Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

Pookas are called up by alcohol, by the darkness that blooms in an alcoholic's soul after that first drink, and with AA and these steps I think I can avoid that drink.

Maybe I'm arrogant, but I'm honestly not that worried about my sobriety. I am, I guess, still a little worried about global warming, and I still wonder what we'll say to the penguins when the end times are upon us.

We first heard about them the way one hears about everything these days: on the web. Some self-styled "urban explorer," wired on whatever and driven by transgressive urges most people claim they get over in high school, snuck into his 532 ndabandoned building in the Detroit metropolitan area. Fortunately, he brought his digital camera and an extra memory card.

Within hours, the first Flickr page went up. Within weeks, the first wiki/blogspot/Facebook groups appeared. The histories of that initial depository were always stitched together out of tall tales and myths. Someone could have found some Roosevelt School District official and asked, but no one did. Soon, the first Crawlers-no one seems to know where that name came from-began braving the empty streets to start exploring and mapping the place. Not long after that came the first trespassing arrests, and the first disappearances. Before too long, the various strands of lore surrounding the Roosevelt Book Depository had coalesced into a story composed of enough truth to become the truth, as far as anyone who studies such things in centuries to come-and publishes them in whatever digital or ethereal or cerebral format one publishes in those times-will ever be able to tell:

A public school district, emptying of students as the last desperate families flee the neighborhoods, its buildings collapsing and its funding gutted, quietly takes over an abandoned tire warehouse on one of those Detroit streets that hasn't seen a functioning streetlamp since the Riots. There, school functionaries-or, more likely, the gang thugs and drunken ex-Teamsters they pay with the last of the district's cash-begin delivering truckloads of used or never used textbooks, supplies, notepads, posters, maps, writing implements, and whole libraries full of outdated, donated boys' and girls' novels and biographies of presidents and sports stars to what they have already christened the Depository. The plan, originally, is to sell it all, in the hopes of renovating the last functioning elementary school in the area.

Then the elementary school closes. The funding is zeroed. The officials disperse back to their homes, which have never been nearby. The ex-Teamsters return to their barstools, the thugs to their gangs.

And in their warehouse with its smashed-in windows and gaping doorframes and ruthlessly tagged cement walls, the books and notebooks and maps and visual aides of the former Roosevelt District Schools lie where they've been tossed, in tottering dunes or great lakes of paper. They huddle like penguins in the Michigan winter snows. They curl and molt in the sucking humidity of mid-summer. They are shredded for nests to house raccoons, rats, pigeons, the homeless. They begin to decompose. To sprout weeds and toadstools. To change.

By the time that first unnamed explorer finds them, they have lain in that space for more than thirty years.

After that, less than six months passed before the discovery-or creation-of the second depository, in the mildew-ravaged, fogbound port hangars near Fisherman's Wharf. That one drew an entirely different breed of explorer. There were boho college kids drifting up the coast through the Youth Hostels. Then a team of college professors from Berkeley who wrote the first academic papers and held the first symposium on the subject, which they dubbed The End. If they were aware of any irony in naming a brand new phenomenon that, they kept it to themselves.

By the end of 2010, there were depositories in Chicago, St. Louis, Ft. Lauderdale. They were always urban at first, their foundations usually the refuse from bankrupt school systems. But then the owners of the last used bookstore in Dallas -a giant conglomerate formed by the desperate owners of the twenty-five largest remaining open shops in Texas -announced that they were closing. And instead of holding a final sale, or throwing everything up for auction on eBay or listing it on ABE, they rented twenty-five U-Haul trailers, filled them at random, and dispersed across the country to seed the depositories.

Other shop owners followed suit. It became an ethical stance, a point of pride, a last great act of self-defeating defiance. They would not scrape the last, dreadful pennies from the bottom of the book well. Instead, they would spread their wares like spores, bury them like acorns in the rich, loamy mulch of decomposing language in the depositories, in the hopes that they would sprout there. Grow a new generation, not of readers-people still read, despite what the academicians tell us-but bibliophiles. A healthier, younger subculture.

Then individuals began following the shop owners' lead. Readers who'd spent their whole lives building and tending their personal libraries formulated wills directing their children to wheel whatever they didn't want to the nearest depots and bury them there. Without open shops, and with the online outlets flooded with merchandise that few sought, selling books became a chore, and a fruitless one at that. Easier by far to find a depository and leave everything there, for whoever might want it.

Of course, the depositories didn't mostly attract bibliophiles. They drew squatters, first. Pushers and junkies. Cultists. Fetishists. When the rate of reported disappearances began to climb, the police took to discouraging, then forbidding visiting the depositories. But they never cleaned them out, rarely patrolled them. And people-whatever their reasons-kept coming, though less often and usually after dark.

Meanwhile, the books lay atop each other like bodies in ditches. In breezes, or in a beam of sudden flashlight, they stirred, seeming not so much to have come to life but retained it, somehow. Occasionally, a page even lifted like a waving hand, extending itself toward whatever had disturbed it, or else waving goodbye.

Esmeralda

I'm already in bed when the knock comes. Sitting up, shivering as the twist of sheet and heavy blanket slides from me, I stare at the misshapen shadows stretched over the hardwood floor. It's the snow outside that has given them their head-like humps, their ice-claws. They look like illustrations in a book of fairy tales. Ezzie would have loved them.

I'm musing on that, wondering whether the bottle of rye on the bedside table is as empty as it looks and also whether I've stored another in the bathroom medicine chest five steps from my cot, when the knock comes again. So there really is someone out there, and that means one of two things: the police have finally found something, or Ezzie's relentless sister Sarah has finally found me.

"Just a… " I start, but my voice comes out even thicker than its current usual, and I suck rye-residue and sleep-fur off my teeth and try again. "Hold on."

My feather-robe and fuzzy slippers were both gifts from Ezzie, of course. For the feather-robe and fuzzy slipper birthday party she threw me during our first year in the downtown Detroit loft. Not so long ago, really. Christ, barely three years.

It's my lucky night, turns out; there is indeed a fresh rye in the medicine cabinet, right between the ibuprofen and Ezzie's razor case, which is my only keepsake. She would have approved, if she'd approved of anything I do anymore. The thing she'd held most dear, after all. Unlike most cutters, from what I gather, for Ezzie it was less about the wounds than the weapon.