Strange Pulp 2: Librarian With a Chainsaw (Part 1)

Welcome to the second issue of Strange Pulp, an irregular journal of weird fiction. If you missed Issue 1, get it here.

This issue contains the first part of “Librarian With a Chainsaw,” another story set in the troubled village of Deepkill, New York. Read it in your email below or in PDF here. (I recommend the PDF!) A content warning is here.

The story’s conclusion will be published on Thursday, along with an epub of the entire thing. If you’d like to read the entire story now, back my Patreon for as little as $2 per month and it’s yours.

One last thing: I’ve created a short survey about this newsletter and I would seriously appreciate your feedback. And if you enjoy the story, forward it to your friends! I’m really excited about this project and I want it to reach as many people as possible.

And now, back to Deepkill…

Dr. Bark was twenty feet off the ground when the librarian started yelling at him. He was hanging from the side of a dead elm, trimming branches knocked loose in last night’s storm. His chainsaw was singing and he was too—Elton John, always Elton John—and it wasn’t until he finished the cut that he noticed the woman in the road screaming his name. He let the chainsaw dangle, popped off his hearing protectors and said, “What?”

“I’m Flora Potter. I work across the street.”

She pointed at the library—a windowless concrete cube on a hill overlooking the creek that gave Deepkill its name. The bridge that connected the parking lot to Hosta Street was blocked by an old maple that the wind had slapped down the night before.

“I guess you want help with that,” he said.

“I do. The library opens at twelve and the children come for story time at one and the way parking is around here—”

“Call my office.”

“I left two voice mails.”

“I’ll hear ‘em Monday.”

“But I need you now.”

Flora Potter wore a bright yellow coat with matching rain boots—an ensemble that, in Dr. Bark’s eyes, made her look like a child. Her eyes were wide, her short hair so black that he figured it must be dyed. (He was wrong.) He doubted she’d make it in Deepkill.

“Weren’t you the one painted over the old mural?”

“Excuse me?”

“You had a mural in the library. A big brown Norwegian Elm. I remember from when I was a kid. I heard you got rid of it. That true?”

Even thinking of the old mural made Flora shudder. It had stretched from floor to ceiling in the children’s room, a gloomy, all-too-realistic depiction of a leafless tree whose despicable grayness reminded her of a congealing mushroom casserole. One of her first acts as village librarian had been to hire some middle schoolers to replace it with a brightly-colored scene of multicultural children at play. There was pride in her voice when she said, “Yes.”

“How come?”

“It was peeling, ugly, and depressing.”

“Reminded me of trees. I like trees.”

Flora’s hands formed fists. She felt an urge to scream profanities at the man on the tree, but she knew that wouldn’t help. Instead, she did what her mother had taught her and smiled even bigger than before.

“Will you help me with my maple or not?”

“Town got wrecked up last night. Schedule’s packed. Gimme two weeks, maybe three.”

“I can’t wait that long.”

“Yeah? What the fuck else are you gonna do?”

He popped his hearing protectors back on. Flora said something, but his chainsaw was roaring and he was singing loud. His voice was as clear as the morning and she hated it just as much.

She gave him the finger. He wasn’t looking but it felt nice anyway. The moment was spoiled, unfortunately, when she felt her legs wobble. Her vision blurred and then went black. She did not make a sound as she collapsed in the middle of the road.

Mud.

Flora had mud in her hair and mud in mouth. It was under her fingernails and caked against her eyelids and packed into her ears.

She opened her jaw. Mud oozed over her tongue. She tried to sit up but there was too much mud pressing on her back. She jammed her fist forward and felt no air.

She wanted to scream but knew it would make her choke. So she took a moment to collect herself, to refuse panic. She put all she had into a single, furious kick. Her foot broke free and a hand closed around her ankle and she was dragged into the world like a child being born.

She tumbled backwards out of a wall of mud. She was in a little hut built of broken wood and pages torn from illustrated books. The sun shone through the paper roof, dull and small. The place stank of rot.

The hand on her ankle belonged to a man with round eyes and round glasses and an exceptionally round head. He had a shaggy bowl cut—like a Beatles wig, Flora thought—and a patchy beard. He wore a limp tweed jacket and corduroy trousers. His left eye was missing and his body was frail. She couldn’t tell what color his clothes had started as. They were mud brown now.

“What. The. Fuck,” Flora said.

And then the world went dark.

Not all the way, not like it had when she collapsed on Hosta. It was like the color drained from everything, like the sun gave up and went to bed.

Something was standing over the hut.

Something big enough to block out the sky.

The man knew what it was. He wrapped his hands around his throat so tight that blood sluiced down his fingernails. He screamed.

Flora’s eyes snapped open. She was still on Hosta, where oil mingled on the pavement with last night’s rain.

