Stinging in her skin. Blood in her fingers. And now a buzzing, the fluttering becoming something new and deeper. The army of paper sparrows buzzed as one and made a slicing sound she could understand.
Where… are… they? Give them to us…
Frannie swatted with the towel, and shouted, “Give what to you? Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Frannie,” Saul said, “Get down.”
“No,” she said. “This meshuge college professor is getting on my last nerve.” That was it, she told herself, get angry and get strong.
She held the towel over her face as she stormed past the end of the counter, paper birds flapping around after her, some pecking at her and others flipping out of her way.
“Hey!” she called as she yanked the front door of the restaurant open. Frannie stepped out onto the front porch and had to stop for a moment as she got a good look at the Book Man.
He was a double geyser of paper birds now, the swarm fluttering out of his leather elbow patches and the backs of his legs, ruffling the loose khakis he wore and lifting the flaps of his tweed.
You have brown eyes, thought Frannie, as dead as Cain's brother Abel.
The Book Man looked at her, shifting his head as the paper birds swirled around him. Frannie began shouting. “What do you want! You got no business here!” Then she added, without really considering how absurd she sounded, “You hear me?”
The face of the Book Man stuttered in her direction and she heard a whisper: Then tell me where they are.
“We don't know what you're talking about.” Frannie spoke aloud in response, but aimed her voice up without thinking about it, because the whisper seemed to be coming from the air. “We just went for a drive and you—”
“Gey in dre’erd!” Saul said as he emerged behind her, a towel wrapped around his head. “Drop back to Hell and let the angels of God bury you! Let the devil thou servest run in terror!”
The Book Man's eyes flashed, and his mustache twitched, but Frannie could not tell if the mouth below show disbelief or amusement. In the distance, Frannie heard an engine behind the Café. She looked around and saw the Newp was gone.
“We do not have what you seek, demon!” Saul stepped off the porch and stood in the rough sand, not fifteen yards from the Book Man. “We will not help you find it! Look no more and turn to God, or to hell with you.”
The bearded demon began to laugh before Saul’s Studebaker smashed into him from the side and sent him flying out of sight.
Newp was behind the wheel. “How…” she whispered.
Frannie had not noticed the car coming around the café. Now the Studebaker's high beams showed the Book Man crumpled in a heap on the rocky ground about 25 feet from the nose of the car. The birds had gone erratic and began to flow in reverse, heading toward their master. The Book Man struggled for a moment to a crouch. As his head pitched forward, the Book Man held a hand to his chin, but he was unable to keep the head balanced, and it fell forward completely and hung by a sliver of neck, so that his body opened up and briefly Frannie could see inside of him.
What she saw in there flowed with paper things crawling over one another like a hive of rodents. Now he put his head back and looked up, staring at Saul and Frannie. The dead eyes were just holes now, the illusion incomplete. Paper worms flowed inside those holes.
The swarm of sparrows in the air around him gathered closer underneath him and he was borne aloft by the paper birds and hidden in a cloud. The cloud surrounded the pickup truck and then dispersed towards the back, leaving the Book Man sitting behind the wheel.
He had his hands right at ten and two on the wheel, like the best driver in the world. He turned a blank, paper-filled head towards them, and with a strange normality, turned the ignition.
The books he sought were not here. Frannie could see him realizing that. They had wasted his time.
The Morris Minor pickup rumbled to life, and the Book Man unceremoniously drove away. For a long time they watched him go, the cloud of paper birds following in the wake of his truck and reminding Frannie of cans on strings, bumping behind a married couple’s car as they drove away, JUST MARRIED. She could see the red lights of the rear of his truck through the cloud of paper sparrows, and soon the taillights and the paper birds and the demon disappeared over the horizon.
Chapter 24
The Book Man drove with ravenous anger through the canyon, the road a flickering blur in his bright headlamps. The Blankguards were frustrating him on purpose, and as he thought about the older man, his bald head and beady, angry eyes, the Book Man fumed. He would have the Blanks. But for now he needed something to stave off this profound hunger, something close to what he wanted, if not the whole cigar, as the humans would say.
The Book Man needed stories. He stopped his Morris Minor pickup at a crossroad and sniffed the air, casting his eyes down the hill. He saw only darkness, no town, no blanket of electric lights in the distance. Only the dark. He began again to drive.
Over the next horizon the Book Man saw a distant town perched atop a hill. He chose a road headed in that direction and barreled hungrily towards it.
In the Book Man's mind, he thought of meals past, so many indistinguishable meals. The recent juicy paper and meat at the bookstore fire in the north of that province called Texas.
The melted crayons and study paper and the flesh of a girl trapped in a Nevada icebox while playing. He had heard the sound—the sound of the smell, literally, the vibrations of particles on the air, and they spoke to him of books and death and he had crossed hundreds of miles to partake in that feast.
And he was going to feast again on the greatest of all, the Blanks, for the Blanks were rich and stories deeper than he usually had occasion to taste. It was the stories he liked, he thought, eating the stories, eating the value and the potentiality.
He killed his headlights and drove by instinct over the asphalt with perfect precision, the tan, rubber-coated steering wheel sliding through his thick human fingers.
The stories. The girl in the icebox in Nevada, he had tasted her story, short and unimpressive but so full of frustration and tragedy in the end, not the last dull tale to be rescued by a good ending. Her lifeless flesh and begun to run with the rough coloring book paper, a book of ragamuffin dolls on an adventure – – a story of mischievous dolls crossing the countryside, their reality seeping into the rotting flesh of their reader, telling a pungent story that even now the Book Man could taste on his nearly human tongue.
Briefly the Book Man had a vision of his first meal, eaten when he was but a few moments into this reality.
Angry he had come into the world, though not angry at the monks who had opened the door. They had been fools who thought they could change matter, dust into glass, iron into gold. Their incantations had attracted him, not for their wisdom but for their obscene hopes. So many things these mortals could do and yet never quite saw.
The men, those creatures God built to squirm across the earth and strive. He seethed at their hopes even as he lusted for them, he came on in fire and drank of their potentiality. He was above them and he would remain above them and he would not be mocked.
He would have the Blankguard’s trove and would make of it his seat of power. He would consume and consume and consume, until all the children of men were empty. He would feast on their empty misery.