Chapter 14: Some Assembly Required (Patreon)

The doll sat up on the line at 3:12 in the morning.

Line Four, third shift, the Play Pals plant on the south side of Terre Haute, Indiana, August 1996. The relaunch: eleven thousand Good Guys a week, red yarn hair, freckles, and denim overalls, coming down the belt to the boxing station in rows like little red-headed soldiers with their eyes shut. Somebody in marketing had decided America was ready for them again. Somebody in purchasing had decided the plant could save forty thousand dollars by grinding up the old 1990 stock from the Chicago warehouse, from the line closed after the accident, and feeding it back into the new plastic. Nobody had asked what was in the old stock. Nobody ever does.

The line supervisor was Earl Kopecky, fifty-one, who'd worked at Play Pals since the first launch. He was standing at the end of Line Four with a clipboard and a Styrofoam cup of coffee when one of the dolls in the middle of a row of identical dolls opened its eyes, sat up, and looked around the plant with mild, professional interest, like a man waking up on a bus to check which stop it was. Then it looked at Earl.

"Hey," it said, in a man's voice, rough and flat and Chicago, nothing like the voice on the chip. "You got a light?"

Earl Kopecky dropped his coffee.

He didn't get a light. What he got, about forty seconds later, was a very bad end on the floor behind the boxing station, where the noise of the belt covered most of it. When the shift lead came looking for him at 3:30, the belt was still running, and every doll on it lay with its eyes shut, in rows, in overalls, exactly as it should—except there was a gap in one of the rows, and the fire door at the end of the building stood open on the hot, black Indiana night.

He'd forgotten what it was like, being alive. It always surprised him a little.

Calling it a body was generous. It was plastic and cloth and stuffing and a voice chip, and something else now, under all of it, that had come back with him out of the vat. A heart, maybe. Something that beat. The longer he stayed in one of these, the more it grew in, the way roots grow into a crack in a sidewalk; he'd learned that in 1988 and again in 1990. Give it time, and a doll starts to bleed.

And he was stronger than he'd been. That was new. He'd tested it the first week in a barn outside Brazil, Indiana, on a farmer's chain-link gate, and pulled it off its hinges with one hand, and afterward he'd stood in the barn doorway with the gate in his little plastic fist and laughed until he had to sit down. Damballa, he thought. You old bastard. You missed me.

He still had the amulet. That made him laugh hardest, later. It had been in his pocket in the Chicago toy store in 1988, the night the cop shot him, a little thing of carved bone on a leather cord, and it went into the doll with him the first time, and into the next doll, and into the vat in 1990, and somehow, by whatever rules governed that sort of thing, it had come out the other side. It was in his overalls pocket now. When he held it, the air got heavy and smelled like a storm coming. When he held it and asked, the storm came. He didn't ask often. You don't wave the good stuff around. Charles Lee Ray had been a lot of things in his first life and the ones after, and stupid wasn't one of them.

What he needed was a body.

The plastic always got tight; that was the trouble. He could feel it starting already—a stiffness in the joints in the mornings, a dullness like a hand that's fallen asleep. The longer he stayed, the more human the doll got, and the more human it got, the harder it was to leave, until eventually the door would close and he'd be stuck forever, a two-and-a-half-foot freak with a pocketknife.

He needed out. He needed a kid. And not just any kid—that was the dumb rule he'd been tripping over since Chicago. It had to be somebody who knew him: the first person he told the truth to, somebody who knew his name. And nobody knew his name anymore. That was the joke. He was a trivia question now, the Lakeshore Strangler, some nut in Chicago who'd liked voodoo. Andy Barclay knew it, but Andy was sixteen and at a military school in Kentucky, too old and too careful, and in the barn Charles Lee Ray had concluded he'd rather stay in the plastic than spend the rest of his natural life as Andy goddamn Barclay.

So. A kid. A new one.

He found the kid on a Tuesday in October, at two in the morning, in a twenty-four-hour Laundromat in Muncie.

A TV was bolted up in the corner over the folding table with the sound low, and nobody else was there. He was sitting on top of a dryer, in the warm, watching the late news replay, because he liked the warm and liked to keep up, and then the news turned into one of those specials: a blonde reporter with a lot of hair in front of a high school in California. Top Story Presents: Woodsboro. The Survivors. He almost changed the channel. Teenagers getting stabbed. Big deal. He'd done it better in Chicago, with nobody filming.

Then they showed the kid. Skinny, long jaw, big Adam's apple, standing on the steps of a sheriff's station with the blonde's microphone in his face, live, his mother's hand on his arm, spelling his name for her—two E's—and later in the special, a few seconds outside a video store in a green vest, telling the camera about rules. There were rules in horror movies, and if you knew the rules, you could survive.

Charles Lee Ray sat on the dryer and watched the kid talk, and slowly he stopped watching what the kid said and started watching how. The eyes moving around the room every few seconds, checking the door, checking the window, like a guy in a bar who's done time. The way the kid sat with his back to the wall. The way his hands didn't move when he talked, not once, not like a kid's hands. The way he answered the blonde: careful, flat, polite, like a guy who'd been interviewed by people with badges before and knew how much to give them.

That wasn't a kid. Charles Lee Ray had been looking at that exact thing in mirrors for eight years: a grown man looking out of something small. A guy wearing a face like a coat.

"Well, hello," he said softly to the TV.

At the end of the special, the blonde said the kid had a website. For survivors. With rules.

He read it at the public library in Muncie a week later at three in the morning, after letting himself in through the book return. Two fingers on the keyboard. It took him forty minutes to figure out the mouse.

Randy's Survival Zone. Black background, red letters. A guestbook. A page of rules. A page of what the kid called hypothetical survival guides, for hypothetical situations, and at the top of that page, in capitals, COMING SOON, and a list. Number nine said: What to do if a doll you didn't buy starts talking to you.

He sat in the dark in the Muncie Public Library and read it six times. Then he laughed so hard he fell off the chair.

The kid knew. Somehow the kid knew—that he was out, what he was, maybe even where he was going before he did. A guy wearing a kid. A guy who'd done the one thing Charles Lee Ray had been trying to do for eight years, who'd gotten all the way in and was walking around in it, living in it, with a mom and a dad and a little sister and a TV show, and nobody knew. A guy like that could teach him something. And a guy like that, if he wouldn't teach, would at least know his name.

The conference room had moved again overnight.

Margaret Pell had stopped minding years ago. On Friday it had been at the end of the east corridor on the ninth floor, past a water fountain that dispensed water of the correct temperature and nothing else. On Monday morning it was at the end of the west corridor on the fourth, past a painting of a lighthouse that hadn't been there on Friday either. The House did that, without any malice. It was a little like living with a cat.

She knocked the knock he answered and went in.

He was already at the end of the long table in a gray suit, reading the Wall Street Journal over a cup of coffee he'd let go cold, and didn't look up. "Good news or bad?"

"Funny." She sat, which she was allowed to do and almost nobody else was, and opened the folder. Behind her a thin man in a Globotech lanyard came in and stood, because he wasn't allowed to sit, didn't know it yet, and would learn. "Mr. Kirby, from the Toy Division. Applications."

"Mr. Kirby." The man in the good suit folded the newspaper. "Good morning."

"Good morning, sir. I, um." Kirby held a stack of paper like a shield. He'd been told about this room the way you're told about the dentist, and about the man, and nobody had told him the man would be pleasant, and it was throwing him. "It's about the Heartland acquisition, sir. Globotech closed on Heartland Toy Company in October, as you know, and Mr. Mars wanted the Commando Elite line on shelves by Christmas, which wasn't, um, realistic, and the lead engineer on the line, a Mr. Larry Benson, made a decision to, ah. To meet the deadline."

"What did Larry do?"

"He requisitioned a pallet of chips from our warehouse in Fresno. For the toys' voice and motion. Surplus, he thought. He saw the spec sheet and he thought they were just very, very good processors. They were—" Kirby closed his eyes. "They were X1000s, sir. From the vessel program."

The man in the good suit put his coffee down. Somewhere in the walls, the House made a sound like a building settling, though it never really did.

"How many?"

"Two lines. The Commando Elite, that's the soldiers, and the Gorgonites, the, um, the monsters. They're designed to lose. The first truck left the plant in Ohio on Wednesday, sir. Before anyone caught it. The rest of the run's on hold. Mr. Mars would like you to know—" and Kirby read this off the page like a man who wished very much someone else had been given the page, "—that the Commando Elite will be the number one toy of 1997."

