Chapter 8: Uninvited (Patreon)

The phone rang at 6:41 in the morning, and I knew before I picked it up.

After a while you get a feeling about phones. Theo had it from the Army—a call at the wrong hour is never the one you want—and Randy had it from three days in September, so between us we had the whole set. I crossed the room and had the cordless in my hand before the second ring, still in my battery pants, rattling like a maraca.

"It's me," Nancy said.

Pay phone. Traffic behind her, a truck downshifting. Her voice was flat and very even, the way people talk when they've decided that if they let in any feeling at all, all of it will come.

"What happened?"

"She went back to sleep." Nancy breathed out. "After we all came out. Around four. She'd been awake an hour, she was happy, Randy, she was sitting up in bed doing Jennifer's hair again, and then she was just... tired. She said she'd close her eyes for a minute."

I sat down on the edge of the bed.

"She started screaming at four-twenty. Max got there first. Then the night nurse. Then somebody called Simms at home." A pause. "She was fighting them. She was trying to stay awake. She was begging them not to let her sleep, and to them that looked exactly like a psychotic break, because to anybody who doesn't know, it is exactly like a psychotic break."

"They sedated her."

"Simms had her sedated and moved to the Quiet Room. Scheduled doses. Every six hours, 'until she stabilizes.'" Her voice thinned on the word. "She's been under since five a.m. She's under now."

I closed my eyes. In the back of my head the kid had gone silent, like a dog that hears something in the yard. Guests can be uninvited. That had never been a threat. It was a plan, and Freddy had said it out loud in front of everybody because he wanted us to spend the whole day knowing it. Knock out the door and nobody comes to the party. Kristen couldn't reach anybody through a chemical, and she couldn't wake up, and every other kid at Westin Hills would go to sleep tonight alone, one at a time, in their own rooms, the way he liked them.

"There's more," Nancy said.

"There's always more."

"Gordon wrote it down. Last night. He put the whole session in the night log, times and names and all. He said he wasn't going to lie in a medical record." One short laugh. "He's suspended pending review. And I'm finished. Simms walked me to my car at six-fifteen."

"Are the kids okay?"

"For now. It's daytime. Joey took a nap after breakfast and woke up in forty seconds with his mouth open, and nobody else will close their eyes." Another truck. "Randy, listen. There's a way. Neil and I have been up all night. Group hypnosis. I can take all of them down at once, together, into one dream, without Kristen. It's how we got in last night, before she reached. They go down holding hands, and they land in the same place."

"So do it."

"I can't take you down."

I waited.

"Not over a phone line," she said. "Neil tried it once with a patient in Cleveland, years ago, a long-distance session. It doesn't take. You need the room. You need the voice in the room, and the hands. And I'm not taking seven kids into his house on his worst night without Kristen and without—" She stopped.

"Him," I said. The kid, she meant, and the remote, and I felt like a useless sack of shit for being able to offer her nothing but a voice on a phone.

"Both of you." The bluntness was almost funny. "I watched you two make that thing cry on Sunday. I'm not doing it without you. I've buried enough kids and friends."

In the back of my head, the kid did something that felt like standing up.

I looked at the clock. 6:47. Ohio was three hours ahead, and if they had to go under tonight—and they did—it would be late, after the night staff settled. Midnight there, nine o'clock here. Two thousand miles, and fifteen hours.

"Nancy," I said. "What if I'm in the room?"

Traffic went by on her end for a while.

"You're seventeen," she said. "You're grounded. You live in California."

"Yes, yes, and yes." I was already up, looking for a pair of pants without forty-eight batteries in them. "Where do I land?"

"Randy—"

"Columbus? Cleveland? What's the closest airport to Springwood?"

"Columbus." She said it like she couldn't believe she was saying it. "It's an hour's drive. Randy, even if you could... how are you going to get a plane ticket by tonight? You're a child."

"I'm not a child," I said. "I'm a celebrity." I found a pen. "What about the bones? Did you ask him?"

The silence on the line changed shape.

"I'm going to my father's," Nancy said. "This morning. He hasn't said one word to me about that night in seven years. Every time I bring it up, he pours a drink." She read me a number, and I wrote it on my hand. "If you're serious, call me there. Seven o'clock my time. Maybe you'll have better luck. You seem to have a way with stubborn."

Gale Weathers called me back in eleven minutes.

I'd found the Top Story line in the phone book and gotten a night-shift production assistant in Los Angeles. "Tell Gale Weathers that Randy Meeks is ready to talk, and the offer expires at seven-thirty," I said, and hung up before he could put me on hold. Theo had known a staff sergeant who said that if you want a senior officer to move fast, you don't ask. You give them a deadline and walk away.

The phone rang at 7:02.

"Randy." Gale's voice, low and warm, the one she used on grieving mothers. She'd clearly been awake a while. "I'm so glad you called. How are you doing, sweetheart?"

"Don't," I said. "I'm seventeen. You're thirty, and Tatum tells me you're dating Dewey now. It's seven in the morning. Let's skip the part where you pretend I'm your nephew."

A little pause. When she came back the warmth was gone, and what was under it was a lot more interesting. "Fine. What do you want?"

"Two plane tickets to Columbus, Ohio. Today. Round trip. One for me, one for whatever adult you bring so nobody arrests you for kidnapping."

"And what do I get?"

"The interview. The one you've been asking for since September. The whole night at Stu's, from the beginning. You and me and a camera, no lawyers in the room. First and only." I swallowed. "I'll tell you everything the police already know. On tape. In my own words."

She didn't answer right away. I could hear her thinking; Gale Weathers thinking sounds like a very expensive car idling.

"What's in Columbus?" she said.

"Nothing's in Columbus."

"What's an hour from Columbus?"

I kept my mouth shut.

"Springwood," Gale said softly. "Springwood, Ohio."

"How the hell—"

"Please. I'm a journalist. Three weeks ago, at two-fourteen in the morning, somebody called the Springwood Police Department from a residential number in Woodsboro, California, about a teenage girl bleeding in a bathroom. Springwood PD isn't exactly the NYPD. They talked. A girl named Kristen Parker. Now at Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital, which has had, let me see—" Paper rustled. She had it right in front of her; she'd had it in front of her for weeks. "Four suicides and two attempts among adolescent patients since last spring, and a staff psychiatrist who won't return my calls. And on your little website, in October, a page called How to Survive a Dream Demon." She let that sit. "I did a segment on you, Randy. You think I didn't read it?"

"Goddamn it, Dewey," I muttered, because there was no way she'd put half of that together without a deputy feeding her, and Dewey Riley would've handed her the station keys if she'd smiled at him right.

Theo used to watch Gale on a laptop in the group home with the sound down so the other kids wouldn't hear, and if I'm honest, out of everybody in those movies she was always the one I liked least: insufferable, starving for attention, perfectly happy to fuck over anybody in her way, Dewey included, if it got her a better shot. Maybe there was a heart under there somewhere. She was still a bitch, and she was the bitch with the travel budget.

"Two tickets, today," Gale said. "Counteroffer. I'm the adult. I fly out with you, I fly back with you, and I'm in the room for whatever's happening in Springwood."

"No."

"Then no tickets."

"You can come to Springwood," I said. "You can't come in the room."

"Randy—"

"There's a hospital full of kids who've been called crazy for a year. Everybody who's walked in there with a notebook has made it worse. You don't get to put them on television. That's not negotiable. The interview's the price. Not them."

A long pause.

"You know," Gale said, "you're a lot less fun than you were on the lawn."

"I got shot in the shoulder since then."

"Fair." Paper again, and a pen clicking. "There's a United out of SFO at eleven-forty, through O'Hare. Gets into Columbus at eight-fifty tonight. If you're at the terminal by ten-thirty with a parent's signature on a piece of paper saying I'm allowed to take you across state lines, you're on it."

"I'll be there."

"And Randy?"

"Yeah?"

"When we get back," Gale Weathers said, "you're going to tell me what really happened in that house," and she hung up, like she hadn't had her own cameras parked on the Machers' lawn while it was happening.

Dad was in the garage. He was always in the garage before work. I'd figured out the first week that Mr. Meeks didn't actually do anything out there; he drank his coffee standing by the workbench, looking at his tools, like a man checking that the world was still where he'd left it, and then he got in the car and went. Twenty minutes, every day. I never asked about it. I'd had a few spots like that myself, once.

He looked up when I came in, saw my face, and set the coffee down. "What's wrong?"

I'd practiced a whole speech in the shower, with a beginning and an end and a part in the middle about responsibility, and none of it made it out of my mouth.

"Dad," I said, "I need to go to Ohio today, and I can't tell you why."

He didn't laugh. He didn't say you're grounded or Randy, what the hell. He looked at me the way he had across the kitchen table the day after Stu's, when I told the police I'd taken his gun.

"Is this Kristen?" he said.

I blinked.

"Your mother talks to me," Dad said. "The phone bill talks to me too. It says Springwood, Ohio, every night for three weeks. At two in the morning, sometimes." He picked the coffee up again and didn't drink it. "She's in a hospital."

"Yeah."

"Is she okay?"

"No," I said. "Not right now. And tonight she's going to be a lot less okay unless I'm in the room. That's all I can tell you, and I know how it sounds."

"How does it sound?"

"Crazy."

"Mm." He looked at his tools. "You know what your mother said to me the day after? After the party?"

I shook my head.

"She said, he knew. She said, Randy knew something was going to happen, and he tried to tell everybody, and nobody listened. She said that all week, about the way you'd been. Like you were watching a car go through a red light." He finally drank the coffee. "She was right. I didn't listen. Burke didn't listen. You had to take my gun out of a box and handle it yourself, because none of the grown-ups would."

"Dad—"

"Is somebody going to shoot at you in Ohio?"

"No," I said. That one I could promise. "There's no gun in this one. Nobody's going to shoot anybody."

"Then how are you getting there?"

"Gale Weathers is buying the tickets."

He stared at me.

"She wants an interview," I said. "I'm giving her one when we get back. She's flying with me. She needs you to sign something."

He kept staring, and then he did something I'd never seen him do and never learned to expect: he laughed, a small, surprised laugh, like something had gone off in his chest. "The TV lady. Christ."

"She's trying to act professional."

"She shoved a microphone in your face the day after you got out of the hospital."

"I know. But right now she's the fastest way I can get there and help my friend."

He shook his head. I could see him deciding, and I could see the whole argument on his face: the sensible part of him that knew this was insane, and the part that remembered the kitchen table, a microcassette in a plastic evidence bag, and his son saying I took it because nobody else was going to.

"I'll drive you," he said.

"You have work."

"I'll call in." He put the mug on the workbench. "I'll sign her paper. I'll look her in the eye and tell her that if anything happens to you, I will end her career with my bare hands. Then I'll come home and tell your mother, and she will kill me, and that's my job, not yours." He pointed at me. "You call. The second you land. And every time you land after that. And if you're not home by Wednesday, I'm getting on a plane myself."

"Deal."

"And Randy?"

"Yeah?"

His face did something I'd never seen a father's face do in my direction, in twenty-six years and change—worried, proud, scared, and resigned all at once, like a man watching a kid go up a ladder he can't climb himself.

"Whatever it is," he said, "you come back."

I couldn't talk, so I nodded.

In the back of my head the kid was quiet too, but I could feel him, warm and knotted up. Seventeen years of a dad who stood in the garage every morning looking at his tools, and the kid had never been one hundred percent sure the man actually liked him.

He does, I told him.

Yeah, the kid said. Then, very small: I know that now.

Dad was back at the workbench rinsing his mug in the utility sink, and I was halfway to the door, when the kid spoke again. Nothing mean in it. He was just noticing, the way you notice rain.

He said it to you, though. "Whatever it is, you come back." He was looking at you when he said it. Not me.

He was looking at his son, I told him.

Yeah, said the kid. I know. That's kind of what I mean.

Martha was at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cap'n Crunch when I came down with a backpack.

"Where are you going?"

"Ohio."

She looked at me over the spoon, then at the backpack, then at Dad behind me holding his car keys, not stopping me, and very clearly not going to explain anything. "What's in Ohio?"

"Nothing."

She took another bite, chewed, swallowed. "Bring me something."

"From Ohio?"

