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The van is making that noise again.
“Turn left in… ten meters,” a woman’s stilted, neutral voice reads out from the tinny speakers on Gerry’s phone.
“I know that,” Gerry grumbles, reaching out with one hand to reach for the phone without taking his eyes off the road. “I can read signs.”
He fumbles it, and it falls onto the floor of the van. He swears.
“The van is making that noise again,” Jon says.
“Turn left in… five meters,” the voice from the phone now somewhere on the floor says.
“I didn’t forget,” Gerry says, annoyed. “For-- can you shut her up? Please?”
“I can turn it off, yes. Gerry, the van’s making that noise. You need to take it to a mechanic.”
“And let them find the dried blood on the upholstery? Yeah, I’m sure that’ll go great. And I guess we can just put all of the gasoline and weaponry in our pockets in the meantime.”
“We could put all of it in the storage room for a while.” That they rented out, specifically for storing the Leitners that they couldn’t burn or tear apart. That happens sometimes, unfortunately.
“It’s fine, I can look after the van. We don’t have the time for that, anyway. We’re on a job.”
“Are we?” Jon mutters, bent over, rummaging at the floor of the van for the dropped phone. Good lord, but it’s filthy down here. They have to clean the van. They practically live in it, half of the time. Whenever they’re out of London, hunting and searching.
“Yes, Jon, Christ. We are. Four people have gone missing from that bookstore. Of course there’s a bleeding Leitner there.”
“None of those people are missing. They’re all back in their homes, with their families, going to their jobs.”
“But they went missing. Sudden and complete radio silence to all friends and family, last spotted in the bookstore or talking about planning to go to it-- and then twenty four hours later they’re back like it never happened, with no explanations. That’s not normal.”
“Leitners don’t just briefly borrow people only to kindly return them unharmed. There are plenty of plausible explanations for their behavior. Criminal activity, or-- or illicit affairs.”
“Illicit affairs,” Gerry repeats, but with a wry smile. “Jon, that’s not how people cheat. They’ve got better excuses than that at the ready. And-- okay, what exact kind of criminal activity are you imagining? Please, tell me. I want to know.”
“Well-- drugs,” Jon says, flustered. To be entirely honest, he hadn’t thought the specifics out first.
“Drugs?” Gerry asks. “Drugs-- what? Doing drugs? Selling them? Buying? Making? In a bookstore?”
“Something like that,” Jon says, flustered. He sits up straighter in the car seat, summoning up all of his dignity. “It could be a-- a drop zone, for all we know.”
“Drop zone,” Gerry repeats, as if amazed. “I love it when you act like you know how to talk like a criminal.”
“I am a criminal,” Jon says indignantly. “Technically. I’ve certainly done plenty of trespassing and arson. And larceny.”
“That’s what we call it on the streets,” Gerry says. “Larceny.”
“Drop me off here,” Jon says unbuckling his seat belt. “We’re almost there.”
“What, you don’t want to be seen coming out of my van? You too good for it?”
“It would rather defeat the point of me being the respectable face if I’m seen with you, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” Gerry says, sounding like he’s indulging him as he does so. Jon gives him a slight suspicious glare for it, but opens the car door as Gerry slows it down for him.
“I’ll enter by the front door,” he says. “I’ll act like a regular customer, distract them. You--”
“I’ll enter by the back,” he says. He grins wryly, pushing some badly dyed black hair out of his face as he does so. Jon keeps offering to help him, he’s sure that he could do a better job. “And I won’t be a customer.”
“Right,” Jon says, and goes.
The bookstore doesn’t remind him of Pinhole Books--where he’d met Gerry--in the slightest. It’s small and cramped, but bright. Kitschy. A bell tinkles merrily over his head as he opens the door, and he enters to the scent of potpourri and paper pages. Somewhere, a cat meows.
Jon immediately scans his surroundings for the cat, but unfortunately comes up short. Perhaps it’s hiding from him, wary of strangers?
Wait, no. Focus. He’s here for the Leitner.
