Sam Saves the Night

by Shari Simpson

  Madalynn laughed. “Okay. If that’s how you want to play it. Let her go, Zac.” With a grunt of regret, Zac released her and Sam stumbled away, breathing hard. “So, Sam. Last night was something, huh? I’m not sure protecting your enemy counts as justice.”

  “Which means you don’t get to be a Dream,” Bree said hostilely. “You’re out.”

  Sam quickly decided that yelling “Yay!” would be unwise, although she was sorely tempted. She arranged her features into as pleasant and bland an expression as she could manage. “Oh, well, guess I’m just not cut out for your tribe. But listen, thanks for everything and hope to see you around the streetlights sometime!” Sam gave what she hoped was a winning smile.

  “Oh, Sam, if only it were that easy.” Madalynn sighed. “Unfortunately, in the process of trying to restore balance between you and Jaida,” she continued, “I’m afraid things have gotten a little out of whack with… you and me.” She sighed deeply, conveying all the angsty responsibility of being a highly attractive bearer of bad news.

  Her earlier bravado waning, Sam felt her soul heart start to bongo. “Oh… really? Because I feel like we’re good. All… even and level. And, like, horizontal and, uh, linear with us…”

  “Oh, Sam, come now. Did you or did you not push me down in front of my entire tribe?” Madalynn questioned, turning to the MeanDreams. “What did you guys see?”

  “She knocked you flat,” said the MeanDreams flatly.

  “Not to mention friending the enemy at school today, after all I went through to render her friendless.” Madalynn shook her head. “You’ve disrespected me, disrupted the course of justice, and disheartened my tribe. That’s a few too many disses, Sam. So now I’m going to have to respond in kind.”

  “What does that mean, exactly? ’Cause, it sounds a little Mafia.” Sam tried for a chuckle, but instead horrified herself by doing an exact imitation of Margie’s wedged-hairball laugh.

  And then it all happened so fast.

  Madalynn snapped her fingers, and her tribe parted to reveal a few members of the Broadways, who, although looking utterly terror-stricken, still managed to pull off a decent overture in three-part harmony. A shivering Arthur struck a triangle with a beater, while Bree and Zac kneeled in front of Madalynn and flicked on two bright flashlights, the combined beams creating a very convincing spotlight.

  And Madalynn attacked. Her first note, that is.

  Listen…

  Then she launched into a showstopper, the eleven o’clock number, the soul barer, in an alto belt that shook the sidewalk.

  No one’s going to tell me how to live

  I don’t think so

  “You get a little and so you give”

  My heart says no

  I’m the one who pulls the strings

  of the guitar

  in my song

  You think you’ve got me figured out

  I don’t think so

  Want to see me filled with doubt

  My shrink says no

  I’m the one who pulls the strings

  of the guitar

  in my song

  Madalynn was singing so loud, the force of her voice blew Sam’s hair back from her face. She was no music expert, but it reminded her of that song from Frozen mixed with what it might sound like if Texas Chainsaw Massacre was made into a musical.

  You want me just to ignore

  I don’t think so

  That I was lying on the floor

  I don’t think so

  Yours was the first shot of the war

  You destroyed our great rapport

  So, I declare that heretofore

  I plan for vengeance, payback galore

  Hard-core

  I will restore

  A level score

  The Waker world has a door

  That will be shut forevermore

  For

  I’m the one who pulls the strings

  of the guitar

  In my soooooong

  Madalynn held her blaring final note for a good twenty seconds, her mist arms stretched into the air. Silence. Sam wasn’t quite sure what to do, so she awkwardly applauded.

  Then Bree and Zac lunged forward, hauling a stumbling body between them, a slender dark-haired girl who looked vaguely familiar. “Take a peek into your future, darlin’,” Madalynn purred to Sam, who stared in disbelief.

  It was Minnie Mouse.

  The Juvenold that Alyssa said was “sent back.”

  And now Sam knew what “sent back” meant, because Minnie’s eyes were half-open, her face was blank, and there was a noticeable absence of a silver cord floating behind her.

