The Janus Tree: And Other Stories

by Glen Hirshberg

  “I think mostly he’s crying,” said Jamie. “I’ve got my eye on him.”

  “I know you do.”

  “We shouldn’t be out here, Wayne.” She touched my hand.

  “Go inside. We’ll be right back.”

  More lights. A royal-blue flurry this time, concentrated in the pines nearest the taxiway, maybe thirty meters away. Up in the platform pod, I could see the jockey’s shadow just a little more clearly through the snow. He was turned toward the forest. I still didn’t think he’d seen us.

  Unease flickered through me again. It felt almost good. It filled the emptiness, or at least colored it.

  As if sensing that thought, Jamie squeezed my hand. I’d worked with her a long time. I squeezed back. “Go on inside. We’re coming.”

  “You can offer White-hair in there the rest of my poutine,” Alex said. “I didn’t actually finish it all. Although it’s kind of cold, now.”

  “Bleah,” said Jamie, and turned for the plane. I saw her look backward at the woods as she climbed up. Maybe she was hoping for another light show. But I had the idea she was hoping the opposite. Maybe that was just me.

  The whining swelled still more. Underneath the shrillness, I could hear another sound, now. A sort of low grinding. Then that faded. I lifted my hands over my head, waved them at the de-icer platform. Next, I tried jumping up and down.

  “See?” said Alex. “You’re still nimble. You know she digs you, right?”

  I stopped jumping. “What?”

  “Jamie. She’s just waiting for you to say the word. She’s been waiting a long time.”

  “What are you talking about? She told you this?”

  “She didn’t have to tell me. I know. It’s one of those things Alex knows.”

  “Let’s get that guy’s attention and get out of here,” I said.

  “I’m just telling you. She’s waiting for you to say you’re ready. I say it’s been three years, Old Dude. And no disrespect. But I say three years is plenty. I say you’re ready. Shit.”

  It came from nowhere, wasn’t anything, vanished just as quickly. A flash of green-yellow right over our heads, like lightning stabbing into the ground. Or eyes blinking.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear it? You have ears in your eyes, Old Dude?”

  “Hey,” I said. Our breath plumed in front of us. “He moved.”

  Both of us craned our necks back, trying to see. The guy up there had moved. I was sure of it. But he’d stopped now. And he was still staring straight at the woods. The whining was creeping deeper into my ears again. And there was yet another sound, this one more familiar. But several blank seconds passed before I realized what it was.

  “That truck is on,” I said.

  “Well,” said Alex, and for the first time, I heard doubt in his voice, too. Just a flicker. But that rattled more than anything else out here. “If it won’t come to us…I guess we just go get it.”

  He started that way, and I followed, and the driver in the cab finally sat up. He looked astonished to see us. Then he started flinging his hands wildly in front of his face, as though he had bees in there.

  “What the fuck?” Alex mumbled, still moving, and I grabbed his wrist.

  The driver was waving more wildly. But not at anything in the cabin. He was also shouting, but he had the windows rolled up tight, and all I could hear was that he was shouting. Not what he was saying.

  And overhead, that sound had returned, not so much louder as higher, almost a shriek. The grinding was back, too. Alex and I were halfway between the de-icer truck and our open plane, right at the edge of the tarmac.

  It didn’t actually sound like grinding, I realized. It seemed too deeply lodged inside my own head for that. It sounded like teeth gnashing.

  The lights didn’t exactly erupt from the trees. They just slid from behind them, as though they’d been hiding there all along. They hovered at the edge of the forest, coagulating like snow-melt on a windowpane. Forming.

  I didn’t have to warn Alex. He was already running.

  Of course he was decades younger, much faster. Maybe he didn’t even see what the lights became, the thing with wings. Or the million smaller things, all of them shining.

