“FUCK THIS,” Andy spat at the intended end of the chapter, pulling out the flare gun from her pocket and shooting into the dark.
A wheezer at the bottom of the stairs opened its foul mouth to shout back, just in time to allow the flare to fly into its throat and burn inside its torso, the rubidium flames shining through its slimy translucent flesh like a bright red, black-smoking Halloween pumpkin of pain.
By the light of which Andy saw fit to jump downstairs, shoot a second wheezer charging for her, spot Nate’s rifle on the floor, bat the skull halfway off a third wheezer, let the charging Weimaraner finish him off, and run for Nate as he was being dragged to the dark end of the room, the creature that had seized him preferring to secure a meal before the fight.
Had Nate not seen a pillar to grab on to by the light of that howling, sparking wheezer-lamp still spasming on the ground, he wouldn’t have delayed the wheezer enough to let Andy jump on its back, sink her cannon into its spine where its four shoulders seemed to join, and pull the trigger, blowing up the concrete below.
Tim was latched on to the third wheezer’s leg, just waiting for Kerri to come downstairs and take a swing at its head. A substantial part of the skull did come off this time.
The wheezer-lamp had stopped moving. A bright red light burned inside its abdomen, its skin blazing white and crawling with overexposed blood vessels.
Andy held Nate’s head up. “Nate. Nate. Look at me.”
His face was drained white, the way living people, or even the recently deceased, never look. He had blood left inside him, though. It showed through his T-shirt, in groups of three parallel slashes at his chest and neck. Andy checked for arterial bleeding; there was none. Kerri was now trying to pry a word out of him.
“Nate. Can you walk?” she asked, propping him up. “Nate? Nate, speak!”
“CO2,” Nate fitted in one breath.
“What?”
(Facing Kerri, quivering.) “Flares…produce CO2.”
A change in the lighting marked the wheezer-lamp suddenly standing up, red light pouring out of the many holes in its torso and its mouth as it threw a ground-rippling, marrow-thirsty, pure carbon dioxide–fueled screech and crawl-ran on all six toward them.
Andy and Kerri both raised their weapons, aimed vaguely, and fired. The lamp exploded like any lamp would, throwing a wave of guts and severed limbs across the room to splatter off the wall.
“Upstairs,” Andy ordered, helping Kerri with the wounded, her sneakers squishing on monster pulp.
The foyer was clear. The front door still held.
And yet the gurgling wheeze of the creatures surrounded them.
In the crowded penumbra, Andy struck a match. Yellow fleur-de-lis wallpaper ululated at the still-healthy flame. She cocked the rifle and gave a quiet military signal to head upstairs. Tim understood it perfectly and took the lead, while Andy helped Kerri help Nate upstairs.
The dog stopped on the sixth step, tail stiffening to DEFCON 1. Two of the dozen wheezer-voices around them raised in tone and manifested, jumping onto the landing ahead, both on all sixes.
ANDY: Sheep smuggler rugsweep!
(Kerri swiftly grabs the carpet and yanks, causing the wheezers to slip off the landing and tumble down to Andy’s feet, right in time for her to take the gun and blow the first one’s head off, dodge three claws, step on the second wheezer’s chest, and shove the cannon inside its gaping mouth and fire.)
PETER: Why didn’t she just say “carpet”?! Like the fucking thing’s gonna understand!
ANDY: Go! Get to high ground!
They rushed upstairs, crossed a hallway, flashlights sweeping the rooms frantically, trying to catch sight of the invisible wheezers that stood cheering around them, crawling all over the house, outside, beneath, above, a stereophonic choir crescendoing to homicidal ecstasy.
Andy gritted her teeth and swept the gore off her face to confront the inevitable conclusion: there was only one room to go.
She hurricaned up the third-floor staircase and hit the attic door. It wouldn’t open.
“No way!”
The wheezer audio track around her grew into what sounded like sadistic laughter.
“NO WAY! (Banging the door.) Open up, motherfucker! We’re here! Open up!”
“Andy! In here!”
She spun on her feet and ran back toward a second floor room, shutting the door behind her. Nate was there, and Tim, and Kerri, her flashlight pointing at the peculiar furniture.
Oxygen tanks. Tens of them in assorted sizes, the smallest ones as big as fire extinguishers, a couple of canisters looking like they’d barely fit through the doorway.
“What…?” Andy stuttered. “These are the same kind we found under Sentinel Hill. He was smuggling oxygen here? Why?!”
“There.” Kerri pointed for a close-up shot. One of the largest tanks was connected to a duct pipe that slithered into a vent in a corner. “He’s oxygenating the attic. He holes up there while the whole lake is leaking gas!”
A high-pitched, overreaching shriek rose from the chorus; Andy and Kerri turned to face it. Their lightbeams hit a bare wall.