"You're going to Ohio. On a school day. While grounded. And Dad's driving you." She pointed the spoon at me. "Whatever's happening, I'm getting a souvenir out of it. It's the only thing I've asked for all year."

"You asked for three dollars a mile."

"That's a business. This is personal."

I kissed the top of her head on my way past. Randy apparently hadn't done that since she was about six, because she went rigid and made a sound like a stepped-on cat.

"Gross," she said. "Okay. Now bring me something good."

Keep it up and I'll bring you his glove, I thought, and went out to the car.

Mom was still asleep. Dad said she'd sat up until one reading the same page of a paperback over and over, listening through the wall to her son laughing until he cried at midnight in a pair of pants full of batteries. "Leave her. I've got it," Dad said, in the voice of a man who was going to have it in about two hours whether he wanted it or not.

I stood in their bedroom doorway for a second anyway. She was on her side with one hand under the pillow, the paperback face-down on the nightstand, still open to the page. Then I wrote her a note and left it on the kitchen counter under the sugar bowl, where she'd see it when she made her coffee.

Mom. I'm sorry. Dad knows. I'll call. I love you. I'm going to say hi to Kristen for you. R.

Five sentences, and one of them was about a girl.

Gale Weathers was waiting at the United counter in the International Terminal at 10:26, in a camel coat and sunglasses, with a garment bag and a shoulder bag that I knew without asking held a Hi8 camcorder. She took the sunglasses off when she saw Dad.

There was a moment. Dad was looking at the woman who'd once described his son on national television as "the Woodsboro horror geek, whose own friends say he always wanted something like this to happen." Gale was looking at the man who, according to the police report, kept a Beretta 92 in a lockbox whose combination was his daughter's birthday.

"Mr. Meeks," Gale said, and held out her hand.

Dad looked at the hand, then took it. "Ms. Weathers."

"I'll bring him back in one piece."

"You'll bring him back in the same piece," Dad said. "He's only got the one."

He signed her paper on the counter with a United pen. Then he hugged me hard, hand on the back of my head, said "Call" into my hair, and walked away across the terminal without turning around, because he was the kind of man who'd have come back if he turned around.

Gale watched him go. "He's nice."

"He's the best," I said, and meant it.

"Your mother?"

"Asleep. She's going to kill him."

"Mm." Gale put her sunglasses back on. "Well. Let's not waste his sacrifice." She handed me a boarding pass: seat 23E, middle. "I'm in the window. Try not to snore."

"I'm not going to sleep."

She raised an eyebrow over the sunglasses.

"Believe me," I said. "You wouldn't get it if I told you."

I fell asleep somewhere over Nevada, like a fucking idiot.

I'd been up since six-forty. The day before I'd run three miles and been in a dream fight until almost midnight. I was seventeen, the plane was warm, and the engines made that long, low drone that's basically a lullaby for anybody who's ever ridden in the back of a C-17. Gale was reading a Newsweek with her glasses on the end of her nose. My head went down, the kid went wait, and I didn't.

I landed in Bradley Video after hours. The lights were off except the red EXIT sign and the blue glow of the TV in the front window, the one that played trailers on a loop all day, and everything was the right shape and the wrong color, the way dreams are. The shelves went back a lot farther than they should have, and every one of them held The Night He Came Home. I was alone—no tiger stripes, no bandana, no M60, just Randy's body in Randy's clothes, and no kid—and that was how I knew it was only mine, a normal, stupid, human dream.

Except for the TV. It was playing a trailer for no movie I knew: a long hospital hallway ending in a heavy door painted green, with a narrow wire-glass window at head height and a light on behind it. Somebody behind the glass was pressing her hands flat against it. Blonde. Mint-green cardigan. Her lips were making the same shape over and over. Randy.

I went up to the TV and put my hand on the screen. It was cold, like the Bradley Video window in the morning before the sun hits it.

Then somebody stepped between the camera and the glass. A hat. A sweater. He turned around slowly so I could see him grin, reached up with the glove, and hung a little hotel-style sign on the doorknob, where it swung on its string.

MEMBERS ONLY.

He tipped his hat at me, very polite, and the screen went to snow.

I woke up with my hand pressed flat against the seat back in front of me and my heart going like a snare drum, and the man in 22E turned around and gave me a look.

"Sorry," I said. "Sorry. Bad dream."

He turned back around. Gale had taken off her glasses and was looking at me the way I imagine she looked at a document somebody had tried to shred.

"You talk in your sleep," she said.

"Everybody talks in their sleep."

"You said Kristen," Gale said. "Four times. Then something about members." She folded the Newsweek on her knee. "Who's Kristen?"

"A friend."

"The girl you were talking about?"

"A friend," I said again.

She studied me a while longer. Then she opened the magazine again and said nothing for ten minutes, which I've since learned is the most restraint Gale Weathers has ever shown in her life. When she did talk, she didn't look up.

"You know what Springwood is famous for? Before this?"

"Yeah."

"Never Sleep Again," she said anyway. "The one with the janitor who faked his death in the fire and went around killing teenagers in their beds. I saw it in college and didn't sleep for a week." She turned a page. "They say it was based on a true story. They always say that. Half of them are lies."

"That one's a lie," I said, not really thinking.

"Oh?" Now she looked up. "What part?"

I thought about the Bradley Video shelf three weeks ago, a cover I'd grown up with and the wrong title on top. A movie that said a man named Fred Krueger crawled out of a fire and kept killing people for years with his bare hands, and a whole country that watched it, believed it, and slept fine.

"All of it," I said. "Every part that makes it easy to explain."

Gale considered me over her glasses. "You know," she said, "I'm writing a book."

My whole body went cold.

"About Woodsboro. About that night. I've got a publisher. I've got a title." She tapped her pen on the tray table. "And every time I sit down to write it, I get to your part and I can't make it make sense. The horror geek who knew the rules. Who knew from day one exactly how it would go." She put the pen down. "Most people panic when their friends start dying. You made a plan. You went into that house with a tape recorder. How does a seventeen-year-old know?"

Book, I thought. She's writing the book. The book becomes the movie. The movie's Stab.

"You weren't there," I said. "You didn't see Stu making jokes about his ex-girlfriend's corpse, wondering what she looked like when her parents found her. You didn't see Billy walk in with the same wounds Sidney and I gave Ghostface that afternoon. You didn't see the look on his face a year ago, almost gleeful, when Sidney hugged him the week her mother died." I shrugged with my good shoulder. "And if you still don't believe me, watch more horror movies. You figure some things out."

I watched her decide not to believe it, and then decide she'd get it out of me later; she was very patient when there was a story in it.

"Uh-huh," she said, and went back to her Newsweek.

In the back of my head the kid said, What's Stab?

Nothing, I told him. A movie. Don't worry about it.

Are we in it?

Go back to sleep, I said, and he didn't, and neither did I.

O'Hare, 5:52 p.m. Central.

We had an hour and twenty minutes to make the Columbus flight. Gale went off to find a newsstand and a phone of her own, because she'd been "out of contact with the office for four hours, Randy, do you understand what that means in television," and I found a bank of pay phones at the end of Concourse C, next to an empty shoe-shine stand. I didn't dial right away. I opened the panel first.

Ability Slot 1: Dark SpearStored: Truth Assertion[SWAP] (5:00)

I'd been chewing on this all the way over the Rockies. Nancy had been at her father's since ten this morning, and if she'd gotten anything out of him she'd have called my house, and Dad would've told me when I called from the gate at SFO. He hadn't. So she'd gotten nothing: seven years of nothing, plus one more day.

Donald Thompson had been a cop, a lieutenant. He was the one who told his sixteen-year-old daughter she was imagining things. He'd been one of the parents who went down into that boiler room with the gasoline, and he'd lied about it for most of his daughter's life—to his wife, to his daughter, to himself—and he was good at it. Nobody was going to argue him out of it over a pay phone, not Nancy and not me. Not with words, anyway.

You said you wouldn't, the kid said. He wasn't accusing me, just checking. You said there were some things you shouldn't make people believe.

I know what I said.

So?

I thought about Sidney in the back of the ambulance, and the collar I hadn't turned on, and the difference between then and now.

This is different, I told him. I'm not making him believe something he doesn't know. He already knows. He's known the whole time. I'm only taking away the part where he gets to pretend he doesn't.

The kid turned that over. Okay, he said. Yeah. Okay.

I hit SWAP.

Five minutes is a long time to stand at an airport pay phone doing nothing. A family of five went by in matching Bulls jackets. A man in a suit shouted into a brick-sized cell phone about a shipment in Toledo. I felt the Dark Spear go out of me like a tooth coming loose, a cold, heavy absence, and then something else settled slowly into the gap, something light that sat at the base of my throat like a word I hadn't said yet.

Ability Slot 1: Truth Assertion

I buttoned Randy's flannel all the way to the neck, like a kid going to church, put in a quarter, and dialed the number on my hand.

Six rings. Then a man picked up—older, heavy, a voice that had once been a good cop's and had spent a long time since being poured into a glass. "What."

"Lieutenant Thompson," I said. "My name's Randy Meeks. I'm a friend of your daughter's."

I felt it light up. I couldn't see it, but I could feel it under the flannel, cool and bright as a ring of cold water, and on the other end Donald Thompson went quiet, the way a man does when a stranger on the phone says something and it turns out to be true.

"The California kid," he said finally. "The one on the television."

"Yes, sir."

"She's been sitting in my kitchen since ten o'clock this morning talking about you." A long, wet breath. "Look, son. I don't know what my daughter told you. I don't know what kind of story you two have going. But she's sick. She's been sick since she was sixteen. She sees things. And you're not helping her by—"

"Fred Krueger killed at least twenty children in Springwood," I said. "When your daughter was in kindergarten. He took them to the boiler room at the power plant. You arrested him. You had him. And somebody forgot to sign the search warrant, and a judge let him walk out the front door."

The line went dead quiet, no dial tone, just a man not breathing.

"So you all went down there," I said. "The parents. You and Marge and the Lantzes and the Grays and the rest of them. With gasoline. You locked the doors and you burned him. And you've never told anyone. Not your wife, after. Not your daughter. You've never told anyone."

"Who is this," Donald Thompson whispered.

"I already told you. And you know I'm not lying." I closed my eyes. "You know. You can feel that I'm not."

He could, and that was the whole point. The collar doesn't make you believe anything; it makes you believe me. The difference sat right there on the line between us, and I hated it a little, and I used it anyway.

"You didn't bury him," I said. "Whatever was left. You couldn't, not in a churchyard where anyone would find it. So you hid it. All these years, Lieutenant, you've known exactly where. And every time your daughter tried to tell you he was back, you poured another drink, because if you listened to her you'd have to go get it."

Far off on the other end I heard a woman's voice. Nancy's. Dad? Dad, who is it?

"He's back," I said. "He's been back. He's killed four kids at Westin Hills since spring. Tonight he's going to kill the other seven, and then he's going to kill Nancy, unless somebody opens that trunk. It has to be tonight, sir. Midnight. Somebody has to put what's in it into the ground with holy water while we keep him busy."

The silence went on so long I thought I'd lost him. Then Donald Thompson said, in the small voice of a man who'd held something up for half his life and just set it down: "The Cadillac."

My knees almost went.

"Kellerman's Salvage, out on Route 9. Back row, by the fence. A '59 Coupe de Ville. I welded the trunk shut myself." A sound that might have been a laugh. "It's been sitting there since Carter was president. I drive past it every day on the way to the liquor store."

"Dr. Gordon will meet you there," I said. "Neil Gordon. He'll have the holy water. Twelve-fifteen."

"Twelve-fifteen." A pause. "Kid?"

"Yes, sir."

"She said you knew things." The heavy breath again. "She didn't say you knew everything."

"I don't," I said. "Just enough."

I hung up with my hand shaking, opened the panel, and hit SWAP before I could think about it, and the cold ring at my throat started to fade like frost melting off a window. Then I turned around, and Gale Weathers was standing there with two soft pretzels, looking at my neck.

I'd buttoned the flannel up, but it was cheap and old, and the collar was bright. A thin white line of light leaked over the top of the fabric all the way around, like the glow at the edge of a door. It was fading—maybe a minute and a half from gone—and for that minute and a half I couldn't say one thing I didn't believe.