"Where did the truck go?"

"A new specialty toy store, sir. It hasn't even opened yet. The owner placed an order back in the summer, before the acquisition, for Heartland's educational line, and the driver—" Kirby checked the page again like it might have changed. "Woodsboro, sir. Woodsboro, California."

Margaret Pell didn't look at the man in the good suit. She'd worked for him nineteen years and knew when not to.

He laughed—a short, helpless, exhaled laugh, the way you laugh at a joke you've heard before that's still good, and you're sorry about it—and put a hand over his eyes. "Of course it did," he said. "Of course it did."

"Sir, we can recall the shipment. Contracts can have it off the truck by—"

"No." He took his hand away. "No. Leave it."

"Sir?"

"Nothing in those boxes can end the world, Mr. Kirby. They're toys." He stood, buttoned his jacket, and went to the end of the room, to the one shelf and its tapes. "The Board doesn't care about toys. Let them get to the store. Put somebody on the street. Watch. Don't touch."

A telephone sat on the side table by the shelf: red, rotary, the old heavy kind, with no cord, because it had never needed one. It rang, once. Kirby jumped. Margaret Pell didn't. The man in the good suit looked at the phone without picking it up, and after a moment, very slightly, he smiled.

"It rang, sir," Kirby said unnecessarily.

"Once," said the man in the good suit. "Once means they're pleased." He turned around. "Thank you, Mr. Kirby. Ms. Pell will show you the way out. Don't try to find it yourself."

When they were gone he stood by the shelf a while, in the room that had moved, with his hands in his pockets. "Let's see what you do with a box of soldiers," he said to nobody, "Mr. Meeks."

I. Monday

The first thing I did on Monday morning, before the run, before coffee, before I'd even put my shoes on, was open the unicorn notebook to the page from September and read my own handwriting.

COMING SOON

There were fourteen. I'd written them on the second night, when I still thought I might be crazy, in the dark by the light of the clock radio, to get them out of my head. Some were towns. Some were things. A week later I'd typed them up for the website and called them "hypothetical survival guides," and people had mostly read them as jokes. Number nine said: What to do if a doll you didn't buy starts talking to you. I'd underlined didn't buy twice. I remembered doing it, and thinking at the time that it was the most important part.

Everybody remembers Child's Play wrong. They remember a killer doll, a little red-haired psycho with a kitchen knife, hi-de-ho, ha ha. What they forget is that Chucky doesn't break in. He doesn't climb through windows. He doesn't need to. Every single time, in every movie, somebody brings him home. Somebody unwraps him, hugs him, and puts him in the bed next to their kid, because he's a present, and you don't say no to a present. Chucky gets invited.

And last night, on the floor of my parents' living room, my little sister had looked up at the couch with a face I hadn't seen on her since she was nine and said I want one.

I closed the notebook and put my shoes on. It was 4:52 a.m., dark and forty-one degrees, and Sid and Tatum would be at the end of the driveway in eight minutes, and I'd be there, because I'd said I would. It's December second, I told myself. Relax. You've got time. Chucky's in a vat somewhere in Chicago. Child's Play 3 doesn't happen for years. It's a commercial. It's a toy. Except it's never just a toy.

They were both already there when I came down the porch steps, which had never happened before.

Sid was stretching against the mailbox in sweats and the BE PREPARED shirt over a thermal, her short ponytail already coming apart. Tatum sat on the hood of the Cherokee with her knees up, drinking something steaming out of a 7-Eleven cup, wearing my old Woodsboro Wildcats sweatshirt, the one that had gone missing in October.

"You're late," said Tatum.

"I'm eight minutes early."

"We're ten minutes early. That makes you late. That's how it works. Leadership." She hopped off the hood. "Hi. Good morning. I have something for you."

"Is it my sweatshirt?"

"It's my sweatshirt. Possession's nine-tenths." She dug in its front pocket and came out with a white-and-orange envelope from the Fotomat booth in the Safeway parking lot. One hour. "I got the doubles."

I knew what it was before she handed it over; I could tell by how suddenly interested Sid became in her hamstring. I opened it anyway. Twenty-four pictures. Thanksgiving. Kincaid in the pool in November, mouth open in a roar. Kristen at Goat Rock with her hands up and the wind in her hair. Phillip and Martha with the marionette. Will in his Indians cap holding a stopwatch. The two turkeys. Gale and Dewey at the end of the table, her hand on his arm, Dewey looking at it like a winning lottery ticket. The whole pack of us at 5 a.m., blurry, running at the camera in the dark.

And the last one. SFO, Gate 74. Me at the window with my hands up at shoulder height like somebody had told me to freeze, face the color of a fire truck, mouth open, and behind me, out of focus, a little blonde girl in a green vest running down the jetway.

"Tatum."

"Executive producer's archive," said Tatum. "I told you. That's the best one. That's the best picture I've ever taken. I'm going to get it framed. I'm going to put it in the lobby at Channel 27."

"There's no lobby at Channel 27. There's a hallway with a Coke machine."

"Then I'll put it on the Coke machine."

Sid had stopped pretending to stretch. She looked at the picture, then at me, and her mouth did what it sometimes did now, since Thanksgiving, the small, crooked, surprised thing, like a smile that had been in storage checking whether it still fit. "Your hands, Randy."

"I know about my hands."

"You look like you're being robbed."

"I was being robbed. Of my dignity. In front of my father." I put the pictures back in the envelope carefully, all of them, including the last one, and tucked the envelope inside my jacket against my shirt, where it would stay warm and dry. Tatum saw me do it and didn't say anything, and the same small, complicated thing from the gate crossed her face and was gone.

"Okay," she said brightly. "Okay. Are we running, or are we just going to stand here in the dark, reminiscing?"

So we ran. Three miles, the loop: to the end of our street, left on Elm (not that Elm—a California Elm with nothing on it but ranch houses and a Lutheran church), along the creek path behind the middle school, up the long hill by the water tower, and home. In September I couldn't have run the first mile without stopping to throw up in a hedge. In December I could run it at a talking pace, with Sid a step behind me and Tatum a step behind her, complaining.

"I hate this," said Tatum on the hill.

"You say that every day."

"I mean it every day. Every single day I mean it more." She was breathing hard. "Why are we doing this. Remind me why we're doing this."

"Because in a slasher movie," said Sid from in front of her, not even out of breath, the jerk, "the girl who can't run is the girl who dies in the first act."

Tatum stopped dead on the hill with her hands on her knees. "Sidney."

"He said it. Not me." Sid jogged in place. "In the rules. Rule four."

"I wrote the rules," I said. "That's not rule four. Rule four is about the phone."

"I renumbered them," said Sid, and turned and ran up the hill backward, looking at us, ponytail coming apart, smiling at Tatum doubled over at the bottom, while the sky behind the water tower started going gray. I ran up after her and didn't think about the doll for almost a whole mile.

At the creek path she went over the four-square wall without slowing, one hand, clean, the way she'd been doing it for a week. I went over the bike rack after her, then up onto the low roof of the equipment shed by the backstop—cat-hang and climb-up, which I could finally do—along the roof, and off the end into a roll on the wet grass and up, running. Tatum, behind us, went around everything. On principle.

"You know you look insane, right?" she yelled up the hill. "You know if anybody saw you doing that at five in the morning they would call the cops?"

"Dewey's the cops."

"Dewey would also call the cops!"

II. Sold Out

"Absolutely not," said my father at dinner.

"I didn't ask yet," said Martha.

"You were going to."

"I was going to lead into it. I had a lead-in." Martha put down her fork. She had, in fact, been leading into it for twenty minutes—how nice the weather had been, the B-plus on her pre-algebra test, Christmas as the season of giving. She'd set the table without being asked. She'd put the napkins in the napkin rings. "It's not even for me. It's for the hamsters. As a, like, a companion. A friend. For enrichment."

"The hamsters," said my mother, "are not getting a hundred-dollar doll."

"Ninety-nine ninety-nine."

"Martha."

"It's ninety-nine ninety-nine. At Toys R Us. That's not a hundred dollars. That's under a hundred dollars."

"It doesn't matter," Mom said. "They're gone. I was at the Toys R Us in Santa Rosa on Saturday for your cousins and there wasn't a single one. Sold out. There were two grown women in the parking lot screaming at each other about the last one in the store. A man got a black eye." She shook her head. "It's like the Cabbage Patch dolls all over again. I'm not going through that again, Ted. I'm too old."

