Chapter 11: It's Morbin' Time (Patreon)

In the Army, before you're allowed to fire a new weapon, you qualify on it.

You don't just pick it up and start shooting. There's a range and a range officer. There's a safety brief that takes longer than the shooting, a card that tells you exactly how many rounds you'll fire from which position at which target, and somebody with a clipboard writing down every hit and miss. It's boring. It's supposed to be. Boring is how nobody gets shot in the foot.

I'd had Morbing for nine days and hadn't really checked it.

I'd been avoiding it, honestly. I'd practiced the Dark Spear until my hands froze and my nose bled, read about demons until the library closed, done push-ups behind the counter at a video store, and every night when I opened the panel to check my loadout, there it sat in the list of abilities between Poison Breath and Truth Assertion, like a smoke detector on the ceiling with its little green light, waiting.

Morbing (Rare Ability)Functionally the same as Vampire Physique (Rare)...However, whenever you use this ability, you have to shout "I'm beginning to Morb!" or "It's Morbin' time!"

Part of the reason was the shouting. I'm a grown man, mostly, and I'd have to stand somewhere and yell that, out loud, with my mouth. But that was the small part. The big part was everything else in the description—superhuman physical abilities, morphing into a bat, bloodsucking—and the list at the end, the one I'd been rereading in my head for nine days: crucifixes, garlic, wooden stakes, sunlight and holy water.

I didn't know if those were on all the time. Whether having the ability in my head at all made me a little bit of a vampire in the background, and I'd been walking around in the California sun for nine days slowly cooking without noticing. I didn't know what it would do to my face, or whether I'd want to bite somebody, or whether I'd be able to turn it off. And you don't find that out by accident, or in the middle of a fight in front of your friends with something coming at you. You find it out on a range, with a clipboard.

So on Wednesday night, after Martha went to bed and I'd finished cleaning the cage, I opened the unicorn notebook to a clean page and wrote a range card.

MORB TEST PROTOCOL ✎ (do NOT lose this notebook)✗ WHERE: the woods. The clearing. Far from the house. Far from EVERYBODY.✗ WHEN: night. 1 a.m. Everybody asleep. NO SUN. (If the sun thing is real, the first test can't be the sun thing.)✗ LOADOUT: swap Wind Barrier → Morbing. Keep Dark Spear. (If something goes wrong, I want SOMETHING.)✗ EMBER STAYS IN STORAGE. Vampire + fire = NO. Not tonight. Not ever, probably.✗ TEST 1: Activation. Does whispering count? (Please let whispering count.)✗ TEST 2: What do I look like. Mirror (Mom's compact). Camera (Dad's Polaroid).✗ TEST 3: Strength. Speed. Senses.✗ TEST 4: The bat thing. (Clothes??)✗ TEST 5: Weaknesses, one at a time, SMALL DOSES. Garlic. Running water. Cross. Holy water. (No stakes. Obviously no stakes. Who's going to stake me. I'm not testing stakes.)✗ TEST 6: Hunger. Have FOOD READY. Not people food. (Butcher.)✗ TEST 7: Turn it OFF. Does it turn off. Does it LEAVE anything.✗ TEST 8 (DAWN): the sun. ONE FINGER. With it on. Then with it off.✗ ABORT: if I want to bite anybody, ANYBODY, turn it off and go jump in the creek. (Wait, running water. Hm.)

I read it back twice. Pangelinan would've made me rewrite half of it and called me a nasty private for the other half, but it was a good card. At the bottom, in smaller letters, I added:

✗ Do not let Martha see. Do NOT let Martha see.

Thursday afternoon I went shopping for the end of the world.

St. Mary's first, with an empty Crystal Geyser bottle, label peeled off. Father Brennan was in the little office by the side door, typing on an electric typewriter with two fingers, and he looked up when I knocked and saw the bottle in my hand.

"Ah," he said.

He didn't ask what it was for; he'd said he wouldn't, and he didn't. He took it into the sacristy, and I heard the tap run, and then his voice, very low, saying something in Latin for about a minute, and he came back out and handed me the bottle, full and capped. It looked exactly like water.

"There are crucifixes on the table by the door," he said. "If you need one of those too. A dollar, in the box. Or not. Nobody checks the box."

I bought one, a small tin crucifix on a black cord, and put two dollars in the box.

"Randy," Father Brennan said as I was leaving, and I turned around. "Whatever you're doing, be careful with yourself. Not just with it. With yourself." He went back to his typewriter. "That's all."

