Chapter 11 Trust #4
“Well, technically that is more than one question, but once you begin reading my journals you’ll learn all of this anyway.
Call it a botanical accident for now. I was one of the people of the East European forest steppe.
I had a talent for finding unusual plant species.
One singular species left me frozen in time for nearly two hundred years and…
deeply changed. So, perhaps you could argue that I am more honestly three centuries old, but I think I’ve earned all five. I have certainly paid for them.”
“Holy shit.”
For a moment, the room around Valentina seemed to fade and she was standing like a giant on a gray, weather-blasted plateau of time.
She was as much a cryptid as the horned wolf, singular and inscrutable, an alien presence walking in the world of mundane things.
The idea made him feel suddenly homeless, once again beyond the edge of the map.
Green’s vision shifted, and he saw his teacher, the woman who built a treetop library, who made him cheese on toast to heal his unraveling nerves.
Green recalled Valentina’s letter to Ivan.
…if we knew then that there was such a thing as too far away…
“So, Ivan…”
“Was a dear, dear friend in eighteenth-century Russia.”
“Too far away.”
Valentina’s eyes went somewhere distant.
“Indeed. Too far away.”
She came back to herself and focused on Green’s face.
“Now, it is time for my question.”
“I don’t think I have any secrets to rival ‘I’m five hundred years old,’ but shoot.”
Something twisted in Green’s guts as it came to him.
He did, very much, have secrets.
“We shall see. Between the rag moth and the glass fawn, well…Last night, I researched the previous six sightings of the fawn. Four of the reports are very old and very incomplete, threadbare oral tradition mixed with allegory. Not ideal.”
“Okay. Not sure what I can answer about that.”
She pulled two notebooks from a nearby desk and opened them in front of Green. He stooped over and read a highlighted passage on the page.
…the others were not so fortunate. They were too close. I watched them fall…
Valentina continued.
“The most recent two accounts are better. Armed with new information and reading between the lines, they seem to agree on two points—that the glass fawn is a bringer of ill fortune and, more to the point, no one who gets closer than perhaps one hundred meters to it survives to tell the tale.”
Green turned his attention to the second journal.
A block of underlined text.
…I only saw its light, but it was the deer. Nothing glows like that in the jungle. When I made it down to the valley camp, it was a charnel house, a place of the dead…
She spoke on.
“They do not mention localized cold specifically, but certain colorful phrases imply it. I’m afraid I trusted my recollections too much.
I sometimes fail to reckon with the truth that human brains are not meant to house a collection of memories as large as mine.
I should have researched the fawn earlier. ”
He swallowed.
“But…if the fawn is so deadly…and it’s been seen before…why hasn’t it killed more? Hundreds? Thousands? Did those other accounts say how they stopped it?”
“Ah, Mr. Green. I believe these are the correct questions. No, the past accounts make no mention of thwarting the fawn, yet the killings seem to take place over a relatively short span of time before halting. Based on past patterns, I suspect that the fawn’s presence in our world is fleeting.”
“So, what, it’s normally…dormant?”
“Or, more likely, absent.”
“You said the Hole in Nothing leads outside our reality, right? Do you think it came through there?”
“That is precisely my current hypothesis. In fact, I suspect that the two phenomena are, essentially, one and the same. Dependent upon one another. If the fawn is from outside this dimension, then it is entirely possible that reality cannot heal while it is present. The fawn’s unrealness is an active injury to our world’s mode of existence that is expressed as that rift between the pines. ”
She tapped the open journals.
“Clearly, it has torn its way into our reality on other occasions. The question is, what made it depart?”
Her words made Green feel unanchored, like he was drifting away from himself. A flash flood of dread crashed inside him. Listening to Valentina undercut her own humanity and then talk about the universe like a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing was beyond disorienting.
“Did you find any mention of the wolf? Did you look?”
She shook her head.
“The only data we have on the horned wolf comes from your observations, which, I remind you, include two encounters during which the creature could have killed you and did not. That alone marks it as less lethal than the fawn.”
It called me “not-man.”
“Well, maybe it couldn’t kill me. Somehow. Maybe like the fawn.”
Valentina’s expression hardened.
“Just so. That brings us back to the answer you owe me. Mr. Green, I have a suspicion that there is something you have not told me. Perhaps it involves that ‘something’ you mentioned urging you toward the mountains when we first spoke. I also have a suspicion that whatever is in that right pocket of yours is involved.”