This really doesn’t seem like the sort of place to have a Leitner. There’s a Live Laugh Love, Hang In There Kitty, and a You Don’t Have to be Mad To Live Here But it Helps poster on the walls. Also a cuckoo clock. There is no general ominous feeling of doom, blood on the walls, or the smell of death. They aren’t always present in cases of Leitners, but they are at least helpful indicators. Here, there’s nothing but an inordinately large shelf for YA literature.
Jon moves, scanning the shelves as he goes, trying to keep his eye out for any unusual volumes. It’s always so annoying when they have to go to a bookstore. Or a library. Any place infested with a large volume of books, really. It confuses the issue. Not all Leitners are conveniently graced with a cover made of human skin, or letters that were clearly drawn in blood, or a title that hints at the reader's future dreadful fate so strongly that it’s almost tacky. Some of them even look like actual, normal books, for heaven’s sake.
Jon still resents the Pride and Prejudice one. It hadn’t even had a damned nameplate. That’s just cheating.
“Hello?” a fragile, wispy voice calls out. “Is someone there?”
“Ah-- yes,” Jon says after a moment of hesitation. He’s supposed to be drawing attention to himself, not avoiding it. Walking towards the source of the voice, he turns a corner and finds the counter. An old, shrunken little woman is stepping out from behind a curtain, presumably leading to some sort of backroom. She blinks owlishly up at Jon behind coke bottle glasses that magnify her eyes into something almost bug-like. Jon straightens his posture instinctively, as if he’s before his gran instead of some stranger. He gives her a slightly stiff, awkward smile, self consciously smoothing down his shirt. He’s wearing his most ‘starched and uptight’ outfit, as Gerry would fondly put it. It helps convey the image and impression that he wants to. Him? A thief and arsonist? Ridiculous. He’s never touched an ax in his life, clearly. Just listen to his accent.
“Oh, hello there, young man,” the woman says. Jon hasn’t been young manned since he was nineteen. Gerry assures him that he doesn’t look old-- just sounds like it. And talks like it. And dresses like it. And-- “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” Jon says. “I’m looking for something… interesting.”
Somewhere deeper within the building, presumably somewhere in the backroom, there’s a sudden dull thud, like something falling over. Jon freezes up. Gerry’s usually better at--
The old woman turns to look curiously behind her, but doesn’t move to go and check on the noise. “That crazy cat,” she sighs. She turns back to Jon and smiles at him apologetically. “Something interesting you say? What do you mean?”
“Just-- something unusual, maybe? I want to, to broaden my horizons. Anything strange you have? One of a kind?”
The last time Jon tried this angle, the man behind the counter had winked knowingly at him and led him into a backroom bursting with fetish porn. Jon dearly hopes that that isn’t going to happen again.
“Well… I think I might have something for you,” the old woman says slowly. She reaches underneath the counter, and pulls out a ratty little book. Carefully setting it down, she slides it over so Jon can inspect the cover. It’s an old fashioned painted one, weatherworn and cracked. It depicts a farm at night, with a … flying saucer up in the sky. There’s an open circle at the bottom of it, from which a bright white light emits. Caught floating in that beam, there’s a man holding a pitchfork, apparently in the process of being pulled up from the ground. In the foreground, a woman--presumably the wife--looks on in dramatic horror. The Replacements the title reads out at the top. At the bottom, there’s a coffee stain that renders the author's name illegible. “This is quite an interesting read, I think personally. I couldn’t put it down!”
“That’s…” Jon says, striving to find a way to politely but firmly say no. He’s looking for a Leitner that most likely isn’t even here, not a… cheap, cheesy, outdated horror pulp science fiction novel.
“I just love it,” the old woman goes. “It’s about a woman whose husband gets kidnapped and replaced and she has to-- oh, I won’t spoil the surprise! It’s so terribly exciting.”