On the other end of the room, Nate slid down the flowery wallpaper, his anxious panting barely audible over the pandemonium.
PETER: (Whispering.) We’re as good as dead here, Nate.
NATE: (Really loud.) You are fucking dead!
“What?!” Kerri shouted. “Nate, what are you saying?”
Tim growled at the door, claws ready to pry off the floorboards.
“They’re right outside,” Andy announced, aiming her gun.
“They’re pouring in through the east wing,” Kerri said.
“Nate.” Peter was breathing hard too, like he actually had something to lose. “Listen to me. We’re not gonna make it.”
Nate could feel both icy sweat and lava blood dripping down his spine. The wheezer-voices were accordingly dropping in volume, from warcry to drumroll.
“Look at this, man. This is her plan? Just walk into ground zero and fight? It’s insane.”
Andy pushed Kerri aside and let Tim take the middle of the room with her, both facing the entryway with gritted teeth and quivery trigger fingers, all eyes on the door handle.
It never moved. Wheezers couldn’t handle handles.
So they blasted the door open.
Andy fired a welcome shot through the frontrunner of the horde, switched to the pickax, and jumped forward, her and Tim both roaring like face-painted warriors. The doorway was immediately taken over by a new creature digging its claws on the doorframe, and then another, and another, and another, and another.
Andy and Tim stopped halfway to the door, astonished, watching the five wheezers struggling to fit through at the same time. A ridiculous number of arms bashing at one another, mouths snapping in the air.
“Take note,” Andy told Tim. “People wonder why bad guys charge at Jackie Chan in a single row. This is why.”
In response to that, wheezers blasted two new doorways, one on each sidewall.
Drooling, hissing, claw-waving creatures poured inside like a tidal wave of sulfuric acid.
In amazement, Andy saw Tim jump at the first one and be flung across the room while she herself shotgunned one creature and pickaxed an eye socket into another one’s face at the same time, all while watching Kerri move to defend Nate and fight off the second wave with a stick.
“Kerri! It’s a gun! (Pickax through something’s ribcage.) Fire the gun!”
Kerri bashed the front wheezer, gaining room to aim the pump-action rifle and fire.
All action stopped for a fraction of a second, if only to admire how the blast went through no less than three screeching devils, silencing them instantly and making them fall to their knees and sideways like tux-clad dancers domino-diving in a swimming pool.
Nate staggered to his feet, cocked his rifle, and stepped forward into the three feet of ground Kerri had conquered against the quickly regrouping creatures, when something crashed through the dormer window on his right. Thorn-shaped teeth snapped an inch away from his cheek. He fired as he fell to the ground, and the gun blast knocked the wheezer out the window and off the roof.
Andy silently approved while she fired her shotgun at Lambda, felt Mu clutching her jacket and slipped out of it, nailed Nu onto the wall with her pickax, surprised Omicron with a butterfly kick while it complained that Xi go first, shot Xi’s head off, ducked to dodge Mu again, grabbed one of its medial limbs in midair, and shoved it into the pickax point coming out of Nu, impaled four lines above.
KERRI: Nate! Ammo!
Andy’s gun clicked empty. She threw it at somebody’s eyeless head, grabbed an empty oxygen canister, dug in her heels, and spun. She swung the bottle around, knocked Pi and Rho off their feet, and kept spinning, off-balance and losing control, knowing she would fall eventually, but hopefully not before she’d broken at least one more neck, and indeed she heard a scream cut short by the sound of the canister striking one o’clock on Sigma’s skull before crying out, “Duck!” and letting go of the bottle, which by sheer luck hit Tau right as Kerri was blasting a hole through its abdomen.
KERRI: Nate! Ammo, now!
Andy didn’t wait to regain balance before she dove for the shotgun, a shell in her hand, and as she landed over the weapon, the nth shrieking monster leaped on her. She rolled aside to avoid being pierced by three claws at once, pried the pickax out of the wall, nailed the last wheezer’s hand on the floor, and then finally chambered the shell and blew its head into goo.
KERRI: Nate! NATE!
Andy took a split second to reassess. Six wheezers were still stuck in the doorway, trying to chew one another’s arms out of the way. The room was covered in two layers of writhing mutilated aliens and black gore. It took a while to make sure no human corpses lay among them. She skipped over the dead bodies toward the burst dormer window.
He wasn’t down on the ground. Kerri spotted him first, at the end of the west wing, hanging off the roof.
Both girls called him.
“Don’t listen!” Peter shouted into his ear. “Just go!”
Nate clung to the ivy on the walls, grabbed a thick trunk and slid down along it, the gnarls and severed twigs tearing the skin off his palms. The girls saw him crash-land on top of the conservatory roof, roll off it, and hit the ground somewhere in the shrubs.
