October 22, 2023 • 41 mins
In this episode of the Cool Zone Media Book Club, Margaret Killjoy continues reading the next two chapters of her folk horror novella the Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion to Robert.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Full Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to It Could Happen Here Book Club. I'm Robert Evans.
This is a podcast about things falling apart, and this
is our special weekend edition of It Could Happen Here,
where Margaret Killjoy and myself sit down and read a story. Well,
Margaret reads the story at this point, I am listening
(00:25):
to it. Presumably the format we'll switch up at some point,
but right now, Margaret, how are we? I'm excited for
part three of the first Daniel Kine book. Are you
excited to give it to me?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I am excited to give it to you, Robert. And
you know, when we switch up the format, you'll just
make up a story as we go, well, like at
the stop in the middle of the chapter, and then
you just make up what happens. Yeah, I guess that's
just called Dungeons and Dragons. Actually, oh yeah, we could
call it Dungeons and Dragons. I was just gonna read
(00:58):
from one of my Thomas Pension books because no one
else is act no one's no one has actually ever
finished one, so it'll it'll be as if I'm I'm
just making up a story. I admit I've never finished
a Thomas Bench no.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
No, of course not why there's things to do in
the world. Markret you gotta finish at Thomas Pinsion book.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
As I get older, I have more interest in, like
finally sitting down and reading War and Peace and all
that shit.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
But I just keep looking at my copy of Alan
Moore's Jerusalem and going one day.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
One day exactly, that'll be like when we're finally and
we'll do the book club version, will be like a
book club presents War and Peace followed by Jerusalem followed
by infinite jest.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, yeah, finally. Or we'll get Jamie loftus On for
that one. She loves reading infinitsh jest.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Or we'll read novella's by I once ran my I
won't tell people I once ran one of my books through.
What grade level is this adult book that I wrote?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
And I was very proud to say that one of
my books was written at a fifth or sixth grade
reading level.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Oh you need baby, I did all my real important
reading by the time I was six.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Great.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I've actually been I'm friends with this baby now, so
I've been reading some uh Doctor Seuss with her, and man,
those are good books. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, there's a
lot of the human human condition contained with an hop
on pop. I hadn't realized.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Once you move up to shel Silverstein m oh now, yeah,
directly from there to Danielle Kine.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
That's right, the Shell Silverstein of Vaguely Lovecrafty and Horror,
the action Punk.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
I'd say Shell silver wrote that Scooby Doo. I don't know.
I I gave up on asterisk punk.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah. I uh, that's that's the next AI generated thing
I would like to see Shelf Silverstein's Scooby do.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
So where we last left our heroes, We're starting with
chapter five. Everyone else will have just heard, presumably like
a week ago, chapter four, but we haven't heard it
in a moment because there was a break between recordings.
And so Daniel Caine is showed up to a town.
There's a three antler deer that's goring people, and some
(03:25):
people in the town love it, and some people in
the town hate it, and the town is gearing up
for some conflict. Chapter five, My second night in Freedom
began more somberly than my first. It was well after
dark by the time Vulture showed up with potatoes and
onions and spring greens to be cooked before heading back
(03:46):
to the lookout rock. The days in Brn were in
the living room working through plans, which left me alone
to cook. I was happy to spend some time in
the kitchen. It had been a long time since I've
been surrounded by people living the way I wanted to live,
and I was almost able to convince myself that things
were going to be fine. I've got a long history
of scraping together little moments of peace in the midst
of hardship, and cooking is a great way to do that.
(04:10):
I cubed the potatoes, and, alongside lots of garlic and oil,
set them in a pan in the oven. I went
through their spice rack and realized half of what they
had had been grown, dried, and chopped here in town.
I let myself get lost in the smell of fresh
and dried herbs. The Brussels sprouts were from the food bank,
but were going to taste amazing regardless. I cut them up,
(04:31):
drizzled them with oil and salt, put them in the
second tray. I've made fancier meals in my life, but
it still felt good. I set the old fashioned kitchen
timer and went to join everyone else. You can't figure
it out, Brune asked, she was pacing. She didn't strike
me as the typoo worried much, but she was worried.
Even Doomsday looked paler than usual. She leaned back in
(04:52):
her easy chair, feigning nonchalance, but her teacup trembled in
her hand. I didn't leave the ritual. I was blindfolded.
I've spent and all day pouring over my books and
there's nothing there. Nothing, nothing about dismissing a spirit, Brene asked,
Or nothing about you, Lyxi. Nothing. Thursday was standing statuesque
at his partner's side. There was certainly more to their
(05:14):
relationship than him trying his hardest to guard her. I
was sure, but times call for us to fulfill certain roles.
Will Rebecca know how, Burne asked. I don't think so,
Doomsday said. Vulture went to warn her last night, and
how did he put it? She's gone paranoid. Jet fuel
can't melt steel beams. Level paranoid made him show her
(05:36):
his ribs, Vulture said, And I agree that you only
get that kind of paranoid when you've just got no
agency at all, when you wish you had control over
your life, but you just don't. She and Clay planned
the ritual together. I don't know that either of them
wouldn't know how to do it alone. What are our options,
Bern asked, If we leave town take Rebecca with us,
(05:57):
will it come after us? Thursday asked it probably can't,
Doomsday said, but it's a moot point. I won't leave
without cleaning up my own mess. Rebecca's place is warded, too,
Thursday asked, Eulyxie can't get her if you and Rebecca
stay inside, what's it going to do? Nothing? Attack the
people close to you. I have no idea, Doomsday said.
(06:18):
She set down her tee untouched, then pulled her feet
up onto the chair and hugged her knees. Where are
Clay's notebooks? I asked? People turned to me, realizing for
the first time I was in the room. The only
thing he liked more than the sound of his own
voice was the sight of his own handwriting, I said.
When he died, he didn't have any of his journals
on him. They lived with Anchor for a while. Brynn said.
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They broke up last winter, and Clay took it kind
of badly. No one knows what they were fighting about
though for a year and a half they were inseparable.
Then a week of quarreling and it was over. They
were fighting about Ulixe. Doomsday said anchor, worshiped it as
it was, didn't need to know anything more about it.
Clay wanted to understand it, so he moved into the
basement of that gas station down by the bridge where
(07:03):
it lives. He moved in with it. I asked, Doomsday nodded,
So if Clay left notebooks, they'd be there. Doomsday nodded.
We have to go get them, bring them to Rebecca.
Doomsday was lost in thought. Slowly she nodded the dear thing.
I said, it's only up during the day, right, powerless
(07:26):
at night.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
I'll go.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Now, when you know you're going to do something anyway,
it's better not to overthink it. Definitely better not to
let your mind linger on the cost benefit analysis. But
going to find his notebooks got me closer to solving
both my problems all at once. I could find out
what happened to Clay, and I could help this Rebecca person.
Dismiss Youlxy and hope Doomsday wasn't going to summon something worse,
(07:48):
something that lived up to her name. I'll take you,
Brynn said, I'll lend you my gun in case the
ghouls are out, Doomsday said. She crossed the room and
went up the stairs. I didn't want the rules to
be out, neither of we have to do this. Thursday said, yeah,
we do, Brynn said. Doomsday came down the stairs two
at a time, her hand on the banister. It's gone,
(08:10):
she said, my gun's gone. Anyone else would have asked
Thursday if he'd put it away the night before, But
Doomsday didn't even entertain the possibility that our partner would
have handled the fire army responsibly. Eric, Brynn said during
the funeral. Now, Doomsday said, we saw him the entire time,
except maybe the ten minutes we stepped away. He stayed
there the whole time. I said, Eric, wouldn't know we
(08:33):
had a gun, wouldn't know where it would be. He's
never in the house, Kestrol, I said, wasn't it at
the funeral the whole time too? Thursday asked, I knew
I was the most likely third suspect, and what I
was about to tell them wasn't gonna help. No, I said,
Kestrel wasn't there. At the end, I told them about
meeting Eric, about our conversation in the park, about how
Kestrel showed up late. He'd had plenty of time to
(08:55):
steal the gun. It's not nice to wrap people out
like that, but it's also not nice to steal people's guns.
Doom Thursday said, can we keep you away from the windows?
Maybe take Brinn's room. He climbed up on the couch
to lock the window. Likely there were bars ready to
go over the doors. There's not a squatter alive who
hasn't been through their house and analyzed all the ways
(09:16):
the police might break in. Hell, usually we've already broken
in once ourselves. Thursday left to secure the house against
human intruders, and Doomsday made her way, defeated up the stairs.
Brenn and I stood in the living room, facing one another,
getting ready to head into the night. The kitchen timer
went off, dinner was ready, no one was in the
(09:37):
mood to enjoy it. We walked down the middle of
the street and I was calmer than I thought i'd be,
probably because I had a plan. I had something I
was going to do. I wore my pack emptied, but
for some essentials we had no idea how many books
we'd be trying to bring with us, so the extra
storage was important. It had been dark for hours, and
I scanned the power lines with those creepy ghoul birds.
