Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women

  School rules against public displays of affection be damned. I throw my arms around Sara and hug her tight. “Thank you,” I say, my voice cracking.

  “That’s what friends are for,” she says. “If you want me to repeat my award-winning performance for your mom, I —”

  “No. No. Absolutely not. You’re only taking one bullet for me on this one.”

  “Okay, but let me know if you —”

  “I won’t change my mind. Decision made. Foot put down. I have spoken. Et cetera.”

  “Ooh, so forceful. It’s sexy. No wonder Malcolm likes you.”

  I let that one linger: Malcolm likes me.

  Maybe this week won’t completely suck after all.

  At lunch, I learn that of the five of us, I am the only one to suffer any significant parental wrath. Missy got grounded for the weekend; Dr. Hamill did not care that she was “at a midnight showing of the original The Thing from Another World” — Matt’s official cover story. Matt, Sara, Stuart, their parents were all like eh, whatever, don’t let it happen again, please.

  “My mom never punishes me,” Sara says, like that’s a bad thing. “She treats me like that kid in that old episode of The Twilight Zone, the one where everyone gets sent to the cornfield.”

  “It’s a Good Life, starring Billy Mumy,” Matt says, filling in a blank no one needed filled in.

  “What happens if your parents think to check the theater’s show schedule?” I ask him.

  “They’d see that the Main Street Movie House was showing classic B-movies from the fifties all night,” he says, “culminating in a midnight screening of the newly restored version of Howards Hawks and Christian Nyby’s The Thing from Another World.”

  “Matt memorizes the schedule every week,” Sara says.

  “Insta-alibi.”

  “Lucky you. I don’t think midnight movies will cut it with Mom,” I say, “and I sure can’t use that if I have to duck out on Malcolm again.”

  Matt gives me a look. “Are you two dating?”

  “Gee, that didn’t sound judgmental one bit. For the record, we are not dating, but I think it highly probable that we will go out again.”

  The look sours. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “Oh, you don’t? Tell me, o wise one, why my dating someone isn’t a good idea.”

  “It’s not the dating someone part, it’s the dating someone outside the group. Outside the business.” Listen to him. Outside the business. “It’s one more person we have to keep secrets from, and it’s tough enough keeping our parents in the dark, much less a boyfriend.”

  “Natalie’s done all right with her boyfriend, and he’s quote-unquote outside the business.”

  “Exception to the rule. All I’m saying —”

  “All you’re saying is, you don’t want me to have a social life.”

  “You have a social life.”

  “Dude, we are not a social life,” Stuart says.

  “What? We have fun.”

  “You so don’t get it, do you?” I say, but why should I be surprised that Captain Cold Feet can’t wrap his brain around the concept of boys and girls going out together, and doing things other than watching movies and playing games?

  “I get it,” he says (yeah, right), “what I’m saying is —”

  The conversation drops stone-cold dead when Missy, without looking up, without a hint of emotion, says, “Matt, just because you’re such a huge wuss you can’t ask Sara out on a date doesn’t give you the right to piss all over Carrie’s love life, so either man up or shut up.”

  Eyes pop. Jaws drop. Shocked expressions are traded. Missy looks at each of us in turn, gives us a tell me I’m wrong shrug, then calmly resumes eating.

  “Just sayin’,” she says.

  Missy threatening to literally deface Amber in a moment of anger, okay, I could maybe — maybe — excuse that away. They have a history. I could understand Missy hitting a saturation point and totally losing it, but to read Matt the riot act like that? In front of everyone? And be so blasé about it? And not understand why the rest of us were so shocked?

  “You okay?” Malcolm says.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Fine. Why?”

  “You’ve been staring at the screen for five minutes. I know mocking up a website for a paint store isn’t the most thrilling assignment...”

  “Eh, I think the weekend is catching up to me, is all,” I say, which isn’t far from the truth. “Nothing an early bedtime won’t cure.”

