Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  “Andy, we solved that case! It was in the papers!”

  “I know, I learned the story by heart too! ‘Tracks in the mud’? ‘Sightings of a monster’? What about the slaughtered deer?”

  Kerri faltered, then offered without attempting a smile: “Grizzly?”

  “There are no grizzlies in Blyton Hills! Do you think if they had fucking grizzlies to worry about they’d have time to invent stories about lake creatures? And what about the hanged corpse?!”

  “Gosh, it’s a local paper, Andy; I guess it was too macabre for the Pennaquick Telegraph!”

  “What about the house? The pentacle? The empty coffins? The symbols written in blood?!”

  “Those were props! Wickley staged the haunting of Deboën Mansion to direct blame at Miss Deboën!”

  “Kerri, come on, stop pretending you forgot about that night!” Andy begged. “Don’t you remember when I found you in the basement? When we locked ourselves in the dungeon? The things outside scratching the walls, all of them? We were in each other’s arms, sweating pinballs, shivering, Jesus Christ, choking on pure terror! Do you want me to believe that Mr. fucking Wickley did that? That a guy in a mask made us cry?”

  “Is that what this is about?” Kerri regretted and then finished saying, in that order, but her mouth wouldn’t stop now. “Andy, I’m sorry your self-imposed tough guy persona got shattered that night, but I’m not going back to Blyton Hills because some creep got your ego hurt!”

  “That’s bullshit!” Whispers had slowly given way to shouts. “It was not a creep! And they weren’t props! I know what I saw! We all saw it!”

  “We were scared!”

  “We are scared!” Andy countered. “We’ve been scared ever since! We never went back to Blyton Hills after that. The next year, we found an excuse to stay at your house in Portland and we didn’t even dare to look each other in the eye. And Sean, your Sean, Tim’s great-grandfather, was standing there, trying to bark us to life again, like ‘What the fuck are you doing here? Why aren’t we back in that house solving the real mystery?’ ”

  “Because we grew up!”

  It went downhill from there, Tim noticed, watching the girls on the bed (not in the bed: blankets had receded long ago), a moody Mom and Dad are fighting look on his Byronian face.

  Kerri caught her breath, tired and sad. “We grew up, Andy. We grew apart. That’s life. You move on, make new friends, lose the old ones. We can’t spend our whole lives in Blyton Hills, chasing sheep smugglers and lake creatures.”

  She brushed some orange hair aside, and she seemed exhausted.

  “I’m sorry, Andy. I’m not going back.”

  She lay down and switched the light off. The coils in the toaster glinted yellow in the dark, a poor but well-intended impersonation of a fireplace.

  Andy met Tim’s eyes, the dog’s profile outlined in the warm glow. They held a silent exchange for a minute or two, until Tim deemed it courteous to lay his head down, close his eyes, and pretend to sleep.

  Kerri murmured in the brown dark, “Can you please take your arm off me? I feel smothered.”

  Andy’s right hand radioed a message: We’ve been spotted. And it fell back.

  She changed positions and tried to lie down faceup in the narrow space between Kerri and the wall, making sure to touch neither. She tried to swallow something in her throat, careful not to make a single noise, and kept her eyes open.

  The tiny room went on flying through space, wrapped in zero Kelvin silence.

  —

  Several hours or light-years later Kerri felt her again, a peach-fuzz brush against her back that didn’t wake her up so much as give her a gentle reminder of the world beyond her body.

  She felt her own left arm, crushed under a bad posture but too numb to complain anyway, and her right one, hanging off the bed. She felt the almost excessive heat on the toaster-lit side of her wrist and the cold on the dark half. She felt the twilight zone along her forearm like the Greenwich parallel of Eternia. She guessed the yellow aura of the toaster behind her closed eyelids, and Tim lying by it.

  The bitter memories of their argument were beginning to rush in when something unexpected happened: a second caress. This time it was deliberate, Andy’s hand brushing her side like a petal stroke. She focused on the body behind her, the microearthquakes it caused on the mattress. And she smiled, internally, for her lips were too deeply asleep to be bothered, but she did acknowledge Andy’s touch as it clumsily tripped on every little wrinkle of the tight shirt around her torso, descending toward the waist where the shirt ended.

