“I had a cavity. The last summer, before Andy arrived. He pulled my last baby tooth out.”
“Did you keep it?”
“And leave it under my pillow—are you kidding? I was thirteen, Nate. Who knows where it is right now.”
“I fucking know! It’s wrapped in another nest, inside a dying tree on that isle! We saw it—it was your baby tooth, Pete!”
(Frowning, touches his jaw.) “No shit! But why would Dr. Thewlis—”
“Dr. Thewlis threw it away! Someone took it. The same person who collected this from the barbershop where Uncle Emmet took Kerri every June to have her ends cut!”
(Meditating.) “Hmm. Yeah, that makes…no sense at all.”
(Manning the oars.) “It will in a minute. Even to you.”
—
The penguin called out once more, its squeak echoing through the hollow walls of Deboën Mansion.
“What if he’s hurt?” Kerri wondered.
“He may be hurt, but he’ll still come,” Andy said. “Besides, the wheezers fear him more than they fear us. I guess they respect teeth and claws more than guns.”
Kerri’s hair suddenly inched off the wall. She stepped away and stared back at the bricks behind her. Andy pointed a fresh glowstick toward it.
She heard it clearly. Something scratching behind the bricks.
And yet she couldn’t feel less afraid.
“Speak!” Kerri ordered.
The thing on the other side woofed.
“Out of the way,” Andy bid, wielding the pickax.
It took her only a couple of minutes to dig a hole large enough for Tim to scurry through into Kerri’s arms. A trifingered claw had carved a wound across his right flank, reaching from the ribcage to his hip. This was only the biggest of several over his whole body; blood trickled out of different spots where his fur had been bitten off. He was missing a large portion of his right ear. And he was sporting the proudest, bloodiest, happiest smile a dog could pull.
“Tim!” Kerri cried, trying to assess the damage as he clambered over and drooled on her, panting joyfully. “God, you’re so brave! You are the bravest, smartest, toughest son of a bitch in the family! (Kissing him back.) Yeah, you are! You’re such a good boy! Great, great boy!”
“Going back up this way is gonna be tricky,” Andy ventured, inspecting the inside of the wall. “We should keep digging our way into the next room.”
Tim scurried out of Kerri’s grasp for a second to catch the plastic penguin in his mouth and allowed her to praise him some more. The next battle could come along whenever it pleased.
—
The isle was deserted. The motorboat was still moored as expected, but Nate had lost the rope when he fell off the rowboat, so he beached the dingy watercraft on the shore where they had landed two days ago. The mud there now showed a bedlam of fresh, webbed footprints.
“Why are we here again?” Peter whispered.
“You don’t need to whisper, Pete, I’m the only one listening to you.”
He walked inland, but not toward the house, apparently asleep and nonchalant like it hadn’t just hosted a skirmish of three and a dog against the army of an underworld evil god. Instead, he knelt in the underbrush and searched for the patch of land where Tim had first detected the line of sulfur. The moonlight was kindly cooperating. He soon noticed the dead weeds signaling the presence of chemicals. The line stretched to the cancerous tree they had seen two days ago, the one with the first monogram and the nest with the tooth inside. Peter. In the other direction, it seemed to lead toward the old willow with the second monogram and the marble grave at its foot. Deboën. The third monogram they had discovered between those two, farther south, on a tree stump. The fourth was on the buoy. Kerri.
By that time he had reckoned there would be a fifth on one of the rocks off the west shore, between the cancerous tree and the buoy, but he didn’t need to take the boat again. He checked the stump first.
It had been a fir, taken down by lightning or wind decades ago. The trunk section remaining was some four feet tall, laureate with a crown of promising, tender green sprouts. Moss was blotching out half the red monogram. There were no cracks or folds in the bark big enough to hide any treasure.
Nate knelt down, delved his hands in the moist earth, and started digging.
He scratched solid rock pretty soon, but a familiar prickly sensation came first. He felt aware of both Peter and the moon around him holding their breaths as he unearthed a new spherical nest.
