Chapter 18: Be Kind, Rewind (Patreon)

At 11:58 on Christmas Eve, two minutes before Christmas, I opened the panel.

The house was asleep. The power had been back a week, and the new front window had been in for three days with the sticker still on it. Downstairs the tree was lit—Mom left it on all night on Christmas Eve the way her mother had, so Santa could find the house. Martha was asleep in her own room for the first time since the siege, with the walkie-talkie I'd bought her on the pillow next to her head. She didn't know that yet. I'd snuck in at eleven and left it there, still in the box, with a bow. My parents were asleep down the hall. On my desk three of the Devas were piled up in the cage under one scarf, and Maga-Z was out again, somewhere on the bookshelf in the dark, chewing on something he shouldn't have been.

The notebook was open on my knees to the page that said SOON. Before the next one.

The next one was coming. I didn't know when; I knew it the way you know weather. Next story loading had been sitting on the panel for ten days like a train at a platform with its doors open. So I hit FUSE.

[FUSE]Select results to combine.

I'd been thinking about it for ten days. I'd made a list and crossed things out and made another one. The spear and the fire. The wind and the spear. Poison and fire and wind all at once, a whole armory. All of it was power, better ways to kill something, and every single time I ended up back at the same three things at the bottom of the list, in the skills. When I thought about the last four months and what had actually saved anybody, the spear barely made the list.

What saved people was Everybody down. Flat. and a room full of people doing it without arguing. A girl on a porch with a poster. You were the bravest person on the whole street.

Mind Control Resistance (Rare Skill) · Cheer (Rare Skill) · Novice Communication (Common Skill)Fuse 3 results? This cannot be undone.[CONFIRM]

I confirmed.

First it all went out of me at once—the door with the deadbolt, the warm thing in my throat, and the plain useful thing from the ambulance in September that made my website readable—like pulling three threads out of a sweater. For about three seconds I was empty in a place I hadn't known was full.

Then it came back in as one thing.

It didn't come through my head like a skill. It came in through my voice: throat and chest and the back of my tongue, a low hum like the one you feel in a church when the organ hits its lowest note. And it settled, like a building on its foundation, like something that had been three pieces finding out it was one.

Unbroken (Rare Skill)Your will is a locked door, and your voice is the key you hand to others. You resist Mind Control and Mind Reading in proportion to your mental strength and overall power level, and you can always tell what words someone needs to hear to get back on their feet. When people stand with you and can hear you, a little of your resistance becomes theirs: fear, despair and outside influence slide off them a little easier while you're talking. You also communicate clearly, and can get your point across even to strangers in a panic.Fuse charges: 1.

I read it three times in the dark.

When people stand with you and can hear you.

I thought about my living room on the night of the fourteenth, eight people on their faces in the broken glass because I'd told them to. Martha on the porch, barefoot. Sid in the doorway with the bat. I'd figured that was me—Theo's old drill-field voice coming back up from wherever it had been since a gravel road. Maybe it had been, and the panel was just writing it down.

I wrote it down too, in the notebook, under SOON:

UNBROKEN. (Mind Control Resistance + Cheer + Communication. 12/24/96, 11:59 p.m.)Rule: only true things. It knows what they need to hear. YOU decide if it's true. If it isn't, don't say it.

Downstairs the grandfather clock started to chime—a wall clock from Sears, really, that Dad had been calling the grandfather clock for so long nobody remembered why. Midnight. Christmas.

I lay back on the bed and listened to it chime twelve times, and somewhere around eight I realized I was grinning at the ceiling like an idiot, because in about seven hours I was going to go downstairs in this house with these people on Christmas morning, and for the first time in either of my lives it was going to be mine.

I. Christmas Morning

Martha woke the house at 6:14, and she didn't use her voice to do it. She'd found the box on her pillow, opened it, figured out there were two walkie-talkies, figured out where the other one had to be, and pressed the button.

KSSSHHK. From my nightstand, where I'd left its twin. "RANDY. RANDY. Come in. Over. Is this from you? Over."

I picked it up. "Merry Christmas, Mart. Over."

"Why did you get me WALKIE-TALKIES? Over."

"So you can always come get me," I said. "Wherever I am. Even if I'm at work. Even in the middle of the night. Over."

Static. A long pause on the channel.

Then, much smaller: "...Over."

Then she was in my doorway in her pajamas with the walkie-talkie in her hand, and she came across the room without a word and climbed onto the bed and hugged me hard around the neck, the way she hadn't since she was eight. She let go, stood up, and said very loudly, in her normal voice, "Okay. It's Christmas. Get up."

I'm going to try to get Christmas morning down right, because it's exactly the kind of thing I'm afraid of losing.

Theo knew Christmas morning as a common room with a county tree, a staff member in a Santa hat, and a present with a tag that said BOY, 15. Some years it was a living room with a family who was trying very hard. I'd been at Christmas mornings. I'd never been from one.

Randy knew all of it, seventeen years' worth, in the same order every year, which was the whole point. Stockings first, on the couch, before anybody was allowed near the tree. Dad's terrible coffee, made only on Christmas from the can of Folgers Christmas blend he bought every December and was the only one who drank. Mom in the armchair with her feet tucked under her and a blanket, watching us open things instead of opening her own. Martha handing out the presents and reading the tags out loud—To Randy, from Mom and Dad—the way she had since she was four, and getting mad if anybody else tried. Bing Crosby on the record player. A pile of wrapping paper that grew and grew, and Dad pretending to be upset about it and then lying down in it.

I had all of that from the inside. Then I came down the stairs in my socks at 6:20 on Christmas morning and it was all happening, exactly that way, in that order, and I was standing in it.

I stopped at the bottom of the stairs with my hand on the newel post.

"Randy?" Mom, in her armchair, with her blanket. "Honey? You okay?"

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. I just..." I looked at it all. The tree, still a little crooked from the golf ball. The new couch from Sears that still smelled like the store. Martha already on her knees under the tree reading tags, Dad in the kitchen doorway with his terrible coffee. "I'm just really glad I'm here."

Mom looked at me. Then she held her hand out from the armchair, and I went over and took it, and she squeezed it and let go and pointed at the couch.

"Stockings," she said. "Rules are rules."

In my stocking: a toothbrush, which was in everybody's stocking every year; a Toblerone; a pack of AA batteries, forty-eight of them, which made Martha laugh so hard she fell over; a little Swiss Army knife, the real kind, with a note from Dad in his neat block capitals, For the hasps. - Dad; and at the very bottom, an orange. There was always an orange. Nobody knew why. Grandma had done it.

Martha gave me a box she'd wrapped herself with about forty feet of tape. Inside was a new notebook—spiral, college-ruled, two hundred pages—with a unicorn on the cover. A different unicorn. This one had a rainbow mane and sunglasses.

"Because the other one's full," she said, watching my face. "I saw. You're writing on the inside cover now."

"Mart."

"And because it's funny."

"It's very funny." I held it without opening it. I was going to fill it with things I couldn't tell her, and I'm pretty sure she knew that. "Thank you."

"You're welcome." She looked extremely pleased with herself. "I got the hamsters a new wheel. That's from both of us. You owe me four dollars."

From Mom and Dad, the normal things. A green sweater. Real running shoes, the good kind, which Mom said were "because you're going to wreck your knees on that playground." She knew about the parkour. Everybody knew about the parkour. And from Mom, a gift certificate to Mission Cliffs, which made me look up at her, because she'd picked me up there exactly once and had stood at the bottom of the wall with both hands over her mouth the entire time.

"I'd rather you fall off something with a rope on you," said my mother, "than something without one."

Then Dad handed me a small flat box about the size of a deck of cards, went back to his chair, sat down, drank his coffee, and watched.

It was a watch. An old Hamilton with a steel case and a brown leather band gone soft and dark from years on somebody's wrist, a white face with plain black numbers, and a second hand that swept instead of ticking. On the back of the case, engraved and worn almost smooth: R.M. 1944.

I looked at Dad.

"Your great-grandfather's," said Dad. "Robert. Grandpa's dad. He wore it in the Pacific." He shrugged at his coffee. "It's been in my desk since Grandpa died. I was going to give it to you when you graduated. But I figured..." He stopped. "You're always counting minutes lately. I see you do it. At dinner. Out running. You look at your wrist and there's nothing there."

I hadn't known I did that.

Theo wore a watch for four years, a black G-Shock like everybody's. You look at it a thousand times a day—how long you've been on watch, how long till you're off, how long since the last radio check, how long you've been pinned down—and when you take it off, your wrist doesn't know. You keep looking.

I put it on. It fit. It had been made fifty years ago for a man about my size, for another war, and the second hand went around the face without a sound.

"Thanks, Dad," I said. Then, because I had a new thing in my throat now, a low hum that knew what people needed to hear, and because six hours earlier in the dark I'd promised myself only true things, I listened to it.

He's been waiting four months to give you something, it said. Not this—anything. He wants to know it helps.

"It helps," I said. "It really helps, Dad. I mean it."

My father looked at me over his terrible coffee, and something happened to his face. He nodded once and looked at the tree and cleared his throat and said, "Okay. Good. Okay." He drank his coffee. Mom reached over from her armchair without looking and put her hand on his knee.

The thing I'd been afraid of happened at nine-thirty, with the paper in a pile and Bing Crosby on his second time through.

I went up to put the notebook away, and on the way back down I passed the hall closet. The door was open a crack. On the shelf inside, where Mom kept the Christmas things, was a shoebox I'd never noticed, labeled in her handwriting: R - STOCKING STUFF / ORNAMENTS / KEEP.

It wasn't taped. I sat down on the top step with it in my lap and lifted the lid.

Inside were all the little things from all the Christmases that Mom couldn't throw away. A tiny plastic Batman from when Randy was five. His first Bradley Video membership card, laminated, from when he was eleven. A crayon drawing of a man in a hockey mask, BY RANDY, AGE 7, with a note on the back in Mom's writing: should we be worried? And a Polaroid of a skinny kid in a vest with his hair sticking up, maybe fourteen, holding a VHS copy of Never Sleep Again up to the camera and grinning like he'd won the lottery.

I ended up on the hall floor with the Polaroid.

I'd done the grieving part in November, on Martha's floor. I knew he was all right. I knew he'd chosen it, that he was somewhere with every movie ever made and no late fees, and that he was me, the way I was him. It's our coat.

He'd just have been so happy this morning. He'd have loved the walkie-talkies. He'd have loved Dad's watch more than anybody; he'd have cried at it, honestly, he cried at everything. He wasn't here to, and I was, and I'd cried at it a little myself, and I didn't know whose tears those were anymore and it didn't matter.

