Interlude 2: When I get Back (Patreon)

I. Over and Out

The network plane came down into Sonoma County at 4:10 on Sunday afternoon out of a gold sky, over brown hills with green in the folds and vineyards with their rows of bare brown sticks running away over the slopes, and the wind sock by the runway hanging limp. Seven days, and it all looked exactly the same. I don't know why that surprised me.

They were at the fence. All three of them. Dad in his Cal sweatshirt with his hands in his pockets. Mom beside him in her good church coat, arms crossed tight across her chest, holding herself. And Martha in front with both hands on the chain-link and her face pressed between them, something black in one fist.

The walkie-talkie.

I saw her see me through the window as we taxied in. I saw her lift the walkie-talkie to her mouth and press the button and say something I couldn't possibly hear through the window and the engines and the fence.

In my pocket—I'd fished it out of the wet jeans somewhere over Oregon—the other one clicked. It had been to the bottom of a well. By rights it should have been dead. It clicked anyway.

Dewey went down the stairs first with Gale's hand in his and the evidence bag under his other arm. Gale had her sunglasses on and her hair down, and Dewey's sheriff's department sweatshirt over her blouse, and over that the camel coat, spotless, which she'd decided not to discuss. At the bottom of the stairs she stopped and turned around and looked up at me in the door of the plane.

She'd said it all on the mountain. She took off her sunglasses and looked at me without them for about three seconds, and then she put them back on and turned and walked to the Taurus with Dewey without looking back.

I came down the stairs.

Martha came through the gate in the fence before anybody could stop her. I don't think anybody tried. She came across the tarmac at a dead run in her sneakers with the walkie-talkie in her fist and hit me at the bottom of the stairs so hard I went back a step and sat down on the second one.

She didn't say anything. She held on with both arms around my neck, her face in Sid's scarf and the walkie-talkie digging into the back of my head, and I held on back.

After a while she lifted her head. Her face was a mess. She looked at me from about four inches away, very serious, the way she looked at everything.

"Are you back?" said Martha Meeks.

"I'm back."

She looked at me a moment longer. Then she held the walkie-talkie up between our faces and pressed the button, and I heard it click in my pocket.

"Over and out," said my sister.

"Over and out," I said, and she put her face back in the scarf and cried.

Mom hugged me in the parking lot by the car with her hand on the back of my head, the way she had on the lawn in September. She didn't say anything either. She held on and breathed, and every so often she moved her hand a little on my hair, like she was checking I was still there.

Dad didn't hug me right away. He took my duffel and put it in the trunk and closed the trunk and stood with his hand on it. Then he turned and looked at me over the roof of the Volvo.

"One minute after," said my father.

"One minute after."

He nodded and looked off at the vineyards and the gold light going down over the hills. His jaw worked.

"I sat at that table," he said, "from eleven-thirty. With the phone. Your mother on one side and your sister on the other. And at twelve-oh-eight I put my hand on it." He looked at his hand, flat on the trunk of the Volvo. "And I thought, if it doesn't ring, I'm going to sit here with my hand on it until it does. Until morning. Until next week. Until somebody comes and tells me." He looked at me. "And it rang. Before the second hand got to the top."

"I ran," I said. "From the porch. In socks."

My father laughed once. It came out of him like something breaking.

Then he came around the car and pulled me in the way he does it, all elbows, and held on, and said into my hair, low enough that Mom and Martha couldn't hear, "Your hand's cold."

I'd forgotten. I'd been holding on to his arm with my right hand.

"Yeah," I said. "It's been cold since Saturday."

He didn't let go. Behind his own back, where nobody could see, he found my right hand with his and held it—my father's hand, big and dry and warm, wrapped around my cold one.

"Is that part of what you're going to tell us?" said my father.

"Yeah."

"Okay." He didn't let go of it. "Okay. Tonight?"

I thought about seven days of being too tired to think. About a kitchen table in December and three rules, and a light around my neck last Sunday that had let me say home.

"Tonight," I said.

II. When I Get Back

We ate first. Mom insisted. She'd made a Sunday roast the way she did for birthdays, potatoes and carrots around it and gravy in the boat that only came out on holidays, and she put a plate in front of me with about twice as much on it as anybody else's and stood behind my chair with her hand on my shoulder until I'd eaten a bite.

"There," said Diane Meeks. "Good." And sat down.

I ate all of it. I hadn't known I was that hungry. In seven days I'd eaten clam chowder on a ferry and Thai food on a floor and a sandwich from a lodge in the snow, and somewhere in there a salad and a pickle for Dana Scully. I hadn't eaten anything my mother made.

Nobody talked about it during dinner. That was the rule; I could feel it the way you feel weather. Martha told me about school: a girl named Jessica had said I'd been arrested, and Martha had told her I was with the FBI, which was true, and Jessica hadn't believed her, which made it even better. Dad told me the Volvo had a noise. Mom told me Mrs. Fimple from across the street had brought over a casserole on Wednesday just in case, without saying in case of what, and Mom hadn't asked.

The Devas' cage was on the kitchen counter; Martha had brought it down. Cham-P was pressed against the bars nearest me, big and golden, first to say hello the way he always was. San-D sat up on her hind legs beside him with her sparkly black eyes on my face. Jum-P was asleep in the food dish. Maga-Z wasn't in the cage at all. He was sitting on top of it in his crooked red scarf, the latch somehow open underneath him, watching me eat with narrow, considering eyes, like he'd known exactly when I'd be back and resented that nobody had asked him.