(10:00):
Either they weren't there or I couldn't see them. What
I did see were torches below us, coming up from
the river. People were walking with torches. I counted a
dozen specks of flame dancing through the night. Brynn saw
them too, mourners, she said, people celebrating Eulyxe. What it's
a tradition, Brynn said, any other night, it wouldn't be
(10:21):
something sinister. Hell, two days ago, I would have been
with them. But tonight it can't be good. She led
the way off the street through a front yard sculpture
garden of rusted reebar animals Eulyxe and as ghouls I
recognize now. We took shelter in an ivy covered roofless
house and peered back out at the street through what
(10:41):
was left of a window and what was left of
a kitchen. The torches came around the bend. Nine adults
and three children bore them, each with a homemade animal mask.
Goats and geese, sparrows and sheep. One of the figures
stood head and shoulders above the crowd. They marched past
us in silence. When they turned the next bend in
(11:02):
the road, we left our shelter and started back down
the hill. The basement door, I learned, was just off
the river, near the base of the bridge. We scrambled
down a steep path, then hopped from rock to rock
along the edge of the water. The trees were thick
down here. The gibbus moon cast enough light that we
could make our way without turning on our headlamps. A
(11:23):
breeze brought the earthy smell of the forest, and the
river was a white noise that drowned out all other
ambient sound. What's in it for you, Berne asked, as
she clambered over a fallen tree. Why aren't you skipping town?
For some of the last months of Clay's life, he'd
walked this path every morning and night. You know there's
a part of me that hates this place, I asked.
(11:45):
It was rhetorical, of course, and brendan answer, I'm too
stubborn to give up traveling. Clay wasn't that same stubbornness
is going to carry me through I came here to
find out what happened to him. I'm going to I
clambered over a fallen log, the bar digging into my hands.
And also, this is clearly the most important reason. Could
(12:05):
you imagine just leaving now, never learning what's going to happen?
The fear of missing out would rip my heart out
of my chest as surely as that deer. Brynn laughed.
I like when she laughed. We continued on along the water,
and I heard the dry heave of gold animals. I
never would have expected that would be a sound I'd
come to recognize. We crouched low, peered into the woods.
(12:27):
We're almost there, Brynn said. She pointed. The base of
the gas station went all the way down to the water,
and a chain link fence stood between us and the
door with a simple unlocked gate. When I focused, I
could just make out a dozen silhouettes between us and
(12:48):
where we wanted to go. Goats and geese, squirrels and
sheep in all respects, but for their lack of organs
and ribs. They acted like every barnyard animal I'd ever met,
annoying and fully aware of the sorrow and emptiness of
their captive lives. They're awake, I said, Should we go
around in through the front. Bryn shook her head. The
(13:11):
trap door to the basement is welded shut. Should we,
I don't know herd them somewhere, get them away from
the door. Bryn, still crouching, flicked open her extendable baton.
I sighed, then extended mine. The weight felt good in
my hand. Most days, a baton made me think I
could take on the world. That night, though I wasn't
(13:33):
so sure it was going to be enough. I wouldn't
fight a single living goat by choice, let alone an
undead one with all its friends. Brynn stood back up
straight and walked right toward our destination. Always afraid, never
a coward, I mumbled to myself. My blood started racing.
I stood up, tightened all the straps of my pack,
(13:53):
and followed. Animal eyes turned toward us with mute curiosity,
which turned to malice as we had to rush past them.
A silent mess of geese got underfoot and lunged for
my hands. I started swinging. It was an animal abuse.
They were dead already. Some of the ones I hit
didn't get up again. Brynn was almost to the gate.
(14:14):
When the goat ran at me, someone or something had
sheared off the beast's horns, presumably before Eulixie had stolen
the creature's rib cage. Not an easy life, or on
life or whatever. I pulled back and swung from the
hip like a one handed batter and hit the goat
in the skull with all my strength. I must have
grown up watching too many zombie movies. Hitting that thing's
(14:35):
skull was like hitting a bowlder, and I probably hurt
my hand more than I hurt the goat. Still, the
blow seemed to have stopped its charge. It was still
in my way. It tried to bleat, but it had
no lungs. I heard a low rumble, like distant thunder,
and turned in time to see a demon bull crash
out of the trees and barrel toward us. Oh fuck,
(14:57):
I said, or Brynn said. I started thrashing at the
dumb goat in front of me with the baton. It
bit my hand and I dropped the weapon. I dove
over it, but my backpack destroyed my attempts at a
smooth acrobatic roll, and I landed on my back. Brynn
helped me to my feet and we were through the gate.
I swung it shut, dropped the latch, and was knocked
off my feet as the bowl slammed into the chain length.
(15:20):
The fence post bent to a forty five degree angle,
and the beast backed up to charge again. I got
up again, clutching my bleeding right hand, and we stumbled
in through the open door to the basement and slammed
it behind us. As though that pitch dark room offered
us safety, we switched on our head lamps. It was
a single, large room, like any basement in any shitty
(15:42):
house anywhere. A water heater and a furnace and pipe
stood out from one wall, and a box spring and
mattress lay on the floor in the near corner, with
simple gray sheets and a pile of ratty old comforters.
A milk crate served as a bedside table, and a
short stack of books stood atop against the far wall.
A blood red deer with three antlers lay sleeping upon
(16:05):
a knee high pile of rib bones. As soon as
my head lamp flashed across Eulyxe, I put my hand
over my light, but the demon didn't stir. With the
sun below the horizon, he likely couldn't move at all.
The bile rose in my throat. The bones Eulyxes slept
on weren't the pale white of long dead, sun bleached corpses.
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They were gray and yellow and gristly. Some of them,
I surmised were human. Let me see your hand, Brynn said,
you're hurt. It's fine, I said. I hadn't really looked
to tell if that was true, but I didn't want
to look, not until I was somewhere safe. It wasn't
bleeding horrendously. I wrapped my wounded hand with the bandana
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from my back pocket, tight enough to keep pressure on
the bite. Don't want you turning into a wear goat
or something. Though Brynn laughed, it was a nervous laugh,
probably because, well, I don't think either of us knew
for certain if that was an actual possibility. It'll be fine,
I whispered. I went to the books beside Clay's bed
while Brent stood watch. There was a copy of twenty
(17:09):
thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the copy I had given him.
I opened the front page, saw my own handwriting, Clay,
maybe you'll get as much out of this as I
did under it. He'd written back, Danielle, I think at
the end of it, you're more nemo than I. It
took all my presence of mind not to drop the book.
(17:31):
Had he known I would come hunting after his ghost
and end up looking through his bedside reading. More likely,
he'd just written a note absent mindedly for Fox's sake.
What did I know about the world anymore? The next
book was history, something about the Kronstat Rebellion, obscure Russian history,
when the Bolsheviks decided to kill all the anarchist sailors.
I flipped through it. No notes to me, but here
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and there he'd highlighted passages. Last a spiral bound notebook,
the first couple pages were filled with some college kid's
English literature notes. A decade back, Clay had shown me
that trick Punk's Christmas, he called it. When the school
year ended, college kids threw out everything from unopened food
to art supplies, to furniture, to computers to well, obviously notebooks.
(18:14):
Head on over to the dumpsters, pick up anything you need.
After the wrote transcription of some boring lecture in a
stranger's hand. However, I saw a page with Clay's handwriting
on it. I threw the books into my backpack. From
outside the open door, I heard birds, dawn, shit. Brenn
and I had the same thought at the same time,
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and we grabbed one another and bolted across the room
to crouch behind the furnace. A row of small windows
lined the top of one wall. The first hint of
color and light came through them a moment later, and
Eulix stirred. The sheer, unrid reality of the situation took
off the worst of my anxiety. Brynn held my good
(18:56):
hands so tight it hurt almost as bad as the
one the goat had bitten. And we watched you, Lixey
rise to face the day for all the world. He
moved like a regular deer, graceful but nervous. If he
knew we were there, he made no sign. Instead, he
headed for the door and was gone. We crouched in
the encroaching dawn, our hands locked together, are breathing as
(19:19):
quiet as we could make it, for full two minutes
before we left to find Rebecca's tree house. A squatter's
life is ruled by darkness, breaking into buildings, digging through trash,
even just sneaking up onto rooftops to see the city.
(19:40):
All those things are easier and safer to do after dark.
But the sun was up as we marched along and
then away from the river the day before summer solstice.
It was going to be up for a long while. Still,
I trained my eyes on the woods for movement. Walking
in the forest, you don't see most of the animals
only once I saw something. Something in the branches above us.
Could have been a squirrel or a bird. Hell could
(20:02):
have been a mountain lion. Better a living mountain lion
than an undead squirrel. After twenty minutes along the river bank,
it was an hour's high cup to a ravine. There
was another way to Rebecca's place, a path that ran
up over the top of the hill, but it would
have taken us through town. We needed to get Clay's
notes to Rebecca so she could figure out how to
perform the ritual, and we couldn't risk running into Ulixe
(20:24):
or Eric. Brynn led us unerringly with a compass and
a laminated US Geographical Survey map. Having a destination Rebecca's
treehouse and an idea of how to get there where
about all I had to prop up my waning courage
While we walked, I let myself wonder more about Eric
and Kestrel. They said doomsday and the rest they were
going to summon something worse. I'd play it by ear,
(20:46):
I decided, listen to Rebecca, decide how much to trust her.
