Night clouds shrouded the Bilsford sky with a clay-gray color as dark as a lizard’s skin. As it thickened into blackness, drawing even more heat away from the December air, it ultimately smothered the light from even the brightest stars. But mere dark couldn’t keep the town’s denizens inside, safe and warm, not on Hobson Night. As Derek and Chelsea drove through town after dinner, it seemed as if everyone under thirty was out having fun.
Everyone except them.
Groups large and small wandered the grassy commons, laughing drunkenly as they tromped the frosty grass. Banners and holiday lights hung from all the streetlamps. If you peered inside the garish fluorescent-lit windows of the supermarkets and convenience stores, you could see long lines of people with their IDs—both real and manufactured—already out as they bought cases and six-packs of beer.
Hobson Street, three blocks of ramshackle off-campus student housing that lay just a quarter mile from Eve Mandisa’s, was the nexus for this dying-of-the-light debauch, but the party always spiraled out from there, sucking the whole town in. University classes had ended yesterday; the campus shutdown would occur tomorrow, but this was a night when college students rewarded themselves for work well done, or drowned their sorrows over opportunities lost. It was rumored, and likely true, that Bilsford scheduled its high-school midterms during this week specifically to keep the younger kids in the town busy and out of trouble.
Like that could ever work.
Derek slowed for a crowd in the crosswalk. Among the people, Chelsea recognized six kids from her classes, singing, “We Will Rock You.”
Derek caught her longing expression as she looked out the window. “Do you want to go later?” he asked hopefully. “Just for a few minutes? Just to drive down Hobson Street and look? We can drink seltzer.”
Chelsea shook her head. “Bah. Humbug. No. Maybe. I don’t know. I think I just want to go home and go to sleep after this.”
“Are you sure?”
She reared. “My lizard ate a dog! I’m feeling a little drained, Derek.”
“Fine. Sorry. I thought the whole idea was to distract your inner reptile.”
“That’s the idea, but not tonight. You should go. Really. I won’t mind.”
Much.
“Maybe. Maybe I should.”
He sounded defiant and annoyed and she didn’t blame him. Who would want to be stuck with her on Hobson Night? Last year, when she was fifteen, she’d actually finished all her tests and her friends begged and begged her to sneak out and play. Her father even made a point about how the lock on the back door was broken and, hell, anyone could sneak out and join the party for an hour or two and no one would notice. But Chelsea stayed in her room, curled up under a book lamp, startled by every crashing bottle or good-natured scream.
Tonight, though, Chelsea was on her way to tell a woman she didn’t particularly like that her dog had been eaten by a lizard she was sitting.
My, how times had changed.
She told her parents everything, but they didn’t seem to believe her until Derek displayed his as-yet-untreated wound. Though the bleeding had stopped completely, the width of the cut looked pink and pulpy and had acquired a strange shade of green on the edge of the frayed skin.
Her mother nearly fainted. But her father, after whistling, just said, “I stuck my hand under a running lawn mower once to grab a ring. Stupidest thing I ever did. An inch in the wrong direction and I could have lost the whole hand.”
Derek nodded solemnly, but Chelsea thought she saw them swap furtive glances of “manly” approval.
Her mother instantly reached for the phone to call the police, to have the killer monster dragon arrested and/or shot, but Chelsea begged her not to, at least until Ms. Mandisa got back in touch.
“It’s not Koko’s fault Aristotle got inside! He was just doing what a lizard does!” Chelsea said.
Seeing her daughter defend the creature that terrified her made Chelsea’s mother think twice. She put the phone down, but kept her hand on the receiver for a few long seconds, for comfort’s sake, it seemed. Chelsea sometimes wondered if her mother had her own OCD, but had kept all the little fears and rituals locked away inside, all her life, telling no one.
Dr. Gambinetti said that everyone had these terrifying stray thoughts, conjured by the reptile brain, and the disease was really just a question of degree. Her father actually said he had them too, but that he ignored them. Chelsea was never sure if he really did, or if he was just saying that to make her feel better. But her mother had never owned up to anything other than a concern for Chelsea that she insisted was born only out of love.
And where was her bio teacher anyway? It’d been three hours and there was no return call from Eve Mandisa. Maybe she figured Chelsea had just freaked out over the rats, so she wasn’t in any rush to hear about it. Maybe Chelsea should have been more specific. In any case, when Chelsea announced her plan to go back with Derek and tell Ms. Sullivan what had happened, her mother was further tested.
“You will not go anywhere near that house!” she screamed.
But Chelsea’s father took his wife into the kitchen and the two parents treated Derek and Chelsea to a muffled but heated exchange. Words like “independence” and “best thing for her” and “she’s a little bigger and smarter than a dog” danced out into the living room.
Finally, the Kaüers did what they always did when they came to loggerheads over how to handle their only daughter. They called Dr. Gambinetti at home. He, surprisingly, offered a compromise between the armed guard Helen wanted and the footloose methods Ben advocated. As it turned out, the doctor was going to be in the area and could meet Chelsea and Derek at Ms. Mandisa’s himself. It would be a good place, he said, to see exactly how his patient was doing.