After dinner Mom washed and Dad dried, and Martha and I cleared the table the way we always did, the way normal families do, and nobody said anything. When the last dish was in the rack, Mom dried her hands on the towel and hung it on the oven handle and turned around and looked at me.

"Living room," said my mother.

It was different this time. That's what I'd been chewing on over the clouds, with Gale asleep across the aisle.

In December, at three in the morning at the kitchen table, I'd told them what I was. Something happened to me. It gave me things. It costs something. The things in the movies are real. I'd shown them the spear and the cane and the hamsters, and my father had made three rules, and we'd all sat there until the sky went gray. That had been the hard part, and it was done.

This was the other part, the one nobody tells you about when you tell your family the truth: you have to keep telling them. Every time you come home from somewhere, you come home a little different, with something new in your hands or behind your shoulder or in your blood, and you have to sit down in the living room and show them, so the son at their table is the son they know about and not the one they knew about last month.

That was Rule One too. I'd figured it out somewhere over Oregon. No lies didn't only mean don't say things that aren't true. It meant don't let them keep believing something that stopped being true while you were gone.

So I sat down on the coffee table facing the couch, the way I'd sat on the one at Dewey's facing Gale a week before. Mom and Dad sat side by side on the couch. Martha sat in the armchair with her knees up and the walkie-talkie in her lap. Behind them the new front window had its sticker off at last, and the street was dark outside, and the Christmas lights were gone from the Fimples' eaves. The tree was gone. The plywood was gone. The new couch still smelled like the store. The room looked like itself again—a living room in January, in a house where nothing had ever happened.

"I didn't wear the light," I said. "On purpose. I don't need it for this. You already know what I am." I looked at Mom. "I just need to tell you what I brought back."

I started with the hand.

"It's cold," I said, and held it out, my right hand, palm up in the lamplight. "Dad noticed at the airport. It's been cold since Saturday night. Since the bottom of the well."

My mother looked at my hand. She didn't touch it. Not yet.

"Her name was Samara," I said. "I told you on Sunday. The girl on the tape. The one nobody came for." I looked at the hand. "I went down to get her. Into the well under the cabin, on Saturday night, at the end. I went down a rope in the dark into the water, and she was there at the bottom, and she—she showed me things. Everything. What it was like. Seven days at the bottom of a well, looking up at a ring of light. And then she asked me why I came."

"What did you say?" said Martha softly.

"I said because somebody should have."

Nobody said anything.

"And then she took my hand," I said. "And she told me not to look away. And I didn't. And the curse stopped. All of it. Every copy, everywhere—Gale's, and Dewey's, and mine, and every one Mulder never found. The tapes went back to being whatever they were before. A birthday party. A wedding. Black Beauty." I closed the cold hand and opened it. "And she didn't let go."

"She's still—" said my mother, and stopped.

"I think so." I looked at the hand. "I don't think it's bad. I don't think she's hurting anybody. I think she's just a kid who finally had somebody come get her, and she's not ready to let go of him yet." The cold shifted a little in my palm as I said it, like somebody turning to look. "It doesn't hurt. It's just cold. And sometimes I think she can see things I can't."

My father was looking at my hand.

"Is she here?" he said softly. "Right now. In the room?"

I thought about it honestly.

"I think she's wherever my hand is," I said.

My father looked at the hand for a long while. Then, very slowly, like a man reaching toward a dog he didn't know, he leaned forward off the couch and laid his own hand open, palm up, on the coffee table next to mine.

He didn't say anything. He just left it there.

The cold in my palm went still, like a held breath, like a kid in a doorway deciding whether to come in. Then, so faintly I almost didn't feel it, it moved an inch toward him and stopped.

My father felt it. I watched him—a coolness on the air above his palm, the way you feel a draft from a window you didn't know was open. His face didn't change. His hand didn't move.

"Hi, sweetheart," said Ted Meeks, to the air. To a little girl nobody had ever called sweetheart. "Welcome home."

My mother was crying without making a sound. She had both hands over her mouth, looking at my father's hand on the coffee table next to mine, and the tears just kept coming down over her fingers. It took her a while.

"What else," she said finally, through her hands. "What else did you bring back."

So I showed them.

I reached behind my left shoulder into the place where the Gacha kept things and took out a little blue bead.

"This cleans things," I said. "Slowly. Anything within about thirty feet." I put it on the coffee table. "Sid's scarf had blood on it. Mine, from my nose, in Seattle. Ten minutes on the plane and it was gone." I touched the scarf, still around my neck, green and lumpy and very long. "I'm giving it back to her tomorrow. Clean."

My mother looked at the bead, and at the scarf, and at the bead again.

"Can it do grout?" she said faintly.

Martha laughed so hard she fell over sideways in the armchair.

"I'll put it in the bathroom," I said. "For a week."

"A month," said my mother, and for a second she almost laughed too.

"And this one," I said, "I haven't used yet. I can mark things. Ten things. Anything I can pick up. And then wherever I am, I can call them to me, and send them back." I looked at Martha. "When I slot it, the first thing I'm marking is your walkie-talkie."

Martha stopped laughing.

"So you can come get me," she said slowly. "Not just call me. If something happens to you. If you're somewhere. You can—you can pull it. And I'd know."

"So I can always come get you," I said. "That's what you said at Christmas. That's what it's for."

Martha looked at the walkie-talkie in her lap. Then she held it against her chest with both hands and didn't say anything else.

