Hidebehind

Twenty-One

Great Grandma informed me that evening that I'd be returning to school that Monday. It was Friday, which meant that I had about two more days of liberty. I wasn't in any sort of mood to be friendly with anyone, so Penny and I had Great Grandma drop us at the library after dinner. I'd never been all too into books, but at least it'd be quiet in there; no one would expect me to converse. We had a good hour before Great Grandma finished whatever errands she had to run and came to retrieve us.

Oxcart's library was a double-wide trailer someone had planted there and converted to a few rows of shelves and a small desk. It was nothing like the winding, cozy library I remembered in my old town. There, the children's room had had a loft filled with squishy pillows, so we could sit and get lost in books there—not that I did that very often; that was more Penny's thing. I'd never been too much of a reader, but the minute she'd been old enough to read, she'd started checking out five, six, seven books at a time. Here, there were no lofts or pillows for her to settle into. There was, however, a little round folding chair with a cushion that shaped it into a nest of sorts, and she curled up there and began reading immediately, leaving me to wonder how she'd even found something interesting so fast.

At first, I just sort of wandered around a little, not really sure what to do with myself. But my wandering in such a small place was too obvious, and I felt kind of stupid moving back and forth between the seven or eight low shelves, so I tried to appear interested in some novels for a while, only to find my brain returning endlessly to all the weird things that had been going on since I'd arrived. In the midst of my thoughts, I suddenly had an idea, and it hit me so out of the blue that I felt like an idiot for not thinking of it before.

Immediately, I approached the librarians' desk—a small, squat thing with a computer, house plant, and lamp on it. "Um, excuse me?"

The guy behind the desk looked up at me from the book he was reading and glowered over his glasses. He wasn't too old, maybe about twenty-five or something, and he was wearing a red shirt with a bear on it as well as a hat with furry ear flaps. He stared at me expectantly, not looking too entirely friendly.

"Uh, I was wondering if you could help me find a book."

He waited for a moment, then said with more than a little sarcasm, "Well, that is what I'm here for, but you're going to have to give me more than that."

"Oh. Oh, yeah. Sorry. So, I'm . . . I'm really into monsters. I like to read about them. And, well, there's one that I'm interested in, and I was wondering if you knew of any . . . I don't know . . . encyclopedias or anything about it."

"What kind of monster is it?" The man stood up and leaned a little closer to me, like we were about to have a serious conversation. I noticed that his nametag read "Axe."

"Well," I said, eyeing the nametag in curiosity, "so, this monster . . . I don't know what it's called, and I don't really know what it looks like, either."

"That makes things a little difficult."

"Yeah, I know. But I know what it does. It kills people, you know, like most monsters, and . . . and no matter how hard to try to see it, it always moves behind you. Like, it's always just out of sight. It's too hard to see, and that's why I can't describe it. No one can. But it'll creep up behind you and just get you when you aren't looking."

Axe plopped down into his chair again and, without a word, turned to the computer on the desk. He started tapping away at its keyboard.

I was dismayed. "So . . . you aren't going to help me?"

He didn't even look at me and instead just said as he scrolled with the mouse, "See, there's this thing called the Internet. It has a lot of information. So I'm searching for monster that's invisible."

"Well, it's not invisible. It's just that I can't—you, can't—a person can't see it because it moves too fast."

Axe gave me a withering look, and I thought I had offended him somehow, but he went back and typed out some more stuff, saying, "Fine. Monster that hides. How is that? I mean, every monster probably hides, right? Not likely we'll find much with th— . . . Here. What about this?"

He swiveled the screen so that it faced me, and I saw a site with the title "Hidebehind."

Before I could even read it, though, Axe swiveled it right back to himself and began to read aloud. "A creature from American folklore. Attacks people wandering through the woods. When someone tries to see it, it moves behind them or some other object . . . sound about right?"

I was agog. When Axe looked at me, I had to pop my mouth shut. "Yes. Yes! That sounds exactly right. Can it be killed or defeated or anything? What does it say?"

He eyed me strangely, then continued. "It drags its victims back to its lair and devours their intestines."

My head began to shake without my even doing it on purpose. I just couldn't even think about that. "Defeat it. Can I defeat it?"

Axe narrowed his eyes at me, crossed his arms, looked me up and down. "You okay?"

"What?"

"Are—you—ok?"

"Yes, yes. Yes, I'm fine. I'm just . . . just really interested. That's all. I'm . . . I'm doing a project for class and, and I need a lot of information."

"Who's your teacher?"

"Huh?"

"Your teacher. W-H-O. Who."

"Mr. Cook."

"Eighth grade, huh?"

I didn't know how to respond to him; it was like he wanted to make small talk in the middle of my important soon-to-be-discovery. I could only nod, although I wanted to yell at him.

"I remember eighth grade. Not my best year."

I wanted to tell him that his ridiculous name probably had made every year of his life not the best. That his annoying habit of not being clear and of wasting time probably hadn't helped, either. But I didn't say any of that. I just stood there stupidly.

"It gets better, kid," he said.

My eyes inadvertently looked left to right, surveying the double wide trailer, and then back to Axe.

"I know what you're thinking, but trust me," he said quietly. "This is better."

I had no desire to ask him more. "Ok, but about my monster?"

He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, all right. Here. You take a look." Axe turned the screen back to me and then busied himself with some book cards or something.

I avidly read the information in front of me but, much to my frustration, I couldn't find anything about defeating the Hidebehind, which I was certain was what had harassed me in those woods. It was big and terrifying, apparently, but nobody had ever seen it. When I'd felt as if something were in the woods with me, that's because it had been watching. Whenever I'd tried to see it, it had hidden behind me. According to the information in front of me, the thing was repelled by alcohol, but I didn't think Great Grandma would be too keen on me picking up drinking.

Basically, I got a bunch of nothing. There wasn't that much information on the thing to begin with. There didn't seem to be any way to defeat it, and the only way to avoid it was impossible. Nevertheless, I muttered a "thanks" as I turned to go.

"It gets better!" Axe reaffirmed.

The hidebehind, I thought, as I approached Penny. At least it has a name.