Green’s hand moved to the acorn, then quickly away. Valentina watched the motion.
“It seems you have not been entirely open with me. As you may have gleaned from Clara’s journal, trust must be a key facet of our arrangement. Trust and community are essential to our work.”
He swallowed.
“I understand.”
“Well, then, to my question. No living person on record has gotten as close as you did to the glass fawn and survived. Nor witnessed rag moth caterpillars, for that matter. So, kindly explain to me why you are still alive.”
Valentina took a seat and folded her hands in her lap.
Green felt the weight of her attention, the same weight that pressed on him at their first meeting.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the acorn.
It sat on his open palm.
Valentina studied it, then raised her eyes back to his.
“Go on,” she said.
He groped for the memory of his not-quite-death and felt the same psychic jolt that always demanded payment when he tried to think of it.
Some part of the machinery that kept him grounded in reality coughed black smoke.
The huge, black bird perched on the no-parking sign laughed its cawing laugh and it seemed to be mocking both his past and present pain.
“I…almost died.”
“Keep talking.”
He told her about the bus, his vision of approaching tires.
About the otherworldly bird. About the ridiculous acorn that was suddenly in his pocket and in his thoughts.
He told her how that event unspooled the rest of his life and how he decided to rebuild it.
He tried to express what it cost him to talk about it, to think about it.
“The memory hurts. That was…almost the end of me.”
“Are you sure it was almost? Perhaps you did die.”
Green just shook his head. He felt a sudden urge to vomit.
“Interesting. That is one more first to add to your tally. I have not heard such a story before. Although, there are a number of large avian cryptids that might match your description of the black bird. I wonder…Perhaps that creature gave you the acorn.”
“Why would a giant bird bring me an acorn?”
Green swallowed, willing his stomach to calm.
Valentina cocked her head like an owl, glancing at the library roof.
“Perhaps it was a bribe. Or a purchase.”
It was too much. He stood too quickly, knocking the journals to the floor. He took three staggering steps toward the hatch before collapsing forward to dry heave on hands and knees. The sheer, hideous terror of the memory kept hammering him as he tried to clear his head.
“Stay there,” Valentina said.
He didn’t feel like he had much of a choice.
She opened the hatch and was gone. Green fell onto his side, hugged his knees, and tried to think of anything else.
It was impossible. It was all more than he could process.
The memory had been a hot stove, now it was a house fire he couldn’t escape.
He shut his eyes tight and wished he could simply pass out.
He heard Valentina’s footsteps, but he couldn’t open his eyes. The fire was spreading. He was choking on smoke.
There was a soft plop near his ear and something changed.
The fire was there, but the roof was gone. A cold breeze swirled through the house and ushered away the dark smoke. A steady rain fell. The flames guttered and died.
Died. My death. I died. And then…I didn’t.
He opened his eyes.
Six inches from his face, Blobert sat on the wooden floor, pulsating and blinking at Green with too many eyes.
“Oh, it’s you.”
He knuckled tears away and rocked into a sitting position.
“May we continue?” Valentina said.
“Jesus, lady.”
She shifted a chair and sat across from him.
“The phobophage will make this conversation easier.”
He took a steadying breath.
“Come on. Say Blobert. Just say it once.”
“I will not.”
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“Alright. I can talk. But I don’t think there’s anything else I can tell you.”
“Very well,” she said. “In the future, please do not hold back such information. We can work on deepening our understanding of your situation together. Let me examine your acorn.”
Valentina held out her hand.
Reluctantly, he passed it over.
She held it up and scrutinized it. She smelled it. She listened to it. She produced an iron nail from her pocket and touched it to the acorn’s cap. She whispered something to the nut, then looked at it as if expecting a response. Then, she handed it back.
“As far as I can tell, it’s an acorn. White oak is my best guess. Quercus alba.”
“That’s all?”
“That is all for now. It may be that acorn is giving you some form of protection. It may be that your near death, or rather undone death, has altered your relationship with mortality in some way we cannot yet determine. Clearly something unusual allowed you to survive the fawn’s presence.
These are questions we will pursue, but not tonight.
I am content that I now at least know the shape of your situation, if not the details.
Tonight, we have other pressing business. ”
Valentina looked out the window.
The western sky was starting to blush.
“It’s time to go.”