NATE: But I saw your book. I read the spell!
DUNIA: Don’t flatter yourself. You read my notes.
NATE: I saw smoke rising from an urn on that bench!
DUNIA: Said the kids who spent their childhood running from losers in costumes.
NATE: We have all the symptoms you listed: the nightmares, the bitterness, the feeling of being lost!
DUNIA: I just described any twenty-five-year-old ever, you self-centered twit! (Gracefully turning, leaving Nate to shatter behind her back.) I’m afraid the only evil that possessed you was Generation X. It’s a shame, really, what youth has come to. When I was your age…(Pause. She pops the candy out of her mouth, tastes her own lips, then retreats.) Bah, forget it. You wouldn’t even believe where I was when I was your age.”
She drifted toward Andy, stroking the Weimaraner’s back en passant. He was still growling threats at the door. And the worse part was something was threatening back from the other side.
Nate, Kerri, and Andy stood wordless. Night was falling apart.
“The world has changed a lot,” Dunia went on through a deep sigh. “But people are the same. A few keep pulling the wagon of progress while the rest just truck along. Always the same ignorant, pitchfork-wielding mob. Easily scared. Easily cheated. They started growing suspicious once, so I chose to leave and come back as my son. Oh, nothing noteworthy—it’s been done before. But two decades later, they start harboring suspicions again—you’d almost think they’re getting wiser. So I try the same trick with a flourish: I die and come back as my daughter, and voilà! Cheated again! They don’t even know how easily you can do the switch today!”
She stopped in front of Andy, scanned her from bottom to top.
“You might be interested—ask your doctor.”
Andy unexpectedly brought the shotgun between them, hardly restraining her trigger finger.
“I’m gonna give you something to ask your doctor about, bitch.”
KERRI: NO! Andy, don’t shoot!
Dunia put the lollipop back in her mouth and smiled, watching Andy scourging her brain for a valid reason not to open fire.
“Oxygen,” Kerri cued. “The air in this room is saturated with oxygen. If you light a spark it could blow up.”
Dunia yielded to a chortle.
ANDY: You’re kidding.
KERRI: No. Oxygen is flammable. We can’t shoot in here.
The chortle paved the way to frank, disrespectful laughter.
“Weee! Look how everything falls into place!” Dunia said, delighted at the infinite hatred under Andy’s brow. “C’mon, you gotta see the humor in this!”
On a side note, the door came off its hinges and slammed on the floor.
Andy immediately switched targets and Kerri ran to pull Tim out of the horde’s reach at the sight of an imprecise number of wheezers staggering in from the staircase.
But to everyone’s surprise, they stopped. The lead one dropped onto four limbs right outside the doorway, its third pair writhing in the air like the forearms of a praying mantis. It hissed at Tim, the dog barking his heart out in hard-learned hate.
“There they are.” Dunia smirked, swaying with her pirate cutlass. She walked idly toward the door as if to greet them, and the first one took a step forward and shrieked at her. Dunia looked on like she would at a yapping poodle.
“Interesting vermin, aren’t they?” she remarked. “They’ll try to eat you, but they don’t actually need to eat. In fact, they don’t even need to breathe. They’ve got these gas bladders or something they can fill with air and waltz in here. You’ll see; they’ll come in in a minute. (To Kerri.) You should write a paper on them.”
Kerri was busy enough holding Tim back, just as Tim was holding the most daring of the creatures at bay.
“The first time I tried the ritual, in nineteen forty-nine,” Dunia once-upon-a-timed, back to her easy-minded ambling, “I was young and reckless. I’d just found the way to the underground city after searching for it for like a hundred years; I had performed the proper steps down there, knocked on the door like the book says; everything was ready to wake up that sleepyhead from his millennial slumber. I knew the ritual called for five officiants, but I reckoned a well-versed expert like myself would be worth five amateurs, so I thought I could pull it off by myself.” She scoffed, inviting some sympathy. “Boy, was I wrong! I failed to wake the big one up, but these pesky little buggers took over the house and nearly smothered me.”
The amphibian section of her audience raised a liquid hiss at the mention.
“I lived, all right, but they’d almost destroyed my house; I would have to face some tough questions and it wasn’t like I had many allies in town. So I decided it was time to change generations again and faked my own death in the fire.”
“But they buried you,” Kerri objected.
“They buried some charred corpse,” Dunia brushed off. “If you nosed about my basement, you’ll have perceived human samples is not something we suffer a scarcity of in this house. I had left the instructions in my will and dug my grave in advance. You’ve been inside; all I did was seal the entrance into the caverns: they dumped the body, threw a marble slab over it, and moved on—hurtfully swiftly, I must say. But whatever; dying is easy. The tricky part was to return as my daughter.”