Kerri stopped breathing for a second, clutching Andy’s arm, until she saw him stand back up. Then there was an ephemeral relief, before her eyes convinced her brain that Nate was actually running toward the dock.
“Nate?! What are you doing?!”
They saw him jump into the motorboat, then stop by the controls and touch his pockets. Kerri had the ignition keys.
“Fuck it,” Peter said, already aboard the rowboat. “Come on!”
“Nate, don’t!” Kerri yelled from the window, watching Nate switching boats, untying the rope, and taking the oars. “Nate!”
Andy pulled Kerri inside a second before a wheezer that had crept up the façade onto the roof slashed her face off. It jumped into the room with them, jaws open at a thylacine angle, in the same second Kerri pulled her knife out and thrust it upward into its abdomen. It landed half dead, its guts lost in flight.
“Out!” cried Andy, pulling her away from the window and toward one of the new doorways the wheezers had been so kind to open for them.
A wheezer cut them off from the gap inside the hollow wall. Tim viciously pounced at it, throwing it down and biting at its neck as the thing tried to shake him off.
“This way!” said Andy, pulling Kerri to the opposite hole, loading shells into her rifle as she ran. They were relying on moonlight now, but Andy somehow recognized the next room.
A stampede of six-limbed monsters almost knocked the door off its hinges.
“We’re trapped!”
“No,” Andy replied. “This is where you disappeared.”
“What?”
“This is the room where you fell into a trap! Where was it?”
“I…I was standing over there and I…pulled that lamp!”
Andy grabbed Kerri by the waist, stood on the corner, and pulled a candleholder on the wall. It came right off into her hand.
Right at that moment, the door came down, along with two wheezers stomped by the rest of the hollering pack.
ANDY: Aw, fuck this.
She shot at the floor. The trapdoor they were standing on crumbled under their feet, dropping them inside a hollow wall to land on a slide, Andy clutching Kerri all the way down and smothering a scream while orange hair went weee along the way, all through the first floor and down to the basement.
A single, bile-coughing wheezer was standing in the coal room where they arrived, its back turned to the end of the slide. It heard the girls crash-landing into the coal pile behind, scrambled to face them, and had its head blown into subatomic matter, thus starting and ending its overall contribution to the story in one paragraph.
Kerri clambered on the coal pile, tried to climb back up the ramp.
“We forgot Tim!”
“He’s fine, come with me!”
“No! We need Tim!”
Andy had to pull her out of the ancient coal room and into the basement proper, frenzied screams of the besiegers booming all around them as they raced through the mansion’s foundations. Under the paroxysm of their flashlights she caught broken glimpses of shadows scuttling around corners, passageways into blackness, a heavy door that seemed secure enough.
She opened it and yanked Kerri inside with her and pulled it shut behind them, and only when the door latched did she recognize the room. She whirled around and tried the door again: locked.
“Oh fuck.”
“This is the dungeon!” Kerri cried, grabbing her own skull. “This is the same fucking dungeon!”
“I know,” Andy panted, striking a match, about to gouge her eyes out for that mistake. “But they can’t reach us here!”
“They can reach Nate! And Tim!”
“Nate’s got a better chance out there, and Tim can hide!”
“Until when?! Who’s gonna let us out this time?!”
“Kerri, please, calm down!”
“They’re outside! They’re scratching the walls!”
“I know!”
“We are going to die!”
“Kerri, keep it together, please!”
They were holding each other’s wrists now, Andy’s imploring hand feeling Kerri’s frantic pulse and failing to calm it for what felt like a frozen minute, until she had to drop the match burned down to her fingertips. Darkness prevailed.
The ruckus outside was subsiding.
Andy searched her pockets. Ten minutes into the war, her once perfectly sorted equipment was in shambles. She found a couple of glowsticks somewhere, snapped one, and examined the wide, empty, preposterously jail-like cellar. A dungeon, for all intents.
Kerri had retreated to the back of the room. Her eyes were barren. Her hair had died.
“We should’ve never come here,” she murmured.
“No, Kerri, you said we had to come, and you were right. We gotta stop him from gassing Blyton Hills, remember?”
“We should’ve never come to Blyton Hills.”
“We had to come.”
“We didn’t! I was better out there!”
“None of us were better out there; we were a disaster!”
“I was safe!” Kerri yelled, yielding to tears. “I was better on my own, three thousand miles from here, and you dragged me here again to die!”
“What? That’s not true!”
“This is your fucking fault!”
“Kerri, I would never put you in harm’s way; I love you!”
“You don’t love me! If you loved me so much, why did you fucking leave in the first place?!”
Andy stopped halfway to her, the shock wave of those words almost blasting her off her feet. The anger in Kerri’s eyes hurt to watch.
