“So!” I laughed. “Is there a cat in a hat wandering around somewhere? A great brain? A Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer?”

Anne folded her hands and knelt at the top of the ditch, looking down at me and grinning.

“You read Stephen King, Mister Vagabond. We’re all kind of like that clown thing, only we don’t all need fear. I need happy childhood dreams. Raven needs his tricks. All those ugly fishies you attacked in the lake, they’re what feeds on baby and toddler fear. Nasty but unfocused, gibbering and saying nothing. Adults who fear water power some of the bigger ones in that lake, but you got lucky.” She cackled into the fresh night sky. “And I’m pretty sure that Nanabozho set things up so he gets a little jolt every time Bugs Bunny tricks Elmer Fudd!”

She got up and stomped down into the ditch. “And you’re in luck again, because I have your stuff.”

She held out the little red Bible. Tucked inside it was my folded up map, which had all my exercise notes. I had been hoping to over-analyze them one day when I could stop and think.

I had to look at her sideways. “Why are you helping a damn vampire?”

Anne tossed the Bible into my lap, burning me, making me groan and scamper away. “Because you’re a big dumb child, silly.”

I managed to escape my gifts, crouching beside them in the dry trench at the bottom of the ditch.

“That’s a very strange Bible,” Anne said. “Written in an Indian language … and it doesn’t exactly match. Open it where I put the map in.”

“I can’t.”

She scoffed and showed me her palm, getting ready to slap me again. “At least try.”

The cover was hot to the touch, and the pages were each slicing, each giving an instant papercut along the length of contact. Anne’s hair glowed redder like a tame little fire, beaming down into the ditch and showing my struggling fingers, my burning and weeping fingers dripping first with normal blood (which did not mark the pages at all) and then the St. Elmo’s fire.

But eventually I split the pages apart, as instructed. A mess of bizarre symbols looked back at me – this was one of the artificial writing systems made for the unwritten native languages.

(kiwapamin)

Anne’s glowing smile shrank a little, but she didn’t stop threatening me with the palm of her hand

(you see me)

(kiwapamitin … I see you)

There was a sudden clicking in my head that hurt, making my teeth clash together.

And with total ease I read the words that Nocome knew. Anne had penciled in a little arrow to guide my eye, and I read aloud:

“There are those whose teeth are swords, whose fangs are knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, the needy from among mankind. The wendigo has two daughters: give and give. Three will not satisfy, and at four it will never say ‘enough’. Sheol, and the barren womb, Earth that is never satisfied with water, and fire that never says, ‘Enough’.”

I fumbled, back in English, taking my hands from the hurtful pages. “Wendigo?”

“It’s supposed to be a leech, though it sounds a bit more like something closer to home,” Anne said with the voice of a schoolteacher. She was a little taller now, I thought. “But it’s a more general warning about being insatiable. A wendigo grows larger with every meal, so the hunger remains.”

I tried to be a little of my usual self – I don’t take holy words lying down.

“In my experience, a lot of the people telling others to be content with what they have actually have more than their fair share and are telling the serfs to pipe down. I imagine some guy in silk robes behind the pulpit calling dirty peasants leeches.”

Anne picked up the Bible and closed it, setting it on top my notes.

“You’re still deciding what you want to eat,” she said, huffing with annoyance. I was apparently a slow child in her class. “You want to eat achievement, doing more of those silly exercises or lake-jumps. You want to eat knowledge, trying to figure out the rules of our kind and summarizing them so neatly. You want to eat depression, going after more and more sad people at the end of their time.” She crinkled her nose. “You want women in a rather vicious way, when drugs take the mask off.”

“I think you should ask permission before reading someone’s mind,” I sighed. I wanted to hiss at her, but it was hard to reply with anger or resentment to this being.

“You don’t need any of that. If you keep going after those things, and pick one to really go after, you’re not going to be yourself in the spring, Mister Vagabond.” She stood up tall with her hands on her hips. “Nocome the wendigo doesn’t have to use hunger to get in your head and take over. Drinking, lusting, pumping iron like a bodybuilder – all of those insatiable wants could be used. Stay here and don’t eat anything.”

I frowned. “For how long?”

“Until you don’t mind waiting. Once you can handle waiting, you can go.”

“Won’t I starve?”

Anne rolled her eyes. “I’ll bring you a basket of blackberries every night. You can live off those. You’ve just been eating animals and people because they taste better.”

I was still in the mood for twisting high-and-mighty words. “Do you cook all your potatoes? You could just eat them raw. And you could drink nothing but water and sleep on a rock instead of a bed.”

I actually got Anne of Green Gables to mouth a silent curse.

I’ve always hated people trying to preach at me. There’s some parable about blind men and elephants that people think is wise – but it’s not really wise, because it’s being told from the perspective of a sighted person who sees the blind men touching the different parts of the elephant and knows what’s really going on. The storyteller gives themselves a superhuman perspective when the whole point of the parable is that we’re all blind men fumbling, unaware that the whole thing is one elephant. Everyone’s blind but the storyteller – sorry, don’t buy it. If all humans are just looking at shadows on the cave wall, you can’t be telling me that we’re actually in a cave in the first place. You took away your own authority by saying that humans were so flawed and tricked. The core paradox and hypocrisy and ego of this preachy bullshit was obvious to me from a young age.

“How about you go without your bedtimes stories,” I countered.

“I can!” She stomped her foot, and seemed to shrink in size a little. “Can you go without blood?”

“Longer than you.”

“Fine!” She spun around and marched halfway out of the ditch, muddy shoes kicking dirt back at me. Then spun around again and marched back to where I was crouched.

“You’re just agreeing with another part of the Bible. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

I disagreed at once. “Then no one can judge anyone and murderers should go free, apparently. Sounds silly.”

Anne growled. “You … are … so good … at twisting things … you’re looking up your own bottom!”

It took a long time for me to stop laughing. I felt the sudden compulsion to hug this opinionated chatterbox, but kept still.

“Okay. I’ll try going cold turkey. I’ll try anything once – but if it doesn’t work, I can’t lose so much time that I can’t try other things. I get it: Nocome or whatever possessed Nocome and then me uses addiction to break people, and it could be cocaine or gambling or fried food. But can I at least go sit and meditate under a tree instead of in this ditch? It’s kind of muddy-“

Anne yanked my arm, getting me moving in some direction. I stooped and pocketed my effects, wincing but able to get them stashed away, and followed the girl. Along with the size change I had noticed that this guardian spirit didn’t have a stable age – when scolding or instructive she would became a schoolteacher in her thirties, and when laughing or trading insults she might be a teenager or even younger in appearance. But when she finally yanked me to a reasonably secluded speck of forest between the fields that would hide me from the sun and any wandering humans during this time of fasting, she changed again.

Now she was grandmotherly, and it was startling to see the red hair go grey. It was even more startling when she hugged me.

“I felt that earlier. You don’t do or say anything when you feel like hugging someone. That’s okay – I don’t forgive people when I should.”

Chapter 42: Overthinking It