He unwrapped it, trying to make out the elongated, soft object that at first he failed to identify.
It helped when Peter yucked away; then he understood.
It was a used tampon.
“Mother—” (Stands up, facing the house.) “—fucker!”
“What?” Peter begged, at a loss.
“He played us, again!” Nate yelled, battling fear and anger and humiliation. “It wasn’t the pentacle in the attic that counted, the pentacle is the whole island! This is the pentacle!” he said, pointing at the monogram and the lines of sulfur that stretched across the fir-plagued landspit. “We formed the pentacle!” He showed the open nest in his hand. “He set us up!”
“Okay…” Peter began, sure to imply how little okay everything was. “But…I mean, how did he do it? He died in ’forty-nine; this stuff had to be laid before we came to the island and brought him back. Who collected all this trash in ’seventy-seven and put it here?”
Nate gazed up at the attic, then at the woods, around the spot where he’d landed from the second floor.
“Help me find my rifle and we’ll find out in a minute,” he grunted, his inner battle almost decided in favor of anger.
—
Andy kicked away the last of the crumbling brickwork and stepped over the debris into the thick, gossamer darkness, panting, ready to switch her pickax from tool mode to impaling device in a second. Tim followed, his bigger slash wound patched up with Kerri’s shirt wrapped around his body, proudly bearing a glowstick in his mouth.
“Clear,” she reported back at the dungeon.
Kerri crawled out, loaded rifle in hand, calling the torchbearer not to stray off. The new room was low, deep, yet broken into narrow corridors by shelves or racks ranked across. A twisted intuition told her it wasn’t wine bottles in those racks.
She stepped back, disturbing a rotten casket, and its contents rattled inside.
“Jesus. These are…”
“Catacombs,” Andy completed. And she watched Tim gleefully pacing by, oblivious to his neon-green halo panning over the sordid rows of stacked coffins piled together, bloated by dampness, cracked open, occasionally toppled onto each other, offering glimpses of leg bones jutting from under unfitting lids and skeletons poured onto their neighbors, smiling in embarrassment.
“But catacombs…how?” Andy reasoned. “The house was built by the Deboëns, and for all we know it was always one guy for a hundred years. Who are these people?”
“These are no catacombs,” Kerri answered. “It’s a warehouse. This is a necromancer’s storage room.”
She knelt down, with Tim dutifully approaching to assist her, torn cobwebs dangling from his nose. Small labels were glued to the niches and the caskets, handwritten. The first one she checked read “Hutchinson,” followed by a numerical reference. Another one read “S. Orne.” A third one read “Hyppachias.”
Andy located a candelabrum and scratched a match to light it, then remembered she had forgotten to check the oxygen levels. They seemed passable.
“So Nate was right,” she said. “Deboën stole these bodies from their burial sites, distilled the salts from them, raised the avatars from the salts, and tortured them for knowledge. And this is where he kept the bodies.”
“His personal library,” Kerri capped. “This is where the dead end up.”
Andy winced at the snap of two ideas clicking together like a fractured bone being set. “Where the dead end,” she revised.
S
he rummaged her pockets, fingers ignoring the ton of annoyingly useful things like ammunition and matches, until she touched the bundle of papers crumpled in the deepest strata of her inventory, then fished out and unfolded an almost forgotten piece of paper. Kerri fingersnapped for the light to approach.
“This is what we found on the dead guy in the mines.”
“Simon Jaffa. Who happened to be Mr. Wickley’s lawyer.”
“And who was carrying a fake ID from RH Corp.”
“And also this map, which looks hand-copied from the blueprints at the city hall. And look at the words here: ‘Deboën shaft,’ ‘Where,’ ‘Dead end.’ This is a single sentence. This room is where the dead end. This is a map to this room; Jaffa was trying to come here through the mines.”
“But what was he hoping to find?”
“ ‘Deboën Shaft Where Dead End. From W, S-5, E-2, bottom.’ ” She scoped out the area, then laid out a hand to Kerri. “Compass?”