A car honked. The driver shouted:

“Why don’t you get the fuck out of the road?”

The woman in the white Nissan jammed her elbow against the horn and kept it there until Flora got to her feet and stumbled out of the street.

Flora climbed over the downed tree, went into the library, and washed her face. She messaged the library facebook group to let them know that story time was canceled. Her car was trapped in the parking lot, so she called a Lyft to take her to the Home Depot in Katara, where she got herself a chainsaw.

Flora Potter liked books more than people. Who could blame her? Books didn’t kill. Books didn’t mock. If a book saw you pass out in the middle of a busy country road, it wouldn’t help—no arms and legs—but it wouldn’t shout at you. Books were comfort, entertainment, education, a shield against the cruelty of the world. They could protect you, but they couldn’t protect themselves.

That was her job.

She’d grown up in Floyd, a one stoplight town on the banks of Lake Huron that was three hours from Toronto and about fifty years behind the twenty-first century. But it had a library, a little A-Frame just back of the post office, and even though they didn’t have a ton of books they had interlibrary loan and that was a lifeline to the world. When she was twelve the library was shuttered and the books were pulped and nobody in Floyd gave a shit but her. She cried off and on for three weeks. When she finished, she asked Jeeves, “How do you become a librarian?” Books had saved her. She wanted to return the favor.

Close to twenty years later, she completed a master’s program in library sciences at the University of Toronto. The job market was, like everyone warned her, atrocious. So when she saw the listing for village librarian in Deepkill, New York, she applied without hesitation. She knew there was no way she’d get hired—she had no experience, no local ties—but four days later, after a weirdly brief phone interview, she was hired.

“Bumfuck New York?” said Lia, her girlfriend. “Why?”

“It spoke to me.”

Lia wrapped her hands around a stemless glass of red wine. Behind her, the brick wall that had drawn them to the apartment glowed in the light of the falling sun.

“But it’s so far.”

“It’s New York. It’s right there. How far could it be?”

Eight hours, it turned out, along winding country roads where Confederate flags flew proudly. Lia helped her move and then flew home from Newark. That was eight months ago. Three times she’d made plans to visit. Three times she’d flaked. They were on life support and Flora was sure the only reason Lia hadn’t pulled the plug was because she was waiting for Flora to admit defeat in Deepkill and come back where she belonged. But though Flora Potter dressed like a friendly cartoon character—rainbow tights and yellow suspenders, floppy berets and lipstick the kids called “stop sign red,”—she had an iron will. No matter how fucked things got, she never gave in.

The chainsaw was a gas-powered, 14-inch Black and Decker with a 3.5 horsepower motor and a three point anti-vibration system. Flora didn’t know what any of that meant and she didn’t care. The tag promised she could “Cut With Confidence” and that is exactly what she did. Wearing crisp cowhide gloves, safety goggles and a bright yellow hearing protector, she carved the maple into firewood. It took all of Sunday and a fair bit of Monday. When she was done, she burned it. Heaped half a dozen of her freshly-cut logs into a triangle in the parking lot and set them on fire. They didn’t want to light—the wood was green, the bark pregnant with sap and damp from the storm that killed the tree—but she had a bottle of lighter fluid for her zippo and once she’d emptied it across them, they got with the program.

A fat column of toxic black smoke swirled into the cold sky. It smelled fucking awful. She dragged the best armchair out of the reading room, parked it on the grass, and enjoyed the blaze. As the sun set she ordered a veggie pizza from Reggie’s—the only place in the village that delivered on Mondays. She flirted hopelessly with the driver and then, after she left, ate as much pizza as her stomach could handle and washed it down with half a fifth of Evan Williams. By the time the fire burned down to the irretrievably scorched pavement, the stars were high and so was she.

“Eat shit, Dr. Bark!” she shouted at the embers. “Bet you’re not even a fucking doctor!”

An advantage of village life. Nobody paid attention when you screamed.

From his hut, Paul Goodlove smelled the smoke. It woke him from a half sleep, a stink like something dying, but he didn’t mind because it was the first thing he’d smelled besides mud in—

Months?

Years?

Could be.

Paul sighed. Cracked his back and slicked his grease-stiff hair out of his eyes. He stepped out of his hut into the world of mud: cracked earth and sawed-off stumps that, as far as he knew, went on forever. The sun was gone but a faint orange light on the far side of the library tickled the black belly of the sky. He wanted a look at the fire but the tangle didn’t like him moving at night. He longed for just five minutes to heat up his hands. It had been so long since he was warm.

“It fucking sucks here,” he said.

He was right. It did.

He assumed the fire was connected to the woman he’d pulled out of his wall one day—two days? Three?—before. The woman who’d sunk back into the mud before he could introduce himself.