“If you loved me so much, why were you just waiting till you turned sixteen to grab a backpack and leave?! Shit, you could’ve come to Portland with me! We could’ve been together! But you just hopped on a train to nowhere to be the lone rider and you left me alone! (Voice shattering.) I was terrified! My life was spiraling out of control! I needed you, for fuck’s sake, I needed you then! And I had to wait for your fucking postcards from Alaska whenever you remembered I exist!”
She bent, exhausted, vocal cords burning, brushing her lifeless hair apart.
“You don’t love me. You left me.”
She sobbed like a gentle rain after the storm. She retreated back to her corner and slid down to the floor.
“You hate me,” the rain said.
Unremarkably, the universe had once again vanished. Not outside that room, Andy realized, but including the room. A green glowstick, Kerri, and herself. That was the total inventory of the cosmos.
And it was disintegrating. She could feel it in her gut—her soul withering and crumbling into space dust.
Kerri was crying from the debris of her own cataclysm, stranded, light-years away, and she was trapped on her own planet, prehistorically overwhelmed, unable to reach. Andy looked into herself, fathoming the void, searching for something to hold on to. Something to evolve from. Something that could grow, one single seed.
“I was afraid.”
She said.
“I was afraid to talk to you. To share what I felt. I thought that if you knew, if I poured my heart out for you, you wouldn’t be able to handle it, it would scare you away. ’Cause it scared me.”
She gazed up, into the lonely crying star.
“So I did the easy thing. I left because I would always know where to find you. I ran away to get my shit together, and I thought about you every single day. You were my last thought before I closed my eyes and your name was—is!—it’s the first word on my mouth when I stir up, but I couldn’t woman up and tell you. So I just kept it to myself, and whenever it hurt too much all I had to do was dial your number and hear your voice, and I’d feel better. And it never, ever crossed my mind that you would be needing me. (Tearswipe.) I was selfish. I was a coward. I am sorry.”
She was kneeling down to Kerri now, her hand hovering near the orange planet by the neon-green light of Glowstick Nebula.
“Kerri, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you. But I am here now.”
Kerri’s hair stirred, a once-fearful civilization gazing up to the sky with hope.
“And I’m getting you out of here.”
Darkness dispelled.
Kerri looked around, smelled, listened.
“They’re gone,” she whispered.
Andy’s sensors hummed back on. The room had returned. It was just dirt and bricks, but it was something to work with.
“The necromancer’s got us, but he doesn’t know yet,” she said. “Don’t speak up. We’re nowhere we haven’t been before.”
“But last time Peter was here to get us out.”
“I know.”
“And Nate deserted us,” Kerri sobbed.
“I know,” Andy repeated through a grimace. That one hurt like someone fingering a fresh wound. “But Tim didn’t.”
“Oh, God, Tim,” Kerri moaned, fighting the gloom off. “If something’s happened to him…”
“Nah, he did pretty well up there. The monsters were within the walls, inside the brickwork, and Tim chased them back in. (Points at a vent.) He must still be inside.”
“How is he going to find us?”
“He will,” Andy said, as she fished out of her jeans the last treasure in her armory—the one thing she had found when the universe faded, the one thing she always held on to.
A plastic penguin.
She squeezed the little toy next to the vent, and the sound wave of a squeak rippled through the walls of the newly silent, carcass-ridden haunted house.
Parsecs away, under the Milky Way, firs watched the thin white scar of a rowboat in the middle of the lake.
PETER: Faster, Nate.
The lights on Deboën Isle were gone; the sighing of waves breaking onshore long lost.
“Don’t think about it, just move. Fuck Andy and her stupid plan. (Leaning forward, whispering.) This was all a mistake, Nate. Their mistake. We should’ve never come back.”
Nate canvassed the horizon. The jagged line of trees could be made out against the sky in any direction, though in one direction stars were yielding ground to wind-riding rain clouds. No shore seemed nearer than any other. Nate realized he wasn’t sure he’d been sailing in a straight line after all.
As soon as he’d started rowing, his arms had kindly pointed out that, in the last eighteen hours, they had descended a mineshaft, gone spelunking, climbed back up, trekked, run, and fought a horde of carnivorous underworld fiends. Rowing didn’t seem so taxing when Andy was doing it, but that was two days ago and, as Nate’s arms patiently reminded him, he was no Andy. The straw that breaks the camel’s back always looks light enough, until it lands.
He squinted back at the isle, camouflaged against the storm. He checked the stars. Four or five of those stupid tiny glowworms should form Ursa Minor; he should know which. Kerri would know which.
“What, are you waiting for a signal or something?” Peter said. “Oh, wait. Here comes one.”
Nate returned his attention to the surface. He didn’t feel it, but the moonlight showed ripples on the still water. Coming from the storm’s direction.
Damn high ripples under his watercraft.
