Nowhere Is Safe

LIBBA BRAY

Hello? We recording? I see a red light, so I’m hoping my battery lasts. Okay, pay attention, because I’ve got only one shot at this, and it’s gonna come at you on the fly. If you found this on YouTube, you are seriously lucky, because you need to know this.

Sorry about that banging in the background. It’s too hard to explain right now, and you don’t want to know what’s on the other side of that door. Trust me.

My name’s Poe, by the way. Poe Yamamoto. And that’s Poe as in Edgar Allan. Yeah, ’cause what guy doesn’t want to be saddled with that name? Crap, I’m all over the place. Okay. Focus, dude. Tell the story.

Let’s say you’ve just graduated high school and you’ve decided to celebrate the end of thirteen years of compulsory education with a little backpacking trip in Europe with some friends. You do the do: Paris, Dublin, Venice—which, by the way, smells like pigeon shit fried in grease—London (cold, wet, expensive, but you knew that), maybe some beers in Germany. And just maybe one of you says, “Hey, let’s go off the grid, check out some of these mysterious towns in Eastern Europe, hunt for vampires and werewolves and things that go bump in the Slavic night.” Why the hell not, right? You’re only doing this once.

So you pack it up and head east. You take a train through the kind of forest that’s older than anything we have here, older than anything you can imagine. Like you can practically smell the old coming off that huge wall of forever trees, and it makes you feel completely small and untested.

Anyway.

You get to a village and you notice the big honkin’ evil-eye pendants the locals hang from their windows. Maybe you even laugh at their quaint superstitions. That, my friend, is the kind of arrogant crap that can get a guy killed. It’s not quaint and it’s not superstitious. There’s a reason those villagers are still alive.

You hang out, eat thick, spicy stew, try to make conversation with the locals, who keep telling you to move on—go see Moscow or Budapest or Prague. Like they want to get rid of you. Like you’re trouble. You ignore them, and one day you and your friends might find yourselves venturing into that unfamiliar forest, winding through a thick mist that comes up out of nowhere. This is not the time to stop and take a piss on a tree or make a travelogue video for your family back home.

You know that prickly feeling you get on the back of your neck? The one that makes you scared to turn around? Pay attention to that, Holmes. That is a Me-No-Likee signal creeping up from the lizard part of your brain—some primal DEFCON center of your gray matter left over from the very first ancestors that hasn’t been destroyed by gated communities, all-night convenience stores lighting up the highways, and a half dozen fake Ghost Chaser shows on late-night cable. I’m just saying that lizard part exists for a reason. I know that now.

So if you’re walking down that unfamiliar path and the mist rises up out of nowhere and slips its hands over your body, turning you around until you don’t know where you are anymore, and the trees seem to be whispering to you? Or you think you see something in the dark that shouldn’t exist, that you tell yourself can’t possibly exist except in creepy campfire stories? Listen to the lizard, Holmes, and do yourself a favor.

Run. Run like Hell’s after you.

Because it just might be.

We still recording? Good. Let me tell you what happened, while I still can.

I don’t know who got the idea first—might have been me. Might’ve been Baz or Baz’s cousin, John. Could even have been my BFF, Isabel. Just three guys and a girl with backpacks, Eurorail passes, and two full months before we had to report to college. Somehow we’d managed to blow through most of our money in a month. That’s when one of us—again, I can’t remember who—suggested we stretch our cash by packing it through Eastern Europe.

“It’s that or we go home early and spend the summer at the Taco Temple handing bags of grease bombs through the drive-thru window,” Baz said. He was on his fourth German beer and looked like a six-foot-four, sleep-deprived goat the way he staggered around. There was foam in his new chin scruff.

“Can’t we go to Amsterdam instead? I hear you can smoke pot right out in the open,” John pleaded.

Isabel shook her head. “Too expensive.”

“For you guys,” John mumbled.

“Don’t be that way,” Isabel gave him a kiss, and John softened. They’d been a thing since the second week in Europe, and I was trying to be cool with it. Izzie was worth ten of John, to be honest. “So where should we go? Not someplace everybody and their freaking aunt Fanny go. Let’s have a real adventure, you know?”