Chapter 10: The Four Dark Devas (Patreon)

One. Martha's gonna find the hamsters. Like, tomorrow. When she does, don't lie to her.

He'd been off by four days. That was the only thing he'd gotten wrong.

I stood in the doorway of my own bedroom with the Top Story check in my shirt pocket and garage dust on my knees. My little sister sat on the carpet in her Buckeyes sweatshirt with four hamsters around her, waiting, and I had about three seconds to decide what kind of brother I was going to be. I'd had a speech ready since Thursday—they're from a pet store in Columbus, they came with the scarves, it's an Ohio thing—and it was a bad speech, with holes you could drive the Top Story van through, and I didn't use it.

"They're mine," I said. "I've had them since Ohio. I didn't tell anybody."

Martha said nothing. On her knee, Cham-P finished his sunflower seed and looked up at her for another one.

"I can't tell you where they came from," I said. "I'm sorry. I really can't. It's not that I don't want to—I don't know how to say it in a way that wouldn't sound crazy, and I've been sounding crazy enough lately." I came in and sat on the floor across from her with my back against the bed. "But I'm not going to lie to you about anything else. Okay? Ask me whatever you want. If I can't answer it, I'll say so. I won't make something up."

Martha studied me. Thirteen is the age when you've just figured out that grown-ups lie to you constantly, and you're furious about it, and you can smell it on them like smoke. I watched her sniff for it.

"Are they stolen?"

"No."

"Are they dangerous?"

I thought about it. "I don't think so. Not to you."

"Not to me," Martha repeated, very slowly.

"They're... loyal. To me. And I think now kind of to you. Maga-Z let you in, Martha." I nodded at the desk, where he sat beside the shoebox lid he'd opened from the inside. "He picked that lid for you. He doesn't do favors. He's never once done me a favor."

She looked over at the desk, and Maga-Z looked back at her with the same expression he'd had since I came in, narrow-eyed and pleased with himself, like a fixer who'd brokered a deal and expected a cut.

"Why are they wearing scarves," Martha said.

"I don't know. They came with them."

"Do they come off?"

"I tried once. Maga-Z bit me. They like them a whole lot."

She almost smiled at that, caught it, and put it away. "They did a thing," she said. "Before you came in. I said hi, like an idiot, like you say hi to a dog, and the sneaky one—that one—" she pointed at the desk, "—he nodded at me. And then I said, you can't understand me, and he looked at me like I was stupid." Her voice went up a little. "Randy. Hamsters don't look at you like you're stupid."

"These do."

"Why?"

"They're genius hamsters."

She stared at me, then at the hamsters. Then she held out her hand flat, palm up, on the carpet between us, and said in a small, strange voice, like she was testing whether a floor would hold her weight: "Line up."

They lined up on her palm, smallest to biggest, sitting up on their hind legs with their front paws folded. Maga-Z came down off the desk to take his place, in no hurry. San-D, at the small end, gazed up at Martha with enormous shining eyes. Jum-P was asleep in his spot, propped upright between Cham-P and Maga-Z like a drunk between two friends.

Martha made a noise I'd never heard out of her—the noise a nine-year-old makes on Christmas morning, which, as far as I could remember, she hadn't made since she was nine.

"Oh my God," she whispered.

"Yeah."

"Oh my God, Randy."

"I know."

"Can they do other stuff?"

"Ask them."

She looked at the row on her hand. "Um. Spin around?"

They spun around in place at the same time, like synchronized swimmers—three of them, anyway. Cham-P reached over and turned Jum-P around by hand, gently, and Jum-P didn't wake up.

Martha put her other hand over her mouth and laughed into it, high and cracked and astonished, her eyes wet, and I sat with my back against the bed and watched my sister fall in love. She's never had anything that was hers and also ours, he'd said, on a couch that didn't exist. I'd thought he meant the hamsters. Sitting on the floor watching her, I figured out he meant me.

We worked it out right there on the carpet at eleven o'clock on a Sunday night, in whispers, like two spies.

"Mom's going to find out," Martha said. "Mom finds out everything. She found out about my eyeliner from the trash."

"So we tell her."

"Randy."

"Not that." I nodded at the hamsters, who were taking turns climbing the drawstring of her sweatshirt hood, except Jum-P, who'd climbed into the hood itself and gone back to sleep. "We tell her we got hamsters. Four regular hamsters. You wanted a pet, I've got money now, I bought you some. That's all true."

"You bought them for me?"

"I'm buying the cage for you. And the food. And the wheel. Tomorrow. That's true too, as of right now."

She thought about it. "And the... the smart part?"

"The smart part's ours. Just us. Not Mom, not Dad, not Tatum, not anybody."

"Not even Kristen?"

I hesitated half a second too long, and Martha's eyes narrowed. "Kristen knows. You told your girlfriend before you told me."

"She's not my girlfriend."

"You told her."

"She's... in Ohio. She has a lot of time. She was very bored." That was a lie; it slipped out small and stupid the way they do, and I heard it the second it was out and made myself say the true thing after it. "Yeah. I told her. On Thursday. She's the only person I could tell. Until now."

Martha considered this. It's a big thing at thirteen, being second, and I watched her decide whether to be mad.

"Okay," she said finally. "But I'm co-owner. Not helper. Co-owner. Fifty-fifty."

"Deal."

"And I get to name them."

"They have names."

"I get to name them more."

"They have very specific names, Martha. They came with them. Like the scarves."

"Then I want to know the names. All of them. Officially." She held out her free hand, the one without a hamster in it. "And I want five dollars a week."

"For what?"

"For keeping the secret," she said, perfectly reasonably. "Secrets are a service, Randy. You charged Tatum three dollars once to not tell Dewey she dented his car. I remember."

Randy had. I remembered too, now. All of it was mine.

"Three," I said.

"Five."

"Only if you clean the cage too. That should teach you some responsibility."

Martha looked at me, at the hamsters, and at me again, and held out her hand, and I shook it. Maga-Z watched us from her palm and then nodded slowly with his whole small body, like a notary who'd be keeping a copy.

"He approves," Martha whispered, and lost it completely, and laughed until Mom banged on the wall.

Monday was Veterans Day.