“Right,” Jon says awkwardly. He picks it up and pages through the first blank pages, because he might as well. Leitners can be rather… deceptive, at times. He can at least check. But he finds no nameplate there, just as he’d expected. “This isn’t quite what I…”
His thumb traces a ragged edge. Has someone torn out one of the front pages--?
“Oh, give it a chance. You won’t regret it, dear. Just the first page.”
Jon’s eyes go to the beginning paragraph almost by instinct. Delilah couldn’t sleep well that night…
He skims the first page, looking for any obvious signs, and sees none. It’s clearly just a cheap little thriller to excite old women. There’s nothing here, just like he’d told Gerry.
In the backroom, there’s another muffled noise. Like something breaking. Jon doesn’t look up from the book, too busy skimming.
“That cat-- wait.”
Down below, something winds around his legs, rubbing up against him. There’s a hopeful meow. Jon turns a page. There are, unexpectedly, illustrations on every other page. They’re very well made. Very… detailed.
The old woman swears, and starts to shuffle in the direction of the backroom.
“Jon!” he hears someone shout from far away. Jon will… he’ll go and check on what that is, as soon as he’s done with this next--
The book gets knocked out of his hands. He blinks down at his hands, and then at the cat that… climbed up on the counter and batted it out of his hands, apparently. It meows at him impatiently, needily. It is clearly of the opinion that he should be focusing his attention on petting rather than something as unimportant as reading.
There is a lot of noise coming from the backroom now. Oh, hell. Gerry was right.
Jon dithers in panicked indecision for a moment, caught between different courses of action, before snapping into movement. He scoops the Leitner up--the old woman touched it without any trouble, so he should be fine so long as he doesn’t read it--before vaulting over the counter. He trips and falls, but scrambles up onto his feet and runs into the backroom past a beaded curtain. Behind him, the cat meows its complaint.
Jon ping pongs against stacked boxes and shelves, knocking over a small pile of books as he goes.
“Gerry!” he shouts. “Gerry, the old woman, I think she’s--!”
“Evil!?” Gerry finishes for him. Jon comes stumbling to a stop. He’s gotten past the point where books are being stored, and found… something else. “Yeah, I guessed!”
Jon has seen plenty of terrible things since he started actively hunting down Leitners. Even more terrible things once he started doing it with Gerry, who had a lot of helpful pointers and experience. Still, he can’t help but stop and stare in horror.
There are three bodies laid out neatly in a row on the floor. Up on a table there’s a fourth, their chest cavity cracked open, flaps of skin pinned out of the way, their insides exposed. There’s an array of tools laid out on a table by the side, some of them bloody, some of them not. There’s a pair of discarded gloves there as well. So. That had been what the old woman had been doing in the backroom.
The old woman herself is laid out on the floor, her face in a state that could be described as ‘pulpy.’ Jon’s been with Gerry for long enough now to recognize what someone who’s had their face kicked in by a steel toed boot looks like.
“Good lord,” Jon says faintly.
Gerry, his hair in a disarray and a slightly wild look in his eyes, looks at Jon. “You were right.”
Jon blinks. “I was?”
“Leitners don’t just borrow someone for a few hours and kindly let them go back home unharmed. Also, don’t get too close to the bodies. They grab at you if you do.”
“They what,” Jon says, aghast. He realizes that the body on the table has its limbs strapped down. “Are they alive?”
“They’re--” the old woman croaks from the floor. Gerry interrupts her with a firm kick to her stomach.
“Yeah, no, I don’t want to hear it,” he tells her. “Don’t care why you did it, don’t care what exactly you’re trying to do. Doesn’t matter.”
Jon kind of cares, but he doesn’t say so. Gerry is generally correct when it comes to matters such as this. They don’t need to know what grand, evil plan she was trying to accomplish here. They just need to stop her.
“And I don’t think they’re really alive, Jon. Don’t worry. They move like… motion activated traps or something. Mindless.”
“Alright,” Jon says, feeling slightly unsteady. He looks queasily away from the bodies, and then remembers the book in his hand. “I-- I believe I found the Leitner, by the by. She tore the nameplate out.”
