Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  “Your name was?”

  “Andy Rodriguez.”

  She scrawled a line on the title page and handed the book to her. Nate came next, carrying the Necronomicon under his arm.

  “I need to talk to you about your father’s arrangements.”

  “Once more: I didn’t get along with my father,” Dunia said resentfully, retreating to her beanbag couch.

  (In a side paragraph, Andy put the anonymous farewell message under the lamp and compared it with the dedication in the paperback: To Andy Rodriguez—remember to share, heart, single-stroke signature. No match.)

  “But you said he was able to raise the dead,” Nate insisted. “Several books in Deboën Mansion expand on an alchemical process to distill the essential salts out of a person’s remains, from which you can raise avatars—”

  “I’m going to stop you there,” Dunia cut in. “I’ve read those books.” She noticed Nate’s odd reaction, then clarified. “The Dark Revenants, by Bob Howard.”

  “You’ve read Bob Howard?”

  “Yes! Wow, you read pulp horror too?” she said, pitch gliding off the sarcasm scale. “Finally someone sophisticated. I’m sick of this town of Milton hooligans!”

  “Okay, Howard used the salts theme in a book, but you said your father could do it—he could bring back the dead!”

  “No, I said he could talk to them. That’s what the avatar is supposed to be: a ghost, the sublimation of a spirit from bodily remains.”

  “Yes, but only as long as you keep it inside the pentacle.” Nate dropped the grimoire on the sequoia table.

  “Don’t—” She curled up her legs, grimacing at the tortured symbols on the page. “Don’t fucking open that book in here!”

  “Howard said what your father says here: that the avatar would try to ‘pour itself into a living vessel.’ Which is poetic phrasing for possession. What if your father prepared in advance his own essential salts, died, and waited for someone to raise his avatar so he could possess them?”

  “And what meddling asshole would be stupid enough to do that?!”

  Andy stepped in just then, in full eye-contact-luring mode. Nate registered it, swallowed back the line he had almost delivered.

  “Let’s say Wickley,” he put forward.

  “Who? The salamander klutz?”

  “We know he’d been hanging out in the house for some time. He reads something he shouldn’t, the avatar is raised, it possesses him.”

  “Wickley was not possessed,” Dunia chuckled, a hair-thin crack in her voice. “I know that much. I know my father; he was nowhere inside that pathetic man.”

  “Okay. What about me? Could he be inside me?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You would know. You would fight it. You can’t have another person’s soul inside and not know—especially Deboën’s. He would make…an impression.”

  “But he wouldn’t be in me anymore; I’m telling you there’s someone in the house already. What if I was just a vessel?”

  “You’d still know. Because the vessel is soiled.” Dunia smirked. “Same thing happened in Howard’s story. Remember? The second astronaut?”

  Nate stopped, flipped some pages in the grimoire until he found again the notes he had seen in the attic.

  “ ‘But each transference shall cost the Avatar dearly, for once it stains one Vessel it can never pour itself out completely, and every Vessel shall remain polluted after the Avatar reaches its Source,’ ” he read again.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Andy asked. “If someone had been a vessel for Deboën, how would they know?”

  Dunia’s eyes drifted away, imagining, the cigarette she’d been speed-smoking throughout the conversation almost out. “I don’t know. You would feel…violated. Like…like there was a smear in your heart that you couldn’t wipe clean, and it would stay there, always, darkening the world around you, making everything taste bitter. You would have nightmares every night. Hallucinations. Glimpses of his world. You would rely on alcohol or drugs to dull the pain, and even then, you would just wander through the motions. You’d feel…lost, bereft of purpose. At best, you’d become an underachiever, forget the goals you once had. At worst, I don’t know. Jail. Mental institutions. Suicide.”

  She focused back on Andy. Andy looked across the table at Nate, and Nate at the sofa on his right where Peter sat listening.

  PETER: Shit. Does that sound familiar, anyone?

  “But it could be worse, of course,” Dunia remarked through a bitter smile.

  Andy wondered, genuinely astonished, “It could?”

