Andy rounded on him, nearly shoving him into the wall.
“Nothing bad ever reaches this room! You hear me?! Nothing!”
She turned to Nate, who had just stepped in, and threw the Necronomicon at him.
“You! Look for the way to put that thing back to sleep!”
“What?! No, wait, I can’t; I’m not a wizard!”
Andy stabbed him with her index finger, shouting at the top of her lungs: “If the town whore from ass-raping Salem put two and two together with the help of that book, so can you! Get rid of that monster! Now!”
Nate digested the line, refused to let it make an impact, and turned to Kerri as she walked in.
“I can’t do this.”
“Nate, I can’t even pronounce its name,” she said, grabbing his shoulders. “You’ve been preparing for this for thirteen years.”
Nate fell silent. His body took the pause to remind him how dangerously far behind in medication, food, and sleep he was, while his mind just wandered around Kerri’s room.
“Clear everything away,” he said. “We need a pentacle.”
Andy rolled up the carpet and instructed Kerri and Joey to push the furniture out of the way, while Nate went through the pencil jars on the girly desk and chose a red crayon to start tracing a wide circle on the floorboards. After that he offered another crayon to Kerri and showed her a grimoire page for reference.
“Draw this one here, facing that wall, then this one with the horns in that corner. Andy, I’ll need candles.”
“First drawer,” Kerri assisted as she started drawing a monogram.
“I know,” Andy said, going for the aromatic candles Kerri kept in her desk and a match in her pocket.
The whole thing took some three minutes to set up.
“We need a signature now, from all of us,” Nate panted, standing up. “Choose a point of the star each; use your blood!”
He needed only to squeeze one of the many fresh gashes across his arms to produce some drops of thick, bright blood on the floor; Kerri and Andy did the same.
Joey stood awkwardly over his own point of the star.
JOEY: Uh…I am not bleeding.
Andy jumped across the pentacle to punch his face, Kerri stopping her fist an inch from connecting.
KERRI: Ah ah ah! Hair will do, I think.
Andy drew back grumbling while Joey made a big deal of Kerri plucking a pinch of hair from behind his ear.
“That’s four,” Nate said. “We need five.”
“We don’t have five,” Andy objected.
“Dunia needed five to wake it up; we’ll need five to put it down!” Nate insisted.
Andy turned to Kerri. Kerri to Joey. Joey to Nate. Nate to Kerri. Kerri to Andy. Andy to Joey.
Then all four glanced down.
Tim, sitting on the last corner of the pentacle, dropped the plastic penguin over the red line and smiled broadly at them, thankful for the attention.
Kerri raised a brow at the wet, tattered toy and concluded: “Saliva counts too, I guess.”
“But he’s a dog!” Nate complained. “I’m pretty sure the specs call for five human summoners!”
“It’s the best next thing! Adapt!” Andy ordered.
Nate flipped through several dry, stiff pages in the book, looking for the annotations he’d noticed while examining it the previous evening.
“Just so you know,” he mentioned, “I know a college professor who ended up in the loony bin for just staring at this book too long.”
“Well, you fucking came out of the loony bin a week ago, so that’s work done in advance!”
“I doubt the professor would have done very well in the creature-splattering bit, Nate,” Kerri told him. “Give yourself some credit.”
Pencils rattled in their jars. Tim barked.
Joey popped out of the circle to lean toward the window.
“God, it’s getting closer. (Turning.) Nate! It’s getting closer!”
“Yes, I fucking heard!” He flipped back a couple pages, then read across a note. “Okay, what we’re trying here may not put it to sleep again, but it’s said to push it back where it came from.”
“The lake,” Kerri guessed.
“No, where it first came from. But remember, the second I start reading these spells, the wheezers will spot us.”
“They’ve got no way in,” Andy said after dragging the dresser in front of the door. She returned to the circle, between Kerri and Joey. “Read.”
KERRI: (Pocketing the lighter.) Read.
JOEY: (Firmly.) Read.
TIM: (Pants encouragingly.)
