The Big Bad Wolf
I’ve done it now. There’s only one place to go, so I hurry up to the third floor as quickly as I can. Luckily, the hallways are empty, the rooms quiet—there’s not a Suck in sight. Passing a window, I see why. They’re all outside bouncing like maniacs on the blow-up bounce toys.
Where is Annika?
I find her in my room, looking shaken for the first time. This, as much as anything, unnerves me.
“My father’s back, Felix,” she says, “and Adolf tried to kill me!” She sinks to the edge of my bed, fingers clenched on the mattress edge. “I—I have no idea what I’ve started,” she says, her voice trembling slightly. But then she sees the notebooks in my hands and leaps to her feet, crying, “You got the records!” After a deep breath, she says, “Time to get busy, Felix. How do we get up to the attic?”
In the closet I reach for the board and push it aside, letting the rope ladder fall. Without hesitation, Annika scrambles up into the attic. When I get up there, I find her, eyes wide, turning a slow circle to take in the hundreds and hundreds of magazine pages that plaster the walls. Finally, she turns and looks at me with both sadness and wonder.
“I admit that interior decorating might not be in my future,” I say. Because I’m embarrassed. Ashamed, really, of my home.
Annika looks like she has something to say but instead shakes off her thoughts about my pathetic life and, back to business, says, “Let’s have a look at those notebooks.” She swipes the dust off a pair of large boxes and motions for me to sit next to her.
I do so, and together we begin flipping through the 2002 notebook.
Suddenly, we hear a roar downstairs—the entire house seems to rattle and shudder with the force of it. “The Wolf knows these are missing,” I whisper. “I forgot to close the safe. He’s calling for an Inspection—”
But Annika seems heedless of my fears. She flips through the notebook, rapidly scanning the pages. “There I am!” she cries. “10-12-2002. Baby A. Age: approximately six months. Adopted by W. Adelstein. Adoption fee—forty thousand dollars. And my father’s signature is right here!”
“It costs forty thousand dollars to adopt a child?” I ask, stunned.
“Actually, it does. Or close to that. I looked into it.”
Annika scrutinizes the page with a sour expression, as if she were sucking on a lemon. “What the hell?” she says. “The adoptions here are listed along with antique deals, as if kids were just pieces of junk that creep sells. There are lots of adoptions, though—look—they all cost forty thousand dollars.”
We hear a shout and a series of crashes below. The Wolf has reached the third floor and is surely searching for me. It sounds like he’s tearing the house apart.
“He doesn’t know about this attic, right?” Annika whispers.
“No,” I reply, “but he knows I don’t leave the house. So he won’t stop looking until he finds me.”
“Maybe he’ll think you finally did leave. There’s a first time for everything, right?”
I don’t answer this question because, again, I’m ashamed.
Annika doesn’t seem to notice. “Is that the year you arrived at Headquarters?” she asks, pointing at the 2000 notebook in my hand.
I nod and start flipping through it. And there I am, just a few pages from the start—Baby X (Felix). Housing fee: $40,000.
“What does housing fee mean?” I ask, showing her the entry.
“Hmm,” she says, knitting her brow. “Maybe someone paid, not to adopt you, but to keep you here? To house you. Maybe it’s the same for the other—”
Seeing the expression on my face, Annika decides not to finish the thought. But I know she means Freaks. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but that can’t be legal, can it?”
I say nothing. Someone paid to adopt her, to remove her from Headquarters. Someone else paid to leave me here. Me and the other Freaks, no doubt. Shame squeezes me like the cell phone in the vise. And the results are probably going to be pretty much the same.
Who are my parents, and why did they do this to me?
I’m going to find out.
Crashing noises, now right beneath our feet.
“He’s in my room!” I whisper.
Annika’s eyes widen, but instead of panicking, like I’m doing, she lies down, putting her ear to the floorboards. I sit down beside her. But only because I’m starting to breathe hard.
“He’s in the closet,” Annika whispers.
“That fragile fuck is here somewhere,” we hear the Wolf say. “He’s the only one unaccounted for, so it has to be him. He somehow heard about Charlotte, so he’s probably going Section 8 about getting Discharged. I’m telling you, that kid’s brain is as breakable as his bones. And he wants me to give this room to one of the other Freaks for some reason. He’s up to something, I know it.”
I’m about to lose all control of my breathing and the attic is going dark in my peripheral vision. But then it occurs to me—the Wolf sounds different. This is not his Bullshit Bombing voice, or his weaselly suck-up voice—not his normal one anyway. He sounds…nervous!
I press my ear to the floorboards beside Annika and listen closer.
“You are, and always have been, a weakling and coward, Wolfram,” a man says, his voice low and commanding, yet somehow familiar. “It’s you who is up to something. Have you been drinking again?”
“No! I swear—”
“We need to find him, Wolfram, you sniveling troglodyte. We need to find and Discharge him immediately. I’ve got bigger problems at home right now with my prima donna of a daughter.”
