“Don’t leave me!”
She had almost laid her down now, but Kerri was clinging to her so firmly she was practically cliffhanging from her shoulders. Andy had to hold her arms to restrain the spasms.
“Kay! Please look at me. Look into my eyes!”
Kerri’s terrified irises suddenly discovered Andy’s, three inches away. Andy tried to sound as soothing as chemically possible.
“We are going to be fine. I promise. Okay? This is your room. Nothing bad can ever happen in your room.”
Kerri swallowed a bezoar rising in her throat. The tremor was receding. “Promise you won’t go.”
“I’m not going anywhere. But you’re hurting my back a little.”
With their eyes locked, Andy noticed the grip around her loosening up some, like Kerri’s fingers were admitting circulation again, trying a gentler clasp around Andy’s neck. Andy let her alight on the bed, as though she were holding a wounded sparrow on her palm.
“Can you pull the sheets over?” Kerri asked in her flimsiest voice.
Andy’s eyes wandered for a second to evaluate. She was leaning inches above Kerri, one knee sunk in the mattress, one foot still touching the floor as a mere concession to appearances.
“I have my own bed.”
“No, don’t leave me!”
“Okay, okay,” she conceded, alarmed by the returning exclamation points. “I’m not leaving. Just let me—”
“Don’t move!”
“Kerri, I can’t stay like this, you’ll suffocate under my weight.”
“Don’t—I don’t mind! Pull the sheets over us!”
“Right, here!” She did as commanded, slithering under the bedclothes and pulling them over her back. She stretched her legs, toeing the south end of the mattress, cozying up to their tight rabbit hole under the paisleyfield.
“See? I got you covered. Nothing’s going to happen. Now I need you to take deep breaths and chill, okay?”
Kerri eased the pressure around Andy’s neck a notch and forced her lungs to fill. Andy did what she could to shift her weight without triggering a panic response; she managed to stand on her elbows and feet, in plank position, her torso merely brushing Kerri.
“You know, the last time I held this position for so long I was doing push-ups in military training, and I wondered what possible use it would have in real life,” she joked.
Kerri didn’t seem to appreciate it, busy trying to control her respiration.
“Just breathe from your abdomen,” Andy advised. “Take a deep one. Like that. Now out. Good.”
The next breath was just as deep, and slower, and a little quieter. Shortly, under Andy’s strict watch, the rhythm fell from frantic to vivace, and then to piano, and every minute it would become softer, gradually merging into the candleflame silence.
They were lying in a soundless house, in a soundless room, in a soundless burrow of wool and cotton and butterflies. And that was when Andy started to pay attention to the many excited sensations that were calling for her awareness. A thousand orange curls of hair falling asleep. Kerri’s breath on her neck. Her own breasts, through her clothes and Kerri’s clothes, cozily nestling up against the ones below.
Her biceps had started giving way long ago.
“This is…kinda awkward,” she underwhispered.
“I just saw you wrestle a Sleepy Lake creature; whatever you’re talking about, I doubt it beats that.”
“Okay.” She tried to accommodate her left hand around Kerri’s head, burrowing among her curls without awaking them.
“That thing could have killed us,” Kerri said.
“It didn’t.”
“It could have killed Nate, or Tim. There was more than one.”
“Yeah, there was.” Her head was touching Kerri’s now, cheek by rose-petal cheek.
“What if you hadn’t woken up, what if they had surrounded us? They could have killed us all in our sleep.”
Andy rounded on her and kissed her mouth.
The universe skipped a heartbeat.
Then she jolted back to see the aftermath, the taste of sun after bathing and raspberry ink and August in her joydrunk lips.
“They could have killed us and dragged us to the water and that would have been the end,” Kerri said, her eyes hardly afloat over her fantasies.
Then, slowly, her pupils drifted to meet Andy’s hovering over her like a first sight after a coma.
“Did you just kiss me?”
“Uh…yeah.”
Neither moved. Kerri’s tongue discreetly reconned the inside of her lips.