"Randy," Gale said slowly. "Is your neck... glowing?"

"Yes," I said.

She waited. "Why?"

"I can't tell you," I said, which was true.

"Is it—" Gale glanced around and lowered her voice. "Is it dangerous? Radioactive?"

"No."

And Gale Weathers, who had spent ten years not believing a word anyone said to her, who had interviewed serial killers and senators and grieving mothers and could smell a lie through a closed door, looked at the thin white light around my neck, nodded, said, "Okay," and handed me a pretzel.

I watched her face while she did it. About three seconds later a little crease showed up between her eyebrows, like somebody who's walked into a room and forgotten why. She'd believed me instantly and completely, and some very sharp part of Gale Weathers had just noticed that she'd done it, didn't know why, and didn't like it. She didn't say anything. She ate her pretzel and read her Newsweek at the gate. But three or four times on the way to Columbus I caught her looking at my collar like she was trying to remember a word on the tip of her tongue.

That was bad, the kid said.

No shit, I told him.

The frost at my throat finished melting somewhere over Indiana.

Ability Slot 1: Dark Spear

Columbus, 8:52 p.m. Eastern.

I called home from a pay phone by baggage claim, like I'd promised. Dad picked up on the first ring.

"Landed," I said.

"Good," Dad said, and I could hear his whole last ten hours in that one syllable. "Your mother would like a word."

The phone changed hands. Then breathing, a long, even, controlled breath, the kind you take before you say something you'll have to live with.

"Randall," my mother said.

"Hi, Mom."

"You left a note."

"I know."

"Under the sugar bowl."

"I know. I'm sorry."

Another breath. I waited for the yelling, the how could you, the do you have any idea. I'd have deserved all of it, and I'd have stood there by baggage claim and taken every word.

"Is she okay?" Mom said instead. "Your Kristen."

I had to lean my forehead against the phone for a second. "Not yet."

"But she's going to be."

"I'm going to try."

"Okay." Her voice wobbled once and held. "Then you go and you try. And you say hi to her for me. And then you come home, Randy, and you are grounded until you are thirty, do you understand me? Thirty. You'll be a grown man with a mortgage and you will still be in your room."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I love you. You stupid, stupid boy."

"I love you too, Mom."

I hung up. Gale was standing a little way off with the rental agreement, pretending not to listen and doing a terrible job of it.

"Thirty?" she said.

"Jesus Christ, woman," I said. "Can you not snoop on my calls? Do I have to start taking them on the shitter to get some privacy?"

Gale drove the way she reported: fast, aggressive, and completely certain that everyone else on the road stood between her and the truth. We did seventy-nine up Route 23 in a white rental Taurus with the heater on high and a Columbus rock station that played "Name" by the Goo Goo Dolls twice in forty minutes.

Springwood came up out of the dark around ten-fifteen. I'd seen it a hundred times; everybody has. It's the most normal-looking town in America, which is the point—elms, big porches, lawns, Victorian houses with the lights off. It could be anywhere in the Midwest. It could be your grandmother's street.

We passed a green sign at an intersection. ELM ST.

"Turn here," I said.

"We're going to the hospital."

"Please."

Gale looked at me and turned.

It was halfway down the block, and I knew it before I saw the number: white clapboard, big front porch, steep roof, dark windows, and a FOR SALE sign that had been on the lawn so long the grass had grown up around the post. Somebody had spray-painted something on it and somebody else had painted over it, and you could still read it through the white. 1, 2.

1428 Elm Street, which was only a house in the dark with nobody in it, and in the back of my head the kid had gone rigid anyway.

"That's the one from the movie," Gale said, low. "Isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"You know, they say nobody's lived there since 1984. They say every family that moves in leaves in less than a year." She put the car back in drive. "People say a lot of things."

"People are right," I said, "more often than they get credit for."

Westin Hills sits on a hill at the edge of town, the way asylums always do in the movies, like somebody built it up there so the rest of Springwood wouldn't have to look at it. Big brick building, three stories, with a bell tower on the east end that I recognized with a feeling like missing a stair. Most of the windows were dark. A few on the second floor weren't.

Nancy was waiting in the parking lot, under a light pole in a long coat with her arms folded, and when the Taurus pulled in she didn't move. She watched us park. I got out, and she looked at the real me—Randy's body, six feet of scarecrow in a flannel shirt, with a bad shoulder and a backpack.

I'd seen her in the dream, and on a movie screen a hundred times, but I'd never seen her awake. She was smaller than I'd pictured, and tired in a way that went a lot deeper than one bad night. The white streak in her hair caught the light from the pole.

"You're taller in person," she said.

"You're shorter."

"You're seventeen," Nancy said, like she'd only just now understood it. Then she did something I hadn't expected at all: she came across the lot fast and hugged me, hard, the way you hug somebody who's come a long way for you. She smelled like cigarettes and coffee and the cold. "You came. You idiot. You actually came."

"I said I would."

"People say a lot of things." She let go, stepped back, wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, and looked past me at the woman getting out of the driver's side.

Gale took off her sunglasses. It was ten-forty at night; I don't know why she'd had them on. "Gale Weathers," she said, and held out her hand. "Top Story."

Nancy looked at the hand. "I know who you are," she said, and didn't take it.

It was the only time I ever saw Gale Weathers out-cooled. She dropped the hand and smiled like it didn't bother her, and it bothered her enormously, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy watching Nancy Thompson hand Gale Weathers her ass in a hospital parking lot.

"My father called," Nancy said to me, done with Gale. "At eight. He said, I'm going. That's all. He hung up." Her voice did something small and complicated. "He hasn't said much about anything in ten years. What did you say to him?"

"The truth."

"I've been telling him the truth for seven years."

"I know," I said. "I cheated."

Nancy looked at my throat. I don't know what she saw there; nothing, probably, since the frost was long gone. "Neil's with him now," she said. "They're going to the salvage yard at midnight. The staff shift change is eleven-thirty. Max is on the back door." She glanced at Gale. "The front desk is a problem. Carol's on nights, and Carol is loyal to Simms, and Carol never, ever leaves that desk."

Gale Weathers put her sunglasses in her coat pocket, fluffed her hair, and got a look on her face I'd only ever seen on the lawn at Woodsboro High. "Leave Carol," she said, "to me."

I don't know what Gale said to Carol; I wasn't there. What I know is that at 11:38 p.m. Gale Weathers walked into the front lobby of Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital unannounced, Hi8 camcorder in hand and press pass on a lanyard, and said loud enough to carry through the double doors, "Hi! I'm doing a piece on the unsung heroes of American psychiatric nursing, and I was told, I was specifically told, that I had to talk to you—"

At 11:39, Max opened the loading dock door. He looked the way I'd pictured him from Kristen's stories: big, soft-spoken, gray mustache, and a key ring the size of a dinner plate. He looked at Nancy, then at me.

"You're the one with the vest," Max said.

"Yeah."

"She's wearing it." He jerked his head toward the building. "Won't let anybody take it off her. Simms tried this morning. Kristen woke up just long enough to bite a nurse." He held the door wider. "Didn't see nothing. You know that, right? Tonight. Didn't see nothing."

"You said that last time," Nancy said.

"I'm gonna keep saying it, because people keep blaming me for the girl getting new clothes out of nowhere." His face didn't do much, but when I went past him in the doorway he put a big hand on my good shoulder for a second and squeezed. "Go get her."

They were waiting for us in the rec room. The lights were off except the lamp on the piano and the glow from the fish tank in the corner, the furniture had been shoved back against the walls, and gym mats lay on the floor in a circle—and there they were, all six of them, awake.

That's hard to explain. I'd met them all in the dream and seen them as who they really were: the wizard in the three-foot hat, the Puppeteer, the girl with the switchblades, the strong kid, the spotlight, the boy with the voice. I'd laughed with them and fought with them and watched Freddy Krueger do an aerobics routine with them, and I'd never once seen them in their own bodies.

Will was in his wheelchair, a skinny kid in pajamas and glasses with the look of somebody who'd learned very early to make himself small so people wouldn't notice something was wrong with him. Kincaid sat on the arm of a couch, bigger than I expected, bigger than me, arms folded, wearing a scowl that looked factory-installed. Taryn sat cross-legged on the floor in a black sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled down over her hands, her hair flat, no crest. Phillip was next to her with his knees up. Jennifer sat on the piano bench with her hands in her lap. Joey stood by the fish tank, and when I came in he looked up and his mouth moved and nothing came out.

They all stared at me.

"You're the other one," Taryn said finally.

"Yeah."

"Where's Rambo?"

I tapped my head. "In here. Would you believe me if I said he's shy?"

"He's a grown man," Kincaid said, like it was an accusation.

"He's in here," I said. "It's complicated."

"You're so tall," Jennifer said, in a giraffe-at-the-zoo voice. "You're like a scarecrow. You're like a nice scarecrow."

"Thank you?" I said. Randy's five-eleven on a good day, with shoes on, but compared to a girl who'd been curled up on a piano bench for a month, I guess I looked like a radio tower.

Will wheeled forward a few feet and looked up at me through his glasses, and without a word he held out his hand. I shook it. His grip was surprisingly strong.

"Wizard Master," I said.

Will went red, and then something else, something that made him look about eight years old, and he looked down at his lap and said, barely out loud, "Yeah."

Kincaid got up off the couch arm and came and stood in front of me. We were almost the same height. He looked me up and down slowly, like a bouncer checking a fake ID.

"On Sunday," Kincaid said. "In the house. The fire hydrant."

"Yeah?"

"That was sick," Kincaid said. Something happened to the scowl that was very nearly a grin, and he held up a fist, and I bumped it.

Phillip didn't get up. He looked at me from the floor and nodded once, and I nodded back. We'd been in a bell tower together; you don't need a lot of words after that.

Joey came over from the fish tank and stood in front of me. He was the smallest and youngest of them. He looked up at me and opened his mouth, and I could see him try, reaching for the thing he'd found on Sunday, the voice that had put Freddy Krueger through three walls, and nothing came out.

"That's okay," I said. "It's in there. I heard it."

He held my eyes a second longer and then gave me a thumbs-up. Two thumbs, very serious.

"She's through here," Nancy said.

Five minutes later Max wheeled her in on a gurney from the Quiet Room.

She was so small. In the dream she was a gymnast, all spring and motion, flipping across the living room of her own head, blonde and bright and quick and laughing at the kid's jokes. On the gurney she was tiny and white, her hair gone limp, a hospital bracelet on her wrist and a bruise on her arm where the needle went in. And she was wearing the vest—my vest, Randy's vest, the green Bradley Video vest with the name tag, over a hospital gown, with the safety pins on the collar and the ketchup stain on the pocket that I knew for a fact was on the one hanging on a hook in my bedroom two thousand miles away. She'd pulled it out of a dream, and when they tried to take it off her, she'd bitten a nurse. Around her wrist, knotted twice, was a dirty olive-drab bandana.

I stood next to the gurney and didn't know what to do with my hands.

In the back of my head the kid was silent. He didn't need to talk. I could feel all of him right up at the front, pressed against the inside of my eyes like a kid with his face on a window.

Can I? he said.

My brother in Christ, you're me, I told him. It was always your hand.

He took hers. I felt it the way you feel a dream, from a little way back: her hand cold and limp and very small in Randy's big bony one. For a second nothing happened. Then, very faintly, the fingers moved—just barely, like somebody at the bottom of a pool hearing their name.

"Hi, Popsicle Kris," the kid said out loud, with my mouth, and in that whole room nobody made a sound.

"Everyone in a circle," Nancy said. "Hold hands. Don't let go. Whatever happens. Whatever you see in there, whatever he shows you, don't let go of each other."

We lay down on the mats. Will's chair was parked right by the circle, and Kincaid and Phillip lifted him down between them without being asked, the way you do when you've done something a hundred times. Taryn took Will's hand and Phillip's. Jennifer took Phillip's and Joey's. Kincaid lay on the other side. I was at the head of the circle next to the gurney, with Kristen's hand in my right and Kincaid's big rough one in my left, and Nancy sat cross-legged in the center with a watch in her hand.