Annika and I look at each other. She looks distressed, but more than that, baffled. I’m baffled too. But then it finally hits me whose voice we’re hearing.
“It’s Doc!” I whisper. “Our doctor. He has to give me my shot before I’m officially—”
“It’s not your doctor,” Annika hisses. “It’s my dad!”
“What?”
“What kind of problems are you having with Annika?” the Wolf asks.
“She’s here somewhere too, you idiot! They’re probably together!”
“WHAT?”
“It’s obvious you’ve lost control here, Wolfram. I am profoundly disappointed.”
“I’m telling you, Willy, she’s not here. No one is here that I don’t—!”
“Then why the hell is my Rauch and Lang parked outside?”
“OH, SHIT! But Willy, I think someone must’ve stolen it.”
“Never should have given her driving lessons!” Doc—or Willy Adelstein, or whoever he is—says. “And it serves me right for letting her learn martial arts. I just sent Axel to the hospital with a broken nose and god knows what else—the guy was puking up blood! But I have to keep her busy with useless lessons every minute of the goddamn day or she sticks her nose into everything! The little bitch is scheming. She’s always scheming. While I was gone, she came here.”
“Willy—I—I—”
“Is that all you can say about your monumental incompetence, Wolfram? She was up in the tower watching this place with a pair of binoculars. I’m telling you, we have to get this under control. I have sorely underestimated her capacity to destroy everything I’ve been working for.”
Annika’s face is an ice-cold mask, but the heat in her eyes could melt metal.
“Her binoculars left marks on the windowpane in the tower room,” Doc adds. “It appeared she was watching a window near the top of this house, under the eaves. Is there access to the attic in this shithole?”
“SON OF A BITCH!” the Wolf howls. “THAT’S WHAT THIS ROOM IS FOR!”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never—”
The boards we’re lying on suddenly shudder. Annika and I scramble to our feet. The Wolf is pounding on my closet ceiling. Annika races to the box stack, and with a few deft moves, she’s at the top by the diamond-shaped window.
“What are you do—?” I start to ask. But then the loose board literally flies out of place into the attic, clattering on the floorboards as the rope ladder tumbles into my closet.
“WHISKY! TANGO! FOXTROT!” the Wolf roars.
Before I can process the full extent of this catastrophe, I hear glass breaking. Annika is smashing out the diamond-shaped window with my spyglass. “Come on!” she cries, turning back to look at me for a moment.
I rush toward the boxes and start climbing. My heart is pounding and my temples throb. What does she think she’s doing?
“THIS IS AWOL!” the Wolf screams as he clambers into the attic. “THIS IS TREASON!” Spittle flies from his mouth as he looks around in utter disbelief at the overflowing boxes of books and magazines and the pictures on the walls. Then he looks up at us on the top of the stack and wails, “THIS IS THE BIG CHICKEN DINNER!”
I knew it would come to this. The moment I got involved with this girl. I knew it would come to this.
Doc, in his perfectly pressed black suit, emerges next to the Wolf. He’s tall and rail-thin, with very white skin and very black sideburns. He glares at us through his monocle, holding both his black doctor’s bag and walking stick in his right hand. He looks like one of the old-fashioned doctors from my out-of-date books.
“Annika!” Doc snaps. “Take off that ridiculous wig and stop this nonsense at once!”
“That’s…Annika?” the Wolf cries. “But—how could I have known what she looked like?” he whines. I can’t believe the Wolf is whining.
“You could have visited our home any time in the last sixteen years, Wolfram.”
“But you know I can’t go in there!”
“That’s your problem, not mine. It has nothing to do with me.”
“How could you possibly say—!”
But Doc has clearly tired of this conversation and turns to his daughter. “You have no idea what you’re meddling in,” he tells her. “And you are putting that boy’s life in jeopardy.”
She is. She absolutely is.
Breathe.
Ignoring him, Annika sticks her head out through the window frame.
“Felix,” Doc says to me, in his reassuring doctor voice. “Annika has severe psychological issues and is prone to hallucinations. You must believe me when I tell you that she is a mortal danger to you right now.”
“I saw that man Adolf try to kill her!” I shout.
“What you saw,” Doc says calmly, “was her nurse, Axel, attempting to give her a sedative. Annika has been acting out paranoid fantasies about being a prisoner in her own home for the past few weeks. She needs help.”
Could this be true?
Annika pulls her head back into the attic. “Look out there,” she tells me. When I only stare at her stupidly, she says, “Just look! You’ll see!”
“Annika!” Doc yells. “You are in one of your states! You need your medication.”
Annika looks at her father, stares him dead in the eye, and says, “Medicate this!” And she gives him the Left-Handed Salute.
“You will hurt that boy!” Doc says, ignoring the gesture. “He needs a full battery of tests before he can leave this home. Do you want to be responsible for his death?”
Now Annika turns her electric blue eyes on me. “Do you trust me?” she asks. “Or him?”