Sal's Meats is on Main Street next to the shoe repair. Sal is sixty and enormous, with forearms like hams, a white apron with things on it I didn't want to identify, and a grandson who'd been a freshman at Woodsboro High in September.

"A pound of liver," I said. "Beef. Raw."

"Liver." Sal looked at me over the counter. "Your mother making liver and onions?"

"It's for me."

"Raw?"

"I'm... going to cook it," I said, which was not technically a thing I planned to do. "Eventually."

Sal considered me. He knew who I was; everybody did. He wrapped the liver in white paper and taped it, and then, without asking, wrapped another, smaller package and set it on top.

"What's that?"

"Blood sausage. On the house." He leaned on the counter. "My grandson says you're on a, what do you call it. A program. Bodybuilding. Says you're out running at five in the morning. Says you're gonna be the next Schwarzenegger." He tapped the smaller package. "Iron. Good for the blood. You look pale, kid."

"Thanks, Sal."

"Eat a vegetable," Sal said. "Once in a while. For your mother."

The garlic was easy. A whole braid of it hung in our kitchen, because my mother put garlic in everything she'd ever cooked except breakfast, so I broke off a head and put it in my jacket pocket.

The Polaroid was Dad's, a gray OneStep from the late seventies that lived on the top shelf of the hall closet with a half-used film pack in it. Mom's compact was in her purse, and I borrowed it, which I'm not proud of, and left a note in the purse that said I'll give it back - R., which would've been very hard to explain if she'd found it before I put the compact back.

At five o'clock I opened the panel and made the swap.

Ability Slot 2: Wind BarrierStored: Morbing[SWAP] (5:00)

Feeling a power go out of you is a strange thing. Wind Barrier left like a long breath out, a pressure in the air around me I hadn't noticed until it was gone, and then, slowly, over five minutes, something settled into the space it left. Heavy, was my first thought. Heavy and cold and patient, like a big dog lying down in a doorway. It didn't do anything. It lay there in the back of me in the dark, the way Truth Assertion sat at the base of my throat and the Dark Spear sat in my palm, waiting.

Ability Slot 2: Morbing

I stood in my bedroom and waited for something to happen, for my teeth to hurt, for the light from the window to sting, and nothing did. The sun came in sideways through the blinds, orange and low, five o'clock in November, and lay across my arm, warm, and that was all. So it wasn't on all the time, not unless I said the words. I wrote that down: TEST 0: having it slotted does nothing by itself. Sun OK. (Thank God.)

Then I went downstairs, set the table, and ate my mother's pork chops with garlic mashed potatoes, two helpings, with no problems at all, while Martha told us about San-D learning to ring a little bell she'd tied to the cage whenever she wanted to be picked up.

At nine I went into the living room with everybody and sat on the floor in front of the couch, and we watched Seinfeld. Kramer was doing something with a coffee table book. Dad laughed so hard he snorted, Mom swatted him, Martha said "Ew," and I sat with my back against Mom's knees and a heavy, cold, patient thing lying in a doorway in the back of my head, and laughed when they laughed.

Stay in the room. I was learning, slowly. But I set my alarm for 12:45.

The woods behind our house are a strip of second-growth oak and bay laurel, maybe forty acres, between our street and the county road. A creek runs down the middle, high in winter and dried to a string of puddles by August, and in November it was somewhere in between: knee-deep in the middle, fast, cold, and loud over the rocks.

The clearing was on the near side, a quarter mile in, where some kids had built a fort out of pallets in the eighties and somebody else had burned it down. The oak with the dead circle from October stood on the far side, with a new hole a foot below the old one.

I got there at 12:58 with a backpack—flashlight, notebook, a Bic pen and a backup Bic pen, Polaroid, compact, garlic, holy water, crucifix, the white paper package from Sal's with the smaller one on top, a towel, and a change of clothes, because of TEST 4, because I'd seen enough vampire movies to know where that one was going—and Maga-Z in my jacket pocket.

I hadn't meant to bring him. He'd been on the roof of the cage when I got up in the dark, the way he always was now, and when I opened my bedroom door to go, he moved: off the cage, onto the dresser, down to the floor, across the carpet, up the leg of my jeans, and into my pocket, all in about four seconds. He sat there and looked up at me. I said no, very firmly, in a whisper, and he looked at me like he was waiting for me to finish.

He was a familiar—loyal and obedient, the rules said, with their own opinions—and this was apparently one of his opinions.

"Fine," I'd whispered. "But if anything happens, you run. You run home. You go to Martha. Understand?"

He'd nodded.

So now he was in my pocket in the clearing at one in the morning, and I stood in the dead leaves in the dark with my flashlight off, because the half-moon gave enough light, and I'd run out of reasons not to.