  Minnie was no longer a SleepWaker; she was, once again, a sleepwalker. Somehow, Madalynn had taken the darkness, the night, and the freedom of her soul away from Minnie Mouse.

  Madalynn and the MeanDreams started to drag Minnie away. And just before they disappeared into the night, Minnie woke up and started screaming.

  “Noooo!” Sam screamed, too. She would have charged after them, hyper-crossed like an essence on fire, if Byron hadn’t suddenly materialized and blocked her.

  “Stop! Sam, stop!” He held on to her, one solid soul grasping another.

  “Let me go! I have to—!” Sam pummeled and kicked, her misty heart throbbing in terror. How did this happen? How could this happen?

  “You can’t go up against them all by yourself, Helper or not!” Byron shouted, and she finally stopped pushing, reeling back, remembering Minnie’s slack expression, the slightly open mouth, the dead eyes. That’s what I looked like. All that time, that was what her mother and Jax had been seeing, had been dealing with. I can’t go back to that. I can’t. Joanne’s words rang in her head. That one desperate, exhausted life.

  “Sam. Look at me.” Byron shook her, trying to get her attention.

  “They… they had some of the Broadways,” Sam whispered.

  “Yeah. I heard the power ballad on my way over,” Byron said grimly.

  “And Minnie… did you see her? Did you see what they did to her?”

  “I didn’t really see much of anything. I only heard you scream and—”

  “Where were you? Why weren’t you here?” Sam wasn’t even able to pretend anymore. And she was glad when he looked shamefaced.

  “I’m sorry, I was… Listen, I know you’ve never been happy about me being By the Spy, but my mother asked me to do it. I mean, not to be a spy, but just to make sure new Wakers are okay,” Byron said, visibly agitated. “Knavish detached a new Extreme tonight, and I was supposed to show her the ropes. Literally. Their souls like to do stuff like zip-line between skyscrapers.”

  “Well, just… bad timing, okay?” was all she could manage. Sam reached down and grabbed her staple gun, felt the weight in her hand, trying to ground herself in this nightmare.

  “Tell me.”

  “Minnie… she’s a sleepwalker again. That’s what Alyssa meant when she said the MeanDreams ‘sent her back.’ ” As Sam expected one type of reaction from Byron—the same horror she felt—it hurt a lot more to see his confusion and disbelief.

  “That’s not possible. They don’t have that kind of power. They can’t.”

  She almost dropped her wimpy weapon. “I know what I saw.”

  “But… come on… you’ve never actually seen someone sleepwalking before, right?” Byron was shaking his head, obviously completely closed off to this possibility. “We were sleepwalkers, but I never saw anyone else in the act, did you? So how do you know for sure?”

  “Byron.” Sam felt sick to her soul stomach. “There was no silver cord.”

  “You must have missed it. You missed it the first time I showed you, remember?” Sam looked into his eyes. She could see that he was not going to budge, but for the life of her, she couldn’t fathom why.

  “Okay. If you say so.” She looked down at the staple gun, turned it over and over in her hands. There was a dead silence between them.

  “What are you gonna do now?
” Byron asked uncomfortably.

  “I’ll stay here. Just to make sure Madalynn’s not coming back to, like, drown Jaida and her dad in tap water.”

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  “Nope, I’m good.” She gave him a smile that signaled his release from duty. “If they come back, I’ll shoot staples into their eyes.”

  “But—”

  “I’m good.”

  Byron nodded, hesitant.

  And then he was gone.

  Well, he was a Roamer, after all. What did she expect?

  More. Her inner voice never failed to tell the annoying truth. I expected more.

  OWWWWWW.

  This was the first thought that passed through her waking mind the next morning. Ever since she’d been a SleepWaker, the mornings had been revelatory for Sam—the feeling of a rested body, relaxed muscles, renewed cells, and all that good stuff—it was mind-blowing. But today… not so much.

  Sam raised an arm to rub her crusty eyes and immediately noticed the scratches on her hand. What the heck?! Did my body fall out of bed onto a porcupine? She looked over to see if Weezy had somehow gone rabid in the middle of the night, and immediately moaned—her neck was painfully stiff. What in the wide green world was going on? This was what it felt like when—

  No. Sam didn’t even want to complete that thought, but her independent brain forged ahead without her permission. When… I was sleepwalking.

