by David Reed
What I didn’t know then—it takes a lot more than that to kill a trickster. . . . And there’s no reason the thing you’re hunting can’t follow you home.
The Crusher
BY THE TIME I GOT BACK to Sioux Falls, I regretted my speedy exit from Calico Rock. If there was one thing I’d learned from Rufus, it was that . . . well, I mostly learned how to be an alcoholic from Rufus, but if there was another thing, it was that you can’t cut corners. In fact, that was Rufus’s #1 rule, but I’ll get to the rules later, if I can still remember them.
When I pulled into the salvage yard, I went right inside to my library. I knew I’d read about tricksters in one of my lore books, but I also knew it was gonna be a long night of reading before I tracked the stats down. This was before the Internet, see, and we couldn’t just Google the name of the monster and get some occult nerd’s website detailing all the ways to gank it. Still had to do things the old-fashioned way, with sleepless nights and paper cuts and the smell of mildewy paper from the old books. Mighta taken longer, but I preferred it that way—which is probably why my house still looks the way it does. If Sam had his druthers, my whole library would be digitized and searchable by now, but that’ll happen just as soon as my ass grows wings and flies to Jupiter. I guess flying to Uranus woulda been a funnier joke, but I think there were enough asses in that sentence as it was.
Anyway, I went inside, got right to research. If I ever had the bad luck to run into a trickster again, I was gonna be prepared. The next morning, I finally found the book I was looking for—a giant encyclopedia called Gods of the African Jungles & Plains, by a scholar named Michael Cowan who specialized in these things—I met the guy in person last year, found out he had a run-in with a trickster back in the seventies, while on an aid mission to a remote village in what was then Zaire. He took one too many jabs at the smell of the dung huts, offending the trickster. ’Course he didn’t know it was a trickster at the time. For all I know, it mighta been Anansi he offended, since there’s nothing stopping a demigod from flittin’ back and forth across continents whenever he pleases. Anyway, when Michael got back to the States, none of his family recognized him, and I mean not even a little. His son thought he was a home invader when he came in through the kitchen window (his keys didn’t seem to work anymore) and almost shot him with his own hunting rifle. Another man was living in his house, driving his car, sleeping with his wife . . . and everybody was acting like he was the crazy one. Eventually, his doppelgänger revealed himself to be the trickster, and demanded penance from Michael. In exchange for returning his life to normal, the trickster wanted Michael to live in a dung hut, like the ones he’d made wise cracks about in the village he’d visited in Zaire. Facing that or losing his entire life and everyone in it forever, Michael chose the hut. Still lives in it. For all his belly-aching about it, the hut smells better than you’d think. That’s what drove him to compile all of the trickster lore, to save others from the same fate. Inside the book, I discovered this:
That’s Anansi in his native form—bit uglier than the old widower I’d met the day before, but in a way I could see the resemblance. What I read about him scared the piss outta me—according to lore, a trickster can only be killed with a wooden stake dipped in the blood of its victim, and I certainly hadn’t done that to Anansi. Made me wonder—if Michael Cowan researched everything there was to know about tricksters, why hadn’t he ever killed the one that’d sentenced him to life in a house made of shit bricks? Probably because of this next bit:
If, by some terrible circumstance, one discovers him or herself caught in the vexing iron sights of a trickster (or demigod of similar capacity and deftness for matters of ill-repute), the remedy is not reprisal or violent ends, but rather capitulation. Though their deficiencies are well-documented in tribal stories (primary sources listed in Appendix C), the trickster is not to be trifled with by mankind. They are, by their very nature, impetuous and quick to anger, quick to judge, and quick to smite those whom they believe to be deserving. The justification for their actions may be capricious and without merit, their mannerisms childish. Despite that, never forget that they hold dominion over energies and magicks vastly beyond the limits of human understanding and will use them, frankly, to make your life miserable for the simple reason that they find it humorous.
