Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  “For the record, I think you’re right,” she told Kerri. “Peter is dead. But that doesn’t change anything.”

  “What do you mean?” Kerri panted behind her.

  “Well, we’ve learned there are gray areas between life and death. Maybe it isn’t Peter writing the notes. It could be an avatar.”

  The cavern seemed to follow a symbolically spiraling path. Water dripped from invisible crannies. Thick, bulbous tree roots now poked through and slithered down the walls.

  The final stretch of the slope met the ceiling. The stone above was suspiciously flat.

  “I think I know where we are,” Andy said.

  “Who would raise Peter’s avatar, and why?” Kerri insisted, watching Andy trace the edges of the slab above them. “Deboën wants us dead; why would he go and resurrect the one of us who died?”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Andy said, pausing for a second before going on to inspect the carved rock columns that seemed to support the ceiling. “Unless it’s Deboën’s avatar using Peter’s body.” The candlelight was now outlining the links of a heavy chain and gears fixed to the rock. “Maybe that’s what happens if we die—the part of Deboën inside us would take control.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Kerri said, defeated. “It’s magic, so who cares how it works.”

  (Touching every part of the mechanics.) “Gee, Kerri, I wish this were closer to your area of expertise too, but we’re fighting lake creatures and a necromancer, so common science is not going to help us much and how the fuck does this secret door open?!”

  Kerri snatched the pickax from Andy and struck a brick jutting out from under a column in a corner. The brick smashed to dust, the column descended, gears rattled, and the marble slab above them slid back before Andy’s eyes.

  Kerri pointed at the different pieces of the puzzle.

  “Door, rails, cogs, counterweight, wedge. (Embracing all with a gesture.) Physics.”

  ANDY: (Smirking, foolproven.) You enjoy this, don’t you?

  KERRI: Being trapped with you in dark miserable caves? I can think of worse things.

  —

  They climbed out of Deboën’s grave to cold, clean air inside the vault of the willow tree.

  Andy pushed aside the curtain of drooping branches and met a full moon and gentle rain. Kerri took the glowstick from Tim before allowing him to explore the isle again.

  “Okay, so this answers the question of how they sneak in and out of the house with the front door chained,” Kerri explained, glancing at the open tomb and the spiral cavern they had just ascended. “I bet you the other end of this cave flows into the basement. Or even the mines.”

  Andy shushed her, then pointed up. The mansion slept peacefully, a round cat eye shining yellow atop.

  “He’s still bunkered up there,” Andy said, glaring at the attic window, and then she checked herself. She had lost much of her gear, considerable ammo, one man of the team, their two-way radio (which Nate happened to carry), and about 40 percent off her health bar, judging by the bleeding cuts all over her arms. And she was back at square one, standing in front of the mansion, armed with a shotgun and a pickax.

  An icy lake breeze took the opportunity to remind her she’d also lost her jacket somewhere during the skirmish, raising goose bumps on her neck.

  “Okay, look…uh…maybe…”

  She had no trouble finding the words—they weren’t difficult ones. It was just that they caused her physical pain to utter.

  “Maybe…we should just wait for someone else to take care of this. I…I mean, we barely got out of there alive, and we’re right back where we started. (Checks her Coca-Cola watch.) Copperseed and Joey must’ve evacked the town by now. Maybe Al and the cavalry are on their way. We can just take the motorboat, find Nate, and wait on the mainland. Right?” Her own ears couldn’t believe what her mouth was babbling. “I mean…it’s not our fight. We’re just a summer detective club. Let’s go home.”

  Kerri, rain-freckled, replied, “I don’t think that’s an option anymore.”

  Andy followed her line of sight to the nearest shore. For a second she feared (and felt her heart clenching, anticipating the blow) that Joey’s motorboat would be gone. It was still there. But not far from it, the rowboat was beached there too. The rowboat Nate was supposed to have escaped in.

  Tim came back from reconnaissance, looked expectantly at the team leader.

  “Nate’s inside,” Andy muttered.

  All three gazed up at the house, black and huge and pointy like the back of a sleeping dragon.

  ANDY: Okay, listen, new plan. We go in, bust the attic door, take Nate—

  KERRI: That’s exactly what he’s expecting us to do, and we can’t be sure that Nate’s up there anyway.