I'd forgotten. That's how far into it I'd gotten that first week. I was out the door at five, and on my second mile I ran past the park on Main Street and saw the folding chairs in rows in front of the war memorial, the little flags in the grass along the path, and the man from Parks and Recreation unrolling a long blue carpet in front of the podium, and I stopped dead on the sidewalk in the dark with my breath steaming and remembered what day it was.

November 11. Theo would've been at the VFW in Sacramento. He'd gone every year since he got out—not for the speeches, which he couldn't stand, but for the old guys at the back in the faded caps, who didn't stand when they called the branches because their knees wouldn't let them anymore, who never talked about where they'd been, and who you could talk to for an hour about nothing at all while both of you knew.

I went home, ate my eggs, and at eleven, on a lunch break Mr. Bradley gave me without asking why, I walked back to the park.

There were maybe sixty people, a good turnout for Woodsboro on a Monday. The high school band would usually have played, but the high school was closed, so somebody had a boom box on a card table playing a cassette of a Marine band. The mayor made a speech. A minister prayed. A man from the American Legion read the names of the Woodsboro men who'd died in every war since the First, and it took a while, and the little kids in the front row got restless and their mothers shushed them.

I stood at the back by the oak trees, behind the last row of chairs, in my Bradley Video T-shirt and a windbreaker. Nobody looked at me—Blind Eye, maybe, or maybe nobody looks at the back at these things. I stood the way your body never forgets: heels together, feet at forty-five degrees, hands clasped behind the small of my back, chin up. Parade rest. Randy's body had never stood like that in its life, and it slid into it like a hand into a glove. When they called the Army, I didn't raise my hand or stand. I was seventeen. As far as anybody in that park knew, I'd never been anywhere.

The bugler at the end was a high school kid in a borrowed uniform, and he cracked the high note in "Taps," the way somebody always does, and it didn't matter. It never matters. I closed my eyes and thought about Pangelinan. About Doc Reyes. About the plywood shack in Kandahar with the blood on the floor. About Specialist Wiley, who was twenty-two and was supposed to come home in March.

When I opened my eyes there was an old man standing next to me—eighty, maybe, thin and tall and stooped, in a tweed jacket, with a cane and a black VFW cap with KOREA stitched across the front in gold thread. He had a face like a walnut and very clear blue eyes, and he was looking at me instead of the flag.

"You stand like a soldier, son," he said.

It wasn't a question, and I didn't know what to say.

"I've been watching you," the old man said. "Since the names. You didn't fidget once. Not once in forty minutes." He studied me. "Who taught you to stand at parade rest?"

The truth was a staff sergeant from Guam at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the summer of 2018, which I couldn't say. "My... uncle," I said. "He was Army." Technically not a lie. Theo had an uncle in the Army. We just weren't close in any way.

"Mm." The old man didn't believe me, and I watched him not believe me and decide it was none of his business, the way old soldiers do. "Well. He taught you right." He held out a knobbled, spotted hand with a grip like a vise. "Walt Bradley."

I shook it. "Bradley. Like the video store?"

"That's my kid brother's place." Walt Bradley smiled a little. "He tells me he's got a boy working for him who does push-ups behind the counter. Scares the customers." His blue eyes went over me again, slowly, top to bottom, the way they'd have gone over a private in 1951. "I'd guess that's you."

"Yes, sir."

"He says you were in that business in September. The Macher house."

"Yes, sir."

Walt Bradley nodded slowly and looked back at the flag, coming down the pole now, slow and crooked, in the hands of a Legion man with bad arthritis.

"I ran," he said. "After. Six miles every morning. Thirty years. My brother thought I was crazy. My wife thought I was crazy." He was quiet a moment. "I wasn't crazy. I just couldn't stand still. If I stood still, I was back there."

I waited.

"It gets quieter," Walt Bradley said. "Not quiet. Quieter. I'm not going to lie to you and say it goes away. But it gets quieter." He leaned on his cane and turned to go, then turned back. "And son? When it does? Stop running. You'll know when. Don't keep going just because you're scared of what happens when you stop."

He walked off slowly across the grass with his cane, toward a station wagon where an old woman waited with the door open. I stood at the back of the park at parade rest until the chairs were folded and the boom box was gone and the man from Parks and Recreation was rolling up the blue carpet, and then I went to church.

St. Mary's is the Catholic church on Church Street, two blocks from the library. On Friday I'd stood outside it with an armful of books about demons and not gone in. This time I went in.

It was empty, the way churches are at one o'clock on a Monday: dim and cool, smelling like old wood and candle wax and something sweeter, incense from Sunday, I guessed. Stained glass. A long aisle with a red carpet. Racks of little candles in red glass cups beside a statue of a woman in blue. I stood at the back, the way I'd stood at the back of the park.

I'd been in churches. Theo had. The group home in Rancho Cordova was run by a Methodist charity, and we went every Sunday in a van whether we wanted to or not, and mostly I hadn't. There'd been chaplains in the Army, good ones. One of them, Chaplain Osei, sat with me for two hours on a crate behind the aid station the night after Wiley and didn't say one word about God the whole time, and that was the closest I ever came to believing in Him. Randy had been raised Catholic, sort of, the way a lot of kids in the eighties were—baptism, first communion in a little clip-on tie, Christmas Eve and Easter, and then nothing. He'd stopped going at twelve. He told his mother it was boring, and she let him, because she'd stopped going years before.

I didn't know what I was. Standing in the back of St. Mary's, I honestly didn't. I'd seen a dream demon burn and the light come out of him. I'd watched a hundred dead children get their faces back and walk out of a theater into the gold. I'd watched a kid I loved more than I'd ever loved anybody walk through a screen door into something that looked, to him, like a video store with no late fees. That has to be something. I just didn't know what to call it.

"Can I help you?"

He'd come out of a door by the altar, an old priest, seventy or so, in a black shirt and white collar with a gray cardigan over it and a hole in the elbow. Short, round, bald on top, with big square glasses and a face that looked like it laughed a lot when nobody was around. He was carrying a cardboard box of hymnals.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe."

He set the box down on the end of a pew and looked at me. He recognized me—everybody in Woodsboro did—but he didn't do what everybody else did, the little jump and the look away. He just looked.

"You're the Meeks boy," he said.

"Yes, Father."

"I'm Father Brennan." He sat down on the end of the pew beside the box with a little groan, like his knees had opinions. "Your mother used to bring you, when you were small. You were an altar server for about two weeks, when you were ten. You set a curtain on fire."