The boat rocked gently once, violently twice, and then a wave nearly flipped it over, sending the sailor overboard.
Darkness, and then cold—in that order—stung every pore in his skin.
He frantically swam up to the surface, too scared to even stare into the depth of the second-deepest blackest lake in the Americas.
“Here, let me help.”
He grabbed Peter’s bloated white hand, and Peter smiled back from the boat, worms crawling out the corners of his smile.
Every fir in the county heard Nate’s scream.
“Kidding!” Peter said, laughing, a beautiful punchable white grin across his face. “Sorry! Come on, Nate, it was a joke! Hurry up, or you’re gonna die in there.”
He smiled a rascally apology, offering a hand over the bulwark—a clean, strong hand that Nate refused to take.
“I’m sorry, man. I couldn’t resist. Come on. We need to get out of here.”
Nate, blood and gore washed from his face, stayed in the water, barely afloat, completely ignoring his body’s cries of pain, staring at Peter from this new perspective.
When he finally climbed back on the boat and sat across from Peter, wet clothes stuck to his skin, wounds too cold to bleed any longer, something had changed.
Peter retrieved the oars that had fallen overboard and handed them to him. Nate didn’t take those either. That had been the last straw indeed. As light as they come.
NATE: Why would you do that?
PETER: (Confused.) Do what?
NATE: Help me. Why would you even want me to escape?
PETER: (Frowns, puzzled, then shrugs.)
NATE: If you are a smear in my heart, if you are a piece of Deboën left inside me, haunting me in the shape of my dead friend…why would you let me go now? You wanted me in that house. You wrote messages inviting us.
PETER: (Genuinely nonplussed.) I don’t follow you. (Then challenging.) I thought I was a manifestation of your subconscious.
NATE: Yes. Either you are my subconscious and you want me out of here because you’re scared—which means I’m scared, but I should be braver than you—or you’re truly an avatar of Deboën and you don’t want us here anymore…because we can actually beat you.
PETER: (Blank.)
NATE: In either case, you’re a coward, and I should go back.
A gentle thunder unexpectedly switched sides and rumbled triumphantly for Nate as he snatched the oars from Peter’s hands and forced his arms to start rowing again—back to Deboën Isle.
Peter sat as powerless as an overwhelmed female character in a Victorian drama.
“How…” he began, amusingly astonished. “How the fuck did we go from me scaring you shitless to me being a coward?”
“Logic,” Nate puffed. “You keep mocking Andy, but you were never that smart yourself, Pete.”
“Oh, so I’m Pete now. Very logical. So one minute I’m Peter, the next I’m some evil spirit, the next I’m your subconscious voicing your inner mind, registering side details and bringing them to your att—ooh, what’s that red thing over there?”
Nate turned, expecting literally anything. There was a red buoy dozing on the water, some sixty yards to starboard. It was probably the same one Andy had spotted two days ago; they’d seen it through Kerri’s binoculars.
He could see the landmass of the isle now, much closer. The buoy was way off his path. He checked Peter.
PETER: (Shrugging.) What?
Nate nodded and forced himself to veer.
“What?” Peter cried. “We ain’t going to the isle anymore?”
There was something about rowing for the buoy that reminded Nate of approaching that one mental patient even the other inmates avoided. The nearer one got, the crazier he seemed, just like a weather buoy standing under the rain in the middle of the Atlantic, determined to announce to the world that there was something worth signaling there, although logic dictated that most likely there wasn’t. Nonetheless, in his experience, Nate had noticed crazy people have a way of being right.
Some grueling minutes later, the boat bumped gently into the buoy and Nate put his hand on the hard plastic surface. He felt strangely good upon thinking he was the first person to touch it in years, to give it that level of attention.
When it bobbed, he noticed the marking spray-painted on the side.
He searched his pockets for the flashlight he’d lost long ago. He couldn’t make out any rocks or reefs in the water anyway. He moved the boat around and saw the complete monogram. He knew the book it had come from.
A rope hung from the upper tip of the buoy, sinking underwater. Nate took it in his hands—it felt viscous and sticky—and fished out a lidded jar.
“Want me to open that for you?” Peter offered.
Nate opened it himself. The inside was perfectly dry. An interested moon seemed to peek over his shoulder, lighting the scene; and yet, it had just begun to drizzle.
He tipped the jar over. Rice poured onto his left palm, padding for the soft, prickly object that fell right after.
He’d seen one like this before—a nest made of twigs and straws, pressed into a rough ball. He unwrapped the nest and moonlight shone on what was hiding inside. Fortunately, its color almost blazed in the dark.
It always used to do that.
It was a flock of orange hair.
Two blank lines later, they were still sitting there.
Peter shook the daze out of his head.
“Okay, I think I speak on behalf of at least fifty percent of the people on this boat when I ask, What the fuck is going on?!”