“You…killed your own daughter?” Andy asked.
Dunia stopped again in front of her and gave a disappointed moue.
“No,” Kerri second-guessed. “You never had a daughter.”
“Thank you,” Dunia approved. “It was all a strategy to solve my image problem in town when I first became Daniel. My wife was a concession, and my daughter was a ruse.”
“But someone must have seen the child,” Nate complained.
“Oh, of course they saw an infant. My wife’s daughter born out of wedlock, her oh-so-shameful scarlet letter. But hey, I had no trouble calling her mine! I pretended to mail her off to a boarding school as if she were my own blood! Luckily she actually died in infancy—those places are expensive.”
“You supplanted a teenager?” Kerri asked, trying to navigate through all the other objections arising.
“Yes. I mean, you’re what? Twenty-five? You could still look twenty-one with the right makeup. Considering my real age, taking thirty years off your skin is basic magic. So, yes: new gender, new age…People still detested the family name, but I needed my claim on my old property. Luckily, my gutless wife/mother had offed herself already. I had to live in the house on Owl Hill and the townsfolk were as friendly as ever, but at least they stayed away from here. And I could come and go as I pleased through the gold mine. So I just had to sit and find a way to circumvent that stupid five-officiant thing. And then in ’seventy-seven, because I’d been such a good girl for so many years, you came along”—she grinned, spreading her arms to kindly embrace them all—“the Blyton Summer Detective Club.”
Andy awkwardly acknowledged the reference as she finally untied Nate, side-eyeing the creatures that were gathering inside the doorway.
“Use the gun,” she told Nate, giving him his rifle and switching to Pierce herself. “Just don’t fire it.”
“ ‘Blyton Hills’ heroes’!” Dunia quoted happily. “When you started building a name for yourselves, I knew you’d eventually visit my mansion. All I needed to do was start a rumor in the right circles. Rumors lure gold diggers like Wickley, and Wickley lured you. As soon as you arrived that summer I started arranging things. I got the jock’s tooth from the dental clinic, your pretty red hair from the barbershop. (Re: Andy and Nate.) You two were a little more difficult, until you came to the lake and I swept your campsite while you were away. That was enough to build the isle-wide pentacle. All I had to do now was wait for you all to enter into it, which you did some days later…although I rocked your boat a little to persuade you.”
“And so we became the other four officiants,” Nate summed up, his knuckles white around a rifle gripped like a baseball bat.
Andy swung the pickax at a skulking wheezer, making it recoil and sneer at her in a vicious teeth display.
“Wait, so…you were here in the mansion that night?” Kerri asked Dunia.
“Of course. I’ve got my safe room underground; maybe you’ve seen it. Oh, I didn’t mean to harm you, really! It just happens that as soon as you go through the first motions in the ritual, Thtaggoa stirs in his sleep, the ground shakes, and these buffed-up gremlins crawl up and go all Night of the Living Dead on your posterior. So while you lot were yelling and running all over my house, and incidentally causing a hell of a mess, I was down there going through the ritual, and I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for that meddling kid Thomas Wickley!”
Andy and Kerri and Nate turned at the name, ignoring the knife-clawed needle-teethed hordes of hell.
“Who?!”
“Yes!” she said, feeling her indignation supported. “Can you believe it? That sad old jerk-off finally found the way to my treasury and walked right into the ritual while I was in the middle of the aklo—the most glorious moment! Of course he got scared—I’ve been told before I’m on the theatrical side when I summon. So he ran away upstairs and fell right into that Wile E. Coyote contraption you call a trap, but by then he had led the vermin to my safe room, and I had to escape through the mine, thus stepping out of the pentacle, and…Basically that asshole ruined everything!”
A wheezer chose that exact moment to step forward and hiss in a particularly nasty way at the hostess, to which Dunia responded by swinging her sword at the provoker and decapitating it as cleanly as such a thing can be done. The severed head rolled to Kerri’s feet, who instinctively kicked it away.
The headless body was still writhing on the floor as Dunia continued, now pointing the black-stained blade at the kids. “You’d think I could just start again, but noooo! Turns out once the ritual has started, it can only be finished or undone by the same five officiants! (Falsetto.) ‘Ooh, look at me, I’m the Necronomicon, you must follow my rules!’ ” she mocked. “And by the time the creatures wormed back into their holes, your army friend and the sheriff were poking around on the isle, reporters were knocking on my door in Owl Hill, and soon after that summer was over. You kids left and didn’t come back.”
