Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  Copperseed handed her a mask, put one on himself, and prepared to work for a day as the toughest lab assistant this side of the Mississippi.

  —

  Nate, Andy, and Tim found themselves back on the police station porch the next minute, basking in uncontaminated air.

  Nate sat down on a step, rubbing his mouth. Andy noticed the somber circles around his eyes.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” He inspected Andy. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool, everyone’s okay!” Peter said, kicking litter along the sidewalk. “Fuck the signs, we’re all systems go! Locked and loaded! Five by five! I don’t even know what that one means.”

  Nate popped a pill into his mouth and pocketed the bottle. Assuming Andy was waiting for the right time to ask what now, he suggested, “We could go see Dunia Deboën.”

  “Why?” Andy asked. “We’ve got the lake creature in there. What could she possibly have to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. We never met her last time; since we’re reopening the case, might as well check every angle this time around.”

  “And say what? ‘Hi, we just caught one of the Sleepy Lake creatures; as the granddaughter of a pirate who practiced black magic, can we have your input?’ ”

  “If we were still kids, what would we be more likely to do?” Nate said. “Sit here and wait, or go visit the witch’s house?”

  Tim was already halfway down the block, calling over his shoulder like, Yo! Where did the witch live again?

  —

  The witch lived on the northeast side of town, on a winding street that followed the creek at the foot of Owl Hill. All the backyards on that street looked out onto unabated wilderness, which started, with astounding impetus, just ten feet away from the fences, normally on the inside. Frontyards, demoted to the storage of junk and sale ads, had long lost all appearance of tameness. Houses stood in the middle, half digested by the forest.

  Deboën’s house, which Andy and Nate still remembered from hushed pointing and rumoring when they used to cycle by, stood slightly prouder than the rest, having apparently agreed on a fragile nonaggression treaty with the invading rain forest. The front garden could almost have been described as beautiful, until on a closer look the observer noticed that most of the blossoming whites and pale blues were actually wild species in their early-spring exuberance, unassisted by gardeners. Junipers and blackberry bushes coexisted peacefully with cast-iron lamps, a bird fountain, and a moss-ridden set of garden furniture, and the brownstone building tried its best not to cramp the hill’s Gothic sense of style.

  Crows perched on a fig tree announced the arrival of visitors. A squirrel fled the rough path of sandstone slabs at the sight of Tim. As they pushed open the gate, Nate pointed out that the name on the mailbox was Morris.

  They resolved to knock anyway and ask for directions.

  Andy rubbed the verdigris off her fingers as they waited by the front door.

  “So this is a witch’s house?” she said. She checked the spiraling ornaments of the porch lamps and the handrail, the silent wooden wind chime, the withered Christmas wreath on the door. “Looks like the place of an old lady who never got married.”

  “That’s Puritan for ‘witch,’ ” Nate said, and he knocked again.

  Tim finished wreaking havoc among the abnormally dense animal population of the tiny garden and climbed up to the porch, the trip having already been well worth his time. Andy and Nate deliberated wordlessly.

  They were coming back down the stoop when a figure under a wide tornado of a coat and a flower-bearing hat shuffled through the entrance gate, towing her shopping bags, negotiating the sketchy garden path in her high-heeled boots. A black-eyed face looked up from under the hat.

  “Can I help you?” she said, with the exact tone of someone whose next line is going to be Yes, I heard of this Jesus Christ guy, but I’m not voting for him.

  “Are you Ms. Deboën?” Nate asked.

  “It’s Morris now,” the woman said, hurrying up the steps past them to drop the bags on dry land. She examined the visitors while producing a jingling tangle of keys. “Who are you?”

  She had a flimsy, high-pitched voice, kind but tired. Andy poked herself out of confusion.

  “Uh, my name’s Andy Rodriguez; this is Nate Rogers. We are…uh, doing some research on the history of Blyton Hills. We wonder if you could spare some minutes to answer a few questions?”

  “About what?”

  “Your…I mean, the Deboën family.”

  The woman managed to find a key that agreed to fit the lock and opened the front door. An unsubtle aroma of thyme and tobacco rushed out.