"Hey," said a voice.

Mom was at the top of the stairs. She'd come up for something, and she was looking at me on the hall floor with the shoebox and the Polaroid, and her face did a thing.

She came and sat down on the carpet next to me in her robe with her back against the closet door, like a kid, and looked at the Polaroid.

"Oh, God," she said softly. "That vest. You wouldn't take that vest off for a year."

"I know."

"You slept in it. Twice."

"I know, Mom."

She sat a while. Then, not looking at me, in a voice I'd never heard her use:

"I said something. That Monday. At the kitchen table at three in the morning, after you put the cane down between the coffee cups." She folded her hands. "I asked you why you. And then for a whole week I looked at you across this house like I was trying to figure out who was sitting at my table. I know I did. I caught myself doing it in the microwave door. I've thought about it every day since, Randy, because I think that's the part you saw. Not the hug. The looking."

The hum came up in my throat.

It was very clear, and there weren't any words in it—it was more like looking across a room at somebody and knowing exactly what they're about to say. I looked at my mother on the hall floor in her robe and knew what she needed to hear, the way you know a song.

She thinks she lost you in September. She thinks the boy in the Polaroid is gone, and she's been trying to love whoever came back instead, and she's afraid it shows. She needs to know she didn't lose him.

I sat there with it in my mouth and made myself check, the way I'd promised in the dark six hours before. Is it true?

It was. Not all of it, and not the way she'd mean it. But it was true.

"Mom," I said. "I'm still him."

She looked at me.

"I'm different. I know I'm different. Something happened in September and I'm not going to be able to explain it, and I'm sorry. But I'm still him. I'm still the kid in the vest. He's in here—all of him." I put the Polaroid back in the shoebox, carefully, on top of the crayon Jason. "You didn't lose him. I promise. You didn't lose anybody."

My mother put her hand over her mouth.

She didn't cry, exactly. She sat on the hall floor with her hand over her mouth and her eyes very bright, looking at me, and then she took her hand away and put her arms around me sideways, awkwardly, the way you hug somebody when you're both sitting on the floor, and held on.

"Okay," she said into my shoulder. "Okay. Okay."

Downstairs Martha yelled "ARE YOU GUYS COMING? DAD'S LYING IN THE PAPER AGAIN," and Mom laughed wetly and let go and wiped her face with her sleeve, and we went down.

I've wondered since whether that was the skill or me, and whether I'd have known what to say without it. I think I would have, eventually. It just meant I didn't have to wait another four months to find it.

II. Guestbook

On Christmas night, after the ham and the second round of ham sandwiches and It's a Wonderful Life on Channel 2 with everybody falling asleep on the new couch at once, I went into the den and turned on the computer and did the thing I'd done every night since October and hadn't been allowed to do for two weeks. I read the guestbook.

A hundred and forty new entries. Most of them were the usual (merry christmas from Ohio, Randy!; my little brother wants to know if the dolls are real; somebody in Tulsa with a long theory about Bigfoot) and some were the ones I'd been waiting for.

W. — Sunnydale, CA: Merry Christmas from the Hellmouth!!! (Giles says I'm not supposed to call it that in writing. Giles can't stop me. Giles is in Bath for the holidays.) Nothing exploded this month. Xander says that's suspicious. R.G. says to tell you "the Council has confirmed March." I don't know what that means but he made me write it down exactly. Also we put up the thing you said, about inviting people in. On the library door. In Latin. Happy holidays!!!R: Merry Christmas, Willow. Tell Giles thank you, and tell Xander he's right, and tell the girl in March to be nice to the librarian, he's going to need it. And keep the Latin up. All year. Even in summer.

A Cadet — Kentucky: No box came. I checked every day. I'm at Kent over break, most of the guys went home. The colonel's wife gave everybody who stayed a present and I wouldn't open mine till I saw her buy it. She thought I was being weird. I made her show me the receipt. It was socks. Merry Christmas. I heard your dad sat in the garage with a bat for a week. I heard he BELIEVED you. I read that part six times. Thank you.R: Merry Christmas, Andy. Good job on the receipt. Wear the socks. And if you're ever in California, I'll show you a Little League field. Behind third base. You'll like it.

H.M. — Maine: I kept the journal like you said. The fog was thinner this month. I dreamed about a hospital instead. My dad came into my room when I woke up screaming on the 19th and I told him I loved him, like you said, and he cried. He NEVER cries. I didn't ask about Cheryl yet. I'm working up to it. Merry Christmas, weird internet guy.R: Merry Christmas, Heather. Keep working up to it. You don't have to do it all at once. But do it before you're seventeen and a half.

A.W. — Michigan: Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. Merry Christmas. Spring still?R: Spring still. Answer the phone.

Campfire Kid — Midnight Society: We did a Christmas campfire. In the snow. Eight people showed up. We only invited seven. We counted twice. Then we went home. Merry Christmas.R: Good. Good. Count three times next time, and if it's still eight, don't tell a story. Just go home.

B.G. — Nevada: Season's greetings. Heather and I have stockpiled the canned goods through 1999. If you require shelter, there is room in the bunker. Do not come by road. — B.G. (P.S. Your site has been accessed eleven times this month from a Delaware IP address registered to a charitable trust. I have no further comment.)R: Merry Christmas, Burt. Thanks for the room. I'll fly. (Thanks for Delaware. Write me if they ever sign.)

I didn't know anything about Delaware. I knew somebody read the site at three in the morning every night from the same address and never signed; I'd asked Mulder to look in October, and he'd never said what he found. And I knew about a van with FALCON CABLE on the side, a big gray man who caught a falling kid, and a forgettable face in a gray raincoat who'd said nice roses. I didn't know if they were all the same thing. I had a feeling. On page one of the new notebook, the rainbow unicorn, I wrote DELAWARE: a charitable trust, 3 a.m., underlined it, and left it alone.

There was an email, too.

To: survivalzone@geocities.comFrom: F. MulderSubject: item six

Merry Christmas. I'm told you've had a week. The circumstances, as reported by the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department, involve "unknown juveniles," a transformer, and a Globotech product recall that nobody at Globotech seems to know about. I have a file now. You're in it. Congratulations.

That's not why I'm writing.

In October I didn't ask you about four teenagers in Washington State who died at the same minute, in four different places, of heart failure. I should have. They were all from Moesko Island. They'd all stayed at the same rental cabin, up at Shelter Mountain, the weekend before they died. Your list still says "What to do if you watch a videotape and the phone rings right after," and I have spent the last two months on Moesko Island and the Olympic Peninsula, and I'd like you to know I've found three more people who say they watched a tape and got a phone call. All three of them are alive. All three of them refused to tell me how.

They all said the same thing. "I showed it to somebody."

I think you know what that means. I'd like to know how you know.

— FM

P.S. Scully says Merry Christmas and that I'm not to encourage you. Consider yourself not encouraged.

I sat there with the cursor blinking.

Moesko Island.

I scrolled back through the guestbook, two weeks of Christmas wishes and Bigfoot, to the entry I'd been looking for since I sat down and hoping I wouldn't find. December 21st, the day Tatum drove the Gorgonites to Yosemite.

— Moesko Island, WA: i didnt listen. i couldnt. you said dont show anybody. i was so scared. i showed someone. a man on the ferry. i didnt even know his name. im still here. its been a month and im still here and i think about him every day. hes probably showed someone too. its going around. im sorry. im so sorry. i didnt know what else to do

No reply address this time. No Hotmail. Just that.

A man on the ferry.

I did the math. I couldn't not. A Moesko kid watched it in November, the week I wrote back, and showed it to a man on the ferry around the eighteenth or nineteenth. He showed it to somebody seven days later, and that person showed somebody else. A link a week, maybe less if people panicked early. Six links since November. Seven. A chain of people who'd each looked somebody in the face and handed them a death sentence so they could live, and then gone home and tried to have Christmas.

It's going around.

I wrote back. There was no address, so I wrote it in the guestbook, where the kid would see it if they ever came back.

R: You didn't do anything I wouldn't have been scared enough to do. Listen to me: you're still here. Stay here. Don't come back to this page and don't read about it and don't go looking for the man on the ferry. It's not yours anymore. I'm going to deal with it. I promise.

I looked at that for a while before I hit SUBMIT. I'm going to deal with it. I promise. I didn't know how. I didn't know where the chain was, or how long it had gotten, or where it was headed—whether it was coming south toward California, toward me, the way things always seemed to.

I knew it would.

I hit SUBMIT, and then I wrote Mulder back.

To: F. MulderSubject: Re: item six

Merry Christmas. Tell Scully I'm not encouraged.

You're right. "I showed it to somebody" means exactly what you think it means. Copy it, show it, live. That's the only cure there is, and it's not a cure, it's a hot potato.

Don't watch it. I mean that. Whatever you find, don't watch it. And if Scully finds it, let her hide it from you. She'll be right.

It's going around. A kid on Moesko started a chain in November, through a man on the ferry. If it gets to you before it gets to me, call me before you do anything. My home number is below. Don't call after 10.

— R

Then, because I'd learned to write things down, I opened the rainbow unicorn to page two.

THE RING (2002). Moesko. The tape. The chain. 7 days.It's going around.It's coming.

And under that, in the corner, very small:

Rachel Keller. Aidan. Noah. Katie Embry. Shelter Mountain Inn, Cabin 12. Has it happened yet?

I'd thought it had. In October, when Mulder's same-minute deaths turned up, I'd thought that's it, that's the movie, it's started, and waited for a reporter and a little boy who draws. But they'd been four kids from Moesko, island kids, not a girl from Seattle named Katie with an aunt at the newspaper. Somebody had gotten to Cabin 12 first. The movie was still out there ahead of me, waiting for its first scene, and not yet was, for once, something I liked the sound of.

III. The Archive

We did our Christmas on the twenty-seventh at Tatum's, because her mom was working a double at the hospital and Tatum said a house with nobody in it on Christmas week was "the saddest thing in the whole world, Randy, it's sadder than Old Yeller." Sid and I weren't going to argue with that.

The Riley house was small and warm and smelled like the cinnamon candle Tatum had lit in every single room. The tree was a little fake one that Tatum had decorated entirely in Woodsboro Wildcats blue and gold, and on top, instead of a star or an angel, was a Polaroid of Dewey in his deputy's hat taped to a paper-towel tube.

"He's our angel," said Tatum. "He watches over us. He also hates it, which is a bonus."