The next line she delivered in a serious, almost sympathetic smirk—the closest thing to respect the kids would get from her.
“Oh, but I knew you would come back. You’d seen too much to just turn your back on it. You couldn’t just smile it off and pretend forever. You were broken. You had to come back.”
Her eyes strayed for a moment to the dead human body on the floor.
“Of course I began to worry when this one killed himself, so I went to California and got him. I pulled him out of the grave. Did my best to make him pass for living. Fortunately, his death was the triggering event that set the rest of you in motion. Now, you are all here. I had him posing as the villain just to keep you off my back. He wrote the messages; I dictated them. Maybe I misjudged you there; you would have obeyed the messages like idiots thirteen years ago; not now. But whatever. You’re here now. All four of you.”
She saber-pointed at Nate, a wicked smile on her white face. “You scampered off a little too early.” Then, at the girls: “Oh, but don’t be hard on him. He came back. He tampered a little with my pentacle too, so I had Dead Pete apprehend him and fix the damage. All systems are go!”
Kerri, munching through the lengthy villain monologue, was only left to ask: “But…why? Why do you want some alien god to rise and end the world?”
Dunia paused, surprised, and carefully observed the question.
“Oh. Well, I don’t know. Same reason you want to open a frog or split an atom. I just…(Shrugging.) Fuck, I just want to see it!”
She paced around them once more, intimately proud of the unskimped attention.
“There’s not that many things I’ve got left to see in this world, you know? Shit, when you’re writing fantasy erotica for a living, you’re really scraping the bottom of the bucket list!”
“Well,” Andy intervened, stepping forward, “let me help you put an end to your boredom.”
In a lightning-fast movement she drove the pickax right at Dunia’s neck, stopping it just short of puncturing the jugular. Dunia stood still, the cold steel point perched on her shoulder like a skeleton sparrow.
“For thirteen years I’ve been hiding from this,” Andy uttered through gritted teeth, an opportune slash of hair darkening her face. “For thirteen years you haunted me. You ruined the better half of my life. But that’s over. I’m going to beat you. I’m going to feed you to these goddamn things. And I’m going to see you dead once and for all before you have time to complete the fucking ritual.”
Even the bad guys fell silent.
Dunia stayed in position, head held high, neck tendons inching away from the sharp instrument pointed at them, mouth closed tight, struggling to placate a mischievous smile.
ANDY: (Understanding.) You finished it already, didn’t you?
DUNIA: (Giving up, chuckling.) Please! Why would I even be telling you all this otherwise?
A wheezer ruled that enough time had been wasted on uneventful dialogue and charged at Andy from behind. A shout from Kerri warned her to spin and duck, dodging an eviscerating slash, and then she blocked the other claw with her left as she dug her knee on the floor and struck upward with the pickax, nailing the point through the creature’s chin and into the palate.
Two more jumped into the ring, Tim immediately catching one in midair and pounding it to the floor, Nate delaying the second’s attack by batting its head with a Browning nine iron while Kerri jumped to the forefront to fend off the hissing peanut gallery still sitting it out and Andy rolled back onto her feet, struggled to yank the pickax out of the dead creature, finally pried it out, along with its head, just in time to swing at a fourth one coming out of nowhere.
The wheezer took the hit, staggered for a second, unharmed from the torn-off head corking the point of the tool, then shrieked into Andy’s face. It was its last action before Kerri and Nate clubbed it at the same time, Tim going for its legs a second later to keep it occupied while Andy stepped on its shoulders, gripped the edges of its lower upper jaw, and twisted its neck.
“Whoa, look at that!” Dunia cheered, along with the rest of the wheezers still waiting by the door. “See? I told you they would get used to the atmosphere in no time! They can hold their breath long enough to disembowel you!”
“We need to get out of here!” Kerri urgently suggested.
“Good luck with that,” Dunia intervened, inviting the kids to peer through the circular windows.
The night had dissolved into white. An Endeish Nothing had erased the lake and the firs and the sky.
“How long can you hold your breath?” Dunia challenged them. “Long enough to reach your car from here?”
“But you will die here too,” Andy told her spitefully.
“Me? I already survived this situation once.”
“I wasn’t talking about the situation, bitch!” she retorted, as she swung the uncapped pickax at her face and Dunia leaped back, amused by the surprise attack. She raised her saber to block the pickax’s comeback, tried to yank it from Andy’s hand, failed, and then took advantage of her rival’s weapon’s unwieldy shortness to hack at her arm. Andy pulled back an inch shy of amputation, the pirate blade missing the bone and slashing cleanly through skin and muscle.