TEST 1. I took a breath.

"It's Morbin' time," I whispered.

Nothing. The panel opened at the edge of my vision, very politely.

Morbing: Activation phrase not recognized.Volume insufficient. Please shout.

I stared at it. "You're kidding me," I said out loud to a floating text box in the woods, and it didn't say anything else, because it didn't need to.

I tried "I'm beginning to Morb" at a normal speaking voice, in case the other phrase was the problem. Volume insufficient. A little louder. Volume insufficient. I tried it at the volume you'd use to call somebody across a parking lot, which was already louder than I'd ever wanted to say that sentence in my life, and the panel came up again and said, I swear to God:

Volume insufficient. Please SHOUT.

In capitals. It had capitalized it at me. In my pocket, Maga-Z put both front paws over his face.

I stood in the clearing in the dark and thought about Theo in a barracks at Fort Irwin in the spring of 2022, scrolling on a phone at two in the morning, laughing until he cried at a meme about a movie nobody had seen. I thought about the multiverse looking at me, specifically me, and deciding this was the price. I thought about Walt Bradley and Father Brennan and be careful with yourself, and Maga-Z, and four hamsters on a plane, and the kid laughing on a couch in the sun.

Our breath is gonna kill people, he'd said. And they're gonna die smelling great. He'd have loved this. He'd have loved it.

I filled my lungs all the way, the way you do for a PT test, threw my head back, and shouted it into the dark over Woodsboro, California, at 1:03 in the morning on November 15, 1996, at the top of Randy Meeks's voice.

"IT'S MORBIN' TIME!"

Three streets over, a dog went off like a car alarm, and then another. A porch light came on somewhere through the trees, somebody yelled "SHUT UP!" and the dogs kept going, and then it hit me.

It started in my mouth.

The movies show you the eyes and the fangs and the dramatic music. They never show you that the first thing that happens is your teeth hurt—the worst toothache I've ever had, in both upper canines at once, a deep, pulling, aching pressure that turned into a slide, long and slow and grinding like a drawer coming open, until I had my hand over my mouth and could feel them under my fingers. Long. Sharp. Longer than they should be, all the way down to my lower lip.

Then the cold. It spread out from the middle of my chest like ice across a pond, along my arms, down my legs, into my fingers and toes and the roots of my hair. Nothing like the Dark Spear's cold, the kind that froze my hands white; this one didn't hurt at all; it was more like I was a room and somebody had turned off the heat and the room had stopped caring. My heart slowed. I felt it happen. Thump. A long, long pause. Thump. Like a clock somebody had forgotten to wind.

And then the world turned on. That's the only way I can put it. It was like I'd lived my whole life, both lives, in a dark room with cotton in my ears, and somebody had flipped every switch at once. The half-moon was so bright it hurt. I could see every leaf on the oak across the clearing, every vein in every leaf, in silver and gray, sharp as a photograph. I could hear the creek a hundred yards away—not as a sound, as a map, every rock it went over, every eddy. I could hear the dogs three streets over, and the man who'd yelled shut up going back inside and closing his screen door, and the TV he had on very low, an infomercial for knives that could cut through a shoe.

I could hear a heartbeat in my pocket, tiny and fast, like a moth against a window. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

I could smell it, and I didn't move a muscle.

If I'm going to tell this part at all, I'm going to tell it right.

I braced for it. I'd seen it a hundred times: every vampire movie ever made has the same scene, where the new one wakes up and hears a heartbeat and their face changes and the hunger takes them like a hand around the throat, and the next thing anybody knows there's a body in an alley.

I stood in the clearing with my hand over my new teeth and a tiny heart going tick-tick-tick six inches from my hip, and waited for the hand around my throat, and it never came.

I was hungry. That part was real. Hungry the way you are after a twenty-mile ruck march, when you'd eat an MRE cold out of the bag and ask for another, sitting in my stomach low and loud and insistent. I could smell Maga-Z and hear him, and somewhere far back in this new body a very old, very simple piece of machinery had noticed him, the way your eyes catch movement in the corner of a room.

But that's all it was—noticing. Information, like knowing the stove is hot. It didn't pull. It didn't bend me toward anything. It didn't want anything I didn't want. It sat there, and I sat on top of it, and it was mine the way my hands were mine. The thing in the doorway at the back of my head had stood up when I shouted and looked around, and then, I swear, it looked at me and waited to be told what to do.