We ate a frozen pizza and a whole tin of Christmas cookies Mrs. Riley had left on the counter with a note that said ONE EACH, which we ignored, and then we sat on the floor in front of the little blue-and-gold tree and did presents.

Tatum went first, because Tatum always went first.

She gave Sid a pair of little silver earrings shaped like crescent moons, which Sid put on right away and didn't take off. She gave me a box about the size of a brick, wrapped in the Sunday comics, with my name on it in silver Sharpie and DO NOT OPEN UNTIL I SAY underneath.

"Okay," said Tatum. "Now."

Business cards. Five hundred of them from the copy shop on Main on heavy cream card stock, RANDY MEEKS in raised black letters. Under that: Host, RULES OF ENGAGEMENT. WCTV Channel 27, Thursdays 10 PM. Under that, smaller: Proprietor, Randy's Survival Zone. And under that, so small you almost needed a magnifying glass: Be prepared. You're never ready.

"Every host needs cards," said Tatum, with enormous satisfaction. "It's professional. It's branding. I'm the executive producer. I think about these things."

"Tate."

"Don't make it weird."

"These are amazing."

"I know," said Tatum, and looked at the tree very hard while her ears went pink.

Sid gave me a scarf she'd knitted herself. She told me that before I opened it, in the careful, braced voice of somebody who expects to get laughed at, and when I opened it I understood why. It was dark green and very long and very lumpy. About a foot in it got suddenly wider for no reason, then narrower, then wider again, like a snake that had eaten several things. One end had fringe. The other didn't.

"My mom was teaching me," said Sid. "The Christmas before. I never finished the first one. I found the needles in a box in the garage in November." She was looking at the scarf, not at me. "I'm really bad at it."

I had the hum in my throat, and I knew exactly what she needed to hear—It's perfect, or something like it, warm and easy and kind.

I didn't say it.

You don't say that to Sidney Prescott. Hand her the warm, easy thing and she can smell it from across a room and stops trusting you; she's spent too long being handed things by people who wanted something. I'd learned that the hard way in September and October, standing on her porch getting yelled at. With Sid you skip the right thing and go straight to the true one.

"It's really lumpy," I said.

Sid's mouth twitched.

"It gets fat in the middle. Like it ate a rat."

"Two rats," said Sid. "There's another one at the end."

"I'm going to wear it every single day," I said, "until it falls apart. Which, looking at it, is going to be about February."

She laughed—the real one, the surprised one, like a smile that had been in storage checking whether it still fit. Then she reached over and wrapped the scarf around my neck twice, because it was long enough to go around twice and still drag on the floor, and tucked the ends in and patted it once, like a dog.

"There," she said. "Now you look like an idiot."

"I always look like an idiot."

"Now you look like my idiot," said Sid, and went very red, and Tatum made a sound like a teakettle, and I looked at the tree.

I gave Sid a harness. A good one, a blue Black Diamond, plus climbing shoes in her size, which I'd had to get out of Tatum, and a Mission Cliffs punch card with forty climbs on it.

"Because you topped out first try," I said. "In November. And you've never been back."

She held the harness a while.

"My mom used to say," she said slowly, "that I'd climb anything. When I was little. The bookcase, the fridge, the tree in the backyard. She'd find me on top of things." She ran her thumb over the buckle. "I stopped. After. I don't know why."

"I'd rather you fall off something with a rope on you," I said, "than something without one."

Sid looked up.

"My mom said that when she gave me mine. It's a good line. I'm stealing it."

For Tatum, a box of tapes: ten blank Hi8 cassettes, the good Sony ones, still in the shrink-wrap, with a bow. A Brother P-Touch label maker, the kind that spits out little strips of black-on-white tape. And a cardboard file box with EXECUTIVE PRODUCER'S ARCHIVE already on the side in the P-Touch's square little letters, because I'd tested it.

Tatum stared at it.

"You got me an archive," she said.

"Every archive needs a system," I said. "It's professional. I think about these things."

She threw a cookie at me. Then she went and got the real archive out of her room, the Payless shoebox she'd been keeping since October with every tape she'd shot since she picked up a camera, labeled in ballpoint on masking tape—EP 1, EP 2, THANKSGIVING, POOL, GOAT ROCK, SFO!!!—and dumped them all on the carpet in front of the tree and handed me the label maker. "You do it. You're the one who wanted a system."

So I sat on the floor of the Rileys' living room in my lumpy scarf and labeled tapes.

I'd known it would come to this. I'd planned for it; it was half the reason I'd bought a label maker. And there at the bottom of the pile was a cassette with masking tape across the top in Tatum's round, bouncy ballpoint.

12/14. THE NIGHT.

Somewhere on that tape was me from behind in the dark front hall of my parents' house, opening the door, kicking a propane cylinder, throwing my right hand up, and a December wind coming out of nowhere to carry a bomb forty feet into the street. And earlier, from the porch, zoomed in on the Fimples' front door: a girl running out of a house with a doll army behind her, and a boy throwing his hand back over his shoulder half a second before the hedges flattened.

The hand of God, Tatum had said.

I could do it right now. The camcorder was on the coffee table and a blank tape was in my lap, still in the shrink-wrap. Ten minutes in the bathroom, dub over the four seconds twice, and nobody would ever know.

Tatum was across the room putting the cookie tin back exactly where her mom had left it, like that would hide that it was empty.

I didn't move. It was Tatum's—her archive, the only thing she'd made since September that was entirely hers—and she'd handed it to me and said you do it. I'd lied to her a lot. I'd had to. I'd never stolen from her, and I wasn't going to start on the floor of her living room at Christmas.

I labeled it 12/14/96: THE NIGHT in square little P-Touch letters and put it in the file box with the others.

When I looked up, Sid was watching me.

She was on the couch with her new harness in her lap and her new moon earrings on, and she had the careful look on, the word-problem look, the same one she'd given me in the doorway of my garage on the fourteenth when it smelled like a chemical fire and I said paint thinner. She looked at the file box, and at me, and away. Then she picked up the harness and started working out the buckles.

She asked for it on New Year's Eve.

I wasn't there. Tatum told me later, the way you tell somebody something that doesn't mean anything: Sid had come by the Rileys' on the afternoon of the thirty-first to borrow a dress for the party, and on the way out she'd asked to borrow the December fourteenth tape. I want to watch Martha on the porch again. With the poster. I think about it a lot. And Tatum said sure, of course, it was in the archive, it was labeled, Randy had made a system.

Sid brought it back on the second of January.

"I'm so sorry," she told Tatum in my driveway at the end of the morning run, her breath smoking in the cold. "I recorded over part of it. By accident. My dad was taping the Rose Parade and he grabbed the wrong tape. There's like four minutes of floats in the middle." She held out the cassette. "I'm really sorry, Tate."

"Sidney," said Tatum, betrayed. "The archive."

"I know. I know. I'll make it up to you."

Tatum took the tape and looked at it with her face all scrunched up. Then she sighed and put it in her coat pocket. "Was it the good part? Please tell me it wasn't Martha."

"No," said Sid. "Martha's fine. It was the beginning. Some of the stuff from the porch, and the front hall." She shrugged. "It was dark anyway. You couldn't see much."

She didn't look at me once. She looked at Tatum, and at the water tower, and at her shoes.

I stood in my driveway in my running clothes and my lumpy green scarf with a fifty-year-old Hamilton on my wrist and kept my mouth shut, because any word I said would have been a way of asking her a question she'd gone to a lot of trouble to make sure I'd never have to answer. Some things you just let people give you.

IV. Not Yet

Kristen Parker landed at SFO on December thirtieth at 2:40 in the afternoon, on a United flight from Columbus through Denver, wearing the RANDY vest.

The green Bradley Video one. The one the kid had worn into a boiler room in October, which came out of a dream with her the next morning still smelling like smoke and Elm Street. She had it on over a white turtleneck and her mint cardigan, blonde hair feathered back and bangs in her eyes, and she came up the jetway with a backpack and a tote bag and saw me at the window at Gate 74—same gate—and stopped walking.

People went around her. Neither of us moved.

"Hi," she said, from twenty feet away.

"Hi."

"You're tall," said Kristen. "I forgot. On the phone you're not tall. In the dream you're—" She stopped. "In the dream you're you now. You were the right height. I just forgot how tall."

"Six feet. Apparently."

"On a good day," said Kristen, who'd heard me say it on the phone a dozen times, and then she dropped her tote bag in the middle of the concourse and came the rest of the way at a run and hit me, and I caught her, and this time I didn't put my hands up.

Behind me my father, who'd insisted on driving, studied the ceiling.

He'd made his case at breakfast. I've met her, Randy. She sat at my table for Thanksgiving with sixteen other people and I carved and passed her the cranberry sauce, and I think I said about four words to her, and then she kissed you at this airport in front of me and got on a plane. He'd put his coffee down. She's staying under my roof for three days. I'd like to say a few more words than four.

"Mr. Meeks," said Kristen, letting go of me, pink to the ears, holding out her hand very straight and formal, as if she hadn't eaten his turkey a month ago. "Hi. Again. Thank you for letting me stay. And for, um—" She looked at me. "For not saying anything. At the gate. Last time."

Dad shook her hand and looked at the vest.

He'd seen it before, five days straight in November, on this girl, at his table and in his living room and on his back patio: the green Bradley Video vest with the crooked name tag that said RANDY in white label-maker tape. For five days he'd walked past his son's bedroom door, where the real one had hung on its hook every day since September, and never once asked how there could be two. He didn't ask now, either. He's a smart man, my father. He's been married to my mother for twenty years.

"Welcome back, Kristen," he said. "You hungry? There's an In-N-Out on the way."

"I don't know what that is," said Kristen.

My father looked at her with deep, genuine pity. Thanksgiving had been a turkey and Gus's pool and two nights of Denny's, and nobody had thought to take seven kids from Ohio to the one thing in California that actually mattered.

"Oh, honey," he said.

He got his few more words at the In-N-Out on the Bayshore Freeway, in a plastic booth by the window, while Kristen ate a Double-Double with the face of somebody being let in on a secret. I sat on her side of the booth and kept my mouth shut. That was the deal Dad had made in the car on the way up: You can sit there. You can't help.

So I didn't help. I watched my father, who'd spent twenty years running early meetings at an office in Santa Rosa, ask a seventeen-year-old girl questions slowly and kindly, the way he'd ask a new hire, and actually listen to the answers.

What was Springwood like. (Small. Cold. Everybody knew everybody, and nobody talked about anything.) How was her mom. (Better. Weird. Since November she'd started knocking on Kristen's door before she came in, which she'd never done in Kristen's whole life, and Kristen didn't know if that was good or bad.) Was she back at school. (Since December; Springwood High had put her in remedial everything because of the hospital, and she was going to test out of it in February, and then they'd be sorry.) What did she want to do. After.