"There's one more," I said. "And it's big. I haven't really taken it out since Saturday, and I don't know how big it is in a room." I looked up at the eight-foot ceiling. "Everybody stay sitting down."

I reached behind my left shoulder into the place where something long and heavy had been leaning against the inside of my back since Oregon, and pulled.

It came out of nothing into my hand the way Soul Solid does, except it kept coming. My right hand closed on a smooth, hard, cool shaft, and I pulled and it came and came, sliding out of the air in front of me like a sword out of an invisible scabbard—dark wood bound with red, more and more of it—until I was standing in the middle of my parents' living room holding a spear.

Seven feet, maybe more. The point came within an inch of the ceiling, and I had to tip it carefully so it wouldn't touch the light fixture.

It was red. The shaft was dark, almost black, wrapped along its length in a red spiral of cloth or leather like the stripe on a barber pole, and the head was red all the way through, like glass or a garnet, long and leaf-shaped and very sharp, and the lamplight went into it and didn't come back out.

It hummed—not out loud, but in my hands, a low constant feeling in my palms and through my bones, like holding a power line.

Gae Dearg.

My cold right hand was on the shaft. The hum went up my arm and met the cold, and the cold moved, like somebody turning to look. Like somebody who'd been at the bottom of a well seeing something bright.

Nobody in the living room said a word.

My father was staring at the point of the spear an inch from his ceiling. My mother had both hands over her mouth. And Martha had sat all the way up in the armchair, the walkie-talkie forgotten in her lap, mouth open, eyes going from the red point down the shaft to my hands and up to my face.

"That's so cool," whispered Martha Meeks.

"Martha," said my mother faintly.

"It is, Mom. It's so cool. The black one was cool, but this one's red. He's got two magic spears." She looked at me. "What does this one do?"

I looked at the red point.

"It goes through things," I said. "Things that are supposed to be protected. By whatever protects them—magic, I guess. Things that can't be hurt. It goes through anyway."

"Like the doll," said Martha.

"Like the doll. The black one worked on him because of who he'd asked for help. This one would've worked on anything that was holding him up." I looked at the point. "Next time. Whatever's next."

My father was still looking at the point of the spear, red and humming an inch from the plaster.

"Randy," he said, very carefully. "Can you put it back?"

I put it back. It slid into nothing the way it had come, into the place behind my shoulder, until my hands were empty and the room was just a room again with a little blue bead on the coffee table.

On the end table by the couch, Maga-Z was sitting in his scarf. Nobody had brought him in from the kitchen. He'd let himself out and crossed the house and climbed the end table to watch, and now he was looking at the empty air where the spear had been with the expression of a professional assessing somebody else's work.

I sat back down on the coffee table. My legs were shaking a little.

"That's what I brought back," I said. And then, because it was Rule One and it counted: "Except this."

I took my wallet out of my back pocket and laid two business cards on the coffee table next to the bead.

My father picked them up. He read the front of the first one, turned it over, and read the back in Mulder's terrible handwriting—Consultant—and then the second one. If he calls you at 3 a.m., call me first.

"The FBI," said my father.

"Unofficially. It's not a job. There's no badge. He gets things on his desk nobody else wants, and sometimes he'll call and tell me about one, and I'll tell him if he's right." I looked at him. "I told him you hear about every call. Before I do anything. Every time. I told him that was your rule, and it was older than his."

My father studied the cards.

"What did he say?"

"He said you sound like a reasonable man."

"And the other one?"

"She's a doctor," I said. "She thinks it's a terrible idea. That's why she gave me her number."

My father almost smiled. He set the cards down on the coffee table side by side, very neatly, the way he'd fold a taco wrapper.

"I like her," said Ted Meeks.

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Is it always going to be like this?" said my mother finally, barely audible. "You go somewhere. And you come back. And there's something new in your hands. Every time."

"Yes," I said. "I think so. That's the price. I told you in December. Every time, a little stronger. Because the next one's worse."

"And every time, you sit down on that coffee table and show us."

"Every time," I said. "That's Rule One. Dad made it. I'm keeping it."

My mother held my eyes. Then she got up off the couch and sat on the coffee table on my right side, and it made a sound like it was thinking about giving up, and nobody cared.

She took my right hand, the cold one, in both of hers and looked at it.

"It's freezing," she said.

"Yeah."

Mom looked at my hand a while. Then she lifted it and pressed it against her cheek and held it there with both of hers over it, the way you warm a little kid's hands after the snow, and closed her eyes.

"Then I'll hold on too," said Diane Meeks—to me, to the cold, to whoever was in it.

My father got up and sat on the coffee table on my other side with his shoulder against mine, and it creaked. Then Martha came over from the armchair and climbed onto the coffee table behind me, which made four, and the coffee table finally gave up. One of its legs went crack, the whole thing sagged three inches to the left, and all four of us went sideways in a pile onto the living room carpet.

Nobody got up for a while.

In my right hand, against my mother's cheek, something that felt very much like a little girl laughed. And on the end table Maga-Z saluted—a slow, sardonic salute, the salute of a man who had seen everything and approved of very little of it, but would allow this.

III. Woodsboro High

On Monday morning I went back to school.

Mom offered to write me a note for one more day. I said no. Dad had called the school the Monday before and told them family emergency, which was true; I'd missed a week, the second semester of my senior year had started without me, and somewhere in the main office was a stack of make-up work with my name on it, a guidance counselor who wanted to talk to me about college applications, and a vice principal who wanted to talk to me about everything else.

