Chapter 23: Late Show (Patreon)

The tape came on Wednesday by overnight FedEx, in a padded mailer with Gale's handwriting on the label and a Post-it note stuck to the cassette inside.

Not a dub. The original. Micah sent us two; I'm keeping one in a safe and the intern is still on vacation. Don't let anyone watch it who doesn't have to. - G.

P.S. I'm not writing about this.

P.P.S. Dewey says hi. Dewey says to tell you hi "in a normal way, like a normal person." I don't know what he thinks I was going to do.

I. Somebody Else's Tape

Tatum and I watched it in the den on Wednesday night with the door closed and Martha banished upstairs. The Devas' cage sat on the bookshelf. Cham-P and San-D were at the bars, watching the TV like a nature documentary, Jum-P was asleep, and Maga-Z had let himself out onto the shelf and was sitting on a copy of The Shining with his eyes on the screen, as though he expected to be asked his opinion afterward.

Tatum brought equipment, of course: the Channel 27 Hi8 deck, signed out on a form she'd forged; a little four-track audio mixer; a pair of big headphones that made her look like an air traffic controller; and the notebook with EXECUTIVE PRODUCER on the cover in silver marker.

"Let the minutes show," said Tatum, setting it all up on the den floor, "that this is the first time in my life I've ever done homework for a ghost."

"It's not a ghost. It's a demon."

"Even better."

Sid didn't come. On the run that morning she'd said, very low, that she didn't want to watch somebody stand over their boyfriend in the dark for two hours. Not after Billy. Tatum had squeezed her hand and said I'll watch it for both of us, and Sid had nodded and run on ahead.

So it was Tatum and me, and I put the tape in.

I'm not going to tell you all of it. It was home video on Hi8, from a nicer camera than Tatum's, which she noticed immediately and resented. A bedroom in a new house: beige carpet, a big bed with a cream comforter, a dresser, a door to the hall standing half open. The camera sat on a tripod in the corner, pointed at the bed, with a white timestamp ticking in the bottom right. FEB 02 1997. 11:47 PM.

In the bed was a guy in his twenties with short dark hair and a smirk, who waved at the camera before he turned out the light. Micah. Beside him, back to the lens, already asleep or pretending, lay a blond woman, pretty and tired.

Katie.

After that the bedroom went green with night vision and nothing happened for a long stretch: two people breathing, the timestamp ticking.

Micah had sent eleven nights. Gale's intern had made it four minutes into the first one. We watched all eleven, mostly on fast-forward, with Tatum calling out timestamps, stopping, going back, stopping again.

At 3:15 a.m. every night, give or take a minute, the bedroom door moved a few inches, slowly, as if somebody were leaning on it from the hall. Then came a sound—heavy, slow, far away. Footsteps, though they weren't on the floor so much as through it, like something very large walking on the other side of the drywall.

On the fifth night, at 3:15, Katie sat up in bed.

She got out in her nightgown, walked around to Micah's side, and stood there looking down at him with her arms at her sides. She didn't move or blink for two hours and nine minutes by the timestamp. Then she turned around, went back to her side, lay down, and was asleep.

Micah slept through all of it. On the tape from the next morning he played it back for her at the kitchen table, laughing. Babe. Babe. Look at you. You're like a statue. She watched it and didn't laugh.

On the seventh night she stood there again. On the eighth. On the ninth, about an hour and a half in, standing over him in the green dark, she smiled.

That was when Tatum took off her headphones, set them on the carpet, and sat with her face in her hands.

"Okay," said Tatum finally, muffled. "Okay. I hate it. I hate it so much. I'm going to have to sleep in Sid's bed for a month."

"You don't have to keep going."

"Shut up. Executive producer." She lifted her face. It was very white. She picked the headphones back up. "Okay. What are we looking for. Specifically. Because I've been watching a lady stand next to a bed for an hour and I need a job."

I looked at the frozen timestamp. 3:15 AM.

"Three-fifteen," I said. "Every night. Why three-fifteen?"

"It's three in the morning. That's when scary stuff happens. Everybody knows that."

"Three. Not three-fifteen." I looked at the paused frame, the door a few inches open. "It's always three-fifteen, within a minute, eleven nights running. A demon doesn't own a watch. Something's keeping time."

Tatum looked at me, then at the screen, then down at her mixer.

"Audio," she said. "If something's keeping time, maybe you can hear it."

It took her two hours.

I'd never seen Tatum work like that—not at the station, not on the archive, not anywhere. She ran the Hi8 audio through the mixer, isolated the tracks, pulled the hiss down and pushed the low end up, and listened with her eyes shut and both hands pressing the headphones to her ears. Night after night: 3:14, 3:15, 3:16, the same minute over and over, until I was sure she'd fall asleep sitting up. She didn't. At 11:40 she opened her eyes.

"There's something under it," said Tatum. "Under the footsteps. Every night, right before the door moves. It's real low. Like, real low, below where you'd hear it on a TV." She pulled the headphones off and handed them over. "Listen. Night six. Three-fourteen and fifty seconds."

I put them on, and she played it.

Hiss. Breathing. The faint hum of a refrigerator downstairs. And under all of it, so low it was nearly a feeling instead of a sound, a rumble, the kind a truck makes three streets away. Long and low and wet.

"It's a voice," said Tatum. "I think it's a voice. Slowed down, or—I don't know. Something's wrong with it." She took the headphones back. "Hang on."

She flipped a switch on the mixer, nudged a fader, and listened again with her eyes closed. Her face went gray.

"It's backwards," she said. "It's backwards, Randy. Somebody's talking backwards under the tape." She took the headphones off and held them out at arm's length, as if she didn't want them touching her anymore. "I reversed it. Listen."

Under the hiss and the refrigerator and the footsteps, slowed down and turned around and dragged up from the bottom of the tape, was a voice. It didn't sound like a man or a woman or anything with a throat. It sounded like gravel in a drain, and it said one word, over and over, every night at three-fourteen and fifty seconds, just before the door moved.

Katie.

Katie.

Katie.

Like somebody calling a dog, or a child in for dinner. Patient. Fond. Owning.

I took the headphones off. Tatum was sitting on the den floor hugging her knees, staring at the frozen frame of Katie's back and the door a few inches open.

"It's been calling her," said Tatum. "Every night, at the same minute. Since—since how long?"

"Since she was eight," I said.

Tatum looked at me.

"Don't ask how I know," I said. "Rule One. I can't tell you that part. But since she was eight. There was a fire at her house when she was a kid, and it's been following her ever since, house to house, calling her name at three-fifteen, and she's never slept through the night once in her life." I looked at the screen. "And now she's got a boyfriend who points a camera at it every night and laughs."

The refrigerator hummed on the tape, paused, a sound from somebody else's house. Tatum didn't say anything until it cut out.

"Three-fifteen," she said finally. "Why three-fifteen."

"I don't know. But I'll bet you anything that's when the fire started."