Kristen stopped with the burger halfway to her mouth.

"Nobody's asked me that," she said, "since I was twelve."

Dad waited.

"I used to do gymnastics," said Kristen slowly. "Before. I was good. I was really good. And then I stopped sleeping, and you can't do gymnastics if you don't sleep, so I stopped." She put the burger down. "I've been thinking about it. Since I can sleep again. I'm too old now for the real thing. But there's coaching. Or physical therapy, maybe. Helping people who got hurt get back up." She looked at the table. "That's stupid. I don't know."

"It's not stupid," said my father.

She looked up.

"My son goes to physical therapy twice a week," said Dad. "A woman named Gloria. She's been doing it thirty-one years, and she's the only person in Sonoma County he's actually scared of." He took a french fry off my tray without asking. "That's not stupid, Kristen. That's a job where people are glad to see you."

Kristen looked at him for a second. Then she picked the burger back up and took a very large bite and looked out the window at the freeway with her eyes very bright, and didn't say anything else until we got to the car.

In the parking lot, while she was in the bathroom, my father leaned on the Volvo with his keys in his hand and said, without looking at me, "Okay."

"Okay what?"

"Just okay." He jingled the keys. "I wanted to know who she was. Now I know a little. Okay."

My mother was waiting on the porch when we pulled in. I found out later she'd been out there forty minutes in her coat, pretending to check the mail.

At Thanksgiving she'd had seventeen people, two turkeys, and a dining room that didn't fit any of them, and Kristen had been one face at the end of a long table—the quiet one in the vest, the one Mom had moved her own chair for without being asked. They'd talked a little in the kitchen over the dishes, maybe ten minutes, while Taryn and Jennifer argued about the radio. Mom told me the Sunday after that Kristen dried dishes like somebody who'd never been allowed to help in a kitchen and didn't want to do it wrong.

Now she came down the porch steps and didn't shake hands. She hugged her, briefly and carefully, the way you hug somebody when you're not sure they want it.

Kristen froze for a second. Then she hugged her back.

"You're in Martha's room," said my mother, letting go, in the voice she uses for rulings. "You get the bed and Martha gets the floor, and that's not up for discussion; she's been planning it for two weeks. Tomorrow you're helping me with the party food, because I need somebody who actually listens when I say thin slices." She looked at Kristen's face. "If you want to. You don't have to."

"I want to," said Kristen, very fast.

"Good." Mom looked at the vest, just for a second—the same small, complicated look she'd given it across the dining room in November—and then back at Kristen's face, and put whatever it was away. "Come inside, it's cold. Your hat's waiting for you. Martha's been wearing it for a month and she has opinions about giving it back."

Martha had been planning it for two weeks. She'd cleaned her room—actually cleaned it, down to the carpet, for the first time since the Reagan administration. She'd built a second hamster-viewing station on her desk out of a shoebox and a magnifying glass. She'd asked me about a hundred questions: does she still like No Doubt, did she ever meet Gerald (she hadn't; Gerald came after Thanksgiving), do you think she'll remember when Maga-Z opened the cage. Kristen got Martha's bed. Martha got a sleeping bag on the floor, by choice, because it was "like a sleepover, but for three days."

The Devas came to the bars when Kristen walked in, the way they did for me and Martha and nobody else. Cham-P first, big and golden, pressing his whole front against the wire to say hello. San-D right behind him, sparkly-eyed, up on her hind legs to see her face. Jum-P woke up, which was an event all by itself, blinked at her once, and went back to sleep on Cham-P's back.

They'd met her at Thanksgiving. Martha had brought the cage down to the living room that Thursday afternoon, against every rule we'd ever made, because she couldn't stand not to. Maga-Z had picked the latch in front of seventeen people and strolled out onto the coffee table like he owned it, and Kincaid had shouted, and Martha had nearly died. Afterward Kristen sat on the floor in front of the cage for an hour with the football game going on over her head, just watching them, and at the end of the hour Maga-Z came down from the top level and stood at the bars in front of her and gave her a long, narrow-eyed look—the look of somebody deciding whether you were worth robbing. Then he went back up.

Now he stood at the front of the cage in his crooked red scarf and gave her the look again.

"Hi, guys," said Kristen softly. "I'm back. I said I would be."

Maga-Z saluted. It was a slow salute and a sly one, like the two of them shared a secret and he wanted her to know he'd be collecting on it.

Kristen put her hand over her mouth.

"He remembers you," said Martha from the doorway, delighted and scandalized. "He doesn't do that for anybody. He didn't do it for Tatum until December. And when he did it for Tatum he looked like he was going to steal her car."

"I told them at Thanksgiving," said Kristen, through her fingers. "When nobody was looking. I told them I'd come back. I didn't know if they—"

"They understand English," said Martha, with enormous authority. "Officially they're normal. Unofficially..." She shrugged: what can you do. "You can't tell anybody."

"I won't," said Kristen, very seriously.

Martha had decided at Thanksgiving, somewhere between the coffee table and the airport, that Kristen Parker was the coolest person she had ever met. By the end of the first night—after an hour of whispering in the dark across the bedroom floor that I could hear through the wall and pretended I couldn't—she'd upgraded it to a fact, and she spent the next three days proving it by following her everywhere.

Kristen had already seen Woodsboro. At Thanksgiving she'd seen all there was: the motel and Gus's pool, Main Street from the back of Tatum's Cherokee, the creek path at five in the morning, my parents' living room with seventeen people in it. There isn't a second tour of Woodsboro. There's barely a first one.

So on the thirty-first, we ran.

Five a.m., in the dark, the way we had in November. Kristen came down the stairs at 4:50 in borrowed sweats and her own sneakers, hair in a ponytail, before I'd even finished tying my shoes, and stood by the front door with her arms folded like she'd been waiting an hour.

"You don't have to," I said. "You're on vacation."

"I ran at Thanksgiving," said Kristen. "I'm running."

Sid and Tatum were at the end of the driveway the way they always were, Tatum on the hood of the Cherokee with her 7-Eleven cup and Sid stretching against the mailbox. They saw Kristen come down the porch steps behind me in the porch light, and something happened on the hood of the Cherokee and at the mailbox and right next to me, all at once, so fast I almost missed it. Like three cats spotting each other across a yard.

"Ohio!" said Tatum, sliding off the hood, bright and warm. "You came back. Did you get my FedEx?"

"I got it," said Kristen, exactly as bright and warm. "It's on my mirror. Thank you, Tatum."

"Executive producer's archive," said Tatum.

"I know," said Kristen. "You wrote that on the back."

"Hi, Kristen," said Sid from the mailbox. Quieter. Watching.

"Hi, Sid." Kristen smiled at her, a real smile, mostly. Then she looked at my neck, at the dark green lumpy thing wrapped around it twice, and the smile stayed exactly where it was. "That's a new scarf."

"Sid made it," I said. "For Christmas."

A very small pause.

"Oh," said Kristen. "It's very..." She looked at it. "Long."

"It's lumpy," said Sid from the mailbox, with no expression at all. "You can say it. He did."

"I would never," said Kristen.

Then we ran.

I was an idiot about that run, and I've thought about it a lot since. Kristen ran next to me the whole three miles—the water tower, the creek path, the hill—at my shoulder, matching my pace exactly. When Sid came up on my other side on the long flat stretch by the creek, the way she always did, Kristen sped up half a step. When Sid dropped back, Kristen dropped back. When Tatum yelled something from behind (Randy, your form is TERRIBLE), Kristen laughed a little louder than it was funny.

And at the four-square wall, she went over it.

She'd never done it before. In November she'd watched from the side while Taryn did it first try and Kincaid hit it like a truck, and she hadn't tried. But on the thirty-first, in the dark, she ran at it without breaking stride, put one hand on top, went over in a long clean arc with a little twist like a gymnast coming off a vault, landed running, and didn't look back.

Tatum stopped dead on the path.

"Oh, come ON," said Tatum.

Sid had her eyebrows all the way up. She looked at the wall, then at Kristen running on up the path with her ponytail swinging, then at me, and her mouth did the thing a smile does before it makes up its mind.

"She's showing off," said Sid, low enough that only I could hear.

"What? No. She's just—"

"Randy." Sid gave me a look of deep, patient pity. "She's showing off for us."

Then she went over the wall herself, second try, clean, the way she'd learned it in November, and ran on after Kristen, and I stood on the path next to Tatum like a man who'd been handed a tax form in a language he couldn't read.

"You," said Tatum Riley, "are so dumb."

That afternoon I took her to the only two places in Woodsboro she hadn't seen.

The first was The Inner Child, which hadn't existed at Thanksgiving and had opened on the sixteenth after all, with wooden trains in the window and Stuart Abernathy behind the counter and Alan in his green apron, who saw Kristen through the window and dropped an entire shelf of marble runs.

The second was the park.

I told myself it was on the way. It wasn't. Woodsboro Memorial Park is on the far side of town past the duck pond, and the only reasons to go in December are the playground and the ducks, and we skipped both. We walked out past the Little League fields in the cold afternoon light, me in my lumpy scarf and her in the RANDY vest, and when we got to Field 2 I stopped.

Kristen stopped too.

She was looking at the backstop, the big curved chain-link wall behind home plate on its long low footing. At the third-base end. At a patch of grass by the footing that looked exactly like the grass around it.

She stood there with her hands in the pockets of the vest.

"Something's down there," she said.

I didn't answer.

"I don't know how I know that." Her voice was very low. "It's like—you know when you're in a dream and you know what's behind a door before you open it? Like that. Except I'm awake." She shivered. "Something's down there, and it's angry, and it's very, very small."

The Dream Master. The girl who could pull people into her dreams from two thousand miles away, who'd stood on a stage in a theater full of faceless children and not let go. I'd never asked what else she could feel. It had never even occurred to me to ask.

"It's in a coffee can," I said. "Under three feet of concrete."

Kristen turned and looked at me.

"That's where you put it," she said. "That's the coffee can."

"That's the coffee can."

She looked back at the patch of grass, and then she did a thing I didn't expect: she walked over and stood on it. Both feet, in her white sneakers, on the dead grass, where three feet down, under concrete and dirt and concrete again, a Maxwell House can held two blue glass eyes.

She looked down at her feet.

"You're not getting out," said Kristen Parker to the ground, very clearly, in a voice I'd heard her use exactly once before, in a movie palace full of dead children, when she took a word back. "Do you hear me? You stay down there. You stay small."