  They came like a blizzard on a glacier, all at once and from everywhere. I was flat-out sprinting, but knew I wouldn’t make it. They were in my hair, ears, eyes, and they ached. It was useless to swipe at or fight them, but I was still running anyway, until the first blast from the de-icer blew me straight off my feet. The de-icer didn’t stop. It went on pummeling me with fluid, and I started to scream, then shut my mouth tight for fear of what I’d swallow, liquid or light, and tried scrambling back upright. Then I gave that up and crawled.

  The lights were screaming. Or I was. Or Alex and Jamie were from the doorway of the plane, both of them soaked, dripping, waving, shouting. I reached the steps, and the gnashing got louder, seemed to clamp down on my spine and chew straight through it, and I sagged bonelessly sideways, feeling light, so light. Then Alex yanked me inside and slammed the door tight.

  For one long moment, there was only darkness and silence. Because I hadn’t opened my eyes, I realized. Because I was too terrified to open my mouth. I felt a towel on my face, Jamie’s gentle hand against the back of my neck. I opened my eyes to find Alex, dripping purple droplets everywhere like a freshly bathed poodle.

  “Okay?” he said.

  I nodded, trembling. “I think. You?”

  He started to laugh. “Holy shit,” he said. “Holy crazy Canadian shit.”

  It wasn’t funny. But with Alex there, you couldn’t help smiling anyway. Jamie was doing it, too, while pointlessly patting over and over at my face. I took her hand to stop her. Then I just held onto that.

  We were back in our seats, our heads wrapped in scratchy airline towels, ears still ringing, hands still shaking but settled firmly on the controls that would guide us either safely back to the terminal or up in the air and as far from Prince Willows Town as this plane’s pathetic fuel tanks could carry us, when the cockpit door opened. Alex was the one who turned. Then he said, “Wayne.”

  I turned, too. Jamie stood in the doorway, face waxy, eyes blank. “He’s gone,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The guy in 2B. The crying guy. He’s not on the plane. He didn’t go out past me either. He’s nowhere.”

  I stood up, shaking my head. “That’s ridiculous. He must have—”

  “Wayne,” Jamie said, and her eyes filled with tears. “He’s gone.”

  It happened only occasionally, Bill told me once, years later, over one final round of Molsons, before both of us left the flying game for good. Only in the dead of winter, on the coldest nights. Mostly not even then. No one really knew when or how the realization had been made about the de-icing fluid. But that seemed to help. Sometimes. To keep them back. Sometimes.

  “Always so sad,” Bill had said. “Always, always, always.”

  At least, that’s what I thought he’d said. It wasn’t until that night, back in my hotel, pouring a drink, that my hands started to shake, and I realized I’d heard him wrong. Not so sad. The sad. Always the sad.

  Was it grief that drew them? Or reacted with something else in that air, in those woods, and created them? Had my grief drawn or created them? If so, it wasn’t the anti-freeze that saved me. It was the sobbing man. His was fresher.

  Had they swallowed him? I like to think he was one of them, now, instead. Reunited, maybe, with what he’d lost. Or at least in company, with the Nimble Men. Sometimes, that thought comforts me.

  You can’t fly to Prince Willows Town, any more. Not long after that night, they closed the facility, redirecting all traffic to the bigger, better-serviced airport at Sudbury, where the light-towers are numerous and brighter, and the trees keep their distance.

  Part III

  Book Depository Stories

  Esmeralda

  The First Book Depository Story

/>   “I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead…”

  Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door

  Prologue

  We first heard about them the way one hears about everything these days: on the web. Some self-styled “urban explorer,” wired on whatever and driven by transgressive urges most people claim they get over in high school, snuck into his 532nd abandoned building in the Detroit metropolitan area. Fortunately, he brought his digital camera and an extra memory card.