“Why?”
“It…seemed the right moment,” Andy stuttered. “But maybe it wasn’t. I’ve been known to get it wrong before.”
“I see.”
“Do you want me to move off?”
“No,” Kerri said quickly.
“Okay.”
A blank-meaning time-lapse paragraph fireflew by.
“So…you like girls?” Kerri said.
“Yeah. Well, no. I mean…mostly you, really.”
“Oh. (Pause.) It’s…maybe ’cause we’ve been so close this week…?”
“No, I’ve…I’ve been feeling like this awhile.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know, since I was…twelve? Is twelve too early?”
“No, I think it’s the normal age.”
“Maybe eleven.”
“Wow.”
It was the quietest “wow” in history.
“Does it…shock you?” Andy asked.
“No,” Kerri said firmly. “No, it’s just that…I didn’t know you were…”
“L?”
“Yeah…E…”
“V…”
“Uh, wait, you lost me there.”
“In love with you.”
All around them, Kerri’s hair was awake and eavesdropping.
Kerri mentally checked her constants. Her heartbeat was slowing down. Her breathing was tranquil. Her breasts felt the marshmallow pressure of Andy’s, but there were no complaints there. Nothing had come as a shock indeed.
“Andy, I…I mean, it’s very sweet, but…I’m not into girls, I think.”
“Have you tried?”
“No. But I haven’t tried skydiving either and I’m pretty sure it’s not my cup of tea,” she said. “I mean, no, wait, that wasn’t—” She sighed. “That was harsh. Andy, I’m sorry; I was freaking out a minute ago.”
“I know.”
“Maybe it wasn’t the right time.”
“I know,” Andy said, realizing, but the bitterness of that realization could not possibly spoil the sweet smell surrounding her. “It’s just that…you were like…hugging me, facing me, and I thought it wasn’t fair to you because you didn’t know how I felt.”
“Do you want to move off?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
Kerri shifted a little, her hands clasped around Andy a little more gently, pulling her closer. Andy noticed: her own pulse was now beginning to pace up. She made a conscious effort to bridle it.
“I just thought that…if I kissed you it’d be less awkward.” She took a second to evaluate. “Fuck, that worked out great.”
“Hey.”
Andy’s own hair gasped as Kerri caressed her cheek.
“Never punish yourself for this. You hear me?”
They were too close to see the other’s whole face, but Andy noticed Kerri’s eyes smiling.
“I’m glad you told me. Plus, you succeeded in calming me down.”
“Yeah. I’m not sure I was aiming for that, but whatever.”
“Andy, listen to me,” she began, carefully. “I don’t think I like girls. But I do like you too. A lot. And I really, really need you to be here right now. Can you do that?”
The soldier in Andy took over. “Yes. Of course.”
“You can?”
“On top of you.”
“Yes, on top of me. Will that be a problem?”
�
��No, I can handle it.”
“Good.”
“Can I move my hand? It hurts a little.”
“Make yourself comfortable.”
They both maneuvered a little, full-cycling a mutual hug, Kerri’s arms resting surely on Andy’s back, Andy’s hands sunken in pure orange euphoria, legs intertwined, breasts still clothed but formally acquainted.
When Andy looked again, Kerri had closed her eyes. A peaceful cub smile dozed on her face.
“Kerri.”
“Yup.”
“Would you rather I was a boy?”
“No. You wouldn’t be in this room if you were.”
“I like this room a lot,” Andy said. Butterflies and paisley dozed around their burrow. “I was afraid if I told you, you wouldn’t want me in here anymore.”
“Don’t ever worry about that,” Kerri whispered, fingers caressing the back of Andy’s neck. “Nothing bad will ever happen in this room.”
Andy closed her eyes and rested her head next to Kerri’s, face sunken into welcoming sugar-candy orange hair.
—
“Well, that was an interesting development,” Peter told the ceiling of the next room, lying on the upper berth. “No man in a mask this time. I hope.”
“Shut up,” Nate groaned below him.