Then she stepped off and came back and took my arm, and she didn't bring it up again the whole way to the car.

Mom and Dad had a party on New Year's Eve, a small one. The Rileys. The Prescotts. The Abernathys. The Fimples, which was its own kind of miracle—Phil had replaced his whole Home Command Center with an "even better one" and couldn't stop talking about it. Mr. Bradley and his brother Walt in his VFW cap. Dale Pruitt from Channel 27 in a Grateful Dead sweater. And Dewey, in a sport coat, with Gale Weathers on his arm.

Kristen spent the whole afternoon in the kitchen with my mother, slicing things thin. She came out at seven with flour on the vest and a dish towel over her shoulder and the dazed, pleased look of somebody who'd been told a great many stories about me between the ages of two and nine, including the one about the bathtub and the Halloween I went as a VCR. My mother came out behind her looking almost exactly the same.

"She's nice," Mom said to me in passing, under her breath, with a tray of crackers, in a tone of mild accusation, like I'd been hiding it.

I hadn't known Gale was coming. I found out at nine, when she walked into my parents' living room in a black dress and every conversation in the room stopped for about a quarter of a second and then started up again, louder.

My mother's smile went very fixed. Next to me on the new couch, Kristen stiffened.

She knew Gale. Everybody from Ohio knew Gale. Gale had flown with me to Columbus in November and sat in a Westin Hills hallway while I went into a dream; Gale had come to Thanksgiving in a cream wool coat with a store-bought pie, looked down a long table at five girls, and asked sweetly, which one of you is the girlfriend? And Kristen had heard every word I'd said about the interview on the phone afterward, including the one that started with w.

"She asked which one was the girlfriend," Kristen said under her breath, watching Gale take off her coat. "At Thanksgiving. In front of everybody. I had to sit there."

"I remember."

"I didn't know what to say."

"Nobody did," I said. "That was the point."

Gale saw me. She said something to Dewey, patted his arm, came across the room through the party with a glass of white wine, and stopped in front of the couch.

"Randy." She nodded to Kristen. "Miss Parker. Back again. You look well."

"Ms. Weathers," said Kristen, in a voice like a door closing.

Gale took that the way she took everything, without blinking, and looked back at me.

"The hearing's on the sixth," she said. "Cotton's. Santa Rosa. They're playing the tape in open court, which means it's public record the minute it's played, which means—"

"You're airing it."

"Thursday the ninth." She held my eyes. "Did Randy Meeks Know. I wanted you to hear it from me. Not from the promo." A pause. "That seemed like the right thing to do."

The hum came up in my throat. It knew what she needed to hear, clear as a bell: She wants you to tell her it's okay. She wants permission. She's been carrying this since November, and she's not as sure as she sounds.

It wasn't okay, though, so I kept it.

"Thanks for telling me," I said instead, which was true.

Gale looked at me a second longer. Something small crossed her face and was gone. Then she nodded once and went back across the room to Dewey, who'd watched the whole thing from the doorway with the face of a man watching two dogs he loves meet at a dog park.

"I don't like her," said Kristen.

"Nobody likes her," I said. "Dewey likes her."

"Dewey," said Kristen, watching him put his arm around Gale's waist, "cannot say no to her. Look at him. He'd walk into traffic."

I looked. He was smiling down at Gale like she'd hung the moon.

"Yeah," I said. "I know."

Tatum and Sid came at ten with Neil and Tatum's mom, who'd gotten the night off for once and looked like she didn't know what to do with it.

Tatum had on a silver dress stolen out of her mom's closet, too long and safety-pinned at the hem. Sid was in Tatum's other dress, a blue one, with the crescent-moon earrings. They came through the front door laughing about something, the way they'd been coming through doors together since they were six, and Kristen sat up a little straighter beside me on the couch and put her hand on my arm. Not my hand—my arm, just above the elbow, lightly, like she was only resting it there.

She left it there for the next hour.

I noticed. I'm not completely dumb, whatever Tatum says. When Tatum sat on the arm of the couch on my other side, Kristen's hand tightened a little and then relaxed. Kristen laughed at all of Tatum's jokes, which were good jokes, but every laugh came half a second late, like she was checking first. And she watched Sid across the room talking to my dad about climbing harnesses with a look I'd only seen on her once before, in a dream, when she was trying to figure out which door Freddy was behind.

At eleven Sid came over to the couch, leaned down, and unwound the lumpy green scarf from my neck without asking. She wrapped it around her own and said, "It's cold on the roof, and I made it, so it's mine on holidays," and walked off.

Kristen watched it go—my scarf, around Sid's neck, across the room—and didn't say a word.

"Kris," I said.

"I'm fine." She smiled at me. "She made it. It's hers on holidays. That's fair." Her hand on my arm didn't move. "That's completely fair."

At a quarter to midnight we went out on the garage roof.

All of us kids, out my bedroom window the way the kid had gone a hundred times, and Billy before him, onto the shingles over the garage in our coats with a blanket off my bed and a thermos of Mom's cocoa. Kristen in the vest, who climbed out first and sat down next to the spot I was going to sit in and patted it before I was even through the window. Tatum in the silver dress with Dewey's sport coat over it. Sid in the blue one with the moon earrings and my lumpy green scarf. And Martha in her Buckeyes sweatshirt and Kristen's old knit hat, San-D tucked warm in her hood and the walkie-talkie on her belt, because she'd pointed out, correctly, that it was New Year's Eve and anything could happen, and how was she supposed to come get me if I didn't have mine?

From the garage roof you can see the whole town, which isn't much, because Woodsboro isn't much of a town. The lights on Main. The water tower on the hill with its red light on top and the dark line of the hills behind it. And the sky, which in Woodsboro in December is enormous and clear and full of stars.

At 11:59, somebody downstairs turned up Dick Clark.

We could hear the countdown through the window, the crowd in Times Square three thousand miles away and three hours ago, on tape, counting down a year that had already ended in New York. Ten. Nine.

Martha counted along out loud. So did Tatum, loud and ironic, and then not ironic. Eight. Seven.

Kristen's hand found mine under the blanket.

Six. Five.

I looked at the town. At the water tower. At the dark street below the roof, where seventeen days ago a doll had sat on a toy truck in the Fimples' spotlights and waved at me. At the pole at the end of the street with its brand-new transformer humming, and the empty place under it where a white van used to park.

Four. Three.

I'm here, I thought. I made it. A whole year. It wasn't a whole year, it was four months. It just felt like one.

Next story loading.

Two.

One.

Somebody's illegal fireworks went up over the water tower, red and gold and green, bursting over the hill with the sound coming a second late, pop pop pop. Down on Main somebody leaned on a car horn. Inside, the whole party cheered, my father's voice yelling HAPPY NEW YEAR over all of it and my mother laughing.

Kristen looked past me for half a second at the girl in the silver dress on the other side of the blanket. Then she kissed me.

Quick, on the mouth, sweet and cold and a little awkward, because we were under a blanket on a roof with a thermos between us. I didn't freeze this time, and I didn't put my hands up. I kissed her back, just for a second. Just long enough.

When we stopped she was smiling at me in the light of somebody's illegal fireworks.

"Did we figure out the word?" she said.

I thought about two thousand miles of copper wire, and a phone bill, and a list in a notebook of things that were coming. And a girl in a silver dress on the other side of the blanket, looking very hard at the water tower.

"Not yet," I said.

Kristen considered this.

"Good," she said. "I like not yet." She leaned her head on my shoulder and settled in like somebody planting a flag. "Not yet means there's more."

On her other side Martha said "Gross" with enormous satisfaction, without looking, the way you say amen. In her hood, San-D reached up and patted her cheek.

On Martha's other side Tatum was still looking at the water tower, knees pulled up inside her mom's silver dress and Dewey's sport coat around her shoulders, watching the fireworks over the hill like they were the most interesting thing in the world. Sid was watching Tatum. After a while Sid shifted over on the shingles until her shoulder was against Tatum's, and Tatum leaned into it. Just a little. Just enough.

"Happy New Year, Tate," I said, across all of them.

Tatum turned her head and looked at me in the red and gold light, and for a second her face did the small complicated thing it had done at the gate at SFO, and on the porch in November, and in her mom's Cherokee with my mother's porch light coming on. Then it was gone, and she gave me the big smile, the Tatum one.

"Happy New Year, dumbass," said Tatum Riley.

I did the second fusion at 6:10 on New Year's morning.

Alone, in the garage, after the first run of 1997—all of us in the dark at five, Sid and Tatum and me and Kristen, who ran at my shoulder the whole way again and went over the four-square wall again with the twist again, and this time Tatum just sighed. They'd gone in for Dad's pancakes. I said I'd be a minute.

I stood next to the workbench where two coffee cans had sat in the lantern light three weeks before, and opened the panel.

Some people make resolutions. Lose weight, read more, call your mother. Mine were Stop being so busy being smart that you forget to be scared at the right time, and Don't become the guy whose lizard has the steering wheel, and Get hit and get back up.

I'd made the list the week before. I'd been watching Half Light every day since the backstop: the little cold voice at the back of my neck, listening to the house all night and flinching at the plywood, at Kristen's footsteps in the hall at two in the morning, at Mom. It had been right twice and wrong forty times, and it was getting louder. If you cannot learn to control this side of yourself, you can just as easily become a paranoid savage. I didn't want to switch it off—I'd needed it. I just needed it to calm down.

[FUSE]Half Light (Uncommon Trait) · Sober (Common Trait) · Tough Skin (Uncommon Trait)Fuse 3 results? This cannot be undone.[CONFIRM]

It came in from the outside the way traits do, all over at once, like stepping into cold water and then feeling the water warm up. The voice at the back of my neck didn't go away. It changed. It got lower and calmer, like a man who'd been yelling into a radio and finally figured out somebody was listening.

Survivor (Rare Trait)Your instincts speak to you in a calm voice now. You can feel danger coming, gauge the strength of those around you and know when to run, without the panic or paranoia that comes with it, and your nerves stay steady under pressure. You are immune to addiction. Your skin is dense and tough, hardening a moment before a blow lands, and that toughness scales with your physical stats, serving as natural armor at higher levels.Fuse charges: 0.

I stood in the garage and listened.

The furnace through the wall. Pancakes in the kitchen, and Kristen laughing at something Dad said. Martha on the walkie-talkie, testing it: Randy, come in, the pancakes are getting cold, over. A car out on the street, going by slow.

