The sun was shining, the town was quiet, and Barbara Smith Gutierrez Doe was having a panic attack in the middle of the street.
Usually the best thing that could be said about the weather in Idle was that it was a dry heat. True, the sun always beat down upon the desert and scrublands like the eye of an angry god, but it was never truly muggy. The infrequent storms instead swept in with a howling crash and a blast of cold air, and the thirsty ground drank of the life-giving rain.
There was no rain, however, and the heat of the asphalt simply turned the remains of Barbara's father into steam.
Her heart was hammering in her chest. There was nothing she could do about that except sit, and breathe, and hope in the meantime that the Stranger didn't come back. She doubted it would; it hardly seemed to notice her at all and left without a backwards glance. Still, Barbara was not feeling very rational. The thought of that deadly, baking gaze being turned on her once again was enough to send her gasping for air that was heavy with water and hatred.
The asphalt and concrete dried, and her feet were uncomfortably hot. She managed a full, deep, and controlled breath. Another. Another. John Doe had been very good at remembering to breathe. Barbara liked to think she took after her father.
After a moment, Barbara managed to wobble to her feet long enough to go back inside her shop. The shade was blessed relief from the glare of the light, and Barbara stumbled over to the chair behind the register. The old wicker creaked and complained as she sprawled onto it; Barbara absently remembered it as a gift from Maria Sage, back in the 50s. Despite its age and rough treatment, the chair held firm. She gripped the armrests and breathed deeply, out and in and out and in.
Then, and only then, did Barbara begin to think.
Fable and John Doe had never been chatty about their own natures. Most of what Barbara knew about them came from observation and unrelenting questions. They had been even less communicative about what else might be like them in the world: Fable seemed to have a different answer every time Barbara asked, and John Doe seemed less unwilling to speak as unable to adequately describe the beings in question. They had always been quick to assure her that they were Capital-S Strangers, and Strangers had no place in Idle.
Still, decades of questions were bound to produce something eventually, and for so long Barbara had had nothing but time to ask them. What fragments she had gathered from them would likely be the envy of any respectable occultist, and tomes purloined from Fable's shop had enough detail to at least give the thing a name.
"The Dry Death," Barbara said aloud. The words were quiet, but seemed to fill the empty shop regardless. The heat inside grew even heavier. Barbara found herself shivering in spite of it.
It was an old, hateful thing, hateful in the way that John Doe and Fable could never truly understand. Fable and John Doe didn't hate each other with intention so much as they were diametrically opposed by their very natures: Fable, a story that gave life; John Doe, a life that stole stories. They fought each other like the twin suns of binary star, trapped in each other's orbit, tearing and dancing and hating and loving until the boundaries blurred together. Until they made something new and strange and named it Barbara.
There was no creation in the Dry Death. There was only an endless drought, and a glaring sun, and a heat that withered. It fed on hatred that burned like flames, and it could only ride the form of someone who hated so much that everything human inside them withered and died.
Katherine Paxton. Barbara leaned back in her chair and considered the dark, dusty rafters. John Doe rarely spoke about the man whose identity he had stolen. Sarah and Alma had been the same--Barbara did not know and would not ask, they would know but never tell. As a system for familial harmony it had worked for nearly 80 years. It had worked and worked until it very abruptly didn't.
It was a strange and new thing, learning you had an enemy. Barbara didn't know what to think about it besides a desire for it to go away. She very much didn't want to think about why Katherine hated Idle so much that she would invite the Dry Death to destroy it, even at the cost of her soul.
To business.
Barbara plucked the phone book out from under the register and started flipping through it. There was no question of her doing this alone. Barbara was far too ordinary to move against the spirit of drought itself. To face the Dry Death with even a prayer of victory Idle would need her father. However, her father was currently without a body. With no body, no name, he was little more than hungry waters dwelling deep beneath the earth, barely able to think and feel. Against a foe this deadly he needed power. He needed form.
Linda Lowes...Barbara tapped the name, frowning. A possibility. Linda was as thoroughly unkillable as she was unlikeable. Her father would have no need to change forms for decades, even centuries. Even a being like the Dry Death might not be able to put her down for good. But no, Linda survived, and that wasn't the same as winning. Linda would survive even as Idle turned to dust under the sun. Not good enough.
Ofelia Morana. Potent, but unreliable. Barbara knew she was rarely in town for long, and couldn't be certain of finding her before the town dried up and died.
Her eyes lingered for the moment on the Sages, a neat little string of four numbers that spelled magic and esoteric power. The Sages had been in Idle nearly as long as Barbara had. Her fingers formed a fist involuntarily. Little Ellian Sage had been coming into Barbara's shop her entire life, buying brightly colored yarn and giggling as she made a cat's cradle. She didn't deserve to be fed to Barbara's father. She didn't...
Tell me then, prim little girl behind her prim little counter: who deserves to lose their soul?
Barbara stared at the phone book without seeing the words. Ever so slowly, she closed it and exhaled.
That was the trouble, wasn't it?
Barbara had made her father promise never to take a name from the people who lived in Idle. Whatever else might be true about him, he kept his word. Barbara had closed her eyes to it for nearly a century. If they weren't in the town, they weren't her problem. They were nameless already--what were they going to lose if Idle's oldest monster decided to take their body and identity?
Who deserves to lose their soul?
All of them. None of them.
But most of all, Barbara.
She didn't remember leaving her shop, or locking the door behind her. She didn't remember passing the sheriff's office and looking inside as Dell kicked her feet up on the desk. She did remember passing the Idling Diner--Junie was inside, and gave her a wave. Barbara waved back with a genuine smile. If she failed, she hoped Junie would have the sense to run. She wasn't a monster like the rest of them.
