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“Oh,” Mort said. He didn’t seem to be judging, but Tristan was.
“It wasn’t so bad. It kept me fed, and put clothes on my back, and some of her regulars would drop off extra things to us. I got a football one year. But the older I got…” He stopped talking.
“Anyway,” he said. “One of the guests when I was younger. He smelled like rotten eggs. I’d always know when he was here. One night, I crept out to see him, and he looked a lot like the guy I just saw. Red eyes, tail, hooves, horns. I screamed, and my mom came out to see what was wrong, and then…” He shut his eyes and shook his head, as if trying to dislodge the memory. “He told her not to worry, that I’d gotten a fright, and he took her back into her bedroom.”
Mort stayed sitting, listening, still and focused. Tristan shifted uncomfortably, not used to being looked at like that.
“I tried telling her the next day, but she thought it was a lie. She thought I was making things up because I didn’t like her ‘friends’. I got in trouble for being up so late.” Tristan took a long swig. “That’s when I started drinking. If I sipped a little of the beer from her friends’ cans, I slept. I didn’t have to hear the… sounds.”
Mort’s expression was serious and very engaged. He was listening, truly listening.
“That is a very inappropriate experience for someone of that age.”
“I had a lot of inappropriate experiences,” Tristan said.
Mort nodded solemnly. “Terrible as they are, they do not explain why you were able to discern the nature of the visitor.”
Tristan shrugged again. “Saw a shrink once who said it was probably a trauma response.”
“If that were true, everyone would see demons.”
“That’s what I said.”
“And what did they say?”
Tristan thought about it a second. “Well, a few things. But mostly they said, ‘Ow, stop hitting me.’”
Mort flickered a brow. “You hit a therapist? Why?”
“I had anger issues when I was a teenager. Something about random dudes coming to my house to fuck my mom. I used to hit a lot of people. Don’t worry. I’m not going to hit you.”
Mort laughed at that piece of reassurance. “Very kind of you.”
Tristan’s eyes narrowed slightly as he examined Mort with all the beer-soaked insight he could muster. “You’re really not afraid of me, huh? Most people around here don’t want anything to do with me. But you’re not from around here. Where are you from?”
“Like I said,” Mort replied. “Hell. Let’s go shopping. This house needs food.”
“Only way to get groceries, if that’s what you mean, is to head out of Solitude and go to Perdition. It’s about thirteen miles from here.”
The entire region had been settled by depressed miners, which explained a lot in terms of place names.
“Let me guess. We’re going to have to walk?”
“Yep.”
“That’s a long walk,”
“Yep. It’s why my diet is beer and gas station food. Short drive, long walk.”
“Then we will need a vehicle.”
Mort did not need a vehicle, but Tristan was in no shape to walk twenty-six miles in a day.
“Truck died years ago,” Tristan said.
“Let me take a look at it,” Mort said.
“You a mechanic?”
“I’m used to broken things.”
Tristan propped the hood of the truck up on a piece of two by four. The struts had long since rusted away. Mort looked into the motor, seeing several obvious issues immediately. The wiring had been gnawed away by rats, and there were remnants of a nest in the carburetor. He did not know the actual words for any of these things, but he knew that this much organic matter inside a machine was a bad thing.
“The garage we walked to. I mean, the gas station, there was a garage attached to it, no?”
“Yeah. Tom’s garage.”
“Alright, let’s get Tom here and see what he can do.”
“Eeergghhh…” Tristan made a less than encouraging sound. “Probably best he doesn’t see me.”
“Why not?”
“He’s not a fan,” Tristan explained.
Mort decided to leave that piece of interpersonal drama alone for the moment. Tristan’s background was clearly fraught with conflict.
Mort walked to the garage alone, leaving Tristan behind at home. There he found an overall-clad figure he presumed to be the local mechanic.
“There’s a truck that needs to be fixed. Owned by Tristan…” Mort realized he didn’t know Tristan’s last name, though he had definitely read it on the documents. Brown? He wanted to say Brown. No. Not Brown. It started with S.
The mechanic hadn’t looked at him yet. He was too busy fiddling around with a bit of engine and too arrogant to care about a customer. People out here were not nearly so obsessed with pretending to give a shit about business. They did what they wanted, and most of the time they didn’t want to do anything.