Nate looked up at him, red herrings scampering away from his mind.
“How come you know Dr. Thewlis?”
“Who?”
“The dentist. This afternoon, in the car, you pointed out the town’s dental clinic. When did you ever visit Dr. Thewlis?”
“I had a cavity. The last summer, before Andy arrived. He pulled my last baby tooth out.”
“Did you keep it?”
“And leave it under my pillow—are you kidding? I was thirteen, Nate. Who knows where it is right now.”
“I fucking know! It’s wrapped in another nest, inside a dying tree on that isle! We saw it—it was your baby tooth, Pete!”
(Frowning, touches his jaw.) “No shit! But why would Dr. Thewlis—”
“Dr. Thewlis threw it away! Someone took it. The same person who collected this from the barbershop where Uncle Emmet took Kerri every June to have her ends cut!”
(Meditating.) “Hmm. Yeah, that makes…no sense at all.”
(Manning the oars.) “It will in a minute. Even to you.”
The penguin called out once more, its squeak echoing through the hollow walls of Deboën Mansion.
“What if he’s hurt?” Kerri wondered.
“He may be hurt, but he’ll still come,” Andy said. “Besides, the wheezers fear him more than they fear us. I guess they respect teeth and claws more than guns.”
Kerri’s hair suddenly inched off the wall. She stepped away and stared back at the bricks behind her. Andy pointed a fresh glowstick toward it.
She heard it clearly. Something scratching behind the bricks.
And yet she couldn’t feel less afraid.
“Speak!” Kerri ordered.
The thing on the other side woofed.
“Out of the way,” Andy bid, wielding the pickax.
It took her only a couple of minutes to dig a hole large enough for Tim to scurry through into Kerri’s arms. A trifingered claw had carved a wound across his right flank, reaching from the ribcage to his hip. This was only the biggest of several over his whole body; blood trickled out of different spots where his fur had been bitten off. He was missing a large portion of his right ear. And he was sporting the proudest, bloodiest, happiest smile a dog could pull.
“Tim!” Kerri cried, trying to assess the damage as he clambered over and drooled on her, panting joyfully. “God, you’re so brave! You are the bravest, smartest, toughest son of a bitch in the family! (Kissing him back.) Yeah, you are! You’re such a good boy! Great, great boy!”
“Going back up this way is gonna be tricky,” Andy ventured, inspecting the inside of the wall. “We should keep digging our way into the next room.”
Tim scurried out of Kerri’s grasp for a second to catch the plastic penguin in his mouth and allowed her to praise him some more. The next battle could come along whenever it pleased.
The isle was deserted. The motorboat was still moored as expected, but Nate had lost the rope when he fell off the rowboat, so he beached the dingy watercraft on the shore where they had landed two days ago. The mud there now showed a bedlam of fresh, webbed footprints.
“Why are we here again?” Peter whispered.
“You don’t need to whisper, Pete, I’m the only one listening to you.”
He walked inland, but not toward the house, apparently asleep and nonchalant like it hadn’t just hosted a skirmish of three and a dog against the army of an underworld evil god. Instead, he knelt in the underbrush and searched for the patch of land where Tim had first detected the line of sulfur. The moonlight was kindly cooperating. He soon noticed the dead weeds signaling the presence of chemicals. The line stretched to the cancerous tree they had seen two days ago, the one with the first monogram and the nest with the tooth inside. Peter. In the other direction, it seemed to lead toward the old willow with the second monogram and the marble grave at its foot. Deboën. The third monogram they had discovered between those two, farther south, on a tree stump. The fourth was on the buoy. Kerri.
By that time he had reckoned there would be a fifth on one of the rocks off the west shore, between the cancerous tree and the buoy, but he didn’t need to take the boat again. He checked the stump first.
It had been a fir, taken down by lightning or wind decades ago. The trunk section remaining was some four feet tall, laureate with a crown of promising, tender green sprouts. Moss was blotching out half the red monogram. There were no cracks or folds in the bark big enough to hide any treasure.
Nate knelt down, delved his hands in the moist earth, and started digging.
He scratched solid rock pretty soon, but a familiar prickly sensation came first. He felt aware of both Peter and the moon around him holding their breaths as he unearthed a new spherical nest.
He unwrapped it, trying to make out the elongated, soft object that at first he failed to identify.
It helped when Peter yucked away; then he understood.
It was a used tampon.
“Mother—” (Stands up, facing the house.) “—fucker!”
“What?” Peter begged, at a loss.
“He played us, again!” Nate yelled, battling fear and anger and humiliation. “It wasn’t the pentacle in the attic that counted, the pentacle is the whole island! This is the pentacle!” he said, pointing at the monogram and the lines of sulfur that stretched across the fir-plagued landspit. “We formed the pentacle!” He showed the open nest in his hand. “He set us up!”
