The Reaches

[Near]

“A while” failed to address what he was getting at, which was whether there had been any overlap in their time spent here before now. It wouldn’t have made any difference, only the disparate treatment sparked a sort of masochistic smolder of curiosity: had Courtland’s severely finite capacity for trust and kindness been squandered on this freak instead of his own son?

But no, patchy as the quilt of his Reaches memories had become over the years, Near was pretty sure -- not unassailably positive, but pretty damn sure -- some scraps would remain of anything approaching the level of bizarre that Jude represented. Which meant this eschatological whatever Courtland had gotten himself involved in had probably begun after his family’s desertion. And that was almost funny: Courtland Farr, filling the void of his wife and son’s absence with psychic jackasses and the end of everything.

“Be a circus animal, see the world,” he quipped as he swiped the bottle up and poured himself another quarter of a glass, dregs leftover when he returned it to the table. “Sure you don’t mind sharing?” As if it wasn’t too late. As if he wasn’t already downing it and turning back to the books to scan their spines for messages from beyond.

“Do you do the wine-from-water trick, too?”

[Jude]

Yes, there had been overlap. Jude had known of Near Farr, the true son, the heir, and he knew they were never to meet. Part of the reason Jude got to into places like the library was specifically because they were off-limits. The risk of encountering Near in the library was near zero, the Audubon be damned. Jude did not take such a rule personally. He understood that the things he did, the things he represented, were not for everyone. That was still true, even though now he understood what it meant that these things applied to everyone.

Become more snug in his seat by the moment, Jude eyed what was left in the bottle. His head swam pleasantly, warm nausea turning his stomach. The room took on a fifth dimension, layered over the fourth, time, and he was not afraid. Should he be? Things had a color to them he could not describe. "Cheap party trick," he said of water to wine. "And everyone's a critic." Everyone with a wine cellar relished the opportunity to be unimpressed.

He looked down, and watched Near's shadow as it moved. It seemed to be -- rippling. Jude blinked several times. He heard the wind coming from some place far away, and he watched as Near's shadow shivered once more. "Circus animals are less dangerous." An odd warble came into Jude's voice. All jokes, these stories, until they weren't.

[Near]

A little booze seemed to have set the kid wobbling through a halfway place between slap-happy and smug. Something hanging around behind his “cheap tricks” and the crooked edge of insinuating his own dangerousness, Near got the sense that if they had been anywhere near other people, this would be the point at which Jude started challenging the big guys to arm wrestling contests.

“Yeah, yeah, Carlo Rossi shakes in his boots at the thought of you overthrowing his crap wine empire. And I’m sure you could kick an angry elephant’s ass …” Still all shruggy nonchalance, but the thing was, he probably could, and back-of-the-head recognition of this fact gave Near pause for the first time since his successful imposition of the wine. Because he had no idea what stage followed harmless happy/smug in Judeworld.

He had the stem of his glass between two fingers and was teetering it back and forth as he skimmed eyelevel bookspines like Tinder profiles. Now he stopped, turned himself around to assess the self-professed danger.

“You okay?”

[Jude]

No, not arm wrestling contests -- Jude was healthy, but no strongman. One simply wasn't a conduit for dark interdimensional forces without taking advantage of it from time to time. Or, one simply wasn't a conduit without being taken advantage of from time to time. Space, time, and matter combined into a thick door. Jude and his sister were a peephole bored into it.

Where are you? something called from a place inside his head. His mind was the forest outside, swathed in fog and rain, and the voice was not one voice but a chorus, synchronized into a single melodious calling. Where are you? He wanted to answer it.

No.

One hand on the armchair tightened to a fist. The shadow-shivering ceased, but he felt something in the woods lifts its head and turn. Are you over there?

"I'm fine." Near wouldn't believe him, and Jude didn't want to believe it either. He was fine.

[Near]

Everyone was fine. The drunk falling off his bar stool was fine. The guy bleeding in the alley was, too. And so was Jude.

It was one of those getting-through-life scripts: people learned it by rote, understood they weren’t really supposed to answer any other way, that all the other apparent routes were just painted on the wall. Lucky, too, that Jude knew enough to know that he was fine, because the truth was, for all that he had asked, Near would have been up a creek without a rejoinder if he had responded with anything but. The thought, the small relief, sent him on a quick mental shuffle through the deck of his own stray-cat lovers, most of whom had skipped that day of normal human interaction school. “You okay?”  No That’s how things got messy, going off-script.

“Yeah, sure, me too,” he added, promptless, a turn in his voice suggesting his appreciation of their mutual understanding of social mores and also this: whatever his issues, his dead dads and home invasions, he was probably closer to actually resembling “fine” than the kid.

The books made no sense to his eye. Irritating: Courtland should have let him muck around in here more often if he was going to send cryptic messages that might or might not have been about the library later in life. “Know any Boers?”

[Jude]

He really did want to be fine. It would have been much better, to have been fine.

Jude had never run away before, not like this, but on a few occasions he had become separated from his sister, or his sister had become separated from him. He didn't need to know where she was, but it had occurred to him to ask, to seek, and he had peered out from his own mind into a world made of shadows, shadows layered on shadows, filled with voices that emanated in languages not human. He had whispered into the darkness, Where is she?, and his call had reverberated out into the space between time and matter, and come back to him. I'm here. He felt her now, calling out, listening for him as if knocking on a wall, searching for a hollow spot.

He opened his mouth to speak, as a shadow passed over the room. It was as if the room dimmed, as if darkness came down, a blanket, then lifted. It could have been a time-lapsed blink. Jude's mouth remained opened, silent, the pose of a drunk trying to come up with a believable explanation.