  And that’s where she noticed it. Cold.

  She suddenly found herself wondering whether Andy would have cold hands from being far from the toaster, or if they could be that cold, while the hand sped up slightly across her skin and then hesitated by the edge of her jeans, and it didn’t resume its path over the clothes, but burrowed beneath, and Kerri’s thoughts hurried up too, deliberating how she should react, because the hand was hovering south over her belly and sending a scouting fingertip, cold and smooth, surfing between her thigh and her abdomen, scurrying easily under her panties. And a long fingernail was brushing through her pubic hair, and another finger and another and another followed, too quickly, over her labia and bending around her legs, cold and skinless and clawed, closing in a burning icy clutch ready to grab her groin and rip her womb apart shout now!

  The scream woke every single cell in every body in the room. Hers, and Tim’s, and Andy’s, who immediately grabbed Kerri by the shoulders and shook the dream off her.

  “Kerri! Kerri, wake up!”

  She fought to break loose, blinded by panic.

  “It’s me!” Andy insisted. “Kerri, I’m real! I know how it is; feel me; I’m real! You’re okay!”

  She was.

  Kerri noticed the hands clutching her whiter wrists. They were strong and warm, a landscape of veins and knuckle valleys, untiringly detailed like every millimetric hair on Tim’s paws on the bed and the voices of both—Tim barking in a pathetically sweet attempt to soothe her, Andy’s words slowly succeeding. She recognized the room in twilight, the yellow glow of the toaster, every piece of junk on the floor, Tim’s compassionate eyes and Andy’s dark, resolute ones, inches from her.

  And in the next breath, the dam broke. Massive, physically painful sobs burst out of her chest.

  Andy released her wrists and tried to hold her head, but she recoiled, hiding under the sheets.

  Andy sat still. She had not seen Kerri cry since they were kids. She used to feel awkward back then too. So did Tim, apparently. She settled with resting a hand on her, over the blanket.

  “Kerri, we have to end this. You can’t go on like this. It broke us.”

  The gesture of her hand encompassed everything in Kerri’s room, in Kerri’s life.

  “You were going to be a scientist. By this time you were supposed to be in the Amazon rain forest, naming a new species of butterfly after each one of us. We won’t find peace until we fix this.”

  Kerri had cowered into a corner, hiding behind her knees, her orange hair so inconsolably distressed.

  Andy saw Kerri Hollis, age twelve, in the way she swiped her eyes and nose and tried to woman up.

  “I don’t want to go back,” she said with a quiver.

  “Kerri, the fact that you don’t want to go back is proof that we must go back,” Andy sotto voce’d, recognizing a softness in her voice that she had not used in the last thirteen years. “Would you be scared to go to the place where you had the greatest times in your life if we had really caught the bad guy?”

  Kerri shied away. “I prefer to think it ended happily.”

  “But it didn’t!” Andy exploded, softness lost to a passionate monologue. “Look at us! Look at what we are! I wish it had ended happily and that we’d gone on to solve more cases, and that somehow our teenage adventures had morphed into a happy sitcom of our adult life with all of us turning to face the camera smiling and every scen
e beginning with a long shot of a great house with a garden and a big-ass pool while a stupid fucking sax went dibiddydawahwawah, but it didn’t happen! Peter’s dead and Nate’s in a loony bin and you live in this hole and I’m going psychotic and even the dog knows there’s still something out there!”

  Out the window, New York had slid back into view, blowing steam and pining for coffee.

  Kerri and Tim both watched Andy panting after the climax. The darkness of the immediate future trickled in like saltpeter down the walls.

  “Okay, I get it,” Kerri whispered. “There’s something out there. I can’t ignore it. But why do we have to take care of it? Why us?”

  Andy sat back down, a rogue hand holding one of Kerri’s. Softness took over again: “Because we’re the Blyton Summer Detective Club. BSDC forever, right? It’s what we do. We help people, catch the bad guys, fix problems. It’s the last thing I remember being good at. You want to know what I’ve been up to the last five years? I’ve been a cook, a cabbie, a welder, a train operator, an air force cadet, and I sucked phenomenally at every single one of those things. So I’m going back to what I was good at, and you and Tim are coming with me.”

