Geekomancy Read Online Free PDF

phone, wrinkled her face in annoyance, and started walking.
    She pulled her collar up as she crossed the street. If she were smart, she’d just go to a café and have some tea, then head home and pretend that the whole bullshit episode hadn’t happened. Sandra and Darren had apparently blacked out the sight of the troll, but Ree couldn’t help but see the damned thing every time she closed her eyes. She could still hear the pitch-perfect hum of the lightsaber as it cut through the monster’s knees, so she continued following the directions Captain Analog had spouted. There was something seriously screwed up in Pearson, and investigating it was way better than going home and wallowing in misery, though possibly just as bad for her mental well-being.
    And that’s when she lost it, Doctor, Ree imagined Sandra saying as she looked down at a future Ree, locked in a padded room.
    Wilco was mostly empty at 10 PM on a Thursday night. There were students here and there, a few homeless people, and the random unplaceable folks in clusters of ones and twos.
    Making her way through the sporadic crowds, Ree reached Auburn, which was ten blocks south of Main. She’d left the U-District and entered a boring neighborhood filled with offices and apartments where rich kids from Cali and New England lived. This allowed them to attend U of P without ever having to deal with the inconvenience of seeing any parts of Pearson besides their classrooms and bars.
    Ree walked a block, then turned left again, walked one more block, and turned left a third time. Why Eastwood couldn’t have just said “Go south nine blocks and then go in the first door on the right” was hard to say, but maybe he had a yen for folklore. Or was a jackass with a yen for folklore.
    Remembering the rampant awesomeness of the lightsaber, she knocked on the door, hoping to get answers. She waited a few seconds, and then the door swung open with a reassuringly archetypal creak. The genre-loving part of her brain chuckled in approval as she stepped inside to see a stairwell going down.
    Ree pressed the Record button on her voice memo app and started down the stairs. If nothing else, she’d be able to turn this into some kind of one-act.
    “Eastwood of Eden”? No. “East by Eastwood”? Nah. “Tunnels and Trollops.” Yes. That’d do.
    There was another door open at the bottom of the stairs, lit by one naked bulb flickering consistently enough that she wondered if it was Morse code.
    The room beyond looked like a cross between the Science Fiction Museum and the dealer’s hall at Origins. Stacks climbed to the ceiling, forming narrow, dimly lit rows across the room. At the far side of the room, Eastwood stood in front of a desk piled high with books, yellowed paper, and a leaning tower of laptops. The far wall was covered by flat-panel TV screens.
    Eastwood threw open his hands and said, “Welcome to the desert of the real.” His voice carried easily through the long room, the air still.
    She snerked. “Morpheus, eh? Your coat needs to be bigger, and you need that awesome gap between your teeth.”
    “Whatever. Just come in and close the door. We don’t want to be interrupted, and you may have been followed.”
    “What, by fratboys?”
    “If only,” Eastwood said. “I can deal with the Bromance crowd.”
    Eastwood said the phrase with surprising seriousness. Curiouser and curiouser.
    Ree made her way across the room, sneaking a look at the boxes and artifacts on the shelves. There were a lot of bound manuscripts, some old Betamax videos, DVDs, longboxes of comics, and costume pieces from TV shows and movies across the 20th century, among others. She stopped and looked at a piece that looked like Gort’s head from The Day the Earth Stood Still .
    “Okay, I’m here. Lay some exposition on me, donor figure.”
    “That’s Folklorist talk. Did you go to Berkeley?” Eastwood asked.
    “Didn’t. Dated someone who did.” Ah, Berkeley, home of the best Folklore