I hadn't known that, and then I did. It surfaced out of Randy's memory like a fish out of dark water: the smell of burning velvet, the candle-lighter in his hand, and an old priest—this old priest, a lot less gray—beating it out with a hymnal and not even yelling.

"I'm sorry about the curtain," I said.

"It was an ugly curtain." Father Brennan patted the pew beside him. "Sit, if you want. Or stand. Nobody minds either way."

I sat. It's very quiet in a church. You notice how much noise there is everywhere else.

"I've got questions," I said finally. "They're going to sound strange."

"Most of the good ones do."

"Holy water," I said. "Does it matter who blesses it? Does it have to be a priest?"

He didn't blink. "To be holy water, in the sense the Church means, yes. A priest or a deacon blesses it. It's a sacramental, not a sacrament. It's a sign, and a prayer, that the Church makes together." He tilted his head. "Why?"

"A friend used some," I said. "Somewhere bad. And it worked. On something it shouldn't have had to work on." I swallowed. "And the guy who used it isn't even Catholic anymore. Does that matter? Does it work better if you believe?"

Father Brennan took his time over that, and I liked that he didn't have an answer ready.

"The old theologians had two Latin phrases for that," he said. "Ex opere operato: from the work done. That's the sacraments—a baptism is a baptism, it doesn't matter how holy the priest is. And ex opere operantis: from the work of the one who does it. That's most everything else. A sacramental works through the faith of the person who uses it, and the prayer of the Church behind it." He spread his hands. "So, yes. It matters. Not whether he's Catholic. Whether he meant it."

I thought about Neil Gordon on his knees in a junkyard, saying his grandmother's funeral words and hoping God was grading on a curve. "He meant it."

"Then I'd imagine it did exactly what it was supposed to," Father Brennan said, as simply as if he were telling me a car had started.

"Hallowed ground," I said. "What makes ground hallowed?"

"A bishop consecrates it. There's a rite. A cemetery, a church."

"What if there isn't a bishop? What if it's just a hole in the dirt, and somebody says the words?"

"Then it isn't consecrated, technically." He smiled a little. "But I've been a priest for forty-four years, Randy, and I don't believe God reads the paperwork as closely as the diocese does."

"Exorcism," I said.

That one he didn't answer right away. He took off his glasses, polished them on his cardigan, which made them dirtier, and put them back on.

"That's a rite, too," he said. "In the Rituale Romanum. It can only be performed with the bishop's permission, by a priest the bishop appoints, after a very long investigation, almost all of which end with a doctor. In forty-four years I've seen one. I hope I never see another." He looked at me. "Why are you asking me about exorcism, Randy?"

I didn't answer.

"You've been through something terrible," he said gently. "This town has. And when terrible things happen, people come in here looking for one of two things. Some of them want comfort. And some of them want ammunition." He studied me through his smudged glasses. "You're not looking for comfort."

"No, Father."

"May I ask what you're expecting to fight?"

I thought about the list in the unicorn notebook: Moesko Island, and Derry, and a cabin in Tennessee, and a box with a puzzle on it. "I don't know yet," I said, which was true. "That's the problem."

He nodded like that made sense to him. Maybe it did.

"There was one more question," he said. "You didn't ask it. But you came in here with it. I can see it on you."

He was right. It was the last line in the unicorn notebook, the one I'd stared at on Friday—extra damage against holy and divine beings; what does that make ME, carrying it?—and there was no way to ask it, and I asked it anyway. Sort of.

"Hypothetically," I said. "If somebody had a weapon. Not a gun. Something... else. Something they didn't ask for. And it worked on bad things, it worked really well on bad things. But the thing it was best at, the thing it was made for, was hurting holy things." I looked at the altar. "What would that make the person carrying it?"

Father Brennan was quiet for a while.

"It wouldn't make him anything," he said finally. "A weapon doesn't make a man. A man makes himself, every day, with what he does with what he's carrying." He paused. "But if somebody handed me a thing like that, Randy, and I didn't ask for it? I'd want to know who gave it to me. And what they wanted me to do with it."

I had nothing for that. The System is the curse, I thought. It keeps putting me in horror movies. It feeds on what I do. I'd never once asked who was feeding it. I'm still not sure it matters. Whatever gave me the Chaos Gacha is plenty powerful without my help, and I don't have time to care, not if I want to see another day. So we keep using each other, it and me.

Father Brennan got up slowly, with the knees again, and picked up his box of hymnals. "Come back whenever you want," he said. "Bring a bottle, if you need water blessed. I won't ask what it's for." He started away, then stopped and looked back. "And come back Sunday, if you want, too. Not for the ammunition. For you." He smiled. "We've replaced the curtain. It's fireproof now."

The Falcon Cable office is on Third Street in a low beige building next to a laundromat, and in the back, through a door with a hand-lettered sign reading WCTV 27 · COMMUNITY ACCESS · PLEASE KNOCK, is the only television studio in Woodsboro.

I'd found it in the phone book on Sunday night after Martha went to bed. I'd been lying in the dark with the hamsters rustling and Walt Bradley's voice in my head—stop running, you'll know when—and I didn't know when, not yet. So I did the only thing I know how to do with that feeling, and made a plan.

It was the thing I'd told Kristen about in October, on the phone at two in the morning, before any of it: the show I'd never make. A guy from the military reviewing horror movies. Rules of Engagement. In another life I'd had a channel with two hundred and eighty thousand subscribers, and it was the only thing I'd ever been good at that nobody had to teach me. There was no YouTube in 1996, and no Internet video worth the name; a thirty-second clip took twenty minutes to load on a 28.8 modem and looked like a postage stamp underwater. But there was public access. By law, every cable company in America had to give the town a channel, a camera, and a studio, and let anybody use them for free, first come, first served, for whatever they wanted—church services, city council meetings, a guy in Fresno who played the accordion for an hour every Tuesday, an old man in Santa Rosa who talked to his cat. And maybe a horror geek with a website.

I knocked.

A man of about forty-five opened the door: gray ponytail, Grateful Dead T-shirt, reading glasses pushed up on his head, a half-eaten bagel in his hand.

"Yeah?" he said. Then he looked at me, and his eyebrows went up, and he took the bagel out of his mouth. "Oh, wow. You're Randy Meeks."

