most of the animals
Speaker 3: only once I saw something. Something in the branches above us.
Speaker 3: Could have been a squirrel or a bird. Hell could
Speaker 3: have been a mountain lion. Better a living mountain lion
Speaker 3: than an undead squirrel. After twenty minutes along the river bank,
Speaker 3: it was an hour's high cup to a ravine. There
Speaker 3: was another way to Rebecca's place, a path that ran
Speaker 3: up over the top of the hill, but it would
Speaker 3: have taken us through town. We needed to get Clay's
Speaker 3: notes to Rebecca so she could figure out how to
Speaker 3: perform the ritual, and we couldn't risk running into Ulixe
Speaker 3: or Eric. Brynn led us unerringly with a compass and
Speaker 3: a laminated US Geographical Survey map. Having a destination Rebecca's
Speaker 3: treehouse and an idea of how to get there where
Speaker 3: about all I had to prop up my waning courage
Speaker 3: While we walked, I let myself wonder more about Eric
Speaker 3: and Kestrel. They said doomsday and the rest they were
Speaker 3: going to summon something worse. I'd play it by ear,
Speaker 3: I decided, listen to Rebecca, decide how much to trust her.
Speaker 3: We stopped only once to pick at the previous night's
Speaker 3: dinner from tupperware. Brynn had a few bottles of cold
Speaker 3: coffee and caffeine did its best to replace the adrenaline
Speaker 3: that have been slowly draining out of my system since
Speaker 3: we left the basement. I love coffee, she said, smiling.
Speaker 3: I know it's been all to say. I know I'm addicted.
Speaker 3: I know everyone loves it. I don't care. There's only
Speaker 3: a small handful of things in this world that make
Speaker 3: me happy, and coffee is one of them. What's another,
Speaker 3: I asked. We're both slightly delirious. She thought about it
Speaker 3: for a while. Shit like feeling useful or not paying rent, right,
Speaker 3: But I'll stick with weaknesses romance novels. I fucking love
Speaker 3: trashy romance. The straighter the better, the worse the politics,
Speaker 3: the better. I'll just eat that shit up. That's awesome,
Speaker 3: I said, your turn, she said. We capped, the coffee
Speaker 3: started back up the ravine. I want to say horizons
Speaker 3: because as often as not, the chance to get over
Speaker 3: the closest one is what gets me up in the morning.
Speaker 3: But you told me about romance novels, so I'll do
Speaker 3: you one better. Fan fiction, erotic, queer fan fiction. I
Speaker 3: don't even care what fandom. Give me someone getting on
Speaker 3: with a werewolf, of a seahorse, unicorn, whatever, and I'll
Speaker 3: be happy. Really, I read it on my phone. I said,
Speaker 3: you know I'm gonna have to make fun of you
Speaker 3: about this, right, you won't be the first one. I said,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna make fun of you about it, but I
Speaker 3: still want you to read it aloud to me as
Speaker 3: soon as we get back to phone signal. I promised. God.
Speaker 3: My wiring was all kinds of fucked up for the
Speaker 3: rest of the hike, going crazy from lack of sleep.
Speaker 3: I was happier than I'd been in months. The treehouse
Speaker 3: was a beautiful little witch shack, held a full thirty
Speaker 3: feet aloft between four narrow pines. Its siding had been
Speaker 3: blowtorched to black during the finishing process, and there was
Speaker 3: one porch on the side of the house and another
Speaker 3: on the roof. The windows were mixed matched and erratically placed.
Speaker 3: A rope and wood ladder dangled down, inviting us up.
Speaker 3: A black stovepipe thrust out and up from the side
Speaker 3: and on the east slope of the hill like that,
Speaker 3: I knew it got a full view of Dawn in
Speaker 3: love Rebecca. Bryn had her tattooed hands up of her
Speaker 3: mouth to project her voice. Rebecca, maybe she's in town,
Speaker 3: I asked, after a few fruitless minutes, you heard vulture.