"I'm going to count down from ten," she said. "When I get to one, you'll be asleep. Then I'll lie down, and I'll be right behind you."

"What time is it?" I said.

"Eleven fifty-eight." She looked at me. "Two minutes early."

"He'll know we're coming."

"He always knows," Nancy said. "Let him." She took a breath. "Ten. You're at the top of a staircase. It's a long staircase, and it goes down into the dark, and every step you take, you're more tired. Nine..."

I closed my eyes.

"Eight. Seven. Hold on to each other..."

On the other side of town, in a salvage yard off Route 9, two men were getting out of a truck with shovels, a flashlight, and a little plastic bottle of water from St. Mary's.

"Six. Five..."

Kristen's fingers moved in mine.

"Four..."

You ready? I asked the kid.

No, he said. You?

Never been ready for anything in my life.

Good, said the kid. Me neither.

"Three. Two..."

"One," said Nancy Thompson.

I landed on Elm Street, and it had a marquee.

The house at 1428 was where it always was, white clapboard and a steep roof, but somebody had bolted a theater marquee across the front of the porch, the old kind, a thousand yellow bulbs chasing each other around the edges and black letters on a white board. It buzzed and flickered and lit up the whole street like noon.

THE FREDDY SHOWLIVE • ONE NIGHT ONLYMEMBERS ONLY

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," I said, in my own voice, Theo's voice, deeper and rougher, out of a chest that had done a lot more push-ups than Randy's. I looked down: tiger stripes, ammo belts crossed over my chest, the M60 in my hands, heavy and familiar and completely useless, and the Bowie knife on my hip. I reached up and found a bandana on my forehead again, olive drab, knotted at the back. I'd given the last one to a girl. Apparently I believed in bandanas a lot more than I believed in consequences.

"You got a new one," the kid said beside me.

Of course he was there, six feet of scarecrow in a green Bradley Video vest and flannel, the remote in his right hand and forty-eight batteries clinking in his pockets like loose change, staring up at the marquee with his mouth open. "Members only. Is he serious?"

"He always mixes the comedy in with the serious. That's his whole problem."

The others came in around us—not all at once, the way they had when Kristen reached, but one at a time, like people coming down a staircase in the dark. Taryn first, in leather, her black crest a foot high, switchblades already fanned between her fingers. Kincaid, rolling his shoulders, gold chains clinking. Phillip, with a faint silver glow of strings around his wrists. Jennifer, blinking, a halo of white light hanging over her head like a lamp nobody had switched on yet. Joey. Will in his star-covered robes, standing on his own two feet, reaching up to straighten his hat. And last, Nancy, at the back of the group in the long coat with the white streak in her hair, looking up at the marquee. She'd been here before, more times than any of us.

"He knows we're here," she said.

"Yeah," I said. "I got that from the sign."

Kincaid went up the porch steps and tried the door. It didn't budge. He put his shoulder into it, and the whole porch shook and the marquee bulbs jittered, and the door stayed exactly where it was.

"It's locked," Kincaid said, deeply and personally offended.

"Try again."

He hit it with the full weight of the kid who'd lifted a fire hydrant on Sunday, and the door didn't even rattle. It sat in its frame the way things sit in a dream when whoever owns the dream has decided they will. MEMBERS ONLY, said the little card hanging from the knob, the same one I'd seen on the plane.

"He believes it's locked," Nancy said. "This is his house. In his house, what he believes is the rule."

"So we need to believe harder," Will said.

"We need to be members," the kid said.

We all looked at him. He was patting his pockets, past the batteries and a roll of Certs and a pen and a crumpled coupon for two-dollar Tuesdays, and he found what he wanted in the vest's inside pocket and held it up, grinning like an idiot: a laminated blue card. BRADLEY VIDEO across the top, MEMBER SINCE 1989, and under that, typed, RANDALL MEEKS.

"You've gotta be fucking kidding me," I said. "If that works—"

"I work at a video store," the kid said. "I'm a member of everything." He walked up the steps past Kincaid and slid the card into the crack of the door by the latch, like every burglar in every movie he'd ever seen, and wiggled it once, twice, and the door clicked open.

Kincaid looked at the door, then at the kid, then at me.

"I hate him," Kincaid said, with enormous respect.

He'd scooped out the whole inside of 1428 Elm Street like a pumpkin and filled it with a theater, an old movie palace of the kind nobody builds anymore: red velvet, gold trim, balconies stacked four high into the dark, a ceiling painted with stars. Rows of seats ran down and down toward a stage whose proscenium arch was shaped like a mouth, with a red curtain and footlights.

Every seat was full, and that was what took everybody's breath at once. They were children, hundreds of them, in the seats and the balconies, sitting with their hands in their laps, and they had no faces. Where a face should have been was smooth gray, like a thumb pressed into clay. They sat still and didn't look at us: an audience, his audience.

"Oh God," Jennifer whispered. "Oh God, are those—"

"Don't look at them," Nancy said, even and terrible. "Don't look at them. That's what he wants."

Something I didn't want to know flashed through the back of my head: a burned man in a boiler room, all the children he'd taken, and where they'd gone afterward. Into him. He kept them. He wore them—I'd seen it in the third movie, back where I came from, their faces pushing out of his chest—and tonight he'd brought them to watch.

A light came on above the stage, a red box on a stick like the ones in TV studios. It lit with a buzz, and the word on it glowed like an ember.

ON AIR.

The curtain went up. She sat in a chair in the center of the stage under a single white spotlight, a big chair like a throne, or the guest chair on a late-night talk show, with bright new chains around her wrists and ankles. Her head was down. She was wearing the vest.

"Kristen," the kid said.

She lifted her head. Her face was wet. She saw him, and then the rest of us, all nine at the back of the theater, and her mouth opened. "No. No, no, no, go back, he wants you here, he—"

"Ladies and gentlemen!"

He came out from the wings in a tuxedo, or part of one: a tailcoat over the sweater, a bow tie, the hat, and an old silver microphone on a long cord in his left hand. His glove caught the spotlight one blade at a time as he walked out, click click click click, like somebody counting. Under the tux, across his chest, there was still a hole, black and ragged and weeping, right where my Dark Spear had gone into him in his own boiler room. It hadn't healed. He'd dressed around it.

The audience applauded, all the faceless children at once, a flat, even, mechanical sound like rain on a tin roof.

"Welcome," said Freddy Krueger, "to a very special episode."

The kid pointed the remote at him and hit MUTE, and nothing happened. He hit it again. Click. And again. He looked down at the remote. The little red LED that had burned bright and solid on Sunday was blinking, and not in the low-battery way—a slow, even pattern, like a warning—and a green digital display I'd never noticed before had lit up across the top of the remote:

NO SIGNAL

"Ohhh, yes," Freddy said, with the widest grin I'd ever seen on him. "Oh, I've been waiting for this part." He came to the edge of the stage. "You see, video boy, I did some homework. After Sunday. After you and your little clicker made me look like a jackass in front of my kids." He spread his arms, and the glove caught the light. "And you know what I learned?"

The ON AIR light buzzed over his head.

"You can't rewind a live show," Freddy Krueger said.

The kid hit REWIND. Nothing. PAUSE. Nothing. FAST-FORWARD. The display flashed at him: NO SIGNAL. NO SIGNAL. NO SIGNAL.

"No tape," Freddy crooned. "No tape, no buttons. It's all happening right now, sweetheart. In real time. No take-backs. No do-overs. Whatever happens tonight—" He swung the microphone on its cord in a slow, lazy circle. "—happens."

"Theo," the kid said.

"I know," I said, and raised the M60.

I'm not going to pretend I remember all of it in order. A real fight doesn't come back that way. Theo had been in two and a half of them, in the mountains, and neither one came back to him afterward as a story. They came back as pieces—a smell, a sound, something somebody said—and you spend the rest of your life trying to put them in order and never quite manage it.

So. Pieces.

The M60 bucking in my hands, tracer fire going down the aisle like a string of Christmas lights, and Freddy on the stage not bothering to duck. He let the rounds go into him and out the back, laughing, and brushed lint off his tux.

The seats. That was the first thing he did. He didn't come at us himself; he snapped his fingers, and every seat in the theater came alive. The velvet cushions opened like mouths, the armrests curled like fingers, the seats reached for us, and the faceless children in them turned their blank gray faces toward us all at once, like sunflowers.

Will. The seats went for Will first, of course. Freddy had gone after his legs on Sunday and he went after them again, a whole row folding up around him like a Venus flytrap, velvet closing over his robes, pulling him down into the dark between the rows. His hat went crooked, and for a second his face went small again, the kid in the wheelchair. You can't walk, Will. You never could.

Kincaid roaring, tearing an entire row of seats out of the floor by the bolts and throwing it into the balcony.

Phillip on his knees in the aisle, strings shooting from his fingers in every direction, catching the reaching armrests, tying them in knots, holding them.

Taryn. The syringes came for her again, and this time they were in the hands of the children in the audience, every one of them holding out a needle, silent and patient, like kids at a birthday party holding out presents. Taryn stood in the middle of the aisle with her crest up and her knives out, shaking. "Come on," she said to them through her teeth. "Come on, then."

Jennifer's light came on all at once, like somebody throwing a breaker, white and blinding, pouring out of her into the dark, and everywhere it hit, the faceless kids flinched and the seats went still. She stood on the back of a seat with her arms out and her eyes shut, her whole body shaking with the effort, lighting up the theater like the Fourth of July. "There's too many," she was saying. "There's too many, I can't hold all of them—"

And the stage. I went for the stage.

Battle Maniac lit up in my chest like a match dropped in a gas tank. I dropped the M60, because it was a toy and always had been, drew the Bowie knife, and ran down the center aisle over the seats with the second heartbeat going so hard I could taste it. I didn't even think about the Dark Spear. I wanted my hands on him.

He was waiting for me. He always is; Freddy is patient. He let me come all the way up onto the stage, into the spotlight, close enough to see the melted texture of his face and smell the burnt hair coming off him, and then he stepped inside my swing like a boxer, with that horrible grace of his, and put the glove into me. Four blades, just under the ribs on the left. In, and across.

I've been hit before. Once in Afghanistan, through the outside of the arm, and I didn't even know it until the medic told me. This was somebody opening a door in my side and letting the cold in.

I went down on one knee on the stage. Somewhere very far away, the kid yelled my name—my real name.

Freddy leaned down. The microphone was still in his other hand, and he held it up to my face like I was a contestant. "And how are we feeling tonight?"

"Great," I said. "Never better. How's the chest?"

He didn't like that. His eyes went to the hole in his sweater, just for a second.

"Clicker can't save you now, soldier boy," Freddy whispered. "No rewinds tonight. You go down in my house, on my show, and you stay down. And then—" He looked over my head at the kid coming down the aisle with the remote held uselessly out in front of him. "—then I'll take the little one. And keep him."

"You can't keep him," I said. "He's not yours."

"Tonight," Freddy said, "everything's mine. It's live."

He straightened and raised the glove. I saw it glint in the spotlight and thought, very clearly: Well. This is a stupid way to go.

"Nancy, sweetheart!"

A man's voice, older and heavy, one I'd heard on a pay phone at O'Hare six hours earlier, coming from the wings, stage left. Freddy froze with the glove up, and I twisted around on my knee to look.

A big, graying man stood in the wings in a brown suit and a trench coat, like a cop out of a black-and-white movie, hands open at his sides. His face was pink and sweaty and kind and ashamed, and I'd never seen it before in my life, and I knew it anyway. Donald Thompson.

"Nancy," he said again. "Oh, honey. Oh, baby girl, I'm so sorry."

Nancy was halfway down the aisle. She'd stopped dead.

"I did it," he said. "I went to the yard, just like your friend said. I dug him up. It's over, sweetheart. I buried him. He's gone." His voice broke, and he held out his arms. "Come here. Come here and let me look at you. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I never listened."

Nancy stood white-faced in the aisle. "Dad?"

If you're ever in the dream and you see your dad, I'd told her on the phone, days ago, it's not your dad.

She knew. I could see that she knew. I could also see a twenty-three-year-old woman who'd waited seven years to hear her father say I'm sorry, who was hearing it now, and whose whole body wanted it to be real so badly that what she knew didn't matter. She took a step toward him.