  Of course, this was impossible. She had a clear memory of her soul enduring the awful events of the night before. There was even physical evidence, for Pete’s sake; the staple gun rested heavily on her blanketed leg. “So, yeah, impossible, right?” she said out loud to Weezy, who opened one googly eye and snorted gently. He then commenced to give Sam an early morning lick-down, which was both disgusting and comforting. As his rough tongue caressed her ouchy flesh, she said it to herself again and again: Impossible. Right?

  As she limped over to Wallace, Sam tried to focus on solving the mystery of her achy body and not on the cryptic phone call she had received from Principal Nussbaum requesting her presence at school on a Saturday morning. She tried to convince herself that he wanted to compliment her in person on how much she’d changed recently, what with the staying-awake-in-classes-and-answering-a-question-here-and-there thing, but when he met her at the doors to the auditorium with a confused/enraged expression on his face, that fantasy went right out the window. Mr. Todorov stood next to him, weeping, “If you wanted us to do Fiddler on the Roof, why couldn’t you just say so?!”

  Sam felt a familiar sense of dread. Whatever was going on, she knew it was going to be big and messy and hard to explain. And probably expensive. Definitely expensive.

  Principal Nussbaum flung the auditorium doors open and Sam gasped.

  The entire set that she had built the day before was on the ceiling.

  Under the ceiling? On the floor of the ceiling?

  What am I looking at?

  Renkioi Hospital, with its beds and Crimean War pastorals and Florence Nightingale’s nursing station, was nailed to the ceiling of the auditorium and hanging upside down.

  “How is that even possible?” Sam whispered.

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” said Principal Nussbaum icily.

  “What do you mean?” She couldn’t seem to raise her voice any louder than a guilty-sounding mumble.

  He pointed a finger violently behind her at the security station. Sam turned slowly as Claudia, the security guard, pressed “play” on the video system at her desk. Sam approached, her terror mounting, as a grainy figure moved across the screen.

  “Are you flyin’ on me?” Claudia said in disbelief.

  Because the grainy figure on screen was Sam.

  My body is still sleepwalking. Even with my soul freed, my body can’t rest.

  The grainy-screen Sam opened a ladder.

  I’m not a Helper. I’m not even a MeanDream. I’m worse than that.

  The screen-Sam grabbed a hammer and nails and started up the ladder.

  People show who they really are in the darkness. In the darkness, my body is still destroying things.

  The screen Sam reached the top of the ladder, turned, and very deliberately looked into the camera.

  And smiled.

  A very familiar, very shiny, gleamy, megawatt smile that was not Sam’s at all.

  Payback galore had begun.

  “I’m telling you, Madalynn is hijacking bodies!” Sam yelped.

  “Not scientifically possible,” Fletch said with utmost conviction.

  “But I saw her! I saw her face in my face! And look at my hands!” She displayed her scratched, bruised fingers. “How do you explain that?!” Sam had never understood her mother better than now, because all she wanted to do was tear her own hair out.

  “A few boo-boos does not an upside-down castle make.” Fletcher was being maddeningly confident. “How could Madalynn possibly have done that all by her lonesome?”

  “I don’t know! She probably had the whole tribe with her, but she was the only one who decided to be visible! Because she wants me expelled, or, like, hauled into juvenile court!” Sam’s voice was so shrill by this point, she was surprised the clinic’s windows were still intact.

  “Samantha, calm down,” said Joanne, briskly grabbing a tube of ointment and applying the goo to Sam’s wounds. “We realize this is a very emotional time for you, but nothing is to be gained by ranting.”

  Sam submitted to Joanne’s gooing with gritted teeth. “Okay. Listen. Queen MeanDream has figured out how to hop into a soul vacancy, and she’s also turning SleepWakers back into sleepwalkers, and those two things have to be connected somehow, and you don’t think that deserves a rant?!” Her voice rose again against her will. “Besides, how can you say ‘not scientifically possible,’ when you were the ones who told me that scientists pretty much know zip?” Joanne sighed rather dramatically and wrapped Sam’s hands in gauze.

