Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  The Chatham County Library book sale doesn't happen at the library proper. They have it at this little Lions Club building in what I guess you'd call “downtown” Pittsboro. Pittsboro is little more than a traffic circle, an old courthouse from the 1860's that burned and collapsed a couple of years ago and a secondhand store called Beggars & Choosers reputed to be the absolute best place for fifty miles in any direction to put together a Halloween costume. Otherwise it's a slightly self-consciously folksy little place that does a lot of antiques trade and has a couple of historical markers out by the highway. Nothing much going on, but I always get the feeling that's how Pittsboro likes it. It’s about 25 minutes of extremely pretty country driving from either Durham or Raleigh and whenever I go there I am a little stunned that a place so nice can exist so close to a major media market covered up in suburbs.

  I'd been to that book sale before during actual business hours. It happens late enough in the fall that it's dark before the sale ends each night. I was the last customer out the door one time and that's how I noticed the Book People. They were parked down the block, trying and failing to look nonchalant. The windows of the mini-van they'd driven were tinted really damn dark, way darker in the back than I imagined would be street legal, but that stuff is no match for a vampire's eyes. I saw them sitting there watching the staff lock up behind me while I lugged three big bags of books over to my Firebird on the far side of the lot.

  Let me assure you, just in case you decide to go around playing amateur burglar or otherwise finding occasions requiring stealth, pulling up to a retail establishment right before closing time and watching them lock up is a dead giveaway you're casing the joint.

  I got in my car, circled the block, killed the lights and pulled around behind the book sale building to park. Unobserved, I slipped across a dewy lawn and up to the side of the building where I could peek around at the front and see what the as-yet-unknown Book People were doing.

  Mostly they were standing around looking nervous while the oldest of them all, a little old lady with a stark white shock of hair that stuck out in all directions and a slightly off-kilter grin, was hunched over picking the lock. Her fingers shook but I think that might have actually helped her hit all the tumblers. I could hear the click when the door swung open and everyone let out the breath they had been holding. They piled inside, spread out and started milling around.

  Vampires are nothing if not voyeurs. I peeked in a window to watch.

  “Brothers and sisters.” The smooth, mellow voice came from a preppy middle-aged woman. She had once-upon-a-cheerleader hair and a sweater tied around her neck by the arms, like an Izod ad from 1984. The others didn’t stop milling as she spoke. She stepped up onto the end of a table to address them. “Please take a few moments to select your implements for tonight's ritual. Do not rush, and when a book speaks to you do not shy away because it isn't what you had hoped – or because it's what you feared. You will know the book as the book will know you, and when hand meets spine you will know whether the book in your hand is to be your tool for tonight's working.”

  I waited and watched as they walked around – some of them eyes closed and bumping into tables, others walking directly to specific sections like CRIME and CLASSICS and holding out their hands, fluttering them like nervous butterflies, then finally reaching out and jerking a book from the boxes that sat atop each table. Obviously some of them weren't thrilled with what they got but the lady had been pretty clear: the book they got was the book they were getting. They reassembled in the middle of the room but flinched as a car went by outside. They worried it was someone coming back. It wasn't. Hurriedly, raggedly, they formed a loose circle around the woman who had spoken before. She addressed them again, sounding rehearsed.

  “As the world is an expression of the god and the goddess, the Lord and the Lady, the Sun and the Moon, so too are the books in our hands the expressions of their authors. Writers craft the worlds calling out to them to be created. They are the progenitors of whole realities insisting upon their own existence. As above, so below; and as below, so above. The gods on whom we call take the shapes dictated by a world in need of them, and the world they divinely fashion has the form it takes because it can take no other. The world and the divine are the hand and the glove, the glove and the hand. The cycle of creation and destruction, life and death, spring and summer and autumn and winter, is not a repetition but a moving forward, a progression, and we are the ones who witness the spin of the tire, the turn of the press, the pen stroke of the hand authoring the cycle.”