Chelsea figured he suggested it because it was his big opportunity to see her in the middle of a full-blown attack. Despite its sloppy appearance, the doctor’s office was controlled and safe. This was real life.
The university campus was impossible to navigate because of the traffic, so they had to take the long way around. As they finally exited the center of town, with its lit buildings and equally lit denizens, into the less well lit neighborhoods, she felt her reptile brain wriggling its long, sharp tail in her head, ready to perform for her doctor.
They pulled up in front of Tess Sullivan’s house, frozen leaves crackling beneath the tires. Tess’s car still wasn’t in the driveway, and the house was dark, its silhouette barely visible against the trees. Ms. Sullivan obviously wasn’t home. Maybe she’d given up on her beloved Aristotle and, like many of the older residents, decided to flee the neighborhood for Hobson Night.
Derek shut off the engine and looked at his watch. “We’ve got half an hour before Restrooms gets here. What do you want to do?”
Chelsea hadn’t noticed when it began, but a light snow was falling. It was supposed to get worse—dump up to six inches—as the evening went on, but right now it was just a feathery sprinkling, floating bits of sugar against black velvet. She watched the flakes land on the windshield and melt.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you want to do?”
“Well, you know what I always like to do?”
He slid his arm around her coat.
Boys. Ready to roll at the drop of a hat. They were like—what was the word?—opportunistic feeders.
She pretended not to know what he was talking about. “No. What?”
He came forward and put his lips against hers. She did not resist, tingling with pleasure as he wriggled his arms under her coat. He took her mind off guard perfectly and she was thankful. For the first time in what seemed a million years, she actually felt herself relax. Her whole body seemed to exhale. Sure, a tightly wrapped, icy little something in the back of her mind was still beating away, but maybe if she gave in to this simple pleasure, even that could melt from the warmth.
After all, it wasn’t the end of the world. Just a lizard doing what lizards do. Nature. Just like this. The circle of life.
She let him put his tongue in her mouth, prod her teeth and pull her closer. It was so quiet, except for their quickening breath, that she thought she could hear the snowflakes landing. As the car windows fogged from the heat of their bodies, she heard more than that, though. She heard tree branches crack lightly in the wind. Distant laughs. Music from a car stereo.
Then scraping.
No, scratching. Like something crawling up beside the car, something that could tear through the door and grab them.
She stayed in Derek’s arms, eyes closed, knowing it was just the OCD, but she counted anyway, hoping he couldn’t read her mind. She counted the flashes of darkness on the inside of her eyeballs, counted how many teeth Derek’s tongue touched. Counted her breaths, counted the seconds.
Eventually, Derek noticed she wasn’t moving.
He pulled away and looked at her. “Look, Chelsea, don’t force yourself or anything.”
“I’m not!” she protested. He just looked at her and she felt like crying. “I’m sorry. I feel so stupid. I can’t even kiss you. I am so damn lame.”
He pulled farther back and looked out the window. “You’re not. You’re not lame. It’s been a big day. We’ll…we’ll try again after this is all sorted out.”
She watched him, thinking how wonderful he was being. Too wonderful. In fact, he seemed way too calm about the whole thing. Didn’t he want her?
“Derek, how can you just stop like that? Aren’t boys supposed to get all worked up?”
“Oh, I am,” he said, laughing a little. “I just…I just want to make sure things are right between us.”
She was about to grab and kiss him again, show him just how right things were between them, when a heavy tapping came at the window that made them both jump.
The wide head and bespectacled eyes of Dr. Gambinetti hovered outside the window, surrounded by shadow and snow. He was narrowing his eyes, trying to see past the fog into the car’s interior.
Derek opened the door as Chelsea buttoned her long coat.
“Very sorry to interrupt,” Gambinetti said. “Are you the young man who calls me Restrooms?”
Derek blanched. “Uh…Chelsea…”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Chelsea said, climbing out of the car. Why had she told Gambinetti about that? She was certain she’d lost Derek to Penny now.
Gambinetti laughed. “You really should see the look on your face. It’s fine, Derek. I’ve been called much, much worse. And I’m glad to meet you.”
Chelsea could see the doctor’s laugh was genuine. There was a faint smell of alcohol about him, too. Scotch? Even Dr. Gambinetti was getting in on Hobson Night.
Maybe she should?
“Chelsea,” he said, widening his grin. “You don’t seem all that rattled by these shocking goings-on.”
“Actually,” she began. Deciding she didn’t want to go into the details of her aborted make-out session at all, let alone in front of Derek, she said, “Nothing.”
Gambinetti nodded. “Have you spoken to the dog’s owner?”
Chelsea shook her head. “No. She’s not in.”
“I hope you understand I’m not making light of any of this. Bad things do happen. We’ve talked about it. But the important thing to realize is that your imagination can’t predict it. When we write, when we draw, when we”—he cast a glance at Derek—“when we play, the imagination is an amazing tool. But if it says that this telephone pole is going to fall on me if I don’t recite the names of all the episodes of Battlestar Galactica, that’s something else.”
Chelsea nodded. She’d heard it all before. “But you do believe me about the dog leash?”
