Appalachian Grandpa Stories- Ruinous Little Terrors

"Well damn," I said, slamming the book closed as I laid it on the arm of my chair a little harder than I meant to.

"What's wrong?" Grandpa asked, looking up from his Louis L'Amour novel.

I looked over and could see the snow beginning to fall behind him again. I had hoped the snow would hold off for a little while longer, but it looked like we would be snowbound again. The lull in the snowfall today had been the first time we'd been able to get the old truck down the mountain in a week, and we had used the opportunity to get groceries, eat a meal we didn't have to cook, and make a trip to the used book store in town. Grandpa had tons of books, but he was always in the mood to get a few more. To his credit, he always bought them, read them, and then shelved them before getting another one, a system I never took to. I had found three of the four Dragonlance novels and had been chewing my way through them while we were snowed in. I was hoping to find the fourth one, Dragons of Summer Flame, and as if sent a gift from providence, it was sitting midway down the Three for a Dollar bin. I should have checked it out before dropping a whole thirty-three cents on it, but I had been too excited to finish the story, and now I would have to pay the price.

"Someone tore the last few pages of the book out." I said, my anger growing the longer I thought about it, "Now, how will I know how it ends?"

Grandpa laughed, "Could be worse. I suppose the pages could be blank. Then you'd know a Ruin ate them."

I scrunched up my brow, "A what?"

"A Ruin," Grandpa said, marking his place in his book, "It's the bane of all written words and those who enjoy them."

"Yeah, I heard you, but what is it?"

"They look like little foxes and live in the margins of books. They eat words and steal secrets, something they horde like a dragon hordes treasure."

I stared at Grandpa for a few minutes to see if he was messing with me, but the longer he stared back, the more I realized he was serious.

Why shouldn't he be? We had faced a creature made from mass graves just this fall, and Grandpa had spent his time before that teaching me about the different creatures that called the Appalachian wilderness their home. Of all the things I'd heard about in that time, you'd think that nothing would surprise me anymore, but this definitely caught me off guard.

"Grandma used to say they were the bane of a well-stocked library. I saw a pair of them once while I was stationed in Alaska. Cute little devils, but they almost ran my friend's sister out of work."

"Was this the native guy you befriended?" I asked, tossing the book on the nightstand as a far more interesting story came to light.

"Indeed, John White was one of my best friends. It was fortunate that he didn't go to the front when the time came, though I doubt he thought himself fortunate at the time."

"One story at a time, Gramps. Let's talk about these fox things first."

Grandpa smiled, tilting his head as he tried to think of a good starting point, "I guess it all started when his sister came to visit us at the barracks."

Alasie was a few years older than John, and they could have twins if not for the glasses.

She came trudging up to the barracks one morning just as we were finishing a top to bottom barracks clean that we did every wednesday, and John separated from us to go and speak with her. The men were curious. Most of them hadn't seen a woman in about three months, what with the snow. Alasie didn't have anything for them. She talked with John, and they spoke a while in the language the natives spoke on the res. When John pointed at me, his sister looked dubious. They spoke a little longer, and without warning, they parted like players in a huddle.

As John came back, he picked up his shover, and the two of us started pushing the slush off the walk.

"Everything okay?" I asked after we'd shoveled in peace for a few minutes.

"Ala is having trouble with a spirit. At least, she thinks it's a spirit. It's not like anything she's ever experienced before. I know you have experience with this sort of thing. Do you think you might be able to help us?"

I told him I'd be glad to, and we started making plans for the next time we had leave from the base. As it happened, we both had weekend passes coming up, so we decided that next Friday, we would go into Weller Brock, the city his sister lived in, and see if we couldn't help her. It wasn't uncommon in those days to get leave pretty regular, the war was starting to rattle down a little, and Alaska wasn't exactly under attack every day. Saturday morning, we bundled into an old jeep from the motor pool, flashed our passes, and headed into Weller Brock.

Now, before joining the Army, I only thought I was from a podunk town. Weller Brock was a pothole in the road by comparison. It was a reservation town, about three or four thousand people in all, with a little main street, a gas station, and a lot of tribal housing scattered willy-nilly about. The Army guys went in to drink at the Whale's Belly, the local tavern, or to pick up some comforts at the General Store, but that was about the length to which we were tolerated. The reservation guys didn't like us, and most of the Army guys didn't care for them either, but we kept a certain amount of ignorance of each other and went about our lives.

