Donna nodded her agreement.
“I think the film speaks for itself, and we’ve got another screening in just a bit, so let’s get right to it and open up the floor for questions.” Janine felt thrilled and terrified by the dozen or so hands that shot up. “Yes, you.”
“Uh, hi,” a long-haired twenty-something guy in a Homer Simpson T-shirt said. “I really loved your movie.”
The emcee passed his microphone down to Donna, who passed it to Janine like a hot potato, the cord dragging on the ground. “Thanks,” Janine said.
“Yeah,” the guy continued. “So my question is…Like, what was the budget? Because I thought it was really amazing, like, how you could get such realistic visual effects on what otherwise seemed to be a pretty shoestring budget, you know? So…Uh, yeah. How did you do that?”
“Oh,” Janine said, exchanging a dry look with Donna as she wondered how to answer without making the guy feel like an idiot, even though he obviously was one. “Those, um, weren’t effects.”
The guy stared at Janine for a second, mystified, before a slow smile broke out on his face. “Ohhh,” he said, chuckling. “Of course they weren’t. Ha, that’s so cool. Well played.”
“No,” Janine said, “I’m serious.”
“Oh, I know,” the guy said, nodding knowingly as he sat down. “So am I.”
Janine barely had time to process this odd exchange before the emcee pointed to someone else.
“Hello,” an older woman said. “While I deeply appreciate the craft and storytelling on display, I think we need to address the elephant in the room. You’ve taken a set of horrific real-life murders of children and used them to create this horror film.”
Janine looked to Donna, this time very unsettled.
“It’s unquestionably entertaining,” the woman continued, “but, considering this is a very recent event, it seems—to me, at least—in poor taste. Could you speak to that a bit?”
Janine gripped the microphone, stunned. “Of course,” she said. “This is definitely not a hor—”
“I don’t see it like that at all,” a skinny dude wearing a suit vest over a T-shirt stood up to say. “I see this film as a tribute to those deaths, as a heightened metaphor for what they went through. And honestly, I think it’s a beautiful achievement.”
As some other people shouted their agreement, the whole room began to applaud again, and Janine’s stomach dropped. She and Donna stared at each other in horrified disbelief.
Nobody in the audience thought it was real.
Well, that’s not true. Janine locked eyes for a moment with GamGam, whose cheeks had gone an ashen gray. She knew it wasn’t pretend.
“Come on, stand up, you two!” the emcee said. “Take a bow, you deserve it!”
Completely overwhelmed, Janine and Donna tried to let the moment pass, but it was no use.
They got to their feet and took an awkward bow as the applause continued.
* * *
—
“I DON’T KNOW if I’m ready,” Alicia said, standing in between Rex and Leif, staring down at the slow-moving water of the Cape Fear River.
“We totally get it,” Rex said, hands in the pockets of his Hornets Starter jacket. “We can just go somewhere else.”
“Yeah,” Leif said. “Definitely.”
The Triumvirate was attempting to make their way to the tiny island, where they could sit and talk and pretend things were just as they’d always been, that their lives hadn’t been irrevocably changed by what they’d been through.
This was not their first attempt.
Alicia had, unsurprisingly, developed an aversion to water. Thankfully, this spot was upstream from where Bleak Creek emptied into the river, so they could at least avoid contact with the tainted waters of Bleak Creek Spring (waters they were avoiding as much as possible these days, taking fewer showers and never drinking from the tap).
“No,” she said now, a cool November breeze blowing past them, “I need to get over this. Leif can do it; I should be able to too.”
“Yeah,” Leif said, “but I was in the spring for barely any time compared to you. And I was totally freaked to go back into water at first. It would make sense that it would take you longer because—”
Alicia grabbed Leif’s hand, and his heart jolted in his chest.
Over the past couple months, there had been no hugs, no playful shoves, no half nelsons, no physical contact whatsoever. Leif knew that was to be expected, as Alicia had gone through an extraordinary trauma—and he also knew how selfish it was to be wondering about her feelings for him in the midst of everything else she was dealing with—but it still hurt.
To feel her skin touching his was electrifying, like a flashback to a better time.
The spark faded as Leif watched Alicia grab Rex’s hand, too.
“We’ll go at the same time,” she said. “Okay?”
“Yep,” Rex said.
“Just say the word,” Leif agreed.
Alicia nodded and took a deep breath. “The word.”
They splashed their worn-out sneakers into the bracingly cold water at the same time, Alicia’s eyes immediately clenching shut, her shoulders lifting to her ears.
“One step at a time,” Leif said. “You got this.”
Alicia whimpered.
“Do you want to go back?” Rex asked.
Alicia shook her head.
“All right,” he said, “then we gotta go forward.”
A few dozen steps later, Rex and Leif encouraging Alicia for every one of them, they made it onto the island.
“You take the Big Rock,” Rex told Alicia as he and Leif helped her sit down.
Leif saw Rex release her hand, so he did too, even though he wanted to keep holding on.
“Oh, wait, aren’t there some rules or something?” Alicia asked.