I don’t know her! I know Doc! He’s taken care of me my whole life!
“Get them, Wolfram,” Doc orders the Wolf. “Or you will rot in prison for the rest of your life.”
“Don’t threaten me, Willy,” the Wolf claps back. The whine is gone—he sounds like himself again. “This soup sandwich is yours to eat,” he adds. “That’s your daughter. This is your business. It has nothing to do with me.”
“Get them down here this instant or so help me god—!”
“I said, don’t threaten me!” the Wolf shouts. “I’M DONE WITH THIS PLACE! WITH YOU! WITH ALL OF IT! AND HOW’S THIS FOR A THREAT: I HAVE YOUR MISSING FILM!”
“You…what?” Willy gasps.
I have no idea what’s going on, or what to do. But if Annika is insane, then…well, being crazy sounds a whole lot better than…whatever I’ve been. Am.
While Doc and the Wolf continue to threaten each other, I put my head through the window.
“Look!” Annika whispers.
Outside, I see the usual: dead lawn, dirt path, hedge wall. Junk on both sides. But it all begins to waver and darken in my peripheral vision as it occurs to me that I could fall. Before I’m seized with vertigo, I lean back into the room, breathing hard.
“Wolfram,” Doc says, very calmly. “I am asking you one more time to get those two down here. I promise that if you don’t, I will give you what you’ve always wanted and deserved.”
“WHAT I WANT IS TO BE RID OF YOU!”
“We need to jump,” Annika tells me, her hand on my arm.
Even though I’m wearing several inches of pads, when her hand squeezes lightly, I feel like I’ve been Hotshocked. I think of Charlie, the last person to touch me, the last person to tell me to look out this window. I think of my real mother and father, wherever they are. Did they touch me? Surely they did. Didn’t they?
The Wolf looks at Doc, then up at us. He makes his way slowly to the box stack, but with a yellow glove held up—as if to signal that he means no harm.
“Felix,” Annika says, locking her electric eyes onto mine, “my martial arts teacher once told me that while it’s very important to protect your body—our bodies aren’t ours for very long—they’re not the real part of us, the part that lasts forever. The most real part of you is your spirit.” She takes her hand off my arm and adds, “Don’t let them break your spirit, Felix.” Then, after knocking out one last shard of glass from the frame, she leans out the window and falls.
“Annika!” I cry, looking out after her. And then I see what she wanted me to see—not across the yard but directly below the window. A bounce toy, the ocean, is right there, and Annika is already bouncing up from its surface, her wig and glasses flying. She bounces a few more times, then settles between two sharks.
“Jump!” she calls up to me.
But I’m just staring at her, dumbfounded. Suddenly another hand, this one in a yellow rubber glove, grabs my shoulder pads. The Wolf has ahold of me, and then his head is out the window next to mine. My breathing goes wild, and everything in my field of vision darkens again.
“Let him go!” Annika cries, standing on the bounce house, her defiant face upturned.
“Bring him down here!” Doc shouts from the attic behind us. “Do not fuck this up, Wolfram! I’m warning you—!”
The Wolf turns his head and puts his hairy mouth right against my ear. “He never told me she had to die,” he says, sounding strangely clam. “Time to pop smoke, China.”
Then, instead of pulling me back in through the window, the Wolf pushes me out of it.
For some reason, I don’t make a peep as I fall to my death.
Above me, I hear the Wolf roar, “CONSIDER THAT FILM FRONT-PAGE NEWS, WILLY. SEE YOU IN THE FUNNY PAPERS! YOU’RE SCREWED!”
I get a glimpse of Annika jumping to the side just before I hit the bounce house floor on my back. I sink deep into it, then spring up. I bounce a few more times, then come to rest.
Am I dead?
“Are you okay?” Annika asks, leaning over me, eyes wide.
I’m not dead.
I glance back up at the attic window, and see, to my astonishment, a blinding streak of blue lightning.
And then the Wolf falling from the window.
Annika grabs me. She rolls us both to the side just before he hits.
The Wolf bounces like I did, then settles on his back.
Annika and I both scream.
I’m not dead, but the Wolf is. His body is burned beyond recognition. His face is entirely melted to bone and blackened flesh, and his yellow rubber gloves drip from his hands. The charred ruins of his wolf-skin hat smoke on his scorched skull.
I can’t stop screaming.
I’m screaming from a place inside me I didn’t know existed. Annika pulls me by the hand, down the bounce house’s entry ramp, and onto Headquarters grounds.
Sucks are pouring out the front door, gathering around the bounce house to see what happened.
“Come on, we’ve got to get out of here,” Annika says, though her voice sounds to me like it’s coming from far away. She helps me into her car, still parked in the driveway, then jumps into the driver’s seat just as Doc comes out onto the front porch, yelling and waving his walking stick in the air.
Moments later we’re speeding away, and I’m heading, for the first time in my life, down the gravel road, away from Headquarters.