Kerri pulled out her Colonel Mustard instrument, consulted it, needle wobbling giddily at first in a Did I hear some heavy action sequences earlier? fashion, and pointed west.
All three strode to that end of the room, then turned on their feet and clacked their heels.
“Now from here, south five,” Andy instructed.
They walked to the right, counting the gaps between the shelves, up to the fifth. Blind rats scuttled away from the torchbearer.
“East two.”
They walked to the second rack of coffins on the right.
“Bottom.”
They crouched and dragged an unbelievably heavy stone coffin into view. The label on its side came loose and fluttered to the floor. It read “Capt. D. Deboën, 1849.”
“That’s the year Deboën arrived in Blyton Hills,” Kerri recalled.
Andy pushed the lid off the casket, convinced that there was no skeleton to disturb. For one thing, bones couldn’t possibly be that heavy. Tim hovered the neon-green light over some neatly piled bricks. Then he checked with Andy, equally disappointed.
“Okay, that was anticlimactic,” she said.
“Not really,” Kerri pointed out, hovering the candelabrum over the coffin. Without the green tinge of the glowstick, the bricks showed their true color. “These are gold ingots.”
Andy picked one up. Her second hand came swiftly in assistance of the first, surprised at its density.
“These are…? How much is this worth?”
“What you’re holding in your hands right now?” Kerri said, fighting a chortle. “About the GDP per capita of Monaco.”
“What?! Holy shit!”
She went through her pockets again, excited, this time planning to do some rearrangements.
“I can carry one; can you carry another?”
“Are you for real?” Kerri smiled. “I thought we were here to stop an apocalypse.”
“Yeah, but shit, look!” She didn’t even need the lights; her smile was blazing, daring the dark. “We found pirate treasure! And it’s real! I mean, it’s not like that Redbeard’s plunder of stolen jewelry we found! This is the real thing!”
“Shh! Keep your voice down!” Kerri giggled.
“I know, but come on! Oh, shit! I told you! I told you this is the only thing I’m good at!” She shook her head, tried to curse the adrenaline out of her system. Tim attempted to fit one of the bars into his mouth, but it immediately proved too much for his jaw. “This is…”
She turned, searching for an adjective, but got distracted by the way Kerri was looking at her.
“It’s awesome,” she settled with.
“Yeah.”
TIM: (Gazes queryingly at the girls in a close shot for padding.)
“I really liked your postcards from Alaska,” Kerri said. “And the late-night calls.”
“Good,” Andy puffed, tossing the ingot back into the coffin. “I really wanted to write more; I just…I never knew how to say things. I can’t write to save my life.”
“They were very nice postcards.”
“Right. Well, I promise I’ll write you something better one day. A great love letter like—”
—
Floorboards squeaked once more as shoes stepped over the mangled dead creature at the foot of the stairs where the carpet lay coiled up in a gored mess. The haunted house foyer gazed down at the cloaked figure coming downstairs to inspect the collateral damage.
Nate and Peter, crouching in a dark spot behind a sofa, waited for him to step into the living room.
NATE: Shh.
PETER: (Surprised.) Why the fuck do you tell me to shh for, asshole?!
—
“Andy?” Kerri tipped her shoulder. “Andy, you just stopped in midsentence.”
Andy blinked back to reality. She checked Kerri’s legs. “You were wearing those pants yesterday.”
“Uh…yeah. I only brought two pairs, and I’ve kinda outgrown my old bell-bottoms.”
“Peter’s love letter. You put it in your back pocket yesterday when Nate barged in on us.”
Kerri frowned, checked her derriere. “Damn. It must be all crumpled.”
“Show me,” Andy ordered, while she checked her own pockets once more.
—
PETER: Brilliant plan, Nate.
Nate gripped his rifle, ears ignoring the voice beside him and waiting for incoming footsteps, knees ready to catapult him out into the light at the right moment.
PETER: I mean, yeah, let’s just shoot the guy. He’s lived for like a hundred and fifty years, but surely no one thought of this before.
Floorboards sulkily greeted the host into the living room. Nate risked leaning out and taking a peek.