I looked down. Maga-Z was looking back up at me. He'd climbed halfway out of the pocket, front paws on the edge, studying my face, whatever it was doing in the moonlight. Every instinct a hamster has ever had must have been telling him what I was. He stayed anyway, a quarter inch from my hand, in his tiny scarf, with the cool, unbothered look of a professional sizing up somebody who'd just become a lot more dangerous and deciding he could still take him.

So I worked it out. Morbing, not Vampire Physique. The panel had been very clear: functionally the same, but named something else. And there's only one vampire in the whole history of pop culture the word morbing could ever point at. Forget Dracula, forget Lestat, forget every guy in a cape in a castle: Michael Morbius, a biochemist with a blood disease who did it to himself, in a lab, on purpose, trying to live. The living vampire. Heart still beating. Mind still his. A man with a vampire's body and his own name.

Whatever had written this ability, whatever had built the joke, had named it after the one vampire in fiction who was still a person.

I took my hand off my mouth. "Hey," I said to Maga-Z. My voice came out strange, lower, with a rasp at the bottom like a voice on an old record, but it was mine. "It's okay. It's just me."

Maga-Z held my eyes one more second. Then, slowly and very deliberately, the way he'd done it for Martha and me on Wednesday night, he raised one paw and saluted.

I laughed. It came out with fangs in it, which is an extremely weird sensation, and I didn't care. Then, because I really was starving, I dug in the backpack for the white paper package from Sal's and tore it open, and the smell of the liver came up out of it, cold and dark and iron, and my stomach made a noise like a garbage disposal.

I ate it. All of it. A pound of raw beef liver, with my hands, sitting in the leaves in a clearing at one in the morning, and it was, I'm ashamed to say, the best thing I've ever eaten in either of my lives. Better than my mother's eggs. Better than the honey milk. It went down cold and slick and rich, and the hunger went quiet and warm and satisfied, the way it does after Thanksgiving dinner.

Then I ate the blood sausage too. On the house.

Maga-Z climbed out of the pocket, sat on my knee, and calmly washed his face, like a man watching his buddy eat something disgusting at a truck stop and deciding not to comment.

I picked up the Bic with bloody fingers and wrote under TEST 6:

✗ HUNGER: real, but just HUNGER. Like after a 20-mile ruck. I can hear/smell heartbeats; it's information, not a pull. I'm in control. ME. 100%. (Living vampire. Morbius. The name was the hint the whole time.)✗ Still: FEED IT. It burns calories like a furnace. Raw liver = incredible. (Gross. Do not tell Sal.)

I underlined ME twice.

I did the rest fast, like a checklist, because I didn't know how long I could stay in that body, and I wanted every minute of it on paper.

TEST 2. I opened Mom's compact and held it up to my face in the moonlight. It showed the trees behind me, the oak, the half-moon, the dead leaves. My hand holding the compact was in the mirror—I could see my fingers on its edge—but where the rest of me should've been there was nothing, the trees going right on through where my head belonged like I was a window. I closed it and opened it again. Same thing.

I set it down and picked up Dad's Polaroid, put it on a stump pointed at the middle of the clearing like a group photo at a picnic, set the timer lever on the front, went and stood in front of it in the moonlight, and waited for the click and the flash. The flash hurt. It went into my eyes like a needle, and I staggered. The picture came out of the front with that whirring sound, and I picked it up by the white edge and flapped it, which you're not supposed to do, while it developed, gray, then green, the image surfacing slowly out of the fog.

It was the clearing: leaves, oak, moonlight. In the middle of the frame, standing in the leaves, were my clothes. My jeans. My black jacket with the zipper half up. My Bradley Video T-shirt under it. The sneakers. Standing upright in the shape of a person, with the jacket's empty hood and empty sleeves and empty cuffs, like a scarecrow nobody had bothered to stuff, and nothing in them at all.

I stared at that picture a while.

Then I tucked it between the pages of the notebook and wrote: TEST 2: no reflection. No photo (clothes show, I don't). What do I LOOK like? Unknown. Probably bad.

I found out months later, in a different town, from a man who saw me with it turned on. He said I looked like a guy who'd been dead three days and was mad about it. Pale as paper, he said, blue in the lips, black under the eyes, the veins showing dark on the backs of my hands and up the sides of my neck like a road map—and the eyes. He said the eyes were the worst: red-gold, like a cat's in headlights, and they shone a little on their own in the dark. But that night all I had was a picture of an empty jacket.

TEST 3. Strength first. I'd been wondering about it for nine days. Superhuman physical abilities, it said, and what did superhuman mean? Twice as strong? Ten times?