"Nancy," I croaked from the floor.

She took another step. Then she stopped a dozen feet from the man with her father's face and closed her eyes, and I watched her breathe in and out like she was counting down a staircase.

"My father," Nancy Thompson said, very clearly, "is in a salvage yard on Route 9. Right now. With a shovel. Digging you up." She opened her eyes. "He's never said I'm sorry to me in his life. He doesn't know how. It's the worst thing about him and the best thing about him, and you don't get it. You don't get any of it."

The man in the wings smiled. It was Donald Thompson's face, and it was all wrong.

"You don't get to be him," Nancy said. "You don't get to be anyone. I took it back from you once. I'll do it again."

And she turned her back on him, just like that, on the thing with her father's face, and stood in the aisle facing the other way, facing us, arms at her sides, eyes open.

"You're nothing," she said to nobody, to the air, to the dark. "I'm not scared of you. I'm not giving you anything."

I saw it hit him; I was right there. Freddy flinched like he'd been slapped, and the man in the wings shimmered and thinned like a picture on a TV with bad reception, and on the stage in front of me Freddy Krueger staggered half a step, put his hand on the hole in his chest, and snarled. "Bitch. You always were—"

He'd looked away. For one second he'd looked away from me and from the kid, at her, and one second is all it takes to find a button you've never pressed.

The kid had stopped halfway down the aisle. He'd quit pointing the remote and was looking at it, turning it over in his hands with the little green NO SIGNAL on the display, the way he'd look at a VCR at Bradley Video that some customer had jammed a tape into sideways. Looking for the problem. For the thing that would make it work.

I felt it before I saw it, the way you feel your buddy's idea through the back of your own head—a click, a spark, something going very bright and very simple. There was a button on the remote he'd never pressed. There always is. Every remote in America in 1996 had forty buttons and everybody used five: TV/VCR, SLEEP, CLEAR, INDEX, and at the bottom left, set a little apart from the rest because it was the one you never wanted to hit by accident, a small round button with a red dot on it.

REC.

"You can't rewind a live show," the kid said out loud, slowly, working it out like a math problem. "But you can tape one."

Freddy's head snapped around. "Don't," said Freddy Krueger.

The kid pointed the remote at the stage, at the red ON AIR light buzzing over Freddy's head, at Freddy himself in his tux and sweater with his glove up and his mouth open.

"Everybody tapes everything," the kid said. "My mom has every Murder, She Wrote since 1988 on tape. My sister tapes Party of Five. Nobody in this whole country has watched anything live since 1985." He grinned, Randy's yearbook grin, the electrocuted one. "Welcome to the VCR age, Fred."

He pressed REC.

The ON AIR light went out. Where it had been, a new light came on above the stage, small and red and round, blinking once a second like a heartbeat—REC ●—and the green display on the remote, which had read NO SIGNAL for five straight minutes, flickered and went dark and came back:

● REC 00:00:01

00:00:02

00:00:03

The whole theater went quiet. The seats stopped reaching. The faceless children froze with their needles held out. Kincaid stopped with a whole row of seats over his head, and Jennifer's light held. Freddy Krueger stood in the spotlight on his own stage, and I watched him understand that he was on tape now.

"No," Freddy said.

"Yeah," said the kid, and pressed PAUSE.

Interlude: Neil

Kellerman's Salvage, Route 9. 12:14 a.m.

I'm a psychiatrist. Let me get that out of the way first. I have a medical degree from Case Western, a board certification, and eleven years of clinical practice, and I spent every one of them believing that the things my patients see in the dark are real to them, and only to them. I mention it so you understand what it cost me to stand in a junkyard at midnight with a flashlight in one hand and an Evian bottle full of holy water in the other.

Father Keegan at St. Mary's had blessed it at six that evening. He hadn't asked what it was for. He'd looked at my face and at the empty bottle and simply done it. I think priests in Springwood have learned not to ask.

Donald Thompson walked ahead of me down the rows. He was sober. He'd told me so three times in the truck—haven't had a drink since eight, Doc. Not one. Not one.—and he had a crowbar over one shoulder, a shovel over the other, and a hacksaw stuck through his belt, and he walked like a man who knew exactly where he was going, because he did. He'd been driving past it for years.

It sat in the back row by the chain-link fence, where the salvage yard ran out and the woods began: a 1959 Cadillac, pink once, rusted now to the color of a scab, its fins standing up in the flashlight like something prehistoric. The trunk was welded shut with a bead so thick and ugly you could tell the man who'd done it had been in a hurry, and afraid, and not very good at welding.

Donald stood in front of it without moving.

"Marge held the flashlight," he said. "That night. When I did the weld. She held it and didn't say a word. Not one. We never talked about it again, not till the day she died." He set the shovel down. "Nancy thinks I'm a drunk because I'm weak."

"Donald—"

"I'm a drunk," he said, "because I'm a coward," and he put the crowbar in the seam.

It took twenty minutes: hacksaw, crowbar, hacksaw again, Donald swearing under his breath without a pause, and me holding the flashlight the way his wife had, without a word. At twelve thirty-eight the trunk lid came up with a scream of old metal.

Inside was a burlap sack, old, rotted, black with something that wasn't oil, and through the holes in the burlap, bones. I'd seen human remains in medical school. These looked like those and also didn't. They were brown and blackened, and some were fused, melted together in places the way plastic melts, and they were too neat—folded, as if whatever was in that sack had arranged itself to be comfortable, and was waiting.

"Get the shovel," Donald said. "There's soft ground by the fence. We dig, we put him in, you do your thing with the water, and—"

The sack moved.

I'm a scientist, so I'll be precise, though I'll never be able to prove any of it. The bones inside the sack moved all together, with a sound like somebody shaking a bag of sticks, and then they came out. What I'll always remember is how slow it was. The skull came up first, out of the burlap, on a neck of vertebrae clicking into place one by one, and it turned slowly and looked at Donald Thompson with empty black sockets and grinned.

Then the rest of it came. It stood up out of the trunk of that Cadillac like a man climbing out of a bath, clumsy and jerky the way a marionette is when whoever's working it isn't paying attention: the arms swinging half a second late, the head lolling, the knees locking and unlocking at the wrong times. There was no glove on it. Its right hand had finger bones grown long and sharp as knitting needles.

I've thought about this a great deal since, and I believe, with no evidence at all, that it was distracted: that whatever drove it badly needed its attention somewhere else and could spare only a little. A skeleton on a string, held by a man with his hands full. A little was enough.

It hit me first, a backhand, almost careless, and I went over a pile of hubcaps and lost the flashlight and most of my breath. I heard Donald yell and the crowbar ring off bone. When I got up on my elbows, in the light of the flashlight rolling on the ground, the thing had Donald Thompson pinned against the side of the Cadillac.

He'd hit it hard. Its left arm hung wrong from the elbow, and it didn't care. It spread its other hand across his chest and leaned, and I heard his ribs go, one, two, three, like somebody stepping on kindling. He screamed. It swung its long bone foot into his leg just above the knee, and that went too, a thick, wet crack, and he stopped screaming because there was no air left in him to do it with. It raised the right hand, the long needle fingers, to his throat.

I was on my knees in the dirt twenty feet away with a plastic bottle in my hand, and I was never going to get there in time. I knew it the way you know things in that long, slow second before the other car hits.

And the skeleton stopped dead—not falling, not faltering, just stopped mid-motion, finger bones an inch from Donald Thompson's throat, jaw open, head tilted, hanging there without so much as a sway, as if someone very far away had reached over and pressed a button.

I didn't think. I've thought about it every day since, but right then I didn't think at all. I got up and ran and tore the cap off the bottle with my teeth and threw holy water over the thing from three feet away. It went through it like acid through paper. The bones smoked and hissed where the water hit, and then all at once whatever had been holding it up let go, and it clattered apart into a pile at Donald's feet. The skull rolled over once and lay there, grinning at nothing.

Donald slid down the side of the Cadillac and sat in the dirt, gray-faced, breathing in little bubbling sips. "Burn it," he whispered. "Doc. Burn it."

I had no matches and no gasoline. I had half a bottle of water from St. Mary's and, in my coat's inside pocket, a little silver crucifix on a chain that my grandmother gave me at my confirmation. I'd carried it through medical school, residency, and eleven years of practice without once taking it out.

I dug. I'm not a strong man. I dug a shallow hole in the soft ground by the fence with Donald's shovel and pushed the bones into it with my hands and feet, every one, the skull last, and then I stood over it and flung the holy water down on them, and they burned—with light, not fire. Where the water hit, the bones went a hard, hissing, magnesium white too bright to look at, then cracked and blackened, and the smell of a struck match came up out of the hole a thousand times over. The light poured up out of the grave in a column, hot on my face. Somewhere very far away, or very close, somebody screamed, long and high and terrible, and it wasn't Donald and it wasn't me.

The skull still grinned up at me through the light.

I took the crucifix out of my pocket. My hands shook so hard I nearly dropped it. I knelt at the edge of the hole, reached down into the light, and laid it on the skull, right on the forehead between the empty eyes, and it sank in. The silver went red, then white, and burned into the bone—a cross, two clean smoking lines, as if the skull were wax—and the scream went up and up, past anything a throat could do, and then it stopped.

The light went out of the grave all at once, like a switch flipped. What was left at the bottom of the hole was black and crumbling and quiet, and only bones.

I filled it in. I made the sign of the cross over it, which I hadn't done since I was eleven, and said the words I remembered from my grandmother's funeral. I'm not a priest, and it wasn't hallowed ground. I said them anyway and hoped God was grading on a curve. The ground smoked a little, and then it didn't.

It was 12:49. I know because I looked at my watch, as I'd been trained to do, so I could write down the time.

"Is it done?" Donald said.

"I think so."

"Is she okay?" His eyes were closing. "Nancy. Is she—"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know yet. Stay awake, Donald. Stay awake. You've done enough sleeping."

Then I ran for the office, and the phone, and the ambulance.

Freddy Krueger hung paused in the spotlight on his own stage, glove raised, mouth open, the little red REC light blinking above his head. He couldn't move. His eyes could, and they rolled toward the kid, so full of hate it was almost funny.

"It's a tape now," the kid said, coming down the aisle, breathing hard, the remote's LED blinking fast. "It's a tape now, Theo. It's a tape." He climbed onto the stage and knelt next to me where I lay on my side in a spreading black puddle I didn't want to look at. "I can rewind you."

"You'll use it all up," I said.

"So I'll use it all up." He pointed the remote at my side, at the four long cuts under my ribs. His hand was shaking. "Hold still."

The LED went from blinking to dead. We both looked at it.

"Oh, come on," the kid said.

I started to laugh, and it hurt so much the theater went gray at the edges, and then I reached down and pulled something out of my ammo belt. I hadn't looked at my ammo belts once all night. They'd been across my chest since I landed on Elm Street, heavy and familiar, the way they'd been on Sunday and on the cover of every VHS action movie I'd rented when I was ten, brass cartridges all in a row—except tonight they were batteries. Copper-top double-As, row after row, bandoliers full, crossed over my chest like a Mexican revolutionary's. Forty-eight at least, probably more. I'd gone to sleep in Ohio in a pair of jeans without a single battery in them, but I'd gone to sleep believing in them harder than I'd ever believed in a gun.

The kid stared. "Dude."

"Belief, man." I pulled two out and pressed them into his hand. "Reload."

He popped the back off the remote, dumped the dead ones, slammed in the fresh ones, and the LED came back bright and red. He pointed it at me and pressed REWIND, and I felt it go backward—the only way I know how to say it. The cold going back out the door in my side, and the door closing. The blades going back out of me, across and out in reverse. The puddle on the stage crawling back into me, black to red to nothing. I was on one knee, and then standing, on the stage in the spotlight with the Bowie knife in my hand, my tiger stripes ripped open in four long lines across the ribs and nothing under them but skin.

"Thanks," I said.

"You owe me twelve dollars' worth of batteries, by the way," the kid said.

Then Freddy started to burn.

It started in the hole in his chest, the one I'd put there with the Dark Spear, the one that had never healed. Light came out of it, whiter and colder than firelight, in a thin bright line like light through a cracked door, and then the crack widened. Somewhere in Ohio, in a shallow hole by a fence in a salvage yard, somebody was pouring holy water on his bones.