  Tim stood on all fours again, panting at the prospect of action.

  Kerri murmured, “Can I sleep some more before we go?”

  “Okay,” Andy said, lying down again and pulling the sheets back up. “But not too long. We gotta fetch your cousin Nate in Arkham.”

  “They were onto us,” said Xira, swiping the wharg blood from her ax blade. “We must get to Actheon’s citadel before them.”

  “We’ll cut through the woods,” Adam suggested.

  “We’ll cut through the woods,” said Princess Irya, Xira’s faithful companion.

  “You know they make wharg blood with maple syrup and purple dye?” Ethan triviaed, but no one listened. “It’s actually delicious.”

  “Go! The sun is setting,” Xira bid, hopping over the gurgling carcasses toward the Bierstadt sunset that shone red upon Adam’s acned face, inches away from the screen.

  “This show is stupid,” Craig grumbled from his armchair.

  All seats in the living room had been tacitly assigned among the inmates long ago, mostly through ancient pacts among the elders, with the occasional revision of terms by means of an amicable skirmish. The twin armchairs with autumn motifs were for people no one really liked; Craig was one of them. Old Acker was granted the rocking chair. The corner chaise longue was for catatonics. The sofa was a sort of UN demilitarized zone, an upholstered Jerusalem that members of different creeds reluctantly shared during interbellum periods. Anyone actually caring for the TV broadcast had to relinquish his seat and take the first row on the linoleum floor.

  “Adam,” said Nurse Angela, beginning the four o’clock roll call for medicines. She approached the unresponsive fat kid in front of the TV, put a red-and-white pill in his open mouth, prodded his chin shut, and moved on. Adam knew every word of dialogue of Xira the Princess Warrior by heart. He liked to read Irya’s lines.

  “Kimrean.”

  “Meeeee!” cheered the schizophrenic hermaphrodite lying on the sofa.

  “You know, this was one of Linda Hamilton’s ten least favorite episodes,” said Ethan, bearing Kimrean’s mantis legs on his lap. “The filming was so taxing.”

  “How do you know?” Kimrean asked, childishly interested.

  “She told me.”

  “Oh, come on!” went Craig, snapping off his chair and getting an automatic first warning from the head nurse—barely a nasal caveat in a sitcom housewife tone. “I’m so sick of this! So Linda Hamilton told you. Was that when you chaperoned her to the Golden Globes?”

  “Before that,” Ethan replied matter-of-factly. “We weren’t officially dating yet.”

  “You dated her?” wowed the hermaphrodite, staring with mismatched eyes, brown and green.

  “Bullshit!” cried Craig, just short of loud enough to merit the second warning. “Christ, it’s infuriating! They don’t want us to make any progress—they’re just locking us away! How do you expect patients to recover when you put the pathological liars next to the only guys dumb enough to believe their shit? (Aside, to the nurse offering him a cup.) No, Dr. Willett put me off that yesterday; Belle knows—tell her, Belle. (He goes on, undisturbed.) All day I have to listen to your collective fantasies! This asshole dated Linda Hamilton, that one met Peter Manner, you screwed Patty Hearst—everyone in this place is so well-connected and full of shit!”

  ADAM: A storm is brewing, Xira.

  CRAIG: Shut up!

  “I screwed Hearst?” Kimrean wondered, and then recalled, “Oh, yeah, I did.”

  “Rogers.”

  The nurse neared the second armchair, where Nate sat, or lay, a cigarette between two Band-Aided bony fingers. He took the Dixie cup, swallowed his pills, opened his mouth in a hippo display for the nurse to see, and continued smoking, all this using a record low number of muscles.

  The nurse, a young woman right out of school, leaned closer to him. “Did you really meet Peter Manner?”

  “Yeah, I did,” Nate groaned. “He was my best friend.”

  “Really?” she whispered excitedly. “I loved him in that movie with Shannen Doherty—I used to have such a crush on him! You went to school with him?”