I walked back to the house. It took about forty seconds, which should've been my first clue, since it had taken me twelve minutes to walk out. Mom's Volvo sat in the driveway under the streetlight, a 1989 240 wagon the color of dried mustard. They weigh about three thousand pounds; I'd looked it up. I went around to the back, bent my knees the way Gloria said you were supposed to lift, and put my hands under the rear bumper. I'd meant to try a little, just see if I could rock it.

I lifted a little, and the back of the Volvo came up off the driveway like a shopping cart.

Both rear wheels, a foot in the air. I wasn't straining. I wasn't even breathing hard—I'm not sure I was breathing at all. I stood under the streetlight holding the back end of my mother's station wagon off the ground like a wheelbarrow, and it felt like holding a full laundry basket. Heavy-ish. Awkward. Nothing. I set it down very, very gently. The suspension creaked. Inside, Dad's snoring didn't change.

I could hear his snoring through two walls and a closed window like he was in the car with me, and under it I could hear his heart, slow and a little irregular every few beats, the way fifty-year-old hearts get. Mom's next to it, quicker and lighter. Down the hall, Martha's, fast and fluttery, the way your heart goes when you're dreaming about something exciting. And on my dresser, through the window, four tiny ones ticking like watches.

Nothing pulled. They were just heartbeats, my family's, all asleep and safe, keeping time with each other in the dark, and I stood in the driveway and listened to them a while, like rain on a roof. Then I walked back into the woods.

Speed was next: the three-mile loop—our street, down to Turner Lane, along the county road, back up through the woods. I ran it every morning. On a good morning Randy's body did it in twenty-four minutes and change.

I ran it in four.

I don't really remember it. It was like being in a car at night on a highway with the windows down: everything was a smear. I remember the wind in my ears and not being out of breath, not being anything. My feet didn't hurt, my shins didn't hurt, my lungs weren't doing anything at all. I remember passing the Woodsboro Herald van on the county road, the same guy who'd yelled at me about a reflector, the van swerving, and his face in the window, mouth open, staring after something that had gone past him on foot at sixty miles an hour in the dark.

Back in the clearing I wasn't sweating or breathing hard. I checked my pulse at my wrist the way the Army teaches you, fifteen seconds and multiply by four, and got sixteen. My heart was beating sixteen times a minute.

I wrote that down too, and my handwriting was perfectly even, and that bothered me more than anything else so far.

Then I ran a test that wasn't on the card, because when I wrote the card on Wednesday night I'd had Tough Skin for exactly one day and hadn't thought it through. This toughness scales with your physical stats. Right then my physical stats were lifting the back of a Volvo like a laundry basket.

I had Dad's old Buck knife in my jacket, the folding one from the camping box in the garage, because the card said bring SOMETHING. I opened it, laid my left forearm on a log palm up, put the point against the inside of my wrist where the skin is thinnest, and pushed. Nothing. I pushed harder. It was like pushing a knife into a car tire; the point made a little white dimple in the skin and stopped there, and the blade started to bow.

I'd lifted a car with these hands twenty minutes earlier, so I quit being careful and leaned my weight into it, like leaning on a stuck drawer, and the tip of the knife snapped off.

It went tink somewhere into the leaves. I sat there holding a Buck knife with no point, looking at a white dent on the inside of my wrist that faded while I watched, pink, then nothing. No blood. Not even a scratch. On Tuesday night a compass point had barely gotten through my thumb, and on Thursday night, with the cold thing awake in my chest, a steel knife had broken on my wrist.

I wrote: TOUGH SKIN + MORBING = ARMOR. Knife point snapped on wrist. Full weight. Zero damage. (Tough Skin scales with stats. Morbing = stats go through the roof. THEY STACK.) And after a second: Does this work on everything? (Test the weaknesses before you get cocky, dumbass.) I'd be glad, later, that I wrote that part.

TEST 4. The bat thing.

I'd been dreading this one too, for different reasons. The description said morphing into a bat. It didn't say how. In the movies there's usually a sort of whoosh and a cloak and then a bat, and I didn't have a cloak, just a black jacket from the Gap.

I stood in the middle of the clearing and thought bat, and nothing happened. I thought it harder and tried to picture it—wings, small and leathery, the flutter, the way they pour out of the bell tower at dusk in every movie ever made—and something did.

It was like falling down a well. Everything got very big very fast. The trees shot up and the ground came up at me, and my clothes came down on me all at once, a heap of denim and cotton and nylon like a collapsing tent, and I was underneath it in the dark, tangled in a T-shirt suddenly the size of a circus tent. My arms were wings now, and I didn't know how wings worked.