  “I’m not sure I’m the best person to tell you. Why don’t you ask, I don’t know, every other man or woman in town?”

  “We did,” Nate lied, softly blocking the door after her. “We heard some unflattering gossip; we were hoping to get the facts from you.”

  “Okay,” she said. “My father was such a creep that just for carrying his name I’ve been getting the worst cut at the butcher’s and having to cut my own hair for thirty years. How’s that for a fact?”

  She held looks with Andy, Nate spying his favorite brand of canned mac and cheese inside the woman’s shopping bags. Then they all checked on Tim. He had half his body inside the house and was carefully inspecting the umbrellas by the door.

  “What kind of researchers are you?” the woman inquired. She had manga-sized eyes, emboldened by mascara.

  “History.”

  “Folklore,” Nate began to say just a little before Andy. Then he continued. “We’re interested in the legends of Sleepy Lake.”

  The woman examined them again, squinting now. The realization triggered the most volatile, ghostly memory of a smirk.

  “You’re the kids,” she said. “The teen sleuths who caught the Sleepy Lake monster.”

  “Yes,” Andy said, kind of embarrassed. Being recognized like this would be the closest to flashing a badge she would ever do. “Can we ask you a few questions about the house up there?”

  Tim was already inside the hall and ready to make himself some toast as soon as he found the kitchen.

  “All right, come in,” the woman said, yielding the lead.

  The house was smaller than Kerri’s, but way more cluttered. The tiny entrance hall alone held so many pieces of furniture—all dark wood and aged cloth—but with each piece having a seemingly good reason to be there, that Andy felt she was in the rare presence of a hoarder with a sense of taste. It did look like a witch’s house—one that would be featured in the fall ’68 issue of Country Homeowners.

  “Sit wherever, I’ll be with you in a second,” the witch said while she hatched from her scruffy overcoat and hat, emerging at least two sizes tinier, her miniature hourglass body clad in a tight sweater and leather pants, perfectly adjusted to gracefully navigate through the crammed space. The word “voluptuous” came to Andy’s mind, mainly because she thought of it as a word for sexy that was used decades ago, while she watched the little woman drag her groceries into the kitchen.

  An iron lattice separated the hall from the living room, where the stuffiness expanded in the shape of megafauna-skin cushions and junglesome indoor plants. Andy called the dog away from the many objects she felt like sniffing herself. Nate orbited toward the books on the shelves—old dusty leather-bound volumes flanked by Tiki book stoppers and luxurious plants. On a closer inspection, they were just jacketless editions of fantasy romance.

  “Can I offer you something?” the woman called. “Coffee? Tea? A toad’s eye in syrup?”

  “No, thank—” Andy stopped short, an eyebrow triggered to stand alert.

  Their hostess appeared in the doorframe. “Just kidding. Gotta live up to my reputation, you know.”

  She closed the fridge and stepped out to join them.

  “Please, sit down. Where are the other two?”

  The guests exchanged puzzled loo
ks.

  “You used to be five, didn’t you?” she said, settling on a beanbag sofa and opening a tin cigarette box. “Three boys, a girl, and a dog?”

  Andy smiled, thinking how flattered that would have made her teenager self.

  “Only one came; she’s pursuing a different lead,” Nate answered.

  “That’s cute,” said the woman, blowing out the inaugural puff of smoke. She dragged a table resembling a slice of sequoia and a brass ashtray near her, and crossed her maroon-leather-boot-clad legs. “What can I do for you?”

  Andy looked away from the underside of her thighs and queried Nate. He seemed to relinquish the lead.

  “Mrs. Deboën—”

  “Morris. Or just call me Dunia.”

  “Dunia. You must be familiar with the Sleepy Lake area.”

  “Not really, I’m not very outdoorsy.”

  “But you used to live in Deboën Mansion once.”

  “Only my first five years. You know, a house on top of a mine, and a lake ten yards off the door: not a very child-friendly place.”

  “Not to mention your father’s experiments,” Nate inserted, trying to throw her off.