“Okay…” Peter began, sure to imply how little okay everything was. “But…I mean, how did he do it? He died in ’forty-nine; this stuff had to be laid before we came to the island and brought him back. Who collected all this trash in ’seventy-seven and put it here?”
Nate gazed up at the attic, then at the woods, around the spot where he’d landed from the second floor.
“Help me find my rifle and we’ll find out in a minute,” he grunted, his inner battle almost decided in favor of anger.
Andy kicked away the last of the crumbling brickwork and stepped over the debris into the thick, gossamer darkness, panting, ready to switch her pickax from tool mode to impaling device in a second. Tim followed, his bigger slash wound patched up with Kerri’s shirt wrapped around his body, proudly bearing a glowstick in his mouth.
“Clear,” she reported back at the dungeon.
Kerri crawled out, loaded rifle in hand, calling the torchbearer not to stray off. The new room was low, deep, yet broken into narrow corridors by shelves or racks ranked across. A twisted intuition told her it wasn’t wine bottles in those racks.
She stepped back, disturbing a rotten casket, and its contents rattled inside.
“Jesus. These are…”
“Catacombs,” Andy completed. And she watched Tim gleefully pacing by, oblivious to his neon-green halo panning over the sordid rows of stacked coffins piled together, bloated by dampness, cracked open, occasionally toppled onto each other, offering glimpses of leg bones jutting from under unfitting lids and skeletons poured onto their neighbors, smiling in embarrassment.
“But catacombs…how?” Andy reasoned. “The house was built by the Deboëns, and for all we know it was always one guy for a hundred years. Who are these people?”
“These are no catacombs,” Kerri answered. “It’s a warehouse. This is a necromancer’s storage room.”
She knelt down, with Tim dutifully approaching to assist her, torn cobwebs dangling from his nose. Small labels were glued to the niches and the caskets, handwritten. The first one she checked read “Hutchinson,” followed by a numerical reference. Another one read “S. Orne.” A third one read “Hyppachias.”
Andy located a candelabrum and scratched a match to light it, then remembered she had forgotten to check the oxygen levels. They seemed passable.
“So Nate was right,” she said. “Deboën stole these bodies from their burial sites, distilled the salts from them, raised the avatars from the salts, and tortured them for knowledge. And this is where he kept the bodies.”
“His personal library,” Kerri capped. “This is where the dead end up.”
Andy winced at the snap of two ideas clicking together like a fractured bone being set. “Where the dead end,” she revised.
She rummaged her pockets, fingers ignoring the ton of annoyingly useful things like ammunition and matches, until she touched the bundle of papers crumpled in the deepest strata of her inventory, then fished out and unfolded an almost forgotten piece of paper. Kerri fingersnapped for the light to approach.
“This is what we found on the dead guy in the mines.”
“Simon Jaffa. Who happened to be Mr. Wickley’s lawyer.”
“And who was carrying a fake ID from RH Corp.”
“And also this map, which looks hand-copied from the blueprints at the city hall. And look at the words here: ‘Deboën shaft,’ ‘Where,’ ‘Dead end.’ This is a single sentence. This room is where the dead end. This is a map to this room; Jaffa was trying to come here through the mines.”
“But what was he hoping to find?”
“ ‘Deboën Shaft Where Dead End. From W, S-5, E-2, bottom.’ ” She scoped out the area, then laid out a hand to Kerri. “Compass?”
Kerri pulled out her Colonel Mustard instrument, consulted it, needle wobbling giddily at first in a Did I hear some heavy action sequences earlier? fashion, and pointed west.
All three strode to that end of the room, then turned on their feet and clacked their heels.
“Now from here, south five,” Andy instructed.
They walked to the right, counting the gaps between the shelves, up to the fifth. Blind rats scuttled away from the torchbearer.
“East two.”
They walked to the second rack of coffins on the right.
“Bottom.”
They crouched and dragged an unbelievably heavy stone coffin into view. The label on its side came loose and fluttered to the floor. It read “Capt. D. Deboën, 1849.”
“That’s the year Deboën arrived in Blyton Hills,” Kerri recalled.
Andy pushed the lid off the casket, convinced that there was no skeleton to disturb. For one thing, bones couldn’t possibly be that heavy. Tim hovered the neon-green light over some neatly piled bricks. Then he checked with Andy, equally disappointed.
“Okay, that was anticlimactic,” she said.
“Not really,” Kerri pointed out, hovering the candelabrum over the coffin. Without the green tinge of the glowstick, the bricks showed their true color. “These are gold ingots.”
Andy picked one up. Her second hand came swiftly in assistance of the first, surprised at its density.
“These are…? How much is this worth?”
“What you’re holding in your hands right now?” Kerri said, fighting a chortle. “About the GDP per capita of Monaco.”