I'd like to say I flew. I didn't. I thrashed my way out the bottom of my own T-shirt, launched straight up, and went about eight feet into the air in a series of panicked, jerking, uncoordinated flaps, like a moth with a head injury. Then the world spun, because a bat mostly doesn't see with its eyes. It hears, and my ears were suddenly full of a sound like a thousand pinball machines, every leaf and twig and branch in the woods shouting its position at me at once, and I had no idea how to listen to it.

I hit the oak tree. Then the ground. Then something soft and green and wet.

Then I was a person again, very suddenly, all at once, lying on my back in a big patch of sword ferns in the moonlight in the middle of November, naked, every inch, not a sock. My clothes were twenty feet away in a heap in the middle of the clearing with the backpack and the notebook, and a hamster sitting on top of the pile, looking at me.

It was forty-one degrees out; the bank sign on Main Street had said so on my way home from Sal's. I didn't feel it. That was the scariest part—lying naked in a fern at forty-one degrees and not feeling cold at all.

From the top of the clothes pile, Maga-Z regarded me. Then, very slowly and with what I can only call enormous dignity, he turned around and faced the other way.

I got dressed. Fast. Then I wrote: TEST 4: bat = yes. Clothes = NO. Flying = NO (needs practice). Hearing = insane (echolocation?). DO NOT DO THIS IN PUBLIC. DO NOT DO THIS AT ALL UNTIL YOU HAVE A PLAN FOR PANTS.

TEST 5. The weaknesses.

I'd thought about this one the most. You don't want to test the thing that kills you. You want even less to find out about it in front of something that knows about it when you don't. Small doses, one at a time.

Garlic first, because it scared me least. I took the head out of my pocket, broke off a clove, and held it to my nose, and sneezed, and sneezed again, and then my whole face felt like I'd shoved it into a bucket of hot sauce—eyes streaming, nose burning, a sick, rolling, carsick feeling that came up all at once and almost brought the liver with it. I threw the clove into the trees as hard as I could, which turned out to be very hard; it went out of sight like a bullet. It was ten minutes before my eyes stopped running.

I wrote: GARLIC: not deadly. VERY bad. Like pepper spray. Mom's cooking: fine when OFF. (Tested: dinner.)

Running water was second. The creek was a hundred yards away down a slope, fast and loud and knee-deep in the middle. I walked down to it, stood on the bank, and put my foot out to step onto the first rock, and my foot wouldn't go.

Nothing hurt. It was more like reaching for a door handle in a dream when your hand won't close on it. My foot hung in the air over the water. I wanted it on the rock and was telling it to go, and it just... didn't. It hung there, and then it went back to the bank on its own and set itself down on the dirt and stayed.

I tried three times, then with the other foot. I tried simply throwing myself across, and my whole body locked like a dog hitting the end of its chain, and I fell over backward onto the bank. On the far side of the creek, twenty feet away, the woods went on exactly the same, and I couldn't get there.

I wrote: RUNNING WATER: can't cross. Not pain. Body just won't. (BRIDGES??? CARS??? Test later.)

The cross was third. I took it out of the little paper bag from the parish table, a dollar crucifix, tin, on a cord—I'd paid two—and held it out at arm's length, dangling by the cord, and looked at it.

It was hard to look at, and it didn't glow or shine or anything. Just a little tin cross turning slowly on its cord in the moonlight, and my eyes kept sliding off it the way they slide off the sun, or off something very ugly or very sad, and the cold, patient thing in the doorway of my chest had backed up all the way to the back of the room and pressed itself against the wall.

I made myself do it.

I closed the cross in my left palm. It was like grabbing the handle of a pan that's been on the stove—the pain instant and enormous and clean, white-hot all the way up my arm to the elbow—and there was a hiss and a smell like burned steak, and I dropped it and was on my knees in the leaves with my hand jammed between my knees and my teeth, my fangs, clamped on my jacket sleeve so I wouldn't scream and wake the whole street a second time.

When I could look, there was a mark in the middle of my palm, a small, neat, raw cross like a brand, smoking a little. And while I watched, it started to close. That was the other thing about this body: it healed. Not fast, like in a movie, but you could watch it. The edges of the burn went pink, then pale, then pulled together, and in about two minutes it was a faint pink cross on my palm, like a scar a year old.

I wrote: CROSS: burns on contact. Heals (fast-ish) while ON. Can't LOOK at it right. (Does it have to be blessed? This one wasn't. Bought from the parish table. Hmm.)