  “Yes, because…the problem is not that you carry a bad piece of soul with you. The problem is it doesn’t belong to you. And eventually the owner might want it back.”

  She squished the cigarette, and for a while she seemed to just contemplate her own scenario, while Nate sat and Andy stood staring at each other, both feeling their guts wither and die.

  “Thank you,” Andy managed to voice after a full minute, and she quickly grabbed the cumbersome book and gestured Nate to move on. A gag reflex had to hold on at her throat to let the following words squeeze through: “We’ll be leaving now; you’ve been very kind.”

  Even Tim thought the visit had been awkwardly brief, but no one asked him. He trotted past their hostess apologetically, and Dunia barely had time to react and walk them to the door.

  Not ten seconds later they were back in Mrs. Morris’s garden and hurrying toward the amber Chevy, whose color for the first time didn’t seem bright enough to Andy’s eyes. The taste of lead was building up to her palate. She tried to spit, but her mouth was dry.

  She started the engine, stepped on the gas, and heard Nate say, “Oh my God.”

  She checked on him after the first turn—his blue eyes like mere pilot lights, the grimoire dropped between his legs.

  “This is impossible,” she said, instantly surprised at how desperately wrong her voice sounded. “Nate, we’re not possessed.”

  “We were. We were the living vessels,” Nate mumbled.

  “We were not! You said the avatar can’t leave the pentacle!”

  “I was inside the pentacle. Maybe. I can’t remember where the lectern was. The salts were on the workbench to my left, inside the pentacle too. When I raised the avatar, it poured itself into me. It was set up that way.”

  “But what about us?! I never stepped inside the pentacle!”

  “You didn’t need to. It was in me already,” Nate said, rubbing the distracting shadows off his face. “Just go through the events again. After I read the spell, I saw the smoke rising, I got really scared, and then…there was a tremor.”

  “We noticed that downstairs.”

  “The next thing I know, Peter is waking me up and pulling me by the arm.” He rubbed his right shoulder. “That’s when it transferred to him.”

  “I had found Kerri tied up when the tremor hit,” Andy remembered. “I set her free, but then the creatures came up. We hid inside a dungeon—maybe it was a cellar, I don’t know.” Andy replayed the memory, and suddenly swerved to dodge a van that had been blaring at them for two blocks. “We could hear them, scratching the walls.”

  “We heard you two crying. When Peter and I got there, the creatures were gone. Peter opened the door.”

  “Kerri hugged Peter.”

  “And so it got into Kerri. And then somehow…”

  “I took Kerri’s hand.” She bit her lip, the realization slapping her face with thirteen years’ worth of stored potential energy. “But why? Why would it take us?”

  “It didn’t; we were just vessels. It was trying to get to its source.”

  “What source?”

  “The body, Andy! Deboën’s body! We were sharing an isle with it.”

  “But we never saw or touched Deboën’s body,” Andy argued, but the strength of her arguments, like her voice, had long ago begun to falter. A living vessel was too broad a definition; it only requir
ed imagination. A tree is a living vessel. Worms are living vessels. Suddenly every artery of ivy spidering up the front stairs and over the roof, every weed in the garden, gained meaning. Any blade of grass was a breeze away from the others, every bramble was connected to another bramble, every tree root was part of an underground network serving a single purpose.

  And there, beneath an unmarked marble slab under the vault of a willow, the source just waited.

  “We were just a transport,” Nate summed up. “It went right through us.” He swallowed, the skin on his neck bristling up at the sight of the ice-cold sweat drop that was coming down. “I did this to us.”

  Peter sat tranquilly in the backseat with his legs spread open, ignored by the dog.

  PETER: It’s okay to cry, Nate. Everyone here knows you’re a pussy anyway.

  NATE: Shut up! Just fucking shut up!

  ANDY: Nate! (Steers onto Main Street past a honking truck.) What the fuck, man, who are you talking to?!

  NATE: (Diving into his palms.) Shut up! Christ, shut up!

  ANDY: Nate, c’mon, man! We can fix this!

  (Tim sticks his head between the front seats, trying to soothe the boy.)