“What?! Holy shit!”
She went through her pockets again, excited, this time planning to do some rearrangements.
“I can carry one; can you carry another?”
“Are you for real?” Kerri smiled. “I thought we were here to stop an apocalypse.”
“Yeah, but shit, look!” She didn’t even need the lights; her smile was blazing, daring the dark. “We found pirate treasure! And it’s real! I mean, it’s not like that Redbeard’s plunder of stolen jewelry we found! This is the real thing!”
“Shh! Keep your voice down!” Kerri giggled.
“I know, but come on! Oh, shit! I told you! I told you this is the only thing I’m good at!” She shook her head, tried to curse the adrenaline out of her system. Tim attempted to fit one of the bars into his mouth, but it immediately proved too much for his jaw. “This is…”
She turned, searching for an adjective, but got distracted by the way Kerri was looking at her.
“It’s awesome,” she settled with.
“Yeah.”
TIM: (Gazes queryingly at the girls in a close shot for padding.)
“I really liked your postcards from Alaska,” Kerri said. “And the late-night calls.”
“Good,” Andy puffed, tossing the ingot back into the coffin. “I really wanted to write more; I just…I never knew how to say things. I can’t write to save my life.”
“They were very nice postcards.”
“Right. Well, I promise I’ll write you something better one day. A great love letter like—”
Floorboards squeaked once more as shoes stepped over the mangled dead creature at the foot of the stairs where the carpet lay coiled up in a gored mess. The haunted house foyer gazed down at the cloaked figure coming downstairs to inspect the collateral damage.
Nate and Peter, crouching in a dark spot behind a sofa, waited for him to step into the living room.
NATE: Shh.
PETER: (Surprised.) Why the fuck do you tell me to shh for, asshole?!
“Andy?” Kerri tipped her shoulder. “Andy, you just stopped in midsentence.”
Andy blinked back to reality. She checked Kerri’s legs. “You were wearing those pants yesterday.”
“Uh…yeah. I only brought two pairs, and I’ve kinda outgrown my old bell-bottoms.”
“Peter’s love letter. You put it in your back pocket yesterday when Nate barged in on us.”
Kerri frowned, checked her derriere. “Damn. It must be all crumpled.”
“Show me,” Andy ordered, while she checked her own pockets once more.
PETER: Brilliant plan, Nate.
Nate gripped his rifle, ears ignoring the voice beside him and waiting for incoming footsteps, knees ready to catapult him out into the light at the right moment.
PETER: I mean, yeah, let’s just shoot the guy. He’s lived for like a hundred and fifty years, but surely no one thought of this before.
Floorboards sulkily greeted the host into the living room. Nate risked leaning out and taking a peek.
The cloaked figure stood by the phonograph, inspecting the lounge area where the kids had been chilling out. The candles were still burning, the area unscathed from the battle.
Nate observed him bending near the sofa and picking up a book. The Vampire Sorority series.
The necromancer flipped it open, his impressions mercifully concealed.
Nate jumped in frame and pointed the rifle at him.
“Freeze!”
The figure obeyed. In fact, he didn’t even bother to flinch. He just stood still, book in hand, awaiting further orders.
Nate was standing five feet from him. Good thing, because he wouldn’t miss the shot, regardless of how spectacularly the gun was trembling in his hands.
“Take off your hood!” he ordered, not caring about sounding scared. It felt good. He felt scarier when scared. “Show your face!”
The villain dropped the book and slowly turned to face him. Nate gritted his teeth, trying to make out the visage under the cloak.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just have a bad feeling,” Andy explained, laying the letter on the floor, and then, on the right side, flattening the last thing she’d fished out of her pockets.
Kerri leaned closer, and so did Tim.
“Hood!” Nate cried, the tip of his weapon inches away from the necromancer’s head.
The necromancer raised his hands, letting Nate notice his big, bone-white fingers, and grabbed the rim of his hood.
The neon-green light in Tim’s mouth adumbrated the long, beautifully penned letter headed by the words “Dear Kerri” on one side and the short missive “Good-bye” on the other.
Andy was about to ask, “Do you see any similarities?” but she needed only to read the transformation in Kerri’s eyes.
All the Dixie cup skin, Sahara lips, Titanic eyes, despair look in the world could not begin to masquerade his face. Peter Manner, 26 (24 of which alive), his tall, powerful frame clad in shapeless black, stares back at Nate from the wrong end of an assault rifle.
Nate’s hands stopped trembling. His muscles stopped aching. His mind stopped working.
All he could do was turn to his right for an answer.
And his own Peter—the one with perfect hair, in a letter jacket and jeans, standing right next to him, seemingly as amazed as he was—simply stood jaw-dropped for a minute and then acknowledged:
“Okay, this is awkward.”