Andy threw out a cry of pain, and in the next breath she retaliated by jumping forward, swinging back vertically then horizontally one, two, three times, forcing Dunia to bend backward and spread her legs for balance, and then, suddenly channeling all of her pain-born energy into her right foot, Andy launched th
e Tsar Bomba of nutkicks into Dunia’s leather-wrapped groin.
The hit lifted Dunia two feet off the ground.
She landed on all fours, saber still in hand, eyes wide open at the shock, then wider once the pain hit her neuroreceptors.
The room held its breath for a long while, all through that unconfirmed knockout, even after Dunia coughed out her surprise.
And then she scoffed.
“Aw, fffuck!” she puffed through an astonished, astonishing laughter, her hand still shielding the offended area. “God, that was literally below the belt, you stupid cow! What the fuck was that about?!”
The kids remained silent while she caught her breath. Then they turned to Andy for the reply.
“Uh…I was hoping you’d still have your birth genitals.”
Dunia laughed again while she brought herself back on her feet, color flushing back to her cheeks.
“Girl, you’re so adorable,” she said, having more difficulty speaking due to hilarity than fatigue or pain. “I do keep them. Remember the rumor about me being the son of a witch that was supposedly burned at Salem?”
She burst into laughter while the kids queried one another, the realization etching a new age line around their eyes.
“I told you it’s been done before!” she hollered. “Boy, you should see your faces! Gets you every time!”
She laughed for another two seconds before Andy charged at her and she had to parry her off, then lunge back.
Andy stepped back to defend, at the same time checking her six o’clock to find several wheezers ready to jump in, and she rolled out of the way of the first one to let Dunia deal with it while she started to dig for gold on the second and Nate swung his rifle at the third and Kerri lost her rifle to the fourth and Tim dashed to her assistance while the rifle slid across the floor into Andy’s hand, who stood up, flipped it in the air, butt-bashed the wheezer ahead and barrel-stabbed the one behind, and threw the firearm back to Kerri, shouting, “Catch!”
A new throng of slimy, eyeless maniacs avalanched onto the battlefield as Andy gripped Pierce, dove to the ground with a hand anchored on some writhing creature’s face, and merry-go-rounded, slashing wheezers at three o’clock, twelve o’clock, nine o’clock, and finally Dunia at six, who blocked the pickax with her blade down, smiling with joy at the sight of an actual spark from the clashing metal that Andy and Dunia paused to follow throughout its microseconds life span, witnessing how it failed to set the room on fire, and then forgot about it as they engaged again, Andy striking blindly with Pierce, trying to knock Dunia off-balance, Dunia repelling the hits coming faster and faster and hoping for the gliding steel to trigger a new spark until she got tired of waiting and connected a surprise kick at Andy’s nose, time dropping to slo-mo to appreciate the beautifully arcing wake of blood as she backflipped, then speeding up again as Nate dented the butt of his rifle against Dunia’s face and took the opportunity to swing it back at the wheezer charging from behind, and in the same circular motion try to finish off Dunia by hammering the base of her neck, a blow Dunia dodged by rolling away and then using her sword to attempt a twirling moulinet counterattack to the heart that Nate’s ribs barely shielded, forcing him to trip backward over a dead wheezer and allow the actually-not-so-dead body to clamber on him and try to bite his face off, which Tim forbade by leaping onto the creature’s neck while Dunia somersaulted back to her feet in time to deflect Kerri’s rifle swinging her way, only noticing too late that the rifle was a distraction for the knife slicing toward her jugular, forcing her to jump back and lose a heartbeat to recover her balance before ducking under the next blow as she directed her momentum to strike back at Kerri with an angry, vertical hack that the redhead parried with the stock of her rifle, then a slash from left to right that hewed the scalp off a passing wheezer, then finally a kick below the belt at which Kerri’s outraged hair hollered in shame as she crashed into the workbench, her center of gravity on tilt for the crucial instant where Dunia advance-lunged to impale her through her stomach, their eyes locking in midair, Kerri’s suddenly catching the alarm in Dunia’s as she glanced down to notice she had planted her left foot too far ahead and that Andy, lying on the roadkill carpet, was driving Pierce right through Dunia’s leather boot and the floorboards and into the second floor where Dunia’s vintage blood dripped on the heads of the wheezers below turning their eyeless heads up and hallelujahing the red rain in a pitch that could not possibly eclipse Dunia’s bestial, gut-born cry of pain threatening to blow off the ceiling.
Meddling Kids Page 29