Nate, kneeling over, made sure the candles were properly arranged and started reciting: “ ‘Ngaïah Adolon, Ngaïah Metraton, Ngaïah Zariatnatmik, Kheïa ‘nthropapena, Kniga Necronomnkon, Thtaggoa ishta nukflarr suk’lzark’ui methragamnon!’ ”
Tim barked a loud four-letter word at the sudden thunder that made the butterfly displays flutter on the walls. Kerri, Andy, and Joey turned to the dormer window to see the booming sound reverberating away, the shock wave fading down the trees on their street.
And then, from the silent aftermath of that thunder, rose the distant, ultrasonic, hypermassified shriek of a hive-minded, saw-larynxed Doomsday army zeroing in on the enemy.
“Tim, stay in the circle!” Kerri ordered. “Tim! Shut up and sit! Sit!”
“ ‘Ia Melekemnis, Geïadhar laïak sekh zfr’khack’ui…’ ”
“Tim, sit! Joey, hold him!”
Thunder boomed in the north, perhaps a mile closer by Andy’s reckoning. She wanted to block her ears, not at the sound of a mountain moving, not at the wheezers, but at the words that Nate was reading. She couldn’t understand them, but she could read in Kerri’s eyes the confirmation that she wasn’t imagining it: the words sounded forbidden; they poisoned the air around them; they gave her nausea. They didn’t talk to her, but something buried deep in her genetic memory was eavesdropping and was extremely shocked.
“ ‘Ganna sabakhhazk’ui, mlif nglk’ui, Ia Melekemnis gizranabakhhaztuk! Ngaïah Adolon, Ngaïah Metraton…’ ”
KERRI: You read that already!
NATE: I gotta do it three times!
ANDY: Shut up and go on!
Joey, wincing at the sound of the spells, struggled to hold Tim in place.
“Come on, boy, here, stay. Look, you like the penguin?”
He squeezed a peep out of the doll. Tim nearly bit his hand off upon recovering it and curled up around it in the pentacle, shielding it from another clap of thunder shaking the house.
Nate speed-read through the verses, returning to the first line for the third time just as Kerri peeked through the window.
“They’re here!”
Andy made out three or four creatures racing down the street. The speed they were able to reach scared her, but the impunity with which they dared run through the streets of Blyton Hills, how they skipped over the fences, how they trod on the amber station wagon parked in front, which in the last few days had so seamlessly fitted in the neighborhood—that had her clenching her fists until the bones cracked.
“Are we sure the doors are blocked?”
“ ‘Ia Melekemnis’—don’t leave the circle now—‘Geïadhar Thtaggoa…’ ”
“How do they know where we are?!” Joey cried.
“The spells attract them,” Andy explained.
“ ‘Ia Melekemnis, gizranabakhhaztuk!’ ” Nate flipped the page. Andy gaped at the amount of lettering contained on the next.
“All that?! Are you fucking kidding me?!”
“What did you expect?! It took Dunia like a whole night!”
A thunderbolt crashed, literally, not far away from the town. They could make out the sound of crushed trees in the echo.
“Wait!” Kerri yelled. “It took Dunia all that time because she was the only willing participant. We can read too, right?!”
Nate glanced over the notes, tore them out of the book and distributed t
hem.
“You read this, you this, you this. Pronounce like it’s badass Italian; kh is Jalisco, zh is Jean-Jacques.” Something banged the door downstairs. “Go!”
Kerri and Joey joined him immediately, their own words pronounced too quick to even let someone notice the difference; Andy checked the first word and almost panicked.
“ ‘Nara…Nyara…’ ”
KERRI: Just read, I’m sure whoever’s listening won’t complain about your diction!
“ ‘Nyarlathotep nemumfur, sum jag’rwi kjagadar uzuzwi nekrogradin…’ ”
Something made of glass just ceased to be in the living room downstairs.
“They’re inside!”
“Read!”
Tim started barking again—the only thing that wasn’t causing noise at that point was the plastic penguin he was protecting. Everybody was reciting verses that thickened the air and condensed on the walls; creatures berzerked through the first floor; thunder multiplied, splitting timber and rock, destroying the world outside, creeping up the Richter scale, blocking the light. Andy noticed the shadow cast over the paper she was reading.