The woman who might be able to help him get home.

He loped across the mud to the nearest stump and tore off a strip of dead bark the width of his hand. If it caught him, the tangle would kill him for this. So he worked in speed and silence and was back in the hut before he was seen. He broke the bark into pieces the size of pencils. He held the first one against the pages that formed his walls and gave a little shove.

Flora jammed the pizza box into the break room mini fridge. She had to bend it into an L to make it fit.

“Breakfast,” she said. “I shall breakfast like a queen!”

She went upstairs to the children’s section. She loved it here. The lights were brighter than in the adult reading room. The shelves were more crowded, the books battered from heavy use. Tiny bean bags formed a circle around a rug depicting the very hungry caterpillar gnawing through a watermelon, a pickle, an ice cream cone—all rendered in colors so vibrant, they made her want one more slice of pizza. Her mural filled the back wall. She spent a while staring at it, nipping from her bottle of Evan. She’d gotten the best artists the middle school had to offer. They’d tried their hardest. It still kind of sucked.

“But it’s mine.”

She turned off the lights and shuffled into her office. She used her hip to shove her desk to the side of the room and dragged out the half-inflated air mattress. Her sheets, creased from too many nights’ use, were still on it. The pump roared, planting the seed for the hangover that would greet her in the morning. The gray lump beneath her sheets plumped like a raisin. Soon she was wrapped tight in her yellow comforter. The lights were off. The darkness was absolute.

In the children’s room, the books began to move.

Flora knew she shouldn’t be sleeping in her office. She’d crashed here on her first night alone in Deepkill, after she drove Lia to Newark and cried the entire way back. She’d planned to find an apartment the next day, but a town this small had no apartments and taking a room in someone else’s place would have put her at a landlord’s whim. Here, she was in control. She’d never lived alone before—had gone from Floyd to university to apartments shared for 8-20 months at a time with a series of girlfriends that terminated with Lia. She’d never known the freedom to wander, naked and farting, listening to whatever she liked as loud as she liked. She’d never understood how nice it was to eat dinner without checking to make sure it worked for whoever else was around. She’d never been in a position to put herself first.

She liked it.

The library was a funny place. Her ostensible supervisor was Jilly Bryant, her predecessor, whose only apparent interests were Elizabethan poetry and Parliament menthols. Aside from the cleaning person who came once a week and the utility man who came never, Flora was the only staff. This would have been a problem if the library had many visitors, but aside from her sparsely attended story hours almost no one ever passed through the door. It was a shame, because the collection was interesting—a few new books and a seemingly random jumble of old ones. Most of it was junk: Victorian seed catalogs and shabby poetry, Cold War propaganda and melodramatic novels by authors so obscure, she couldn’t even find them online. She was kind of obsessed with it—cataloging it would take years, and she expected to enjoy every minute.

Flora had made various attempts to bring in visitors, but aside from painting over the mural nothing she’d done had attracted notice. One of her many little ideas had been to prop up a beat to hell paperback of Moby-Dick beside the check-out desk. Each day, she turned the page. They were up to 274—a beautifully demented run-on sentence about the horrible whiteness of the whale—and as far as she could tell, no one had glanced at it but her. So she felt no guilt about squatting. As long as nobody else gave a fuck what she did at the library, Flora thought, neither should she.

She turned on her white noise app. The whoosh of an imaginary box fan filled the small, airless room. Below it was a quiet whisper—the heating system, she figured—that she liked to imagine were the books themselves, singing her to sleep. Just before she set down her phone, a text came in from Lia that glowed so bright it hurt her eyes.

“When are you coming home?”

Flora silenced her phone. As long as she was close to her books, this was home enough.

While sleep swallowed Flora, the books in the children’s room rearranged themselves, squirming out of the way as A Tree Is Nice, We Planted a Tree, The Busy Tree, and The Giving Tree bulged and shuddered like waking animals. Their covers bent. The plastic that protected their dust jackets from the juice-sticky hands of Deepkill’s children split. Clear liquid oozed from their spines, pooled on the shelves and dripped onto the rug. Thin furry stalks—like vines but very much not vines—crawled out of their pages. Their many-jointed limbs reached around the edges of the shelves. They felt for the carpet. They crept toward the gentle rumble of white noise.

They did not move quickly, but like Flora they were relentless. After ten minutes they had cleared the very hungry caterpillar. After thirty they were edging under the office door.

Their ends were sharp. Where they brushed the air mattress, air whistled out. They slid up its side, tearing holes in Flora’s comforter, plunging through the synthetic down, reaching for her legs.

They wrapped around her ankles. First one, then two, then a dozen. And then they snapped shut like a noose, cutting deep into her skin.

Flora woke up screaming.