Peter jumped off the berth, ghost sneakers landing lightly on the carpet.
“Come on, man, I’m honestly congratulating you on a good job. Packing Uncle Emmet’s gun—that was a smart move.” From the pencil pot on the desk he grabbed a fistful of darts and faced the target on the door.
“You told me to pack the gun,” Nate reminded him.
“Oh, yeah, I did. Good old me.”
He threw a dart; Nate covered his ears with his pillow.
“Anyway, it was a long shot,” Peter went on. “Not literally; I mean my telling you to pack the gun. Because those lake creatures turning up was…(A dart hits the board.) Well, not totally unexpected, but still a good twist. There was a chance they’d be there, but they were supposed to be asleep, right?”
Nate dropped the pillow and confronted Peter, who was standing right in front of him, his smug grin and perfect hair impervious to post-traumatic stress.
“We didn’t wake them up,” Nate said.
“I know we didn’t, Nate. I’m saying you did,” he said, waving a dart at him. “That night in ’seventy-seven, when Kerri was kidnapped in the basement, and Andy went to search for her downstairs, and I had to rescue them both; what were you doing in the attic all that time?”
“Like you don’t know!” Nate shouted. “You are in my head!”
The next thing in his head was very nearly the steel tip of a dart. It missed his skull by a centimeter and stopped with a thud right above him, nailed into the upper berth.
“I do know!” Peter gloated. “I mean, whoa, Nate, telling Kerri about the Necronomicon is gonna be tough enough, but what do you think the girls will say when they find out that you not only saw the book in Deboën Mansion, but you also read it? Aloud? You fucking twit?!”
PART THREE
COLLAPSE
The bunker was reached some minutes past ten a.m. Andy woke up, found herself face-sunk in orange curls filling her eyes, ears, nose, and lips. She was joyfully drowning in Kerri’s hair, its fragrance and softness pounding on her senses like a cheerful Mongol army banging on the gates of Baghdad. And the truthfulness of that sensation, the physical reality of it, was beyond philosophical doubt. She even recognized it from the last time she’d felt it, that night thirteen years ago when she was hugging Kerri, twenty feet underground, in a dungeon, in smothering darkness, too busy sobbing in terror and listening to the lake creatures scratching the walls to notice the bliss back then. But she was paying attention to it now, in Kerri’s bed, their top-bottom position changed during sleep into a sort of overprotective spooning, her face drowned in real, 100 percent pure rainbow-powered ecstasy.
A certainty that in all its glory could not mitigate another truth: what had just awoken her was the sound of scratching on the walls.
She laser-eyed the wallpaper right next to the bed, trying to make out a clue in the dim light of the bedroom, shushing Kerri’s hair down. Nothing happened.
Until a minute later, when something scratched the door.
Andy got up, for some reason careful not to wake Kerri, and scanned the bedroom for a weapon. She knew only too well there would be nothing. Weapons were not known in Kerri’s bedroom; it was a war-free territory; it was a utopian civilization oblivious to the greedy, fanatic, barbaric things living outside.
The door quivered on its hinge, flinching under the graze of claws on the other side.
Andy felt her heart defect to chaos. The scratching was becoming deafening. She couldn’t believe Kerri didn’t hear it. She couldn’t believe the creature outside had not heard her galloping pulse. Desperately she ordered her brain to slow down and go through her options. The window was blocked; she would make less noise by ransacking the wardrobe for Kerri’s old baseball bat. She needed to lay out a strategy. She needed to rein in her heart and think—the skill she sucked at most in the world.
She went for the wardrobe, gripped the bat, swung it with her right hand as she pulled the door open.
Tim padded in with a Thank you, Jeeves nod at Andy, went to smell Kerri’s hand.
Andy stumbled out into the hallway for a second, a hand to her mouth to block a vomit jet of pure rage, and closed the door behind her. She leaned on the wall, panting, internally yelling at her body to put itself together. The house was as quiet as it had been in years, a time capsule of closed blinds and shrouded furniture.
