Tim had grown tired of all the boat trips and he spent this last one nested on the driver’s seat with Kerri, dismayed head draped over her thigh, hoping for some affection. The Pennaquick County Police had contributed to the Blyton Summer Detective Club’s arsenal with a pair of pump-action assault rifles, a new two-way radio, and loads of extra ammo, which Andy was jamming into every available pocket, along with small boxes of strike-anywhere matches to perform flame tests. Kerri was still holding on to her knife. They all had flashlights and respirators around their necks.

A last familiar shape lay between the empty bags on the deck after Andy had finished gearing up: it was the pickax—the one she had retrieved from the mines and inadvertently left in Joey’s boat the previous afternoon. She flipped it in the air, calibrating its weight, and decided to slip it through a belt loop in her pants.

“Can’t be too prepared,” she commented. “I’ll trade you Uncle Emmet’s shotgun for a rifle, okay, Nate?”

Nate sat astern in the dark, careful not to lean his arm over the bulwark.

“Nate,” Peter said beside him. “Lieutenant Ripley is talking to you.”

“We’re doing the same shit all over again,” Nate muttered, to no one in particular.

Andy couldn’t tell if she was supposed to overhear or just hear that, but she followed anyway.

“We’re retracing our steps,” she rephrased. “After the lake, after exploring the gold mines, we talked to witnesses, hit the library, connected the mines and the mansion, and we begged for someone to ferry us to the isle, until finally one evening exploring the lake we came across the rowboat, and here we are. This is the night we catch our guy.”

“Yeah, ’cause it went so well for us last time,” Nate snapped. “Remind me what’s different?”

Andy simply opened her jacket and let the weapons say hello. “We’re prepared. We know who the bad guy is.” A draft of ice-cold tailwind pushed a long-lost bang of black hair across her face. “And I, for one, am way angrier.”

She left to help Kerri dock the boat, and Nate stayed sitting there, savoring her words.

“She was always angry,” Peter sidenoted.

—

They were pulling over at the pier when Andy, rope in hand, noticed another line tied to the post. Kerri shut off the engine, and the hollow sound of the rowboat drunkenly nudging the pier became evident. The towering firs on Deboën Isle remained silent in expectation.

They debarked, and the girls moored the motorboat while Nate advanced inland and confronted the mansion.

Atop the building, in the round attic window, a soft yellow light pulsed.

The three kids and the dog stood in silence at the foot of the front stairs, in the hazy light-puddle from that one lit room. Thirteen years, and Deboën Mansion had not lost its arrogance.

Andy shoved a rifle into Nate’s hands, flung another one at Kerri, and cocked Uncle Emmet’s shotgun herself, single-handed.

Kerri, sight line pinned to the lit window, said, “We don’t fire until we see his face.”

Andy tried to make out the minutiae of her expression in the dark.

“You serious?”

“Yes. We faced guys in costumes before. And we always had the good sense not to kill them, but to expose them. Shoot first, ask later may be standard procedure for police in Compton, but it’s not gonna be mine.”

“You both talk like he can be killed,” Nate challenged.

“He can be killed, Nate,” Andy affirmed. “The wheezers killed him once. (Points in the general direction of the mauled east wing.) If that necrodouchebag thinks I’m any less nasty than those wiggly spider-armed motherfuckers, he’s got a Pennaquick Telegraph Breaking News Edition coming.”

“That was a good line,” Peter admitted.

Andy stepped forward and rounded on them. From Tim’s lower perspective, the smoldering yellow disk of the attic window shone around her head like the nimbus of a shotgun-and-pickax-wielding angel.

“Listen to me. This is nothing like the last time. At all,” she spoke, challenging the team to argue it. “Last time we were kids. We came here scared, full of good intentions, trying to solve a mystery. And Daniel Deboën used us. He bullied us.”

She blew the strand of hair off her face, then changed her mind and nodded it back on. This was a special night.

“We’re not kids anymore. We’re not taking shelter in the haunted house—we’re going into the house to drag the haunter out on his sorry ass. Are you with me?”

Myriad tiny voices within Kerri’s hair went yeah like a Rage Against the Machine chorus as Kerri cocked the rifle, lips pursed to keep the fury within.

Nate tautened up, gripped his weapon, and snorted his fear back in.

Tim barked as happily as a dog ever did.