Still drunk, she had no idea where she was or what she was doing but she knew her ankles hurt. She twisted, getting tangled in the comforter, and the things squeezed tighter and she tried to pull her legs to her chest, but her legs could not move. The stalks gave a fierce yank, whipping her off the air mattress. The pain in her ankles—the sudden bite of blood in the air—snapped her out of her fog.

I am so fucking alone here, she thought. If I die, how long before my body is found? How long before anyone lets Lia know?

She forced herself to stop struggling. The things on her legs relaxed—not letting go, but readying for another pull. She fumbled for her phone, finding it right as the stalks pulled again, slamming her into the door so hard that the wood split. Flora bit her tongue to keep from screaming.

Flora turned on her phone. Lia’s message hung on the home screen like smoke. The stalks rammed her into the door again, cracking her toes and cutting close to bone. This time they didn’t relax; they pulled harder, fully taut, trying to drag her through the door. It hurt like nothing she’d ever felt but she didn’t drop her phone. She got the flashlight on and pointed it at her legs.

The things that bound her were colorful. Red, blue, a sickly orange. Their silver tips glistened like screws. They were fuzzy.

They looked like pipe cleaners.

She’d have laughed if they weren’t threatening to strip the skin off her feet. As they pulled tighter, she pushed past her agony and sat up. She reached for her right ankle. At her first touch, they let go and snapped back under the door.

Flora wasted no time catching her breath. She lurched to her feet—holy hell they hurt!—and tore open the door. She saw nothing but the quickest flash of the stalks snaking around the shelves. She hobbled across the floor, turning the corner as they slithered back into the books that spawned them. They were gone.

“God damn it.”

No, not all of them. A straggler was caught on the bottom corner, stuck between shelf and rug. Flora grabbed it with both hands and pulled until it snapped. Half of it flicked back into the 1957 Child’s Guide to the Trees of New York State. The other writhed in her palm.

It looked like a pipe cleaner but it wasn’t, not quite. Its spine was articulated, polished bone. Its fuzz was damp fur. She dropped it on the floor and crushed it with her heel until it stopped moving. It left a sticky residue on her foot. She sniffed.

Sap.

In the break room she tore off half a roll of paper towels, wrapped it around the mangled skin of both ankles, and secured it with bookbinding tape. She took a garbage bag and returned to the children’s section. Along the way, she grabbed her bourbon and turned on every light in the building. It was nowhere near enough.

Wearing yellow cleaning gloves, she grabbed the Child’s Guide. Its cover was soft, spongy. It split in half when she dropped it in the bag, revealing pages that stank like compost and crawled with stubby white worms.

She tossed every tree book in the bag. The Giving Tree, a favorite of her father’s which had always depressed the hell out of her, was last. She cinched the bag tight, marched outside and tossed it in the trash can. She splashed some of the Evan onto it and set the whole mess on fire.

It burned fast. The bag melted away, giving off acrid black smoke, and then the books caught fire, their plastic sheathes curling like closing fists. She sipped her bourbon, watching until all of them had been reduced to ash. There was a sound at the end—probably just steam escaping—not unlike a child’s scream.

There was absolutely no way Flora was going back to sleep. Instead she opened up the storage closet, looking for something caustic to scrub the sap off her skin. She found yellowed ledgers and blank return slips, unopened sticky notes and rusty staples, and an entire case of keychain flashlights bearing the logo of the Deepkill Village Library. She kept looking, trying not to see the blood seeping through her homemade bandages, pooling against the tape. At the bottom of the last box she found something odd. A plastic nameplate, just like the one on her office.

“Paul Goodlove, Village Librarian.”

Unlike everything else in the box, it looked new.

She tossed it in the trash.

Flora took shelter in her car. She turned up the heat and peeled the tape off her legs. It hurt as much as she figured it would. She opened the first aid kit Lia had put in her glovebox, smeared her wounds with disinfectant and wrapped them in real bandages. She dropped the old ones, wet with blood and flecked with skin, out the window.

She googled Paul Goodlove. An article came up from the Deepkill Echo, a profile of the new village librarian. He’d been hired just three months before her. The photo showed a man with a round head and round glasses and hair like a bad Beatles wig. He was clean shaven and had two eyes but there was no question. This was the man she’d met in the mud.

She opened her messages app. Her thumb hovered over Lia’s text, but what the fuck was there to say? Instead she typed out a message to Jilly Bryant. She was grateful to have the language of business to mask her fear.

“Dear Ms. Bryant. I hereby resign the position of Deepkill village librarian, effective today. Goodbye.”

She should have left immediately. She knew that. But she was tired and bleeding and still pretty drunk. She needed to rest, just for a little while, and then she would hit the road.

Flora Potter closed her eyes, certain this was her last night in Deepkill.

She was right.