"Yeah."

"The website guy." He grabbed my hand and shook it, bagel crumbs and all. "Dale. Dale Pruitt. Station coordinator. Come in, come in. Man. I read your site, man. My daughter showed it to me. That Mailbag thing. The rules. You know what you've got there? You've got public access energy. You've got raw." He pulled me through the door. "What can I do for you?"

The studio was the size of a two-car garage, black curtains on three walls and a blue one on the fourth, two big studio cameras on rolling pedestals older than me, a desk with a fake wood front and a potted plant, lights on a grid overhead. In a little booth behind a window sat a control board with a hundred knobs, a stack of three-quarter-inch tape decks, and a coffee maker that had clearly been on since the Carter administration. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

"I want to make a show," I said.

It turned out there were rules. There are always rules.

You had to live in the service area. Check. You had to take the producer orientation, a four-hour class on Saturday mornings covering the cameras, the board, and the FCC rules, before they'd let you touch anything. You couldn't sell anything on the air. You couldn't swear on the air—Dale said that one with a long, meaningful look at me, which I felt was unfair, since he'd only read the website. You couldn't defame anybody. And you had to bring your own crew: at least one camera operator, one person on the board, and you, if you were the talent.

"What's the show?" Dale said, sitting on the edge of the desk eating his bagel.

I told him. He stopped chewing about halfway through, and when I finished, he swallowed, set the bagel down on the fake wood desk, and looked at me with an expression I've seen on maybe four people in both my lives: a grown-up hearing a kid's idea and realizing, with some surprise, that it's good.

"Rules of Engagement," Dale said slowly. "A horror movie survival show. By the kid who actually survived one." He shook his head. "Man. That's not public access energy. That's Tuesday night on Fox energy."

"Thursday," I said. "I want Thursday. Nine o'clock."

"Thursday at nine is the Woodsboro Lutheran Bell Choir."

"Ten?"

Dale checked the schedule on a clipboard and drew an arrow. "Thursday at ten," he said, "is yours. After orientation. Bring your crew."

"Is this the next one?" Tatum said on the phone that night.

"It's the thing between the next ones."

"Is anybody going to try to kill us?"

"Only the FCC."

A pause. "I've never run a camera in my life."

"Neither have I. It's a four-hour class. Saturday."

"And what, I just film you? Talking about movies?"

"And the business side."

"What business side? You said it's free. You said you can't sell anything."

"You'll think of something," I said. "You thought of the T-shirts."

She had thought of the T-shirts, on Sunday when I called to apologize. She'd said it as a joke—you should make shirts, you'd make a million dollars, "Be Prepared" on the front and your face on the back—and then stopped laughing, said wait, actually, and talked for ten minutes about a guy her cousin knew who did screen printing in Petaluma.

"I did think of the T-shirts," Tatum said slowly.

"See?"

A longer pause. "Okay. But I want a credit. A real one. At the end. In the scrolly part."

"Camera and business manager."

"Producer."

"Martha already called producer."

"Martha? Your sister Martha? What's she producing?"

"She called it at dinner. She's thirteen, Tatum, she's going to be insufferable about it. You can be co-producer."

"Executive producer," Tatum said. "That's higher. I know that's higher. That's the one that gets the Oscar."

"That's not how that works."

"Executive producer, Randy, or I'm not running your stupid camera."

"Fine."

"Fine," said Tatum Riley. Then, after a second, in a completely different voice: "Hey. Are you... are you okay? Like, really? Sid said you sounded weird on Sunday. When you called."

I hadn't called Sid. I'd almost called her twice and written her name in the notebook, and I hadn't called.

"I didn't call Sid," I said.

"Oh." Tatum went quiet. "Huh. She said you did. She said you called and hung up."

I'd picked up the phone twice and put it down twice. I hadn't dialed. I was almost sure I hadn't dialed.

"I'll call her," I said.

"You better," Tatum said. "Saturday. Nine a.m. I'm bringing donuts. You're paying."

THE SURVIVAL ZONE, Monday night. The counter said 061,442.

Springwood had been on the news—not Gale's segment, which Gale was sitting on until she could get her hands on my tape, but a wire story out of the Springwood Herald: TEEN SUICIDE CLUSTER AT OHIO HOSPITAL ENDS; DOCTOR PLACED ON LEAVE. Somebody at the Herald had dug a little and found out that one of the girls at Westin Hills had a pen pal in California, that the pen pal was the Woodsboro website kid, and that he'd flown out there the night it ended. It was two paragraphs at the bottom of the story, and it was enough.

I sat in the den with the lights off and the monitor humming, read the guestbook until one in the morning, and answered what I could.

Jennifer C. — Springwood, OH: you STILL haven't sent the picture. kristen says you have a "nice nose." i need to SEE this noseR: The nose is fine. The nose is a regular nose. Stop asking Kristen about my nose.

A Springwood Dad — Springwood, OH: My son was at Westin Hills from April to July. He's home now. He's sleeping through the night for the first time in two years. I don't know what you did and I don't think I want to. Thank you.R: I didn't do much. A lot of brave kids did. Tell him he did good.

Brian — Fresno, CA: u flew to OHIO for a GIRL?? legendR: I flew to Ohio for a friend, Brian.Brian — Fresno, CA: for a GIRL friendR: Brian.

Skeptical in Sacramento — Sacramento, CA: So now you're a psychiatric expert too? You're a teenager who watches too many movies. People in that hospital were SICK. Maybe stop pretending you're a hero.R: You're right that I'm a teenager who watches too many movies. You're wrong about the rest. The kids at Westin Hills weren't sick. They were scared, and nobody believed them. If you ever run into a kid like that, try believing them first. It costs you nothing.

Maria T. — Woodsboro, CA: my grandpa says he saw you at the veterans thing today standing in the back like a soldier and he cried a little. he says hiR: Tell your grandpa hi back. Tell him thank you.

— Moesko Island, WA: what happens after seven days

That last one had no name, just a place, and I sat in the dark with my hand on the mouse, looking at it.