Speaker 3: She's not going anywhere for a while. There's a wardstone
Speaker 3: there keeps you Lisie out. Brynn pointed to a single
Speaker 3: white stone about the size of my head. A circle
Speaker 3: suddenly etched onto its face. Not sure why the ladder
Speaker 3: is down. Though she tested the ladder, it held her weight,
Speaker 3: so she made her way up. I followed. The house
Speaker 3: was even more gorgeous up close. Rebecca had done an
Speaker 3: amazing job, down to details like filigree carved into the
Speaker 3: doorframe and an oreboris painted on the door. Brynn knocked.
Speaker 3: No answer, Rebecca, she shouted, I don't think she's here,
Speaker 3: I said, pointing to a padlock that held the door shut. Shit,
Speaker 3: Brynn said, stomping her foot on the porch and shaking
Speaker 3: the trees we were attached to. She went to the
Speaker 3: nearest window, peered in. She fell trembling. If it weren't
Speaker 3: for the railing, she might have fallen off the porch.
Speaker 3: I looked. The sun lit the floor in big squares
Speaker 3: where it came through the windows, and in one of
Speaker 3: those squares was a dead woman. She lay on her side,
Speaker 3: with her eyes open, her mouth open. She was so small,
Speaker 3: almost childlike, but I could see in the lines in
Speaker 3: her face she had lived at least a decade longer
Speaker 3: than me. I knew the hard way that when faced
Speaker 3: of the corpse, it's up to the person who didn't
Speaker 3: know the now dead person to handle things. Clay had
Speaker 3: done it for me once when we found agnes O Deed.
Speaker 3: I'd done it for him a year later, when it
Speaker 3: had been Sammy with his guts on the wrong side
Speaker 3: of a knife wound. Can you pick the lock, Britt asked.
Speaker 3: Clay always said you were good at shit like that, probably,
Speaker 3: I said. I pulled a screwdriver from my pack, a
Speaker 3: large Philip's head with a rubber grip. I took my
Speaker 3: shirt off, wrapped it around my good hand and jabbed
Speaker 3: at the corner of the window to break the glass.
Speaker 3: It broke with that strange thud that surprises me every time,
Speaker 3: nothing like the sound you hear in movies. You've got
Speaker 3: to break glass against glass to get a noise like that.
Speaker 3: I reached through and unlocked the window, opened it stepped inside.
Speaker 3: Brynn came in directly after. Some people respond to crisis
Speaker 3: by shutting down or running. Some people respond to crisis emotionally,
Speaker 3: which is probably the healthiest way. Myself, I handled crisis
Speaker 3: by shoving fear and sadness and worry down as far
Speaker 3: into my gut as I could. It's never nice, and
Speaker 3: all that nasty shit comes up as trauma later, but
Speaker 3: the practice has kept me alive. Brynn, she was made
Speaker 3: of the same stuff as me, maybe sterner. She went
Speaker 3: directly to the corpse started searching her friend for wounds.
Speaker 3: They weren't hard to find. Four bullet holes marked her
Speaker 3: sleeveless white blouse. All were on her torso, two on
Speaker 3: her chest, one near her hip, one in between. You
Speaker 3: know anything about forensics, Brynn asked, No, I said, neither
Speaker 3: do I, But I know enough about shooting to tell
Speaker 3: you that that's a pretty fuck off bad shot grouping.
Speaker 3: While Brin saw to Rebecca, I scoured the rest of
Speaker 3: the one room shack. A mattress lay on the floor
Speaker 3: in the corner. A bookshelf was filled to overfull with
Speaker 3: dried and tinctured herbs and jars and dropper bottles, plantain
Speaker 3: and ragwart and fever few, plus flowers and leaves I
Speaker 3: couldn't recognize, hung drying from line stretched across the space.
Speaker 3: The wood burning stove was cold since it was June,
Speaker 3: that didn't tell me much. An antique desk, the only
Speaker 3: piece of furniture in the room not handbuilt from scrap lumber,
Speaker 3: took up most of one wall. Under a bank of windows.