  ANDY: We just wandered in. It was a trap, Nate. We just…fell for it. It could have happened to anyone. We…(Her hand tries to grasp a word, fails, and falls back, slapping the wheel.) We were the meddling kids.

  (Nate reemerges from his hands, eyes inflamed.)

  “Nate, please, pull yourself together, okay?” Andy begged. “We need you. Please.”

  “I killed Peter.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Let’s just say thirty sleeping pills, a bottle of vodka, and Nate killed Peter,” Peter suggested.

  “Nate, you didn’t!” Andy insisted. “Peter killed himself, okay? We were all used by—”

  Right there the final piece fell into place, and the picture could not have been more disturbing.

  “Then the guy in the cloak…”

  “It’s Deboën,” said Nate. “In his old body. And he wants the rest of his soul back.”

  A car screeched two inches away from Andy’s window as they drove past the school sign. She floored the brakes. The station wagon swung around, throwing Tim against the window as inertia made them U-turn, screeching to a stop right in front of the school.

  Andy keyed the engine off. Her own heart boomed almost as loud.

  Joey Krantz knocked on her window. Andy registered the can of Coke in his hand.

  “Hey. You call that driving?”

  Nate and Tim stumbled out of the car. Andy took the soda from Joey and led the troops up the front steps of Blyton Hills Elementary.

  “So what are we doing now?” Joey inquired.

  “I don’t know,” Andy responded.

  “What are you gonna do about the lake creatures?”

  “I don’t know.”

  (The school doors crash open, the cast marching in.)

  JOEY: I was thinking I could drive you back to the lake and—

  NATE: We can never go back to the lake.

  JOEY: Why not?

  NATE: (Ignoring him, paces up to Andy.) He wants us. That’s why he’s sending us messages. He needs us there, in the house. We only got off the isle today because he didn’t count on Joey.

  ANDY: I didn’t count on Joey!

  JOEY: Who’s after you?

  (They stop in the middle of the hallway, Tim missing the cue and walking on before realizing.)

  ANDY: (To Joey.) Daniel Deboën might be…(She checks Nate, then rephrases.) Daniel Deboën is alive.

  JOEY: No way! (Astounded.) God. Did you guys know he descended from a witch that was burned in Salem?

  NATE: FUCK SALEM!!

  ANDY: (Resuming the hike.) What do you suggest we do?

  NATE: We run. We should have never come back. All this time he’s been gathering strength, and what’s inside us are the only bits of him that he’s missing. We must stay away. Peter did the right thing.

  ANDY: Peter?! Peter did the right thing?! He killed himself!

  NATE: And that’s a bit of Deboën’s soul that Deboën will never recover.

  They had reached the chemistry lab, but Andy wasn’t nearly ready to let Kerri join them at this point of the conversation.

  NATE: Okay, maybe it’s a little too drastic, but…In any case, we should stay as far from Deboën as possible. We should leave Blyton Hills tonight. And definitely never go back to the house.

  (Door opens, Kerri steps out.)

  KERRI: We have to go back to the house.

  (All three stare admiringly at her timing. Andy shyly offers her the Coke.)

  ANDY: Captain’s gone for the pH test.

  KERRI: I don’t need it; there was one in there. I just had to give you something to do; you were driving me crazy.

  (She takes the Coke and the lead, back down the hallway.)

  JOEY: Nate just said we can’t go back to the house.

  ANDY: He said we can’t go back.

  KERRI: We have to. We gotta stop that guy.

  NATE: You know who he is?

  KERRI: It’s irrelevant.

  NATE: It’s Deboën, Kerri!

  KERRI: Irrelevant. We’ve got to stop him before he tries to raise Thookatoo again.

  JOEY: Raise who?

  NATE: Thtaggoa. A primeval entity that—

  KERRI: Whatever, he’s not the threat either.

  NATE: Not a threat?!

  ANDY: The creatures are the threat.

  KERRI: No, they’re not.

  JOEY: Guys!

  (They stop.)

  JOEY: What the fuck is the threat?!