  There was a pause, and I could see her words had a soothing and bolstering effect on them. They all stood a little straighter and a little more solemn now. They’d forgotten all about cops and security systems and library volunteers who might forget a purse. The stooped old lady with the mad smile had her eyes closed and a sort of serenity on her face I rarely saw in sane people. The blonde lady leading them took a few seconds to look directly at each of them in turn before she spoke again. “Maria is in the East so we shall start with her. Open your book, sister, and with it light the fire of the first watchtower.”

  The Latina cracked her book open to a random page. She cleared her throat and I heard her read in the halting, slightly uncertain tone of one who doesn't regularly read aloud – that is to say, almost everyone in the world. “Ho, ho! Commander! It's moving! The machines are ready! Fuel, my commander! We must have fuel and nothing else!” Her voice grew in confidence and enthusiasm so that the last sentence was delivered with something like real feeling. She then stated the title with a much more reserved, subdued, almost subservient tone: “Cement.”

  The blonde woman – the priestess, I later learned, named Lorraine – turned to the younger of the two men, a forty-something white guy built like a barrel of molasses. He opened his book and read in one breath, all in a go, running the title together with the text, “The cutting-edge on even the most well-made knife is not permanent Knife Skills Illustrated: A User's Guide.” He looked a little embarrassed by that, but Lorraine favored him with a nod that seemed to indicate maybe this was a deep truth worth hearing once or twice. She turned to a woman in her fifties who held up a thin volume and read:

  “His movements have the attractiveness of the awkward man who has learned to circumvent this condition by slowing everything down. Catlike in his languid movements, with his slightly hunched shoulders, hands a little too big for his body, like he's never quite known what to do with them.” She paused and then said, “Crime, by Irvine Welsh.” Her voice was gentle and plodding and wasn't at all unlike the description she had read from the book.

  Next up was a frumpy woman in her thirties. She had on blue stretchy fat pants and a shapeless sweatshirt sweater kind of thing that zipped up the front. In my mind, I immediately classified her as a recognizable variety of Bon-Bon and daytime TV addict. She held up a thick hardback and read aloud. “Windows there are none in our houses: for the light comes to us alike in our homes and out of them, by day and by night, equally at all times and in all places, whence we know not. It was in old days, with our learned men, an interesting and oft-investigated question, 'What is the origin of light?' and the solution of it has been repeatedly attempted, with no other result other than to crowd our lunatic asylums with the would-be solvers.” She paused, then, “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.”

  Lorraine smiled a little. “An excellent lesson in humility.” She turned towards Warren, who opened his book and cleared his throat.

  “You were either with her or you were against her. She believed that her father was not her real father; that her mother had tried to drown her in a pond when she was child; that her pulmonary specialist wanted to have sex with her; that in death she would be met by Carl Jung, the Virgin Mary, and Merlin the Magician; that she had done her work on earth and her work was good; that she was one of those who had been chosen to herald the coming new order of beautiful humanity; that in a former life she had died a water death as a R
oman galley slave, shackled to the oars; that men were shits and her children were hostile; that her smoking was her business, so mind your own fucking business; that her son was an artist just like she was; that she and I should go into therapy together.” He smiled a little and looked up. “The Afterlife: A Memoir.”

  Most of them had chuckled a little at the lines about smoking and about men being shits, and Lorraine was among those who had. The Stepford Soccer Mom look concealed a human being. She flicked her eyes to the last person, the hunched little old lady, who opened her eyes and her book at the same time, eyes falling to the page. Her voice creaked out, “She kept going, her sneakers slapping the pavement, until she came to a barrier of a thousand split-open garbage bags. She crawled over it, taking the time to pick up a few interesting items, like a broken salt shaker and a soggy copy of National Geographic, and stuff them into her bag. Then she was over the barrier and she kept walking, the breath still rasping in her lungs and her body trembling. That had been close, she thought. The demons almost got me! But glory be to Jesus, and when he arrives in his flying saucer from the planet Jupiter I'll be there on the golden shore to kiss his hand!” She looked up. “Swan Song. Robert McCammon.”