After a minute, still soaked in sweat, she popped in the bedroom again.
“Tim. A word, please.”
Tim followed her into the hallway as if summoned out of a meeting, and Andy knelt down to him.
“Never fucking do that again,” she admonished. “Do you understand? You don’t go scratching walls or doors. Ever. If you’re shut out, you bark. You hear me?”
Tim did his best impression of comprehension.
“Try it now. Bark,” Andy ordered. “Come on. Bark.”
Kerri opened the door and ordered, “Speak!”
Tim woofed unquestioningly.
“The command to make him bark is ‘speak.’ ‘Bark’ is too close to ‘park,’ ” she explained, kneeling to snuggle the dog. “Right, Tim? You’re a very smart boy when we use the right words, aren’t you?”
She stopped the petting for a second to take in Andy’s pose.
“What’s with the bat?”
Andy was going to blurt a ridiculous excuse when they were interrupted by the analog ring of the telephone in the living room. She ran downstairs to pick it up.
“Hello?”
“Did you say you know a biologist?”
It took her a while to tell Copperseed’s voice apart from the static, and a little longer to pick up the thread from their last conversation.
“Yeah. Why?”
“State can’t send a forensics expert until tomorrow. I fear we don’t have that long.”
“We don’t?” she said, self-consciously puzzled.
“I just checked on the body; it’s decomposing fast. I don’t think our freezer is cold enough. If you know someone, we need to examine it now.”
Andy glanced at Kerri on the landing upstairs.
“I’m not sure she’s ready,” Andy whispered into the phone.
“Ready for what?” Kerri asked.
Andy covered the mouthpiece. “Something’s wrong with the wheezer’s body. Copperseed says we need to check it before—”
“I can do it.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” She folded her arms, lips pressed, conjuring strength all the way up from her newly found Huckleberry Hound socks. “I’m a biologist.”
“But, you know, it’s performing an autopsy on—”
“Dissection. It’s a lake creature. Local fauna
,” Kerri said. “All that is required is a scientific description. Like a new species of butterfly. Might even name it after one of you guys.”
“I’d rather wait for the butterfly,” Andy said, and returned to the phone. “Deputy? Okay. She’ll do it.”
—
They were back at the police station within half an hour, the time to shower and gather some instruments from the kitchen cupboard and Kerri’s old Polaroid camera. Copperseed nodded them good morning, thus ending the formalities, and led them down a ramp and into the morgue. In a station with no forensics lab, it was no more than a bare pantry-sized cubicle with a sink and two cold chambers where bodies could be stored, often for convenience, since Blyton Hills had no funeral home. The kids were still adjusting to the dismal room when Copperseed opened one of the chambers and pulled the slab out.
Tim complained vigorously about the smell, and everybody else turned away, sleeves under their noses, mentioning several biblical characters by first name.
The thing lay facedown, minus the face: the medial limbs that sprouted from under its shoulder blades made it difficult to rest on its back. Kerri, who had avoided the body while Andy and Nate were packing it up, immediately captured some details she had not registered before: the webbed toes, the squamous skin, the growths reminiscent of anemone sticking out of the holes under its ribs.
Copperseed took a pen and pinched one of the upper arms. The flesh gave way like lukewarm wax.
“No way,” Andy complained. “It was a lot tougher a few hours ago.”
Nate shot a photograph of it, started waving the Polaroid. Tim was still yapping, unable to accept that everyone else had gotten over the smell already.
“Tim can’t be here,” Kerri said, forcing last night’s dinner back where it belonged and stepping forward to the specimen. “Take him out.”
“Nate, can you look after him?” Andy said.
“Both of you,” she firmed up. “This is a lab now.”
“But I don’t want to leave you alone with this,” Andy protested.
“I won’t be alone; the deputy will assist me,” she said, nodding toward Copperseed and pulling some cuticle scissors out of her kit. “Go, I’ll meet you at Ben’s in two hours.”
Meddling Kids Page 14