Freddy screamed. Paused as he was, he screamed with his mouth wide and unmoving, a long, high, awful sound coming out of a face that couldn't change, and the light poured out of the hole in his chest and out of his mouth and out of his eyes, and the children stood up.

All of them at once, in the rows and the balconies, the faceless children in the red velvet seats. They dropped their needles and turned toward the light coming out of him, and as it touched them, one by one, they got their faces back. I'll never forget watching it. A girl with pigtails in the third row. A boy in a Little League cap in the balcony. Twins. A kid no older than five in footie pajamas. Hundreds of faces coming back like photographs developing in a tray, looking around, confused, like people waking up on a train, and then walking up the aisles toward the doors at the back of the theater, where a light glowed now that hadn't been there before, soft and gold like a summer afternoon.

Jennifer turned her spotlight toward the doors, just to help them see. Taryn had her hand over her mouth. Will had taken off his hat and held it against his chest. Kincaid was crying without a sound, huge tears rolling down his face, and didn't wipe them.

Kristen stood at the edge of the stage; Kincaid had broken her chains while I was busy bleeding. She watched the children go up the aisles and out the doors, and when the last one had gone—a little girl with a jump rope who looked back over her shoulder once—Kristen walked straight across the stage to the kid, put her arms around him, and pressed her face into his vest.

The kid stood there with the remote in his hand and a girl holding on to him and had no idea what to do with any of it.

Put your arm around her, dumbass, I told him.

He did.

On the stage, Freddy was coming apart. The light had eaten the tux and was eating the sweater, and it had burned a hole through the brim of the hat. The pause was starting to slip—he was twitching, jerking, fighting it, the REC light blinking over his head.

"This," Freddy got out through his teeth, through a mouth full of light. "Isn't. Over. You hear me, video boy? I'll be back. There's always a sequel. There's always—"

"Yeah, yeah," said the kid. "We know how it ends." He held up the remote. "We've seen it."

He hit FAST-FORWARD, and Freddy's last speech went by in a high-speed chipmunk squeal, arms windmilling, hat spinning, a whole villain's monologue in about four seconds. Then the stage lights dimmed on their own, tinny bright music started up from nowhere, and white letters came scrolling up over the stage through the dark, fast:

KRISTEN PARKERNANCY THOMPSONROLAND KINCAIDTARYN WHITEWILL STANTONJENNIFER CAULFIELDPHILLIP ANDERSONJOEY CRUSELandRANDY MEEKS as HIMSELFTHEO ALVAREZ as ALSO RANDY MEEKS

"Theo," the kid said, delighted. "You got a credit."

SPECIAL THANKS: DR. NEIL GORDON • MAX • LT. DONALD THOMPSONNO CHILDREN WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS PICTURE

Then something happened to Freddy's face. Under the burned brim of the hat, right in the middle of his forehead, a mark lit up, one line up and down and one across, a white-hot cross burning itself into him from the outside in like a brand going into a steer. I could smell it and hear it sizzle. Two thousand miles away and a world over, in a hole by a chain-link fence, a man who wasn't a priest was laying a silver crucifix on a skull.

Freddy stopped twitching. His eyes went wide and then dim, the way a TV picture shrinks to a dot when you pull the plug.

"Now," I said.

The kid pointed the remote at Freddy Krueger and pressed EJECT. Clunk-whirr—every kid in America in 1996 knew that sound, a VCR opening its mouth—and Freddy Krueger folded. There's no other word for it. He folded like a paper doll, light pouring out of every crease, in half and in half again, flatter and smaller, until there was nothing left of him on the stage but a black rectangle hanging in the spotlight, spinning.

It fell, and the kid caught it: a VHS cassette, black plastic, no case, with a white label on the spine handwritten in shaky ballpoint, like somebody'd done it in a hurry in the dark.

FRED KRUEGERDO NOT REWIND

The kid looked at it, and then down the aisle at the woman in the long coat standing alone in the middle of the empty theater. He climbed down off the stage, walked up the aisle, and held it out.

"Seven years," the kid said. "You should do it."

Nancy Thompson looked at the tape in his hand for a long while. Then she took it and turned it over, thumbed up the little plastic flap on the front the way everybody has, to look at the shiny brown ribbon inside, hooked her finger into it, and pulled.

It came out in a long, glittering, whispering loop. She kept pulling, yards of it, hand over hand like hauling in a rope, the tape spilling out of the cassette and piling around her feet in shining coils, and with every yard, from somewhere far away, somewhere under the floor of the world, came a scream, fainter, and fainter, and fainter. When the reels were bare she snapped the tape between her hands, and the scream stopped.

Nancy dropped the empty cassette on the floor and looked at the tangle of tape around her feet. Then she looked up at all of us, the kids and the Randys and the girl in the vest, and her face was doing something I'd never seen it do, in the movies or the dream or a hospital parking lot. It looked young.

"Okay," Nancy said, and laughed, just once. "Okay."

And the theater was gone, and we were standing in the living room of a house on Elm Street. Just a living room: wallpaper, a couch with a crocheted blanket over the back, a coffee table with a TV Guide on it, sunlight coming in the front windows. It was an ordinary, stupid, beautiful Saturday morning in some year nobody had ever lived, and somewhere down the street a lawnmower started up.

"Hey," Joey said.

We all turned. He was standing by the window with the sun on him, and he'd said it out loud—one word, in a normal voice, a little hoarse from not being used.

"It's nice out," Joey said.

I woke up on a gym mat in the Westin Hills rec room with Kincaid's hand crushing mine and a fish tank bubbling somewhere to my left. For a second it was crowded, and then the kid settled in behind my eyes the way he always did, like a dog turning around three times before it lies down.

It was 12:53 a.m. I know because the very first thing I did was look at the clock over the door. Theo's habit: write down the time.

All around me people were waking up. Taryn sat bolt upright and put both hands on her face, checking. Will lay on his back on the mat staring at the ceiling, laughing softly over and over like a kid being tickled. Kincaid let go of my hand, wiped his face with his whole forearm, and said to nobody, "I wasn't crying," and nobody argued. Jennifer was hugging Phillip, and Phillip was letting her. Nancy sat in the middle of the circle with her eyes open and didn't move.

And on the gurney next to me, Kristen Parker opened her eyes.

They were cloudy; the drug was still in her and would be for hours. She turned her head on the thin pillow slowly, the way you do when it weighs a hundred pounds, and looked at me—at the real me, Randy's long face and Randy's bad haircut and Randy's big stupid ears, lit by a fish tank.

"You're..." Her voice was thick. "You're so tall."

"Everybody keeps saying that," the kid said with my mouth.

"Is it over?"

"Yeah," he said. "It's over."

She looked at him, and her fingers, still in his, squeezed—weakly, but on purpose. "Your hands are cold."

"Yours too."

"Popsicle," Kristen whispered, and smiled, and went back to sleep, just sleep, the ordinary kind, with nobody in it but her. The kid didn't let go, and I didn't make him.

Over by the fish tank Joey Crusel cleared his throat, and everybody went quiet the way people do when a church bell rings.

"Thanks," Joey said, out loud, awake.

The panel opened on its own while I was sitting there.

STORY COMPLETE: Springwood

Feat Achieved! Talk a father into a junkyard+1× Bronze Skill Gacha Ticket

Feat Achieved! Crash a party you were uninvited from+1× Silver Trait Gacha Ticket

Feat Achieved! Eject a dream demon+1× Gold Ability Gacha Ticket

Feat Achieved! Nobody dies on Elm Street+1× Platinum Random Gacha Ticket

Tickets unlocked.1× Platinum Random · 1× Gold Ability · 1× Silver Ability · 1× Silver Random · 2× Silver Trait · 1× Bronze Trait · 2× Bronze Skill[PULL]

Nine tickets, and a Platinum. I looked at it a while, and then closed it.

Aren't we gonna...? said the kid.

Later, I said. Right now I'm holding a girl's hand. Your girl. Well. Your hand.

She's not my girl.

She's wearing your vest, man. She bit a nurse over it.

He didn't have an answer for that, and he didn't let go, either.

Carol got away from Gale Weathers at 1:04 a.m.

I heard it before I saw it: fast heels in the hallway and a woman's voice saying "Doctor, I told you, she said she was doing a piece on nursing—" with another, colder voice over it. Then the rec room doors banged open, every fluorescent light came on, flat and horrible, and Dr. Elizabeth Simms stood in the doorway in a raincoat over a sweatsuit with her car keys still in her hand.

She took in the room. The mats on the floor. Seven of her patients in pajamas sitting in a circle, awake, and all of them, for the first time in her professional experience, calm. Nancy Thompson, who didn't work here anymore. Kristen Parker, on a gurney that should have been in the Quiet Room, asleep with her mouth a little open and a smile on her face. And me.

"Who," Simms said, "is that?"

Kristen slept through it. Will answered from the mat, glasses crooked, still smiling. "That's Randy. He came from California."

Simms opened her mouth, and nothing came out.

Gale Weathers appeared at her shoulder in the doorway, a little out of breath, her hair only very slightly less perfect than it had been at eleven, her Hi8 in her hand. The lens cap was on. I checked, and she saw me check.

"Dr. Simms," Gale said warmly. "Gale Weathers, Top Story. I'd love to get your comment on why a hospital would keep a seventeen-year-old girl sedated around the clock, in a padded room, for no documented reason other than being afraid to fall asleep—"

"Gale," I said.

She looked at me. I looked at the camera. She looked at the kids on the floor in their pajamas.

"Off the record," Gale said, her mouth thin. "For now."

Donald Thompson was in the ICU at Springwood General with a shattered femur, four broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a blood alcohol level of zero. The ER doctor told Nancy the zero surprised him most.

I went at three in the morning, with Gale, because Nancy called Westin Hills from the ER and asked for me by name. They'd let her in to see him. When I came in she was sitting in a plastic chair by the bed holding his hand, and he was asleep, with a tube in his side and a cast from hip to ankle, looking a hundred years old. Nancy was asleep too. She sat upright in the chair with her head against the wall and her hand in her father's, sleeping deep, the way you sleep at twelve on Christmas Eve, her face completely smooth. Nobody was in there with her.

I didn't wake her. I stood in the door a minute, then went back out into the hall, where Dr. Gordon was sitting on a bench with dirt to the elbows and mud in his hair, holding a paper cup of vending-machine coffee in both hands and staring at the wall.

"It stopped," he said when I sat down beside him, without looking at me. "The skeleton. It had its hand at his throat, and it just... stopped. Mid-motion. Completely still. For maybe ten seconds. Long enough." He turned the cup in his hands. "As if someone—"

"As if someone had paused it," I said.

He looked at me then. I didn't need to say anything else. Neil Gordon was a smart man and a psychiatrist, and he looked at me, the kid from the video store whose vest a sleeping girl was wearing in a hospital on a hill, and put it together. Then, very deliberately, like a man setting down something heavy, he decided he would never, ever ask.

"Thank you," he said instead.

"Thank Lieutenant Thompson," I said. "He opened the trunk."

The kid said goodbye to Kristen on Tuesday morning in the dayroom, under the TV with the crack in it.

She was really awake now, the drug mostly worn off, pale but with color coming back into her cheeks. Dr. Gordon had come in at eight, clean, in a tie, walked straight into Simms's office, and closed the door, and after a lot of raised voices the upshot was that Kristen Parker was off sedation "pending a full review." Nancy was still at the hospital. Max was on shift, carefully not seeing anything from the far side of the room. Kristen sat on the windowsill in the vest. I don't think she'd taken it off since Saturday.

"So," Kristen said.

"So," said the kid.

I'd given him the wheel, all of it. I'd said this one's yours and stepped back as far as I could in a head built for one—his face, his hands, his girl—and I was the guy in the back seat looking out the window, trying not to listen. I listened anyway. I'm only human. Mostly.

"You flew across the country," Kristen said.

"Yeah."

"On a school day."

"I don't really go to school right now. It's closed. You know, because of the murders."

"Right." She looked out the window. "Your mom's going to kill you."

"She said to say hi."