And at 4:55, in the dark and the cold, Tatum and Sid were at the end of the driveway for the run—Sid stretching against the mailbox in the BE PREPARED shirt with no scarf, in January, and Tatum on the hood of the Cherokee with a 7-Eleven cup.

Neither of them said anything when I came down the porch steps.

Tatum looked at me over the cup with red eyes. Then she got down off the hood and walked up to me and hit me in the arm in exactly the same place she had on the Rileys' kitchen floor and said "Seattle" like it was a swear word.

"I know."

"You were not there. On the tape. Your face wasn't—"

"I know. I'm sorry. I'm here now."

She looked at me. Then she put her hand flat on my chest, on my sweatshirt, like she was checking, and pressed, and felt my heart going under her palm, ordinary and fast.

"Okay," said Tatum Riley. "Okay. You're here." She took her hand away. "We're running. Then you're telling us everything. After school. I don't care what you have to do. I don't care if you have to skip class. Everything."

"After school," I said. "I promise. Everything I can."

Sid hadn't moved from the mailbox. She looked at me over Tatum's shoulder in the dark the way she had on the Rileys' lawn, straight, saying nothing. Then her eyes went to my neck. To the scarf—green, lumpy, very long, wrapped twice, ends tucked in.

Clean.

I watched her see that it was clean—not washed, clean, like new, like it had never left her room—and I watched her not ask.

"You brought it back," said Sidney Prescott.

"I said I would."

She nodded slowly, and something happened to her face in the dark at the end of my driveway that was a lot bigger than the small crooked smile from November, and I didn't have a name for it.

"Run," said Sid. "You can give it back after. You'll need it. It's cold."

We ran.

Woodsboro High was a long, low, tan building from the sixties, with a flagpole out front and a marquee by the road that said WELCOME BACK WILDCATS · SPRING SEMESTER · GO WILDCATS in black plastic letters, one of them upside down. It looked the same. It always did. It had looked the same the morning after Casey Becker and the morning after Himbry and the morning the school reopened in November with a grief counselor in every classroom and a sheriff's deputy at the front door. It looked the same this morning. I didn't.

Being the most famous kid in a small town means you're famous for whatever people decided last. In October I'd been the kid who survived Billy and Stu. In November, the kid on the news with Gale Weathers, the kid with the website. In December, the kid whose house got hit by unknown juveniles with a propane tank. Then on Thursday, January ninth, Gale Weathers had gone on national television for an hour and asked the whole country Did Randy Meeks Know?, and the following Monday Randy Meeks had disappeared from school for a week, and nobody would say where.

I had a week of rumors to catch up on, and I caught up on all of them before first period.

I'd been arrested. I'd been arrested by the FBI. I'd been sent to a mental hospital, the one in Ohio where those kids were. I'd run away to Los Angeles to be in the Stab movie. I'd been on Top Story again in a secret segment that hadn't aired yet. I'd been in a car accident. I'd been in a coma. I'd died and come back—that one came from Christy Fimple in the hall outside the chem lab, very seriously, with her hand on my arm, as a thing she'd heard from a reliable source on the cheerleading squad.

"Was it the FBI?" said Christy. "Really?"

"Really."

Her eyes went huge. "Why?"

I thought about Rule One. My father hadn't said anything about lying to Christy Fimple, but I had a feeling it counted.

"There was a tape," I said. "That was killing people. In Washington. I helped them figure out how to stop it."

Christy looked at me with her hand still on my arm. Then she laughed, a big, delighted, relieved laugh.

"Oh my God, Randy. You're so weird. Okay. Okay, don't tell me." She squeezed my arm and let go. "I'm just glad you're not in a coma."

"Me too."

She went into chem, and I stood there in the hallway working it out. You tell them the truth, and they laugh, and it's safer than any lie you could've told. I filed that. It was going to be useful.

In AP English, Mrs. Hartley stopped in the middle of Hamlet when I came in late with my pass, looked at me over her glasses, and said, "Mr. Meeks. Welcome back. I trust you're well," in a voice that meant she'd heard all the rumors and believed about half of one of them. As I sat down she added, "We're on Act Five. The gravedigger. You'll have a lot to catch up on."

"I've been to a funeral," I said. "Sort of. I'm going to one Wednesday."

The whole class looked at me. So did Mrs. Hartley.

"Then you'll understand the gravedigger better than most," she said gently, and went back to Hamlet.

At lunch a sophomore I'd never met walked up to the table where I was sitting with Tatum and Sid, in front of the whole cafeteria, and stood there holding his tray, and said, "Did you know?"

The tables near us went quiet the way a room goes quiet, in rings, outward, like a stone dropped in a pond.

He was fifteen, maybe. Skinny. Big glasses. A Star Wars T-shirt under a flannel. He looked like the kid I'd been. He looked like Randy Meeks, before.

"About Billy," he said. "And Stu. Gale Weathers said—on TV—she said nobody knows if you knew. That you could've told somebody. That you might've known for days." He swallowed. "Did you know?"

Next to me Tatum had stopped moving. Sid had put her fork down.

Rule One.

"Yeah," I said. "I knew."

The ring of quiet got wider.

"I knew it was Billy the morning after Casey," I said. "I didn't have any proof. Nobody would've believed me—the sheriff didn't, when I tried. So I did what I could. I kept Sid in her house. I went to the party with a gun. And I got a tape of them saying it, so Cotton Weary could go home." I looked at him. "And I didn't save Kenny. Or Mr. Himbry. I knew, and I couldn't save them. That's the truth. That's all of it."