The interior of Deboën Mansion blinked awake, startled at the first blast at the doors, and the portraits and sets of armory stared in disbelief at the front entrance as the pickax burst through the lightcrack, severing the lock, and Andy kicked her way in, moonlit and angerstruck, doors shattering the decoration behind as she shouted at the shocked furniture:

“Blyton Summer Fucking Detective Club! Anybody home?”

Kerri and Nate came to flank her right after, rifles aimed at the horrified haunted house.

Tim scurried between them, promenaded across the hall, stopped by a decorative suit of armor, and peed on it.

KERRI: That’s the spirit, boy.

—

Nate’s flashlight surveyed the area while Andy struck a match. Fat, healthy-looking flame. The carpeted stairs to the second floor stared down at them like Old West bank clerks would at very loud, untidy robbers.

“Does anyone else think it’s strange that someone lives here, yet the door is still locked from the outside?” Nate polled.

“I don’t know.” Andy shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“It kind of appeals to the detective bit in ‘Blyton Summer Fucking Detective Club,’ doesn’t it?”

“Right.” She nodded. “Well, we’ll make sure he fills us in during his hog-tied villain exposition. Up we go.”

“Wait!”

Andy froze halfway to the first step.

KERRI: This guy wants us to come upstairs and find him.

ANDY: Yup. Pretty much my plan, coincidentally.

KERRI: We shouldn’t be doing his bidding. He knows we’re here; he’s got the light on to entice us. He’s expecting us. We should do something different, throw him off-balance.

ANDY: Good point. Nate?

NATE: (Shrugs, points distractedly at Kerri.) Brains.

ANDY: Right. (Gazing around.) Okay, got it.

She stepped back from the stairs and led them through the double doors on the left, into the living room. Dead hanging curtains and embarrassed furniture squinted at their light beams.

Andy lit a match, okayed the flame, then stumbled upon an oil lamp on the mantelpiece and chose not to let the match waste. The colors of the room (bright hues, even conservatively joyful) stirred back to life in the tottering light.

“Nice,” Kerri sarcasm evaulated. “Good to be home.”

Even though the house had been officially abandoned in 1949 (except for a bout of illegal squatting from Wickley in ’77), it had obviously fallen behind with decorating trends back in the early 1920s. The present tenant was clearly uninterested in catching up. In fact, the whole room was uncannily identical to their memory of it. Kerri could have sworn that no one had stood below the breeze-rocked chandelier since their own terrified teenage selves—and the impression it made on her was exactly the same. That bone-ringing familiarity was more unsettling than every haunted house cliché.

Nate even jolted when he peeked over his shoulder and recognized the face over the mantelpiece. Above the dead fireplace hung the somber oil portrait of Damian Deboën, the founding father. The man posed in flamboyant 1860s fashion, leaning on a crescent-bladed sword, like an ambiguous yet proud symbol of a previous career that had granted him the present status. He was the only thing in the room not to seem intimidated by their intrusion. Still, Nate could detect the scandal in his black eyes: the hateful, cryogenic look a Reconstruction-era gentleman would reserve for punks and lesbians.

The likeness, however, wasn’t nearly as frightening to Nate as it had been to his eleven-year-old self—not even in the dim light of the oil lamp and the candelabra that Andy had just kindled. It was just brushstrokes on canvas. And the room, he noticed, wasn’t that big. Rediscovery shrinkage.

Kerri checked the painting, then looked across the room at an ornamental shield on the wall. Visual memory or imagination placed two swords crossed on top of that shield, not dissimilar to the one in the portrait, but there was only one now. She spotlighted it, and she could outline the ghost of its twin in the dust.

She was about to point this out when she saw Andy sliding a vinyl record from its sleeve. She delicately alighted it on the gramophone (one of those with an external horn like something a Tolkien character would blow into and expect horsemen to rush in), wound up the device, tampered with some switches, and carefully landed the needle on the first track.

It seemed miraculous enough that the old contraption sputtered any sound at all—that of dust and scratches and the tungsten needle coughing. When the music came, it could hardly compete with the noise, but it came nonetheless, in the shape of a forgotten soprano’s rendition of Tessera.

“What the fuck are we doing?” Kerri inquired in the name of pretty much every living and inert thing in the house.

“I bet you he wasn’t expecting this,” Andy answered confidently.

She propped the shotgun next to a sofa and sat down, spraying disgruntled dust into the cosmos. Tim did not hesitate to follow suit.