And the voice. Still no words, only the shape of something at the back of my neck, unbothered, calm as a sentry at three in the morning who's stood a thousand nights of watch and knows exactly what a car going slow on New Year's Day sounds like.

That's nothing, it said. Go eat.

So I went and ate. Fuse charges: 0—both of them spent before the next one, which was the exact thing I'd been scared to do since November. I wrote it in the rainbow unicorn at the breakfast table next to my pancakes while Kristen read it upside down and didn't ask:

SURVIVOR. (Half Light + Sober + Tough Skin. 1/1/97, 6:10 a.m.)Charges: 0. Done. No more not yet.

Kristen flew home on the second.

At Gate 74, again, she hugged Martha, who cried, and Mom, who almost did, and Dad, who shook her hand and then gave up and hugged her too. Then me.

"Six o'clock," she said into my scarf. My scarf again: Sid had given it back at the end of the run that morning, folded, on the hood of the Volvo, without a word.

"Six o'clock."

She didn't let go. She stood at the gate with her face in the lumpy green wool, and I felt her take a breath and hold it.

"They've known you since you were five," she said into the scarf, too softly for anybody else to hear. "Tatum and Sid. They've known you your whole life. They're here. They see you every single morning at five. And they're—" She stopped. "Have you looked at them, Randy?"

"Kris."

"And I'm in Ohio." Her voice cracked a little. "I get you on the phone at six o'clock and in dreams when you remember to sleep. And I'm scared that one morning I'll call and you'll..." She didn't finish.

The hum came up in my throat. It knew what she needed, right there, warm and easy: Tell her she has nothing to worry about.

I checked. Is it true?

I didn't know. That was the honest answer. I didn't know what Tatum's face had done on the roof, or what Sid's my idiot meant, or what not yet meant either, and I wasn't going to tell her something I didn't know just because she needed to hear it. Not her.

So I told her what I did know.

"You're the one who comes in to get me," I said.

Kristen held her breath.

"When I'm stuck. When I'm somewhere nobody else can reach. When I haven't slept in five days and there's a doll in the hedges. You're the one who comes in." I held on to her. "Nobody else can do that, Kris. Nobody else even knows the door's there."

She was quiet a long while. Then she pulled back and looked at me, in the RANDY vest, with her bangs in her eyes and her face red.

"Something's coming," she said. "Isn't it."

I looked at her face, which knew things about doors before they opened.

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

"When?"

"Soon."

Kristen nodded slowly. She didn't ask what.

"Then I'll sleep with the phone," she said.

She reached up and fixed the scarf where she'd crushed it and tucked the ends in, and then stopped with her fingers on the lumpy green wool and looked at it.

"It's terrible," she said. "This scarf."

"I know."

"It's really, really warm, though," said Kristen Parker grudgingly, like it cost her something. She patted it once, the way Sid had, and went down the jetway without looking back. She'd always been smarter than me about that kind of thing.

V. The Hearing

Department 7 of the Sonoma County Superior Court in Santa Rosa is a long wood-paneled room with a drop ceiling, bad fluorescent lights, and a seal on the wall behind the judge that's been painted over so many times the bear in the middle looks like a dog. On Monday, January 6, 1997, at nine in the morning, it was full.

Every seat. The press had the back two rows: Gale on the aisle in a gray suit with her notebook, a man from the Chronicle, a woman from the Press Democrat, a guy from Court TV with a ponytail. Behind them, standing along the back wall, were people from Woodsboro, half of whom I recognized. Mrs. Tate from the Hallmark, who'd moved to Fresno and driven back for it. Mr. Bradley, in a tie. A couple of teachers. Kids from school who'd cut class to be there—kids I'd known for thirteen years and three months—who looked at me when I came in and then looked away.

I sat in the second row behind the DA's table with Mom and Dad. Sid sat at the end of the row with her father, and Neil held her hand in both of his the whole time like he was afraid she'd float off.

And at the defense table, in a navy suit that didn't fit him across the shoulders, hair cut short and hands folded on the table, sat Cotton Weary.

I'd never seen him in this life. In Theo's I'd seen him in two movies, played by an actor with a big jaw and bad hair, and thought of him mostly as a punchline: the guy who just wants to be on TV. The night of the party I'd called him a Sabretooth-looking motherfucker in my head. He didn't look like that now. He looked like a man who'd spent a year in a room the size of a parking space waiting to be killed for something he didn't do, and who was working very hard to keep his face blank in case somebody took it away again.

He turned around in his chair once while the clerk was doing the paperwork and looked at the second row. At Sid.

Sid looked back. Neither of them did anything, and after a moment he turned around again.

They played the tape at ten-fifteen.

The DA set it up himself, a Sony microcassette player plugged into a little amplifier on a cart with two speakers aimed at the room. It was the same microcassette I'd set on the top step of the Machers' porch on a Friday night in September with a bullet in my shoulder, red light on, on VOR. It had been in an evidence bag in a locker at the sheriff's station for three and a half months, and Burke had brought it over himself, still in the bag. He nodded to me on his way past.

The room listened to it.

Twenty-three minutes. I'm not going to write all of it down; I've heard it enough. You've probably heard it too, if you've seen the movie—not the real one, the one they'll make out of it someday with the wrong title, Stab, where everybody's a little prettier and nobody bleeds as much and it isn't my voice.

It was my voice in that courtroom, though, coming out of two little speakers. A seventeen-year-old's voice, high and tight and breathing too hard, with a hole in its shoulder, talking to two boys it had known since second grade. Asking them questions. Getting them to say it. We killed your mother, Sid. Billy's voice, calm, almost proud. And Stu, laughing.

I watched Sid while it played. I couldn't help it. She sat at the end of the row with her father's hands around hers and listened to her boyfriend explain how he'd killed her mother, in public, in a courtroom, for the second time, and she didn't move at all.

Then the tape got to the end. The lawn. My voice saying That's not how it goes. Stu saying something. My voice again: New ending.

And the gunshot.

The whole room flinched, a hundred people at once, and then froze. The tape ran on another minute and a half—the front door, the hall, my feet—because the recorder was voice-activated and there was a lot of voice. Two more shots, and Billy saying my name, and a third. Then four more. Then nothing but the hiss and the sound of a girl crying softly somewhere far from the microphone, which was Sid, in September.

The DA pressed STOP.

Nobody spoke. The judge, an older woman with reading glasses on a chain, looked at the cassette player for a while. Then she took her glasses off and let them hang and looked at the defense table.

"Mr. Weary," she said. "Would you stand, please."

Sid testified at eleven.

They didn't need her to. Everybody in that room knew the tape was enough. But her lawyer had asked if she wanted to, and at Thanksgiving, at our table, she'd said yes in the voice she uses for things she's already decided. She walked up to the stand in a black skirt and a white blouse with her hair pulled back and the crescent-moon earrings Tatum gave her, put her hand on the Bible, sat down, and looked straight at Cotton Weary.

"A year ago," said Sidney Prescott, "I sat in this chair and said I saw you leaving my house the night my mother died."

The room was silent.

"I didn't see you," said Sid. "I saw a man in a jacket like yours. In the dark. And I was sixteen, and my mom was dead, and everybody kept asking me who it was, and I wanted it to be somebody. I wanted it to be over." Her voice didn't shake. "I was wrong. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Mr. Weary. You lost a year because of me. I can't give it back."

Cotton Weary looked at her.

He couldn't say anything; he wasn't the one on the stand. But for a second his face quit trying to hide things, and what was under it was so tired and so young that I had to look away.

The judge vacated the conviction at 2:40 that afternoon. There was paperwork—there's always paperwork—and Cotton Weary walked out of the Sonoma County Superior Court on Wednesday, January 8, at 10:15 in the morning, into a crowd of reporters on the courthouse steps, squinting at the sun in his navy suit like he'd forgotten what it looked like. The first thing he did, with forty microphones in his face, was look around the crowd for Gale Weathers, find her, and grin.

"Ms. Weathers," said Cotton Weary. "You wrote a book about me. You ever think about doing a sequel?"

VI. Did Randy Meeks Know?

It aired on Thursday the ninth at eight o'clock on Top Story. The whole hour.

We watched it in the living room, all four of us, on the new couch in front of the new TV, because Mom said if the whole country was going to watch it then we were going to watch it together as a family, and then we were going to talk about it, and then we were never going to talk about it again.

It was good. I'll give her that much.

Nobody tells you that about Gale Weathers. She was insufferable and ruthless, and she'd fucked over a lot of people on her way up, probably Dewey too, eventually, but she could cut a story like a surgeon. It opened on the courthouse steps on Wednesday, Cotton squinting into the sun: a man freed by a tape. Then back to September. The town. The murders. Footage of the memorial at the school, Sid in the crowd, me in a sling. Gale walking through Woodsboro in a camel coat, in voice-over: a small town with a lot of movie fans, and a lot of dead teenagers.

Then the tape—not all of it, only the parts that mattered. Billy's voice, We killed your mother, Sid, over a slow pan across a photo of Maureen Prescott.

Then the gunshot.

Then Gale in my living room, this room, across from me on the old couch, the one that was in a landfill now. Her voice: When did you know it was Billy?

They used all of it. Her whole case, cut clean. The lump on Billy's head; the kid in the vest who'd figured it out on day one. Tatum's line about Billy switching off and back on, wrong. The hidden-camera footage from the party, from behind the fake ficus, grainy and green: me in the middle of a room full of drunk teenagers, turning my head and looking straight into the lens. Freeze-frame. Zoom. My face, seventeen, in the dark, looking at the camera like I knew exactly what it was.

Gale's voice over it: He knew where the camera was. He knew to bring a tape recorder. He knew a man was on death row for a murder he didn't commit.

Three people died after Randy Meeks knew. Principal Arthur Himbry. My cameraman, Kenny Jones. And Billy Loomis.

Then me on the couch, in close-up: I don't know. Both. Probably.

And at the end, the best two minutes she'd ever shot. Me standing up out of the old couch in this room, walking past the camera to the door, turning around, and saying very clearly, in a voice I didn't recognize as mine, Here's your exclusive, you weasel.

She'd left it in. Of course she had.

Then a black screen, white letters, and her voice, low, the last line of the hour:

Randy Meeks saved the life of Sidney Prescott. He saved Tatum Riley. He got the tape that set Cotton Weary free. Nobody disputes that.

But did he know?

And if he did, what else does he know?

Credits.

Nobody in the living room spoke.

Dad turned off the TV. Martha was on the floor in front of the couch with San-D in her lap, staring at the black screen with her jaw tight, and San-D had turned around to look up at her face. Mom had her arms crossed so hard her knuckles were white.