Okay, so, maybe you read that and thought, “Guess I’d better steer clear of tricksters,” but what I took from it was that I’d better find a pointy stick and the blood of one of those spontaneously combusted grandmas from Calico Rock so that I’d have a fighting chance against Anansi if I ran into him again. That meant turning right around and driving cross-country again, probably breaking into a morgue or digging up a grave, just on the off chance that Anansi doesn’t give up his self-imposed retirement. Them’s the breaks.
I put some ribs on the barbecue (for courage) and planned out my strategy—I was gonna try to get to Mrs. Greyson’s body before it was interred or cremated—if I was too late, the job’d be a whole lot messier. Nobody likes digging up six feet of dirt, much less poking and prodding a mangled corpse. I re-packed my duffel bag full of weapons and other hunting implements and made my way out into the junkyard, where I’d parked.
The sun was setting over the twisted wrecks of cars in the salvage yard—I’d somehow spent the entire day scouring through books without realizing it. Happens more often than I’d like. A wolf’s howl caught my attention, coming from the forest behind the yard. Wolves aren’t unheard of in South Dakota, but they’re uncommon in these parts. Especially back then, before the ”Save the Wolves” effort was in full swing. You were more likely to see a farmer standing over the carcass of a wolf he’d just killed than hear a wolf in the wild. Hearing it was odd, but I didn’t think anything of it until I heard the exact same howl again only seconds later—and this time it was behind me.
It’s a little spooky for anything to move that fast, much less a creature with fangs and a taste for bloody red meat, so I decided I should play things safe and pulled a .22-caliber rifle out of my duffel. That kind of firepower would drop a wolf no problem. I got near my car, felt like I was home free . . . then I heard the whimpering. I spun around, fast as I could, scanning the whole yard—I thought it musta been an injured animal, deer, coyote, maybe even a dog, but I couldn’t see anything. The critter whimpered again, this time a little deeper, sadder. It was in pain, whatever it was, and it was close.
Enough of this “circle of life” hogwash, I thought, and went back to my business, only to be greeted by the strangest sight as I rounded the car to get to the trunk. A bite was taken out of its ass. I don’t mean that metaphorically—something had chomped off the left rear end of the car, slashing into the tire and leaving rent metal with large fang-marks where the bumper, tail lights, and rear quarter-panel had been. It was the car that was whimpering. It was friggin’ making noises like it was a hurt kitten.
Even for me, that crap wasn’t normal.
I did the only thing that made sense—I raised my rifle and got ready to shoot it. Hunter rule #27: if a big inanimate object that should never be alive suddenly is alive, you kill it, ASAP. When I got the car in my sights, it growled at me. Deep and guttural, like a bear or a lion. Great, I pissed it off.
As I pondered how screwed I was, I realized there was no way a .22 was going to kill something that weighed thousands of pounds. My best options:
A. Run
B. Run
C. Run
D. Piss myself, then run
Then I remembered that it was a car (let’s pause for a big WTF here . . . okay, we can continue), and even with one tire popped, it could still outrun me. Outdrive me. Whatever. It could go faster than me, run me down, and squish my head like a grape.
With my rifle still trained on the car, I took a few steps back. My foot ran into the hub cap of a junked old jalopy that’d been sitting in the yard collecting rust for a decade—and the jalopy barked at me.
A set of high beams hit me, nearly
blinding me. Then another, and another, and another. A dozen engines rumbled to life all over the junkyard. Whatever had happened to my car, it had happened to all of the cars, and none of ’em seemed pleased to see me. In the moment, all I could think was that I shoulda taken better care of them. One of ’em I’d taken all the seats out of, one of ’em didn’t have any side panels or doors, one of ’em had been stripped of all its wiring . . . they were going to kill me, and I couldn’t help but marvel at how ironic a death that would be, run down by the cars I’d spent my life tearing apart . . . so, of course, it had to be the trickster. Anansi must have followed me home, and was trying to take vengeance on me for what I’d done to him.