I knew what happens after seven days. I'd seen it a hundred times: a girl in a white dress coming out of a TV, a well, a ring of light at the bottom of it, closing. It was supposed to be 2002. It was supposed to be Washington State and a reporter and a little boy who draws pictures. But I was sitting in 1996, in a world where every horror movie I'd ever seen was happening sooner or later, and somebody on an island off the coast of Washington had a tape, had watched it, and had found the one website in America with a line on it that said What to do if you watch a videotape and the phone rings right after. I'd written that line in September on a list under COMING SOON. I hadn't written the island's name. I hadn't written anything but the line.

I didn't answer it in the guestbook. Instead I clicked the little envelope next to the entry, which had an email address, a Hotmail—Hotmail was four months old; whoever this was had gone out of their way to be hard to find—and wrote:

To: (Moesko Island)Subject: seven days

Don't show it to anyone yet. Don't copy it yet. Write down everything you remember about the tape, every image, in order, and send it to me. And tell me what day you watched it.

Randy

I hit SEND and watched the little envelope fly away on the screen, and thought about the panel, next story loading, and a man named Walt Bradley telling me to stop running. Not yet, I thought. Not yet.

The email didn't come back that night, or the next, which, fuck.

On Tuesday morning I tried to jump off the middle school.

Onto it, technically, then off it, then over the bike rack. Martha told it differently at dinner, so let's get that straight.

In Theo's world there's a whole sport about getting from one place to another as fast as a human body can go, over whatever's in the way—walls, railings, rooftops, the gaps between rooftops. Parkour. Free running. Some French guys invented it in the Paris suburbs, and by the time I was twenty the internet was full of British kids in sweatpants backflipping off parking garages. I used to watch them at two in the morning in the barracks the way other guys watched porn, because I couldn't do it, and had always wanted to, and Theo's body was built like a fire hydrant. In 1996 nobody in America had ever heard the word, which was fine. Nobody needed to.

Every horror movie I'd ever seen had the same scene: somebody running, and something in the way. A fence, a locked gate, a car, a ditch. They stop and fumble and try to climb it like a normal person, slowly, one leg at a time, and that's when the knife comes down. Nobody in a horror movie has ever just gone over anything. If you can go over things, you're out of the movie.

So on Tuesday at 5 a.m., in the dark, after the run, with Martha on her bike as pace car and witness (three dollars a run, our old rate), I went to the playground behind Woodsboro Middle School and started learning how to go over things.

The safety vault first, over the low wall by the four-square courts—one hand, one foot, swing through. I did it twenty times and got it on the sixth. The speed vault over the bike rack, both legs together, sideways, one hand, took forty minutes and a skinned palm. The precision jump, from the top of the jungle gym to the beam of the swing set, landing on the balls of my feet: I missed the first one, hit the beam with my shin, and lay on the wood chips a while making a sound like a teakettle.

"Are you dying?" Martha called from her bike.

"Yes."

"Can I have your room?"

"No."

What surprised me was how much this body already knew. Randy had never done a pull-up before September, but he'd had fourteen years of falling off things the way skinny kids do, and seven weeks of the PROGRAM had put something under the skin. I could hold the cat-hang—hanging off the edge of the jungle gym roof by my fingertips with my feet flat against the post—for twenty seconds. The climb-up after it I couldn't do at all, not yet. And the parkour roll, over one shoulder and across the back, the thing that turns a long fall into a short one, I did on the grass forty times until I stopped hitting my head.

At six-fifteen I took a running start at the low wall by the four-square courts, put one hand on it, and went over without stopping or thinking, landed running on the other side, kept running, turned around at the swings, and did it again.

Martha went quiet on her bike for a second. "Okay," she said grudgingly. "That one was kind of cool."

I wrote it in the notebook at home under PROGRAM v2—PARKOUR (don't call it that out loud). Vaults. Rolls. Cat-hang. Climb-up = 0. Goal: anything waist-high, never stop. Anything head-high, two seconds.—and under that, because I'd been thinking about it all week: Rooftops by spring?

Tuesday afternoon I went down to the creek with a bucket.

I'm not an idiot. I'd been carrying a fire power in storage for three days and hadn't so much as lit a match with it since that birthday-candle flame in the leaves, because I grew up in Sacramento, where you learn early that California in the fall is one big pile of kindling waiting for a reason. So: the creek, in the deepest part of the woods, where the water ran over a flat slab of rock and the bank was mud and gravel and nothing that would burn. A galvanized bucket, full. Dad's fire extinguisher from the garage.

Martha caught me at the back door with the bucket in one hand and the extinguisher under my arm, and looked at the bucket, then the extinguisher, then me. "I'm not going to ask," she said. "That's the deal." She went back to the couch and her Walkman, then said without turning around: "But if you set the woods on fire, I'm telling Mom first. Before the fire department."

"That seems fair."

So it was just me, the creek, and the bucket. I swapped Ember in for Wind Barrier and waited five minutes, and it came in the opposite of the way Morbing would, two days later: light and restless instead of heavy and cold, a little warm flicker behind my breastbone like a pilot light that wanted to do something and didn't care what.

The candle first. One finger. Easy. Then the whole palm: a flame the size of a fist sitting in my open hand like a pet, blue in the middle and yellow at the edges, licking up toward my face without touching it. It was warm the way a stove is warm when you hold your hands over it. It didn't burn me—only I was fireproof, as I found out a minute later when I let it lean too far and the cuff of my flannel started smoking. I said a word my mother doesn't know I know and stuck my arm in the bucket.

"Shaping," I said, arm in the bucket. "The panel said shape."

So I shaped it. A ball first, packing the flame down between my hands like a snowball until it was tight and bright and roaring a little, and then I threw it overhand out over the creek. It flew about thirty feet, a lot faster than a baseball, and hit the water, and the water went up in a hissing white column of steam taller than I was, and I stood there with my mouth open like a kid at a fireworks show. It cost about what a Dark Spear cost, maybe a little less.

The arrow was harder. I tried stretching the flame out thin and long, like pulling taffy, and it kept going ragged at the ends and breaking into sparks. Eleven tries. On the twelfth I quit thinking about pulling it and thought about the Dark Spear instead—the throw, the release, the shape of something that's already moving—and the flame in my hand went long and narrow and white-hot at the point, and I didn't throw it. I just meant it, and it went. It crossed the creek like a tracer round, hit the mud bank on the far side, and punched a fist-sized hole a foot deep, glowing orange at the bottom and steaming.

"Okay," I said finally, under my breath. "That one was kind of cool."