"That woman," said my mother, in a voice I'd never heard out of her, low and shaking and furious. "That woman sat in this room. On my couch. She drank my coffee."

"Diane."

"She called him a coward, Ted. On television. In front of the whole—"

"She didn't call me a coward," I said.

They all looked at me.

"She asked a question," I said. "That's all she did. She asked if I knew." I looked at the black TV. "And the answer's yes. Sort of. Not everything, not the way she thinks. But enough. I knew enough to be scared, and enough to bring Dad's gun and a tape recorder to a party, and not enough to save Mr. Himbry, or Kenny. That's all true. She didn't say anything that wasn't true." I swallowed. "She just said it in the order that hurts the most."

Nobody said anything.

"That's what she's good at," said Martha from the floor, softly.

I looked at the Hamilton. 8:58.

"I have to go," I said. "I'm on at ten."

Rules of Engagement, Episode Three, went out live at 10:00 p.m. on Thursday, January 9, 1997, on WCTV Channel 27, three weeks and one grounding late.

Dale had wanted to cancel. He'd called the house at six. Randy, son, I've seen the promos, the whole county's going to be watching that thing at eight, and then they're going to flip the channel and see you, and the phones are going to— And I'd said, Yeah, Dale. That's why we're doing it.

So at 10:00, under three lights, one of which still buzzed, with Tatum on Camera One, Martha in the booth in her Certified Producer lanyard with her hand on the board, and Dale behind her with his hand on the seven-second-delay button, I looked into the lens.

"Good evening," I said. "Welcome to Rules of Engagement. I'm Randy Meeks. If you were watching Channel 4 earlier tonight, you know why you're here." I let it sit. "Tonight's topic was supposed to be how to survive a winter power outage. We're going to skip that. The phones are open. Ask me anything."

All four lines lit up at once, before I'd finished the sentence.

The first caller was a man from Petaluma who wanted to know how it felt to get away with murder. Dale's hand hovered over the button. Through the glass I shook my head at him, very slightly.

"It doesn't feel like getting away with anything, sir," I said. "It feels like I shot two people I'd known since I was seven, in a house I used to sleep over at, and I think about it every day. I don't know if that's what you're asking. But that's how it feels."

He didn't have anything to say to that. He hung up.

The second was an older woman from Santa Rosa, crying. Her son had been at Stu's that night and had run, and he'd been ashamed of running ever since. Had he done the right thing? The hum knew exactly what she needed, and I checked—is it true?—and it was, so I said it. "Ma'am, the people who ran are alive. Tell him I said running was the smartest thing anybody did that night. Tell him I wish more people had."

The third was a kid who said I was so cool and could I say hi to his sister. I said hi to his sister.

The fourth was the one Dale's hand came down on. I never heard what they said. I saw Martha's face go white in the booth, and Dale hit the button, and seven seconds of dead air went out over Sonoma County while Martha stabbed the line off with one finger like she was killing a bug.

Then the fifth.

Line two. Martha picked up, listened, and turned around in the booth to look at me through the glass with her eyes very wide. She mouthed something I couldn't read. She mouthed it again, bigger.

Dale leaned over her shoulder and listened. Then he straightened, looked at me, and slowly took his hand off the button, and Martha punched it through.

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

A little pause. Somebody breathing. A TV on low in the background.

"Hey, kid," said Cotton Weary.

Tatum's camera dipped an inch, then came back up.

"Mr. Weary," I said.

"Cotton. Mr. Weary was my dad. And he was a son of a bitch." A short laugh. "I'm in a motel in Santa Rosa. They give you a motel. You get out of prison, they give you a motel and a check for forty dollars and a bus schedule." Another pause. "I watched Gale's thing."

"Yeah."

"She asked did you know." I could hear him moving—lying down on a motel bed, maybe. "You want to know what I think?"

"Sure."

"I think I don't give a shit." He said it flat, with no heat in it. "A whole town knew I didn't do it. Half of 'em, anyway. The sheriff knew it was thin. Gale knew, she wrote a whole book. The girl—" He stopped. "Sidney knew she wasn't sure. And for a year every single one of 'em went to work and ate dinner and watched TV while I sat in a box in San Quentin waiting on a date." A breath. "You were seventeen. You went to a party with a tape recorder. You're the only one who did anything."

I let that sit.

"So I called to say thanks," said Cotton Weary. "That's it. That's the whole call. Thanks." And then, after a second, in a different voice, lighter and quicker, the voice from the courthouse steps: "Also, I hear you got a TV show. I was thinking, you know, a guy like me, with my story, I'd be a hell of a guest, and if you ever—"

I heard it under the joke, under I'd be a hell of a guest. The thing he needed.

The hum came up low and clear: He's been saying he didn't do it for a year, to everybody, and nobody listened. He got out Wednesday and he hasn't stopped saying it. To the cameras. To Gale. To you. He's going to keep saying it for the rest of his life unless somebody tells him he can stop.

I checked. Is it true? It was.

"Cotton," I said.

He stopped.

"You didn't do it," I said. "Everybody knows now. Everybody. It's on a tape, in a courthouse, in public record, forever. You don't have to prove it anymore." I looked into Tatum's lens, at a man in a motel room in Santa Rosa I'd never met. "You can stop."

The line went silent.

It stayed silent so long that Dale leaned over in the booth to check the board in case the call had dropped. It hadn't. I could hear him breathing, and the TV in the background, some late movie. And then something else, a small sound I've never told anybody about and won't now.

"...Yeah," said Cotton Weary finally, rough. "Yeah. Okay."

He hung up.

I looked at the camera for a while, and seven seconds of nothing went out over Sonoma County, and nobody pressed the button. Dale told me afterward it was the best dead air he'd ever put on.

"We'll take one more call," I said.

Gale called the station at 10:31, after we'd signed off.

Dale picked up in the hallway by the Coke machine, listened, and held the phone out to me with an expression of deep and total neutrality.

"Weathers," he said.

I took it. "Gale."

"You told him he could stop." She sounded strange—tired, nothing like the courthouse steps. "On the air. I watched. I was at Dewey's."

"Yeah."

"That was..." She stopped. I'd never once heard Gale Weathers stop in the middle of a sentence. "That was the best thing on television tonight."

I waited.

"Including mine," said Gale. "Don't you dare quote me." She hung up before I could answer, which I've since decided was the most Gale Weathers thing she ever did.

VII. Be Kind, Rewind

The tape came on Friday.

I wasn't there for this part. I'm telling it the way Dewey told it to me later, at one in the morning on Sunday, on his kitchen floor, in the voice of a man reading his own police report.

It came to the Woodsboro Motor Lodge, where Gale had kept a room since September, in a padded mailer with a Bellingham, Washington postmark and no return address. Gus brought it up to her room himself, because he liked her, because she tipped. Inside was a VHS tape. No case. No label on the spine. On top of the cassette was a faded, peeling orange sticker, the kind every video store in America puts on every rental—BE KIND, REWIND—and under it somebody had stuck a yellow Post-it in neat block capitals:

YOU SAID ON TV YOU WANTED TAPES. YOU'LL WANT THIS ONE.

Gale got a lot of tapes. Since the Woodsboro segment in October, Top Story had been getting a box of them a week: home videos, news footage, people who'd taped their own kids at the memorial, people who'd taped the sky over Woodsboro and thought they'd caught a UFO. Once the promos for Did Randy Meeks Know started running, the box turned into a mailbag. Her producer in Los Angeles forwarded the good ones. Most of them were nothing.

This one hadn't come through the network, though. It had come to her room, which meant somebody knew where she was staying, which meant, to Gale Weathers, somebody close.

She thought it was a tip. Dewey said she was sure of it: a party tape, maybe, from somebody at Stu's who'd had a camcorder and seen the segment and wanted to sell. Or the sheriff's department, leaking. Or some kid who'd seen something.

So on Saturday night, January 11, at Dewey's apartment over Hendrickson's Hardware on Main, after Chinese takeout and two glasses of wine for Gale and a Diet Coke for Dewey, who was on call, Gale took the tape out of her bag, set it on the coffee table, and looked at him.

Dewey said, "Gale, if it's evidence, I'm supposed to—"

Gale looked at him.

And Dewey, who had never once in his life been able to say no to her—who'd once driven to the San Francisco airport at four in the morning because she'd left her good earrings at his place—put the tape in his VCR.

They watched it at 10:40 p.m. When it was over, the phone in Dewey's kitchen rang.

My phone rang at 11:20.

The kitchen phone, the one on the wall that Mom's list on the fridge still said was FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY. I was in the den, still dressed, writing in the rainbow unicorn by the green light of the computer. I'd come home from my shift at Bradley Video at nine-fifteen and hadn't made it to bed yet. I picked up on the first ring, before it could wake anybody.

"Meeks residence."

"Randy."

Gale. But not the courthouse-steps voice, or the one from the hallway at Channel 27, or my living room in November. This one was small and flat and very careful, the way people talk when they're trying not to let their voice go anywhere.

"I need to ask you about your list," said Gale Weathers.

I closed my eyes.

"Which item," I said. I knew which item.

"Number six." I could hear her breathing. "What to do if you watch a videotape and the phone rings right after."

Behind her, very faint, Dewey was saying something low and soothing that didn't sound soothing at all.

"Did you watch it?" I said.

"Yes."

"Did Dewey?"

Silence. Then, smaller: "...Yes."

"What did the phone say."

Gale didn't answer right away.

"A little girl," she said. "A little girl's voice. Two words."

I opened my eyes. The den. The green light. The Hamilton on my wrist, the second hand sweeping around without a tick.

"Don't touch the tape," I said. "Don't touch it, don't rewind it, don't take it out of the machine. Don't go anywhere. I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

"Randy, what is it—"

"Fifteen minutes, Gale."

I hung up and stood in the dark kitchen with my hand still on the receiver.

On my belt, the walkie-talkie crackled.

KSSSHK. "Randy?" Martha, half asleep, from her bed upstairs. She'd heard the phone. She heard everything. "Was that the emergency phone? Over."

I picked it up.

"It's okay, Mart. Go back to sleep. Over."

A pause. Static.

"Do I need to come get you? Over."

I looked out the window at the dark street, at the new transformer humming on the pole at the end of it, and past that toward Main Street and a little apartment over a hardware store where the TV was still on.

"Not tonight," I said. "Go to sleep. I love you. Over."

Another pause, longer.

"...You never say that on the walkie-talkie. Over."

"I'm saying it now. Over and out."