Gambinetti nodded. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. But just so I can tell your parents that I checked, why don’t we go inside and have a peek?”
He turned toward Eve Mandisa’s house and looked as if he was going to march right on over, but then even he hesitated.
“It’s in a cage, isn’t it?”
Derek and Chelsea nodded. “Yeah.”
The snow fell just a little heavier as they crossed the street. Unlike Ms. Sullivan’s dark house, the scant light from the open basement door reached into the living room, giving the windows where Chelsea had opened the drapes a yellow aura as if someone were watching a small yellow television somewhere inside.
As they made their way across the yard, Dr. Gambinetti, apparently a little drunk, thumped along like a big bear, barely getting out of the way of the brush and piles of leaves he encountered along the way. He kept his voice cheerful and upbeat as he talked. “Fear of reptiles runs deep. It’s a natural reflex, hard-wired into our animal brains. But it can be conquered. Otherwise, how could we live in the modern world, the way it is? We don’t hunt, we don’t gather, and there are seldom real reasons for fight or flight, not in Bilsford, anyway. But our bodies don’t know that. They just do what they’re built for.”
On the porch, Chelsea fished out the keys and focused on the doctor’s voice. It was strange to see him, to hear him talk like this outside his office. She couldn’t quite decide if it made the world seem somehow safer, or his words less useful. For now, it seemed to comfort her. Her hands weren’t even shaking when she put the key in the lock. She figured Derek must be bored out of his mind, though.
“Take driving. Every time you drive your car, every time you brake, see a red light, or get stuck in traffic, adrenaline rushes into your system and your body thinks it’s out on a grassy plain, fighting for its life, not sitting behind a wheel. That’s why road rage is so common.”
She pushed the door open and waited for the two men to walk inside first. Gambinetti hesitated again, but when Derek simply walked in, he followed, smiling at the décor in the living room. Chelsea hung back at the door and flipped a switch on the wall. As she hoped, it turned on some of the lamps in the living room. But they were low, on tabletops, and cast tall shadows around the couch and the large reclining chair with its back to the hallway.
“Koko is in the basement, yes?” Gambinetti asked. Chelsea nodded as she closed the door. “Fine. Let’s talk up here a moment. I want to go through a few things. Part of everyone’s brain, the reptile brain, if you will, is constantly scanning the environment for threats, for food, for mates.” He eyed Derek. “Yes?”
“You bet,” Derek said.
“The brain sees something, a shadow, a funny-shaped branch, that it thinks might be a threat, and it sends a ‘threat alert’ to the brain so the body is ready.”
As he spoke, Chelsea thought that one of the shadows in the hallway had moved. But no, it was just the curved back of the reclining chair projected up on the wall by the lamp. She fought an urge to count something. Seeing where she was looking, Gambinetti unbuttoned his large leather duster and sat on the chair, revealing his jacket and Snoopy tie. It creaked loudly as his bulk pressed into it, and the shadow of the chair on the wall moved just as it was supposed to.
“The brain then takes a closer look and decides whether the threat is real or not. If not, it sends an ‘all clear’ signal to the body, and the body calms down. In the OCD brain, the alarm keeps coming, over and over, until the frustrated brain feels forced to imagine a way to make itself feel safe again, by washing, by counting, by checking the doors it already knows are locked. Until what, Chelsea?”
“You bring your adrenaline level down by breathing and change the focus of your mind by imagining something else,” Chelsea recited. Feeling warm, she slipped off her heavy coat and laid it on the couch.
“Yes. Calm the physical body with relaxation techniques, train the mind to switch subjects. If you do that often enough, you literally build new neural pathways. It’s a good reality versus a bad use of the imagination.”
Chelsea exhaled. “What might be owes its deepest debt to what is.”
Gambinetti smiled. “Perfect.”
“But what if the threat is real?” Chelsea asked.
“Then?” He smiled. “Well, then you fight or run away.”
Still smiling, Dr. Gambinetti leaned back in the squeaky lounge chair, just as two massive claws reached up from behind and clamped onto his shoulders.
He was just saying, “Huh?” when Koko’s broad head appeared above his own, at first looking like a comical hat. The huge shadow that lay against the wall behind him—the one Chelsea had spied and feared all on her own, without the interference of the OCD—writhed as if stretching its muscles.
In seconds the large man and the large chair were pulled backward, tumbling over, down to the floor, where they lay beneath the mighty lizard. Gambinetti’s arms flailed as Koko snapped his jaws open, downward, and attached himself to a part of the therapist’s body obscured by his coat and shirt. Finding the spot, the jaws shut like a rattrap; the head twisted and pulled, yanking up some large and fleshy body part mixed with torn bits of coat.
Gambinetti never even screamed. Even now his arms and legs didn’t flail so much as twitch. He was breathing, but it didn’t seem right. It was too fast, too mechanical. Koko, meanwhile, most of his body still hidden in shadow, climbed up and put his great claws on Dr. Gambinetti’s heaving chest.
The massive lizard raised his head toward Chelsea and Derek and opened his mouth, revealing two saw-like rows of teeth. Then Koko hissed, long and loud, as if to say, “I found my dinner. Go get your own.”