Tree of Life, Part Six

17 December 2006

The whole way up, I was torn about whether or not I should even be doing this. I mean, he didn’t exactly give me his address personally, and our only interaction was supposed to be professional but ended up…not being that. And he probably didn’t almost catch my house on fire, but it kinda still feels like he almost did. But he did tell me it might be dangerous, and I told him to do it anyway, so really, whose fault would that have been?

Mandy was surprisingly eager to give me Matteson’s address, on the condition that I told her what happened as soon as I left. Sometimes I worry that girl is too invested in knowing everything about everyone, but I couldn’t deny it was helpful at the moment. I parked across the street from his house, took a deep breath, grabbed the box, and headed for the door. A woman answered, and I faltered for a second.

“Oh, uh, hi, sorry, I was looking for John Matteson?” The woman glanced down to the box quickly, but smiled.

“I can go get him, who should I say is here?”

“My name’s Alice. If he’s busy, I—”

“Alice! Rick’s friend?” I nodded. “Oh it’s nice to meet you! I’m Jackie, Rick has said so much about you. Come in, come in!” She stepped aside and I walked into the living room. I forgot Rick had said his girlfriend lived in the same house as Matteson. Seems like the sort of thing I should have made sure to remember before coming here. Jackie closed the door and ran off toward the kitchen, vanishing around a wall, and I stood looking around. Based on what Rick had said about Matteson and Jackie, I expected to see some bookcases; but all I found in this room were seats, and a tv, and some kind of multi-part stereo system. I was looking that over when I heard Matteson’s voice behind me.

“That was my dad’s,” he said. I spun around. “Had it as long as I can remember, and now it’s mine. Should probably get some new records for it.”

“Right, yeah, that would be good,” I said, tucking my hair behind my ear. “I was just expecting something different, I guess.” He raised a brow.

“Like what?”

“Oh, well, uh, books, mostly.” He smiled and motioned with his head before walking back to the kitchen, and I followed. The place where Jackie had vanished was apparently a stairway into the basement, and when I got down there I felt my breath catch in my throat. The very back was devoted to a washer and dryer, and some exercise equipment, but the rest of the room was a fully furnished library. Jackie was down there, looking through a book with alchemical symbols on the front, I recognized them from that year I spent reading everything I could find on The Philosopher’s Stone after Harry Potter came out. “Ah, yep, there they are, then.” He nodded, looking over the room.

“Yup. Still organizing a bit,” he said, pointing to a stack of book-filled milk crates near the stairs, “figuring out how to work my books into my dad’s collection.”

“There’s still a lot of him here, huh?”

“I imagine there always will be.” He took a sad breath and then turned to me. “So, what brings you by?”

“Oh! Right!” I set the box on the table in the middle of the room and opened it, and he stepped forward to peek inside. “Well, you know, now that I own that house, I had gone looking into the property history. And after our encounter with, uh, your family, I went back and looked over it again and found some records of their time there.”

“Oh, wow,” he said, pulling out a copy of a notarized form from when the property was given to Aaboukingon. “This is amazing!” We worked through the box, talking about the stuff we found and what Matteson knew about it, and Jackie told me about how she’d met Aaboukingon now that he was part of the river again, and it was really nice. After a while Jackie went to work, and the two of us kept talking. He showed me around the library a bit, how the books were arranged, which ones were in which languages (and which of those languages he could read), and I asked some questions about the books that were out and being researched. He told me he had been learning to use his abilities as an Anchor by reading some theories about how the metaphysical realm worked and what his part of it was. It was starting to get late in the afternoon, so we went back upstairs and he insisted I stay for dinner, at the very least to make up for overcharging me about the ghost that wasn’t even a ghost. So I went back down and grabbed a book on alchemy, and flipped through it in the kitchen while he cooked and we talked. He confessed pretty early on that he hadn’t done much work with alchemy, specifically, but he was sure the book would give me some helpful tips if I wanted to dabble at it. It was old, the pages felt like they were written on vellum and the cover was certainly leather. I couldn’t even start reading it until I’d smelled it a couple times.

“How do you keep old books like this safe?” I asked. He shrugged.

“Some books are just like that, I guess. Usually ones about magic or some other powerful and important topic. It isn’t magic directly that keeps them intact, otherwise they wouldn’t last around me, but something like magic just seems to have become part of what they are.” Over dinner, he asked about what I do, and I explained my biology degree and my hopes of getting work in the conservation field, and he seemed legitimately interested so I ended up telling him all about how I got into it and my little side projects of setting up trail cameras behind the house.

“You know, if we worked together, I bet we could find a proper cryptid,” I joked.

“So you can poke at them?”

“Mr. Matteson, I told you, I have a heart for conservation. I would, at worst, tag them.” We both laughed at that one, and I asked him if he really did know anything about cryptids. He told me that he had heard rumor that most of them were just spirits that got stuck on this side of reality, but he hadn’t asked one to verify that. I almost chickened out and left immediately after dinner, but I took a moment to compose myself and then went for it. “Hey, so, look. My program at school has this Christmas party in a few days, and I was wondering, you know, if you’d be free on Thursday.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I think I could be. Should I pick you up, or meet you there, or…?”

​“Pick me up, I think that would be best.” He nodded. We paused for a moment, and then I quickly waved. “Okay, well, see you then!” He smiled and agreed, and stood on the porch to watch as I returned to my car and drove away.

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