The holy water was last. I'd saved it because I was more afraid of it than anything else; I'd seen what it did to Freddy's bones. I uncapped the Crystal Geyser bottle, and the smell alone made the cold thing in my chest press against the back wall again. I didn't drink it or pour it on myself. I tipped the bottle very carefully and let one drop fall on the back of my left hand, where the sparrow used to be, on another arm, in another life.

It hissed like spit on a griddle, and it went in.

That was what was so bad about it. The cross had burned the surface; this went into the skin, and down, like a lit cigarette pushed in slowly, and a little curl of smoke came up. The pain was worse than the cross, and different—less hot than wrong, like the inside of my hand had decided it didn't want me in it anymore. It healed too, but much slower. After ten minutes the mark was still there.

I wrote: HOLY WATER: worst one. One drop = cigarette burn, goes DEEP, heals slow. A splash would be very bad. A bottle in the face would probably be the end. NOTE: Father Brennan blessed this. I watched him do it. It works. It works on ME.

And under that, smaller: Tough Skin did NOTHING. The knife snapped and the holy water went straight in like the skin wasn't there. It's armor against THINGS. Not against God.

I sat a while after that on the bank of a creek I couldn't cross, with a hand burned by a tin cross and a drop of water, and thought about what that meant. A weapon doesn't make a man, he'd said. A man makes himself. The cold thing in the doorway shifted, and settled, and waited.

TEST 7. Turning it off.

I'd been putting that one off too, because if it didn't turn off...

In the end it wasn't up to me. At 1:25, twenty-two minutes after I'd shouted into the dark, I was sitting on the creek bank writing in the notebook when I felt something go, like the last of the water draining out of a bathtub. The cold in my arms started drawing back toward my chest. My teeth began to ache again, the other way this time, the long slow grinding slide in reverse, and the world started turning its lights off one switch at a time.

The moon went back to being a half-moon. The creek went back to being a noise. The dogs three streets over, who'd only just stopped barking, went silent—they hadn't stopped, I just couldn't hear them anymore.

My heart picked up. Thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump. Back to normal, then past normal, a hundred and forty, a hundred and sixty, like I'd just sprinted a mile, which I suppose, in a way, I had. And all at once I was freezing, shaking, teeth chattering so hard I bit my tongue, every bit of cold I hadn't felt for twenty-two minutes, lying naked in a fern at forty-one degrees, coming back to find me at once.

On top of that I was empty, worse than after three Dark Spears, the tank scraped dry. I tried to call the spear just to see, and nothing came, not even the cold in my palm.

Morbing: Deactivated (energy depleted).

I lay back on the creek bank and stared up at the trees and shook.

Twenty-two minutes of being a monster, and then nothing left in me at all.

I pulled the notebook onto my chest and wrote, teeth chattering and hand shaking so hard I could barely read it later:

✗ DURATION: 22 min. Then empty. Then FREEZING. (Bring a blanket. Bring a THERMOS.)✗ It turns off by itself when the tank's empty. Can I turn it off EARLY? (Test next time. There will be a next time. God help me.)✗ All the cuts/burns while ON: healed or mostly healed. Holy water mark still there. (Watch it.)✗ I would like to never do this again.✗ I'm going to have to do this again.

I didn't sleep. There wasn't much point. I went back to the house at two and sat in the garage in Dad's old camp chair under a moving blanket with a hamster on my knee, drank three cups of instant cocoa made with tap water from the utility sink, and waited for the shaking to stop. It took an hour.

At two I'd swapped Morbing out to get Wind Barrier back, because I couldn't stand having it lying there in its doorway. Then I sat for four hours thinking about TEST 8, and at six-thirty I swapped it back. You have to know. That's the whole point of qualifying.

In mid-November the sun comes up over the hills east of Woodsboro at about 6:50. The garage has one window, on the east side over Dad's workbench, dirty, with a knothole in the shutter outside that lets in a single beam of morning light about as thick as a pencil, which moves slowly across the floor as the sun rises. I'd noticed it my first week and thought it was pretty.

I closed the garage door all the way and put a moving blanket over the window, except for the knothole, and stood in the dark in the far corner with a towel, the holy water bottle, the notebook, and a glass of water from the sink, just in case.

At 6:52 the pencil of light came through the knothole and lay across the concrete, gold and sharp, with dust turning in it.

I didn't shout it at first—the dogs were all awake already. I said it at a normal volume and the panel said volume insufficient, and I said it louder and the panel said please SHOUT, so I shouted it in the closed garage at six fifty-two in the morning, "IT'S MORBIN' TIME," and somewhere in the house, through two walls, I heard Martha say very sleepily, "...what?"