Feat: Find 3:15 on somebody else's tape.Bronze Skill (held).Story in progress: Late Show.

Late Show. The thing on TV after the news, after everybody's gone to bed, for the people who can't sleep.

"What," said Tatum. She was watching my face. "You just went somewhere. Your whole face did."

"Sorry," I said. "It's nothing I can explain." I looked at her. "And you found it. Me, I'd have gone through all eleven nights and never heard it."

"I found a backwards demon voice," said Tatum. "On a Wednesday." She looked at the mixer. "I'm going to throw up."

"You did amazing."

"I know I did amazing. I'm still going to throw up." She got up off the floor and went to the den door, then stopped with her hand on the frame. "Randy."

"Yeah."

"I'm coming," said Tatum Riley. "To San Diego. Me and Sid. I don't care what you say. You can't do this kind of thing with your eyes closed and headphones on and a thing in the hallway. You need somebody on the camera." She looked at me. "That's me. That's my job."

"I was going to ask," I said, and her face did something complicated and pleased that she turned toward the hallway before I could get a good look at it.

II. Valentine's Day

We left at six on Friday morning, in the dark, in the Cherokee. Presidents' Day weekend; no school until Tuesday.

Tatum's parents thought we were going on a college visit to UC San Diego, which was true, because Tatum insisted. On Monday she'd called the admissions office and booked the three of us on the Saturday campus tour at eleven under her own name—so it's not a lie, Randy, Rule One, I'm following your rules too. Sid's father mostly thought the same thing. Sid had told him something else, too, at the kitchen table on Thursday night, something I didn't hear and didn't ask about. All I knew was that when Neil Prescott dropped her at the end of my driveway at 5:55, he got out, came around to my side of the car, shook my hand and held on to it, and said, "Bring her back," in a voice exactly like my father's.

My parents knew everything. Rule Two. Mom packed us a cooler. Dad checked the Cherokee's tires with a gauge from his glove box while Tatum stood with her arms crossed saying Mr. Meeks, I checked the tires, and he said I know you did, honey, and checked them anyway.

And at six in the morning Martha came out on the porch in her pajamas with the walkie-talkie and said "Over," and I said "Over," and she told Tatum and Sid, very seriously, "Make sure he comes back," and Sid said, "I will," like she was signing something.

Interstate 5 runs down the middle of California like a ruler. Eight hours, flat and brown and straight, with the Coast Range on one side and the Sierra on the other so far off they're just blue lines, and nothing between them but farms and cattle feedlots you can smell ten miles before you see them, and the gray ribbon of road running at a point on the horizon that never gets closer.

Tatum drove. Sid rode shotgun. I sat in the back with the duffel and the cooler and Gae Dearg leaning on the inside of my back where nobody could see it.

It was Valentine's Day. Tatum noticed at a Chevron in Santa Nella at nine-thirty, when the girl behind the counter gave me my change, held on to my hand a second too long, and said "Happy Valentine's Day" in a voice that made Tatum, in line behind me with a bag of Funyuns, go rigid.

The girl had pink hair, a safety pin through her ear, and a Misfits shirt.

"Thanks," I said. "You too."

"You want a free coffee?" she said. "It's on me. For Valentine's."

"I'm good. Thanks."

She looked disappointed, and she watched me all the way to the door.

In the parking lot Tatum got behind the wheel, slammed her door, and sat with the Funyuns in her lap without starting the car.

"What," said Tatum, "was that."

"What was what?"

"That. The girl. With the pink hair. She held your hand. She tried to give you free coffee."

"She was being nice."

"She was not being nice. She was being Valentine's." Tatum narrowed her eyes at me in the rearview mirror. "Since when do girls with pink hair try to give you free coffee?"

I thought about Rule One, and about the panel. Goths and Punks are drawn to you for some reason.

"Since last weekend," I said. "Probably."

"What does that mean."

"It's one of the things. The things that came. I got a couple, after Los Angeles, that are—less useful." I looked out the window. "Kind of embarrassing."

Tatum watched me in the mirror without blinking. In the passenger seat, Sid had turned around too, and she was just looking at me, very straight.

"What kind of things," said Sid.

"Rule One," I said. "I can't tell you that."

"You can," said Tatum. "You totally can. You just won't."

"It's in the same family as can't."

"Randy."

"Girls might like me more," I said to the window, very fast. "Some girls. Certain girls. It's not on purpose. I didn't ask for it. It just came, like the bead."

Nobody in the Cherokee breathed.

Then Tatum started laughing. She laughed so hard she had to put her forehead on the steering wheel, and honked the horn by accident, and a trucker at the next pump looked over.

Sid didn't laugh. She turned back around in her seat and looked out the windshield at the Chevron, and when Tatum finally pulled out onto I-5, still wiping her eyes, Sid said, very low, to the window:

"That's so unfair."

"I know," I said. "I didn't ask for it."

"Not to you," said Sid.

I didn't know what that meant. I looked at the back of her head, at the ponytail and the scarf—green, lumpy, very long—that she'd wound around her own neck that morning at the end of my driveway. I still didn't know what it meant at Bakersfield. I think I did by Los Angeles.

At one in the afternoon I called Kristen from a pay phone at a Denny's in Castaic, at the bottom of the Grapevine. It was four in Ohio, so she'd be home from school.

She picked up on the second ring.

"Hi," said Kristen Parker. "You're calling on Valentine's Day."

"I'm calling on Valentine's Day."

"Did you get my card?"

"It's on my desk." It was. It had come on Wednesday, a big red drugstore card with a cartoon bear on the front, and inside, in her handwriting, Stay small. Come back. - K., with a drawing of a well with an X through it. "Did you get mine?"

"It's on my mirror," said Kristen. "Next to Tatum's FedEx." A pause, a good one. "The roses were too much."

"Gale's florist. She gave me the number. She said it was the least she could do."

"Gale sent me roses?"

"I sent you roses. Gale's florist delivered them."

"Oh." I could hear her smiling. "Okay. That's better. That's so much better."

Then, at the counter behind me, Tatum laughed loudly at something the waitress said, and Sid said something back, and two thousand miles away in Springwood, Ohio, the line went quiet.

"Where are you," said Kristen.

I thought about Rule One. I'd taken it for my family, then for Tatum and Sid. It didn't say anything about Kristen. It didn't have to.

"Castaic," I said. "California. At a Denny's. With Tatum and Sid." I swallowed. "We're driving to San Diego. There's a thing—a demon, in a house, with a guy who films it."

I listened to the long-distance hiss for a while.

"You're spending Valentine's Day," said Kristen Parker slowly, "in a car. With Tatum and Sid. Driving to fight a demon."

"When you put it like that—"

"How else am I supposed to put it, Randy?"

"I don't know." I leaned my forehead on the pay phone. "I'm sorry, Kris. I know how it sounds. I know it's Valentine's Day. I sent you roses and I'm calling you from a Denny's, and they're right there and you're in Ohio, and it's not fair. I know it's not fair."