If I could have talked with the guy, maybe we could have worked something out. After all, I hadn’t successfully killed him, so no harm, no foul, right? What’s a little stabbing between friends? I doubted he’d see things that way, but at the time it seemed like it was worth a try. Instead, I tried to plot a course through the pack of rabid junkers between me and my house, but they were moving now; they rolled around on steel rims and bald, flat tires. The sound was terrible—a mix of diesel engine rumblings and the scraping of metal on metal, along with low groans and whispers. The cars were whispering. Talking to each other, plotting out ways to corner me and kill me and get me back for all the things I’d done to them. I was like a toddler having to answer to his mistreated toys.
Behind me, another wolf-like howl cut above the din of the cars. It was different than the noises that the cars were making—somehow more savage and beastly. Odder than the howl was the cars’ reaction to it—several of them flinched back, their reverse lights coming on as they retreated away from the howl. Whatever it was behind me, they were afraid of it, and it seemed reasonable that I should be, too.
At moments like that, you’ve gotta ask yourself some tough questions, such as:
• Do I have any shot at surviving this? ’Cause if not, you might as well go down swinging.
• What are the chances that this is a dream? I’ve been trapped in my own dreams before, and things got pretty weird in there, too. In this particular case, it seemed far likelier that this was the twisted workings of Anansi, not my own subconscious (though this did seem like something I’d dream).
• Who can I call to get some help? At the time, all the hunters I knew were several states away—this problem was going to be resolved before they’d be able to get to Sioux Falls, one way or the other. Either I’d be a blood stain in a tire track, or I’d—somehow—have found my way out of this.
• What do I do next?
That last one is a bit of a pill, isn’t it? Never an easy answer. An army was in front of me, bloodthirsty steel monsters that I didn’t understand and couldn’t predict. Behind me . . . mystery. Something bigger, fiercer. Angrier?
I chose the mystery. I turned tail and ran as fast as I could, into the darkness at the far end of the salvage yard. At the extreme edge there’s a chain-link fence topped with razor wire—don’t want anybody sneaking in—that would impede my escape. Luckily, my extracurricular activities meant that I didn’t have the time to constantly maintain the fence, and I knew there were at least a couple spots where I could squeeze through a break in the chain. As I got further from the headlights of the cars, I realized that they weren’t chasing me. They’d huffed and puffed when I first started to run, but none of them was brave enough to follow. Talking about cowardly cars . . . this still sounds ridiculous, twenty-some years later. But they were. They were alive, and they were chickenshit—scared of whatever it was that prowled the dark end of the lot.
A lot of people, knowing all that, would rather take their chances with the cars than hang out by the mysterious howling beast. After all, the cars were junkers—broken down, some didn’t even have engines. Not that their engines mattered much when they were being supernaturally propelled, but they certainly weren’t moving as fast as they would have if they were fresh off the dealership asphalt.
This’d be a good time to tell you how my trade works. There’s money in scrap metal, more than you’d think there would be. Something like 80 percent of all aluminum that’s ever been produced is still in use, ’cause of the magic of recycling and reclamation. Metal doesn’t change. It doesn’t get weaker with time, it doesn’t break easy, it doesn’t need to be coddled and babied to last. Sound like anybody you know? People bring me their cars—I buy ’em for cheap, and can make a good living off of selling the bits and pieces back to people that need ’em. Most any wrecked car can still be useful, even if the outside looks like it’s been through hell. If only people were that resilient. Now, I told you all that so I could explain the exception—sometimes, a car’s been through enough. It’s too old, too rusty, too dented to pound back into shape. Every good piece stripped off, sold to the highest bidder. Obsolete to the point that nobody will ever come looking for its parts again. That’s a sad thought, right? The day will come when nobody will ever ask about you, ever again. That happens to cars sitting in my junkyard all the time, and when it does . . . they go to the crusher.
The crusher itself is a relic of an older time. I bought it a year after I bought the salvage yard itself, and it didn’t work worth a damn. It’d seen too much abuse at the hands of an owner who didn’t take good care of it, the gears and inner workings were cracked and corroded, the outside tarnished with the oil of a thousand crushed cars. Their lifeblood stained the machine that had smashed them into an eighteen-inch cube. Took me a year of weekends to fix up the crusher into reasonable shape, and all the while the ancient hulls of forgotten cars lined up to be the first victims of the thing’s hydraulic jaws.