Kristen turned and looked at him.

"She calls you my Kristen," the kid said, and went so red I felt it from the back seat. "Not—I mean, she just says it like... It's a mom thing. She's being weird. It doesn't—"

"Your Kristen," Kristen said slowly.

"It's a mom thing."

"Uh-huh." She was trying very hard not to smile, and failing. "And what do you call me?"

The kid opened his mouth, and nothing came out. In the back seat, I put my face in my hands.

"Popsicle Kris," the kid said finally, very small.

"Yeah," said Kristen. "That's what I thought." She reached up and with two fingers straightened the collar of his flannel, then left her hand flat on his chest for a second, right where his heart was going like a rabbit's. "You came all this way," she said softly. "For me."

"For everybody."

"Randy."

"...For you," the kid said.

She kissed him on the cheek, quick and light, just once. Then she hopped down off the windowsill and stood there in the vest with her chin up, daring him to say something about it, and he couldn't. He'd been struck completely dumb.

"You'll call," Kristen said.

"Every night."

"Not every night. You'll get grounded until you're forty." She tugged at the olive-drab bandana on her wrist, still knotted twice. "And tell your friend..." She stopped and looked at him, and somehow past him, into the back seat. "Tell Theo thank you. For the bandana. And for saying the thing. About the hands."

She means you, the kid told me.

I know who she means.

"He says you're welcome," the kid said. "He says keep it. He's got a new one."

Kristen smiled. Then Max cleared his throat very loudly from across the room and pointed at the clock, and she rolled her eyes and headed down the hallway toward group. At the corner she turned and walked backward three steps just so she could wave, and then she was gone, and the kid stood there in the dayroom.

Theo, he said finally.

Yeah.

She kissed me.

She did.

On the face.

That's where the cheek is, man.

A long pause.

That was the best thing that's ever happened to me, the kid said. In my whole life. Including the powers.

I let him have that one without a single joke, which, if you know me at all, tells you something.

"Teen Suicide Cluster at Ohio Psychiatric Hospital Ends; Doctor Placed Under Review," Gale said on the way back to Columbus, like she was reading it off a teleprompter. She had both hands on the wheel of the Taurus and was doing eighty. "That's the story. That's the one that runs. An overworked, overmedicating psychiatrist. A cluster of vulnerable teenagers. An intern who fought for them and got fired for it. A doctor who took a stand. A happy ending." She glanced at me. "And one father, injured in an unrelated accident at a salvage yard. Drunk, probably. Everybody will assume."

"He wasn't drunk."

"I know he wasn't drunk," Gale said. "You know he wasn't drunk. Nobody else is going to care."

I looked out the window at Ohio going by, flat and brown and endless. So that was how it happened. I'd seen it from the inside now, how the movies got made: somebody like Gale told the version that made sense, the version that made sense went on the news, the news went into a book, and the book went into a movie. In a few years there'd be a Never Sleep Again 3 at Bradley Video about a mean lady doctor who drugged teenagers, and a janitor who never existed, and no dream at all, and everybody would believe it and sleep fine. Maybe that was the point. Maybe it was the only way anybody could.

"Thursday," Gale said. "The interview. My people will call your people."

"I don't have people. I have a thirteen-year-old sister who charges by the mile."

"Then I'll call her." A pause. Then, without looking at me, very casually: "And Randy?"

"Yeah?"

"That thing on your neck," Gale Weathers said. "At O'Hare."

I waited.

"I believed you," she said. "When you said it wasn't dangerous. I just... believed you. Completely. The way you believe the sky is blue." Her hands tightened on the wheel. "I don't do that, Randy. I haven't done that since I was nine years old."

I watched the fields go by. "You wouldn't get it," I said. "I cheated."

"I'm going to find out what that was."

"I know," I said. "I'd expect nothing less from a professional snoop."

She glanced at me sideways and then laughed, short and surprised, like I'd paid her a compliment. Maybe I had.

Gale fell asleep over Iowa with her head against the window and her sunglasses on, which I've come to believe is the only way she's physically capable of sleeping, and I opened the panel.

Tickets available: 9[PULL]

Cheap ones first. You always do the cheap ones first.

Minty Breath (Trash Trait)Your breath always smells fresh and minty, no matter what you ate.

I'd eaten two airport hot dogs at O'Hare. I breathed into my hand: peppermint. Wintergreen, even. The multiverse had given me the one power every kid on a first date would sell a kidney for, and I was thirty-five thousand feet over Iowa next to a sleeping woman who'd once called me a horror geek on national television.

It's not useless, the kid said with great dignity. For... later.

For your nightly phone calls, where she can't actually smell your breath?

Shut up.

Scenic Wind (Trash Trait)A scenic wind favors you. Your hair and clothes flutter majestically whenever it's opportune, even indoors.

A breeze came from nowhere inside a sealed Boeing 737. It lifted Randy's bad haircut off his forehead, made the collar of his flannel ripple heroically, and fluttered the pages of the in-flight magazine in the seat pocket like a flag. The man across the aisle looked up from his crossword, eyed the air vent, and reached up and closed it.

I toggled it off. After a second's thought I toggled it back on. You never know when you'll need to look majestic.

Novice Kama Sutra (Common Skill)

I read the description and closed it very, very fast.

What was that one? said the kid.

Sex, Randy.

What?

We just got skilled at sex.

Why?

Because the Gacha thought it'd be funny, I guess.

Novice Shooting (Common Skill)You're as good as the average soldier at aiming and shooting. You'll improve much faster than normal if you train.

"I am the average soldier," I said out loud, and the man across the aisle looked at me again.

Then I thought about it. Theo was the average soldier. Randy wasn't. Randy's hands had never held a rifle until three weeks ago, and it showed, on the lawn at Stu's, with Dad's Beretta shaking in my left hand. Now there was a warm little weight in Randy's body, in his hands and eyes and shoulders, that matched the one in my head like a key fitting a lock. Faster than normal, if you train. Okay. Not wasted.

Sober (Common Trait)You're immune to all addictive effects. You can drop anything at any time with no withdrawal.

I thought about Donald Thompson in the ICU with his blood alcohol at zero for the first time in half his life. I thought about the guys in my unit who came home and found a bottle, about the group home and what half the kids there ended up doing, and about what I'd come close to a couple of times in the years after the Army. I left that one on.

Four Dark Devas of Destruction (Trash Familiar) · DanganronpaDespite the grandiose name, the Four Dark Devas of Destruction are four very quirky, very well-trained hamsters, each with its own personality.

Something moved in my flannel shirt pocket.

I looked down, and a big, round, orange face with a pink nose looked back up at me, then heaved the rest of itself out of the pocket onto my chest—the biggest hamster I'd ever seen, solid as a dinner roll—and sat there looking pleased to meet me. A tiny orange-and-white one scrambled up after it, climbed my collar, tucked itself under my chin, and gazed up at me with enormous shining black eyes like I was the best thing that had ever happened to it. A third, white and tan, stayed in my other pocket; I could feel it in there, curled up and warm, not bothering to wake up. The fourth was already in my lap. Tan, a little scruffy, sitting up on its hind legs with its eyes narrowed to slits, studying the man across the aisle with an expression of cold, patient calculation, like it had already worked out where he lived.

They were wearing tiny scarves.

Oh no, I said.

Oh YES, said the kid.

I stuffed them all back in my pockets as fast as I could before a flight attendant came by, and they went without a fuss; they were, as advertised, very well trained. The tan one, who I'd later learn was called Maga-Z, poked his head back out of my left pocket, gave the man across the aisle one more long look, and then looked at me. I swear to God he was deciding whether I was useful.

Martha, I thought. Bring me something from Ohio.

No. Absolutely not. You don't hand your thirteen-year-old sister four hamsters out of a multiverse slot machine and hope for the best. I didn't know what they ate, or if they slept, or if they'd vanish when I closed the panel, or live forever, or turn out to be the size of a Buick when they got wet. They were mine until I knew what they were. I started laughing anyway, silently, with four hamsters in my shirt, and couldn't stop.

Wind Barrier (Uncommon Ability)Conjure a barrier of violent air streams around yourself. Excellent at deflecting projectiles and elements; not so good against physical force.

Something that stops bullets, I thought. Maybe not knives, or a glove, but bullets. I thought about the porch at Stu's, Billy with a pistol and Sidney in front of him, and the shoulder that still woke me up at three in the morning.

That one's good, the kid said.

That one's very good.

Poison Breath (Uncommon Ability)Breathe out a cloud of poisonous gas that also erodes physical matter.

"Oh, come on," I said out loud. The man across the aisle had given up on his crossword and was openly watching me now. Poison Breath and Minty Breath on the same night.

Our breath is gonna kill people, the kid said, awed, and they're gonna die smelling great.

The panel shifted.

5 abilities acquired. +1 Ability Slot.Ability Slots: 2

I sat up so fast Gale stirred against the window. Two slots. Two. I could be believed and armed. I could have the Dark Spear up and the Wind Barrier ready at the same time, without standing in front of a monster going hang on, I have to swap my loadout—the difference between a kid with a trick and a guy with a kit.

And there was one ticket left. The Platinum Random was bigger than the others on the panel, and white, with pearly light moving across it like oil on water. I'd earned it for eight kids, a woman, and a cop who were going to wake up tomorrow. Nobody dies on Elm Street.

I pulled it. The reel spun slowly through every category, abilities and items and things with wings and teeth and a sword so big it had its own moon, while I held my breath like it was my last pull on a Reno slot machine, and stopped.

Morbing (Rare Ability)Functionally the same as Vampire Physique (Rare): superhuman physical abilities, turning into a bat, drinking blood, and every traditional vampire weakness (crucifixes, garlic, wooden stakes, sunlight, holy water).However, whenever you use this ability, you have to shout "I'm beginning to Morb!" or "It's Morbin' time!"

I read it twice, and then put my head back against the seat and closed my eyes.

In 1996 there is exactly one person on Earth who knows what that means. Nobody in 1996 has heard of Morbius. Nobody knows that in 2022 a Marvel movie about a vampire doctor would bomb so hard the internet turned it into a joke for a whole year, and that the joke was a catchphrase nobody in the actual movie ever said—and nobody in any year after 1996 would get it either, because in this world there would probably never be a Morbius. It was a joke for exactly one person, and that person was me.

It was a good power. A great power: super strength, super speed, turning into a bat, healing from blood, the kind of thing that makes the difference against somebody with a chainsaw. All I had to do to turn it on, in front of monsters and killers and my friends and possibly my family, was shout the dumbest sentence of the twenty-first century at the top of my lungs.

What's Morbing? said the kid.

You don't want to know.

Is it bad?

It's a vampire power, I said. It's really good, actually.

So what's the problem?

I opened my eyes. Gale was still asleep against the window, the man across the aisle was still watching me, and in my pockets four hamsters in scarves shifted around.

The problem, I told the kid, is that it's Morbin' time.

I don't think he got it. He laughed anyway, because I was laughing, and after a while the man across the aisle went back to his crossword, and I sat there somewhere over Nebraska with my head against the seat and tears running down my face.

Mom was waiting at the door when Dad's car pulled up at 7:40 on Tuesday night.

She didn't yell or say grounded. She came down the porch steps and across the lawn in her socks, took my face in both hands, and looked at me the way you look at something you thought you'd broken, and then put her arms around me and held on.

"You stupid, stupid boy," she said into my shoulder, the good one.

"I know."

"Is she okay?"

"Yeah, Mom." I held on to her. "She's okay. She said hi back."

Martha was on the porch with her arms folded. "Well?"

I walked up the steps, dug in my backpack, and handed her the bag from the gift shop at Port Columbus: a snow globe with the Ohio Statehouse in it, and a scarlet-and-gray sweatshirt two sizes too big that said OHIO STATE BUCKEYES across the front. Martha shook the snow globe and watched the snow come down on the Statehouse, and held the sweatshirt up against herself.

"You went to Ohio," she said. "On a school day. While grounded. And you brought me a snow globe."

"And a sweatshirt."

"It's huge."

"You'll grow."

She narrowed her eyes at me, already pulling the sweatshirt on over her head, and then stopped with it halfway down and looked at my chest. "Did your shirt just squeak?"