Speaker 3: A ladder led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Something
Speaker 3: like a dozen well carved wooden figurines of deer littered
Speaker 3: the desktop, each no larger than my palm. They were
Speaker 3: stained blood red. A piece of cardboard dripped from a
Speaker 3: case of beer served as a cutting mat and a
Speaker 3: staining mat. It looked like with silhouettes of dark stain
Speaker 3: and gathered chips of wood. The carving tools themselves were
Speaker 3: scattered all over the floor. Rebecca's corpse was close to
Speaker 3: where I stood. My mind wouldn't forget that fact for
Speaker 3: long enough to concentrate on anything else. Bullet holes pierced
Speaker 3: the plywood along the back wall. The bullets went out
Speaker 3: the back, I said, running my finger along the splintered wood.
Speaker 3: Who the fuck, Brynn said Eric. I said, we don't
Speaker 3: know that. Yeah, we do, I said, who the hell else? Kestrel, maybe,
Speaker 3: but I bet it was Eric. Brynn closed Rebecca's eyes,
Speaker 3: then kept searching the body. She has a knife in
Speaker 3: her hand, carving knife. Tears welled up, catching me by surprise.
Speaker 3: Here was a woman cut down by a man afraid
Speaker 3: of her power. She'd fought back knife versus gun. I
Speaker 3: never got to meet her, I said, I've got the
Speaker 3: feeling I really missed out. Yeah, Brynn said, I want
Speaker 3: to kill him. I said, it was true, a simple thing,
Speaker 3: a clear epiphany. I wanted to kill Eric for killing
Speaker 3: this woman, even though it could have been Kestrel. I
Speaker 3: wanted to kill Eric for killing her. Eulxe might do
Speaker 3: it for you, Brynn said, imagine his thinking. I said,
Speaker 3: he's got to have thought this through. Killing Rebecca means
Speaker 3: saving Eulyxe means he's doomed himself to being killed by Eulixe.
Speaker 3: Imagine being so sure of the righteousness of your cause
Speaker 3: you're willing to sacrifice your own ideals to achieve them.
Speaker 3: Every politician ever, Brynn said, every authoritarian communist. He killed
Speaker 3: her in cold blood. I said, I couldn't think straight
Speaker 3: killed her. She came up and wrapped her arms around me,
Speaker 3: and I buried my head into her chest, and my
Speaker 3: anger turned into something like sorrow. I cried, standing over
Speaker 3: the body of her friend. She supported me. We've got
Speaker 3: to get back, I said, pulling away. I stepped out
Speaker 3: of the treehouse. The air outside was fresh, cleansing. Bryn
Speaker 3: joined me, and I went to the latter and looked down.
Speaker 3: Eulyxe stood silent, staring up at us from the ground.
Speaker 3: There was a hammock on the porch. On the roof,
Speaker 3: thick cotton rope held our weight, and our feet dangled
Speaker 3: over the edge, like we were teenagers on a date
Speaker 3: instead of squatters hiding from a demon in a corpse.
Speaker 3: I can't stay there all day, I said. I had
Speaker 3: a friend in town about six months back. You know
Speaker 3: how you think you know somebody and then they just
Speaker 3: do something awful, beat their partner, abuse someone something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I said, so this guy I lived with, my friend Greg.
Speaker 3: I liked him all right. He was friendly, hard working,
Speaker 3: really polite. His partner Sam, no one liked her. She
Speaker 3: used to throw shit fits at general assembly, horde booze
Speaker 3: from the everything for everyone, that kind of thing. She
Speaker 3: worked hard too, I guess, but I don't know. She
Speaker 3: just rubbed everyone the wrong way. She and Greg had
Speaker 3: been together maybe three months, when one night they were
Speaker 3: drunk and he raped her. I don't know if he
Speaker 3: thought he raped her, but that never really matters. She
Speaker 3: didn't want to have sex with him that night, and
Speaker 3: he did it anyway. Yeah, it doesn't really matter what
Speaker 3: he thinks about that. The next day, the very next day,
Speaker 3: before she's even told anyone, Greg walks outside her house
Speaker 3: and there's Ulxe just standing on the porch, just looking
Speaker 3: at him. He goes to the fuck back inside, and
Speaker 3: he waits elixes out there, not moving until sunset. The
Speaker 3: rest of us come and go, But that fucking deer
Speaker 3: was just waiting for and watching him. What happened as
Speaker 3: soon as night fell, Sam drove him up to Minneapolis,
Speaker 3: kicked him out of the car and said if she
Speaker 3: ever saw him again, she'd kill him herself. I whistled.