"You were too old for the Cabbage Patch dolls."

"You were the one who stood in line for four hours at the Emporium."

"For you," Dad said. "It was for you. You wanted one."

"I was twenty-nine."

"And I was in love," said my father with great dignity, and Mom laughed and threw her napkin at him, the one from the napkin ring, and Martha, who'd just watched her entire campaign get derailed into her parents being disgusting at each other, put her face in her hands.

I hadn't said anything. I'd been eating very slowly and carefully and keeping my mouth shut, because I was afraid that if I opened it, what would come out was over my dead body, and that's not something you say at the dinner table about a doll if you want people to keep thinking you're okay. So nobody was buying it. Mom wouldn't, Dad wouldn't, and they were sold out anyway. Good. Great. That had been the whole plan, and that was what scared me, because if nobody was buying it, and one showed up anyway—

"Randy," said Martha through her fingers. "Help me."

"No," I said.

She took her hands down. "You didn't even hear the—"

"I heard it. It's a good pitch. The napkin rings were a nice touch." I put my fork down. "No."

Martha stared at me, a little hurt, which was worse than angry. I was supposed to be on her side. I was always on her side. I was the one who'd let her co-own four genius hamsters, kept her secrets, and taken her to the Thrifty for forty-eight double-A batteries without asking her to explain what she thought they were for.

"Why do you care?" she said.

I had no answer I could give her at the table.

I knocked on her door at nine.

She let me in, which meant she wasn't really mad. Her room was the way it always was, a disaster with a system: clothes on the floor sorted by some logic only she understood, posters of No Doubt and Leonardo DiCaprio, a map of the world with pins in all the places she was going to go. On her desk under the lamp sat the hamster cage, which by the terms of our agreement lived in her room on weekends and Mondays and in mine the rest of the week. All four of them were up, more or less. Cham-P was running the wheel hard enough to rattle the cage. Jum-P was asleep in the igloo with his scarf pulled over his face, as usual. Maga-Z was on the roof, working at the latch with his teeth. San-D was in Martha's lap, tucked under her chin, a small orange-and-white bundle with her eyes half open, watching Martha's face.

I sat on the floor with my back against her bed.

"I'm not mad," Martha said. "Just so you know."

"I know."

"I'm disappointed."

"That's worse. You've been reading Mom's playbook."

"She left it out." Martha stroked San-D between the ears with one finger. "It's not about the doll. Okay? I know I'm too old. I know it's stupid. It's just..." She shrugged. "It was a nice commercial. Everything's been so... and he looked like a friend. That's all."

Friend to the end, I thought, and kept my face where it was.

"Martha," I said. "I'm going to tell you a rule. Like the hamster rule. It's not a joke. It's not one of the ones from the website. Okay?"

She looked at me. She'd seen me serious before; since September she'd seen it more than a thirteen-year-old should have to. Her finger stopped moving. "Okay."

"If a Good Guy doll ever shows up in this house," I said, "and nobody bought it—and I mean nobody, not Mom, not Dad, not Grandma, not a contest, not a nice man at the mall, not Santa—you don't open it. You don't pick it up. You don't talk to it. You come get me. Right away. Wherever I am. Even if I'm at work. Even if it's the middle of the night."

Martha took a while to answer. "Is this," she said slowly, "an I can't tell you that one?"

That was our deal. No lies, not to her. Just I can't tell you that one, and somewhere around the second week of November she'd decided to let me have those.

"Yeah," I said. "That's an I can't tell you that one."

She looked at me, then down at San-D, who'd lifted her head and was looking from Martha's face to mine and back, worried, the way she did whenever somebody in the room was upset. On the roof of the cage, Maga-Z had stopped chewing the latch and was watching me too, eyes narrowed, filing it away.

"Okay," Martha said. "Nobody bought it, come get you."

"Swear."

"I swear. God." She rolled her eyes, but I could tell she meant it. "You're so weird now."

"I contain multitudes."

"You contain something," said my sister, and threw a sock at me.

III. Long Distance

I made two calls that night from the den after everybody was in bed. Dad had gotten November's long-distance bill on Saturday and looked at it the way men look at an X-ray, and we'd had a talk that ended with me paying for anything outside the 707 area code out of my Bradley Video money, which was fair. So I kept the calls short. Mostly.

The first was to Kentucky.

Kent Military School had a switchboard, and the switchboard had an old man on it who sounded like he'd been running it since Korea and who did not at first believe I was Cadet Barclay's cousin. Then I told him I was calling from California about a family matter, about Christmas, and he made a noise like a door shutting and said, "Hold." I held for six minutes at twenty-six cents a minute, listening to a dead line hum.

"Hello?"

He sounded younger than I'd expected. He was sixteen and sounded about twelve.

"Andy? It's Randy. From the website."

The silence went on so long I thought the switchboard had cut us off. "How did you get this number."

"It's on the school's letterhead. In the guestbook, you said Kent. There's only one." I kept my voice low. The den was dark except for the green light of the computer's power button and the streetlight through the blinds. "Andy. Did you see the commercial?"

Another silence. Then, very small: "Yeah."

"Okay."

"They showed it in the rec room. Saturday, during the Notre Dame game. Everybody was—" He stopped. "Everybody thought it was funny. One of the guys did the voice. Hi-de-ho. I went to the bathroom and I threw up."

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. I get that."

"They said he melted." Andy's voice had gone flat—the flat of a kid who'd said this to a lot of adults who hadn't listened. "In the factory. In 1990. I watched. Kyle and me. He fell in the—there was a vat, and he fell in, and he... I watched him melt, Randy. They poured the plastic out. They cleaned it. And now they're making them again, and nobody—"

"Andy."

"—and nobody cares, because they think it was a guy, they think it was some guy in Chicago who used a doll to—"

"Andy. Listen to me." I waited until he stopped. "You're going to do what I told you in the guestbook. Okay? Anything that shows up for you that you didn't order. Any box with no return address. Any present from somebody you don't know. You don't open it. You don't let anybody else open it. You take it out behind the barracks and you burn it, and you don't care who sees you do it, and if they put you on a work detail for it, you take the work detail."

"...Okay."

"And if you see one around the school, in somebody's locker, in the rec room, whatever, you call me. Collect. I'll take it."

"Why would there be one at the school?"

I didn't answer that. In Child's Play 3 there's one at the school. Play Pals reopens the factory, somebody sweeps up the vat, some of what was in it goes back into the new plastic, and a Good Guy doll arrives at Kent Military School in a box with no return address, addressed to Cadet Andy Barclay. It's Chucky, eight years on, wanting a new body, and since Andy's too old now he goes looking for a younger one. Except this was 1996, two years early. They'd relaunched the line two years early, and I didn't know why, and I had a cold, low, ugly feeling at the bottom of my stomach that this time the box wasn't going to Kentucky.

"Just call me," I said. "Okay? You're not alone. I said that in the guestbook too. I meant it."

"...Okay." Andy was quiet a second. Then, lower: "Randy. If he does come. To somebody. He's going to be nice. That's how he does it. He's the best friend you ever had. And when grown-ups are around, he's just a doll. He never moves. He never talks." A breath. "So when you tell, nobody believes you. That's the part he likes. He likes it when nobody believes you."

I wrote that down in the dark on the back of the long-distance bill, by the computer's green light. He likes it when nobody believes you.

"Randy?"

"Yeah."

"Do you think he's back?"

I looked at the dark den, the blinds, the streetlight, and the edge of the Christmas wreath Mom had already hung on the front door, a dark ring against the glass.

"I think he's never really gone," I said. "That's his whole thing."

The second call was to Ohio.

I'd like to say I hadn't thought about it all day. I'd like to say I was a grown man, twenty-six on the inside, with a tour in Afghanistan behind me and a dream demon in the ground, and that a seventeen-year-old girl kissing me at an airport gate had not occupied my mind at all through a three-mile run, a full day of school, dinner, and a phone call to a traumatized military cadet about a killer doll. I'd be lying. I'd thought about it roughly every ninety seconds since Sunday at four p.m. Pacific.

She picked up on the first ring. She always did. She had a pink phone in her room now with the long distance unlocked, an arrangement with her mother that had something to do with the Westin Hills settlement and something to do with her mother being a little afraid of her since November.