Leif and Rex exchanged a quick look. Alicia of before had known the rules of the rocks very well, as she had mocked them constantly. This was yet another thing in a long line of things that Alicia didn’t remember from her old life. No matter how many times this happened, Leif was always a bit shaken (and grateful all of his memories had returned more or less intact).
“There were,” Leif said. “But now the only rule is that when you’re on the island, you can talk about whatever you want. Especially the stuff that, off the island, makes people look at you like you’re some kind of damaged weirdo.”
“Good rule,” Rex said, clearly making a conscious effort to support what his best friend said and not point out some way to improve upon it. He’d been apologizing to Leif for being a selfish dick more or less nonstop since he’d rescued him from the spring. Leif had been appreciative at first, but lately he’d found himself longing for the way things had been; sure, Rex had been annoying sometimes, and it was nice to have him acknowledge that, but these new contrite vibes didn’t make for the most fun friend dynamic.
“Yeah,” Alicia said. “I can get behind that.”
“You take the other one,” Rex said to Leif, gesturing to the Small Rock.
“Really?” Leif asked.
“Sure!” Rex said, awkwardly lowering himself to a third, much smaller rock, his long limbs jutting out at strange angles. “This is actually pretty comfortable.”
Leif saw how hard Rex was trying to sell this lie, how intent he was on making life okay for his two best friends, and this time, he felt deeply moved.
Then he started cracking up. “That’s just stupid, man.”
Alicia laughed too. “There’s no way that’s comfortable.”
“Yeah, no,” Rex said, joining in the laughter. “It’s a lot more painful than I thought it would be.”
“Come on, get up,” Leif said, helping Rex to his feet so that he could take the medium rock and Leif could take the tiny one.
> Laughing had opened something up within all three of them, as if allowing them to fully access the sacred space of the island. Once they’d settled on their respective rocks, Alicia spoke first.
“Are we gonna feel like this forever?” she asked.
“Like what?” Rex asked.
“Bad.”
“I hope not,” Rex said, staring out toward the woods, toward Ben’s Tree.
“I hate that we can’t tell anyone the truth,” Alicia said. “I hate that so much. And I hate the way people look at me.”
“I know,” Leif said. “I hate that people all feel so sorry for us, but they don’t even know what actually happened. And if we told them, they’d think we were nuts.”
“I hate that there’s nothing left we can do,” Rex said. “That we can’t save Ben. And your friend Josefina. And the other kids. Maybe I should try again.”
Leif sighed. “But why? There’s still nothing there.”
It was the horrible truth. Rex and Hornhat had returned to Bleak Creek Spring multiple times, with the scuba gear and more blood—pig’s, human’s, even goat’s—hoping they’d open the gateway, reveal the heads of children and teens protruding from the spring wall, and get to work digging them out. But it never bubbled and glowed the way it once had.
The spring was never anything more than a spring.
“Yeah, but…” Rex shook his head. “So they’re just stuck down there forever? In the Void, or whatever you guys called it?”
Alicia shivered on her rock, wrapping her arms tightly around herself.
“Maybe,” Leif said. “Who knows.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
“Still can’t believe Janine and Donna’s movie won the audience award,” Leif said. “It’s mind-blowing that everybody thinks it’s a giant stunt.”
“I know,” Rex said. “I wish my parents would’ve let us go see it.”
“I don’t,” Alicia said. “Then we would’ve had to listen to everybody tell us what great actors we are.”
“Yeah,” Leif said. “That woulda sucked.”
“Should have been our movie at that festival,” Alicia said, staring down into the water.
Leif and Rex generally refrained from ever mentioning PolterDog, seeing as they still, consciously or not, held it responsible for all the terrible things that had happened. But hearing Alicia mention it now, on the very island where the idea had first been conceived, was actually nice.
“I agree,” Leif said.
“For sure,” Rex said. “Hornhat still really wants to see it.”
“Who’s Hornhat?” Alicia said.
Leif and Rex looked at each other, alarmed.
“I’m kidding, guys,” she said. “I remember Mark Hornhat. We see him literally every day at school.”
“Oh, too bad,” Leif said. “I was gonna say this was the one case where it’d be advantageous to forget someone.”
“Come on,” Rex said, laughing. “Hornhat is cool now! He helped save our frickin’ lives.”
“Yeah, but he’s still very annoying,” Alicia said.
“Also true,” Rex said.
As the three of them again burst into giggles, Leif realized it didn’t matter if Alicia never felt about him the way he did about her. Because sitting there laughing with the two people he loved most in the world, he suddenly felt so lucky.
They were still here.
Still alive.
Still together.
And maybe that was enough.
Leif adjusted his body on the tiny rock.
It really was quite uncomfortable.
EPILOGUE
“LATER, GUYS,” ALICIA said, pedaling away in the dusk as they broke off at their usual spot, the corner of Creek and Pritchett. Alicia had overcome her fear of the water, the Triumvirate having now visited their island nearly every day for a few weeks, each time helping Alicia to piece together her life from before the Void.
They’d determined that this would be their last trip until next year, the depth and temperature of the river having made reaching the island nearly impossible. Rex and Leif had asked, as they always did, if she wanted them to escort her home, and, as she always did, she’d told them no.