So, when an Army jeep rolled through town during the daylight hours, you can imagine that it made a little bit of a stir. People watched us drive by with sullen faces full of mistrust, and the sight of the equally native John behind the wheel did very little to change those looks. John took it all in strides, but I could tell it hurt him a little. To have your own people look at you like an outsider was a little different than being an outsider yourself, and when he lifted a hand to an older woman and her daughter, a greeting that was ignored, he let his hand drop slowly.

"They don't like that I joined the Army," he told me as if I hadn't worked that out already, "There has always been a tense separation of the reservation people and the military, a separation that I have violated."

"I'm sure you had your reasons," I told him, but he only snorted.

"My reasons were that Dad wandered off into the woods one night, drunk off whiskey, and never came back. My reasons were the four siblings left at home that needed to be fed and a mother who slid into the same bottle that had killed my father. Ala helps; that's why she understands why I enlisted, but the community just sees it as a betrayal."

We pulled up outside a squat little building with a sign that declared it to be a Public Library, and I was surprised to see a little shitsplat town like this with such a service. My own hometown didn't even have a library, wouldn't until nineteen fifty-five, and as we walked inside, it seemed to be little more than a long hallway. The shelves were pushed against the walls, giving it a slightly claustrophobic feel, and I couldn't imagine looking for books in here if it was busy. There was a desk at the end of the hallway, and as we came in, John's sister looked up and came to greet us.

"You must be the mountain man John's told me about. I'm Alasie. Welcome to my library."

I shook her hand, thanking her for inviting me, "It's a little cramped, but I'm impressed at how well-stocked it is."

She looked around at the shelves almost lovingly, clearly pleased with what she had done here, "It took a lot of convincing to get the Elders to agree to the space, even more to convince the Governor to let me utilize the library resources to get the books I would need for educational pursuits. They don't seem to understand why a bunch of natives might want more than hunting seals and eating snow, go figure." she said, flashing me a sardonic smile.

I couldn't help but laugh. After spending time around the serious-minded John, I had expected his sister to be similar in temperament. Alasie, however, was downright vivacious. She was a little older than John, about four years his senior, and it appeared she was just as serious about her aspirations as John was. She was a knowledge seeker, someone interested in understanding more than what resides in this world, and she reminded me a little of my Grandmother.

She made us some tea from a little kettle on a wood-burning stove and told us about her problem.

"It started about a week ago. I was shopping in the next town over for paperbacks and came across a guy trying to sell a crate of "rare books." I looked through them, and sure enough, there were some first editions in there. Most of them were ratty, definitely secondhand, but beggars can't be choosers. For someone with a budget as small as mine, a crate of books for a price so low was too good to pass up, but once I got them back to the library, I realized I'd been had. The books had been vandalized. Pages were blank, paragraphs were missing, and some of the books were just completely empty. I got the books that were complete and put them on the shelves, but that's when the others started disappearing. Books I'd had for months, books I' had since I was a little girl, started being returned incomplete. Paragraphs from the middle of the book, sentences without certain words, and finally, whole books that had been scrubbed clean. I don't know what it is doing, but I know it's not natural."

"How can you tell?" John asked.

She took a book off her desk and showed us a series of small paw prints inside it.

"They've left these prints in quite a few books. The weird part is the prints are made with ink, but they're always dry, and they don't smudge on any other pages. If it were only a book or two, I could let that slide. Everything must eat, after all, but it has eaten thirty books in the last six days. Many others are now incomplete, missing parts of their story, and I don't have the budget to replace so many books. I need them to stop, I need this to stop, because if it doesn't, then the council will close the library for sure."

John was perplexed, but I knew exactly what she was dealing with.

"Their fox prints," I said, and both of them looked at me in surprise.

"As far as I can tell, yes." Alasie said, "But how did you know that?"

"They're called Ruin or Rune, I'm not sure. My Grandmother's ascent made it hard to tell, but she had an infestation of them in her library once. She had picked them up in an old book she'd bought from a traveling man, some collection of old herbs and poultices, and it chewed through some of her books before she caught it. "Little Terrors," she called them, but she knew just how to trap them."

"And how do we do that?" asked John, intrigued by the idea of something he'd never seen before.

"They like to eat written word, but there's one thing above all else that they can't resist, and that's secrets."

I remembered how my Grandmother had taken an old leather book off the shelf then, lovingly running her fingers over the cover before opening it to a spot in the middle. She inscribed a mark over the childish writing inside, dragging her finger over the page after dipping it in an inkwell, and mumbled to herself. I was small, so I didn't have a clue what she was doing. The symbol she drew lit up a little, and when she closed the book, she laid it on a desk and said it wouldn't be a problem.

I asked if she had an old journal, something from when she was a kid, and Alasie said she had just the thing.

