CHAPTER SIX. Monsters

Leaf woke to the sun shining through the exact inch of opening between the insubstantial-to-begin-with curtains and groused and grumbled and cursed and tumbled to the floor all a-wrapped in bedsheets and blankets, then crawled out to make himself a cup, no a pot, of coffee.

As if he had a hangover, but just like the night before, he was stone-cold sober.

Starting to think he probably ought to be stone-cold forever, since how the hell else was he gonna tell the difference between monsters brought on by booze addled brain or. Well. Real monsters?

He pawed around for the instant, all bleary-eyed, and found it. This place had some aspirations and some pretensions and Leaf always appreciated a motel that liked to fancy itself the Four Seasons, and he'll have you know he has been in the vicinity of such places, even seen pictures. Drifters, however, in the lobby of that kind of hotel, he always imagined would be incinerated on the spot by lightning or something, like how it was depicted if a monster walked into a church, zap, right there on the doorstep. 

But he hadn't been. He wondered, as his hands did the automatic with the water and the boiling and whatnot, whether he'd have to clean up and spiffy up or if really rich dudes were artful about being slovenly and just stayed lookin' like the crap the dog dragged in after a hunt because they were rich enough not to have to care, or whatever. Maybe they looked even less put-together than he did, and he wondered why on earth he was having a philosophical debate in his own mind about whether drifters could get away with looking as if they belonged in the Four Seasons when his brain came along with a good hard wallop to the brainpan in the form of a reminder of what had happened the night before.

Something was either gunning for him or otherwise, either way aware of his existence and so forth. 

"Maybe it wants to give me a job," said Leaf to himself, coffee mug now to his lips and he laughed a little, danger time almost spilling the liquid on himself in his short-lived hilarity. "Heart I was a dab hand at the day-laborin', an' thought to look me up as had known me by reputation, not resumé. Do that still happen in this day an' age? Or monster nepotism. Maybe I got a monster lookin' out for me, an' wouldn't that just beat all."

He drank the coffee in contemplation, thinking of last night's conversation with The Yoln, and how many strange new possibilities it had opened up in his mind. No longer satisfied with traveling just to see the mountains or the ocean or whatever people happened to be living someplace? Now he could seek out the monsters! Ghosts, too. Maybe he could make, like, a compendium or something. He'd seen things like cryptopedias and things like that, listing fearsome critters which weren't even technically real monsters (for a given value of real since until now he hadn't known monsters were), but people seemed to eat all that up anyway. Maybe there was something to that, after all; wanting there to be more magic and wonder in the world. He kind of got it. After all, he'd chosen a particularly strange lifestyle, all things considered, partly for the romance and the magic of it all. Although he knew the dirty and difficult reality of the thing, he was still entranced by it. And now there were monsters, and somehow that made it even more intriguing.

He wondered why he hadn't seen them before. He wondered why other people hadn't seen them before, since they were everywhere. He supposed that all those stories had to come from somewhere, after all. Maybe he'd just joined some elite group of people who knew about them, kind of like how superheroes got inducted into whatever secret school or cave or society they were recruited to in comic books, with their special powers, sometimes latent. He wondered if he had any special latent powers himself, or he was just a dude.

If so, why was somebody trying to contact him through the medium of a monster nobody had ever even heard of? When the monsters themselves apparently tended toward the circumspect, suddenly one of them got tasked with revealing itself, and unavoidably the rest of monsterkind along with it.

He figured maybe they liked to stay out of sight. Knowing the state of human beings and how they were about even other human beings who were different, if that were the case, it was wise.

He wandered aimlessly around the room for a while as he drank his coffee. Somehow it just wasn't...right...to head to the ol' Labor Ready and see if anybody had work for him. He was getting a little low on funds now but nothing too drastic, so he could take a philosophy day, which were like mental health days for drifters but more like pondering life the universe and everything. Since all three had suddenly taken a sudden left turn into the strange, it looked like it was time for Leaf to invest a little time in considering the whole of it all.

He showered and texted Cherry and got dressed. There was a place that sold some great local beerbatter fish up the road a little and he was intending on heading over there, since the drive was the long and scenic, this time an actual drive with the label 'Scenic Drive' on the green signs, not just a random excuse to get led around by his downstairs brain, and, hell with it, also his poor romantic's heart. Sure, Cherry was sex on a stick, anybody could see that (she was a stripper, after all, so she was professionally sexy), but he was just a dumb idiot in love beside all that, she was fantastic so the whole hot-stripper schtick was mostly icing on the cake for him and beside the point. If she'd had her brain put into some other body, even a man's body, he'd love her stupid just the same.

She texted him back within ten minutes saying well don't that beat all. I'll see what I can find out with the new info. But the thing is you might be beyond the looking glass, here, and no research can help. You gotta learn on your feet, maybe. But you've always been good at that. You're a resourceful guy. You'll figure it out. Long as this isn't just some weird result of a bender, but like I said, there were enough witnesses to the eyeball monster that I can't just chalk it up to very human hallucination or highway hypnosis. So if it's real, you might just be the one to be teaching me a thing or two for once.

Leaf could not help the trilling wave of joy that washed over him at the compliments. He was not a man who heard them often, and receiving them from Cherry in particular - especially when it was about competence, research, or intelligence, which he always held in high esteem when it came to her talents and qualities. Leaf thought of himself as a manual laborer, something like a tractor or other farming implement that just happened to have hands. The thing was, he wasn't stupid, not exactly, but he was pretty run-of-the-mill and average, had hated school, couldn't wait to graduate and get out. He flunked a lot of classes and only just managed to get a diploma because some guy at the adult learning center took an interest in his welfare for whatever reason and told him that while he could earn his GED there, the diploma would open a lot of other doors. And Leaf had listened. Maybe one day, he'd even go to college, if he could figure out what he wanted to attend college to do.

So far, he'd drifted, and having been a drifter for so long, in love with the road as all drifters usually came to be, the years passed like the leaves falling in autumn until he felt like he was a little too old to be participating in any of the college foolery he saw in the university towns he passed through, working for a day here and there, and seeing the kids just look progressively younger.

Then again, there was always a first time for everything.

He sent a brief thank-you text to Cherry, and headed out to Gregor thinking about whether he could stomach beerbatter fish for breakfast, and if not, he was sure the place probably had a gigantic hearty breakfast offering, because those types of places always do.

He slid into the driver's seat and caressed the dashboard with a smile. Gregor never let him down, despite his age and so forth.

"Hello, Leaf," a voice seemed to come out of nowhere and scare the pants off him.