  “Yeah, I’m with you there. But hey, we only have to kill, mmm, twenty more minutes,” Malcolm says, glancing at the clock. “After that, freedom, sweet freedom.”

  “Free is relative for some of us.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry.”

  “No biggie.”

  “Hey, even though you’re grounded, would it be cool if I gave you a ride home? I looked out the window a little while ago, and it’s really coming down, and I don’t want you walking home in that mess, and I thought —”

  “You thought correctly,” I say. “I’d love a ride home, thank you.”

  “Okay. Cool.”

  The next twenty minutes of my web design class flies by, propelled by giddy anticipation. I shouldn’t be this excited over a two-minute car ride, but it’s more than that: this is my second chance with Malcolm.

  He accompanies me as I swing by my locker to grab my coat. We pass Sara in the hall. She slips me a big smile and a thumbs up.

  I’m going to want details, she says via the brainphone.

  We step outside and wow, did it pick up. Fat white flakes pelt me in the face, each one delivering a tiny icy sting, but we take our time walking to the student parking lot. Malcolm keeps a hand on my arm the whole way, to keep me from falling on the slippery sidewalk...or so he says.

  His car is under a blanket of snow. He hands me his keys, asks me to start it up while he clears the windshield. I break one of the cardinal rules of respecting a man’s car by playing with the stereo. I skim several stations, looking for something very specific. Come on, Radio Gods, don’t fail me...

  I land on some generic pop song. The tune is instantly forgettable, and I couldn’t name the artist for the life of me, but it’s slow, soft. It’ll do. I turn up the volume.

  “What are you doing?” Malcolm asks.

  “Making up for Saturday,” I say, holding out my arms. “We never got our last dance of the night.”

  Malcolm chuckles, lays the scraper on the hood, embraces me. There in the parking lot, oblivious to the worsening snowstorm, we turn in a slow circle for the remainder of the song, through a station identification announcement, and into a commercial for an auto parts store.

  “We should hit the road,” Malcolm says, “before it gets any worse.”

  “We should,” I say. It takes us another minute to act on our own advice.

  Malcolm makes the trip at half the speed limit, extending the drive to nearly ten minutes. He pulls up to the curb in front of my house, shifts the car into park. The ride is over way, way too soon.

  “Here you go,” he says. “See you tomorrow.”

  “See you tomorrow,” I say, but I don’t make the slightest effort to get out of the car.

  What the hell.

  I lean over to give Malcolm the belated good-night kiss he richly deserves. There’s surprise on his lips. At first.

  We part. He blinks at me. “Um,” he says.

  “Drive safely,” I say, sliding out of the car.

  He waits until I’m at my front door, until I’m stepping inside before pulling away from the curb — slowly, because of the snow, but I imagine it’s because he doesn’t want to go.

  I don’t want him to go.

  All right, girl, enough with the gooey mush stuff, you’ve been on one date with the guy — albeit, one pretty awesome date (rampaging demon notwithstanding).

  Granddad’s car wasn’t in the driveway, which means I have the house all to myself for a while. I manage to kill a half-
hour blowing through homework, while bad daytime TV drones on in the background. Get off my stage! You are the father! Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Uck. How can people watch this garbage?

  One show features a feuding mother and daughter, which hits, no pun intended, a little too close to home. I shut off the TV and, taking advantage of the fact Mom won’t be home to confiscate my phone for a few hours, call Dad at his office.

  “Hey, hon,” he says cheerfully, “this is a nice surprise. What’s up?”

  “Not much. Stuck at home, killing time, thought I’d call.”

  “You snowed in up there?”

  “Not so much. Strict maternal discipline is keeping me inside today.”

  “Uh-oh. Do I want to know what happened?”

  “Don’t worry, nothing too controversial. Went to the school dance Saturday, got swept off my feet by a handsome gentleman caller, stayed out too late, brought the wrath of Mom down on my head for breaking curfew.”