The kid stood there holding his tray.

"Okay," he said finally, barely audible. "Okay. Thanks." Then, after a second, red to the ears: "I liked the part about the tripwire. On the website. In the lesson. I put one on my door."

"Good," I said. "Check it every night."

He nodded and went away fast with his tray to a table at the far end of the cafeteria, where three other skinny kids in flannels were waiting for him with their mouths open. The noise came back slowly, in rings.

Tatum let out a long breath.

"Jesus, Randy," she said.

"Rule One."

"What's Rule One?"

"I'll tell you after school," I said.

IV. Rule One

We did it in the garage.

Not my room. My room had a door Mom could knock on and a wall Martha could hear through and three hundred videotapes that would make it all sound like a joke. The garage was cold and smelled like oil and the lawnmower and the Volvo, and it was where I'd first tested the powers in September, at night, with the door down and a towel hanging from the rafter. Dad's workbench. Mom's old bike. The freezer, where a doll had once lain in the dark and offered me a deal.

Tatum sat on the hood of the Volvo, because that's where Tatum sits. Sid stood by the workbench with her arms crossed and her back to the pegboard, the way she'd stood in my parents' kitchen doorway with a bat on the night of the fourteenth.

I stood in the middle of the floor and told them what I'd told my family, all of it, in the same words or close. Something happened to me in September. I don't know how to explain it. It gave me things. It's got a price. The things from the movies, how they were real, how they acted exactly like the movies, and how I'd always known because I'd seen them. How it kept coming and was going to keep coming. How I had to get stronger every time, or one day it would come for somebody I couldn't save.

They listened without a word.

When I was done, I showed them. The wind first: a slow circle of it in the cold garage that lifted the dust off the floor and set the towel on the rafter swinging and blew Tatum's hair across her face, and she didn't push it away. Then Soul Solid, out of nothing into my hand. And then, because the garage ceiling was twelve feet and I didn't have to worry about the light fixture, Gae Dearg.

It came out of the air in front of me, red and black and seven feet long, humming in my hands, and the red point took the light from the bulb over the workbench and turned it into something deep and dark and full.

Tatum put both hands over her mouth. Sid didn't move at all.

I put the spear back, and the cane, and stood in the middle of the garage with empty hands and the towel still swinging, and waited.

Tatum spoke first. Of course she did.

"You told your parents first," said Tatum Riley.

Of all the things I'd thought she might say, that hadn't made the list.

"Yeah," I said. "In December. The night the doll came."

"You told your parents before you told us." Her voice was going up. "In December. We've been running with you since November. At five in the morning. In the dark. I filmed you. I filmed the hand of God on your porch, I've got it on tape, and you let me think it was a gust, and you told your parents—"

"It came in through Martha's name, Tate," I said. "At two in the morning. Under our tree. I didn't have time to do it any other way. I woke them up and I told them, and after that, they lived with it." I looked at her. "And then my dad made a rule, and I've been keeping it ever since. That's why I'm telling you now."

"You could've told us first!"

"Tate," said Sid.

Tatum stopped. She looked at Sid, then at me. Her face was red and her eyes were wet. She slid off the hood of the Volvo and stood in the cold garage with her fists clenched at her sides.

"I'm sorry," said Tatum. "I know. I know that's stupid. I know they're your parents. I just—" She stopped and laughed, a terrible wet laugh. "I just wanted to be first. For once. With something."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't try. I walked across the garage and put my arms around her, and she let me, and put her face in my shoulder and said, muffled, "Magic spear. You've got a magic spear, you dork," and laughed again and cried and hit me softly in the back, twice.

Sid hadn't moved from the workbench.

When Tatum finally let go of me and went back to the hood of the Volvo to wipe her face on her sleeve, Sid was still standing there with her arms crossed and her back against the pegboard, looking at me.

"I know," said Sidney Prescott.

I looked at her.

"I knew," she said. "Not—not this. Not spears. But I knew." She looked at Tatum. "Tate, the tape. From the fourteenth. The hand of God. You know how I said my dad recorded over part of it? The Rose Parade?"

Tatum froze.

"He didn't," said Sid. "I did."

Nobody in the garage breathed.

"I borrowed it," said Sid. "On New Year's Eve, when I came over for the dress. I said I wanted to watch the porch again. And I took it home and watched the part with the porch, and the bomb, and the wind. Six times. Frame by frame. And the fourth time I saw his hand." She looked at me. "You put your hand out. Right before. At the porch. Like you were pushing something. It's a quarter of a second—you can only see it if you go frame by frame. And then the wind came. From exactly where you pushed."

I kept my mouth shut.

"So I taped over it," said Sid. "With the Rose Parade. So nobody else would go frame by frame. So nobody would see." She uncrossed her arms. "And I didn't ask you. I never asked you. I figured if you wanted me to know, you'd tell me, and if you didn't, you had a reason." Her voice stayed level. "I figured you'd tell me when you were ready. And you did."

Tatum was staring at her.

"You taped over my footage," said Tatum, very slowly. "My best footage. For him."

"Yes."

"You lied to me. About the Rose Parade."

"Yes." Sid looked at her. "I'm sorry, Tate. I'm not sorry I did it. I'm sorry I lied."

Tatum opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again.

"That," said Tatum Riley, "is the most romantic thing I've ever heard."

"Tate—"

"It is! You protected his secret identity! With the Rose Parade! That's comic book stuff!" Tatum looked at me. "Randy. Randy. She protected your secret identity."