"Hi," said Kristen.

"Hi."

There was a silence, a good one, a loud one—two thousand miles of copper wire, humming.

"So," said Kristen.

"So."

"I had nine hours," she said. "On the plane. And the layover in Denver. Nine hours of thinking about your face. With your hands. Up. Like—"

"I'm aware of the hands."

"Tatum sent me the picture."

"Tatum sent you the—" I sat up in the desk chair. "When? How? It's been one day. She only got them developed this morning."

"She mailed it overnight. FedEx. With a note." Paper rustled. "It says, For your files. You're welcome. -T.R., Exec. Prod."

"I'm going to kill her."

"I put it on my mirror," said Kristen, and laughed, the beach laugh, and I put my forehead on the desk next to the keyboard and laughed too, under my breath so I wouldn't wake the house, because it was that or die.

When we'd both stopped, she said in a different voice, "Was it okay?"

I lifted my head.

"Because I didn't ask," said Kristen. "I just did it. Everybody was looking and I was scared I'd never see you again and you'd go back to being a voice on the phone and I'd go back to being... and I didn't ask. And you had your hands up. And I keep thinking, on the plane, I kept thinking, what if he didn't want—"

"Kris."

"...What."

I made myself think about it, because she'd asked, and she deserved an answer that wasn't a joke, and I was very good at jokes, and she knew it. The honest answer was complicated. The person who'd flirted with her on the phone for two months had been two people, and one of them was gone. He'd loved her in the enormous, scared, teenage way you love the first girl who ever laughed at your jokes. The one who was left had all of that, the whole weight of it, plus twenty-six years of being somebody else, and didn't know yet how it all fit. I'd never been anybody's boyfriend for longer than four months in either life, and both times it had ended with somebody crying in a car. And she was in Ohio and I was in California, and I had a list in a notebook with fourteen things on it that weren't going to wait.

But that wasn't what she'd asked.

"It was okay," I said. "It was more than okay. I just didn't see it coming. That's all. That's the only thing. I genuinely didn't know."

"How did you not know? You flew across the country."

"You guys were being chased by a weird dream demon. Of course I'd fly in. I'm just that nice."

"Randy," said Kristen Parker with infinite patience, "nobody is that nice."

I laughed. She laughed. Two thousand miles of humming wire.

"So what do we—" she started.

"I don't know," I said. "Honestly. I don't know what you call it. When it's two thousand miles."

"Me neither."

"Can we keep doing this? Talking. Every night. And figure out the word later?"

She was quiet a second. "Yeah," Kristen said, and I could hear her smiling. "Yeah. We can figure out the word later."

We talked for forty minutes, every one of them out of my Bradley Video money.

When I hung up the house was dark and quiet, and I sat in the den in the green light a while, and then went down the hall to Martha's door and opened it an inch and looked in. She was asleep with her Walkman on, tinny No Doubt playing into her ears, and on the desk under the lamp was the hamster cage. Cham-P was asleep against the bars on the side nearest her bed. Maga-Z was on the roof, wide awake, still working on the latch, and he stopped when he saw me and held my eyes like a man caught mid-burglary, and when I didn't do anything about it, he went back to work.

IV. The New Neighbors

The moving truck came on Tuesday.

I saw it from the end of the street when I got off the bus: a big yellow Ryder backed up the driveway next door, the Hendersons' house, empty since October. The Hendersons had left two weeks after the night at Stu's. They had two daughters. They'd sold to the first offer, forty thousand under what Mr. Henderson had been asking in August, and moved to Arizona, and they weren't the only ones. Since Ghostface, Woodsboro had been bleeding families like a cut that wouldn't close; in December 1996 you could buy a three-bedroom ranch on our street for the price of a nice car, and somebody had.

A man in a fisherman's sweater was struggling with a rolled-up rug on the back of the truck. A woman with a clipboard on the lawn was directing two movers and a dresser in the voice of somebody who'd been directing movers since six a.m. and had opinions about all of them. And there was a kid, sitting on the roof of the truck cab.

Maybe fifteen. Skinny, with a mop of brown hair, a flannel shirt open over a T-shirt for some band I didn't know, and ripped jeans. He sat up there with his knees drawn up and a Walkman on, eating a Pop-Tart out of the foil and watching the street with the bored, flat, slightly hostile expression of a kid who'd been told this was going to be an adventure and a fresh start so many times he could have punched someone.

The woman with the clipboard looked up. "Alan. Get down from there."

The kid took off one earphone. "I'm helping."

"How are you helping?"

"I'm supervising." He took a bite of the Pop-Tart. "From above."

"Alan Abernathy, if you fall off that truck and break your neck three days before Christmas break, I swear to God—"

I'd been walking up the sidewalk. I stopped.

I don't know how to describe what happened in my head. Smaller than the morning I woke up in Woodsboro, smaller than Kristen's name in a guestbook, and somehow worse, like standing at the end of a long hallway and hearing a door you didn't know was there swing softly shut at the far end. Abernathy.

Then, from across the street, a voice I'd known for three months and thirteen years: "Hi, Randy!"

I turned around. Christy Fimple was on her front porch in a Woodsboro High cheer sweatshirt, holding a bag of trash. She was sixteen and had lived across the street since she was four. She'd babysat Martha twice the summer Martha was nine, and never again, because Martha locked her out of the house both times. Her father, Phil, sold sporting goods and had just installed some kind of computerized home system that turned their lights on and off at random hours and made our dad say the Fimples' house is haunted again at dinner. I'd known her name for three months. The kid whose body I lived in had known it for thirteen years. Fimple.

I'd never put it together. Why would I? Who remembers the neighbor girl's last name from a kids' movie—a movie with toys in it, which I'd seen once, on cable, at nine, in a group home in Sacramento, on a Sunday afternoon, liked, and never thought about again? Christy Fimple. Phil Fimple. Alan Abernathy. Small Soldiers.

"Hi, Christy," I said, and my voice came out completely normal, which I'm still proud of.

She waved the trash bag at the truck. "We've got new neighbors! They're from Ohio!"

"Of course they are," I said.

The whole thing ran through my head right there on the sidewalk in about four seconds, the way a movie does when somebody says its title.

Small Soldiers. 1998. Joe Dante, the Gremlins guy. A big defense contractor called Globotech buys a toy company, and the CEO wants the new line to be amazing, so an engineer named Larry takes a shortcut and puts a military microprocessor in the toys: the X1000, a chip designed to learn. The toys wake up. Two lines: the Commando Elite, a squad of action-figure soldiers led by Chip Hazard, voiced by Tommy Lee Jones, programmed to win, and the Gorgonites, a bunch of misfit monster figures led by Archer, programmed to lose, to hide. A kid named Alan Abernathy, whose dad runs a toy store, signs for the shipment. The Gorgonites end up with him, and the Commando Elite come to finish the war here, on his street. They take over the house next door, the Fimples', with all its gadgets. They turn Christy's dolls into a squad. They lay siege to the neighborhood. And it ends with... power lines. Something with the power lines, an electromagnetic pulse that fries every chip on the block, and the Gorgonites sailing off to find their homeland.

And nobody dies. That was what I kept coming back to, standing on the sidewalk with my backpack on, watching Alan Abernathy eat a Pop-Tart on the roof of a Ryder truck. Nobody dies in Small Soldiers. It's a kids' movie, PG-13 for cartoon violence. Phil Hartman gets a lampshade on his head. It's funny.

Except.

Except everything I'd seen in this world was the real version, the version the movie was about. Freddy wasn't a funny guy with one-liners, and Ghostface wasn't a meta joke. The Fimples had real lightbulbs, a real gas line, and a real nine-year-old cousin who visited at Christmas, and a chip that makes plastic think, programmed with nothing but war, on a street full of families, in the real version... And last night there'd been a commercial for a doll. Two, I thought. Two stories. The same street. The same month. That's not a curse anymore. That's a schedule.

The kid on the truck had noticed me looking. He took off the other earphone and looked back with his flat, bored, suspicious face, and then the face changed and his eyes went wide and he sat up. "Hey. Hey. Wait. You're the guy."

"I'm a guy," I said.

"No, you're the guy. From the news. The thing. The show." He scrambled down off the cab and the back of the truck, past his father, who was still fighting the rug and said "Alan" in a voice of deep, permanent fatigue, and jumped the last four feet onto the driveway. "Woodsboro: The Survivors. We saw it in Ohio. In October. You're the guy who killed the two guys with the—"

"Alan!" said his mother.