She was actually somewhat relieved to part ways, both because she and Leif had to slow down considerably for Rex to keep up on his scooter, and because she’d come to relish riding around town by herself on her bike. Something about the constant motion, the not having to talk to anyone, made it the place where Alicia felt most at ease in her new life. She always stayed out till the very last minute of her parents’ strict sundown curfew, exploring random streets, enjoying the solitude.
She noticed the last bit of sun dripping down below the horizon, and she knew she was pushing it a little too far this time. She picked up her pace, hoping to rocket through the last few blocks before home.
As she approached Fulkins Park on her right, she noticed something lying in the road ahead of her.
Maybe roadkill.
She got closer and started to steer around it, relieved to see it was just a stuffed animal.
A blue frog.
She experienced a jolt of recognition and turned her head, catching something in her peripheral vision.
She almost fell off her bike.
Standing in the near-darkness of the park, staring at her, was a little blond girl in a white dress.
A little blond girl with sad eyes and a slightly crooked smile.
Alicia had no trouble remembering her.
“Hi, Alicia,” the girl said, her smile getting wider. “Everybody misses you.”
Alicia pushed down the scream lodged in her throat.
She pedaled away quickly.
DEDICATED TO OUR CHILDREN,
LILY, LOCKE, LINCOLN, SHEPHERD, AND LANDO.
KEEP QUESTIONING AUTHORITY
(OTHER THAN OURS, OF COURSE).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like everything in our career, we couldn’t have done this alone. Well, maybe we could have, but it would have sucked.
Thank you to:
The South in general and Buies Creek, North Carolina, in particular. We are who we are because you are the way you are.
Lance Rubin, our sherpa in the adventures of novel-writing. Your talent, insights, and contributions were absolutely indispensable.
Our wives, Jessie and Christy, for supporting us in yet another entirely new and daunting endeavor, as well as tolerating us as we talked incessantly about this story. You are our hearts.
Our kids, Lily, Locke, Lincoln, Shepherd, and Lando for helping us stay connected to our own childhood through the vibrant ways you experience yours.
Our parents, for encouraging us to think big but never forget we’re from a small town.
Stevie Levine, our CCO and creative partner, for your input, ideas, notes, and guidance, as well as your management of our many other simultaneous projects.
Matt Inman and the whole team at Crown, for your tireless commitment to excellence and meaningful involvement throughout.
Ward Roberts, Daniel Strange, Jessie McLaughlin, Nica Halula, Helen Kim, Britton Buchanan, Lily Neal, Mike Feldman, Jenna Purdy, and Cole McLaughlin for your detailed feedback on our first draft.
Our amazing staff at Mythical Entertainment. Your incredible work on Good Mythical Morning and beyond allowed us to give this novel the attention it deserved.
Marc Gerald for daring us to write a novel.
Brian Flanagan, our COO, for holding down the fort at Mythical while we threw ourselves into this book.
Byrd Leavell, Brent Weinstein, Ali Berman, and the team at UTA.
Adam Kaller, Ryan Pastorek, and the team at HJTH.
Our childhood friend Ben Greenwood for leading us into constant adventure a
nd fearlessly embodying Mythicality in all that life held for you. You gave us the Tree, the Rocks, and the River.
Each and every Mythical Beast who has supported our creative aspirations. We consider it a privilege to be on this journey with you. Keep on being your Mythical best.
ALSO BY RHETT McLAUGHLIN & LINK NEAL
Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, raised in North Carolina and best friends since the first grade, are an L.A.-based comedy duo known for creating the Internet’s most-watched daily talk show, Good Mythical Morning; the narrative series Rhett & Link’s Buddy System; the award-winning weekly podcast Ear Biscuits; and the instant #1 New York Times bestseller, Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality. Their YouTube channels have a combined subscriber base of over 24 million people with 7 billion total views. They have been featured on and in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Live with Kelly & Ryan, The Conan O’Brien Show, Variety, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.
Read on for a sample of #1 New York Times bestselling book Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality
Crown
Available wherever books are sold
A MYTHICAL WELCOME
YOU DID IT! You have officially made at least one good decision today. By opening this book you are opening yourself up to the very real possibility of increased Mythicality in your life. Why, exactly, you decided to open this book is not important. Maybe you heard that this book contains a skyscraper-shaped board game that builds character (true), a visual guide to slow dancing poses (true), apocalyptic-themed party ideas (true), and actual sheet music and lyrics for the song we want you to sing—and hopefully play on the organ—at our funeral (also true). Or maybe you opened this book because you wanted to see pictures from the time Link broke his pelvis (hilarious unless you were Link), or read about the time Rhett was confronted by a tattooed man while wearing a child’s shirt (it didn’t turn out well). Or perhaps you heard that one chapter of this book was written by our wives (a very risky decision) and another entire chapter was written from the future (the United States Department of Time Travel and Extraterrestrial Affairs will not permit us to confirm nor deny the validity of said chapter from the future). Regardless of your reasons, all that matters now is that, by opening this book, you have just merged onto the highway to Mythicality.
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