  ANDY: Right. Okay, so we cut his oxygen supply. We connect the duct pipes there to the motorboat’s exhaust and we gas the fucker!

  KERRI: Not enough pipe, and if Nate is in there, we just killed him.

  ANDY: Right. What if we lure him out and set a trap like last time? We build a Lake Creature Phony Express!

  KERRI: You expect a hundred-fifty-year-old necromancer to pull open a fake door in his own house, roll down two flights of stairs on a serving cart, and land in a fishing net? Also, no cart and no net.

  ANDY: True. (Thinks, then to Tim.) Feel free to jump in any time.

  TIM: (Tilts his head, resenting the pressure.)

  ANDY: Okay, wait, I got it. We go in the way Tim came to us in the dungeon—inside the walls. We can just follow the duct pipes to the attic and reassess. If Nate’s there, we rescue him; if the necromancer is, we catch him by surprise.

  Kerri figuratively sat on it for a minute.

  ANDY: I don’t need to hear it’s a good plan, just tell me it ain’t the worst thing you heard me say.

  KERRI: Actually, “ain’t” is the worst thing I heard you say.

  ANDY: Good enough. But first, let’s plan our escape route. And we need to pack.

  —

  The packing bit was arduous but relatively quick: it involved taking a gold ingot each and hiding it inside the glove compartment in Joey’s motorboat. Andy decided to take a second one, for Nate’s sake, and then Kerri pushed herself to carry two as well, for Tim’s. In the end, they had carried up the spiral cavern about 1,800 ounces, but as Andy put it, any man could carry that.

  They inventoried their equipment next. Considerable ammo had vanished along with Andy’s jacket. She kept a pocketful of loose matches, a couple glowsticks, a dozen shells, Uncle Emmet’s shotgun, a plastic penguin, and Pierce. Pierce was the name she had just given to the pickax, the tool-slash-accessory-slash–slasher weapon that had become her dearest item in their arsenal. Kerri carried her assault rifle and her knife. Tim held a dying glowstick and looked fairly concerned about the amount of wound-licking he had pending.

  After that, they charted out the rest of the underground tunnel system, going back through Deboën’s grave and following the rest of the spiral cavern, past the door to the circular chamber and the necrotheque. As expected, it ended at another door opening into the lower basement, next to the hatch through which they had emerged from the mines the previous afternoon. The bookcases they had dumped over the hatch had been bashed away from the inside. Tim, chest wrapped in Kerri’s blood-smeared checkered shirt, inspected the area and seemed to corroborate that wheezers had surged up that way, and retreated down later.

  From that point, Kerri had no trouble finding their way back upstairs, as they did before. Some sixty seconds later, the three of them resurfaced through the door under the main stairs, inside Deboën Mansion.

  The house, at that point, shuddered lightly—not an earthquake so much as a passing subway, a slow double-bass note that hardly rocked the frames on the wall. Tim raised his one whole ear and let go a most embarrassed whine.

  “I missed you too,” Andy told the mansion when the tremor subsided.

  From there on, Kerri had to tut Tim away from the decomposing carcass
es, starting with the pair at the foot of the stairs. The smell, as they stealth-walked up to the second floor, was something not even the language of the mole people under Manhattan would have words for.

  The ruinscape in the corridor upstairs was worthy of post-Godzilla Tokyo. By then, even Tim avoided lowering his snout as they squelched through the trapdoor room and into the oxygen tank storage. The battlefield there was literally flooded in a quarter inch of black jelly, polka-dotted with islands of scaly bodies shining like rotten fish under the moonlight.

  Go dark now, Andy mimed to the team, switching off her flashlight. Kerri nodded and clutched her rifle firmly. Tim led the way toward one of the gaping holes and into the narrow passageway between the walls.

  Even he had trouble negotiating the corners; the girls were forced to sidestep. They didn’t take any wrong turns before Tim spotted the flex-duct conducting the oxygen that was to be their white rabbit. They encountered further challenges climbing up to the third floor, especially with Tim, but the Weimaraner didn’t even whimper when Andy had to pull him up by the collar. Even the dog had a gut feeling that some very old open business was about to be closed.

