Chapter 27: Ready to Run
Her death came fast, but Forgrave as a book on my mental desk would probably take seventy-five years to read.
I left the Centre St. Joseph government hospital with a great weight on my psyche that didn’t leave when I finally put the cacophony of voices and general smog of protective warding behind me. Forgrave wanted to walk again, to see again, and the dawn was just a few hours away. The early morning streets were mostly empty except for lonely pedestrians like me, so I took us down to the waterfront to give the dearly departed a better view across the river. Nagging snippets of unrequested data were popping into my head about random buildings I walked by, or a park, the trees down one stretch of old road in the more historic part of town.
At the waterfront I basically let the new presence in my head have my eyeballs and ears while sitting on a bench. I wanted to sit because I felt quite full after the big meal, and wouldn’t be needing to take a bite out of an animal for days yet. My pink backpack was still heavy with the weight of the Bible, and it grew noticeably heavier as the sun finally crawled over the edge of the Earth to hit us full force, the only clouds in the sky some lonely cirrus wisps that were burning away.
After a long stretch of silence which I didn’t feel like interrupting, the presence in my head said, “You seem depressed.”
This was honestly how I felt all the time. Maybe Helen was just a bright, bubbly person. Right now she had reason to be ecstatic.
“When I was blue, here’s what I did.” And she told me, the chemistry and culinary art of it all, for the next twenty minutes, without pause. Basil tea was a common staple, but it was accompanied by a large number of sub-rituals. Having a grandmother to talk to is often nice, but I was starting to see that having one living in your head could become tiresome. I idly reminisced about my own grandmothers and their genetic inheritances: overeating, and a love for stories of murder and mayhem.
By about 7 am I was going to need to at least check out some basil to shut Helen up.
In a small corner store that she knew all so well and told me all about, I would review the items that old ladies, vegans and natural-fibers-types enjoy, dunking my head into the deeper, greener mysteries. Panier Sante was in an old wooden building with a rich garden in the front and a cobblestone path lined with choice pieces of quartz; a brown cat lying in a sunbeam on a patio chair began to hiss when I crossed the garden’s threshold, but then it made eye contact with Helen through my eyes and laid back down. I was just the driver, so I was allowed in for now.
Hemp didn’t hurt or hinder me at all. Ginseng roots could sting painfully if I waved my hand near them, but only one root out of twenty did so. Some of the wild berry jams were as nasty as the maple syrup, so I’d be counting on Helen to notice the plants from afar in the wild: foxberry, elderberry, huckleberry were all on my repellent list. Chili peppers too. A four-leaf clover, naturally, was also a bit of a toe-stubber. Houseleak flowers were fun – like slamming your shin against a chair. I was very surprised to discover that to my new senses blackberries smelled exactly like blood. I had a candidate substitute, but groaned at the thought of vegan vampires.
And the holy basil itself turned out to be worth knowing about after all, because it broke my ‘hardness’ scale, surpassing the rose. It was making me grimace and flinch from far down the aisle. I couldn’t imagine even touching the stuff, leaving the store without taking anything, resulting in a silent huff from the voice in my head, a dismissive shake of the head from the brown cat tutelary still sprawled out in the sun. I didn’t have the speed or stealth for true shopping before noon.
Finding a park bench and organizing, Marie Pleurd’s map confirmed what I suspected: there was very little between Trois-Rivieres and Deep River except wilderness. Mount Tremblant had been given a mighty big X, so I’d be going far around the one hotspot of human activity. I’d be back on a diet of wild game, which was a chore but still safer and more comfortable than the blood diamond. That was for emergencies, though emergencies were surprisingly frequent.
Helen’s mental roadmaps gave me a sharper sense of things, and I’d actually be faster on foot going north of the skiers and the gamblers at Tremblant through an expansive national park, just me and the animals and whatever was hiding behind the trees whenever I turned back around quickly. I had it on Gisant’s authority that Nocome wouldn’t be following, but that would seem like a flimsy comfort up there.
Well, best get through the land of the wendigos while summer was waxing. I left that day, jogging to the city’s outskirts, feeling human sweat on my brow and a human stitch in my side, both of which vanished at the strike of noon.
Chapter 28: The Wild
Image credits: Mokkie, Thierry Labetoulle