More hiss.

"Is it bad," said Kristen at last, in a different voice. "The demon."

"Yeah. It's bad."

"Are they going to help you?"

"Tatum found the thing that tells me when it comes. On the tape. She found it by herself. And Sid—" I looked back at the counter, at Sid with her ponytail and the green scarf, reading the menu and very carefully not looking at me. "Sid doesn't let me be the only one."

Kristen was quiet so long I checked that the line was still open.

"Okay," she said finally, softly. "Okay. Then they can come. This time." A breath. "But you call me. After. You call me. Before them. Before your parents, even. Okay? Just this once."

"Okay."

"Promise."

"I promise, Kris."

"Okay." Another breath, firmer. "Happy Valentine's Day, Randy."

"Happy Valentine's Day."

"Stay small," said Kristen Parker, and hung up.

I stood at the pay phone with the receiver still in my hand. Behind me at the counter, Tatum was looking at me and Sid was very carefully not, and I thought, Lucky. I've got a lot of things, but lucky isn't one of them, and went back to my Grand Slam before it got cold.

III. Scripps Ranch

Micah Sloat lived in a brand-new two-story tract house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Scripps Ranch, in the hills north of San Diego, on a street of identical new houses with new lawns and eucalyptus saplings tied to stakes, all painted a beige that wanted to be pink. When we pulled up at 4:30 on Friday afternoon the sun was out, it was seventy-one degrees, and there were kids on bikes in the street.

It was the least haunted-looking place I'd ever seen.

"This is it?" said Tatum. "This is where the backwards demon lives?"

"This is it."

"It looks like a Pottery Barn catalog."

"So did the Morgan place, once," I said. "So did ours."

Micah opened the door with the camera already running.

He was twenty-seven, I found out later, and looked younger: short dark hair, gray T-shirt, cargo shorts, bare feet, and a Sony Hi8 camcorder on his shoulder with the red light on, pointed at me. He was grinning around the side of it.

"Randy Meeks," said Micah Sloat. "No way. Gale Weathers said she'd send somebody, I thought she meant, like, a producer. You're the kid. The list kid." He swung the camera to Tatum, then Sid. "And you brought—who are you guys? Interns?"

"Executive producer," said Tatum, very coldly.

"Nice." The camera swung back to me. "Okay, okay, so, I want to get, like, an intro. Like a thing. You walking up the driveway. Can you go back and walk up the driveway again? Slower? And maybe look up at the house? Like you sense something?"

I looked at the red light.

"Turn it off," I said.

Micah lowered the camera an inch. "What?"

"Turn it off. Please. Just for now." I looked past him into the house: a front hall with a staircase going up, beige carpet, framed prints, a table with keys on it, and at the top of the stairs, the dark mouth of a hallway. "I'd like to meet Katie. Without the camera. If that's okay."

Micah looked at me as if I'd switched languages on him.

"Dude," he said. "The camera's the whole point."

"I know," I said. "That's why I'd like you to turn it off."

Katie was in the kitchen.

She sat on a stool at the island with a mug of tea, the way Sophie had sat at her kitchen table a week before, except this kitchen was bright and white and new, with every blind open and the sun pouring in. She was twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, blond and small and pretty, in a UCSD sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled down over her hands. An English student, she told me later. She wanted to teach.

She looked up when I came in, and her face did something I'd watched a lot of faces do since September. First she knew me from TV. A second later she knew why I was here, and her face crumpled—and then she put it back together fast, like a dish slid back onto a shelf before anybody noticed it had slipped.

"You're the guy," said Katie Featherston. "From the website. With the list."

"Yeah."

"Gale Weathers sent you."

"Gale Weathers called me. I came by myself." I looked at the stool across the island from her. "Can I sit down?"

She considered me, then nodded.

I sat. Tatum and Sid stayed in the doorway. Micah came in behind them with the camera off, dangling from his hand by the strap, and leaned against the refrigerator with his arms crossed, looking annoyed.

"Micah thinks it's a ghost," said Katie, without looking at him. "He thinks it's cool. He bought the camera so he could catch it. He wants to sell the tape." She turned her mug a quarter turn on the counter. "He sent it to Gale Weathers because he thought he'd get on TV."

"Babe," said Micah.

"It's not a ghost," said Katie. "Is it."

"No," I said. "It's not."

She closed her eyes.

"It's been with me since I was eight," she said. "There was a fire at my house, in Carlsbad. I don't—I don't remember it very well. I remember waking up and the house was on fire and it was in my room. Standing at the end of my bed. A shadow. And then it was gone and my dad was carrying me out." She opened her eyes. "Then when I was thirteen, it was back. And when I was sixteen. And every time we moved. It follows me. I hear it at night, walking." She looked at me. "I've never told anybody that except Micah. And a psychic, last week, who came over and took one look at the hall upstairs and said he couldn't help me. He said it wasn't a ghost. He said I needed a demonologist."

"Dr. Averies," said Micah from the refrigerator. "He's in Europe. For a month."

"And then Micah sent the tape to TV," said Katie. "And then you."

She looked at me, calmer now, and tired.

"Are you a demonologist?" said Katie.

I thought about it.

"No," I said. "But I'm here. And he's in Europe."

Katie stared at me across the island while the refrigerator hummed and a kid on a bike went by outside, ringing his bell. Then she laughed, a small, wet, surprised laugh, and put her face in her hands.

"Okay," she said through her fingers. "Okay."

I told her about 3:15—not about Tatum and the backwards voice, not yet. Only that it came at the same time every night, within a minute, and that I thought I knew why. Then I asked her, very carefully, whether she remembered what time the fire had started, when she was eight, in Carlsbad.

Katie went still.

"My mom used to say," she said slowly, "that the clock in the hall stopped when the fire reached it. One of those electric ones. It melted, and it stopped." She looked into her tea. "It said three-fifteen. My mom kept it. It's in a box in her garage. She used to say it was the time our lives started over."

Nobody spoke.

Micah had uncrossed his arms. He was looking at Katie, and for the first time since we'd come in, he wasn't looking at the camera, or at me, or at the hall.

"You never told me that," he said softly.

"You never asked," said Katie, and got up to put the kettle back on.

IV. Three-Fifteen

We did the college tour on Saturday morning, because Tatum made us. It lasted an hour and a half, led by a guide named Brent who walked backward the whole time and told us about the library that looked like a spaceship, the eucalyptus groves, and the beach a mile away. Sid asked about the psychology department. Tatum asked about film. I didn't ask about anything. I walked through the bright, clean, sunny campus with my hands in my pockets and Gae Dearg leaning on the inside of my back, thinking about a hallway at the top of a staircase in Scripps Ranch.

"Now it's not a lie," said Tatum in the parking lot, satisfied.

"It was never a lie," said Sid. "You just wanted a tour."

"I did want a tour. Did you see that library?"

When we got back to the house at two, Micah had bought a Ouija board.