Speaker 3: Moral of the story is that Ulixie most definitely can
Speaker 3: stay there all day. We're not predators, I said, no.
Speaker 3: But we're hunting for a way to dismiss it, aren't we.
Speaker 3: I can see why you all kind of like having
Speaker 3: it around, though, with a story like that, I'm not
Speaker 3: going to tell you it hasn't been nice, Bryn said,
Speaker 3: up until the point when it wasn't. I'm always so
Speaker 3: quick to resort to violence, I said, I'm not ashamed
Speaker 3: of that. I think it's necessary sometimes, but damn, it'd
Speaker 3: be nice to be able to just quit violence cold Turkey,
Speaker 3: let a spell take care of it for me. There's
Speaker 3: no magic bullet, though, Brynn said, never was, never will be.
Speaker 3: I agreed. It should have been a beautiful day. It
Speaker 3: was warm enough that the breeze felt good, but not
Speaker 3: hot enough to be uncomfortable. Fuck, I said, how are
Speaker 3: we going to dismiss it now? I guess that's up
Speaker 3: to doomsday.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: We were halfway up to the canopy and I could
Speaker 3: see the forest, in the river, in the prairie in
Speaker 3: the distance. More herbs hung drying all around us, and
Speaker 3: their scents combined to be just short of overwhelming. More important,
Speaker 3: Brynn sat next to me, all worked up to sweating
Speaker 3: from everything, and her smell was overwhelming. She had her
Speaker 3: arm around the small of my waist, mine was around
Speaker 3: her back. Let me see your hand, she said, No,
Speaker 3: it's fine. The bandana was still wrapped tight around the wound.
Speaker 3: My palm's still hurt, but I wasn't ready to look
Speaker 3: at it. There was an awful lot of shit going
Speaker 3: on just then that I wasn't ready to let myself
Speaker 3: think too much about God. I wish you'd showed up
Speaker 3: like a month ago or something. Brynn said, what do
Speaker 3: you mean. It'd be nice to get to know you proper,
Speaker 3: Bryn said, instead of like this. Oh you don't like
Speaker 3: demon hunting with me? I asked. Brynn giggled. I looked
Speaker 3: at her, and she must have gotten self conscious about giggling,
Speaker 3: because she started giggling harder, covering her face and laughing.
Speaker 3: She fell onto her side in the hammock, and I
Speaker 3: had my arms around her and I started laughing too.
Speaker 3: What a fucking day, I said, What a fucking day?
Speaker 3: She agreed. We both fell asleep like that, curled up
Speaker 3: on the hammock. I dreamt about jail. A few hours later,
Speaker 3: I broke out of dream jail by waking up, but
Speaker 3: I was still trapped. I peered over the edge of
Speaker 3: the treehouse roof and Elixie peered right back at me.
Speaker 3: The bowl was beside him. That woke me up all
Speaker 3: the way, and I looked to the trees around me.
Speaker 3: Squirrels and birds all on dead, sat silent on the branches,
Speaker 3: not ten feet from my head, all staring at me
Speaker 3: with their glossy eyes like as not. They'd been there
Speaker 3: for hours already, and they didn't seem to want to attack,
Speaker 3: just watch, just bore into me. Bryn was snoring, her
Speaker 3: head crane back. I trusted her. I realized everything around
Speaker 3: me was terrifying and none of it made sense, but
Speaker 3: Brinn seemed to accept it, and I was learning to
Speaker 3: accept her. Freedom ran on trust. I needed to trust someone.
Speaker 3: I flipped through Clay's notebook, his handwriting only grace. Twelve pages.
Speaker 3: On each he'd written the same single line, The only
Speaker 3: way out is through the last page had another line
Speaker 3: underneath the first. What hand dare sees the fire. He'd
Speaker 3: always been saying shit like that. When you needed advice,
Speaker 3: he was always there saying something needlessly cryptic but reasonably wise.