  “No, I’d rather not,” she deflected gracefully. “He sent me to boarding school as soon as he could and then bought this place for my mother. I think he was happy to get rid of us.”

  “Why?” Andy followed up.

  “Well, according to popular belief, my father only married my mother and had me to avoid being tagged as a hermit, like his father was,” she explained matter-of-factly. “It was what you’d call a PR matter.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Maybe. I myself married a man I didn’t really love just to borrow his name, so I guess it’s possible.” As if in confidence to Andy, she added, “It never works out.”

  “Why didn’t you just leave town?” Nate pursued.

  “All I own is this house. And I can’t find a buyer. I guess I should’ve left anyway and hit the road when I was still young and careless. Only I was never careless. I am now, but too old to be a stripper.”

  The words “Never too late!” were blocked and severely frowned upon by a head-shaking bouncer right before leaving Andy’s mouth. Instead, she asked, “What do you do?”

  “I write erotica,” she answered, pointing at a little workplace set near a window, computer included. Then she added through an impish smile: “Yes, it’s people like me.”

  Tim sneezed as a reaction to all the fluttering hormones.

  “But your family must have had tons of money,” Nate complained. “They owned a gold mine; it was a big company once; they must have made a fortune.”

  “I saw nothing after my parents died. I mean after my father died in the fire; I wasn’t expecting anything when my mother decided to pass out in the car with the engine running. That was…three years after my father?”

  “ ’Fifty-two?” Nate offered. “The mansion caught fire in ’forty-nine.”

  “Yes, about that. I was seven when he died. Anyway, the lawyers who handled his legacy took a bad offer for the mine and used the money to keep me in a school in Eugene. So after I graduated I had this house in this beautiful neighborhood that loves me so much, and nothing else.” She paused, scratched the Weimaraner’s head en passant, then continued. “If I know my father, I think he kept his fortune hidden in the house; he wasn’t the investing type. It probably burned in the fire. There was some searching, back in the day.”

  “Of course. That’s the gold Wickley hoped to find.”

  “Who?”

  “Uh, Thomas X. Wickley,” Andy repeated. “The Sleepy Lake creature.”

  “Oh, yeah.” The woman sighed, as if recalling a minor character from a TV series.

  “Apropos of which,” Nate detoured, searching his coat pockets, “you may be aware of rumors that lake creatures have been sighted again.”

  “No, but that was to be expected,” Dunia said. “Rumors about lake creatures had been going on for decades; the arrest of a guy in costume had no right to spoil the fun.”

  “Well, we went creature hunting last night, and we came across this,” he said, pulling out a Polaroid and sliding it across the table to Dunia. “We’re…ninety percent sure it was not a guy in a costume.”

  —

  The pulpy underheaded, overlimbed corpse lay oxidizing on a thickening film of its own juices, its chest sliced open. Kerri tried not to glance at it as she scribbled on an official Pennaquick County Police notepad. A fetid odor assailed the walls of the dust masks she and Deputy Copperseed were wearing.

  “Respiration is most likely carried out through the orifices on each side, though the function of the cilia inside them is unclear,” she dictated to herself as she wrote in her nervous, spiky handwriting that had forgone any attempt at legibility pages ago. “What I once called lungs more likely serve as swim bladders. However, it did roar through its mouth.” She clarified for the deputy: “Amphibians are born with gills and later develop lungs. This thing seems to have both, and still it breathed with great difficulty when it faced us. Maybe the bladders act as air reserves when it crawls out of the water.”

  Copperseed stayed vigilant, the mask allowing him to grimace freely at the stench without denting his poise.

  “There’s no chance these things are the product of toxic dump, is there?” he inserted with a pinch of resentment.

  “It’s not a mutation, if that’s what you’re asking,” Kerri answered, taking a knife and rasping softly one of the open ribs protruding out of the chest. She could easily peel some bone off it; the skeleton was melting. “This is different at every level. The chemical composition…Nothing carbon based could possibly oxidize this fast.”

  She stepped back a little, trying to zoom out for the whole picture. The stench was insulting. The sight of it, even as a still life, challenged reason.

  Pen and paper waited self-consciously on the side table, wondering if they should be doing something for themselves.