We stopped only once to pick at the previous night's
dinner from tupperware. Brynn had a few bottles of cold
coffee and caffeine did its best to replace the adrenaline
that have been slowly draining out of my system since
we left the basement. I love coffee, she said, smiling.
(21:07):
I know it's been all to say. I know I'm addicted.
I know everyone loves it. I don't care. There's only
a small handful of things in this world that make
me happy, and coffee is one of them. What's another,
I asked. We're both slightly delirious. She thought about it
for a while. Shit like feeling useful or not paying rent, right,
(21:27):
But I'll stick with weaknesses romance novels. I fucking love
trashy romance. The straighter the better, the worse the politics,
the better. I'll just eat that shit up. That's awesome,
I said, your turn, she said. We capped, the coffee
started back up the ravine. I want to say horizons
because as often as not, the chance to get over
(21:48):
the closest one is what gets me up in the morning.
But you told me about romance novels, so I'll do
you one better. Fan fiction, erotic, queer fan fiction. I
don't even care what fandom. Give me someone getting on
with a werewolf, of a seahorse, unicorn, whatever, and I'll
be happy. Really, I read it on my phone. I said,
you know I'm gonna have to make fun of you
(22:09):
about this, right, you won't be the first one. I said,
I'm gonna make fun of you about it, but I
still want you to read it aloud to me as
soon as we get back to phone signal. I promised. God.
My wiring was all kinds of fucked up for the
rest of the hike, going crazy from lack of sleep.
I was happier than I'd been in months. The treehouse
(22:31):
was a beautiful little witch shack, held a full thirty
feet aloft between four narrow pines. Its siding had been
blowtorched to black during the finishing process, and there was
one porch on the side of the house and another
on the roof. The windows were mixed matched and erratically placed.
A rope and wood ladder dangled down, inviting us up.
(22:51):
A black stovepipe thrust out and up from the side
and on the east slope of the hill like that,
I knew it got a full view of Dawn in
love Rebecca. Bryn had her tattooed hands up of her
mouth to project her voice. Rebecca, maybe she's in town,
I asked, after a few fruitless minutes, you heard vulture.
(23:12):
She's not going anywhere for a while. There's a wardstone
there keeps you Lisie out. Brynn pointed to a single
white stone about the size of my head. A circle
suddenly etched onto its face. Not sure why the ladder
is down. Though she tested the ladder, it held her weight,
so she made her way up. I followed. The house
(23:33):
was even more gorgeous up close. Rebecca had done an
amazing job, down to details like filigree carved into the
doorframe and an oreboris painted on the door. Brynn knocked.
No answer, Rebecca, she shouted, I don't think she's here,
I said, pointing to a padlock that held the door shut. Shit,
Brynn said, stomping her foot on the porch and shaking
(23:54):
the trees we were attached to. She went to the
nearest window, peered in. She fell trembling. If it weren't
for the railing, she might have fallen off the porch.
I looked. The sun lit the floor in big squares
where it came through the windows, and in one of
those squares was a dead woman. She lay on her side,
with her eyes open, her mouth open. She was so small,
(24:17):
almost childlike, but I could see in the lines in
her face she had lived at least a decade longer
than me. I knew the hard way that when faced
of the corpse, it's up to the person who didn't
know the now dead person to handle things. Clay had
done it for me once when we found agnes O Deed.
I'd done it for him a year later, when it
had been Sammy with his guts on the wrong side
(24:38):
of a knife wound. Can you pick the lock, Britt asked.
Clay always said you were good at shit like that, probably,
I said. I pulled a screwdriver from my pack, a
large Philip's head with a rubber grip. I took my
shirt off, wrapped it around my good hand and jabbed
at the corner of the window to break the glass.
It broke with that strange thud that surprises me every time,
(25:00):
nothing like the sound you hear in movies. You've got
to break glass against glass to get a noise like that.
I reached through and unlocked the window, opened it stepped inside.
Brynn came in directly after. Some people respond to crisis
by shutting down or running. Some people respond to crisis emotionally,
which is probably the healthiest way. Myself, I handled crisis
(25:23):
by shoving fear and sadness and worry down as far
into my gut as I could. It's never nice, and
all that nasty shit comes up as trauma later, but
the practice has kept me alive. Brynn, she was made
of the same stuff as me, maybe sterner. She went
directly to the corpse started searching her friend for wounds.
They weren't hard to find. Four bullet holes marked her
(25:45):
sleeveless white blouse. All were on her torso, two on
her chest, one near her hip, one in between. You
know anything about forensics, Brynn asked, No, I said, neither
do I, But I know enough about shooting to tell
you that that's a pretty fuck off bad shot grouping.
While Brin saw to Rebecca, I scoured the rest of
the one room shack. A mattress lay on the floor
(26:07):
in the corner. A bookshelf was filled to overfull with
dried and tinctured herbs and jars and dropper bottles, plantain
and ragwart and fever few, plus flowers and leaves I
couldn't recognize, hung drying from line stretched across the space.
The wood burning stove was cold since it was June,
that didn't tell me much. An antique desk, the only
(26:29):
piece of furniture in the room not handbuilt from scrap lumber,
took up most of one wall. Under a bank of windows.
A ladder led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Something
like a dozen well carved wooden figurines of deer littered
the desktop, each no larger than my palm. They were
stained blood red. A piece of cardboard dripped from a
(26:50):
case of beer served as a cutting mat and a
staining mat. It looked like with silhouettes of dark stain
and gathered chips of wood. The carving tools themselves were
scattered all over the floor. Rebecca's corpse was close to
where I stood. My mind wouldn't forget that fact for
long enough to concentrate on anything else. Bullet holes pierced
the plywood along the back wall. The bullets went out
(27:13):
the back, I said, running my finger along the splintered wood.
Who the fuck, Brynn said Eric. I said, we don't
know that. Yeah, we do, I said, who the hell else? Kestrel, maybe,
but I bet it was Eric. Brynn closed Rebecca's eyes,
then kept searching the body. She has a knife in
her hand, carving knife. Tears welled up, catching me by surprise.
(27:38):
Here was a woman cut down by a man afraid
of her power. She'd fought back knife versus gun. I
never got to meet her, I said, I've got the
feeling I really missed out. Yeah, Brynn said, I want
to kill him. I said, it was true, a simple thing,
a clear epiphany. I wanted to kill Eric for killing
(28:01):
this woman, even though it could have been Kestrel. I
wanted to kill Eric for killing her. Eulxe might do
it for you, Brynn said, imagine his thinking. I said,
he's got to have thought this through. Killing Rebecca means
saving Eulyxe means he's doomed himself to being killed by Eulixe.
Imagine being so sure of the righteousness of your cause
(28:21):
you're willing to sacrifice your own ideals to achieve them.
Every politician ever, Brynn said, every authoritarian communist. He killed
her in cold blood. I said, I couldn't think straight
killed her. She came up and wrapped her arms around me,
and I buried my head into her chest, and my
anger turned into something like sorrow. I cried, standing over
(28:43):
the body of her friend. She supported me. We've got
to get back, I said, pulling away. I stepped out
of the treehouse. The air outside was fresh, cleansing. Bryn
joined me, and I went to the latter and looked down.
Eulyxe stood silent, staring up at us from the ground.
There was a hammock on the porch. On the roof,
(29:03):
thick cotton rope held our weight, and our feet dangled
over the edge, like we were teenagers on a date
instead of squatters hiding from a demon in a corpse.
I can't stay there all day, I said. I had
a friend in town about six months back. You know
how you think you know somebody and then they just
do something awful, beat their partner, abuse someone something like that. Yeah,
(29:24):
I said, so this guy I lived with, my friend Greg.
I liked him all right. He was friendly, hard working,
really polite. His partner Sam, no one liked her. She
used to throw shit fits at general assembly, horde booze
from the everything for everyone, that kind of thing. She
worked hard too, I guess, but I don't know. She
just rubbed everyone the wrong way. She and Greg had
been together maybe three months, when one night they were
(29:46):
drunk and he raped her. I don't know if he
thought he raped her, but that never really matters. She
didn't want to have sex with him that night, and
he did it anyway. Yeah, it doesn't really matter what
he thinks about that. The next day, the very next day,
before she's even told anyone, Greg walks outside her house
and there's Ulxe just standing on the porch, just looking
at him. He goes to the fuck back inside, and
(30:08):
he waits elixes out there, not moving until sunset. The
rest of us come and go, But that fucking deer
was just waiting for and watching him. What happened as
soon as night fell, Sam drove him up to Minneapolis,
kicked him out of the car and said if she
ever saw him again, she'd kill him herself. I whistled.
Moral of the story is that Ulixie most definitely can
(30:29):
stay there all day. We're not predators, I said, no.