"—the masks—"

"ALAN." His mother had crossed the lawn: a thin, tired, pretty woman with her hair up in a clip and the eyes of a person who'd moved across the country partly for the schools and partly because of something that had happened at the last one. "I am so sorry. He doesn't—" She put out her hand. "Irene Abernathy. We're your new neighbors. Obviously."

I shook it. "Randy Meeks. Hi. Welcome to Woodsboro." I looked at the kid. "Sorry about him. I mean the news. Not your kid. Your kid's fine."

"Is it true?" said Alan. "Did you really—"

"Two guys tried to kill me and my friends," I said. "I stopped them. It's not as cool as it sounded on TV."

Alan gave me a look I recognized: the look I'd had at fourteen in a group home, watching Rambo: First Blood Part II for the eleventh time. "It sounded pretty cool," he said.

"Alan," said his mother, and then to me, apologetically, "He's had a rough year."

"I got expelled," Alan said. "Twice."

"Alan."

"What? He's gonna find out. Everybody finds out." Alan shrugged. "First time was the fire alarm thing, and that wasn't me, I just knew who did it and wouldn't say. Second time was the chemistry lab, and that kind of was me. But the beaker was already cracked."

"Okay," I said. "Sounds fair."

"Thank you," said Alan to his mother, like I'd ruled in his favor in a court of law.

The man in the fisherman's sweater had finally gotten the rug off the truck. He came over wiping his hands on his jeans, a big, earnest, slightly worried-looking guy with a beard and the general air of a man who owned a lot of wooden puzzles. "Stuart Abernathy," he said, and shook my hand like he was selling me something wholesome. "You're the neighbor kid? Great. Great. Good to meet you. We're from Ohio, did Irene say? Winslow Corners. You wouldn't have heard of it."

"No, sir."

"Well, we're opening a store. On Main, by the hardware store. Where the card shop used to be. You know it?"

I knew it. The Hallmark on Main had closed in October. It was run by Mrs. Tate, whose son was a junior; he'd been at Stu's that night, one of the ones who ran when Tatum started screaming, which was why he was alive and why they'd moved to Fresno anyway. "I know it," I said.

"It's called The Inner Child." Stuart Abernathy said it with enormous pride. "Educational toys. Wooden toys. Puzzles, science kits, that kind of thing. Nothing with a battery if we can help it. And absolutely nothing—" he lifted one big hand like a man swearing an oath, "—nothing with a gun."

"No guns," I said.

"Not one. Not a water pistol. Kids get enough of that on TV." He beamed at me. "We open the sixteenth. Just in time for Christmas. Tell your folks!"

"No guns," I said again. "That's... that's great, Mr. Abernathy. That's a great policy. Keep it that way. Please."

He looked a little surprised at how much I meant it, then pleased. "Well. Hey. Great!" He clapped me on the shoulder and went back to the truck.

Alan was still looking at me. "You're weird," he said—not unkindly, with interest, like he was talking about a band he thought he was going to like.

"So I'm told."

"Can I come over sometime? And ask about the—" He made a low stabbing motion so his mother wouldn't see.

"No," I said. "But you can come over sometime."

He grinned, and it changed his whole face. Under the flat, bored thing he was a kid, a nice one, who'd had a bad year in a town he didn't like, had just been moved to a town where people got killed, and had found, on his first afternoon, somebody he thought was cool.

Across the street, Christy Fimple was still on her porch with her trash bag, watching. She was looking at Alan. Alan saw her looking, went red to the tips of his ears, and got very interested in his Pop-Tart. Oh, I thought. Oh no. It's starting.

I went inside and sat on the edge of my bed in my jacket for about twenty minutes, doing nothing. Then I got out the unicorn notebook, turned past COMING SOON, past WHAT WORKS ON WHAT, past the PROGRAM and the range card and the Morbing notes to a clean page, and wrote at the top in capitals:

SMALL SOLDIERS (1998)

Under it I wrote everything I could remember, which wasn't much. That was the problem. I'd watched Child's Play a hundred times and made a whole video on it, Rules of Engagement: Can You Survive Chucky, two hundred thousand views. I'd watched Small Soldiers once, at nine, half asleep on a group home couch.

Globotech. Larry. X1000 (military chip, learns). Commando Elite: Chip Hazard (Tommy Lee Jones). Butch Meathook? Others. Gorgonites: Archer (good guy). Monsters. Programmed to lose. Alan gets them. Christy's dolls → soldiers. Phil Fimple's house. Power lines?? EMP??? Ends OK. Nobody dies.

I stared at nobody dies. Then I drew a line through it and wrote underneath: In the movie.

V. Episode Two

Rules of Engagement went out Thursdays at ten on WCTV Channel 27, Falcon Cable, between a call-in gardening show run by two retired Lutherans and a block of local high school basketball. After Episode One—Mrs. Loomis, and two hours of sheriff's deputies standing by the Coke machine in the Channel 27 hallway taking statements—Dale Pruitt had come into the studio with a little gray box with a red button and set it on the console like a man laying down a sacred relic.

"Seven-second delay," Dale said. "Bought it with my own money. From a guy in Sacramento. Anybody calls in sounding like a horror movie, I hit the button, and the folks at home hear dead air."

"Dead air's bad, though," said Tatum.

"Dead air," said Dale, "is a lot better than a dead host."

So we had a delay. Tatum ran the camera. Martha, in her Certified Producer lanyard, ran the board with Dale breathing over her shoulder, and was getting very good at it and very annoying about how good she was getting. Sid didn't come to the studio (she'd decided that after Episode One), but she watched, and every Friday on the run she gave me a review. Episode One had gotten a B. Content A, delivery C, you said "um" thirty-one times. I counted.

Episode Two went out on December fifth. I'd changed the topic on Tuesday night, after the truck, and Tatum had looked at the new cue cards and then at me and said, "Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"The doll? You're doing a whole episode on the Christmas doll?"

"I'm doing an episode on toys," I said. "And what to do when they do things toys don't do."

"Randy, that's crazy. That's the kind of thing a crazy person says on public access. That's the exact thing."

"Tatum," I said. "I'm a seventeen-year-old who hosts a survival show. On public access. At ten p.m. The ship has sailed. The ship's on the bottom."

She'd looked at me, then at the cue cards, and then slowly started to laugh. "Fine. Fine. But I'm doing a Dutch angle."

"You don't know what a Dutch angle is."

"I'll learn."

So at 10:00 p.m. on December 5, 1996, in a studio the size of a two-car garage, under three lights, one of which buzzed, at a slight but definitely deliberate tilt, I looked into the camera and said: "Good evening. Welcome to Rules of Engagement. I'm Randy Meeks. Tonight's episode is about toys."

I'd thought about how to do it all week. It was the same trouble as the website, times ten. On the website you could write a rule and people could take it or leave it. On TV there were kids watching. On TV, a thirteen-year-old girl in a lanyard was running the board ten feet away, and she'd said I want one. So I didn't say Chucky. I didn't say Chicago, or voodoo, or Charles Lee Ray, or the Lakeshore Strangler, which was what the Tribune called him in 1988, before a little boy named Andy Barclay told the police a doll had done it and they put him in a psychiatric ward for saying so. I did it like a safety video.

"Rule one," I said. "Know where it came from. Every toy in your house, you should know where it came from. Who bought it. Which store. If you can't answer that question about a toy, that's a toy you don't keep.

"Rule two. Toys don't move. I know that sounds obvious. But it's December, and it's busy, and everybody's tired, and things get moved around, and you think, huh, I left that on the shelf, and you put it back, and you don't think about it again. Think about it again. If it's not where you left it, and nobody in your house moved it, that's a problem. Write it down. Tell somebody.

"Rule three. If it talks, it should only say what's on the box. Every talking toy in America has a list of sayings printed on the side of the package, five, ten, twelve phrases. If a toy says something that isn't on that list, I don't care how cute it is, I don't care if it's your little brother's favorite, you take the batteries out. And if it keeps talking after you take the batteries out—"

I looked at the camera.

"—you leave. You take everybody, and you leave the house. And you call me."

Line two lit up on the console. Dale picked up, listened, and looked at Martha, and Martha punched the button with a little flourish she'd been practicing.

"Hi, you're on Rules of Engagement," I said. "Go ahead."