I sat on a rock with my hands in the creek, because they felt like they'd been holding a coffee cup too long, watched the hole in the far bank stop glowing, and thought about the Dark Spear. I'd been thinking about it since Saturday night in the leaves with the update glowing over my face. FUSE. Combine two results into one new result of equal or greater rarity. A spear of cold black nothing that killed what it touched, and a fire that went where I meant it, shaped like an arrow, already moving. I didn't know what you'd get if you put them in a pot together. A burning spear. A black fire. Something that went through an oak and set the forest on fire behind it. Something better. And I had one charge, and no idea if I'd ever get another.

I got the notebook out and started a list on the page after SUMMON IT THROWN:

FUSE IDEAS (1 charge: CAN'T WASTE IT)1. Dark Spear + Ember → ??? (black fire? burning spear? best one)2. Wind Barrier + Scenic Wind → (a real wind? a barrier that doesn't need me to see it coming?)3. Dark Spear + Wind Barrier → (a tornado spear?)4. Truth Assertion + anything → ???NOT YET. Think about it. Sleep on it. There's time.

There's always time. That's what everybody in a horror movie thinks, right up until there isn't. I closed the notebook, picked up the bucket and Dad's extinguisher, which I hadn't needed, and walked home.

Kristen called at six on Tuesday, like always.

"So," she said. "I have news."

"Okay."

"Simms is gone. Like, gone gone. On leave. 'Pending review.'" She was so happy I could hear her grinning. "Dr. Gordon's back. He came in this morning in a tie. Max says the board met for six hours and Dr. Gordon's lawyer was a lady and she made Simms cry."

"Good."

"And they're letting people go home. Not everybody. Not yet. But Joey's mom is coming to get him on Friday. And Phillip's aunt. And Will's parents had a meeting with Dr. Gordon." She took a breath. "And me. Maybe. Elaine has to sign some stuff. Elaine has to want to sign some stuff." The grin went out of her voice a little. "We'll see."

I sat on my bed with the phone. On my dresser was the brand-new cage Martha had picked out at PetSmart on Monday afternoon, frankly a mansion, three floors and a slide. Cham-P was running the wheel at full speed; he was the only one strong enough to get it going that fast. San-D was in the little hammock, watching me talk on the phone. Jum-P was asleep in a plastic igloo with his scarf over his face. Maga-Z was on the roof, which meant he'd already found a way out of the cage.

I'd been thinking about it since Sunday. Since before Sunday, maybe—since a plane over Nebraska, laughing with hamsters in my shirt and the Top Story check in my pocket. Seven thousand five hundred dollars. A used car. A semester at a state school. Eight plane tickets.

"Kris," I said. "What are you doing for Thanksgiving?"

She went quiet. "Nothing," she said after a second. "I mean. If I'm home, Elaine's going to her boyfriend's family's thing in Dayton, and I'm not invited, because his mom thinks I'm 'troubled.' And if I'm still here, there's turkey in the cafeteria. Max says it's actually okay. It's the one day the food's okay." A pause. "Why?"

"Come here," I said.

The line went silent.

"All of you," I said. "Everybody who wants to. You, and Kincaid, and Taryn, and Will, and Jennifer, and Phillip, and Joey. Come to Woodsboro. For Thanksgiving. My mom makes a turkey, my dad makes this weird stuffing with sausage in it, there's pie. It's California, it's sixty-five degrees, there's a beach. You can see the ocean. Have you ever seen the ocean?"

"Randy." It came out of her like air out of a tire.

"I'll pay for the tickets."

"You can't—"

"I can, actually. I've got money. Gale Weathers gave me money. It's a long story. I'll tell you about it. I'll pay for the tickets and a place to stay, and all you have to do is get on a plane."

"Randy, that's like... that's thousands of dollars—"

"I know."

"Why?"

I thought about a rec room at midnight, seven kids in pajamas, a gurney, and her hand, very small and very cold, moving in mine. Joey with his two thumbs up. Will saying yeah down at his own lap. All of them in a circle holding hands, going down a staircase into the dark for each other, with nobody in the world believing a word they said.

"Because you guys never got a good one," I said. "A good holiday. A normal one. Nobody trying to kill you. Nobody calling you crazy. Just turkey, and football on TV, and my dad falling asleep in his chair. You guys never got that. And I've got money in my pocket that a lady who likes ratings gave me, and I can't think of one single better thing to do with it."

Kristen went quiet. I could hear her breathing, and the dayroom behind her, the TV, somebody laughing—Kincaid, probably.

"I have to ask Elaine," she said finally, in a small, wobbly voice.

"I know."

"And everybody has to ask their Elaines."

"I know."

"And somebody has to come with us. A grown-up. They won't let seven kids from a psych hospital get on a plane by themselves. They'll think we're running away to join a cult."

"I know," I said. "I was going to call Dr. Gordon."

Another silence. "You've really thought about this."

"Since Nebraska."

"Nebraska?"

"It's a long story."

She laughed, and it came out wet. "You have so many long stories."

"I'll tell you all of them," I said. "At Thanksgiving. On a beach."

That night before bed I opened the panel one more time and did the other thing. The Fuse could wait. The junk drawer couldn't; I'd been carrying it around since September like lint in a pocket, and Saturday night had told me what it was actually worth.

[DISMANTLE]Select results to break down.

Throat. The Trash trait from the ambulance, toggled off in September and never back on; I'd never even figured out what it was for. Crying, the Trash skill: apparently I could cry on cue, like a soap actress, and I'd never once used it on purpose. These days I could cry well enough on my own.

And Blind Eye. That one I thought about longer. Blind Eye was supposed to make people not notice me. I'd pulled it in the ambulance and thought perfect, a survival trait, and then Gale Weathers put my face on national television twice and the Herald put it on the front page, and the most famous kid in Woodsboro couldn't hide behind a trait that only worked on people who weren't already looking. It hadn't worked once. It never would. Besides, with the show, I had a reason to be visible now. I could help more people that way. Sorry, buddy, I thought. You never had a chance.

Throat (Trash Trait 0.4) · Crying (Trash Skill 0.5) · Blind Eye (Common Trait 1.1)Dismantle 3 results? This cannot be undone.[CONFIRM]

I confirmed. They went out of me like three pulled teeth, with no pain, just gone—little spaces where something used to sit, which I'd never noticed until they were empty.