But we're hunting for a way to dismiss it, aren't we.
I can see why you all kind of like having
it around, though, with a story like that, I'm not
going to tell you it hasn't been nice, Bryn said,
up until the point when it wasn't. I'm always so
quick to resort to violence, I said, I'm not ashamed
of that. I think it's necessary sometimes, but damn, it'd
(30:52):
be nice to be able to just quit violence cold Turkey,
let a spell take care of it for me. There's
no magic bullet, though, Brynn said, never was, never will be.
I agreed. It should have been a beautiful day. It
was warm enough that the breeze felt good, but not
hot enough to be uncomfortable. Fuck, I said, how are
we going to dismiss it now? I guess that's up
(31:12):
to doomsday.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
We were halfway up to the canopy and I could
see the forest, in the river, in the prairie in
the distance. More herbs hung drying all around us, and
their scents combined to be just short of overwhelming. More important,
Brynn sat next to me, all worked up to sweating
from everything, and her smell was overwhelming. She had her
arm around the small of my waist, mine was around
(31:36):
her back. Let me see your hand, she said, No,
it's fine. The bandana was still wrapped tight around the wound.
My palm's still hurt, but I wasn't ready to look
at it. There was an awful lot of shit going
on just then that I wasn't ready to let myself
think too much about God. I wish you'd showed up
like a month ago or something. Brynn said, what do
you mean. It'd be nice to get to know you proper,
(31:59):
Bryn said, instead of like this. Oh you don't like
demon hunting with me? I asked. Brynn giggled. I looked
at her, and she must have gotten self conscious about giggling,
because she started giggling harder, covering her face and laughing.
She fell onto her side in the hammock, and I
had my arms around her and I started laughing too.
What a fucking day, I said, What a fucking day?
(32:20):
She agreed. We both fell asleep like that, curled up
on the hammock. I dreamt about jail. A few hours later,
I broke out of dream jail by waking up, but
I was still trapped. I peered over the edge of
the treehouse roof and Elixie peered right back at me.
The bowl was beside him. That woke me up all
(32:40):
the way, and I looked to the trees around me.
Squirrels and birds all on dead, sat silent on the branches,
not ten feet from my head, all staring at me
with their glossy eyes like as not. They'd been there
for hours already, and they didn't seem to want to attack,
just watch, just bore into me. Bryn was snoring, her
(33:00):
head crane back. I trusted her. I realized everything around
me was terrifying and none of it made sense, but
Brinn seemed to accept it, and I was learning to
accept her. Freedom ran on trust. I needed to trust someone.
I flipped through Clay's notebook, his handwriting only grace. Twelve pages.
(33:21):
On each he'd written the same single line, The only
way out is through the last page had another line
underneath the first. What hand dare sees the fire. He'd
always been saying shit like that. When you needed advice,
he was always there saying something needlessly cryptic but reasonably wise.
(33:42):
I wish he'd listened to his own advice, though, I
wish he'd kept going. I wish he'd found his way
through Sitting there then, with the sun dappled through the
leaves and the needles of the forest, I tried to
piece out what had happened to him at his funeral.
I thought he'd given up because there wasn't any future
in writing the Rails. But that wasn't it. It couldn't
(34:02):
be it. That was me seeing more of me and
him than there really was. Motherfucker had spent fifteen years
looking for the hobo utopia the Big Rock Candy Mountain,
until he just gave up and made the place. Then
he defended it with the witchcraft he knew. Then he'd
run away. Then he'd done Eulix's work all on his
own and ended his own life. Why. Maybe because he'd
(34:26):
been exiled from Paradise by a beast of his own making.
Maybe because he decided freedom was home and he couldn't
come back. That's what having a home will do to you.
Maybe I dropped the notebook onto the hammock. Brynn woke up.
The only way out is through, I said, pardon, I
should brin the pages. We did all this and we've
(34:46):
got nothing, nothing from Clay, nothing from Rebecca, and we
can't get home to warn anyone there's a killer on
the loose. That's funny, Brynn said, that's not the quote. Quote.
He says the best way out is always through. And
I agree to that, or in so far is that
I can see no way out but through. It's from
a Robert Frost poem, A Servant to Servants. It's a
(35:09):
true statement, I guess, I said, But doesn't do us
any good. He got the other one closer. What the
hand dare? Seize the fire? The Tiger by William Blake?
That line mean anything to you, I asked, Hell, it
means even less to me than the Robert Frost. Clay
moved into the gas station because he was studying Eulixie right,
trying to learn how to dismiss it. Yeah, and the
(35:32):
only thing he wrote down, I said, And all that
time was some misquoted poetry. I guess here, come downstairs
with me. I went to the hatch in the roof,
opened it and climbed down the ladder. The house stank
of death, leaving us gagging, and I opened all the
windows that could be opened. We tried our best not
to stare at the dead woman on the floor for
(35:53):
a few hours more. We just had to keep ourselves
from thinking too hard about her. These, I said, pointing
to the twelve deer figurines on the desk, What do
you make of these? She was obsessed, Brent said, half
the town is obsessed. Though she held up her hand
showing me her eulixe tattoo. I picked up one of
the red figures and on a whim, lined it up
(36:15):
to the dark outlines of stain on the cardboard that
marked word had been painted. I did the same with
the rest, a sort of simple jigsaw puzzle. They formed
a circle, each facing clockwise. The figure at one o'clock
was on its side, and the figure at twelve stood
over it, its mouth down by the other's ribs, like
it was killing it, like it was eating its heart.
(36:38):
I don't know what it means, I said, I don't
think it's a coincidence, though Clay writing twelve pages and
Rebecca carving twelve figurines. Now, I don't suppose it is, oh,
I said, twelve pages, twelve figures, twelve months, Solstice to solstice.
It's just telling us that her only chance is tomorrow,
which we already knew, which we already knew. She agreed, hooray.
(37:04):
But what are they gonna do?
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Robert Evans, Well, I don't know, Margaret, but you, being
my friend who always has a cryptic response to everything
anyone says, I'm excited to find out.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
Yeah. When I first started writing these two characters is
a very long time ago. I've been writing Clay and
Daniel Kine for like, just since I was like twenty,
and Clay was always the guy standing there with cryptic
things to say. I think I'm just trying to grow
into him. What are you say?
Speaker 2 (37:40):
I do? Like that. One of the through lines here
is you've got there's both like a lot of focus
on how careful these punk kids are with their guns
and how not careful they are with magic, which yeah,
I enjoy. Like one of them is the very like
because the harm and the danger is incredibly clear with
(38:00):
a gun, Right, You've got like an end and the
thing comes out of the end and you want to
be real careful that nothing is in front of that
end that you don't want things through, whereas the magic
is much much less unclear and how it functions in
some ways, and so it leads to this kind of
I don't know, maybe recklessness on behalf of the protagonists.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
Oh that is interesting. I no, that makes sense to me.
And it's a kind of like, you know, like maybe
by the time there's ten of these books, they'll be
like going around and teaching magic safety classes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Well, it's also it's interesting just because there's also a
very I mean a very punk attitude towards it. Like
I think about the ways in which, like a lot
of the older anarchist punks that I know treat the police,
the kind of like the great care and sort of
like wariness with which they treat the police, and then
the recklessness with which they treat something like a train totally.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah. Yeah, Oh, better be careful there's police around.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Be real, like I'm gonna hop on this moving beast.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Yeah, and if you get scared, just drink some whiskey
and that'll help you jump on.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
Yeah, that'll get you straight.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
God.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
I like definitely I always had two rules about train hopping.
You don't hop on while it's moving, and you always
hop on sober until the one day when the only
way to get out of Milwaukee was to hop on
a moving train. And so I was scared. So we
all drank whiskey in order to get unscared. Don't do
what I did.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
It was bad.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
I almost saw my friend get sucked under the wheels,
and someone, the kid who was showing us the hopout spot,
like pulled her back away from the fucking wheels.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Now.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
I did an interview that has always stuck with me
when I was at Cracked for an article with this
young woman in a Boulder who was doing train hopping
on the college campus and went just timed it badly
and lost both their legs. Yeah. The older punk she
was jumping with was a former Army medic and tourniqueted
her legs like on the spot. Is the only reason
(40:06):
she didn't die. Yeah, and then got blamed. He like
got blamed because he was the older one, yeah, like
inciting her to jump, and she was like, well, no,
I was. Everyone did this, all of the dumb kids.
We all did train hopping. He's he didn't get me killed.
He's the only reason I didn't die. Yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
If you're listening, don't jump on moving trains, and.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Don't jump on moving trains, do it sober. But also
do be careful with your guns too.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Yes, yeah, totally and magic probably if that's real. I
don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Oh, I was going to advise people to be real
reckless with that shit.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Yeah, okay, yeah, you know, yeah, what could go wrong?
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yeah? Well all right, Margaret, Well that's uh, that's this
episode in the in the can.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
Ye see you all next Sunday for another episode of
cool Zone book clothes right with the vocal Friday. That's
an important part of them. Yeah, yeah, I'm.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at Coolzonmedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Full Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to It Could Happen Here Book Club. I'm Robert Evans.