  “Ah.” I detect a note of concern. Understandable, I have to admit. During my Dark Period, I regularly stayed out past my curfew, and back then I couldn’t claim to have been out with a nice guy. “How long are you out of action?”

  “All week.”

  “All week? That seems a little harsh.”

  “Well...truth be told, I didn’t take the judge’s sentence with grace and dignity.”

  Dad sighs. “Another fight?”

  “I know, I know, I feel lousy about it, but, in my defense, Mom way overreacted to begin with.” Dad grunts neutrally. He’s not taking sides, not yet. “I don’t know what’s going on, Dad. Everything that happens between us lately, it gets blown out of proportion. We go from zero to catfight in five seconds flat, sometimes over completely stupid stuff. We can’t disagree about anything without tearing into each other.”

  “You know why you and your mother butt heads so badly, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. Because we’re totally different people with nothing in common.”

  Dad’s laugh is so loud it hurts my ear. “Ohhh, honey, no, you two are not totally different people; you’re more alike than either of you would ever care to admit.”

  “Like fun we are.”

  “Like fun you’re not. You’re both aggressive, headstrong, willful, ridiculously smart, sometimes too much for your own good...”

  “Dad, headstrong and willful mean the same thing.”

  “Yeah, like that. And you both hate looking weak. So, you two have a disagreement, you dive in, guns blazing, and of course neither of you is going to back down and let the other one win.”

  “Great, so we’re living in a warzone until I leave for college?”

  “Unless one of you decides it’s time to act like the bigger man. Woman, rather. It’ll be hard for one of you, I know, but someone there has to take the high road.”

  Oops, careful there, Dad, you’re dropping hints all over the place. And yet, “Point taken. Thanks.”

  “Anytime. I hate to chat and run, but I have to take some plans over to town hall before it closes.”

  “Okay. Love you.”

  “Love you, sweetie.”

  The Father, he is wise.

  Mom gets home late because of the snow. “Dinner’s almost ready,” I say as she enters the kitchen, cocking a perplexed eyebrow at me.

  “You’re making dinner?”

  “You were running late, I had nothing to do, Granddad was complaining he was getting hungry...”

  “I was not complaining!” Granddad says from the living room.

  “Fine! You were expressing your needs in a very insistent manner!”

  “Oh,” Mom says, unsure what to make of this unexpected sight, of her daughter removing from the oven a casserole dish full of stuffed shells, which she made with her own two hands.

  (All right, Mom prepped them last night, all I did was take them out of the fridge and put them in the oven, but I’m taking credit for making dinner anyway. So there.)

  “I got this,” I say. “Go sit down.”

  I can almost call dinner completely normal. Granddad takes care of the lion’s share of mealtime conversation, which means Mom and I can avoid talking to each other entirely. That might sound callous, but the tension between us, while diminished, is still there, and the way I figure it, if we’re not talking to each other, we’re not fighting with each other.

  Once the dirty dishes are in the washer, Mom says to me, all businesslike, “All right, Carrie...”

  “My homework’s done, my laptop is on the coffee table,” I report, “and I’m heading to my room. Good night.”

  “Carrie.” I turn. She holds out her hand. “Your phone?”

  It’s a sad statement on my generation that adults think they can punish us simply by taking away our technology, as if we’re incapable of entertaining ourselves without something that needs to be plugged in. But hey, it makes her feel like she’s disciplining me.

  In a moment of ironic timing, my phone vibrates in my hand as I hand it to Mom. It takes effort, but I resist looking at the screen to see who’s calling.

  It’s probably nothing important.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “She’s still not picking up,” Concorde says. “Someone else try her.”

  “It won’t do any good,” Sara says. “She’s been grounded.”

  Concorde tilts his head, like a dog failing to understand his master’s command. “Grounded. Carrie.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Carrie got grounded.”

  “Yes. Because she broke curfew Saturday night, because she was busy fighting a demon, and couldn’t think of a decent alibi to feed her mom.”