It was dark, and hostile, and downright frightening, but they had camped in worse places. Even lived in worse places. And the broken opera was starting to get comfortable in the room, and Andy loved camping anyway.

Nate browsed the bookshelves, picked something that seemed both ancient and innocuous, and took it to his newly assigned armchair.

Andy had pulled out a book too. Kerri, sitting across, pointed her flashlight at the back cover.

“Why are you reading ‘another inspiring entry in our favorite pop-Gothic series,’ according to Sapphic Readers Quarterly?”

“It was a gift,” Andy said.

Then Tim raised his head.

The soprano quivered.

The books convulsed in their shelves, windowpanes rattled, paintings clopped, furniture neighed and furiously stamped the ground.

And then it all ceased.

The gramophone needle had drifted off the disc. Four pair of eyes checked one another.

“Okay. That’s our vacation done,” Andy gathered.

“Is this it?” Nate asked Kerri. “The limnic eruption?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was expecting something more dramatic.”

She pulled a curtain back to reveal a window and peered through the shutters. The isle’s lush plant life blocked her view of the lake. Andy had better luck with the window she chose. She could see gentle ripples surfing across the waters.

“It looks calm enough. It should explode like a Coke, right?”

“I’ve never seen it happen,” Kerri argued. “I don’t think anyone’s seen it happen.”

“ ‘Should explode like a Coke,’ ” Peter quoted, from the armchair opposite Nate. “Really, man, why is she replacing me?”

“What was that noise?” Kerri wondered.

“I mean, Kerri is the logical choice. She’s got the looks and the brains, no arguing that.”

“What noise?” Nate asked, fighting to ignore him.

“God, I would even understand you taking over,” Peter went on. “But Andy? I won’t deny she’s got initiative, but—”

Tim snarled at the window; Kerri instantly knelt beside him and tugged his neck.

“Shh. Quiet, Tim. Quiet.”

PETER: See? Even the dog is smarter.

NATE: (Rounding on him, hissing.) Will you shut the fuck up!

SOMETHING: Ggguh.

Nate sprang to his feet. Kerri looked back at him, nodding, That noise.

Andy, spying through the shutters, muttered, “Oh fuck.”

From the vaguely defined shoreline between vegetation and still water, half a Greek alphabet of gray, malformed figures was arduously and determinedly emerging. And then, staggering, undecided on which pair or pairs of extremities to stand on, they were approaching the mansion.

Andy tiptoed back from the window, readying her shotgun.

“Foyer,” she whispered, luring them with a finger.

They retreated back to the entrance hall, and Andy picked up a chair and stealthily propped it to hold the door while Kerri and Nate aimed their rifles at it. The occasional shy wheezing had turned into a frank, raspy choir of a tortured, yet relentless anthem.

(All in whispers.)

ANDY: (Side-glancing the room they just left.) Shit. The lights.

KERRI: It’s okay. They have no vision from living underground.

PETER: Really? Wonder Tomboy hadn’t figured that out?

NATE: (Appalled.) I hadn’t figured that out!

TIM: (Stares at the door like an X-raying Superman, all muscles ready to jump forward and attack.)

This standoff went on for longer than expected. Andy was able to count two full drops of sweat paragliding down her face while she stared at the door handle, daring it to budge.

It didn’t. But the wheezing didn’t cease either. Instead, it grew louder and lumpier and raspier than ever.

Andy couldn’t tell where it was coming from anymore.

She backed away from the doors and signaled the others to follow, the floorboards squeaking treacherously under her feet.

“Where are they coming from?” she wondered.

“Below the lake,” Kerri said. “They follow the CO₂.”

“What about below the isle?”

That was the cue a wheezer was waiting for to slam open the door under the stairs and grab Nate by the neck and try to bite his head off. It would have succeeded had Nate not managed to jab the rifle into its mouth. The wrong end.

Tim was faster than the girls and managed to grab hold of Nate’s jeans, but the creature was already dragging him down to the basement. In a single second Nate screamed for help, his jeans ripped out of Tim’s mouth, he was yanked down the stairs, and the door slammed shut.

It stayed closed for the quantum time length before Andy swung it open again, but in that unnamable lapse everything beyond the door was gone. Struggling shapes and screams. Light and sound. Kerri and Andy and Tim found themselves peering into a flat black rectangle of darkness and interplanetary silence.