  Around the final corner, some light sifted through a few accidental peepholes in the woodwork. Kerri was surprised to realize it was electric light. Which, together with a new, peculiar smell in the air, made her raise a suspicious eyebrow.

  “I can see Nate,” Andy whispered.

  The sound of footsteps hushed them down. Slow, heavy, alert footsteps.

  Kerri needed only to touch an atom on Tim’s head to make him repress a growl. Andy peeked through the smallest woodworm hole in the wall.

  A cloaked figure was roaming around the attic. He had stopped idly by the alchemist workbench, gazing over the pots and urns out the southward window, where night was inappreciably beginning to dissipate: a teaspoon of predawn dissolved in a black ocean.

  He walked another three steps to his left and fronted Nate. Their faces were obscured; Andy could make out that Nate was standing against a wooden beam and he neither moved nor uttered a sound. The necromancer had his hood up. He contemplated Nate, hands behind his back, with the curiosity of a visitor in a museum.

  He then turned around and looked at her.

  He stayed in that spot, for almost a minute, contemplating the blank wall in front of him like it was a mural.

  He walked closer, examining a detail, stopping one step short of the woodwork.

  He raised an inquisitive hand.

  He breathed out.

  He staggered back as Andy crashed through the wall, pickax in her left hand, shotgun in her right, a Mongolian city-raider cry out of her mouth summoning her redheaded and gray-furred sidekicks to battle. The entrance was so spectacularly off the Rodriguez scale, the necromancer literally fell on his ass.

  When he started to rise, his hood cast back, the face beneath made the space-time continuum glitch.

  Kerri lowered or dropped her gun, stunned, her heart dried up and crumbling to ashes at the sight of the lunar pallor, the Death Valley skin, the absolute surrender in Peter Manner’s eyes.

  “Oh my God.”

  Andy had barely a tenth of a second to acknowledge Nate in the middle of the room, comprehending he was not standing against a beam, but tied to it and gagged.

  Then time resumed and Peter, disrespecting the dramatic pause he had conjured himself, sprang forward and slapped the shotgun barrel away from his face. Andy swung the shotgun back at him, but Peter hit her arm and she lost her grip on the weapon.

  Kerri could do nothing but watch as Tim barked himself sore and Andy and Peter engaged in hand-to-hand combat, his hands vipering to clutch her wrists, her arms fending off six hits a second before she remembered her other limbs and kicked Peter’s knee, snapping the bone and gaining a microwindow to grip the pickax and try to drive it into the enemy’s heart.

  KERRI: No, Andy, NO!!

  On his knees, Peter raised his arms, caught her wrists and twisted them sharply, and Andy spun in the air and landed on her feet and took Peter for a spin to the floor and rose a second before he did. She juggled the pickax to her left hand and stepped on his thigh and swung it in an uppercut, and Peter blocked her left with his right and his left on the handle, stopping the point of the pickax an inch from his liver.

  And the next second had them still locked in that position, forces equal, contenders’ arms trembling under the torque in their muscles.

  “Andy, stop!” Kerri begged, barely keeping Tim from jumping onto the cloaked man and tearing him apart. “It’s him! It’s Peter!”

  ANDY: Peter died in Hollywood! He wouldn’t be doing this!

  KERRI: Andy, don’t kill him!

  Peter’s eyes shifted to Kerri. Despite the strenuous tension and the gritted teeth, despite putting everything he had into that fight, his countenance had been that of total defeat from the very beginning.

  KERRI: Peter, what did you want to tell me on the phone?

  ANDY: Kerri, it’s not him!

  KERRI: Pete, tell me, please!

  ANDY: I gotta kill him!

  KERRI: Don’t kill him!!

  Tim was barking beyond his pain threshold. Andy sought the tiebreak vote.

  ANDY: Nate!

  NATE: (Muffled shout.)

  ANDY: Do I kill him or not?!

  KERRI: No! Pete, what did you wanna tell me on the phone?!

  ANDY: Nate! One stomp he lives, two stomps he dies!

  KERRI: Pete, speak! Say something!

  Peter, with all of his strength channeled to deadlock Andy’s, but his hazel eyes anchored to Kerri’s, mouthed only two words.

  Nate stomped the floor once.