This is a podcast about things falling apart, and this
is our special weekend edition of It Could Happen Here,
where Margaret Killjoy and myself sit down and read a story. Well,
Margaret reads the story at this point, I am listening
(00:25):
to it. Presumably the format we'll switch up at some point,
but right now, Margaret, how are we? I'm excited for
part three of the first Daniel Kine book. Are you
excited to give it to me?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I am excited to give it to you, Robert. And
you know, when we switch up the format, you'll just
make up a story as we go, well, like at
the stop in the middle of the chapter, and then
you just make up what happens. Yeah, I guess that's
just called Dungeons and Dragons. Actually, oh yeah, we could
call it Dungeons and Dragons. I was just gonna read
(00:58):
from one of my Thomas Pension books because no one
else is act no one's no one has actually ever
finished one, so it'll it'll be as if I'm I'm
just making up a story. I admit I've never finished
a Thomas Bench no.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
No, of course not why there's things to do in
the world. Markret you gotta finish at Thomas Pinsion book.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
As I get older, I have more interest in, like
finally sitting down and reading War and Peace and all
that shit.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
But I just keep looking at my copy of Alan
Moore's Jerusalem and going one day.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
One day exactly, that'll be like when we're finally and
we'll do the book club version, will be like a
book club presents War and Peace followed by Jerusalem followed
by infinite jest.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, yeah, finally. Or we'll get Jamie loftus On for
that one. She loves reading infinitsh jest.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Or we'll read novella's by I once ran my I
won't tell people I once ran one of my books through.
What grade level is this adult book that I wrote?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
And I was very proud to say that one of
my books was written at a fifth or sixth grade
reading level.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Oh you need baby, I did all my real important
reading by the time I was six.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Great.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I've actually been I'm friends with this baby now, so
I've been reading some uh Doctor Seuss with her, and man,
those are good books. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, there's a
lot of the human human condition contained with an hop
on pop. I hadn't realized.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Once you move up to shel Silverstein m oh now, yeah,
directly from there to Danielle Kine.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
That's right, the Shell Silverstein of Vaguely Lovecrafty and Horror,
the action Punk.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
I'd say Shell silver wrote that Scooby Doo. I don't know.
I I gave up on asterisk punk.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah. I uh, that's that's the next AI generated thing
I would like to see Shelf Silverstein's Scooby do.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
So where we last left our heroes, We're starting with
chapter five. Everyone else will have just heard, presumably like
a week ago, chapter four, but we haven't heard it
in a moment because there was a break between recordings.
And so Daniel Caine is showed up to a town.
There's a three antler deer that's goring people, and some
(03:25):
people in the town love it, and some people in
the town hate it, and the town is gearing up
for some conflict. Chapter five, My second night in Freedom
began more somberly than my first. It was well after
dark by the time Vulture showed up with potatoes and
onions and spring greens to be cooked before heading back
(03:46):
to the lookout rock. The days in Brn were in
the living room working through plans, which left me alone
to cook. I was happy to spend some time in
the kitchen. It had been a long time since I've
been surrounded by people living the way I wanted to live,
and I was almost able to convince myself that things
were going to be fine. I've got a long history
of scraping together little moments of peace in the midst
of hardship, and cooking is a great way to do that.
(04:10):
I cubed the potatoes, and, alongside lots of garlic and oil,
set them in a pan in the oven. I went
through their spice rack and realized half of what they
had had been grown, dried, and chopped here in town.
I let myself get lost in the smell of fresh
and dried herbs. The Brussels sprouts were from the food bank,
but were going to taste amazing regardless. I cut them up,
(04:31):
drizzled them with oil and salt, put them in the
second tray. I've made fancier meals in my life, but
it still felt good. I set the old fashioned kitchen
timer and went to join everyone else. You can't figure
it out, Brune asked, she was pacing. She didn't strike
me as the typoo worried much, but she was worried.
Even Doomsday looked paler than usual. She leaned back in
(04:52):
her easy chair, feigning nonchalance, but her teacup trembled in
her hand. I didn't leave the ritual. I was blindfolded.
I've spent and all day pouring over my books and
there's nothing there. Nothing, nothing about dismissing a spirit, Brene asked,
Or nothing about you, Lyxi. Nothing. Thursday was standing statuesque
at his partner's side. There was certainly more to their
(05:14):
relationship than him trying his hardest to guard her. I
was sure, but times call for us to fulfill certain roles.
Will Rebecca know how, Burne asked. I don't think so,
Doomsday said. Vulture went to warn her last night, and
how did he put it? She's gone paranoid. Jet fuel
can't melt steel beams. Level paranoid made him show her
(05:36):
his ribs, Vulture said, And I agree that you only
get that kind of paranoid when you've just got no
agency at all, when you wish you had control over
your life, but you just don't. She and Clay planned
the ritual together. I don't know that either of them
wouldn't know how to do it alone. What are our options,
Bern asked, If we leave town take Rebecca with us,
(05:57):
will it come after us? Thursday asked it probably can't,
Doomsday said, but it's a moot point. I won't leave
without cleaning up my own mess. Rebecca's place is warded, too,
Thursday asked, Eulyxie can't get her if you and Rebecca
stay inside, what's it going to do? Nothing? Attack the
people close to you. I have no idea, Doomsday said.
(06:18):
She set down her tee untouched, then pulled her feet
up onto the chair and hugged her knees. Where are
Clay's notebooks? I asked? People turned to me, realizing for
the first time I was in the room. The only
thing he liked more than the sound of his own
voice was the sight of his own handwriting, I said.
When he died, he didn't have any of his journals
on him. They lived with Anchor for a while. Brynn said.
(06:41):
They broke up last winter, and Clay took it kind
of badly. No one knows what they were fighting about
though for a year and a half they were inseparable.
Then a week of quarreling and it was over. They
were fighting about Ulixe. Doomsday said anchor, worshiped it as
it was, didn't need to know anything more about it.
Clay wanted to understand it, so he moved into the
basement of that gas station down by the bridge where
(07:03):
it lives. He moved in with it. I asked, Doomsday nodded,
So if Clay left notebooks, they'd be there. Doomsday nodded.
We have to go get them, bring them to Rebecca.
Doomsday was lost in thought. Slowly she nodded the dear thing.
I said, it's only up during the day, right, powerless
(07:26):
at night.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
I'll go.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Now, when you know you're going to do something anyway,
it's better not to overthink it. Definitely better not to
let your mind linger on the cost benefit analysis. But
going to find his notebooks got me closer to solving
both my problems all at once. I could find out
what happened to Clay, and I could help this Rebecca person.
Dismiss Youlxy and hope Doomsday wasn't going to summon something worse,
(07:48):
something that lived up to her name. I'll take you,
Brynn said, I'll lend you my gun in case the
ghouls are out, Doomsday said. She crossed the room and
went up the stairs. I didn't want the rules to
be out, neither of we have to do this. Thursday said, yeah,
we do, Brynn said. Doomsday came down the stairs two
at a time, her hand on the banister. It's gone,
(08:10):
she said, my gun's gone. Anyone else would have asked
Thursday if he'd put it away the night before, But
Doomsday didn't even entertain the possibility that our partner would
have handled the fire army responsibly. Eric, Brynn said during
the funeral. Now, Doomsday said, we saw him the entire time,
except maybe the ten minutes we stepped away. He stayed
there the whole time. I said, Eric, wouldn't know we
(08:33):
had a gun, wouldn't know where it would be. He's
never in the house, Kestrol, I said, wasn't it at
the funeral the whole time too? Thursday asked, I knew
I was the most likely third suspect, and what I
was about to tell them wasn't gonna help. No, I said,
Kestrel wasn't there. At the end, I told them about
meeting Eric, about our conversation in the park, about how
Kestrel showed up late. He'd had plenty of time to
(08:55):
steal the gun. It's not nice to wrap people out
like that, but it's also not nice to steal people's guns.
Doom Thursday said, can we keep you away from the windows?
Maybe take Brinn's room. He climbed up on the couch
to lock the window. Likely there were bars ready to
go over the doors. There's not a squatter alive who
hasn't been through their house and analyzed all the ways
(09:16):
the police might break in. Hell, usually we've already broken
in once ourselves. Thursday left to secure the house against
human intruders, and Doomsday made her way, defeated up the stairs.
Brenn and I stood in the living room, facing one another,
getting ready to head into the night. The kitchen timer
went off, dinner was ready, no one was in the
(09:37):
mood to enjoy it. We walked down the middle of
the street and I was calmer than I thought i'd be,
probably because I had a plan. I had something I
was going to do. I wore my pack emptied, but
for some essentials we had no idea how many books
we'd be trying to bring with us, so the extra
storage was important. It had been dark for hours, and
I scanned the power lines with those creepy ghoul birds.