Salvage: 2.0Exchange available: 1× Silver Random Gacha Ticket (2.0)

I took it. Of course I took it.

Tickets: 1× Silver Random[PULL]

The reel spun through every category, the whole carnival—a sword, a dog with too many eyes, a skill called Tax Evasion that I'd now seen four times and was starting to take personally—and slowed on Traits, and ticked, and stopped.

Tough Skin (Uncommon Trait)Your skin is way denser and tougher than the average persons, yet it is very smooth and nice to touch. This toughness scales with your physical stats, being able to serve as natural armor at higher levels.

It didn't come in through the head like the skills, or through the chest like the abilities. It came from the outside, a slow, faint pressure everywhere at once, like getting into a bath that's a little too warm, as if every inch of me were being pressed gently by a hand. It took about a minute. Then it was done, and I didn't feel any different.

I sat on the edge of the bed and pinched the back of my hand, and it felt like pinching the back of my hand. Then I pinched harder, to hurt, and it didn't, quite; the skin held under my fingers the way leather holds, a little give and then no more. I got Martha's compass out of the pencil cup on my desk, the kind with the sharp steel point for drawing circles in geometry, and pressed the point into the pad of my thumb. Gently. Then less gently. Then like a thumbtack going into a corkboard. It dented. It didn't go in. I pushed until my whole hand shook, and it finally broke the skin, a single bright dot of blood about a millimeter deep. With Randy's old skin, the skin I'd had at dinner, it would've gone in a quarter inch on the first push.

This toughness scales with your physical stats. I sat with my thumb in my mouth and thought about that. Armor someday, maybe; right now it wasn't going to stop a knife. It might, though, if I kept running and doing pull-ups and vaults and the five a.m. hill until it hurt. On top of making me faster, the PROGRAM was now what made the trait work, which meant I had to keep doing it. Every day. Forever.

"Great," I said to the hamsters, who were watching me from the dresser. "More homework."

Maga-Z, on the top level, gave me a slow look that said some of us were born tough.

At breakfast the next morning my mother touched my cheek on her way past with the coffee pot, the way she did sometimes without thinking, and then stopped, and kept her hand there, and frowned.

"Have you been moisturizing?"

"No."

"Your skin is like a baby's." She looked at me suspiciously. "Is this a Tatum thing?"

"It's not a Tatum thing."

"Hm," said my mother, and went to pour Dad's coffee, and looked back at me twice.

Dr. Neil Gordon answered his home phone on the second ring.

"Randy," he said. He sounded tired, and pleased, and a little wary—I was, after all, the kid who'd once told him exactly where to find a dead man's bones. "Is everything... all right?"

"Everything's fine. Better than fine. I heard you're back."

"As of this morning. Pending the board's final report." A pause. "I gather Kristen told you. Kristen tells you everything. Max says she's on the dayroom phone more than the night nurses."

I told him the plan. He listened all the way through without interrupting—psychiatrists are professionally trained to let you finish, I guess—and when I was done he was quiet a long while.

"You understand," he said carefully, "that these are minors. In psychiatric care. Some of whom are about to be discharged, and some of whom aren't. With parents who range from 'very involved' to 'a phone number that's been disconnected since March.'"

"Yes, sir."

"And that it would require a great deal of paperwork. Consent forms. Medical releases. A responsible adult accompanying them every minute of every day."

"Yes, sir."

"And that the responsible adult would have to be someone the hospital and the parents both trusted. Someone who's been working with these kids. Someone with, say, a medical degree. And a week of unused vacation." Another pause. "And who's been suspended for a week and has nothing to do but stare at the wall."

I held my breath.

"Nancy wanted to come," Neil Gordon said, more softly. "When I told her you'd called, I mean—just now, before you, she was on the phone. She'd have come in a heartbeat. But she has to look after her dad. He's out of the ICU, but he's in a cast up to the hip, and he can't do the stairs, and he can't drive, and he can't..." He stopped. "He hasn't had a drink in eight days. She's not leaving him alone for a single one of the next ones. Not for anything."

"Tell her I get it," I said. "Tell her that's the most important thing anybody's doing."

"I'll tell her." A pause. "She'll want to talk to you. She keeps saying she owes you a phone call. A long one."

"Any time."

"I'll make some calls," Dr. Gordon said. "To the parents. To the board. I can't promise anything. But I'll make the calls." I heard him take off his glasses; you can hear that on the phone if it's quiet enough. "Randy. Can I ask you something? Not as a psychiatrist."

"Sure."

"When the skeleton stopped. At the junkyard. With its hand an inch from Donald's throat. You said, as if someone had paused it." His voice dropped. "Was that you?"

I looked at the cage on my dresser, at Maga-Z on the roof looking back at me.

"It was a friend of mine," I said.

"Can I thank him?"

"He's gone," I said. "But he'd have liked that you asked."

That left the money, and my mother.

The money was easy. Dad took Wednesday morning off and drove me to the Bank of America on Main Street, and sat next to me at the new-accounts desk while a woman with a lot of hairspray opened a savings account in my name, with him as custodian, and deposited a check for seven thousand five hundred dollars from Top Story Productions. She looked at the amount, at me, at Dad, and said nothing at all.

"We're going to talk," Dad said in the car, "about the rest of it. About what you do with the rest of it. Not today. Soon."

"I've got some ideas."

"I'm sure you do." He started the car. "I'm sure they're terrible. That's what fathers are for."

Then he drove me to Woodsboro Travel, a storefront in the strip mall next to the Safeway with posters of Hawaii in the window, where a woman named Bev sat at a desk with a computer terminal and a phone whose cord was long enough to walk around the room on. Bev typed things, made calls, wrote on a pad, said "Eight?" twice, and finally told me what eight round-trip tickets from Columbus to San Francisco, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to the Sunday after, would cost if I booked today. It was a lot. It was less than I'd thought. Seven days advance purchase, she said: book by next Tuesday and the fare would hold.

"Hold them," I said. "All eight. I'll give you the names by Friday."

Bev looked at me over her glasses. "You're the boy from the TV."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Flying eight people in from Ohio for Thanksgiving."

"Yes, ma'am."

Bev looked at my father, and my father looked back with the face of a man who'd stopped being surprised by anything his son did sometime in mid-September.

"Huh," Bev said, and held them.