  Within hours, the first Flickr page went up. Within weeks, the first wiki/blogspot/Facebook groups appeared. The histories of that initial depository were always stitched together out of tall tales and myths. Someone could have found some Roosevelt School District official and asked, but no one did. Soon, the first Crawlers—no one seems to know where that name came from—began braving the empty streets to start exploring and mapping the place. Not long after that came the first trespassing arrests, and the first disappearances. Before too long, the various strands of lore surrounding the Roosevelt Book Depository had coalesced into a story composed of enough truth to become the truth, as far as anyone who studies such things in centuries to come—and publishes them in whatever digital or ethereal or cerebral format one publishes in those times—will ever be able to tell:

  A public school district, emptying of students as the last desperate families flee the neighborhoods, its buildings collapsing and its funding gutted, quietly takes over an abandoned tire warehouse on one of those Detroit streets that hasn’t seen a functioning streetlamp since the Riots. There, school functionaries—or, more likely, the gang thugs and drunken ex-Teamsters they pay with the last of the district’s cash—begin delivering truckloads of used or never used textbooks, supplies, notepads, posters, maps, writing implements, and whole libraries full of outdated, donated boys’ and girls’ novels and biographies of presidents and sports stars to what they have already christened the Depository. The plan, originally, is to sell it all, in the hopes of renovating the last functioning elementary school in the area.

  Then the elementary school closes. The funding is zeroed. The officials disperse back to their homes, which have never been nearby. The ex-Teamsters return to their barstools, the thugs to their gangs.

  And in their warehouse with its smashed-in windows and gaping doorframes and ruthlessly tagged cement walls, the books and notebooks and maps and visual aids of the former Roosevelt District Schools lie where they’ve been tossed, in tottering dunes or great lakes of paper. They huddle like penguins in the Michigan winter snows. They curl and molt in the sucking humidity of mid-summer. They are shredded for nests to house raccoons, rats, pigeons, the homeless. They begin to decompose. To sprout weeds and toadstools. To change.

  By the time that first unnamed explorer finds them, they have lain in that space for more than thirty years.

  After that, less than six months passed before the discovery—or creation—of the second depository, in the mildew-ravaged, fogbound port hangars near Fisherman’s Wharf. That one drew an entirely different breed of explorer. There were boho college kids drifting up the coast through the Youth Hostels. Then a team of college professors from Berkeley who wrote the first academic papers and held the first symposium on the subject, which they dubbed The End. If they were aware of any irony in naming a brand new phenomenon that, they kept it to themselves.

  By the end of 2010, there were depositories in Chicago, St. Louis, Ft. Lauderdale. They were always urban at first, their foundations usually the refuse from bankrupt school systems. But then the owners of the last used bookstore in Dallas—a giant conglomerate formed by the desperate owners of the twenty-five largest remaining open shops in Texas—announced that they were closing. And instead of holding a final sale, or throwing everything up for auction on eBay or listing it on ABE, they rented twenty-five U-Haul trailers, filled them at random, and dispersed across the country to seed the depositories.

  Other shop owners followed suit. It became an ethical stance, a point of pride, a last great act of self-defeating defiance. They would not scrape the last, dreadful pennies from the bottom of the book well. Instead, they would spread their wares like spores, bury them like acorns in the rich, loamy mulch of decomposing language in the depositories, in the hopes that they would sprout there. Grow a new generation, not of readers—people still read, despite what the academicians tell us—but bibliophiles. A healthier, younger subculture.

  Then individuals began following the shop owners’ lead. Readers who’d spent their whole lives building and tending their personal libraries formulated wills directing their children to wheel whatever they didn’t want to the nearest depots and bury them there. Without open shops, and with the online outlets flooded with merchandise that few sought, selling books became a chore, and a fruitless one at that. Easier by far to find a depository and leave everything there, for whoever might want it.

  Of course, the depositories didn’t mostly attract bibliophiles. They drew squatters, first. Pushers and junkies. Cultists. Fetishists. When the rate of reported disappearances began to climb, the police took to discouraging, then forbidding visiting the depositories. But they never cleaned them out, rarely patrolled them. And people—whatever their reasons—kept coming, though less often and usually after dark.