My face was hot. Sid's ears had gone red. Neither of us was looking at the other.

"Rule One," I said to the garage floor, because I didn't know what else to say.

"What is Rule One," said Tatum.

So I told them my father's rules. You don't lie. You tell them before you go. Whatever it is, you come back. I told them that as of right now, in the garage, I was taking the same rules for them. No more lies. No more a gust. If I couldn't tell them something, I'd say I can't tell you that out loud, and they'd know it was there.

Sid listened from the workbench.

"Okay," she said when I was done. "Then I've got a rule too."

"What."

"You said you have to get stronger." She looked at me straight, the way she had at Ocean Beach in November with the wind in her hair. "Every time. Or one day something comes and you're not strong enough."

"Yeah."

"Then you're not the only one who gets stronger," said Sidney Prescott. "That's my rule. You don't get to be the only one."

I looked at her.

"Then teach me," I said. "That's what you said. In November."

"That's what I said." She didn't smile. "I'm saying it again."

On the hood of the Volvo, Tatum put her hand up like she was in class.

"And me," said Tatum. "Obviously. I'm saying it too. I'm not getting left out of the magic spear club." She paused. "Do I get a spear?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because it's the only one," I said. "And you'd film it."

Tatum thought about that.

"Fair," she said.

I took off the scarf.

I'd worn it all day at school, through Hamlet and chem and lunch, because at the end of the run Sid had said you'll need it, it's cold and I'd figured that meant not yet. I unwound it and held it out to her, green and lumpy and very long, wider a foot in for no reason at all. And clean.

Sid took it and looked at it in her hands. She ran her fingers along the place where it got wider, the dropped stitch, the end she'd tied off wrong. She looked at the front of it, where we both knew there should've been long brown streaks, because Tatum had told her about the freeze-frames and the ferry and the blood.

There weren't any.

"How," said Sid.

"Rule One," I said. "I can't tell you that yet." I thought about it. "Okay. I can. A little blue bead. It cleans things."

Sid looked at me. Then she laughed—the real one, the surprised one from Tatum's living room floor at Christmas, a smile coming out of storage and finding it still fit—so hard she had to put a hand on the workbench.

"A bead," she said. "You've got a magic spear and a magic bead."

"The bead's more useful, day to day."

"I bet it is." She wiped her eyes and looked at the scarf. Then she stepped forward and wrapped it around my neck again, twice, and tucked the ends in and patted it once, flat against my chest.

"It's a loan," said Sidney Prescott. "Until Wednesday. It's cold on that island. I looked it up."

"Everybody keeps looking things up."

"Everybody's right," said Sid.

V. Next to Anna

My father came with me to Moesko.

He didn't ask. At dinner on Monday night I told them about Wednesday—about Richard and the Lutheran church and next to Anna, Rule Two—and Mom opened her mouth, and Dad said "I'll take the day" before she could get anything out. Then, to Mom: "I'll take the day, Diane." She closed her mouth and looked at him and nodded.

So at five on Wednesday morning, instead of running, I sat in the passenger seat of the Volvo while my father drove us to SFO in the dark. We flew to Seattle on a regular plane, in coach, in two seats by the bathroom, and rented a regular car, a Corolla, and drove north to Anacortes in the rain. He drove the speed limit exactly and didn't ask any questions. Every so often he glanced over at me—at the scarf, at my right hand in my lap—and then back at the road.

On the ferry he stood with me at the rail of the passenger deck and watched Moesko come up out of the gray water: the dark green hump, the lighthouse on the point.

"That's it?" said my father.

"That's it."

He studied it, the lighthouse white with its red top, small and far off in the rain.

"There's a horse trailer on the car deck," said my father. "I saw it when we drove on."

"I know."

"Is it going to—"

"No," I said. "Not anymore."

He looked at me and didn't ask how I knew. He'd taken Rule One to heart in a way I hadn't expected: he didn't ask me things he thought I'd have to answer with I can't tell you that. I think he was saving them up.

The Lutheran church on Moesko was white clapboard with a square steeple and a graveyard behind it on a slope running down toward the water, inside a low stone wall, old headstones leaning in the wet grass. The Morgan plot was at the top of the slope near the wall, under a bare oak. Anna's stone was there, plain gray granite: ANNA MORGAN · 1941–1979 · BELOVED WIFE.

Next to it was a hole in the ground with a green tarp over the dirt pile and two straps across it, and a small white box on the straps. So small.

More people came than Richard had expected.

Dr. Grasnik in a black coat with her reading glasses on their chain. Mrs. Lindqvist from the Harbor House, holding a casserole dish in a bag that she'd obviously brought out of reflex and didn't know what to do with. The old man from the bench outside the church, who'd made a sign on his chest at me a week ago, standing by the wall with his hat in his hands. Mrs. Walsh, small and tired, and beside her, in a black sweatshirt with the hood down for the first time I'd seen it, thin and pale and very upright, Danny. He looked at me across the grave and nodded once. He'd opened his curtains.

Rachel Keller had come up from Seattle with Aidan. She stood at the back in her long gray coat with her hand on her son's shoulder, and Aidan was holding a rolled-up piece of paper tied with red yarn.

There was a wreath of white lilies from Washington, D.C. The card said, in a man's terrible handwriting, Scully burned something on Monday. She won't tell me where. I haven't asked. - FM. And under it, in a neat, small, very straight hand: Trust no one. - DKS.

