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It's like it pokes in from outside, the way a burr clings onto cloth. It's got spikes.
Johanna's walked through woods before, collected burrs aplenty. She doesn't want this thing. It's the wise women who've been taken by it, the clever witches, the learned nuns. She's seen them go and gone, and none of that for her.
So she's filled her head full of nonsense. Only nonsense with the right shapes, though, with slippery edges that burrs don't find any purchase on. She has a plan, too. She'll shape the nonsense into armor, not just for her, but for wiser heads than her own.
Charismatic preachers, they call people who can speak nonsense and persuade with it. Johanna's always been able to give words the form that slips past walls of the mind. It's how she survived her childhood, begging; it's how she made it to womanhood without falling or having to be married; it's how she won her little bit of wisdom from the elders who taught her, the ones who survive, and the ones who don't.
The ones who are gone and forgotten. It's so strange to Johanna how the world wipes itself clean of certain women who she was sure would have left their marks. But that's the thing that pokes in, it took them. It's not a spider, not a burr, and to be truthful, Johanna knows she doesn't want to know what it is. It's enough to know what it isn't and the shape to guard against knowing.
There's curious ones, like Eva was, and Zilpha. For them, Johanna has to hide the lies she's sculpting, make them into something dug up from a false burial, let them be prised from a tight grip. Monsters, she thinks, but strange ones, not the familiar ones from folk tales; ones that serve even worse things in the outer darkness, striving to trick humanity into opening a door for them.
That's not so far from the truth, close enough to shroud it and armor it away. Johanna sets out to persuade herself, first and most completely, so as to display perfect conviction to her deceit.
It's not deceit, though, is it. That thing really does want in, to take over her world, eat the people in it, and everyone Johanna might love, and its servant really does set out to trick fools and destroy the wise. She's not lying, she's fixing things, intensifying them.
Armor on knights doesn't just protect them from swords and arrows, does it, Johanna thinks. It also makes them fearful-looking, not like men anymore, but metal monsters out of frightful dreaming, horns on the helmets, and she's making faith-knights here, armored thought. Faith has power, she has always been taught, and at long last, she lets go her resistance to the teaching.
...
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
The Uncanny Objects database is fiction. Some of it is really good fiction. Chloe enjoys reading it in between entering data into a spreadsheet and writing a scraper to automate pulling data for another spreadsheet. It's got a particular house style, one Chloe can tell from some of the comments is enforced by a cadre of experienced writers and editors. She idly considers making something up to add to it, but she doesn't have a good idea for a story to tell, or a weird object to describe, or anything.
Chloe thinks about a book she read, years back, one whose title and author she can't remember. It was about fictional worlds that really existed; the characters visited them, and it was a lot more recent than Alice in Wonderland, but they used terms from that classic to describe it: down the rabbit hole, cheshire cat, mad hatter, eat-me cake. She daydreams about going into the Uncanny Objects fictional world.
...
The thing's got the scent of Johanna. Its minions dance at the edges of her vision more often these days. She made a mistake, it seems, one she can't remember or bring to mind. Maybe that's one of the signs, maybe the memory was stolen right out of her head, when her faith and nonsense failed her momentarily.
And those minions in turn attracted what Johanna has to call a demon. She hadn't liked to believe demons could escape where they'd been set to dwell in the afterlife of eternal suffering, but what had spoken to her in the woods the night before was no man, no matter he looked like one. He knew things no man knew. He was a threat, and even more, a temptation.
He offered knowledge, and a bargain, like a fair one from a folk tale. He could be that, but Johanna had never believed those were real things, either, and mostly still didn't. No, it was a demon offering that bargain. It had said it would answer any riddle she set it, and then she would need to answer one in turn, to claim her reward.
She wanted so badly to say yes. She needs answers, solutions to her problems with the minions of the thing that is not a spider, not a burr. But she knew she should say no, that the demon's bargain would be nearly as bad as letting the thing get her. Torn between the two impulses, she told it she would return the next night with a bargain.
It very well could be this demon is one of the reasons for the disappearances of curious or learned women increasing the last two years. What if she can stop it herself?
Johanna has created, as a sort of amusement for herself, riddles whose answers reversed themselves once discovered. Where if you thought it was an egg, it turned out to be a boat, and if you thought it was a boat, it turned out to be a mirror, and if you guessed it was a mirror, it was really an egg. She considers the possibility of slipping one of those into the creature's mind. Would it lose itself in the labyrinth of the endless chase of the solution, one after the other after the other and back again?
But that would mean wasting her chance to gain a real answer, too.
...
Nightmares of translucent leaves battle all day.
Chloe finds a book of nonsense that is at least hundreds of years old at the bottom of a stack in her university library's restricted section. She's been working at the library since sophomore year, and now that she's in graduate school, she's cut back on her hours, but they trust her more, and give her a different sort of assignment.
This time it's to check the books that were put in the catalogue before 1940, verify that they are what the catalogue says they are, and see if she can find ISBN numbers. The books from the forties, fifties, and sixties were already squared away.
Chloe took a semester of medieval studies before she decided to major in computer science, so she decided to start with the library's small collection of the really old books. Some of them were put in the catalogue in the nineteenth century, when the university was founded and this library began its existence.
All of the books Chloe finds that old are in protective sleeves. She is very careful when she opens them to wear nitrile gloves so as not to damage the pages with the oil of her skin.
The words that she reads from the nonsense book are strangely memorable. Chloe finds herself, later that night, reciting them under her breath over and over. It reminds her of something from the Uncanny Objects website. She wonders if she might have the seed of an idea. An old book, written by someone from the middle ages, finding its way to a library, causing some sort of strange, eldritch mischief.
...
Johanna can't read or write, so there's no question of her writing down the riddle she gave that trapped the demon, or elf, or whatever he was. It worked, though, and because it worked, she told some women of her acquaintance about it.
One of those, a young religious postulate, wrote it out on a slip of ruined paper she had kept for her personal notes. When she was old, she passed it on along with her other personal effects to a protegee, and in turn she gave it to a collector of such ephemera and puzzles.
And the collector gave Johanna's riddle to a man with a printing press, who placed it in a book.
...
Unique duplicated water forgives ruthlessly.
Chloe lives in the same world as Johanna. She may not understand it, but it's no less strange than the world she wishes she were part of.
She may soon regret that.