Speaker 3: I wish he'd listened to his own advice, though, I
Speaker 3: wish he'd kept going. I wish he'd found his way
Speaker 3: through Sitting there then, with the sun dappled through the
Speaker 3: leaves and the needles of the forest, I tried to
Speaker 3: piece out what had happened to him at his funeral.
Speaker 3: I thought he'd given up because there wasn't any future
Speaker 3: in writing the Rails. But that wasn't it. It couldn't
Speaker 3: be it. That was me seeing more of me and
Speaker 3: him than there really was. Motherfucker had spent fifteen years
Speaker 3: looking for the hobo utopia the Big Rock Candy Mountain,
Speaker 3: until he just gave up and made the place. Then
Speaker 3: he defended it with the witchcraft he knew. Then he'd
Speaker 3: run away. Then he'd done Eulix's work all on his
Speaker 3: own and ended his own life. Why. Maybe because he'd
Speaker 3: been exiled from Paradise by a beast of his own making.
Speaker 3: Maybe because he decided freedom was home and he couldn't
Speaker 3: come back. That's what having a home will do to you.
Speaker 3: Maybe I dropped the notebook onto the hammock. Brynn woke up.
Speaker 3: The only way out is through, I said, pardon, I
Speaker 3: should brin the pages. We did all this and we've
Speaker 3: got nothing, nothing from Clay, nothing from Rebecca, and we
Speaker 3: can't get home to warn anyone there's a killer on
Speaker 3: the loose. That's funny, Brynn said, that's not the quote. Quote.
Speaker 3: He says the best way out is always through. And
Speaker 3: I agree to that, or in so far is that
Speaker 3: I can see no way out but through. It's from
Speaker 3: a Robert Frost poem, A Servant to Servants. It's a
Speaker 3: true statement, I guess, I said, But doesn't do us
Speaker 3: any good. He got the other one closer. What the
Speaker 3: hand dare? Seize the fire? The Tiger by William Blake?
Speaker 3: That line mean anything to you, I asked, Hell, it
Speaker 3: means even less to me than the Robert Frost. Clay
Speaker 3: moved into the gas station because he was studying Eulixie right,
Speaker 3: trying to learn how to dismiss it. Yeah, and the
Speaker 3: only thing he wrote down, I said, And all that
Speaker 3: time was some misquoted poetry. I guess here, come downstairs
Speaker 3: with me. I went to the hatch in the roof,
Speaker 3: opened it and climbed down the ladder. The house stank
Speaker 3: of death, leaving us gagging, and I opened all the
Speaker 3: windows that could be opened. We tried our best not
Speaker 3: to stare at the dead woman on the floor for
Speaker 3: a few hours more. We just had to keep ourselves
Speaker 3: from thinking too hard about her. These, I said, pointing
Speaker 3: to the twelve deer figurines on the desk, What do
Speaker 3: you make of these? She was obsessed, Brent said, half
Speaker 3: the town is obsessed. Though she held up her hand
Speaker 3: showing me her eulixe tattoo. I picked up one of
Speaker 3: the red figures and on a whim, lined it up
Speaker 3: to the dark outlines of stain on the cardboard that
Speaker 3: marked word had been painted. I did the same with
Speaker 3: the rest, a sort of simple jigsaw puzzle. They formed
Speaker 3: a circle, each facing clockwise. The figure at one o'clock
Speaker 3: was on its side, and the figure at twelve stood
Speaker 3: over it, its mouth down by the other's ribs, like
Speaker 3: it was killing it, like it was eating its heart.
Speaker 3: I don't know what it means, I said, I don't
Speaker 3: think it's a coincidence, though Clay writing twelve pages and
Speaker 3: Rebecca carving twelve figurines. Now, I don't suppose it is, oh,
Speaker 3: I said, twelve pages, twelve figures, twelve months, Solstice to solstice.
Speaker 3: It's just telling us that her only chance is tomorrow,
Speaker 3: which we already knew, which we already knew. She agreed, hooray.
Speaker 3: But what are they gonna do?
Speaker 2: Robert Evans, Well, I don't know, Margaret, but you, being
Speaker 2: my friend who always has a cryptic response to everything
Speaker 2: anyone says, I'm excited to find out.