(10:00):
Either they weren't there or I couldn't see them. What
I did see were torches below us, coming up from
the river. People were walking with torches. I counted a
dozen specks of flame dancing through the night. Brynn saw
them too, mourners, she said, people celebrating Eulyxe. What it's
a tradition, Brynn said, any other night, it wouldn't be
(10:21):
something sinister. Hell, two days ago, I would have been
with them. But tonight it can't be good. She led
the way off the street through a front yard sculpture
garden of rusted reebar animals Eulyxe and as ghouls I
recognize now. We took shelter in an ivy covered roofless
house and peered back out at the street through what
(10:41):
was left of a window and what was left of
a kitchen. The torches came around the bend. Nine adults
and three children bore them, each with a homemade animal mask.
Goats and geese, sparrows and sheep. One of the figures
stood head and shoulders above the crowd. They marched past
us in silence. When they turned the next bend in
(11:02):
the road, we left our shelter and started back down
the hill. The basement door, I learned, was just off
the river, near the base of the bridge. We scrambled
down a steep path, then hopped from rock to rock
along the edge of the water. The trees were thick
down here. The gibbus moon cast enough light that we
could make our way without turning on our headlamps. A
(11:23):
breeze brought the earthy smell of the forest, and the
river was a white noise that drowned out all other
ambient sound. What's in it for you, Berne asked, as
she clambered over a fallen tree. Why aren't you skipping town?
For some of the last months of Clay's life, he'd
walked this path every morning and night. You know there's
a part of me that hates this place, I asked.
(11:45):
It was rhetorical, of course, and brendan answer, I'm too
stubborn to give up traveling. Clay wasn't that same stubbornness
is going to carry me through I came here to
find out what happened to him. I'm going to I
clambered over a fallen log, the bar digging into my hands.
And also, this is clearly the most important reason. Could
(12:05):
you imagine just leaving now, never learning what's going to happen?
The fear of missing out would rip my heart out
of my chest as surely as that deer. Brynn laughed.
I like when she laughed. We continued on along the water,
and I heard the dry heave of gold animals. I
never would have expected that would be a sound I'd
come to recognize. We crouched low, peered into the woods.
(12:27):
We're almost there, Brynn said. She pointed. The base of
the gas station went all the way down to the water,
and a chain link fence stood between us and the
door with a simple unlocked gate. When I focused, I
could just make out a dozen silhouettes between us and
(12:48):
where we wanted to go. Goats and geese, squirrels and
sheep in all respects, but for their lack of organs
and ribs. They acted like every barnyard animal I'd ever met,
annoying and fully aware of the sorrow and emptiness of
their captive lives. They're awake, I said, Should we go
around in through the front. Bryn shook her head. The
(13:11):
trap door to the basement is welded shut. Should we,
I don't know herd them somewhere, get them away from
the door. Bryn, still crouching, flicked open her extendable baton.
I sighed, then extended mine. The weight felt good in
my hand. Most days, a baton made me think I
could take on the world. That night, though I wasn't
(13:33):
so sure it was going to be enough. I wouldn't
fight a single living goat by choice, let alone an
undead one with all its friends. Brynn stood back up
straight and walked right toward our destination. Always afraid, never
a coward, I mumbled to myself. My blood started racing.
I stood up, tightened all the straps of my pack,
(13:53):
and followed. Animal eyes turned toward us with mute curiosity,
which turned to malice as we had to rush past them.
A silent mess of geese got underfoot and lunged for
my hands. I started swinging. It was an animal abuse.
They were dead already. Some of the ones I hit
didn't get up again. Brynn was almost to the gate.
(14:14):
When the goat ran at me, someone or something had
sheared off the beast's horns, presumably before Eulixie had stolen
the creature's rib cage. Not an easy life, or on
life or whatever. I pulled back and swung from the
hip like a one handed batter and hit the goat
in the skull with all my strength. I must have
grown up watching too many zombie movies. Hitting that thing's
(14:35):
skull was like hitting a bowlder, and I probably hurt
my hand more than I hurt the goat. Still, the
blow seemed to have stopped its charge. It was still
in my way. It tried to bleat, but it had
no lungs. I heard a low rumble, like distant thunder,
and turned in time to see a demon bull crash
out of the trees and barrel toward us. Oh fuck,
(14:57):
I said, or Brynn said. I started thrashing at the
dumb goat in front of me with the baton. It
bit my hand and I dropped the weapon. I dove
over it, but my backpack destroyed my attempts at a
smooth acrobatic roll, and I landed on my back. Brynn
helped me to my feet and we were through the gate.
I swung it shut, dropped the latch, and was knocked
off my feet as the bowl slammed into the chain length.
(15:20):
The fence post bent to a forty five degree angle,
and the beast backed up to charge again. I got
up again, clutching my bleeding right hand, and we stumbled
in through the open door to the basement and slammed
it behind us. As though that pitch dark room offered
us safety, we switched on our head lamps. It was
a single, large room, like any basement in any shitty
(15:42):
house anywhere. A water heater and a furnace and pipe
stood out from one wall, and a box spring and
mattress lay on the floor in the near corner, with
simple gray sheets and a pile of ratty old comforters.
A milk crate served as a bedside table, and a
short stack of books stood atop against the far wall.
A blood red deer with three antlers lay sleeping upon
(16:05):
a knee high pile of rib bones. As soon as
my head lamp flashed across Eulyxe, I put my hand
over my light, but the demon didn't stir. With the
sun below the horizon, he likely couldn't move at all.
The bile rose in my throat. The bones Eulyxes slept
on weren't the pale white of long dead, sun bleached corpses.
(16:27):
They were gray and yellow and gristly. Some of them,
I surmised were human. Let me see your hand, Brynn said,
you're hurt. It's fine, I said. I hadn't really looked
to tell if that was true, but I didn't want
to look, not until I was somewhere safe. It wasn't
bleeding horrendously. I wrapped my wounded hand with the bandana
(16:48):
from my back pocket, tight enough to keep pressure on
the bite. Don't want you turning into a wear goat
or something. Though Brynn laughed, it was a nervous laugh,
probably because, well, I don't think either of us knew
for certain if that was an actual possibility. It'll be fine,
I whispered. I went to the books beside Clay's bed
while Brent stood watch. There was a copy of twenty
(17:09):
thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the copy I had given him.
I opened the front page, saw my own handwriting, Clay,
maybe you'll get as much out of this as I
did under it. He'd written back, Danielle, I think at
the end of it, you're more nemo than I. It
took all my presence of mind not to drop the book.
(17:31):
Had he known I would come hunting after his ghost
and end up looking through his bedside reading. More likely,
he'd just written a note absent mindedly for Fox's sake.
What did I know about the world anymore? The next
book was history, something about the Kronstat Rebellion, obscure Russian history,
when the Bolsheviks decided to kill all the anarchist sailors.
I flipped through it. No notes to me, but here
(17:52):
and there he'd highlighted passages. Last a spiral bound notebook,
the first couple pages were filled with some college kid's
English literature notes. A decade back, Clay had shown me
that trick Punk's Christmas, he called it. When the school
year ended, college kids threw out everything from unopened food
to art supplies, to furniture, to computers to well, obviously notebooks.
(18:14):
Head on over to the dumpsters, pick up anything you need.
After the wrote transcription of some boring lecture in a
stranger's hand. However, I saw a page with Clay's handwriting
on it. I threw the books into my backpack. From
outside the open door, I heard birds, dawn, shit. Brenn
and I had the same thought at the same time,
(18:35):
and we grabbed one another and bolted across the room
to crouch behind the furnace. A row of small windows
lined the top of one wall. The first hint of
color and light came through them a moment later, and
Eulix stirred. The sheer, unrid reality of the situation took
off the worst of my anxiety. Brynn held my good
(18:56):
hands so tight it hurt almost as bad as the
one the goat had bitten. And we watched you, Lixey
rise to face the day for all the world. He
moved like a regular deer, graceful but nervous. If he
knew we were there, he made no sign. Instead, he
headed for the door and was gone. We crouched in
the encroaching dawn, our hands locked together, are breathing as
(19:19):
quiet as we could make it, for full two minutes
before we left to find Rebecca's tree house. A squatter's
life is ruled by darkness, breaking into buildings, digging through trash,
even just sneaking up onto rooftops to see the city.
(19:40):
All those things are easier and safer to do after dark.
But the sun was up as we marched along and
then away from the river the day before summer solstice.
It was going to be up for a long while. Still,
I trained my eyes on the woods for movement. Walking
in the forest, you don't see most of the animals
only once I saw something. Something in the branches above us.
Could have been a squirrel or a bird. Hell could
(20:02):
have been a mountain lion. Better a living mountain lion
than an undead squirrel. After twenty minutes along the river bank,
it was an hour's high cup to a ravine. There
was another way to Rebecca's place, a path that ran
up over the top of the hill, but it would
have taken us through town. We needed to get Clay's
notes to Rebecca so she could figure out how to
perform the ritual, and we couldn't risk running into Ulixe
(20:24):
or Eric. Brynn led us unerringly with a compass and
a laminated US Geographical Survey map. Having a destination Rebecca's
treehouse and an idea of how to get there where
about all I had to prop up my waning courage
While we walked, I let myself wonder more about Eric
and Kestrel. They said doomsday and the rest they were
going to summon something worse. I'd play it by ear,
(20:46):
I decided, listen to Rebecca, decide how much to trust her.