"Hi." A woman, forties, tired. "Um. Hi. I'm calling from Bodega Bay. I have a question about... I have an eight-year-old. And he wants one of the dolls, the Good Guys, and I finally found one, at a store in Petaluma, I stood in line for three hours, and it's in my closet, and now I'm watching your show and I'm... should I be worried?"

Behind the camera, Tatum had taken her eye off the viewfinder and was looking at me. Careful, I thought.

"Ma'am," I said. "Did you buy it?"

"I... yes?"

"You stood in line. You paid. You've got the receipt."

"Yes. It's in the bag."

"Then you know where it came from," I said. "That's rule one. Keep the receipt. Give him his doll. Have a merry Christmas." I paused. "It's not the doll you bought you have to worry about."

A little pause on the line. "Oh," said the woman from Bodega Bay. "Okay. Okay. Thank you. That's... thank you."

"Merry Christmas," I said. Martha cut her off with another flourish and grinned at me through the glass with her thumbs up, and I smiled back. She was a good producer. She really was. I wondered whether she'd heard the part about the doll you didn't buy, or only been listening for the cue.

We took six calls. Two about toys. One about a ghost in a barn in Petaluma, which I suspected was an owl. One from a kid who wanted to know if I'd had a favorite toy growing up, and I told him the truth: a one-armed G.I. Joe named Sergeant Lefty. I didn't tell him that Sergeant Lefty had been Theo's, in a foster home in Rancho Cordova, or that for about a year he'd been all Theo owned.

One was nobody. A click and a long breath, Dale's hand already hovering over the red button, and then a dial tone. Tatum looked up from the camera when it happened and held my eyes. Mrs. Loomis, I thought. Or nobody. Or a kid who got scared. Or nobody.

"Remember," I said at 10:28, into the lens, to the people in their living rooms in Woodsboro and Bodega Bay and Petaluma and wherever else Falcon Cable reached on a Thursday night in December. "Be prepared."

"You're never ready," Tatum said under her breath behind the camera. She always said it. She couldn't help it.

"Goodnight."

VI. The Tree

We got the tree on Saturday.

The Boy Scouts run a lot on Route 12 past the feed store every year, Troop 112, and the Meekses had gotten their tree there every year since before I was born—which is to say before Randy was born, which is to say before I was born, both ways, all of me. Dad had a system, the way he had a system for everything. You go at nine on the second Saturday of December, after the trucks have come in from Oregon and before the good ones are gone. You walk the whole lot twice, once fast and once slow, and you don't commit until the second lap. You shake every tree you're serious about to see how many needles come down.

"It's about character," said Dad, shaking a seven-foot Noble fir like it owed him money. "You can tell a lot about a tree from how it handles adversity."

"You can tell a lot about a man," said Mom, "from how long he spends shaking trees in a parking lot."

"Diane, I'm not going to dignify that."

Martha held a cup of the Scouts' hot chocolate in both hands. She was wearing her Buckeyes sweatshirt and Kristen's knit hat, which Kristen had left behind on purpose, and was gazing at a crooked little four-foot tree in the back corner of the lot with deep sympathy. "That one. That one's sad."

"That one's a shrub," said Dad.

"It's lonely."

I wasn't saying much. I walked behind them with my hands in my jacket pockets in the cold, in the smell of pine and wet sawdust and hot chocolate, with the Scouts yelling at each other by the netting machine and somebody's car radio playing Bing Crosby, having a feeling I didn't know what to do with. I'd never done this.

It surprised me. I'd had Christmas; Theo had. Group homes do Christmas. There's an artificial tree in the common room that the county paid for, the same one every year, a staff member in a Santa hat, and presents donated by a church, wrapped, tagged BOY, 12 or BOY, 15 so they can go to whoever's there. Some years there were foster families, and some were nice, and I'd been in a few living rooms on Christmas morning with a family trying very hard to make me feel part of it, which is its own particular kind of lonely. I'd never been in the parking lot. I'd never been one of the people deciding which tree.

Randy had, seventeen times. I had all of them now—the year Martha was a baby asleep in the stroller, the year it rained and Dad picked the first tree he saw, the year Randy was eleven and fell into a stack of wreaths—the way you have your own memories, from the inside. I could feel the cold of all seventeen at once. And I'd never been here.

"Randy?" Mom had stopped and was looking at me. "Honey, are you okay?"

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. Sorry. I just—" I looked at the lot: the lights strung on the poles, Dad shaking a Douglas fir, Martha talking to a shrub. "I really like this."

Mom looked at me a second. Then she put her arm through mine, the way she used to when I was little, which I could remember and also couldn't, and we walked the second lap like that, slowly, while Dad shook trees.

We came home with a seven-foot Noble fir of excellent character and, because Dad was a soft touch under the system (which everybody in the family had always known except Dad), the crooked four-foot shrub for Martha's room.

"It's not a shrub," Martha said in the car, holding it in her lap with its top sticking out the window. "His name is Gerald."

We decorated that night.

Mom put on the Christmas records, actual records, on the living room stereo: Nat King Cole and the Carpenters and a Muppets album nobody would admit to liking. Dad did the lights, swore at the lights, and did them again. Martha did the ornaments, which meant directing everybody else to do the ornaments while she did the important ones herself. There was a box of them in tissue paper, older than me: a glass pickle, a one-eyed felt reindeer, a clothespin angel Randy made in first grade with a face drawn on in marker that looked, honestly, a lot like Freddy Krueger.

"Look at this," said Martha, holding it up. "Look at your angel. It's haunted."

"It's a masterpiece. I was six."

"Its eyes are different sizes."

"That's character," I said. "You can tell a lot about an angel from how it handles adversity."

Dad, on the ladder with a string of lights around his neck like a feather boa, pointed down at me without looking. "Thank you."

Martha had made a tiny ornament for the hamsters out of a bottle cap, a pipe cleaner, and gold glitter, with their four names on it in pen so small you had to squint—M. C. J. S.—and hung it on the lowest branch, right at the front, at hamster height. Then she brought the cage from her room and set it on the coffee table so they could see it. They looked at it from the front of the cage in a row, three of them anyway; Jum-P slept through it, propped against Cham-P. Cham-P made a small, pleased sound. San-D studied the ornament, then looked up at Martha's face, checking she was happy.

"They love it," said Martha.

At ten, Mom plugged in the tree. All seven feet lit up at once, white and red and green and blue, the big old-fashioned bulbs Dad liked, the kind that got hot, reflected in the dark window and the glass pickle and the haunted angel's mismatched eyes. The four of us stood in the living room in the Christmas light with the Carpenters on the stereo. Mom leaned her head on Dad's shoulder, and Martha leaned on me, and I looked at it and thought: this is what they want.

Not just Freddy, not just Billy—whatever was coming. Whatever was in that commercial, whatever was going to come off that truck. They don't just want to kill you, in any of the movies I'd ever seen; they want in. Into the living room, into the light. Into the one place you're supposed to be safe.

I put my arm around my sister. "It's a good tree," I said.

"It's a great tree," said Martha. "Gerald's better, though."

VII. From Santa

On Sunday morning, there was a present under the tree.

Martha found it. She came down at eight in her pajamas to feed the hamsters, who'd spent the night in their cage on the coffee table by the tree, and I heard her stop in the living room doorway, just stop, and then say "Mom?" in the voice you use on Christmas morning when you're six and come downstairs and find out Santa came.

I was in the kitchen making eggs. I'd been up since five and done the run in the rain. I put the spatula down.

It sat under the front of the tree, between the trunk and the coffee table, where you couldn't miss it: a long box, maybe three feet, very neatly wrapped in the shiny red drugstore paper with little white snowflakes, the corners folded sharp. A big green bow on top. And a stick-on tag, white with a holly border. TO MARTHA, it said in black marker, in block capitals. FROM SANTA.

Mom came out of the bedroom in her robe. She looked at the box and at Martha, and then her face softened and lit up, and she turned toward the hall, smiling. "Ted. You didn't."

Dad came out behind her in his slippers with his reading glasses on his head. "Didn't what?"

"The—" Mom pointed at the tree. "After all that! At dinner! Absolutely not! You big softie, where did you even find one, I told you they were sold out in—"

Dad looked at the box. His face was perfectly blank. "I thought you did that."

The living room went silent. The tree was still plugged in from last night, white and red and green and blue. On the stereo the needle was still riding the end of the Carpenters record, hhhhhk, hhhhhk, hhhhhk, because nobody had lifted it.