Unrelated to the shadow, a book fell off the shelf, its cause of death pedestrian, but much more dramatic-seeming due to the event prior.

"I'm not very good with history." He was trying to speak while also trying to... hold very still. In his mind. He was also trying to look like he wasn't doing anything, but being generally unconvincing he was mostly staring at Near with undue fixation. Jude wanted to drink more, and silently bemoaned that this was a worse idea on top of a bad one.

[Near]

Does a book falling to the floor make a sound if no one is around to hear it?

Near lurched backward half a step while the thought skittered around a dark corner of his mind, obnoxious like an urban cockroach and as difficult to crush neatly beneath a heel. It was still there, antennae wiggling suggestively, as he peered down toward the jumper, a book now splayed spine-out on the hardwood, unremarkable except for its apparent suicidal tendencies.

He listened to his heart thud in his ears and waited.

Waited for the book to right itself (write itself?). Waited for the rest of the shelves to cast off their burdens in a display of solidarity. Waited for Jude to admit that he had done it with his damn mindvibes. But the kid only made another too-casual profession of not being good with something (no, no, of course not: history was not The One Thing) and proceeded to stare at him with a wide-eyed intensity which, on that face, absent current context, Near might not have found objectionable. Here and now it was only, mostly, perturbing.

After nothing happened, he bent to retrieve the book, a midsized volume gilded Through Central Borneo  - Volume II. Boers, Borneo, “Close, but not quite.” To Jude as he flipped it over, riffled through a few pages, squinted. The follow-up quip he was preparing shifted into a puzzled “The hell,” as he absorbed the fact that every page he flipped past was effaced, the text scratched out in its entirety, line by line, in what appeared to be black ballpoint pen.

“Did you do this?” he demanded, tossing the book toward Jude’s feet.

[Jude]

Jude's silence was criminal. He was certain that anything he said would reveal the true precarity of the moment, and so the best thing to do was let Near talk and play off his conclusions. When Near said nothing, and only stared at the book on the floor, there was nothing Jude could add to clear his name. His gaze shifted around the room, checking their shadows, the shadows cast by the lamps, the darkness in the corners of the room. Everything was playing nice now, for the moment. It was Red Light Green Light, and right now, the light was red.

Something was wrong with the book. Jude mentally waffled on whether he actually hadn't somehow knocked the book over -- either himself, or adjacent to his game of Hide and Seek. Maybe it was her. Maybe it was them. Maybe it was simply that the book had been in an odd position and had just taken that poorly timed moment to fall. He still favored the latter conclusion, but now something was wrong with the book, and so the odds might be turning against him.

Typically, Jude would have used his powers to catch the book, but the combination of drunkenness and his required stillness prevented him. Instead, the book thudded open and spun a half circle, lying open. Then Jude leaned over to pick it up. "Noooo," he said, once more in the fashion of children and drunks poorly trying to keep secrets. But he hadn't. He was just keeping another secret. His eyes scanned the top line of the shelves. "Not now, and not before." Not while he was young either. He was well-behaved.

[Near]

Liar, shaped like a fissure that materializes in windshield glass one day long after pebble’s impact.

But the kid wasn’t. A liar. Unless he was, and if he was he was all liar, professional liar, untruth with cheekbones, the best dissimulator Near had ever seen, and he’d known a few -- bad, good, very good, other. Knew that even a good liar gave it away a little when performing the shift between sincerity and not, a slight hiccup that you might not recognize for a while as what it was until you thought back and it all made sense. Of course.

Assume, then, Jude’s honesty. The circus freak had nothing to do with it. The culprit could have been anyone: the books stacked along the walls belonged to Courtland Farr at the same time as they didn’t, because they were everyone’s, the sum total of generations of Farrs shoving books onto shelves because it was supposed to be a library.

Beside the missingtooth gap left by Travels in Borneo, a newer, wider volume, plastic jacket still intact: The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology. Less close to Boers, but Near wiggled it out one-handed even so, tested its heft in his palm, and flipped it open with a shove of his thumb. All the same, off-kilter horizontal lines one after the other obscuring the words, page after page, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about it, because these were his books now, weren’t they? Angry? Sad? He settled the empty wine glass on the edge of a shelf and plucked another book, ignoring titles, from the next shelf over. The same. The same.

“They’re all fucked up.” Puzzled remained the best he could settle on. Puzzled, mildly disturbed, maybe a tiny bit jealous because hadn’t he wanted to do this once, years and years ago?

[Jude]

It wasn't a lie, but Jude wasn't sure he was telling the entire truth. The entire truth was that, sometimes, the boundaries between this world and Them could get a little porous, and these sometimeses often occurred in Jude's presence. It was an inhuman task, scratching out every single word in every single book. So was the task undertaken by a very patient madman? Or had something else cast its blight upon the pages of the library? If so, when? Before Jude got here? When he cut his hand? Now, only moments ago? Having not forgotten how poorly his party trick had been received, Jude did not want to have any other crimes ascribed to him.

"Mmmmmmmm," Jude said, long, drawn-out, peering at the wine bottle. He slouched deeper into his seat, folding his hands on his lap. Because rate of consumption was not equal to rate of absorption, he could feel himself getting drunker with each passing moment, floating further down the river of inebriation. Perhaps he should say something. Perhaps explain. But Near didn't like his explanations.

"May-be," he said, the first syllable high, the next dropping in pitch, "that's a bad sign. Of something." He made a pronounced gesture of bafflement. May-be we should drive right now. But that was probably dangerous. Was it more or less dangerous than the words being scratched out of all the books? But there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this that was not that Jude's pursuers were en-route, their witching stick wobbling in search of water.