  Lorraine bowed slightly and then turned to look at and address each of them, moving slowly, so that everyone got looked at while she spoke. “Fuel for the engine. Alienation. Insanity. A loss of sharpness. Awkwardness. Strong opinions that may or may not run counter to the facts. Jesus on a flying saucer. These are all stories that say to me that whatever we summon tonight will be able to guide those of us who might be stuck in some rut, alienated from the knowledge of how to move forward. Are there other interpretations?”

  The Latina spoke, and evidently they didn't have to wait to be called on for this part. “I think whatever we summon might be, itself, alienated and stuck in a rut.”

  Warren nodded his head. “The thing we call on will be difficult to work with. Not of this world. It's going to have its own way of doing things and its own understanding.”

  “It's going to think we're crazy,” the old woman said. Her eyes were crystal clear and her smile was gone. She was down to business.

  The Bon-Bon addict didn't say anything, but she nodded along. Another woman didn't say a word, just shook her head and clucked her tongue.

  Lorraine nodded. “You're all in agreement. Let us see. Let us call to the beyond and see what we have summoned with these words.” She lifted her hands and started to say something – it sounded like Latin, but maybe not perfect textbook Catholic school Latin – and I couldn't resist.

  I love a big entrance.

  I stepped around with the speed of a vampire, turned the knob, opened the door and said with a great big shit-eating grin, “Don't bother asking. I'm already here.”

  Nobody was going to buy I was a god, but they could sense that I was something other and somehow that didn't scare them. We chatted for a while, playing cat and mouse over the question of my identity, and then they asked me for advice about Lorraine's work situation. I suggested she take a grad school class at night and see if being a student again suited her. It's always that kind of thing, with people like the Book People: they're a lot more interested in the nuts and bolts of everyday living – in getting useful results – than they are with pie in the sky. And that, quite frankly, makes them my kind of people.

  Ever since, every once in a while, I drop in on them at a library book sale somewhere or another in the Triangle. Sometimes they ask me for advice; sometimes I participate in their little ritual; and still other times I just watch through a window and let them wonder if I was there. I suspect they think of me as their pet trickster spirit. I consider them, in turn, my pet believers. I don’t believe in anything at all except myself and only sometimes at that. They, on the other hand, believe in everything, all the time, but in a very specific kind of unified everything: a reality held together by some weird knot of faith and the supernatural and the human mind's ability to shape the world to its own perceptions. I love talking with them about it. Warren called me their 'Q' once, which I recognized as the Star Trek reference it was. Vampires watch all the TV we can get our hands on, of course. There's nothing worse than running out of ways to make time pass when you're staring down the barrel of eternity.

  That night they were back in the Lions Club and I didn't bother to try to sneak up on them. I parked next to their van, walked right up to the front door, made a little boot-scraping noise as I wiped the mud from my feet and knocked three times before letting myself in. They were gathered around a picture book one of them had pulled out of the kids' section of the book sale and were talking about the images it inspired in a kind of free-association game. They seemed to believe, though not in any explicit and causal way they could explain to an outsider, that wisdom could be found by a process not entirely unlike panning for gold: take the indicators of wisdom, the jettisoned meaning and attempted significance of countless writers of books and sift them, devoid of context, until the words come together to mean something to the reader. In truth it wasn't that far from the practices of Bryan Gison or how the hell ever you're supposed to spell his name. He and William S. Burroughs and a bunch of their circle used to cut up pages from magazines and try to paste them back together in some random way to discover new, unintended meanings. Burroughs wrote a whole novel that way and it's one of the hardest and most interesting things I've ever read.

  When I walked in they looked up and Lorraine smiled. That was always a little disconcerting and maybe also a part of why I would follow them around and show up at random: not a lot of humans are happy to see you after they've figured out you're more than just some fat dude with a bad attitude. “Welcome, Withrow,” she said. “We're divining meaning from the adventures of a hippopotamus in search of his pants.”

  “Story of my life,” I snarked, but I was polite enough to let them finish their little exercise before demanding their attention for myself. A few minutes of quiet sideline greetings from each of them in turn, with a few scratches of Smiles behind the ears as the others worked on the storybook's arcane meanings, and then they broke out the snacks: wine and cakes, they called it, but it mostly seemed to be gas station junk food and bottled iced teas. With that done, we started chewing the fat en masse.