  “Well… she makes some good points, Jo,” Fletch said, his conviction obviously wavering. “We really don’t know what we’re talking about half the time. Except, of course, for Knavish, who’s a genius.”

  “Just the sort of thing one likes to hear during one’s entrance,” came a voice from the doorway, and in walked Dr. Richard Knavish himself, his green-tinted glasses sparkling with raindrops.

  “Richard! Thank you for coming!” Fletch looked over at Sam. “I hope you don’t mind, Samantha, but I called him right after Joanne received your textual this morning.” He grabbed a tissue and extended it to Knavish. “Would you like to dry your—”

  “No!” Knavish recoiled as if Fletcher had tried to hand him a live snake. Then, more calmly, “No, I’m perfectly fine.”

  That dude is so strange. But Sam was desperate for any kind of help at this point, even from a man whose eyes looked like lime slices. “Dr. Knavish, what is happening?!”

  Knavish tossed his raincoat onto a hook. “That’s what I’m trying to ascertain, child. You are absolutely certain it was Madalynn?”

  “I’m sure,” Sam said strongly. “It was my body, but her smile.”

  Knavish murmured, “Hmmm, I wonder… ‘Before the silver cord is severed, and the dust returns to the ground it came from’… the Tanakh, 450 BCE.”

  “What does that mean?” Sam exclaimed.

  “You’re not thinking that her cord will be severed?” said Joanne, aghast.

  Fletch turned to Sam. “Did your principal mention that Madalynn was disembodied or dead today?”

  “Uh, no. But I don’t get it, why would jumping into my body sever her cord? Doesn’t it go through anything? Mine went through cars, for crying out loud.” Sam heard herself and shuddered.

  Knavish shook his head. “It’s about intent. Passing one’s silver cord through the worldly flesh of another in order to possess and subjugate… It’s against human nature, and in theory, should result in death. But it appears that death is not immediate… hmmm… Perhaps she’s figured ou
t how to inhabit other bodies only temporarily.” Knavish was pacing back and forth, almost talking to himself at this point. “But it’s very dangerous. Repeated bodyhopping will fray the lifeline beyond recognition, eventually causing it to snap, and Lord knows what it might do to the host. Fascinating…”

  The host. That would be me. Sam felt like something black and slimy was crawling inside of her. “This is too much. I can’t do this anymore. I thought sleepwalking was the worst life ever, but…” She turned to Fletch in despair. “I’d rather sleepwalk off a cliff than go through this.”

  “Oh, honey… don’t say that.”

  Her mother was standing at the door, and her appearance made Sam gasp for two reasons: first of all, Margie had her arm around Jaida. But also, Margie had cut off all her hair and was sporting a half-inch buzz that matched the regrowth in her bald spot, showing off a perfectly shaped head and a lovely face with just a trace of dark circles under the eyes.

  “Mom… you look amazing.” Sam knew she sounded way more stunned than she should, but come on, how many kids can brag that their mother looks awesome nearly bald?

  Margie smiled as Fletch made a stab at hospitality. “Come in, come in! Do you need a cup of tea? I can send Jo to the Seven-Eleven.” Joanne must have reached her 7-Eleven excursion limit, because she pursed her lips in annoyance.

  “No, thank you.” Margie closed her umbrella as Sam approached Jaida tentatively.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.” Jaida looked guarded. “This place is weird.”

  Despite her black sludge emotional state, Sam almost smiled. “Total understatement.”

  The door opened again to reveal a soaking-wet Jax. “I thought you were coming back with the umbrella,” he said to Margie.

  “Oops! Sorry, honey. My mind…” She fluttered her hands around her sassy ’do.

  “Jax?” Sam looked back and forth between her brother and Jaida. “Why are you guys here?”

  “Celebrating a brand-new holiday.” Jax grabbed a hospital gown from Fletch’s exam table to dry himself off. “I’m dubbing it Upside-Down Day.”