The cloaked figure stood by the phonograph, inspecting the lounge area where the kids had been chilling out. The candles were still burning, the area unscathed from the battle.
Nate observed him bending near the sofa and picking up a book. The Vampire Sorority series.
The necromancer flipped it open, his impressions mercifully concealed.
Nate jumped in frame and pointed the rifle at him.
“Freeze!”
The figure obeyed. In fact, he didn’t even bother to flinch. He just stood still, book in hand, awaiting further orders.
Nate was standing five feet from him. Good thing, because he wouldn’t miss the shot, regardless of how spectacularly the gun was trembling in his hands.
“Take off your hood!” he ordered, not caring about sounding scared. It felt good. He felt scarier when scared. “Show your face!”
The villain dropped the book and slowly turned to face him. Nate gritted his teeth, trying to make out the visage under the cloak.
—
“What’s wrong?”
“I just have a bad feeling,” Andy explained, laying the letter on the floor, and then, on the right side, flattening the last thing she’d fished out of her pockets.
Kerri leaned closer, and so did Tim.
—
“Hood!” Nate cried, the tip of his weapon inches away from the necromancer’s head.
The necromancer raised his hands, letting Nate notice his big, bone-white fingers, and grabbed the rim of his hood.
—
The neon-green light in Tim’s mouth adumbrated the long, beautifully penned letter headed by the words “Dear Kerri” on one side and the short missive “Good-bye” on the other.
Andy was about to ask, “Do you see any similarities?” but she needed only to read the transformation in Kerri’s eyes.
—
All the Dixie cup skin, Sahara lips, Titanic eyes, despair look in the world could not begin to masquerade his face. Peter Manner, 26 (24 of which alive), his tall, powerful frame clad in shapeless black, stares back at Nate from the wrong end of an assault rifle.
Nate’s hands stopped trembling. His muscles stopped aching. His mind stopped working.
All he could do was turn to his right for an answer.
And his own Peter—the one with perfect hair, i
n a letter jacket and jeans, standing right next to him, seemingly as amazed as he was—simply stood jaw-dropped for a minute and then acknowledged:
“Okay, this is awkward.”
Andy pickaxed the lock off the necrotheque door. It didn’t resist.
She checked Tim for approval: he seemed perfectly ready to leave their stronghold. She pushed the door, and the dog, glowstick in mouth, beaconed the way along an arched gallery.
“It can’t be,” Kerri objected, joining her as she stepped into the new tunnel, which curved off constantly to the right and climbed a step upward every few yards. “It can’t be him, Andy; Peter is dead.”
“Really? How do you know?”
“Because I know. Fuck, everybody knows; it was on the news!”
“Teen sleuths unmasking the Sleepy Lake creature was in the news too,” she mumbled resentfully, hurrying up the steps with the candelabrum in hand, like a distressed countess from a Walpole novel.
“But he died! He overdosed in his house in Hollywood; he was buried in L.A.”
“And you were at the funeral?” Andy challenged her.
“No, but…Christ, he was a celebrity! It’s like discussing whether Elvis is dead!”
“I’m beginning to question that too,” she said as they walked into the glowstick’s light-pool again. Tim was waiting for them to open the next closed door. Andy raised her pickax, then hesitated and tried the handle.
Tim led the troops in once more, highlighting the terra incognita. The chamber he mapped was circular, without any furniture. Candle stubs were wax-welded to the rock floor, arranged in a circle and connected by broken lines of bright red. Andy checked the candlewicks: cold as fossils.
“This kind of scene is getting old,” she said, crossing the room for the next door ahead. “Don’t waste your time—I doubt we’ll work out the details of a death in Hollywood while trapped under a house on an isle in a lake in Oregon.”
The next cave seemed to be drilled through solid rock. There was no masonry or beams; the door they had stepped through was the only man-made feature in the long gallery, which extended both to the left and right. Tim unilaterally chose the path to the right, which incidentally went uphill. Andy just shrugged and followed.
Meddling Kids Page 27