  Meanwhile, the books lay atop each other like bodies in ditches. In breezes, or in a beam of sudden flashlight, they stirred, seeming not so much to have come to life but retained it, somehow. Occasionally, a page even lifted like a waving hand, extending itself toward whatever had disturbed it, or else waving goodbye.

  Esmeralda

  I’m already in bed when the knock comes. Sitting up, shivering as the twist of sheet and heavy blanket slides from me, I stare at the misshapen shadows stretched over the hardwood floor. It’s the snow outside that has given them their head-like humps, their ice-claws. They look like illustrations in a book of fairy tales. Ezzie would have loved them.

  I’m musing on that, wondering whether the bottle of rye on the bedside table is as empty as it looks and also whether I’ve stored another in the bathroom medicine chest five steps from my cot, when the knock comes again. So there really is someone out there, and that means one of two things: the police have finally found something, or Ezzie’s relentless sister Sarah has finally found me.

  “Just a…” I start, but my voice comes out even thicker than its current usual, and I suck rye-residue and sleep-fur off my teeth and try again. “Hold on.”

  My feather-robe and fuzzy slippers were both gifts from Ezzie, of course. For the feather-robe and fuzzy slipper birthday party she threw me during our first year in the downtown Detroit loft. Not so long ago, really. Christ, barely three years.

  It’s my lucky night, turns out; there is indeed a fresh rye in the medicine cabinet, right between the ibuprofen and Ezzie’s razor case, which is my only keepsake. She would have approved, if she’d approved of anything I do anymore. The thing she’d held most dear, after all. Unlike most cutters, from what I gather, for Ezzie it was less about the wounds than the weapon.

  Uncorking the rye, I take a swig, then replace the bottle and slide the razor case under my robe into my pajama shirt pocket. I turn toward the door, pull the robe as closed as it will go against the constant chill, and as an afterthought decide to take the rye along. In eight steps, I’ve crossed my lake-rot, one-room efficiency to the front door so I can peer through the fish-eye.

  “Knock knock,” I say.

  The guy out there is big, maybe six-five, in a black coat that looks warmer than all the clothes I own combined, plus black gloves and a black Derby, even. Not a cop. Also not Sarah, unless she’s grown a foot and a half and cut off all her hair. Sarah and Ezzie and their dark waterfalls of black curls…

  “What?” the guy asks.

  “Knock knoc
k.”

  He stares at the door, and the Lake Superior wind whips up and blows snow on him. It’s kind of great, really. A strapping young Oedipus befuddled by the Sphinx. Me. Finally, he takes the plunge.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Exactly,” I say.

  Pause. Befuddlement.

  “Exactly who?”

  “Exactly my question.”

  Poor Oedipus. Big wind. I gulp rye from the bottle I have every intention of sharing with my caller, providing he convinces me to let him in.

  “Please,” he says, and he sounds nothing like a cop or a vengeful relative or anyone else I know anymore. I open the door. He hurries past me and stands shivering in the center of my all but empty room. Then he starts to unbutton his coat.

  “I wouldn’t suggest it,” I tell him. “It’s not much better in here.”

  Experimentally, he loosens another button. His head almost brushes the bulbous, bug-filled light-fixture that provides the efficiency’s only illumination when I bother to switch it on, which isn’t often. He removes his hat, and I can’t help but smile at the hair, which is black and flat as road tar, with little flattened spikes jagging down his forehead. Little-kid-after-sledding hair.

  He takes in my cot, the nightstand, the remaining 365 or so square feet of empty space.

  “No…no books,” he says, and I understand, abruptly. I consider showing him my iRead, which is the only thing I use now, just to see his face. There’s nothing quite like confronting a Crawler with an iRead.

  Except I can’t quite bring myself to do it. Every time my heart beats, it bangs against the razor case in my pocket. Cold and plastic and empty of Ezzie.

  “How’d you find me?” I ask.

  “Will,” he says. “I’m Will.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Can I sit?”

  The question cracks me up. I gesture around the couchless, chairless, rugless, room. “Pick a wall.”