"No," I said.

The squeak had come from my right pocket, where the tiny one, San-D, had decided she wanted to see who was talking. In my left pocket, something went perfectly still: Maga-Z, holding his breath and playing dead with the focus of a professional. I didn't know hamsters could hold their breath.

Martha studied my pocket, and then my face, which I was keeping extremely normal.

"Weird," Martha said, and went inside in her Buckeyes sweatshirt, shaking her snow globe.

She's gonna find them, the kid said.

Yeah, I said. Probably.

Like, this week.

Probably tomorrow.

I slept that night under the pumpkin poster in my own bed, in plain flannel pajama pants with no batteries in them at all. On the desk sat a Nike shoebox with airholes punched in the lid. Inside, in a nest of shredded Fangoria, Cham-P had curled himself into a big orange ring with San-D tucked in the middle of it, and Jum-P was asleep on top of the pile, flat on his back, feet twitching in some dream of his own. Maga-Z wasn't asleep. Every time I opened my eyes I could hear him in the corner of the box, very patiently working on one of the airholes with his teeth.

And I dreamed, one more time.

It was the living room, the one from the end, the house on Elm Street after the theater was gone: wallpaper with little yellow flowers, a couch with a crocheted blanket over the back, a coffee table with a TV Guide on it, sunlight in the front windows. Saturday morning in some year nobody ever lived, and somewhere down the street, a lawnmower. There was no Freddy in it. I knew that the second I arrived, the way you know a house is empty when you walk in—nothing in the walls, nothing under the floor, just a living room and the sun and the smell of cut grass through a screen door.

I was in my own body, minus the soldier costume. No tiger stripes, no bandana, no belts, just Theo, five-eight, in jeans and a gray Army PT shirt, barefoot on the carpet, with the lopsided sparrow on the back of my left hand.

The kid was on the couch. He sat cross-legged in the corner of it in his green vest and flannel, sneakers off, watching cartoons, something with a dog and a lot of yelling, with the remote in his lap. While I watched, he pointed it at the screen without looking and changed the channel, and it worked, click, the way remotes are supposed to.

"Hey," he said, without turning around.

"Hey."

"Sit down. There's room."

I sat at the other end of the couch, and the cushions sighed. We watched a man on the TV try to sell us a set of knives that could cut through a shoe.

"You know what this is," the kid said. It wasn't a question.

"Yeah," I said. "I think so."

He nodded and changed the channel. A weatherman pointing at a map of a state that didn't exist.

"I've been thinking about it since Sunday," he said. "Since I asked you, in the dark, if I go back in the back seat forever." He turned the remote over in his hands. "And then on the plane, with the hamsters, I sort of... knew. You know how you know a movie's about to end? Nobody tells you. It's the music. It's that everything's been answered." He looked at me for the first time. "Everything's been answered, Theo."

I didn't trust myself to say anything, and after a while he said, "Can I tell you something dumb?"

"Always."

"I'm jealous of you." He said it to the TV, fast, like ripping off a Band-Aid. "Not, like, mad. I'm not mad. I don't think I could be mad at you if I tried. I've seen you. I've seen the group home and the barracks and the night you almost didn't get out of Kandahar. I know why you hold on to stuff so hard." He swallowed. "But my mom makes you eggs. My mom makes you honey milk. My dad stood in the garage and said whatever it is, you come back, and he was looking at you. Martha lets you kiss her on the head. Sid brought you a pie. Nancy Thompson looked at me and then she looked at you and she kept looking. Kristen said tell Theo thank you." His voice cracked a little on her name. "My body runs three miles for you. It never ran three miles for me. I never asked it to."

"Randy—"

"I know. I know. You didn't take any of it. You didn't ask to be here. You woke up in my bed with a hangover that wasn't even yours and a guy in a mask coming, and you didn't steal anything, you just—" He waved the remote vaguely at everything. "Lived through it. All the stuff I was always going to do later. Run. Be brave. Say the thing to the girl. Tell my dad. You just went ahead and did it, because you didn't know you were supposed to be scared of my life." A small, wet laugh. "And everybody likes it better. Including me. That's the dumb part. I like it better too."

Down the street the lawnmower stopped, then started again.

"I'm not supposed to have all this," I said. "It's yours. Your mom. Your dad. Your sister. Your girl. I'm a guy from a group home in Sacramento who doesn't even know what happened to his own body. I've been wearing your life like a borrowed coat for six weeks, waiting for somebody to ask for it back."

"Theo." The kid turned all the way around on the couch to face me. He had the yearbook face on, the electrocuted one, except right now it wasn't funny. "Listen. I'm gonna say this once, because it took me six weeks in a back seat to figure out, and I'm only gonna get to say it once."

I listened.

"It's not my coat," he said, "and it's not your coat either. It's ours. That's what I figured out." He tapped his own chest, then pointed at mine. "When you laughed at the aerobics lady, that was my laugh. You've never laughed like that in your whole life. I've seen your whole life. That was me. When you got on the plane, that was you, but the reason you got on the plane, the reason it felt like your chest was coming apart when Nancy said sedated—that was me. When you flinched at Billy in the glass, that was me. When Mom put the honey milk in your hands and you almost cried in the kitchen, that was both of us. I can't find the line anymore. I've been looking for a week. There isn't one." He held my eyes. "You're as much me now as I'm you," Randy Meeks said. "So you don't need two of us. You never did. The dream just let us pretend."

We sat there a while. The TV went to a commercial, a man in a sweater laughing in a kitchen, selling coffee, and the kid watched it like it was the most interesting thing he'd ever seen.

"What's out there?" I said finally.

He knew what I meant, and looked over his shoulder at the front door. It was open; I hadn't noticed. The screen door was shut, but the wooden door behind it stood all the way back against the wall, and the light coming through the screen was a different light from the windows', gold, soft and warm like a late summer afternoon, the light the children had walked into at the back of the theater, one by one, getting their faces back.

"I don't know," the kid said. "It's weird. When I look at it, it looks like the store."

"Bradley Video?"

"Yeah. But better. Every shelf goes all the way back. Every movie anybody ever made is on it, and the ones they didn't. The good popcorn machine. No late fees." He smiled a little. "It's probably not really that. It's probably just what it looks like to me. But I keep thinking, if it looks like that, it can't be that bad, right?"

"Yeah," I said. My voice wasn't working right. "Yeah. Can't be that bad."

He looked down at the remote in his lap. "This is mine, though," he said. "Isn't it."

I'd been thinking about that all night, somewhere under the dream. The remote had won Springwood. It had paused Freddy Krueger, rewound me twice, made a dream demon do aerobics, and turned a live show into a tape—every bullshit, broken, impossible thing that had saved our lives this week had come out of that cheap gray Panasonic in a skinny kid's hand, and without it, in the next dream or the next anything, I was a guy with a gun that tickled.

"Yeah," I said. "It's yours."

"You'll be okay? Without it?"

"No," I said honestly. "But I'll figure something out."

"You always do," the kid said, "eventually." He grinned, put the remote in the inside pocket of his vest with the batteries, and zipped it up.

Then he got up and put his sneakers on. He tied them in double knots, the way Randy's mom taught him when he was five, and I knew that because I remembered her teaching me. He stood in the middle of the living room in the sun and looked around like he was memorizing it.

"Okay," he said. "Rules."

"Rules?"

"You're the guy who knows the rules. You gotta have rules." He held up a finger. "One. Martha's gonna find the hamsters. Like, tomorrow. When she does, don't lie to her. Let her help. She's never had anything that was hers and also ours."

"Okay."

Two fingers. "Two. Call Kristen. Every night she wants you to. Even when it's boring. Especially when it's boring. Boring is the whole point now."

"Every night."

"Three." He hesitated. "Eat the eggs. When Mom makes them. Don't feel weird about it. Just eat them. She likes it when you eat them."

I couldn't answer that one. I nodded.

"Four. Be nice to Sid. She doesn't know how to say sorry yet. She's working on it." He frowned. "And don't let her go to Windsor without you. I know what happens at Windsor. I've seen it in your head. I'm not dying in the back of a news van because some asshole in a mask wanted a sequel." He poked me in the chest, hard. "We're not. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Five." He was quiet a second. "Don't hold back. The next one, whatever it is. You held back with Billy because of me. Because I loved him, a little, the way you love the guy who was basically a brother you never had." He looked straight at me. "I'm not gonna be in the back seat to grab the wheel anymore. So when you flinch now, it's just you. Make sure it's for the right reasons."

"I will."

"That's all I've got." He shoved his hands in his vest pockets, and the batteries clinked. "I thought there'd be more. There's always more in the movies. A big speech."

"That was a pretty big speech."

"Was it good?"

"It was really good, man."

He grinned, and then the grin went and his face crumpled all at once the way a little kid's does, and I got up off the couch and hugged him.

I'd never done that—not on Elm Street, not in the boiler room, not in the theater. Six weeks of sharing a skull and I'd never once put my arms around him. He was so much taller than me, all elbows and nerve endings, and he smelled like the Bradley Video back room, carpet cleaner and popcorn and the inside of a VHS case. He hung on to me with both arms like he was the one drowning, and I understood, the way you understand things in dreams, that this was the first time anybody had ever held on to Randy Meeks to say goodbye. Everybody else just got to leave.

"Thanks for driving," he said into my shoulder.

"Thanks for the car."

He let go and wiped his face on his flannel sleeve. He walked to the front door and pushed open the screen, and the gold light came in and filled the room and lit his face from underneath like a kid holding a flashlight at a sleepover. On the threshold he stopped and looked back.

"Hey, Theo?"

"Yeah?"

"I got kissed," Randy said. "On the face."

"Should've tried for a real one."

He laughed—the real laugh, the one from the boiler room that had made a dream demon want to die—and stepped through, and the screen door swung shut behind him with the soft little clap screen doors make in summer, and the gold went out of the light.

The lawnmower stopped.

I stood in the living room a while. The TV was still on, cartoons again, and the corner cushion of the couch still held the shape of him, so I sat down in it. I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the cartoon to end. Long enough to notice that the sparrow on the back of my hand was gone, and the hand was bigger than mine, all knuckles, on the end of a longer, skinnier arm, with four thin pink lines across the forearm where a glove had gone in a week ago, over an older scar from a night in September. Randy's arm, which was my arm. I looked at it until I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I was in my bed in Woodsboro under the pumpkin poster, in the dark, with my face wet.

It was 4:57 in the morning.

I lay there and waited for him. For the first minute that's all I did. I listened to the back of my own head the way I had every morning for six weeks, for the small warm weight of somebody else waking up—the voice that would say dude or holy shit or what's for breakfast, the feeling of somebody leaning forward from the back seat—and none of it came.

I'd expected a hole. A missing tooth, the quiet in a barracks the day after somebody ships home. That isn't what I found. When I reached for Randy Meeks, for the kid, for any of it, the way I'd been reaching for six weeks, I found him where I was instead of behind me. The first time he jumped off the garage roof with Billy, the trash can going over, both of them screaming with laughter. Martha at three in a pumpkin costume. His mother tying his shoes. The smell of the back room at Bradley Video. Kristen's voice saying Popsicle in a fluorescent rec room in Ohio, and the feeling in his chest when she said it, which was the feeling in my chest, and had never been two feelings at all. Nobody's memories to look at from a back seat anymore. Mine, the way the group home was mine, and Benning, and Kandahar, and the sparrow, all of it in one room.

On the desk, Maga-Z was sitting on top of the shoebox lid. Outside the box. I looked at the corner where he'd been chewing all night and found an airhole three times the size I'd punched it. He was watching me, not the door, with those narrow, conniving little eyes, and he kept watching, and then very slowly he lifted one paw to his brow in a salute. On anybody else it would've looked respectful. On him it looked like a man in a dark coat telling you that you were family now.

I laughed. It came out wet. It was Randy's laugh, the electrocuted one from the yearbook, and it was mine.

The panel opened on its own at the edge of my vision, like a dog at a window when it hears a car.

User: Randy MeeksStory complete: Springwood.Next story loading...

It didn't say Theo Alvarez anymore. I lay there and looked at that for a while, until I heard Mom moving around in the kitchen downstairs, and then I got up, because she'd be making eggs.