  “No, he was from California; I grew up in Oregon,” he retold, tired of his own story, words dropping off his dry, flaky lips. “We met in summer camp and afterward spent all holidays together at my aunt Margo’s house in Blyton Hills: my cousin Kerri and her friend Andy and Peter and me. And we went camping, and climbing, and fishing, and we got into trouble every school break.”

  He was speaking in a low voice to spare those who’d heard the story already, but for some reason everyone was listening. Craig stood in tension, a skeptical eyebrow arched up.

  “He was so talented,” the nurse said. “So did you continue to see him after that?”

  Nate locked eyes with her.

  “I still do.”

  The room dismissed him with a scoff as Xira went to commercials.

  —

  Tim had been gnawing the armrest into submission for the last ten miles. In the front seat, Kerri sat with her head against her window like a broken robot, hazy eyes surfing the flowing tarmac.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” she beeped.

  “Now?” Andy checked her for a split second. “You went only an hour ago.”

  “I need to go again.”

  “Can you go there in the woods?”

  “No. It’s number two.”

  “But it was number two last time.”

  “Yes! Well spotted, Inspector Craphound from the Rectal Police, you caught me!”

  “Okay, okay. Jesus.”

  Andy was uneasy too. Not so much about the destination as the journey itself, to put it in Confucian terms. Bad becomes unbearable only when contrasted to expectation; Andy had learned through her life on the road to bear little or no expectations, which enabled her to weather most scenarios without visible wearing. But a car trip with Kerri was one of the few premises she had often allowed herself to fantasize about. Of course, in her daydreams the radio worked, the car was certainly something better than a 1978 Chevrolet Vega Kammback wagon, and the destination, albeit undefined, was definitely not a psychiatric asylum in Arkham, Massachusetts. Nor Massachusetts, period.

  Also, horror and apocalypse did not lurk in the near future.

  Ever since they crossed into Connecticut, the mood inside the car had begun to mimic the concrete-and-evergreen landscape along the interstate: murky and unrepairable. Their rare exchanges escalated into Kerri’s anger in shorter and shorter times. Andy had tried to mitigate the gloom with snacks and candy when they first stopped for gas, only to realize once back in the car that neither of them was hungry. A carnival of plastic wrappers sat now self-consciously on the dashboard, like guests to a garden party after somebody drowned in the pool. Tim had been the only beneficiary
of that purchase, which explained why he was now bouncing between the backseat and the trunk and going Baskervilles on the upholstery like a sugar-powered dingo.

  “Can you tell him to stop?” Andy begged.

  Kerri looked into the front mirror. “Tim!”

  The dog swiftly sat down, stiff like an Egyptian jackal god, throwing a Terminatorish I’ll be back glance at the armrest.

  “Thank you,” said Kerri.

  Andy smiled as the dog in the mirror nervously sniffed for more chewable car parts.

  “You’re great with him.”

  Kerri bit a fingernail, eyes back on the curb line. Her hair had been dozing off since morning.

  “Kerri. I’m scared too, all right?”

  “So you keep saying, but I’m the only one longing for adult pull-ups.”

  “Listen, it’s not gonna be like before. It’s gonna be you, me, Nate, and Tim. Together. All the time. None of that ‘let’s split up’ bullshit Peter always came up with.” She resented criticizing Peter’s field strategies so early into her leadership, but whatever. “And we’re grown-ups, right? Look at us. We’re better prepared; we got a car. We’re not riding bikes anymore; if things get ugly, we just drive away.” She hadn’t really thought about this before, but she believed it now. She patted the steering wheel, though not too hard, for fear the Chevy Vega would disassemble. “Hell, the whole town is gonna look different. And a lot smaller. You’ll see; remember how huge Deboën Mansion seemed? I bet you we’ll get there and we’ll wonder how could we be scared of that tiny little cottage. Shit, I bet you even the lake will look like a pond.”

  “I doubt that. It’s the second-deepest lake in the Americas after O’Higgins in southern Chile.”

  “Really? That’s as deep as…what, Lake Superior?”

  “Twice as deep.” Kerri shifted on her seat, eyes fixed on the blurry asphalt. “It was a sort of collapsed volcano that the Zoinx River flowed into. The rest of the river disappeared for centuries before the gap was filled.”