Speaker 3: Yeah. When I first started writing these two characters is
Speaker 3: a very long time ago. I've been writing Clay and
Speaker 3: Daniel Kine for like, just since I was like twenty,
Speaker 3: and Clay was always the guy standing there with cryptic
Speaker 3: things to say. I think I'm just trying to grow
Speaker 3: into him. What are you say?
Speaker 2: I do? Like that. One of the through lines here
Speaker 2: is you've got there's both like a lot of focus
Speaker 2: on how careful these punk kids are with their guns
Speaker 2: and how not careful they are with magic, which yeah,
Speaker 2: I enjoy. Like one of them is the very like
Speaker 2: because the harm and the danger is incredibly clear with
Speaker 2: a gun, Right, You've got like an end and the
Speaker 2: thing comes out of the end and you want to
Speaker 2: be real careful that nothing is in front of that
Speaker 2: end that you don't want things through, whereas the magic
Speaker 2: is much much less unclear and how it functions in
Speaker 2: some ways, and so it leads to this kind of
Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe recklessness on behalf of the protagonists.
Speaker 3: Oh that is interesting. I no, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 3: And it's a kind of like, you know, like maybe
Speaker 3: by the time there's ten of these books, they'll be
Speaker 3: like going around and teaching magic safety classes. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, it's also it's interesting just because there's also a
Speaker 2: very I mean a very punk attitude towards it. Like
Speaker 2: I think about the ways in which, like a lot
Speaker 2: of the older anarchist punks that I know treat the police,
Speaker 2: the kind of like the great care and sort of
Speaker 2: like wariness with which they treat the police, and then
Speaker 2: the recklessness with which they treat something like a train totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, Oh, better be careful there's police around.
Speaker 2: Be real, like I'm gonna hop on this moving beast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if you get scared, just drink some whiskey
Speaker 3: and that'll help you jump on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that'll get you straight.
Speaker 1: God.
Speaker 3: I like definitely I always had two rules about train hopping.
Speaker 3: You don't hop on while it's moving, and you always
Speaker 3: hop on sober until the one day when the only
Speaker 3: way to get out of Milwaukee was to hop on
Speaker 3: a moving train. And so I was scared. So we
Speaker 3: all drank whiskey in order to get unscared. Don't do
Speaker 3: what I did.
Speaker 1: It was bad.
Speaker 3: I almost saw my friend get sucked under the wheels,
Speaker 3: and someone, the kid who was showing us the hopout spot,
Speaker 3: like pulled her back away from the fucking wheels.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: I did an interview that has always stuck with me
Speaker 2: when I was at Cracked for an article with this
Speaker 2: young woman in a Boulder who was doing train hopping
Speaker 2: on the college campus and went just timed it badly
Speaker 2: and lost both their legs. Yeah. The older punk she
Speaker 2: was jumping with was a former Army medic and tourniqueted
Speaker 2: her legs like on the spot. Is the only reason
Speaker 2: she didn't die. Yeah, and then got blamed. He like
Speaker 2: got blamed because he was the older one, yeah, like
Speaker 2: inciting her to jump, and she was like, well, no,
Speaker 2: I was. Everyone did this, all of the dumb kids.
Speaker 2: We all did train hopping. He's he didn't get me killed.
Speaker 2: He's the only reason I didn't die. Yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 3: If you're listening, don't jump on moving trains, and.
Speaker 2: Don't jump on moving trains, do it sober. But also
Speaker 2: do be careful with your guns too.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, totally and magic probably if that's real. I
Speaker 3: don't know.
Speaker 2: Oh, I was going to advise people to be real
Speaker 2: reckless with that shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, yeah, you know, yeah, what could go wrong?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well all right, Margaret, Well that's uh, that's this
Speaker 2: episode in the in the can.
Speaker 3: Ye see you all next Sunday for another episode of
Speaker 3: cool Zone book clothes right with the vocal Friday. That's
Speaker 3: an important part of them. Yeah, yeah, I'm.
Speaker 1: It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
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Speaker 1: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 1: monthly at Coolzonmedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.