"I didn't buy anything," said Mom.

"Well, I didn't."

"Then who—"

"Maybe your mother. She was asking what Martha wanted. On the phone. On Thursday."

"My mother is in Scottsdale, Ted. How would she get a present under our tree—"

"I don't know, Diane, how would I—"

They looked at each other. Then they did what parents do, what every parent in every Christmas movie does, what I'd watched a hundred families do on a hundred screens: without a word, each one decided the other was lying, had done it and was being cute about it. A game. And both of them started, very slightly, to smile.

"Okay," said Mom, drawing it out, arching an eyebrow at Dad.

"Okay," said Dad, holding up both hands. "I'm just saying. It wasn't me."

"Sure."

"It wasn't."

Martha was already on the carpet in front of the tree. She took the box by both ends and lifted it—it was heavier than it looked; I saw her arms take the weight—and shook it gently next to her ear, the way you do. Something shifted inside. Something solid, which thumped once against the side of the box, heavy and soft at the same time, like a sack of sand.

"Oh my God," said Martha. "Oh my God. Mom. Is it—"

I was there before I knew I'd moved. I took it out of her hands, not roughly but fast, too fast, the way you take a kitchen knife from a toddler before your brain catches up with your arms, and she let go in surprise, and then I was standing in the middle of the living room holding a three-foot box in red paper against my chest like a bomb, and everybody was looking at me.

"Randy," said Mom.

"Sorry," I said. "Sorry. I just—" I made myself breathe and made my voice light. "It's two weeks till Christmas, Mart. No shaking. Them's the rules."

"You made that up," said Martha, staring at me from the carpet.

"Everybody knows that rule."

"Randy," said Dad, more puzzled than angry, watching my hands, which were holding the box much too tight. "Put it down, bud."

I put it back under the tree exactly where it had been and made my hands let go.

When I straightened up, Martha was still looking at me—not puzzled, like Mom and Dad, but the way she had on Monday night on her bedroom floor, when I'd said if a Good Guy ever shows up in this house and nobody bought it. She looked at the box. At the tag. FROM SANTA. She looked back at me. Nobody bought it, her face said. Come get you.

I gave her the smallest shake of my head. Not now. She held my eyes one more second, then slowly nodded, got up off the carpet, and went to feed the hamsters.

They were lined up at the front of the cage, all four of them—not at the food dish, not on the wheel, not asleep—in a row at the bars, the way they lined up when I gave them an order, facing the tree.

VIII. Hi

I waited until two.

I lay in bed in the dark in my clothes until the house had been quiet for three hours, Dad's snoring had gone from the light kind to the heavy kind, and the furnace had cycled on and off twice. Then I got up. No shoes. I went down the hall in my socks past Martha's shut door, with the strip of light under it from the little plug-in nightlight she still used and would've killed me for mentioning, past my parents' door, into the living room. The tree was off. The room was dark, blue with streetlight through the front curtains, and cold, because Dad turned the heat down to sixty-two at night and called it character.

I'd brought the Maglite. I didn't turn it on.

I'd been thinking about this for fourteen hours, through Sunday breakfast and a shift at Bradley Video spent checking out tapes and smiling at people and thinking about nothing else. I'd thought about just taking it out the back door into the yard and the barbecue with a can of lighter fluid. But if I was wrong—if it was a real doll from some aunt in Scottsdale—I'd have burned my little sister's Christmas present in the backyard at two in the morning, and there's no real coming back from that in a family. And if I was right, I wanted to know what I was dealing with before I made it angry. So: look first. That's the first rule of anything, IEDs, clearing a house, horror movies. Don't touch what you haven't looked at.

The hamster cage was still on the coffee table. I heard them before I saw them, a tiny scrabbling sound, then nothing, and I let my eyes adjust. All four of them were awake, lined up at the front bars. Maga-Z in the middle, up on his hind legs with his paws on the wire, eyes narrowed to slits at the box, the way a cat watches a mouse hole. Cham-P next to him, pressed against the bars on the side nearest the tree, fur puffed out to twice his size. Jum-P next to him, wide awake, which I'd seen exactly twice in five weeks. San-D on the end, the smallest, in her little red scarf, trembling, looking from the box to me and back. They'd been like that all day, I realized.

"Yeah," I whispered to them. "Yeah. I know."

I got down on my knees on the carpet in front of the tree. The box was where I'd left it: red paper, snowflakes, bow. TO MARTHA. FROM SANTA. In the blue light the block capitals on the tag looked very neat and careful, like whoever wrote them was used to writing with something that wasn't quite a hand.

I didn't pick it up. I turned it slowly end over end along the carpet until the narrow end faced me, found the seam where the wrapping was folded and taped, got my thumbnail under the tape, and peeled it a quarter inch at a time, like lifting a tripwire. The paper came away. Underneath was a bright cardboard box printed in red and yellow and blue, a rainbow, cartoon clouds, and big, round, friendly letters I'd known since I was a kid. Both of me.

GOOD GUYS

Under the letters, at the narrow end, was a long cellophane window so you could see the toy in the store. I clicked on the Maglite pointed at the floor and let the edge of the light come up, just the edge, onto the window.

Red yarn hair, thick and bright. Freckles. Little denim overalls and a striped shirt, red and blue and yellow and green. Small plastic hands folded on his chest, fingers curled. A wide, sweet, friendly mouth. His eyes were closed. That's how they ship—Good Guys have sleepy eyes, the kind that close when you lay them down and open when you sit them up, like a baby doll—and he was lying down in the box, so of course his eyes were closed. That was normal. That was in the specifications.

I held the light there on the cellophane, on the sleeping face, and waited, and nothing happened. Behind me on the coffee table, one of the hamsters made a sound I'd never heard a hamster make, very small, very high. A warning.

I turned off the Maglite.

And in the dark, in the blue streetlight, lying flat on his back in his box under my family's Christmas tree, with nobody touching him or pulling a string or sitting him up, the Good Guy doll opened his eyes. Big, round, and blue, looking straight up through the cellophane at me.

From somewhere inside the box came a high, sweet, cheerful little voice, the voice from the commercial and a hundred thousand Christmas mornings, very soft, so as not to wake anybody:

"Hi. I'm Chucky."

The little plastic mouth didn't move. It didn't have to.

"Wanna play?"

I didn't move or breathe. I knelt on the carpet with the dead Maglite in my hand, the hamsters lined up behind me, the tree dark over us, and from the other end of the house came the sound of my father snoring and the furnace kicking on.

"No," I whispered.

The eyes didn't blink. They didn't need to do that either. And in front of my own eyes, in the dark, the color of a TV left on in an empty room, the panel opened.

Story in progress: Toy Soldiers.Tickets can be used when the current story is complete.[FUSE] locked. [DISMANTLE] locked. Fuse charges: 1.

One charge, I thought, somewhere far away under the cold. Three weeks of not yet. Three weeks of there's time. And then: Toy Soldiers. Plural.

Under the tree, through the cellophane, the Good Guy smiled at me. The mouth didn't move, but he smiled. Then the voice changed. It got lower instead of louder. The sweet, high, recorded thing went out of it like air out of a balloon, and underneath was a man—rough, flat, Chicago, two packs a day, a voice that seemed to smile at the end of every sentence because the joke was always on you.

"Relax, sport," said Charles Lee Ray, very softly, through the cellophane. "Don't wake the folks. It's just you and me. That's how it's gonna be, okay? Just you and me. We got a lot to talk about."

I didn't answer.

"And if you're thinkin' about running down the hall and yelling," the voice went on pleasantly, "go ahead. Be my guest. Wake 'em all up. Bring 'em in here. You know what they're gonna see?" A pause, and a little click as the eyes rolled shut on their own. Then the other voice, the commercial voice, high and sweet and empty: "Hi! I'm Chucky! Wanna play?" The eyes stayed shut. "A doll," said the low voice. "They're gonna see a doll. And a kid on the floor at two in the morning, crying about it. Again. How's that gonna go for you, sport? After the year you've had?"