The cold came. The teeth. The lights. It was worse this time, because I'd only had four hours and a lot of cocoa to refill the tank; it came slower and felt thinner, like a TV with bad reception, and I had maybe five minutes, maybe less. I walked to the beam of light and knelt beside it on the concrete, held my left hand over it palm down, and, slowly, like testing a stovetop, lowered one finger into the sunlight. My index finger. Just the tip.

It smoked.

Instantly—a little white curl came up off my fingertip like I'd touched a hot iron, and the pain came up my finger into my hand, and it was nothing like the cross or the holy water. It was everything, every nerve in my fingertip dipped in boiling oil at once. The skin went red, then white, then black in the time it took me to yank it out of the beam.

I sat on the garage floor with my hand clamped in the towel and my fangs in my lower lip, rocking. When I looked, the tip of my finger was a big blister, black at the very end, already starting to heal at the edges the way the cross burn had. One second. One fingertip. One second.

I wrote: SUN: yes. VERY yes. One second = third-degree burn on a fingertip. A minute in daylight = dead. Probably less. (Tough Skin: nothing. Again.)

Then I said out loud to the panel what I'd been wanting to try for nine days. "Off." Nothing. "Deactivate. Turn off. Stop." Nothing; the panel didn't even open.

So I did what I'd done with the spear in the woods on Wednesday night and stopped thinking about words. I thought about the cold thing in the doorway lying down. I thought about it getting up, walking back into the dark room it lived in, and closing the door behind it. I thought about it carefully and clearly, like telling a big dog to go lie down in its bed. Go lie down.

It went, slowly and grudgingly, the way big dogs do, with a long look back over its shoulder. The cold drew back. My teeth slid back into place. The lights went out one by one. My heart sped up, and I was freezing and shaking again, and there wasn't much left in the tank, but there was some. I hadn't run it dry.

Morbing: Deactivated.

It turned off early. I could turn it off. I looked at my finger, and the blister was still there.

That was the last thing I learned that morning, and maybe the most important: the healing only worked while the thing was on. When it was off, whatever it had left on me stayed. The holy water mark on the back of my hand from last night was still there, a small, deep, round burn like a cigarette. The cross on my palm was a faint pink scar. And my finger was a big ugly blister, black at the tip, throbbing in time with my heart, which was a normal heart now, beating a normal seventy-two times a minute.

I took a breath, knelt by the knothole again, and slowly put the same finger, the hurt one, all mine again, into the beam of light. It was warm. That was all it was: morning sun through a knothole in a garage in California, gold and sharp with dust in it, lying across my fingertip the way it had lain across my arm the afternoon before, and I stayed on my knees on the concrete with my finger in it for a good while.

I wrote: SUN, OFF: fine. All weaknesses ONLY while ON. (Confirmed. Thank God. Thank Somebody.) BUT: damage taken while ON stays when OFF unless it heals first. DON'T GET HURT AND THEN SWITCH OFF. And at the bottom of the page, after a long pause:

✗ VERDICT: a really good power, if I'm smart about it. Twenty minutes of being able to lift a car, and then nothing. I'm still ME in there (thank God), but everything that hurts a vampire hurts me while it's on. Use it at night. Use it when there's nothing else. Feed it before. Never where anybody can see. Never in the sun.✗ And I have to shout it. Every time. Out loud. That's the part that's actually going to kill me.

My mother found me on the front porch at seven-twenty.

I was sitting on the top step in the cold with a moving blanket around my shoulders and the morning sun all over me, my face and hands and neck, as much of me as I could get into it. I'd gone and sat in the sun on purpose. I think I just wanted to feel it not hurt.

She came out in her robe with two mugs of coffee, sat down next to me, and handed me one. She didn't ask why I was on the porch at seven in the morning in a moving blanket; she'd stopped asking things like that a while ago. She looked at my hand around the mug, at the Band-Aid wrapped twice around my finger with the black of the blister showing at the edge.

"What happened to your finger?"

I thought about the kid's first rule, which had become my rule now, for Martha and maybe for everybody. Don't lie to her. I thought about how to say the true thing in a way a mother could hear.

"I touched the sun," I said.

My mother looked at me over her coffee. "Well," she said finally, "don't do that."

"Okay."

She drank her coffee. The sun came up the rest of the way over the hills, the frost on the lawn turned to water and steamed, and three streets over a dog that had been barking on and off since one in the morning finally gave up. Somewhere in the house Martha said loudly, to nobody, "Did anybody else hear somebody yelling about MORBIN?"

Mom looked at me. I drank my coffee.

"I'll make breakfast," my mother said, and patted my knee through the blanket, and went inside.