I knocked on my parents' door on the way out, because that's Rule Two, and then I left a note under the sugar bowl, the way I had before Ohio—Dewey needs help. Back by morning. - R.—and took Dad's keys off the hook and went out to the Volvo and drove to Main Street in the dark.

Dewey's apartment was one room and a kitchen over the hardware store, up an outside staircase that rang under my feet. He had the door open before I knocked. He was in jeans and a Sheriff's Department softball T-shirt with his gun on his belt, which I'd never seen him wear at home, and his face was the color of paper.

"Randy," he said. "Hey. Hey, man. Thanks for—she said you'd know. She said it's on your list." He tried to smile, and it didn't take. "Is it on your list?"

"It's on my list, Dewey."

Gale was on the couch, sitting very straight with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap, makeup still perfect, staring at the TV. It was on. The VCR's little green clock said 11:37, and the screen was snow, static hissing with the sound turned low, filling the dark room with gray light.

"I didn't touch it," said Gale, without looking at me. "You said not to touch it."

"Good."

"It ended, and it went to that, and then the phone rang." She was still looking at the static. "Dewey answered. And then he handed it to me. And I listened. And it was a little girl." Her voice cracked; she stopped, fixed it, went on. "And then I called you. And I've been sitting here. Looking at that. For forty minutes."

I sat down on the coffee table in front of her, between her and the TV, so she'd have to look at me instead.

"Gale," I said. "Look at me."

She looked at me.

And I felt the other part come up in my throat, the part that was new since Christmas Eve. When people stand with you and can hear you, a little of your resistance becomes theirs. I didn't know how to turn it on, or whether it turned on at all. I just talked, low and even, the way I'd talked to eight people on a living room floor in the broken glass, and felt it go out of me like warmth going out of your hands into somebody else's.

"I'm going to tell you exactly what this is," I said. "All of it. And I need you to listen, and not argue, and not take notes. Can you do that?"

Gale looked at me. Her hands had stopped shaking. I watched it happen, and I don't think she noticed.

"Yes," she said.

So I told them.

Seven days. A girl in a well. A tape that wasn't recorded so much as made, by somebody who could put pictures into things just by thinking them. A phone call. A week of nosebleeds and bad dreams, your face going blurry in photographs, horses going crazy when you walk by. And on the seventh night, at the same minute you watched it, every TV in the house turns itself on, and she comes out.

I didn't tell them how I knew. Dewey didn't ask. Gale opened her mouth to ask twice and shut it twice.

"Four kids in Washington State," I said. "In October. Same minute, four different places. It's a federal case—there's an FBI agent who's been working it for three months. That's where this came from. Moesko Island. Somebody watched it there and passed it on, and somebody passed it on again, and somebody mailed it to you." I looked at Gale. "Because you said on TV that you wanted tapes."

Gale closed her eyes.

"You said passed it on," said Dewey slowly. He was standing behind the couch with his hands on the back of it on either side of Gale's shoulders. "What do you mean, passed it on?"

There it was. The question I'd been dreading since the kitchen phone rang.

I could lie. I could say I don't know and spare them ever having to choose. But it was their lives, and that's not a call you get to make for somebody else.

"There's a way out," I said. "Only one that anybody's ever found. You make a copy of the tape, and you show it to somebody else. Somebody who hasn't seen it. When they've watched it, your seven days stop. And theirs start."

The room was silent except for the static.

"That's it," I said. "That's the cure. That's what the kid on Moesko did, and the man on the ferry, and everybody between him and your mailbox. It's why this thing didn't die with those four kids in October. A whole chain of people who each looked somebody in the face and handed them this so they could live."

Gale didn't move.

Dewey said, "No."

He said it immediately, before I'd even finished, the way you say no when somebody asks if you want to touch a stove. Flat and simple and done.

"No," said Deputy Dwight Riley. "No way. I'm not doing that to anybody."

"Dewey—"

"I'm not putting that on somebody, Randy. I'm a cop. I don't—that's not—" He shook his head like a man asked to explain why water is wet. "No."

Then we both looked at Gale.

She sat very straight on the couch with her hands folded and her face not moving at all, and I watched her think. I watched all of it go across her face, everything I knew about Gale Weathers. The ambition. The book. The career she'd clawed up out of local news by her fingernails. The thousand times she'd made a choice that was good for Gale and bad for somebody else and slept fine afterward. She'd fucked over so many people. I'd thought that on a plane to Ohio. I'd believed it. I still did.

She was thirty-one years old, and somebody had just told her she could live if she handed a tape to a stranger.

"Who would I even—" she said softly, to nobody, and stopped.

I kept the thing in my throat to myself. I didn't trust it here. I didn't know what was true, and it wasn't mine to decide anyway.

Gale looked at the static. Then she looked up at Dewey behind her with his hands on the couch, and something happened to her face I'd never seen happen to it. It got younger.

"I've done a lot of things for a story," said Gale Weathers. "Not that one."

"Okay," I said finally. "Okay. Then nobody passes it."

Dewey let out a breath he'd been holding since 10:40.

"Then we've got seven days," I said. "Six and a half. To find a third way. There has to be one. There's always one—that's the whole point of a rule, there's always somebody who reads it closer than everybody else." I got up off the coffee table. "Where's the remote?"

"Why?" said Gale.

I didn't answer. I went to the VCR and looked at the little green clock. 11:52.

I've gone over what I was thinking a lot since, and I'm still not sure I was right. What I was thinking was: I don't know this tape.

I knew the movie. I'd seen it a handful of times in another life. I knew the ladder and the chair and the horse and the woman at the mirror, the shapes of them, the way you know a song you heard on the radio years ago. But the movie was a movie. Somebody had made it in my world in 2002, with a budget and a director and a girl in a white dress with her hair in her face. This was the real thing, the thing the movie was about, and every real thing I'd met so far had been a little different from its movie. Freddy hadn't been funny. Ghostface had been two kids I'd known since second grade. The toys had been people. And I was about to go to Washington State on a clock with two people I cared about, to find a third way out of a curse nobody had ever found a third way out of, and I didn't know what was on the tape.

Under that was the thing I didn't write down: If I'm on the clock too, I can't quit on them.

At the back of my neck, Survivor said, very calmly, Don't.

Under my breastbone, Battle Maniac lifted its head and said, Do it.

I've thought a lot about which one I listened to, and I don't think it was either. I think it was the kid—a skinny seventeen-year-old in a green vest who'd walked into a dream with forty-eight batteries in his pants, scared out of his mind, because a girl he'd never met needed somebody to come in after her. He'd have watched it.

"Randy," said Dewey. He'd figured it out. "Randy, don't. Hey. Don't. You don't have to—"

"I know I don't." I found the remote on the arm of the couch. "That's why it's okay."

Gale was on her feet. "Randy, no, absolutely not, I won't let you—"

"Gale." I looked at her. I let the hum come up a little, and it was true, so I said it. "You just decided you'd rather die than hand this to a stranger. I'm not a stranger. And I'm not taking anything from you. Nobody's passing anything. I'm just watching a tape." I turned back to the VCR. "Somebody has to know what's on it. Might as well be the guy with the list."

The faded orange sticker was still on top of the cassette. BE KIND, REWIND. I hit the button and listened to it whir.

I'm going to tell you what was on it once and then never again, because I've seen it every night since with my eyes closed, and I don't want to put it in your head too.

Static. Then a ring.

A ring of white light on black, ragged at the edges like the sun in an eclipse—or like looking up from the bottom of something deep at a circle of sky.

A woman at a mirror, brushing her long dark hair, very slowly. In the mirror, behind her, something moved, and she didn't turn around. She turned the mirror instead, on its hinge, to face the wall. Then back.

A chair in an empty room, rocking. Nobody in it.

A ladder leaning against a wall, against nothing.

A man at a window with his back to the camera, looking out. He never moved, and somehow I knew he'd been standing at that window for years and had never once turned around to see what was behind him.

A horse lying down in a field. Too still.

Dark water, with something just under the surface.

A tree on a hill, on fire, all by itself, in the dark.

A fingernail being pulled back, slowly, close up. I'm not going to describe that one.

A box opening on a long dark tangle of hair.

A fly crawling across the screen—on the screen, across the glass, from the inside. Dewey made a sound behind me.

And then a well.

Old stone. A ring of stone in a field in gray light, motionless, and the camera, if there was a camera, moving toward it slowly, the way you walk up to something in a dream, or to the edge of something, knowing you shouldn't look down.

It didn't look down. It cut to black.

I sat on Dewey's coffee table with the remote in my hand while the static came back and hissed, and realized I'd stopped breathing somewhere around the woman at the mirror. Then, in the kitchen, the phone rang.

Dewey didn't move. Gale didn't move. I got up off the coffee table and walked into the kitchen, where a beige wall phone was ringing over a counter of Chinese takeout boxes, and picked it up.

I didn't say hello.

At first there was nothing on the line—not static, nothing, the sound of a very large, very empty space, like the inside of a seashell. Like the bottom of a well.

Then a little girl's voice, close, right up against my ear, soft and hoarse and patient, like a child who's been waiting a very long time and isn't upset about it, because she knows she'll get what she wants in the end.

"Seven days."

The line went dead.

I stood in Dewey Riley's kitchen with the receiver in my hand until the dial tone came, and listened to that for a while.

And in front of my eyes, in the dark kitchen, the color of a TV left on in an empty room, the panel opened.

Story in progress: Seven Days.Tickets can be used when the current story is complete.[FUSE] locked. [DISMANTLE] locked. Fuse charges: 0.

Zero, I thought. For once there was nothing left on the table and nothing saved for later.

I hung up the phone.

Behind me Dewey and Gale were standing side by side in the doorway, very close, the way people stand after a car accident. Dewey had his arm around her. Gale had her hand flat on his chest. They were both looking at me.

"Well?" said Gale. Her voice almost held.

I looked at my wrist. At a Hamilton with R.M. 1944 on the back, which a man had worn across the Pacific and my father had kept in a desk drawer for six years, waiting for a reason. The second hand swept around the face without a sound.

12:09 a.m. Sunday, January 12, 1997.

Theirs had started at 10:40. Mine at 12:08, an hour and twenty-eight minutes behind them.

"Seven days," I said. "Saturday night. Ten-forty for you. Eight minutes after midnight for me."

Gale nodded slowly. She didn't write it down. She didn't need to; I could see her file it behind her eyes in the place where Gale Weathers keeps deadlines.

"Then we'd better get moving," she said. "I know a man at the network who owes me a plane."

I pressed the little crown on the side of the Hamilton and wound it the way my father had shown me on Christmas morning, all the way, until it stopped, and started counting.