It sat on the living room coffee table, a Parker Brothers board still in the shrink-wrap, with a Toys R Us receipt taped to the box. Katie sat on the couch as far from it as the couch allowed, arms around her knees.

"I told him not to," she said when she saw my face. "I told him."

"It's a game," said Micah. He had the camera up and running again: on the board, on me, on the board. "It's a Parker Brothers game. It's for slumber parties. I just figured, if it wants to talk, let's give it a way to talk. Right? Isn't that what they do? In the movies?"

"Yes," I said. "That's exactly what they do in the movies."

"See?"

"And then everybody dies," I said.

Micah lowered the camera.

"Micah," I said. "I need you to hear one thing. Once. And then you can do whatever you want." I didn't raise my voice. "It's not a ghost. It's not a dead person who's sad and wants to talk. It's something that's been following your girlfriend since she was eight years old. It burned her house down. It's been calling her name at three-fifteen every night for fourteen years. It doesn't want to talk to you. It wants her. And every time you point a camera at it and laugh, every time you buy it a game, it gets a little stronger, because you're telling it that it's welcome here."

Micah stared at me.

"It's my house," he said.

"Then stop inviting it in," I said.

He didn't use the board, not that afternoon. Sulking, he put it on the shelf of the hall closet, still in its shrink-wrap, and went upstairs to edit footage. Katie made grilled cheese sandwiches in the white kitchen and talked to Tatum about the UCSD film program and to Sid about psychology, and laughed twice—small laughs, real ones.

At six, when it got dark, we went through the house and turned on every light.

At eight, Sid found the Ouija board on the living room coffee table.

It was out of its box and out of its shrink-wrap, lying flat on the glass, with the planchette sitting on a letter. Nobody had touched it. Micah swore he'd been upstairs. Katie swore she'd been in the kitchen with us, and she had, and so had Tatum and Sid and I.

The planchette sat on the letter K.

And while the five of us stood looking at it in the bright living room with every lamp on, it moved. Slowly, across the board, by itself, with a sound like a fingernail on cardboard.

A.

T.

Katie made a sound behind me.

I.

The planchette stopped, and the board under it started to smoke: a thin gray thread from the middle, from under the plastic. Then a small blue flame, then a bigger orange one, and the Ouija board was burning on the coffee table in the middle of the living room, all by itself.

Sid had the fire extinguisher from under the kitchen sink before anybody else moved. She'd checked where it was when we came in (how to check a room, Tuesday, in the garage), and she put the fire out in two seconds.

The board was black and curled, the planchette melted onto it. Through the foam you could still read a single word burned into the cardboard, black on black, as if someone had written it with a soldering iron.

MINE.

That night I lay in a sleeping bag on the upstairs hallway floor, outside Micah and Katie's bedroom door.

Tatum was in the guest room at the end of the hall with the door open, the light on, and her camera on its tripod pointed down the hall at me. Sid sat up against the guest-room headboard beside her with her knees up and a flashlight in her lap, awake. Micah and Katie were in their bed with the door open six inches. Micah's camera stood on its tripod in the corner of their room, aimed at the bed; Tatum had made him re-angle it. You're framing it wrong, she'd told him. You want the door in the shot.

I'd changed the loadout on Thursday night in my room, after a lot of thought.

Ability Slot 1: Exorcists LightAbility Slot 2: Wind Barrier

Exorcists Light, for the thing itself. On Thursday I'd slotted it and let a little out, and my hands had filled with light. Nothing like fire, and nothing like the cold blue of the Spirit Gun: warm and gold and unwavering, like sun through a church window on a Sunday morning. Cham-P and San-D sat up in the cage and squinted, and Jum-P rolled over in his sleep. Maga-Z, on top of the cage, didn't squint at all. He watched my hands with the patient interest of somebody memorizing where a thing was kept. Considerable damage towards Infernal and Dark entities.

And Wind Barrier, for everybody else.

And in storage, leaning on the inside of my back, red and black and humming, the spear.

I lay on the hallway floor in the light from the guest room and watched the bedroom door, six inches open, and listened, and at 3:14 and fifty seconds I heard it.

I didn't hear it with my ears, exactly. It came in under them, a rumble so low it was a feeling, like a truck going by three streets over, up through the floor into my back and ribs and teeth.

Katie.

The bedroom door moved an inch, two, slowly, as if somebody very large were leaning on it from the other side. Except I was on the other side, in the hall, and nobody was there but me.

Then the footsteps, heavy and slow and through the floor instead of on it, coming down the hall toward me from the top of the stairs, from the dark at the far end where the guest-room light didn't reach. Thud. Thud. Like something enormously heavy walking on the other side of the air.

I sat up in the sleeping bag.

Thud.

It stopped right next to me. I could feel it, a weight in the air over me like standing beside a building at night. Cold. And a smell, sulfur and something sweet and wrong under the sulfur, like burned hair.

Then it pushed.

It didn't push at the door. It pushed at me—at the inside of me, at whatever in my head had been bolted since Christmas Eve and double-bolted since a plane over the Central Valley. It came on like a fist, like a truck, like a whole house coming down on a single door.

Let me in, it said, not in words but in heat, in the smell of burning. Let me in, boy. You're so full. You're so full of things. Let me in and I'll show you what they're for.

Nothing in me moved. I'd braced for it to hurt, and it didn't even rock me. It was like listening to somebody throw himself against a bank vault from the inside of the vault. And behind that, all the way down, a small cold hand holding mine.

No, I told it.

It pushed again, harder. The air in the hall went hot. The wallpaper by my head began to curl. In the guest room Tatum made a sound, and I heard her camera go over on its tripod, and Sid said Randy, sharp.

They could feel it too. Of course they could. I was the one it wanted, but it was leaning on the whole house, and Tatum and Sid and Katie and Micah didn't have anything bolted.

So I talked. "It's okay," I said out loud into the hot dark hall, low and even, loud enough to reach the guest room and the bed. "It's okay. It can't come in. It's knocking. That's all it can do. It can knock."

The weight over me pushed one more time.

Then it went—up, back, down the hall, thud, thud, into the dark at the end—and the heat went with it, and the smell, and the bedroom door swung slowly shut on its own and clicked.

I sat in the sleeping bag breathing hard, my shirt soaked through. The wallpaper beside my head had gone brown and curled like a page held too close to a candle. In front of my eyes, the panel opened.

Feat: Don't let it in.Silver Trait (held).

I closed it.

Sid stood in the guest-room door with her flashlight. In the light from the room behind her, her face was very white.

"It tried to get in you," said Sid. It wasn't a question.

"Yeah."

"I felt it." Her voice almost held. "From in there. Like somebody leaning on my chest. And then you talked, and it—stopped. It went off me. Like it couldn't—" She stopped. "Was that you? Was that one of the things?"

"Yeah," I said. "One of the things."

Sid looked at me a second longer. "That's a good one," she said.