  After a couple of deep breaths, Kerri pulled off one kitchen glove and neared her bare index finger half an inch above the shoulder of the upper limb. Her finger hovered along the arm dangling off the slab, down to the wrist and the webbed hand and the long, black-caked claws. And then she touched it.

  That was the final insult: the solid, cold touch; the alien organic chemistry; the microscopic complexity of it, impossible to fake. Her nightmare, smuggled into the real world.

  The deputy grabbed her by the shoulders, signaling time for a recess, while she continued to speak into a nonexisting dictaphone: “It is not supposed to exist. The body is decomposing at an alarming rate; it cannot live for long in air. By tomorrow, there will be nothing solid left!”

  By the end of that sentence Copperseed had dragged her into the courtyard. Sunlight and bird language washed on her face.

  She snatched her mask off, quenching on pure air.

  “It makes some sense,” she droned on. “The accelerated decay would explain why we never saw these things before. Otherwise, even if they avoided humans, we were bound to come across a carcass. And yet, some of its features are stuff I only read about in paleobiology. These things must have existed for…longer than us, longer than chordates!”

  She peered out of her ramblings for a second and found herself sitting on a curb, leaning back on an iron fence. The sky above was a solid blue. Her defiled fingers rejoiced in the cozy caress of the pavement and the interstitial grass. The rumor of Blyton Hills traffic hardly bothered the pigeons fighting over some crumbs by the dumpster.

  Copperseed stood at a comfortable distance, unmasked, hands in his uniform pockets.

  “The first dwellers,” he seemingly quoted.

  Kerri looked up at him, hand shielding her eyes from the sun. The deputy spoke as if he read off a prompter in the clouds.

  “Back in the days of the Second Sky Battle, when the Walla Walla first settled on the smoking hills, they discovered an elusive people lurking in the misty
slopes and the shadowy gorges near the source of the Zoinx River. These folk shunned the sun and the moon, lived only near the water or in it, inside caves where underground rivers flow, and they worshipped Thtaggoa, the undergod in the Mount of Thunder. The Walla Walla knew better than to disturb the first dwellers, for those who ventured too far upriver fell mad with horror at the sight of the brutal, disfigured beings, and those who dared to camp in the deeper valleys were killed and their bodies hanged from trees as a warning to others. For many years the Walla Walla respected their boundaries and never neared the Mount of Thunder or entered the valleys below. But then Thtaggoa grew hungry for power, and the earth rumbled, and the mist from the lake spread, killing the forests and the animals, drowning the villages. And under cover of the mist, the first dwellers marched forth, slaughtering our people. The Walla Walla fought bravely with spears and shields, but the first dwellers were resilient and their numbers never dwindled. Thus, as the undergod in the Mount of Thunder roared, the Walla Walla gathered their clans and sang together, asking the Fathers for help. And in response, from the Warm Snows was sent down a powerful shaman named Ashen Fox. And Ashen Fox walked to the foot of the Mount of Thunder with four brave warriors, and there in a circle of fire he chanted the incantation, and the mount collapsed, and Thtaggoa and its spawn were cast down the pit, and the river filled the pit with water. But Thtaggoa is immortal and still sleeps at the bottom of the lake, waiting to be released and reign again.”

  Pigeons cooed and fluttered away. Kerri took some time to settle back onto the white courtyard under her fingernails, the sun on her cheeks, the flat blue sky above.

  “Okay. As far as I can tell,” she began, “you’re retelling the Walla Walla interpretation of the cataclysm that formed Sleepy Lake. What is the time of the Second Sky Battle? Fifteen hundred, two thousand years ago?”

  Copperseed shrugged in a way that could pass for agreement.

  “Right,” Kerri resumed. “There’s geological evidence that Sleepy Lake is the collapsed caldera of a volcano that blew up around that time. The volcano was your Mount of Thunder. And the Warm Snows from which the shaman came must be the Cascades. The shaman and that Thookatoo thing are likely personifications of natural forces. Probably the first dwellers too.” She paused, allowed the counterargument to catch up. “But then there’s the thing in your morgue.”