And there was a wreath from Woodsboro, red roses, too many of them, the kind of wreath that costs more than it should. The card said: For Samara. I'm not going to write about you. - G.W. And under that, in careful block capitals, DEWEY TOO.

And Richard Morgan, in his funeral suit, stood at the head of the grave with his hands at his sides, looking at the white box. He'd been looking at it since they set it down at seven that morning, Dr. Grasnik told me later. He hadn't looked away once.

The pastor was younger than I'd expected, with a beard and a kind, tired face. He didn't know what to say, and he said so. He'd never met her. Nobody on the island really had: a little girl who'd come home with Anna Morgan in 1972, gone to relatives by 1979, and lain in the ground under a cabin on a mountain for eighteen years after. He read the psalm about the valley of the shadow. He read the verse about suffering the little children to come unto me. Then he closed his book and looked at Richard and said, "Richard. Is there anything you want to say?"

Richard Morgan took his time. Then he walked to the edge of the grave and looked down at the white box on its straps.

"Her eyes were gray," said Richard Morgan.

That was all, at first. He stood there while the rain came down on his bare gray head and the shoulders of his funeral suit.

"I didn't know that," he said. "For eighteen years. I didn't know what color my daughter's eyes were." His voice didn't break. He sounded like a man who'd decided on the ferry, on the drive, in the night, that it wasn't going to. "A boy went down a well and found out for me. And then he called me, and I looked." He looked at the box. "They're gray. Like the water off the point. That's what I want to say. That's all I've got."

He stepped back.

The pastor looked at him a moment, and then nodded and said the last words, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, and the two men from the funeral home in Anacortes stepped forward and took the straps and slowly began to let her down.

My right hand went colder.

It had been cold for four days, since the bottom of the well, a constant cold like holding a glass of ice water that I'd gotten used to and stopped noticing except when somebody touched it. But as the white box went down into the ground, the cold in my fingers tightened. Like somebody squeezing hard. Like a little kid at a crowded fair hanging on to a grown-up's hand when the crowd closes in.

I looked down at my hand.

She's here, I thought.

Not in the box. The box only held bones and a scrap of white cloth and eighteen years of cold water; she'd never been in the box. She was standing right next to me at the top of the slope in the rain, holding my hand, watching them put her in the ground. I don't know how I knew. I just did.

My father, beside me, felt me go rigid. He looked down at my hand and didn't say anything. He just reached over and took my warm left hand in his and held it.

So I stood between them. My father on one side, and on the other a little girl in a white dress nobody could see, watching her own funeral, holding on to the one person who'd come.

Look, I told her in my head, the way I'd talked to her at the bottom of the well. Look at them, Samara. They came.

I felt her look.

At Dr. Grasnik, who'd never signed her death certificate, crying behind her reading glasses. At Mrs. Lindqvist with her casserole. At the old man with his hat in his hands. At Danny Walsh standing very straight—the boy who'd watched her tape and passed her on and sat in the dark for seven weeks because of it—come to say goodbye. At Rachel and Aidan. At two wreaths from two places she'd never been, from people who'd never met her. At her father at the edge of her grave in the rain with his head bare, looking down. Not looking away.

They came, I said. All of them. To see you.

The cold in my hand didn't loosen. But it changed. It stopped being a grip and started being a hold.

Aidan put his drawing in.

When the box was down and the straps were out and the pastor had sprinkled the first handful of dirt, Aidan let go of his mother and walked to the edge of the grave by himself, small in a black raincoat, and knelt in the wet grass. He untied the red yarn and unrolled the paper.

I saw it over his shoulder. Crayon on manila paper: a green field, white fences, and horses, a lot of them, brown and black and white and gray, all running across the paper from one side to the other with their manes flying and their legs stretched out. And in the corner of the field by the fence, a little girl in a white dress with her hair pulled back, watching them, smiling.

Aidan rolled it back up and tied the yarn and dropped it into the grave. It landed on the lid of the white box with a soft sound and lay there.

Then he got up and turned around and looked at me. Not at my face—at my right hand.

"She's holding on," said Aidan Keller.

"I know."

"That's okay," said Aidan. "She's allowed." He walked back to his mother and took her hand and didn't look at me again.

Afterward, when people had started drifting down the slope toward the church and the men from the funeral home were waiting by the wall with their shovels for Richard to leave, I heard something behind me.

Hooves.

Old Man Hennessey was coming slowly up the slope from the road in his feed-store cap, leading a horse. A dappled gray mare with a white mane.

Bella.

She came up the wet grass of the graveyard on a halter and a long lead, calm, head down, ears forward, the way a horse walks behind somebody it's followed for fifteen years and trusts. Everybody stopped. Dr. Grasnik put her hand to her mouth. By the wall the old man with his hat made the sign on his chest again.

Hennessey stopped about twenty feet from me, and Bella stopped behind him. He looked at my face, and then at Richard at the head of the grave.

"Mr. Morgan," said Old Man Hennessey. His voice was rusty, like he didn't use it much. "I've been trying to sell this mare for six months. Nobody'll take her. Nobody on this island will keep a horse." He looked at the ground. "I heard you've got a barn."

Richard Morgan looked at him.

"I've got a barn," he said.

"Empty," said Hennessey.

"Eighteen years."

Hennessey nodded and held out the lead.

"Then you'd best take her," he said. "She's a good mare. She don't spook." He looked at me again. "Not anymore."