Behind the closed bedroom door, very faintly, Micah's voice said, "Katie? Katie. Babe—"

I was up. I opened the door.

Katie was standing beside the bed on Micah's side, in her nightgown, in the dark, with her arms at her sides, looking down at him. Micah sat frozen against the headboard, staring up at her, his face white in the light from the hall. She wasn't asleep. Her eyes were open.

And she was smiling.

The clock on the nightstand said 3:17 a.m. It was Sunday, February 16.

"Not yet," said Katie Featherston in a voice that wasn't hers, deep and slow and fond, gravel in a drain. She didn't turn her head. She kept looking at Micah, smiling. "Not yet. Tomorrow. Tell the boy. Tomorrow."

Then she closed her eyes, lay down next to Micah, and was asleep before her head finished settling on the pillow.

V. Tomorrow

Nobody went back to sleep.

All five of us sat in the kitchen until the sun came up, every light in the house on, coffee nobody drank. Katie didn't remember any of it. She'd woken at 3:30 with Micah shaking her and five people standing around the bed, and no idea why. When Micah played her the tape from the corner of the bedroom—the one Tatum had angled with the door in the shot—she watched herself stand there and smile and say not yet, and didn't say a word. She sat at the island in her UCSD sweatshirt with her hands around her mug and her face wiped blank.

Micah didn't hold the camera. That was what I noticed most. For the first time since we'd come through the door on Friday, the Hi8 sat on the counter by the toaster, off, and Micah sat next to Katie with his arm around her shoulders and his other hand over hers on the mug, watching her face instead of a viewfinder.

"I'm sorry," he said to her at about five in the morning, very low. "Katie. I'm sorry. The board. The camera. I thought it was—" He stopped. "I thought it was a thing. A cool thing that happened to us. I didn't think—"

"I know," said Katie, without looking at him. "I know you didn't."

"I'm sorry."

"I know."

She put her head on his shoulder.

At the other end of the island, Tatum was looking at the little LCD on the camera in her lap, at the frame she'd caught in the hall at 3:15 before the tripod went over: me sitting up in a sleeping bag, and the air over me. Just air. The wallpaper by my head, curling brown.

"I didn't get it," said Tatum softly. "The thing. It's not there. It's just you."

"It's not the kind of thing that shows up on tape."

"Then what is?"

"Her," I said. "Standing by the bed. That's what it wants on tape. That's the whole point—it likes the camera." I looked at Micah's Hi8, off, by the toaster. "It wants somebody to watch."

On Sunday afternoon I asked Micah for something.

"The fire," I said. "In Carlsbad, when Katie was eight. Is there anything left from the house? Anything of hers?"

Micah looked at Katie. Katie looked at her hands.

"There's a box," she said. "In the guest-room closet. Pictures. My mom gave it to me when I moved out. There's not much. Most of it burned."

The box held four photographs, a stuffed rabbit scorched black down one side, and a crayon drawing on construction paper with burned edges, which Katie had made when she was seven. A house. A family—a mom, a dad, and two little girls holding hands. A sun with a face in the corner.

And next to the house, at the edge of the paper where the burn had nearly reached, a shape. Tall and black, colored in so hard the crayon had gone through the paper in places, faceless, with its arms out, standing beside the smallest girl.

"I don't remember drawing that," said Katie.

"I know," I said.

I looked at the black shape and its arms, reaching for the little girl—for Katie at seven, a year before the fire. Since she was eight, I'd told Tatum. I'd been wrong. It had been standing next to her before that, waiting.

"Three-fifteen," I said. "It's always been three-fifteen, because that's when it got her. That's when it started. It's an anniversary, every night." I looked at Katie. "And tonight's the one where it finishes."

"How do you know?" said Micah, barely above a whisper.

"Because it told us," I said. "It said tomorrow."

I made the plan in the guest room on Sunday afternoon with Tatum and Sid, on the back of the box of Katie's photographs. It was the only one I had, and I didn't love it.

In the movie, the last night goes like this. Katie gets up at three in the morning, goes downstairs, and screams. Micah runs down. There's a sound in the dark at the bottom of the stairs, and then Micah's body comes flying up the stairs into the camera, and Katie walks up after him, slowly, covered in his blood, crouches over the lens, smiles, and her face changes.

A few nights before that there's the other scene, the one everybody remembers. Katie in bed, asleep, and then dragged—pulled out by her ankles, screaming, by something nobody can see, across the floor, through the door, down the hall, into the dark.

That one hadn't happened yet, not on Micah's tapes and not in this house. It was going to happen tonight. I knew it the way I'd known about the ferry: it was the big scene, the one on the poster.

"It's going to take her," I said. "At three-fifteen. Out of the bed, down the hall, toward the stairs. Toward the dark. And if it gets her to the bottom of the stairs, into the dark down there, then it's done. It's in her all the way, and she's not Katie anymore."

"So we stop it from dragging her," said Tatum.

"We stop it from dragging her," I said. "And when it's holding her—when it's in the hall with its hands on her, solid enough to drag—that's when it's out where I can reach it." I looked at my hands. "I tear it off her with light. And when it's off her—"

I reached behind my left shoulder, into the place where something long and heavy was leaning, and pulled. Gae Dearg slid out of the air into the guest room, red and black and humming, and I had to tip it fast to keep the point out of the ceiling fan.

Tatum and Sid looked at it.

"That's still so cool," said Tatum, under her breath.

"It goes through things that are protected," I said. "Whatever protects a demon, whatever keeps it from dying, this goes through that." I looked at the red point. "I think. I hope. I've never tried it on anything."

"And if it doesn't work?" said Sid.

I had nothing.

"Then we get her out of the house," said Sid, answering herself. "Into the street, into the light, into the car, and we drive. We don't stop. Tatum drives. I get Katie. You get Micah." She looked at me. "That's the plan if it doesn't work. Okay? There's always a plan for if it doesn't work. You taught us that, Tuesday, in the garage."

"Okay," I said. She'd written it under mine on the box, in smaller letters, and underlined it twice.

At 3:00 a.m. on Monday, February 17, Presidents' Day, I stood at the top of the stairs.

Every light in the house was on except two I'd turned off on purpose, the stairwell light and the light in the downstairs front hall, so the bottom of the stairs was dark. Bait. Everywhere else blazed: the upstairs hall, the bedroom, the guest room, and downstairs through the doorway, the kitchen, white and bright.

Tatum stood in the guest-room door with her camera on her shoulder, running, because I'd asked her to. If it wants somebody to watch, give it somebody to watch. Sid stood at the bottom of the stairs in the dark, against the wall by the front door, with a switched-off flashlight in each hand, the fire extinguisher at her feet, and the Cherokee's keys in her pocket.

Micah sat in a chair by the bed holding Katie's hand. She was asleep. She'd taken two of the pills her doctor had given her and dropped off at midnight holding his hand, and he hadn't let go. His camera stood on its tripod in the corner, off. He'd turned it off himself at eleven without anybody asking.