“Oh, good,” Gerry says. “Don’t really need to question her then, do we? Go get the gasoline. Let’s just burn the whole place down.”
“Is that safe?”
“The next few buildings are all far enough away. It’ll probably be fine.”
“Oh, well if it’s probably fine,” Jon says, but he goes. He gives the bodies all a wide berth as he crosses the room, and finds the back door Gerry used to enter the building. He can see evidence of his fine lockpicking skills at work-- the window inset in the door has been broken, shattered glass strewn across the floor. Darting out, Jon goes to the van and brings back a can of gasoline with some effort. He knows from experience that trying to carry two at once is beyond him.
When he gets back, there are five corpses in the room instead of four. Jon doesn’t acknowledge it-- that Gerry waited until Jon was out of the room to kill the old woman who… Jon really wishes he’d asked for her name first. Even if she was an awful person, it feels like the sort of thing he should know.
Gerry never kills in front of Jon.
“Here,” Jon says, slightly breathless as he hands the can over to Gerry. Gerry gives him a fond look and accepts it. Jon goes back for a second can. Gerry takes care of the front portion of the shop, Jon the back. When he douses the corpse on the table, it jerks and snaps its teeth at him, making him drop the can and yelp as he recoils.
“Jon?” Gerry calls out from the front of the shop. “Everything okay?”
“Y-- yes,” Jon calls back out. “Just-- just startled!”
He makes sure to more carefully avoid the corpses on the floor. Pretty soon, Gerry enters the backroom by walking backwards, leaving a trail of gasoline behind him. Jon tosses the empty can of gasoline onto the floor, his shoulders aching with the weight of it. He holds the door open for Gerry as he retreats, still tossing a line of gasoline as he goes. When the can is empty and they both stand in the alley, he drops it and claps his hands together.
“There,” he says, and starts rummaging through his pockets for a matchbook. “Well, that went pretty well. Not our toughest job.”
“Wait,” Jon says urgently, clutching onto Gerry’s sleeve. Alarm sparks off inside of his chest. “There’s a--”
“Cat?” Gerry asks dryly. Pulling one of the sides of his coat open, he reveals an inner pocket that looks stuffed full-- and then a cat pokes its head out of the top of the pocket and meows at him. “Yeah, don’t worry. I generally avoid setting cats on fire.”
“Oh, good,” Jon says, relaxing. He reaches out a hand towards the cat, letting it give his hand an appraising sniff. It tries to push its head into his hand after a moment, and he indulges it, melting into Gerry’s side as he does so. “Aren’t you a good cat? Yes, you are. It’s not your fault your owner was a murderer. No, it isn’t. You didn’t know any better.”
“We’ll find it somewhere to live,” Gerry says, his voice soft and fond. “Somehow. Some nice shelter or something.”
Or a van, Jon thinks. Wouldn’t that just be perfect? Jon could make it work. He’d just have to clean it up properly, get the right equipment--
Gerry interrupts his excited train of thought by throwing a lit match onto the trail of gasoline leading back into the building. They watch as the fire travels along the trail, quick and devouring.
“Let’s get out of here,” Gerry says. “We’ve got a Leitner to burn.”
“Right,” Jon says, clutching the Leitner to his chest. He thinks of the four people who may not even actually be people, back with their families and friends. “Er--”
“Yeah,” Gerry says wearily, getting into the van. Jon follows him. “Let’s just… hope that all those things die with the Leitner. If not, then we’ve got a new to-do list to take care of.”
Jon feels himself blanch at the thought. He straps himself in, his mind running over various potential problems as Gerry starts the van.
“Oh, hell,” he realizes, a stray thought occurring to him. “I forgot to ask her what the cat’s name is.”
“You must have been distracted,” Gerry says, amused. “Guess you’ll just have to name it yourself.”
They drive out of the alley, away from the shop. Looking in the mirror, Jon can see flames beginning to lick along the walls of it.
“What about Match?” he asks.