Nate finished his verse and flipped the page, the others hurrying down their lines to keep up. Kerri finished first, then Joey; Andy sped through a couple consonant clusters and tossed her paper on the floor just as something started slamming on the bedroom door.
“Nate?”
The dresser blocking the entrance signaled it would come apart at the next blow!
“ ‘Lamakomn ngufli charkflk’ui, ngaïah, ZHRO!’ ”
The house instantly quieted. Tim, embarrassed by the silence, lay down.
Kerri and Andy locked eyes, recognizing the jagged breathing sound coming from the other side of the wall.
“Nate?” Kerri whispered.
“All that’s missing is the aklo backward,” he said. “It’s gotta be here somewhere.”
“What the fuck is an aklo?” Joey asked while Nate turned over the page, devoid of side notes.
Something bony and sharp began scratching the door.
KERRI: Well?
NATE: It’s not here.
KERRI: What?!
NATE: The aklo is missing! Dunia must have known it by heart; she summoned the thing while the book was here!
The new hill two blocks from there howlretched, for lack of a real word. The solid, blazing, ear-shattering noise blew the curtains in the room and knocked the butterfly displays off the wall.
“Wait! Wait!”
Every human, canine, and plastic eye focused on Andy, who was staring back at the dog.
“The aklo…it’s the part of the ritual that Dunia was reciting when Wickley interrupted her thirteen years ago, right? So it’s what Wickley heard! It’s what got stuck in his head and he repeated it to me when I put him under pressure!”
Everybody held their breath, lest their respiration distract her.
“Which…backward would be something like…‘Zhro…ng’ngah’hai…nekrosunai mwlgn iä Thtaggoa fhtagn iä!’ ”
The words puffed out the flames on the candles.
Silence conquered the room. Andy stared at Tim, Kerri and Nate at the broken display cases on the floor, Joey at the door that had fallen silent.
Then it rattled softly, but the breathing of the creature outside increased.
Outside their window, Thtaggoa groaned.
Faraway, scattered wheezer squeaks began to pop up here and there, some fading into distant screams, different from the crazed, cannibal rage that the kids and the dog had learned to respect. It was a new kind of wheezer vocalization they had never heard.
It was their fear.
Andy queried Nate, stepped out of the circle, and looked out the window.
The street was empty.
Then her heart jumped to her mouth when a wheezer appeared in the window, shrieking, not at her, but past her, flying against its will from over the house’s roof.
She opened the window and leaned out as Kerri and Joey and Nate joined her. Two more six-limbed creatures rolled out of the first floor and into the garden, bouncing off the walkway, as though a silent, invisible hurricane were dragging them through the neighbor’s yard, heading northwest, in the general direction of something that glimmered green on the horizon. A star that had never been there before.
The crying from the wheezers increased in volume and pitch, rising too high to hear for everyone except Tim, who was too interested to even turn his ears away. And their cries were accompanied by the ebbing, throbbing, rock-splitting howl of the cyclopean undergod standing behind the house, mercifully out of sight, its poisonous shadow cast over Blyton Hills now dissolving.
Kerri and Joey and Nate turned suddenly as the banging on the door increased, in time to see it blow off its hinges, toppling the dresser, and they ducked to dodge the wheezer that was fired overhead across the room, out the window, pulling Andy with it.
Kerri barely gripped Andy’s waist in time as she was lifted off the floor, with Nate and Joey and Tim grabbing her in turn, and then they all felt the hurricane blowing around them, deafening, devastating, trying to snatch them from Earth’s gravity and drag them toward a star beyond the explored universe.
Andy, half her body out the window, stared into the gaping, eyeless, terrified face of the creature flapping out in the vortex like a kite in a tornado, digging a claw into her arm, boring into her bones, having decided to carry her along to its exile off this galaxy cluster simply because fuck you, Andy Rodriguez.