At 3:14 and fifty seconds, the floor rumbled.

Katie.

It came faster than I'd planned for.

She didn't sit up or stand. One second Katie was lying asleep with Micah holding her hand, and the next her whole body jerked as if somebody had grabbed her ankles and pulled, and she came off the bed, sheets and all, onto the floor with a crash. Micah's hand tore out of hers. She was awake now and screaming, and she was moving, sliding on her back across the carpet toward the door and the hall, arms flailing, fingers clawing at the carpet, the dresser leg, the door frame, while something I couldn't see held her ankles and dragged her.

Down the hall. Toward me, toward the stairs, toward the dark at the bottom.

"KATIE!" Micah was on his knees, grabbing for her and missing.

I put up my right hand and threw the wind.

On the ferry it had been a wall. This time I laid it down flat, a sheet of hard roaring air across the top of the stairs from wall to wall, between the hall and the dark. Katie slid into it feet first, screaming, and it caught her like a net, like the face of a wave. The thing dragging her hit it too. I felt the impact in my arm, a weight like a truck against the wind, and the wind held.

She stopped at the top of the stairs, on her back, a foot from the edge, nightgown whipping, fingers dug into the carpet, eyes huge, still screaming.

Nobody gets dragged down the hall, I thought. Not tonight.

Whatever had her ankles pulled.

I felt that in the wind too, in the barrier, in my arm, like a fish on a line. It pulled, and the wind bent and held, and Katie screamed, and it pulled again—and for the first time I saw it.

Only the edge of it, where it met the wind, where the roaring air pressed against it and showed its shape the way rain shows the shape of glass. Something huge and black hunched at the top of the stairs over Katie's legs, arms down, holding her ankles. It had something like shoulders and something like a head and no face, a hole where the face should have been. A shape out of a child's drawing, colored in so hard the crayon went through the paper.

It turned its no-face toward me.

Boy, it said, in heat and sulfur. You can't hold her forever.

"I don't have to," I said, and with my left hand I let go of the light.

Exorcists Light came out of my left palm like a sunrise. There was no ball and no beam, only light, all at once, the way it comes when somebody throws open a door on a dark room. Gold and warm, the light through a church window on a Sunday morning, if the church were on fire with it. It filled the hall and the stairwell. It poured down the stairs into the dark at the bottom where Sid stood with her flashlights, and the dark down there went away.

And it hit the thing at the top of the stairs.

The thing screamed.

I'd heard Diana scream in a basement a week and a half earlier, a girl's scream, high and thin and terrible. This was nothing like that. This was the sound a furnace makes when you open the door: a roar, and under the roar a thousand smaller sounds, all of them screaming. The walls shook. The pictures came off them. The bedroom light exploded in a shower of glass. And the black, faceless shape at the top of the stairs burned. Where the light touched it, it smoked, its edges curling like the edge of Katie's drawing, black going to gray going to nothing.

It let go of Katie.

It had to. It came up off the floor and reared, huge, filling the hall from floor to ceiling, black and smoking and screaming in the gold, and came at me over the wind and over Katie with its arms out and its no-face open, to take me instead. To take the boy who was so full.

Now.

I let the wind go and put my right hand behind my left shoulder, into the place where something long and heavy and red had been leaning since Oregon, and pulled.

Gae Dearg came out of the air into my hands as if it had been waiting for this its whole life.

I didn't have to think about it. I'd known what to do with the long end of a stick since the woods in November, and my hands found the shaft, my weight went forward, and I put the red point of the spear through the middle of the thing at the top of the stairs.

It went in.

Something should have stopped it. I felt the something: a hardness like a wall of old iron, a protection as old as the thing itself or older, one that had kept it safe from every priest and prayer and exorcism since before there were priests. A shell.

And Gae Dearg didn't care.

It went through the shell like a hot needle through a soap bubble. I felt the shell give the way ice gives under your foot, a crack running all the way through, and the red point went in past it into whatever was inside, into the thing, and the spear sang out loud—a high, clear, ringing note like a wet finger on the rim of a glass, loud enough to drown the roar.

The thing at the top of the stairs stopped screaming.

It looked down with its no-face at the red spear through its middle. And through the shaft, through my hands, through the cold right hand that something small was holding, I felt it: surprise. Pure, enormous, ancient surprise, from a thing that had never once in all its existence considered that it could be hurt.

Then the gold light got into the hole the spear had made.

It went up from the inside like a house on fire—like a house in Carlsbad at three-fifteen in the morning fourteen years ago. Gold, from the middle out, through the black, through the arms and the shape like shoulders and the shape like a head, burning and burning, with a sound like every window in a house blowing out at once, and then the hall was empty.

Thin gray smoke hung in the hall and smelled of sulfur and burned hair. The pictures lay on the floor in their broken frames. The wallpaper was brown and curled all the way down to the stairs, and the bedroom light was a jagged hole of glass.

And the hall light was on, plain and ordinary, a hall light in a tract house in Scripps Ranch at 3:16 in the morning.

I stood at the top of the stairs with a red spear in my hands, breathing like I'd run five miles.

Katie lay on her back at my feet at the edge of the top step in her torn nightgown, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Breathing fast and shallow. Alive.

I put Gae Dearg back, let it slide into the air behind my shoulder until my hands were empty, and knelt next to her.

"Katie," I said.

She looked at me. Her eyes were her own, blue and wet and scared. Hers.

"It's quiet," said Katie Featherston in her own voice, small and hoarse and amazed. "It's—Randy. It's so quiet."

"I know."

"It's never been quiet. Not since I was a little girl. There's always been something. In the back. Breathing." She put her hands over her face. "It's gone. It's gone. It's really gone."

Then Micah was on his knees on the carpet, both arms around her and his face in her hair, crying too hard to say anything, and she held on to him with both hands. I got up and backed away and left them to it.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the light, Sid stood holding two switched-off flashlights, looking up at me. In the guest-room doorway Tatum stood with her camera on her shoulder, red light on, pointed at me. Her face behind it was white.

"Tate," I said. "You can turn it off now."

She didn't. She looked at the little LCD screen, then at me, then back at the screen.

"It's white," said Tatum faintly. "The whole thing. From when you—when the light came out of your hand. It's just white. Like the tape got—like it got burned." She looked up at me. "I was standing right here, and I didn't get any of it."

"Good," I said.

Tatum held my eyes over the camera for a while. Then she lowered it, switched it off, and stood in the doorway holding it against her chest like Dewey with an evidence bag.

"That was the most incredible thing I've ever seen," said Tatum Riley. "And I didn't get it on tape." She laughed, wet and shaky. "That's the worst thing that's ever happened to me."

Feat: Drive out a demon that's had her since she was eight.Gold Ability (held).

I read it. Since she was eight. Even the panel had it wrong; the thing had been there since before the drawing, since before she could remember. I didn't correct it. It didn't care about my corrections.