Imagine being one of those cars. Being squeezed so hard you collapsed to the width of your bones—it must be like being at the center of the earth. Now imagine that the car crusher suddenly developed a taste for human blood, and it came after you—fleshy little bag of meat you. You’d stand no friggin’ chance against it. That is exactly what happened. I got to the chain-link fence, heard that wolf-like howl, and there it was—the car crusher, come alive, and coming after me.
Its massive hydraulic jaws were staring me in the face, gaping open, wide enough to devour me and a Buick at the same time. Red light spilled from the center, as if the crusher had hellfire at its core. I stumbled back, trying to regain my footing as the monstrous thing lifted off its mechanical haunches and started to move towards me. I can’t even begin to explain how it was moving, just know that it was in no way natural. It was like pieces of it were coming apart, lifting it off the ground, then disappearing again into the internal workings of the machine as it lowered itself back to the dirt of the junkyard floor. More like a spider than a car. Now, I can’t draw worth a damn, wish I could, but here’s what it looked like sitting on the ground:
Balls. That didn’t turn out right at all. Trust me, it was scary as all hell. The thing had to weigh five tons, easy, and could crush a pick-up truck flat in a few seconds—and now it was alive, howling like a blood-crazed wolf, and chasing me through my junkyard.
Gotta say, this was a low point for me. Not many ways that this could work out in my favor. I ran towards the light from the cars’ headlamps, thinking I was better off trying to dodge between several enemies and hope that they obstruct each others’ efforts to squash me than go mano a máquina with the crusher. I’d seen the power of that thing’s jaws, I didn’t want that to be me in there, getting turned into a panini.
As I got to the center of the half-circle of murderous cars, I heard the ker-thump of the crusher right behind me as it slammed right through a pile of tires. A second later, a stack of car doors blasted apart as the crusher made short work of them, too. A few errant tires and doors fell into the open maw of the crusher, and it pounded them flat in an instant. Its magical enlivening seemed to have made it even stronger than before, which I was less than psyched about.
The cars began to scatter, which was a small mercy. If they hadn’t, I’ve got no clue what I woulda do
ne—died, I guess. As my Chevelle turned tail, I saw the hole in its backside and realized that the crusher must have done that damage—it was literally taking bites out of cars in the salvage yard. What the hell was happening? What kind of twisted game was this? I ducked between two of the cars, both of which lunged at me, crashing their radiator grilles together with a harsh metal clang, missing my ass by barely a foot. Another car, a Pinto, was heading right for me, high beams so bright I couldn’t see anything but the oncoming death-mobile. I tried to dodge to the left, but I tripped on the twisted root of a tree I’d dynamited out of the yard when I first bought it. Shoulda done a better job clearing the roots, I thought, but there was no time for navel-gazing. I stood up and tore ass for the house, looking back just in time to see the crusher bite down on the car that was chasing me, the grinding of metal on metal mixed with an animal scream as the Pinto was smashed flat. Sparks spit from the crusher’s mouth, along with the spray of motor oil and transmission fluid from the car’s metal veins.
When you take a car to the crusher, you’ve already stripped it of every valuable part, and that includes any gas in the tank or oil in the internal workings. As more sparks flew from the crusher’s maw, I had a half second to contemplate how dangerous it was to crush a car that still had fuel in its tank before a torrent of flame and shrapnel erupted from the Pinto. A bit of twisted steel sliced into my left calf—I’ve still got the scar from it. I limped away from the explosion, hoping that it had taken out the crusher as well, but I wasn’t that lucky. The giant iron beast emerged out of the fire, blackened from the flame, but still in one piece and as angry as ever. I was only twenty or so yards from my house, but I was starting to understand that my front door wasn’t going to be enough to keep the crusher at bay.