She glanced back, and she saw Kerri, and she read Hold on in the lips she’d kissed only once, her own lips crying Please no as one of Kerri’s hands let go.
And then it returned. Carrying a knife.
Kerri stabbed the wheezer’s paw so hard that Andy felt the blade prick her own arm beneath and uttered an ouch of pure joy as the wheezer lost its grip and fell away, spinning, through the enormous worm body of Thtaggoa, now corrupted into subatomic particles carried like dust by the cyclone surrounding the shrieking miserable wheezer and its blasphemous brethren as they crashed through the garden and the town and Pennaquick County and Oregon and over the ionosphere in Canada and out of Earth’s gravitational pull, cruising at lightspeed past the moon and Mars and the asteroid belt and the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Yuggoth, ripping wormholes through space and being spat out at the far end of the solar system, their agonizing cries heard for the last time as they passed through a gas nebula in the constellation of Virgo before squeezing through a physical paradox leading to a barren dead region of outer space.
—
The green star appeared to blink and disappear from the horizon several seconds after the portal outside Mars’s orbit had actually closed, having swallowed the very last piece of Thtaggoa’s spawn and Thtaggoa itself.
The Blyton Summer Detective Club stumbled up from the floor in Kerri’s bedroom. The firmament was filling up again. The white veil was lifting, painting a blue sky grazed by fat smuggled-sheep clouds.
All four, plus a dog, stood in their sloped-ceiling bunker, wordless, contemplating the end of war.
Then Andy clutched Kerri’s waist and shot into her mouth the most violently soft, bloodily sweet, furiously rainbow-waving kiss either had given or received, flooding her tongue with summer rain and lime dew and tropical tidal waves.
She pried herself apart, a string of saliva unbroken between their lips, orange hair gasping in awe, and pointed her index finger at Kerri’s nose.
ANDY: And you and I are gonna try skydiving this summer. All right?!
Tim smugly trotted off the scene to tell his penguin everything was fine.
—
They walked out into the first morning after the apocalypse—a day that had just barged in sweaty and unkempt like a late commuter, asking, Anything happen while I was out?
A lazy rain began to wash out the defiled streets, all casual and gleeful like a late authority figure at the end of a teen detective story.
&n
bsp; They roamed into the middle of the road strewn with tree debris, overall not worse than your average rock star’s hotel room. That mild impression lasted until Joey pointed out the hillside in the north, at the beginning of Kerri’s house row. The last time they had seen that hillside, luscious dark green woods covered it completely. Now it was a great expanse of exposed earth, salted with the stumps and corpses of a razed forest. Thtaggoa’s path of destruction came from beyond the hill, where the sky was still sore and veiled by frayed clouds of smoke, and stopped two yards short of Kerri’s backyard. Its width was too much to measure from the ground.
“Holy shit,” Andy appreciated. “That was cutting it close, Nate.”
Tim called their attention from the other end of the road, where a white car had pulled over to the sidewalk and crashed into the side of a parked Chrysler. They recognized it immediately, even though it had lost the sirens. Several sets of claw marks, fingers two inches apart from each other, were etched all across the roof and the sides, striking out the county seal. Smoke poured from under the warped hood.
Andy jogged toward it and leaned through a shattered window.
“I’m fine,” Deputy Copperseed said before she could lay a finger on his wrist. He was barely sitting up, drenched in reddened sweat. “I tried to lure them away, but they really liked your house. And then, while they were flying back, they got attached to my car too. Dragged me all the way from Main Street.”
Andy nodded, turned to signal to Kerri and the boys that the cop was all right, and then she glanced at his left leg. Operating the pedals with that broken kneecap must have been tricky, she thought.
Coincidentally, that was the last clear idea in her mind before her own legs began to ring and suddenly yielded. She fell on the asphalt, back against the car door, and an insane number of overdue injury reports from all over her body finally flooded the complaint department.
“Oh fuck,” she gasped, overwhelmed by fatigue.
Tim approached her, a sympathetic look in his own bloodied, ear-torn face. She lifted a bruised, blood-streamed hand and caressed his nose.
Meddling Kids Page 32