A second later, under it:

STORY COMPLETE: Late Show.Feat: Nobody dragged down the hall.Gold Random.All tickets unlocked: 4.Fuse charges: 3.Next story loading.

I closed it.

Sid had come up two steps, then three. She stopped halfway, in the light, with her flashlights, looking up at me.

"There was a plan," she said, "if it didn't work."

"I know. It was a good plan."

"We didn't need it."

"No."

Sid held my eyes a moment. Then she came up the rest of the stairs, past Katie and Micah on the floor, past the broken pictures, and stopped in front of me in the smoky hall, looking up at me, very straight.

"Next time," she said, "I want to be up here. Not at the bottom with the flashlights."

"Sid—"

"Next time," said Sidney Prescott. She reached up, took the green scarf off her own neck, the lumpy one, and wrapped it around mine, twice, and tucked in the ends. "It's cold," she said. "At three in the morning."

It was February in San Diego, the heat was on, and the hall had just been on fire. It wasn't cold at all, and I didn't tell her so.

VI. Kristen First

I called Ohio at 3:41 a.m. from the phone in Micah and Katie's kitchen. It was 6:41 there, on a Monday holiday. She'd be asleep.

She picked up on the first ring.

"Did you call me first," said Kristen Parker, wide awake.

"You're first."

"Before your parents."

"Before my parents. Before anybody."

A long, shaking breath on the line. "Okay. Okay. Is it—"

"It's done," I said. "Nobody died. Nobody got dragged down the hall."

"Was it bad."

I looked around. Micah and Katie were asleep sitting up on the living room couch under a blanket, every light on. Tatum sat at the island with her camera in her lap, looking at a white screen. Sid stood at the window with her neck bare, because the scarf was around mine, looking out at the dark street.

"It was bad," I said. "And then it wasn't."

"Okay," said Kristen, and I heard her let go of something. "Okay." Then, smaller: "Thank you. For calling me first."

"I promised."

"I know you did," said Kristen Parker. "That's why I'm thanking you."

VII. Four

I pulled them in a locked stall in the men's room at a rest stop outside Kettleman City, at two in the afternoon on Presidents' Day, because it was the first door between Los Angeles and home that locked from my side. Tatum was inside the mini-mart buying Corn Nuts. Sid was asleep in the Cherokee with her head against the window.

The first one was the tape.

[PULL] Bronze Skill.

Nothing landed in my head. Skills usually did; you got one, and a second later you knew something you hadn't known before, the way you suddenly remember a phone number. I waited for it. Instead something arrived in storage, behind my left shoulder where the spear leaned—something much bigger than the spear, a weight like somebody had parked a truck against the inside of my back.

Herrera Outlaw (Common Item)Cyberpunk 2077 - Sometimes all you need is a stylish drive around. Herrera Outlaw is a luxury limousine, but it is also built to survive the streets of Night City, so don't expect anything below .50 calibre to get through the windows. Not the best car, but it is a stylish set of wheels sure to impress any girl.Stored.

I read it twice.

"That's a car," I told the stall door.

A limousine. An armored limousine from a video game that hadn't been made yet, with windows nothing under a fifty-caliber could get through, parked in the dark behind my shoulder next to a spear. I could feel the size of it every time I breathed in.

The second one was the door that held.

[PULL] Silver Trait.

Lucky Romantic (Uncommon Trait)Your luck with your romantic life seems to be substantially increased.

Lucky, I'd thought at a pay phone in Castaic. Lucky isn't one of them.

Ha, said the Gacha. Ha ha.

I thought about the back of Sid's head against the window out in the parking lot, and Tatum's hands on the wheel all the way down from Woodsboro, and the walkie-talkie on the back seat, and the red glove on my right hand and the green scarf around my neck. Rule One. I was going to have to tell them about that one.

The third one was the demon.

[PULL] Gold Ability.

This one I felt. It came in through both hands and up my arms into my chest and down into my stomach, and it kept coming, heavy and complicated and strange, like reading a contract in a language I didn't speak and somehow understanding every clause.

Contractual Rectreation (Elite Ability)Jujutsu Kaisen - You can invoke any legally binding receipt you have ownership of to take advantage of its effect. You can invoke a receipt for a hot spring trip to make yourself refreshed or a receipt for a house to summon a copy of it that you can control etc.10th ability. Stored.ABILITY SLOT 3 UNLOCKED.

I sat down on the closed lid.

Ten abilities. One slot to start, plus one more for every five. A third slot—I felt it open under my breastbone beside the other two, an empty place, waiting. And Elite. My second Elite. Rectreation, typo and all.

I read it three times. Any legally binding receipt you have ownership of.

Then I took out my wallet.

It held three receipts. A Chevron in Santa Nella from Friday, for gas and Funyuns and a Coke, but Tatum had paid, so it was hers and no good to me. You have ownership of. A Denny's in Castaic, mine: a Grand Slam and a coffee, $6.43. And a long one, folded in half, from the mall in Santa Rosa, from the Tuesday before Los Angeles.

SPENCER GIFTS #412. BLACKLIGHT 18IN x 6. BATTERIES x 12. UV FLASHLIGHT x 2. TOTAL $97.31. PAID CASH. THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT SPENCER'S.

I'd paid for it with my own money from Bradley Video.

I swapped Contractual Rectreation into Slot 3. There was no wait, since the slot was empty; it slid into place like a key into a lock. Then I held the receipt up in my cold right hand.

Invoke, I thought, because I didn't know how else to do it.

The receipt lit, every printed word glowing white for a second like the lines on Diana's skin in the blacklight. Then it began to burn, with light instead of fire, from the edges in, turning to gray ash between my fingers, curling, falling.

All around me in the stall—on the floor, on the toilet tank, on the paper dispenser, propped against the walls—stood six eighteen-inch blacklights in black plastic housings, all on, humming purple.

The stall went purple. My shoelaces glowed. The graffiti on the door glowed. Somebody had written CALL CINDY FOR A GOOD TIME in something that, under UV, turned out not to be ink.

I stood in the purple light and felt what it cost: a constant draw out of my chest, out of the place where the energy lived, like a faucet left running. A trickle. Six blacklights' worth. Copies and effects last only while I keep paying, I figured. And the cost goes with the price.

Ninety-seven dollars and thirty-one cents, I thought. That's six blacklights. A house would cost—

I didn't want to think about what a house would cost.

I stopped paying, and the blacklights didn't switch off so much as go out, like candles. They faded the way the receipt had, from the edges in, into gray, into nothing, and were gone. The stall was a stall again: fluorescent, beige, CALL CINDY. The receipt was gone too, a pinch of ash on the floor of a rest-stop bathroom in Kettleman City.

One-shot, I thought. It burns the receipt. Once.

I looked at the ash until somebody in the next stall flushed. Then I took out the Denny's receipt—Castaic, $6.43, a Grand Slam and a coffee—and didn't invoke it. I folded it very carefully and put it back in my wallet behind my school ID, where it would stay flat. You never know when you're going to need a Grand Slam.