We stopped only once to pick at the previous night's
dinner from tupperware. Brynn had a few bottles of cold
coffee and caffeine did its best to replace the adrenaline
that have been slowly draining out of my system since
we left the basement. I love coffee, she said, smiling.
(21:07):
I know it's been all to say. I know I'm addicted.
I know everyone loves it. I don't care. There's only
a small handful of things in this world that make
me happy, and coffee is one of them. What's another,
I asked. We're both slightly delirious. She thought about it
for a while. Shit like feeling useful or not paying rent, right,
(21:27):
But I'll stick with weaknesses romance novels. I fucking love
trashy romance. The straighter the better, the worse the politics,
the better. I'll just eat that shit up. That's awesome,
I said, your turn, she said. We capped, the coffee
started back up the ravine. I want to say horizons
because as often as not, the chance to get over
(21:48):
the closest one is what gets me up in the morning.
But you told me about romance novels, so I'll do
you one better. Fan fiction, erotic, queer fan fiction. I
don't even care what fandom. Give me someone getting on
with a werewolf, of a seahorse, unicorn, whatever, and I'll
be happy. Really, I read it on my phone. I said,
you know I'm gonna have to make fun of you
(22:09):
about this, right, you won't be the first one. I said,
I'm gonna make fun of you about it, but I
still want you to read it aloud to me as
soon as we get back to phone signal. I promised. God.
My wiring was all kinds of fucked up for the
rest of the hike, going crazy from lack of sleep.
I was happier than I'd been in months. The treehouse
(22:31):
was a beautiful little witch shack, held a full thirty
feet aloft between four narrow pines. Its siding had been
blowtorched to black during the finishing process, and there was
one porch on the side of the house and another
on the roof. The windows were mixed matched and erratically placed.
A rope and wood ladder dangled down, inviting us up.
(22:51):
A black stovepipe thrust out and up from the side
and on the east slope of the hill like that,
I knew it got a full view of Dawn in
love Rebecca. Bryn had her tattooed hands up of her
mouth to project her voice. Rebecca, maybe she's in town,
I asked, after a few fruitless minutes, you heard vulture.
(23:12):
She's not going anywhere for a while. There's a wardstone
there keeps you Lisie out. Brynn pointed to a single
white stone about the size of my head. A circle
suddenly etched onto its face. Not sure why the ladder
is down. Though she tested the ladder, it held her weight,
so she made her way up. I followed. The house
(23:33):
was even more gorgeous up close. Rebecca had done an
amazing job, down to details like filigree carved into the
doorframe and an oreboris painted on the door. Brynn knocked.
No answer, Rebecca, she shouted, I don't think she's here,
I said, pointing to a padlock that held the door shut. Shit,
Brynn said, stomping her foot on the porch and shaking
(23:54):
the trees we were attached to. She went to the
nearest window, peered in. She fell trembling. If it weren't
for the railing, she might have fallen off the porch.
I looked. The sun lit the floor in big squares
where it came through the windows, and in one of
those squares was a dead woman. She lay on her side,
with her eyes open, her mouth open. She was so small,
(24:17):
almost childlike, but I could see in the lines in
her face she had lived at least a decade longer
than me. I knew the hard way that when faced
of the corpse, it's up to the person who didn't
know the now dead person to handle things. Clay had
done it for me once when we found agnes O Deed.
I'd done it for him a year later, when it
had been Sammy with his guts on the wrong side
(24:38):
of a knife wound. Can you pick the lock, Britt asked.
Clay always said you were good at shit like that, probably,
I said. I pulled a screwdriver from my pack, a
large Philip's head with a rubber grip. I took my
shirt off, wrapped it around my good hand and jabbed
at the corner of the window to break the glass.
It broke with that strange thud that surprises me every time,
(25:00):
nothing like the sound you hear in movies. You've got
to break glass against glass to get a noise like that.
I reached through and unlocked the window, opened it stepped inside.
Brynn came in directly after. Some people respond to crisis
by shutting down or running. Some people respond to crisis emotionally,
which is probably the healthiest way. Myself, I handled crisis
(25:23):
by shoving fear and sadness and worry down as far
into my gut as I could. It's never nice, and
all that nasty shit comes up as trauma later, but
the practice has kept me alive. Brynn, she was made
of the same stuff as me, maybe sterner. She went
directly to the corpse started searching her friend for wounds.
They weren't hard to find. Four bullet holes marked her
(25:45):
sleeveless white blouse. All were on her torso, two on
her chest, one near her hip, one in between. You
know anything about forensics, Brynn asked, No, I said, neither
do I, But I know enough about shooting to tell
you that that's a pretty fuck off bad shot grouping.
While Brin saw to Rebecca, I scoured the rest of
the one room shack. A mattress lay on the floor
(26:07):
in the corner. A bookshelf was filled to overfull with
dried and tinctured herbs and jars and dropper bottles, plantain
and ragwart and fever few, plus flowers and leaves I
couldn't recognize, hung drying from line stretched across the space.
The wood burning stove was cold since it was June,
that didn't tell me much. An antique desk, the only
(26:29):
piece of furniture in the room not handbuilt from scrap lumber,
took up most of one wall. Under a bank of windows.
A ladder led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Something
like a dozen well carved wooden figurines of deer littered
the desktop, each no larger than my palm. They were
stained blood red. A piece of cardboard dripped from a
(26:50):
case of beer served as a cutting mat and a
staining mat. It looked like with silhouettes of dark stain
and gathered chips of wood. The carving tools themselves were
scattered all over the floor. Rebecca's corpse was close to
where I stood. My mind wouldn't forget that fact for
long enough to concentrate on anything else. Bullet holes pierced
the plywood along the back wall. The bullets went out
(27:13):
the back, I said, running my finger along the splintered wood.
Who the fuck, Brynn said Eric. I said, we don't
know that. Yeah, we do, I said, who the hell else? Kestrel, maybe,
but I bet it was Eric. Brynn closed Rebecca's eyes,
then kept searching the body. She has a knife in
her hand, carving knife. Tears welled up, catching me by surprise.
(27:38):
Here was a woman cut down by a man afraid
of her power. She'd fought back knife versus gun. I
never got to meet her, I said, I've got the
feeling I really missed out. Yeah, Brynn said, I want
to kill him. I said, it was true, a simple thing,
a clear epiphany. I wanted to kill Eric for killing
(28:01):
this woman, even though it could have been Kestrel. I
wanted to kill Eric for killing her. Eulxe might do
it for you, Brynn said, imagine his thinking. I said,
he's got to have thought this through. Killing Rebecca means
saving Eulyxe means he's doomed himself to being killed by Eulixe.
Imagine being so sure of the righteousness of your cause
(28:21):
you're willing to sacrifice your own ideals to achieve them.
Every politician ever, Brynn said, every authoritarian communist. He killed
her in cold blood. I said, I couldn't think straight
killed her. She came up and wrapped her arms around me,
and I buried my head into her chest, and my
anger turned into something like sorrow. I cried, standing over
(28:43):
the body of her friend. She supported me. We've got
to get back, I said, pulling away. I stepped out
of the treehouse. The air outside was fresh, cleansing. Bryn
joined me, and I went to the latter and looked down.
Eulyxe stood silent, staring up at us from the ground.
There was a hammock on the porch. On the roof,
(29:03):
thick cotton rope held our weight, and our feet dangled
over the edge, like we were teenagers on a date
instead of squatters hiding from a demon in a corpse.
I can't stay there all day, I said. I had
a friend in town about six months back. You know
how you think you know somebody and then they just
do something awful, beat their partner, abuse someone something like that. Yeah,
(29:24):
I said, so this guy I lived with, my friend Greg.
I liked him all right. He was friendly, hard working,
really polite. His partner Sam, no one liked her. She
used to throw shit fits at general assembly, horde booze
from the everything for everyone, that kind of thing. She
worked hard too, I guess, but I don't know. She
just rubbed everyone the wrong way. She and Greg had
been together maybe three months, when one night they were
(29:46):
drunk and he raped her. I don't know if he
thought he raped her, but that never really matters. She
didn't want to have sex with him that night, and
he did it anyway. Yeah, it doesn't really matter what
he thinks about that. The next day, the very next day,
before she's even told anyone, Greg walks outside her house
and there's Ulxe just standing on the porch, just looking
at him. He goes to the fuck back inside, and
(30:08):
he waits elixes out there, not moving until sunset. The
rest of us come and go, But that fucking deer
was just waiting for and watching him. What happened as
soon as night fell, Sam drove him up to Minneapolis,
kicked him out of the car and said if she
ever saw him again, she'd kill him herself. I whistled.
Moral of the story is that Ulixie most definitely can
(30:29):
stay there all day. We're not predators, I said, no.
But we're hunting for a way to dismiss it, aren't we.