Richard looked at the lead in the old man's hand, and at Bella. Then he walked slowly down the slope through the wet grass in his funeral suit and took the lead rope, and Bella lifted her head and looked past him, at me.

I didn't move.

She came anyway—not fast, not afraid. She walked up the slope past Richard with the lead trailing from his hand until he had to let it out or let go, and he let it out. She stopped in front of me, a thousand pounds of gray mare, close enough that I could feel her breath warm on my face in the cold.

She looked at me. Her eyes were dark and calm, with no white around them at all. And she lowered her head slowly and put her nose against my right hand.

My cold hand. The one somebody was holding.

She breathed on it, warm and long, and stood with her nose against my fingers, eyes half closed, perfectly still, and the cold in my hand did something I'd never felt it do. It reached—out of my fingers into the warm breath and the soft gray nose—like a little girl at a fence holding out her hand to a horse for the first time, waiting to see if it would run.

Bella didn't run.

She stood in the rain at the top of the graveyard on Moesko Island with her nose in my hand, breathing, and let herself be touched.

Behind her, holding the lead, Richard Morgan made a sound I'd never heard a man make before. I hope I never hear it again, and I hope I do.

"She wanted to touch them," said Richard, very low. "Every day. From the window. That's all she ever wanted. And they—"

"I know," I said.

Bella breathed on my hand. After a long while she lifted her head and turned and walked back down the slope to Richard, and stood calmly beside him with her head at his shoulder, the way a horse stands next to a person it's decided to belong to.

My hand was still cold. But for a second, with Bella's breath on it, it had been a little less cold, and very faintly, somewhere just behind my right shoulder where nobody was standing, I'd felt something like a laugh—a little girl's, surprised, like she'd forgotten she knew how.

On the ferry back my father stood at the rail with me again and watched Moesko go away behind us into the rain.

"The horse," he said, after a long time.

"Yeah."

"It walked right up to you."

"Yeah."

"Last week it tried to jump off this boat because of you."

"Yeah."

He let that sit. The wake went white behind us. The lighthouse got smaller.

"I'm going to have a lot of questions," said my father. "On the plane."

"I know."

"Some of them you're going to have to say I can't tell you that."

"Probably."

"That's okay." He put his warm hand on the back of my neck. "I'll save those ones. For later. For when you can." He looked at the water. "I've got time."

We stayed at the rail, the two of us, until the lighthouse was gone.

VI. Coming Attractions

February came in gray and wet. It rained for a week. I went to school. I ran with Tatum and Sid at five in the morning in the dark and the rain, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school, in the garage with the door down, I started teaching them things. Not powers; they didn't have powers. Rules. Falls. How to break a grip. How to check a room. How to hold a flashlight so the person you're pointing it at can't see your face. Tatum filmed all of it for the archive, with my permission, on the condition that nothing with a spear in it ever went on Channel 27.

I wrote a new lesson for the Survival Zone: What to Do When Somebody You Love Is in Danger and You Can't Be There. It was the most-read thing I'd ever posted. I didn't tell anybody what it was really about.

My right hand stayed cold. I got used to it. Mom knitted me one glove, right-handed, red, very badly, and I wore it.

Sometimes, late at night, when I walked past the TV in the den, the screen would flicker once, gray, and for a second under the gray there'd be a field and a fence and a horse running. I always said hi.

On Sunday night, February 2nd, at 11:15, I was in the den with the green light of the monitor and the modem's scream turned down, reading the guestbook, when I found it.

It had no name and no email address. It had been typed fast, all lowercase, by somebody who couldn't spell, at 9:40 on a Sunday night from somewhere in Los Angeles.

— los angeles: my mom talks to somebody in the dark. she says its her friend from when she was a kid. her name is diana. when the lights are on theres nobody there. when the lights go off theres somebody in the hall. i saw her. she was tall. she was standing by the bathroom door and when i turned on the light she was gone. my sister doesnt live here anymore. my sister says dont turn off the lights. my dad died. i am ten. what do i do

I read it three times. Then I opened the unicorn notebook to a clean page and wrote at the top:

LIGHTS OUT (2016)

And under it, smaller:

Martin. Sophie. Rebecca. Diana.Los Angeles.Has it happened yet?

I looked at that for a while.

Yes, I thought. It's happening right now.

In front of my eyes, in the green light of the monitor, the panel opened, the color of a TV in an empty room.

Next story loading.

I closed it and looked at the guestbook. At a ten-year-old in Los Angeles at 9:40 on a Sunday night, sitting in the light, afraid of the hall.

I wrote back.

R: Leave the lights on. All of them. Every room, all night, even the bathroom. Don't turn them off for anybody, not even your mom. Keep a flashlight by your bed, and check the batteries. If the lights go out, don't go into the dark to fix it. Stay in the light. Your sister's right.I'm coming. Tell me your street.

I hit SUBMIT. Then I got up and went upstairs and knocked on my parents' door.

My father opened it in his pajamas with his reading glasses on and looked at me—at my face, and at the red glove on my right hand.

"Rule Two," I said.

He held my eyes.

"Where," said my father.

"Los Angeles," I said. "There's a kid."

My father took off his reading glasses and looked at them in his hand, and then back at me.

"How long," he said.

"I don't know yet."

He nodded slowly.

"Okay," said Ted Meeks. "Tell me in the morning. I'll drive you to the airport." He started to close the door, then stopped. "Randy."

"Yeah."

"Whatever it is."

"I come back," I said, and down the hall, faint through Martha's door, I heard her walkie-talkie click.