She told us to watch the library for her, and an hour later, she came back with a little notebook under one arm.

"It's from high school, I had to keep a journal for an English class, and after the assignment, I just kept writing in it. I've been keeping it for the last four years. I don't know if there are any particularly good secrets in it, but hopefully, it'll help."

I paged through it, looking for something good, and finally came to something I thought would work. It was a passage about a boyfriend that she was keeping from her parents, a boy named Inuksuk. Her parents wouldn't have approved of him, their fathers not getting along, and she had dated him for nearly a year before they had broken up, and her parents had never learned of the relationship. It was a secret that had never been learned, and it would be very tantalizing for the Ruin.

I smudged the page with the ink pen she had on her desk, making the appropriate sign as I finished the sigil that would seal them inside the book.

"Leave it out somewhere. They won't be able to resist the pull of secrets. It's in their nature. The Ruin will be trapped in the book, forced to eat the words within until it starves to death."

She thanked us, and as we returned to the base, John thanked me for helping his big sister.

"She's always loved books, and operating the library was a dream come true for her. I'm glad she can make a living doing something she loves."

His sister came to visit us a few days later, but she'd had a change of heart, it seemed.

When she came charging through the gates around midday, I think I'd have rather stood in the way of a charging polar bear.

We were at the canteen, moving some supplies off the convoy that brought us our stuff, and John and I were sitting with a few of the other boys as we soaked up the few hours of sun we'd be allotted that day. We saw her when she came up the road, having walked the three miles from town, we had no doubt, and John looked worried the closer she got. He told me later that she was wearing the look she wore when you had done something wrong, the look that said she was about to beat the tar out of you, and it made him feel about five years old again.

"Get them out!" she said, pushing the book at me. It was the same journal I had used to trap the Ruin in, and I was confused as I looked from the book to her. She had her hands on her hips, her face a mask of rage and concern, and the red around her eyes told me she'd been crying. I opened the book and found a pair of sad little foxes on the inside, their images cast across many of the pages in the margins. It appeared that she had a pair of Ruin, perhaps a mated pair, and as I flipped through the pages, the two of them seemed to have added to their little family. One of the drawings implied that the other was heavily pregnant, and as I flipped further, I saw her cuddled with a small group of the creatures. Many of the words were gone from the page, the Ruin having picked them clean for the little family they were cultivating, and the little blue fox that looked out from the page at me seemed worried.

"You know they'll eat your library bare." I asked her, seeing the Ruin family was now eight strong, "One ruin destroyed years of herbology journals that my Grandmother was keeping. I can't imagine what eight would do."

"I don't care," she said, "I don't want to watch them starve to death. They have babies; I can't just sit by and watch them die in the trap we've set."

Grandma hadn't been capable of watching it either. She would drive away demons and banish haints, but I'd seen her catch spiders in glasses and take crickets outside to release them. She had taken the book she used to trap the Ruin in out into the woods and burned it, saying that it would set him free far away from the house. "If he comes back again, then there's no help fer'im, but as long as he stays away from my library, I don't see why he can't live in peace."

The sudden memory of watching the flames burn the old book away, the ashes rising into the sky as they seemed to turn into a red fox of ashes, gave me an idea, and I told Alasie what she must do.

"Take it far away from the library and burn the book. It won't hurt them, and once the sigil is destroyed, they will be free to leave the book and go about their business. That business might take them back to your library, but if they sense that your intentions are good, they might also move on without fuss."

That seemed to soften her some, and she took the book and thanked me for my help.

The Ruin family never came back to the library, and I don't know what became of them, but I do know that there was a fire at a nearby military archive that year, about a hundred miles from our base. I can't prove anything, but I suppose it's possible that someone found military files and classified documents with holes in the information and decided that it might be easier to burn the whole thing to the ground than explain it to the higher-ups. Either way, I'd have hated to have been the man who had control of the tombs when he began to find the words missing on files that could find him locked up in a military prison for a long time.

Grandpa leaned back as he finished, looking a little wistful as he thought about his time in Alaska.

"If I'd had any sense, I think I'd have stayed in Alaska. It was a hell of a place, a land of wonder and possibilities."

I nodded, thinking about his story, "Good to know that the Appalachians aren't the only place with strange creatures."

Grandpa laughed, "Though it does have some of the most interesting ones. I saw a few in Europe too, though, when my unit was drug over there for a while. Maybe I'll tell you about it sometime." he said, getting out of his chair and hobbling down the hall.

"Making an early night of it, Gramps?" I asked, but whether he meant to sleep or simply lay with his memories for a while, he never said.