It was a matter of minutes before she was standing by the mesquite trees. She put a hand on the bark of the nearest, the wood gnarled and hungry under her skin. They at least were not wilting, not yet; the will to live was far too stubborn to be extinguished by the Dry Death's first pass. In time, though, even they would pass and turn to husks, and all their hunger would come to naught. For now though the narrow leaves dappled her with shade from the afternoon sun. Barbara closed her eyes and imagined they were not branches, but hands warding away the anger of the sky. Soon we will be dead, Barbara Smith Gutierrez Doe. Until then, the light will not touch you.
There was a flat stone, ugly and beige, in the center of the stand. Barbara ran her fingers along it, remembering lunches in silences that were never angry, a plate of sandwiches that all too quickly disappeared. She turned and looked through the trees at the town, so bright and barren down the hill.
Idle was such an ugly thing, Barbara thought fondly. Pierced through the heart by a state road that no one in their right mind would leave. The little neighborhoods, sullen and self contained in the sun, splayed out in a lopsided wheel with dusty, lonely buildings at the center. The beige of the bricks was the beige of the concrete was the beige of the plaster, ridiculous and monotonous and so stubbornly opposed to color that whitewashing bought you a month at the best. It was an ugly, unlovable place filled with ugly, unlovable people who wouldn't know decency if it offered them a bottle of water on a hot day.
It was a town of monsters, and wouldn't they be furious if they knew how much she loved them for it?
Barbara turned away from the town and walked out of the mesquite stand, heading deeper into the scrubland.
The sun was starting to sink by the time she found what she was looking for: a ravine, a jagged wound in the dry ground. It had been a very long time since Barbara made her way to this place; she nearly slipped and fell in the middle of her descent as the sun glared in her eyes. Eventually however, she made it to the bottom with nothing but scuffs on her hands and scratches on her boots.
The cave was just around the bend. Here the terrain was easier to navigate: Barbara made her surefooted way into the darkness, not bothering with a light. She had endured quite enough light for one day. One hand trailed the wall, marking her passage with an even hand as she entered the depths of the earth. The air was stale here, unmoving with thousands of tons of rock to keep it pressed in place. Barbara breathed deeply. It was important that she remember to breathe.
It wasn't until her fingers brushed the rock and came away wet that Barbara came to a stop.
There was no question of seeing in such a pitch black place, but sight was a relic of an outside world. Barbara knew the cave which was her father's lair. She squatted down in the inky blackness and touched the floor: before hitting the rock she knew was present, she felt only water, icy cold despite the heat of the day.
"Dad." The words echoed in the cave. The water under her hand was so still. So smooth. Another might have been fooled into thinking this was an ordinary pool in an ordinary cave. "I have something to say to you."
There was no echo. The darkness smothered the sound of it.
"If I was anyone else you would have eaten me already. I know that much. If it wasn't for me, you would have taken someone in the town long before John Doe started to fall apart. If it wasn't for me...things would be different. Idle might be different. Maybe we wouldn't be in danger now. But we are. And I can't make things better. And you can."
The water was still. Barbara straightened up and stepped deeper. This time there was a splash. Another step. Another breath. Another heartbeat.
"I think...I think we deserve to be hated. Not just you and me and Fable. You don't understand because you've always been a monster. Not everyone in town started off this way, but we all made choices that brought us to this place. Bad choices that hurt people. We made them and we stayed here, out in the desert so far from others. Why do you think that is?"
Step. Splash. Breathe. Beat. Step. Splash. Breathe. Beat.
"I think I know why, after all this time. It's easier to pretend you're not a monster when everyone around you is one. You can be ordinary in Idle. You can be lovable in Idle when there's nothing about you to love. Is that what happened when I was born, Dad? Did you give substance and Fable give shape to a town that could be so very ordinary, even when the things made up of it were anything but?"
The water stirred. Barbara stepped forward, and the water crested over and filled her boots.
"It doesn't matter, of course. I was just wondering."
She was up to her knees and going deeper. Hidden eddies played with the edges of her jeans. Barbara stretched her fingers and found she could touch the surface without stooping.
"The town is going to die, Dad. You know it as much as you can know anything. I know it. You can survive the town dying--you're so much older than Idle, after all. I can't. There's too much of it in me, and too much of me in it. We're the same thing, on a certain level: born on the same day, an ordinary person made up of something inhuman."
The water stirred and grew colder. Barbara tsked.
"Oh, don't be like that. It really is our own fault. This is justice as much as anything in the world is justice. Can you understand the shape of that even without eating it?"
Stillness and silence.
"But on the way here I had a thought: I don't want justice."
"I don't want justice at all. I want crazy ex-soldiers having visions in the sand. I want aliens in human form watching the stars for their brethren. I want witches with bad luck and a horse, a robot with an expiring warranty, and bartenders who know what their patrons order before they say it aloud. I want zombies on the PTA and drug dealers in the parking lot. I want thieves busted for black magic and ghost whisperers with abandonment issues. I want a desert santera and a set of doppelgangers forgetting their own identities. I want a monster hunter who loses her mind. I want a ghostwriter who loses his body."
"I want my town, Dad. It's me in every way that matters. And I want you to have a name, a name that will be strong enough to fight off the light that chokes away life."
"I name you the Town That Devours. I name you Idle. I name you me."
There was no answer. The earth was heavy above, and Barbara was so tired. But tired could wait, because she was her father's daughter. She endured.
When the cold water surged and the bottom of the cave dropped out from under her, Barbara Smith Gutierrez Doe was smiling.