  I’m. Sorry.

  And twice.

  Then Andy headbutted Peter, kicked his arm out of the way, and embedded Pierce under his sternum.

  The body entangled in black robes fell to the floor, on the faded lines of the ancient pentacle.

  Kerri covered her mouth to block a sob so brutal it would have destroyed her throat on its way out.

  Andy exhaled, and so much of her was lost in that breath that her legs quivered and she fell to the floor and her left hand dropped the pickax and her eyes burned with the pain of what she had done.

  Tim, the only one trying to understand what had actually happened, trotted out to sniff the body.

  A minute of silence was cut short by Nate’s muffled screams.

  Andy tried to pull herself up and failed. She tried again, tears blurring at the sight of Peter Manner dead on the floor. She staggered across the room and tore the gag off Nate’s mouth.

  Nate gulped in some air and returned it with his first words: “It wasn’t him.”

  Andy was just realizing they had overlooked something big when Tim, his nose to the floor, homed in on the cupboard. The cupboard opened. Tim looked up and wagged his tail.

  Dunia stepped out and stroked the dog’s bloodied head, a curved sword in her other hand and the most peaceful expression on her face.

  She scoped the room, checking the body on the floor, then Andy, then Kerri, then Nate, and she shrugged.

  “Well. I won’t say everything went exactly as I planned, but…close enough.”

  “Who are you?” Kerri asked.

  “Dunia Morris?!” Andy answered.

  “Oh, Deboën’s fine,” Dunia dismissed with a wave. “Whatever.”

  “It was her!” Nate shouted from his corner, still tied to the beam, red with anger and possibly near-suffocation, but mostly anger at the woman strutting around the room. “She brought us here! She needed us to come!”

  “Yup. Guilty,” she said, resting gracefully on the workbench.

  “We are the pentacle! Not this one, the whole island—the four of us and her, we made the pentacle! She took our blood signatures thirteen years ago! The tooth was Peter’s,” he told Kerri. “And she had your hair too, from the barbershop! And Andy’s blood! And I haven’t been to the rocks, but I bet there’s something of m
ine too!”

  “Used gum and saliva,” Dunia clarified. “Good thing you’re good little campers and dispose of your trash properly. Mother Earth thanks you.”

  “But…What did she…Fuck, why?” Andy settled on.

  Dunia drew her cigarette case from her leather pants, opened it, and produced a cherry lollipop. She put it in her mouth and shrugged coquettishly, grin-biting the stick.

  “Because the ritual requires five,” Nate narrated for her. “Like the glyphs at the bottom of the mines said: five priests to open the gate and release Thtaggoa. Only we weren’t priests. She just stole samples from the four of us to form the pentacle and then she lured us to the isle! We weren’t meddling kids; we were pawns. She probably caused the tremor that made our boat capsize, so we would be trapped here and be part of the ritual without us knowing.”

  Dunia leisurely paced the room, entertained by his rancor.

  “You were bound to come,” she said. “How could Blyton Hills’ teen sleuths fail to visit the local haunted house?”

  “And she would’ve gotten away with it,” Nate resumed, “if I hadn’t resurrected her father by mistake!”

  Dunia stopped on her feet, wincing like the record had scratched.

  “What?”

  She eyed the gang as if trying to identify the smart one and despairing.

  “God, okay. Sorry. My fault. Sometimes I forget I’m dealing with the Blyton Summer Detective Club, not the FBI.”

  “I read your spell book,” Nate told her. “I raised his avatar and it used us!”

  “No, you didn’t,” Dunia said with a scowl, at the same time that Tim began growling at the door.

  “I did! I resurrected Deboën,” Nate cried.

  “Deboën wasn’t dead!” she snarled. “I am Damian Deboën!”

  Tim burst into riotous barks, oblivious to the mainstream focus of attention—the little owl-eyed woman parading among them.

  “You…what?!” Kerri half-phrased.

  “That’s impossible,” moaned Nate. “I brought Deboën back!”

  “Please,” Dunia droned. “Avatars and resurrection—not the same thing. Resurrection is impossible. Believe me. (Pointing at Peter’s corpse wrapped in black on the floor.) That’s the closest I ever got, and he was little more than a puppet.”