He was right, and that was the worst part. Kneeling there on the carpet in the blue dark, I knew he was right, and exactly why, because I'd seen the movie a hundred times and made a whole video about it. Andy Barclay, six years old, telling his mother, and his mother not believing him. The detective not believing him. The doctors in the psych ward not believing him. Kyle, in the second movie, not believing him until it was too late. What made Chucky work, every time, was that nobody believed the kid; the knife and the voodoo were props. He likes it, Andy had told me on the phone from Kentucky a week ago, in his flat voice, when nobody believes you. That was the engine, the whole movie. Take it away, and what was left was a two-and-a-half-foot doll in a house full of people who knew what he was.

Then take it away, said something in me, cold and level, like a staff sergeant I'd had in another life, at a range in the desert with his arms folded. Take it away tonight. Right now. Before he gets one single morning in this house as a present.

I opened the panel.

Ability Slot 1: MorbingAbility Slot 2: Dark Spear

I thought about it for one second. Morbing in the dark, the hearing, the strength; the spear. Everything in me built for a fight wanted to keep them both, rip that box open, and find out. But tonight the fight could wait. Tonight I needed three people to believe me the first time I opened my mouth.

Ability Slot 1: Morbing → Truth Assertion[SWAP] (5:00)

The cold went out of my teeth—Morbing always left like that, a little ache in the gums and the faint hunger under everything going quiet—and for five minutes I knelt on the living room carpet in front of the Christmas tree with one empty slot and one spear and a killer doll watching me through a cellophane window.

"Whatcha doin'?" said Charles Lee Ray after a minute, interested. The eyes had opened again, click. "You prayin'? That's sweet. I used to pray. Different guy, though."

I didn't answer.

"Cat got your tongue? Or is it the little hamsters?" The eyes slid very slightly toward the coffee table and the cage, four small shapes in four small scarves at the bars, in a row, not moving. "Those are some weird hamsters, pal. I been watching 'em. They been watching me back. That's not normal for hamsters." A soft laugh. "That little tan one's been lookin' at me like he wants to cut my throat. Nothing about this house is normal, is it? That's what I like about it."

Two minutes.

"You know, I gotta say, I'm a little hurt. I came a long way. I wrapped myself. You know how hard it is to wrap yourself? With these hands?"

Three minutes.

"Your sister's gonna love me, you know. She's gonna love me so much. She's gonna tell me everything." A pause. "She already told the hamsters plenty. I was listening."

Four.

The collar came in around my throat, cool as a ring of cold water, and settled. I didn't need a mirror; I could see it in the cellophane, a faint white glow reflected in the plastic window, coming up from the neck of my T-shirt, soft and constant, like a choker made of moonlight.

Charles Lee Ray stopped talking. "...Huh," he said after a second. "Nice necklace."

I stood up. I turned around in the dark living room with my back to the tree and the box and the thing in it, the collar lighting my chin from underneath, and took a breath and let it out, and for the first time since the morning I woke up in this body, I didn't do the smart thing, or the careful thing, or whatever kept everybody I loved from looking at me the way they'd look at somebody who needed help.

"Mom," I said. Loud—the voice you use when you need people to come, short of a yell. "Dad. Martha. Living room. Now, please."

Behind me the box said very softly: "Oh, you gotta be kidding me."

They came fast. That's what I'll always remember. You'd think that at two in the morning on a school night you'd get what and Randy, what time is it and go back to bed, and I got none of that. I'd been their son for three months, and something about those three months had taught all three of them what my voice sounded like when I needed them, and they came.

My father first, in his robe and reading glasses, hair flat on one side, holding the Louisville Slugger he'd grabbed from beside the bed without thinking, the one he'd kept there since the night Ghostface came through the Prescotts' garage. Then my mother behind him, pulling her robe closed, her face already white. Then Martha in the hall doorway in her pajamas, barefoot, hair everywhere, holding on to the door frame. They all stopped when they saw me—me, not the tree or the box—standing in the middle of the dark living room in front of the tree with my hands out at my sides and the collar glowing at my throat, soft and white, lighting up the room.

"Randy," said my mother. "What's... what's on your—"

"Mom," I said. "Dad. Martha. Stay right where you are. Martha, stay in the doorway. Don't come any closer to the tree."

They stayed. They didn't decide to; I watched them not decide. That's what I'd learned about Truth Assertion in the garage, testing it on my sister with the door shut: it didn't feel like being made to do something. It felt like hearing something true. Your body knew before your head did.

"Everything I'm about to tell you is true," I said. "You're going to know it's true when I say it. I can't make this glow stop, and while it's on I can't lie to you, not about anything, not even a little, not even if I wanted to. So listen to me. Okay?"

My father had stopped with the bat halfway raised. He lowered it slowly. "Okay, bud," he said, very calm.

"That box under the tree," I said. "Nobody bought it. Not you, Dad. Not you, Mom. Not Grandma in Scottsdale. Nobody bought it, and nobody brought it. It brought itself."

The truth went into them like a key into a lock. I could see it happen.

"It's not a doll. It looks like a doll. It's a Good Guy, from the commercial. But there's a man inside it. A real man. His name is Charles Lee Ray. He killed people in Chicago, in 1988. A lot of people. When the police shot him in a toy store, he used something, a kind of voodoo, to put his soul into a doll. And he's been in dolls ever since. He killed people in 1988, and he killed people in 1990, and somebody brought him back. And now he's here." I took a breath. "I think he came here on purpose. For me. I don't know all of why yet. I think it's because of the show, and the website, and whatever he thinks I am. And he wrapped himself up in your wrapping paper, Mom, from the hall closet, and he put Martha's name on the tag, because he knows the way into a house is through the kid who wants a present."

Nobody moved.

"He wants a body," I said. "A real one. A kid's. And he'll be nice to Martha to get one. He'll be her best friend. He'll be the sweetest thing she ever had. And when nobody's looking, he'll use her. To get to me, or to somebody else." I looked at my sister in the doorway. "That's what he does, Mart. That's all he's ever done."

The living room was dead silent. The furnace had cycled off. Somewhere on the street a dog barked once and stopped. And from under the tree, from inside the box, a high, sweet, cheerful little voice said:

"Hi! I'm Chucky! I'm your friend to the end! Hidey-ho!"

My mother made a sound.

It was the chip, three canned sayings in a row from a toy—Charles Lee Ray playing the only card he had left. Look at me. I'm a doll. Your son's standing in the dark at two in the morning talking about voodoo. Who are you going to believe?

My father looked at the box. Then at me, at the collar. Then, very deliberately, he stepped sideways into the middle of the living room, between the tree and the hall doorway, between the box and my sister, and raised the bat back up and held it at his shoulder, the way he'd held it at a softball game in 1979 with Neil Prescott on first.

"I heard you," Ted Meeks said to me, without taking his eyes off the box, in the flat-tire voice, very quiet and very calm. "I heard you, bud."

My mother had both hands over her mouth and was looking at the box with wet eyes, and she'd stopped looking at it like a Christmas present. She was looking at it like a snake that had gotten into the house. "Ted," she said through her hands. "Ted, it's under the tree. It was under the tree all day. I touched it. I moved the bow—"

"I know, honey."

In the doorway Martha Meeks, thirteen, barefoot, holding the door frame with both hands, was staring at the box with something sharper than scared on her face.

"Nobody bought it," my sister said softly. "Come get you."

"You did good, Mart."

"I didn't do anything. You came and got me."

"That counts," I said.

Martha looked at the box—the red paper, her own name on the tag in block capitals, written with something that wasn't quite a hand.

"He was going to be my friend," she said. Her voice wobbled once on friend, and then didn't. "He was going to pretend to be my friend. And I was going to believe it."

"Yeah."

"Gross," said Martha Meeks to the box, with feeling.

The box stayed quiet.

The Good Guy lay in it in the blue light from the street with his eyes shut and his hands folded on his chest—a doll in a box under a tree, exactly what he looked like, exactly what he'd been counting on—and four people stood in the dark living room looking at him, and not one of them was looking at a doll.

Then the eyes opened, click, big and round and blue, and moved slowly from my father with the bat, to my mother with her hands over her mouth, to my sister in the doorway with her chin up, and last to me, in front of the tree with the collar glowing at my throat. The little plastic mouth didn't move. It didn't have to.

"...Well," said Charles Lee Ray in his own voice, low and flat and Chicago, to the whole room. "Ain't this a kick in the head."

My mother screamed.

My father didn't. He tightened his grip on the bat, took one step forward, and said, low, in a voice I'd never heard him use in either of my lives, "You stay away from my daughter."

And the doll in the box under our tree, for the first time since he'd climbed out of a vat in Indiana, had nothing to say.