  As an answer, Kerri shook the can of Coke, then opened it right under his nose. Nate and Andy barely dodged the soda explosion that hit Joey straight in the face.

  Tim ran to drink from the magic pool of caffeine forming at their feet while a drenched Joey swept the foam from his brow. Kerri stood glaring at him, unfazed.

  “Why did that happen?” she pop-quizzed.

  Joey considered the question, face dripping. “Because you’re an asshole.”

  “No,” Andy tried. “Because…uh…soda. Carbonated water. CO2.”

  “There,” Kerri pinpointed. “Coke is carbonated by injecting CO2 into syrup and water, but CO2 is a gas and water is liquid; in order for the gas to bind with the liquid it needs to be pressurized. When you open the can, you’re depressurizing it: that’s the psst it makes; then the gas molecules start slowly unbinding and floating to the surface. But if you shake the can before you open it, the bonds break and the gas separates from the liquid. If you depressurize the can right after, all the loose gas blows out.” She pointed at Joey’s perplexed face as evidence.

  “Right,” Andy digested. “So what does this have to do—”

  “The water in the lake,” Nate guessed. “It contains CO2.”

  “It’s carbonated,” Kerri explained, “because it sits on a volcano. We saw the CO2 leaking into the mines. Similar leaks at the bottom of the lake are injecting CO2 into the water. I just analyzed it from the wheezer samples—the acidity is off the chart.”

  “So…Sleepy Lake is made of soda?” Joey speculated, puzzled.

  “But the lake isn’t pressurized,” Nate argued.

  “Yes, it is at the bottom, because of the weight of all that water above. In normal conditions, convection would make the water at the bottom come up and depressurize slowly, releasing the gas at safe levels, but if you shake it first…”

  “How do you shake a lake?” Joey insisted.

  “Earthquakes,” Andy guessed.

  “Which are somehow caused every time someone reads a spell out loud,” Kerri concluded. “We’ve seen the effects already. We’re on volcanic soil; small tremors are frequent. When it happens under the lake, it brings an unusually large volume of carbonated water up, releasing CO2.”

  “CO2 brings the wheezers up,” Nate appended.

  “CO2 causes poisoning, makes you feel
weaker,” Andy added.

  “It’s probably why the Indians called it Sleepy Lake in the first place,” Kerri went on. “It’s what kills the animals on the shore and makes the birds scram. But if the quake is big enough, the whole lake will blow up like a can of Coke.” She paused for air. “This is an astoundingly rare natural phenomenon called limnic eruption. Four years ago, it happened in Lake Nyos, Cameroon, and the resulting gas cloud drifted toward populated areas and killed seventeen hundred.”

  “And if it happens here…” Andy began.

  “Provided there’s no wind to blow away the cloud, which would be far greater than the one in Cameroon, it would naturally flow downhill, because it’s denser than air, down the only logical path: the Zoinx River Valley, until it reached…”

  “Blyton Hills,” Andy finished. “That’s almost a thousand casualties.”

  “Then it would continue past us until the Zoinx flows into the Willamette in Belden…”

  “Three thousand casualties.”

  “And, if the wind’s still forsaking us by that time and the cloud is large enough, I guess it could potentially follow down the Willamette into Portland.” She cut off Andy. “I don’t care how many people live there; there’s a few of them I really like.”

  At the end of the hall, the main doors clacked open; Captain Al and Copperseed marched up to them, bearing news.

  “Your Jaffa is the same Jaffa,” Copperseed announced. “But his ID is fake—RH denies ever employing him. State police declared him missing in nineteen eighty; his car was found in the parking lot of the Saginaw Motel with a dead engine. Clerk says the driver was a mine inspector—used to flash his ID to anyone who cared. Last day he checked out, paid in cash, hitchhiked off saying he’d come back for the car, was never heard of again.” He noticed his audience’s sallow faces and the bubbling brown pool on the floor. “What?”

  The Blyton Summer Detective Club rubbed their eyes, shifted on their feet, licked Coke off their noses.

  “State also says they can send men to help in a hunting party,” Captain Al appended. “All they need is a formal request.”