Then the motel. The Woodsboro Motor Lodge sits on the highway on the north side of town: a long, low, two-story L of rooms around a parking lot and a swimming pool that had been drained since 1989, with a neon sign out front that says MOTOR LODGE in pink and VACANCY in green. Dad said the VACANCY had been lit every night since September. Nobody came to Woodsboro anymore. Two families on our street had put their houses up for sale. The reporters had all gone home, and the tourists who used to come up for the wine country in the fall drove straight through now without stopping, like it was a car wreck.

The man who ran it was named Gus—about sixty, with a belly, suspenders, and a toothpick—and he came out of the office when we pulled up, watched me get out of Dad's car, and took the toothpick out of his mouth. "Well, I'll be."

I told him what I needed: four rooms, maybe five, from the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to the Sunday after.

Gus looked at me a while. He looked at the empty parking lot, and at the dead neon in the NO of NO VACANCY, which hadn't been lit since August. "Son," he said, "you know what my occupancy rate's been since that business in September?"

"No, sir."

"Eleven percent." He put the toothpick back in. "Eleven. I had a honeymoon couple cancel on me in October because the bride's mother saw your sheriff on Hard Copy. I had a church group from Modesto turn around in my parking lot." He shook his head. "Everybody's running away from this town. And here's you. Bringing people in."

He gave me five rooms for six nights for less than the price of three. "Clean towels every day," Gus said, shaking my hand. "And I'll fill the pool. Don't care if it's November. A motel ought to have a pool."

My mother was harder.

I told her at dinner on Wednesday, with everybody at the table, Martha and Dad and Mom and a roast chicken. I'd thought all the way home from the Motor Lodge about how to say it and decided to just say it.

"I want to have some people for Thanksgiving," I said.

"Okay," Mom said. "Who?"

"My friends from Ohio."

Mom put her fork down. "Your... Kristen?"

"And the others. From Westin Hills. The ones I—" I didn't know how to finish that sentence. "The ones who were there."

"How many?" said my mother.

"Seven," I said. "Plus their doctor. He's chaperoning. They're staying at the Motor Lodge, I've already booked it. I'm paying for the tickets. I've already put them on hold. All they need is somewhere to eat on Thursday."

My mother stared at me. "Eight."

"Plus Sid and her dad," Martha said helpfully through a mouthful of chicken. "You always invite the Prescotts. And Tatum. And Tatum'll bring Dewey."

"And Dewey," Dad said, not looking up from his plate, "will bring Gale Weathers."

Silence at the table.

"Gale Weathers," said my mother.

"They're dating," Martha said. "Everybody knows. Tatum told Randy. Randy told me." She sipped her milk. "Randy hates her."

"I don't hate her."

"You called her a—"

"Martha."

Mom looked around the table at all of us—at Martha, eating; at Dad, very carefully not looking at her; at me. "So," she said slowly. "Let me see if I understand this. Seven teenagers from a psychiatric hospital in Ohio. Their psychiatrist. Sidney and Neil Prescott. Tatum Riley. Deputy Riley. Gale Weathers." She counted on her fingers and ran out. "And us."

"Thirteen," Martha said. "Plus us is seventeen. Plus the hamsters is twenty-one."

"What hamsters?" said Mom.

"My hamsters," Martha said without missing a beat. "Randy bought them for me. They're in his room. They're on his dresser. They're normal."

Mom looked at Dad. Dad looked at his chicken. "I knew about the hamsters," Dad said.

"You knew about the—"

"I heard them," Dad said. "Through the wall. Sunday night. Somebody laughed until two in the morning." He finally looked up. "Diane. Let them have the hamsters."

My mother put both hands flat on the table and looked at each of us in turn, like a general studying the map of a battle already lost. "Seventeen people. For Thanksgiving. In this house."

"Twenty-one," Martha said.

"The hamsters are not eating, Martha."

"Cham-P will," Martha said very seriously. "Cham-P's a growing boy."

And my mother—who'd held me on the lawn in September with blood all over both of us, who'd found me in the kitchen at two in the morning with my hands frozen white, who'd made eggs every morning for a week and watched them go in the trash—looked at me across the table, and something in her face that had been held very tight for a very long time let go.

"Two turkeys," she said. "I'm going to need two turkeys."

"I'll help," I said.

"You'll help," Mom said. "You will peel every potato in Sonoma County, Randy Meeks." She picked her fork back up. "And your Kristen is sitting next to me. I want to meet this girl."

Late Wednesday night I was on the floor of my room with Martha, cleaning the cage. That was the deal: I cleaned, she supervised.

She sat on my bed with her knees up and her chin on them and San-D curled against her neck under her hair, and watched me scoop old cedar shavings into a garbage bag. She didn't say anything for a while, which for Martha was a medical event.

"Randy," she said finally.

"Yeah."

"You've been weird."

"I've always been weird."

"Weirder." She stroked San-D with one finger. "Since Ohio. Mom thinks it's because of the girl. Dad thinks it's because of September. I heard them talking." She looked at me. "I don't think it's either."

I stopped scooping. Don't lie to her.

"I lost a friend," I said.

Martha waited. She was getting good at that.

"In Ohio," I said. "Sort of. He was... he was there with me. The whole time. Since September. Since before you'd even noticed I was weird." I looked at the cage, at Maga-Z on the roof, watching. "He was the one who was good with the remote. And he was funny, and he talked too much, and he was scared of everything, and he did it all anyway." I swallowed. "And he's gone now. He decided to go. He said it was okay. He said I didn't need two of us."

"Two of who?"

"I can't explain that one."

Martha studied me over her knees. "Was he nice?"

"Yeah. He was really nice."

"Would I have liked him?"

I thought about a nine-year-old girl in a pumpkin costume and a boy holding her hand on Halloween, walking her up to every porch on the block because she was too scared to ring the bells herself.

"You'd have liked him," I said. "He was a lot like me."

Martha nodded slowly. Then she climbed carefully down off the bed, San-D still tucked against her neck, and sat on the floor next to me against the bed, the way we'd sat on Sunday, and after a second she leaned over a little, until her shoulder rested against my arm.

On the roof of the cage, Maga-Z stood up on his hind legs and looked at the two of us sitting on the floor in the lamplight. Then, slowly, and for the first time to both of us at once, he saluted, and coming from him, it felt like being sworn into something.