I can see why you all kind of like having
it around, though, with a story like that, I'm not
going to tell you it hasn't been nice, Bryn said,
up until the point when it wasn't. I'm always so
quick to resort to violence, I said, I'm not ashamed
of that. I think it's necessary sometimes, but damn, it'd
(30:52):
be nice to be able to just quit violence cold Turkey,
let a spell take care of it for me. There's
no magic bullet, though, Brynn said, never was, never will be.
I agreed. It should have been a beautiful day. It
was warm enough that the breeze felt good, but not
hot enough to be uncomfortable. Fuck, I said, how are
we going to dismiss it now? I guess that's up
(31:12):
to doomsday.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
We were halfway up to the canopy and I could
see the forest, in the river, in the prairie in
the distance. More herbs hung drying all around us, and
their scents combined to be just short of overwhelming. More important,
Brynn sat next to me, all worked up to sweating
from everything, and her smell was overwhelming. She had her
arm around the small of my waist, mine was around
(31:36):
her back. Let me see your hand, she said, No,
it's fine. The bandana was still wrapped tight around the wound.
My palm's still hurt, but I wasn't ready to look
at it. There was an awful lot of shit going
on just then that I wasn't ready to let myself
think too much about God. I wish you'd showed up
like a month ago or something. Brynn said, what do
you mean. It'd be nice to get to know you proper,
(31:59):
Bryn said, instead of like this. Oh you don't like
demon hunting with me? I asked. Brynn giggled. I looked
at her, and she must have gotten self conscious about giggling,
because she started giggling harder, covering her face and laughing.
She fell onto her side in the hammock, and I
had my arms around her and I started laughing too.
What a fucking day, I said, What a fucking day?
(32:20):
She agreed. We both fell asleep like that, curled up
on the hammock. I dreamt about jail. A few hours later,
I broke out of dream jail by waking up, but
I was still trapped. I peered over the edge of
the treehouse roof and Elixie peered right back at me.
The bowl was beside him. That woke me up all
(32:40):
the way, and I looked to the trees around me.
Squirrels and birds all on dead, sat silent on the branches,
not ten feet from my head, all staring at me
with their glossy eyes like as not. They'd been there
for hours already, and they didn't seem to want to attack,
just watch, just bore into me. Bryn was snoring, her
(33:00):
head crane back. I trusted her. I realized everything around
me was terrifying and none of it made sense, but
Brinn seemed to accept it, and I was learning to
accept her. Freedom ran on trust. I needed to trust someone.
I flipped through Clay's notebook, his handwriting only grace. Twelve pages.
(33:21):
On each he'd written the same single line, The only
way out is through the last page had another line
underneath the first. What hand dare sees the fire. He'd
always been saying shit like that. When you needed advice,
he was always there saying something needlessly cryptic but reasonably wise.
(33:42):
I wish he'd listened to his own advice, though, I
wish he'd kept going. I wish he'd found his way
through Sitting there then, with the sun dappled through the
leaves and the needles of the forest, I tried to
piece out what had happened to him at his funeral.
I thought he'd given up because there wasn't any future
in writing the Rails. But that wasn't it. It couldn't
(34:02):
be it. That was me seeing more of me and
him than there really was. Motherfucker had spent fifteen years
looking for the hobo utopia the Big Rock Candy Mountain,
until he just gave up and made the place. Then
he defended it with the witchcraft he knew. Then he'd
run away. Then he'd done Eulix's work all on his
own and ended his own life. Why. Maybe because he'd
(34:26):
been exiled from Paradise by a beast of his own making.
Maybe because he decided freedom was home and he couldn't
come back. That's what having a home will do to you.
Maybe I dropped the notebook onto the hammock. Brynn woke up.
The only way out is through, I said, pardon, I
should brin the pages. We did all this and we've
(34:46):
got nothing, nothing from Clay, nothing from Rebecca, and we
can't get home to warn anyone there's a killer on
the loose. That's funny, Brynn said, that's not the quote. Quote.
He says the best way out is always through. And
I agree to that, or in so far is that
I can see no way out but through. It's from
a Robert Frost poem, A Servant to Servants. It's a
(35:09):
true statement, I guess, I said, But doesn't do us
any good. He got the other one closer. What the
hand dare? Seize the fire? The Tiger by William Blake?
That line mean anything to you, I asked, Hell, it
means even less to me than the Robert Frost. Clay
moved into the gas station because he was studying Eulixie right,
trying to learn how to dismiss it. Yeah, and the
(35:32):
only thing he wrote down, I said, And all that
time was some misquoted poetry. I guess here, come downstairs
with me. I went to the hatch in the roof,
opened it and climbed down the ladder. The house stank
of death, leaving us gagging, and I opened all the
windows that could be opened. We tried our best not
to stare at the dead woman on the floor for
(35:53):
a few hours more. We just had to keep ourselves
from thinking too hard about her. These, I said, pointing
to the twelve deer figurines on the desk, What do
you make of these? She was obsessed, Brent said, half
the town is obsessed. Though she held up her hand
showing me her eulixe tattoo. I picked up one of
the red figures and on a whim, lined it up
(36:15):
to the dark outlines of stain on the cardboard that
marked word had been painted. I did the same with
the rest, a sort of simple jigsaw puzzle. They formed
a circle, each facing clockwise. The figure at one o'clock
was on its side, and the figure at twelve stood
over it, its mouth down by the other's ribs, like
it was killing it, like it was eating its heart.
(36:38):
I don't know what it means, I said, I don't
think it's a coincidence, though Clay writing twelve pages and
Rebecca carving twelve figurines. Now, I don't suppose it is, oh,
I said, twelve pages, twelve figures, twelve months, Solstice to solstice.
It's just telling us that her only chance is tomorrow,
which we already knew, which we already knew. She agreed, hooray.
(37:04):
But what are they gonna do?
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Robert Evans, Well, I don't know, Margaret, but you, being
my friend who always has a cryptic response to everything
anyone says, I'm excited to find out.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
Yeah. When I first started writing these two characters is
a very long time ago. I've been writing Clay and
Daniel Kine for like, just since I was like twenty,
and Clay was always the guy standing there with cryptic
things to say. I think I'm just trying to grow
into him. What are you say?
Speaker 2 (37:40):
I do? Like that. One of the through lines here
is you've got there's both like a lot of focus
on how careful these punk kids are with their guns
and how not careful they are with magic, which yeah,
I enjoy. Like one of them is the very like
because the harm and the danger is incredibly clear with
(38:00):
a gun, Right, You've got like an end and the
thing comes out of the end and you want to
be real careful that nothing is in front of that
end that you don't want things through, whereas the magic
is much much less unclear and how it functions in
some ways, and so it leads to this kind of
I don't know, maybe recklessness on behalf of the protagonists.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
Oh that is interesting. I no, that makes sense to me.
And it's a kind of like, you know, like maybe
by the time there's ten of these books, they'll be
like going around and teaching magic safety classes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Well, it's also it's interesting just because there's also a
very I mean a very punk attitude towards it. Like
I think about the ways in which, like a lot
of the older anarchist punks that I know treat the police,
the kind of like the great care and sort of
like wariness with which they treat the police, and then
the recklessness with which they treat something like a train totally.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah. Yeah, Oh, better be careful there's police around.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Be real, like I'm gonna hop on this moving beast.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Yeah, and if you get scared, just drink some whiskey
and that'll help you jump on.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
Yeah, that'll get you straight.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
God.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
I like definitely I always had two rules about train hopping.
You don't hop on while it's moving, and you always
hop on sober until the one day when the only
way to get out of Milwaukee was to hop on
a moving train. And so I was scared. So we
all drank whiskey in order to get unscared. Don't do
what I did.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
It was bad.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
I almost saw my friend get sucked under the wheels,
and someone, the kid who was showing us the hopout spot,
like pulled her back away from the fucking wheels.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Now.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
I did an interview that has always stuck with me
when I was at Cracked for an article with this
young woman in a Boulder who was doing train hopping
on the college campus and went just timed it badly
and lost both their legs. Yeah. The older punk she
was jumping with was a former Army medic and tourniqueted
her legs like on the spot. Is the only reason
(40:06):
she didn't die. Yeah, and then got blamed. He like
got blamed because he was the older one, yeah, like
inciting her to jump, and she was like, well, no,
I was. Everyone did this, all of the dumb kids.
We all did train hopping. He's he didn't get me killed.
He's the only reason I didn't die. Yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
If you're listening, don't jump on moving trains, and.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Don't jump on moving trains, do it sober. But also
do be careful with your guns too.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Yes, yeah, totally and magic probably if that's real. I
don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Oh, I was going to advise people to be real
reckless with that shit.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Yeah, okay, yeah, you know, yeah, what could go wrong?
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yeah? Well all right, Margaret, Well that's uh, that's this
episode in the in the can.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
Ye see you all next Sunday for another episode of
cool Zone book clothes right with the vocal Friday. That's
an important part of them. Yeah, yeah, I'm.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at Coolzonmedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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