  “Why are you allowing people to believe you are a vigilante hero?” Lorraine always knew when to ask a direct question. She would have made one hell of a Sunday School teacher.

  “Are you saying I can’t possibly be a hero?” I smirked a little. Smiles yawned elaborately from the floor.

  Lorraine grinned with genuine pleasure. These were people who liked to banter about words and with them. “I would never suggest such a thing, but you’re no public figure.”

  I smiled again. “I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. Quite the contrary. Anybody who thinks I’m this Bull’s Eye character is all wet. Listen,” I said, “I don't mean to be rudely businesslike, but I have a specific, strange request of you.” They all perked up a little. I think they'd kind of been waiting for me to show up and demand something, sometime. They seemed a little disappointed when it wasn’t their souls or turning anyone's bones to molten lead or whatever they did when they did “real” magic, but hey, maybe next time. “I'm trying to find someone and he said ‘as above, so below’ when he was talking to me. Tall guy, athletic, pointed chin, razor-sharp nose, tawny hair, very good-looking with a...” I paused. How was I supposed to explain that he smelled like the ten most delicious samples of blood I’d tasted in my whole life, rolled up in one? “A kind of charisma it's hard for me to describe.”

  There wasn't a hint of recognition on any of their faces.

  “I kind of got the feeling he might be into the same stuff y'all are, only more...” I waved my hands around, kneading my desire not to offend them like that fear was a ball of invisible dough. “Science-y. Quantum-y.”

  There were a few shared glances conveying something like, “Oh, those assholes,” and
I raised my eyebrows to indicate interest. Finally the oldest woman, who has never told me her name nor has anyone used it when addressing her (which tells me I'm best off not asking), spoke up. “The technopagans. There are a bunch of them around. More than one group, anyway. We can give you a couple of email addresses if you really need to get in touch with them.”

  I hemmed briefly, then, “That's great, and I appreciate it, but if you don't mind my saying so, y'all kind of seem to hate these guys. What gives?”

  Lorraine smiled slightly. “They're fine, but the current they're tapping into is so... sterile.”

  “Uh-huh.” I closed my mouth, but opened it again. “Okay.”

  Warren was already writing down the email addresses, looking at his phone to make sure he got them right.

  “No emails,” I said. I shook my head a little, nose crinkled, and waved it off with one hand like a bad play in football. “Directions.” I’ve got an email account but damned if I was going to give it to someone who thought he was a magic computer witch.

  They all looked at one another for a moment, hesitating.

  “Have I ever hurt one of you? Any other night I would be all fun and games but I’ve got a situation here. Potentially one of a highly spiritual nature.” I tried to sound pleading.

  Apparently it worked. Very reluctantly, after a long gaze had passed between Lorraine and each of them, she gave me a street address in Durham.

  The technopagan house was on a side street near one edge of Duke’s campus in a neighborhood called Morehead Hill. That part of town mostly consisted of shotgun shacks with students stacked like cordwood, halal butchers operating out of random gas stations, suburban farmers with complicated trellises and abandoned brickwork churches repurposed as suspiciously niche charter schools.

  I stashed the Firebird around the corner and down a block from the address Lorraine and the others had given me. Roderick had ridden with me; Smiles and Dog were stuffed into the tiny back seat like an over-full sack. We all clambered out and collected ourselves before setting off, without speaking about it, so that we'd have shadows and time on our side. I wanted to scope the place out a little before I walked right up and knocked, and I didn't really want whoever was inside to see where I came from or what I drove. Paranoid, yes, but some of these spiritual types are pretty out there. You may think of crystal-hefting hippies wearing sarongs and praying to hedgerows, but those types punch just as hard as anybody else if you piss them off bad enough, and that's after they throw the crystals at you. They’re as liable as anyone to be assholes instead of nice, happy, Sir Hugs-a-Lot pagans. After I got to know my pet bibliomancers I read a book called Drawing Down the Moon. It’s kind of a field guide to this stuff. Useful reading if you want to befriend them and be able to talk the lingo.