  “Hm. Well,” Mindforce says. “That’s a problem.”

  “One for another time,” Astrid says.

  “Yes, right, one crisis at a time.”

  “We should be so lucky,” Concorde says, conducting a quick attendance, double-checking the corner of the conference room in case the Entity, as he is wont to do, slipped in unseen to lurk in silence. “All right, people, listen up. This is going to be quick, because we have to move. There have been no casualties reported so far, but we can’t count on that trend holding up. Two hours ago, give or take, there was another, um...”

  “Breach of the barrier between realities,” Astrid says.

  “Yeah, that.”

  “We know that part, believe me,” Sara says, the sour tang of vomit persisting in her mouth.

  “This time, the, uh...”

  “Breach of the barrier between realities,” Astrid says.

  “The breach occurred in Gloucester, and apparently, whatever came through was let off its leash right away,” Concorde says. “Within a half-hour of the, uh, the...”

  “Breach of the barrier between realities. Why is that so hard for you to say?”

  “Within a half-hour of the breach of the barrier between realities — happy now? — our system red-flagged a series of 911 calls to the Gloucester PD. Our system scans first responder communications for unusual activity,” Concorde explains, “and it picked up several reports of people being attacked by bizarre assailants.”

  “Bizarre how?” Matt asks.

  “You’ll love this,” Nina says. “People claimed they were attacked by, among other things, giant spiders, giant snakes, circus clowns, and their dentists.”

  “I’ll take Things People Are Terrified Of for two hundred, Alex.”

  “Bingo,” Astrid says. “That means we’re dealing with some sort of phobophage — a fear demon, something that generates raw, primal terror, then feeds off the resulting psychic energy.”

  “Great. How’re we going to take down something like that?” Stuart says.

  “I have some ideas,” Astrid says. “Trust me.”

  “You know how we can beat this thing?” Matt says. “Call Stephen King’s lawyer, and tell him a demon is plagiarizing It.”

  “Heh. We all float down here,” Nina says.

  “So glad you two find humor in this,” Sara says,
gazing out the Pelican’s porthole window. “We’re only going to be facing a demon that can look like whatever scares the holy hell out of us.”

  “Believe it or not, we’re better off with this thing than we were the Soulblack,” Astrid says. “Phobophages want to keep their prey alive. You can’t scare the dead.”

  “Yeah, that’s real comforting.”

  “I don’t want to find it because it’s going to look like a zombie and if it looks like a zombie I’m going to wet myself,” Missy says.

  “Zombies aren’t real,” Astrid says. “Whatever you might see, it won’t be real. Remember that. Yes, there is a demon hiding behind the illusion, and that demon is dangerous, but that’s why you’re to remain in constant radio contact with me,” she says, tapping her earpiece.

  “Scream in white-hot terror, you’ll come a-runnin’,” Stuart says. “Got it.”

  “Good. Any last questions?”

  “Yeah. This demon. Human host again?” Sara asks.

  “I have yet to meet a demon that can exist on our plane outside of a host.”

  “Uh-huh. And what are the chances we can save this one? Good? Or should we plan to add another name to the body count?”

  “We’re getting to him early on in the possession. As we’ve learned, that gives me an advantage; its hold on the host won’t be that strong...”

  “But?”

  “But, this won’t be like purging the imp out of Missy. This is a major-league demonic entity, something I almost certainly haven’t encountered before. I can’t make any promises.”

  “No,” Sara says, turning back toward the window. “Of course you can’t.”

  Astrid sidles up to Sara. “Do you have a problem with me, little girl?” Astrid says, her words lost to the others, drowned out by the low thrum of the Pelican’s maglev system.

  “I have a problem with how quickly you give up on saving people. You’re supposed to be a super-hero.”

  “I told you: I am not a super-hero, and you don’t know jack about what we’re dealing with,” Astrid says. “This is my playground, not yours, and I know the rules better than you ever will, so don’t you dare lecture me about who can be saved and who can’t.”