The last one was the hall.

[PULL] Gold Random.Random → Trait.

Eye of the Tiger (Rare Trait)You've got the eye of the Tiger, the willingness to push forward and see it through, the will to break your body training and not shed a tear. You are exceptional at training, being able to push your limits when training far easier, and recovering from the effects of training far faster.

I laughed out loud, and the man in the next stall went completely still.

Fuse charges: 3

When I came out, Tatum and Sid were standing by the Cherokee in the sunny parking lot, both with their arms crossed. Sid was awake. Very awake.

"Twenty-five minutes," said Tatum. "I was about to send in a search party. Was it the hash browns? I told you about the hash browns."

"It wasn't the hash browns," I said. "Rule One. Some new things came in."

They'd seen enough since October not to ask from where. Tatum uncrossed her arms.

"Things," she said. "Plural."

"I've got a car."

"A what?"

"A car. A limousine. An armored limousine." I could still feel it back there, heavy as a held breath. "From the future. From a video game that hasn't been made yet. Nothing under a fifty-caliber gets through the windows."

Tatum stared at me until a pickup backing out of the next space honked at her.

"Can I drive it," said Tatum Riley.

"It's in storage. Behind my shoulder, with the spear. I can't take it out at a rest stop, Tate."

"Can I drive it, Randy."

"—Yes. Eventually. Yes."

"Okay." She looked at the Cherokee and then at my back. "Okay. That's fine. That's completely fine. I'm completely calm. You have a limousine in your back."

"And I need to keep my receipts," I said. "From now on. All of them. Everything I buy."

Tatum looked at me.

"Why," she said.

"I'll explain on the way. It's complicated. It's a contract thing."

"You're going to be so annoying at the grocery store," said Tatum.

"And I get better faster now. At training. I can push harder, and I bounce back faster. That's all it does."

Sid studied me across the hood of the Cherokee.

She'd been running with me since November, at five in the morning, in the dark and the cold. She'd watched me throw up in a hedge in October, go over the four-square wall in December, and climb Mission Cliffs in January.

"So now you're going to be unbearable," said Sidney Prescott.

"Probably."

"Five in the morning," said Sid. "Tomorrow. Don't be late."

"I'm never late."

"You're always eight minutes early," said Sid. "That's late. That's how it works." She got into the passenger seat, and through the windshield I could see she was smiling, and that she'd stopped bothering to hide it from me.

Sid was asleep again before Coalinga, or looked it, with her head against the window and Tatum's jacket over her knees.

Rule One. There was still one I hadn't told.

"Tate."

"What."

"There's one more. It's in the same family as the thing at the Chevron."

Tatum's eyes went to the mirror.

"More?"

"Lucky in love," I said. "More or less. My luck with girls just went up. Supposedly."

Tatum drove a mile without answering, a long, flat, silent mile past a field of something green and a feedlot you could smell with the windows up.

"Supposedly," she said finally.

"That's the best I can tell."

"Not definitely. Supposedly."

"It doesn't come with a lot of detail, Tate."

"It sounds like a horoscope," said Tatum. Then, very low, to the windshield, in a voice I almost didn't catch: "Like you need it."

In the passenger seat Sid didn't move. Her eyes were closed and her head was against the window. But I'd listened to her sleep in that car for four hundred miles, and I knew what her breathing sounded like when she was really out, and this wasn't that.

VIII. Globotech

We got back to Woodsboro at 7:30 on Monday night, in the dark.

Tatum dropped Sid off first. Neil Prescott was standing on the porch under the light when we pulled up, the way my father stood. Sid got out and stood by the car a second with her hand on the door. Then she leaned back in through the window and said, to me in the back seat:

"Tuesday. The garage. I want to learn the thing with the stairs."

"Which thing?"

"The thing where you stand at the top," said Sid, "instead of the bottom." And she went up the walk to her father.

Tatum dropped me at my house at 7:45 and didn't leave. She turned off the engine and sat at the curb with her arms crossed on the steering wheel.

"I'm not leaving," said Tatum Riley, "until I see the car."

"Tate—"

"Rule One, Randy. You said I could drive it. Eventually. I want to see it."

My family was on the porch, all three of them: Dad in his Cal sweatshirt, Mom with her arms crossed, Martha with the walkie-talkie, which clicked in my pocket as I got out of the car.

"Over and out," said Martha, satisfied.

"Over and out."

I put my duffel down on the lawn and looked at the driveway. The Volvo was parked on the left side. On the right there was a space. Long enough. Mostly.

"Dad," I said. "Can you move the Volvo up? About ten feet?"

My father looked at me, then at the empty half of the driveway, then at me again.

"Why," said my father.

"Rule One," I said. "I got something in San Diego. I want to show you. And it's—big."

My father studied me. Then he went inside, got his keys, came back out, moved the Volvo up ten feet until its front bumper almost touched the garage door, got out, and went to stand next to Mom on the porch with his arms crossed exactly like hers.

I stood at the end of the driveway in the porch light and reached behind my left shoulder, and pulled.

It came out of the air the way the spear did, except it kept coming. Front end first, it slid out of nothing, out of the dark at the end of the driveway, black and long and low, and longer, and longer—a hood like the prow of a ship, a windshield, a long, long body with doors and doors and doors, all of it gloss black, with dark windows and chrome and a grille like a mouth. Then it was sitting in my parents' driveway in Woodsboro, California, all twenty-two feet of it, its back bumper hanging out over the sidewalk. A limousine from a city that didn't exist yet, in a game nobody had made, built to survive a war.

Nobody on the porch spoke.

In the Cherokee at the curb, Tatum had both hands over her mouth. Across the street, Mrs. Fimple, who'd come out on her porch for her mail, dropped it.

"Randy," said my mother, very faintly. "Is that a limousine?"

"It's armored," I said. "Nothing under a fifty-caliber gets through the windows."

"Where," said Diane Meeks, "are we going to park it?"

My father came down the porch steps and walked slowly down the driveway, past the Volvo, to the limo. He walked all the way around it. He put his hand on the hood. He looked at the grille. He crouched and looked at the tires. He knocked on a window with one knuckle, and it sounded like knocking on a bank vault.

He stood up and looked at me.

"Same place as the spear," said my father. It wasn't a question.

"Same place as the spear."

He nodded slowly. He looked at the limo, then across the street at Mrs. Fimple on her porch with her mail at her feet, then at the Rileys' Cherokee at the curb with Tatum in it, both hands still over her mouth.

"Okay," said Ted Meeks. "This is what we're going to do."

Inside the family, Rule One held. My mother, my father, and Martha knew where the limousine had come from, as far as anybody could: the same place as the spear, the same place as the bead and the wind and the cane. They knew it was mine, and that it had shown up after I stood at the top of a staircase in San Diego and kept a demon from dragging a girl down a hall, the way things always showed up after. They didn't know how, and they'd stopped asking, because I couldn't lie to them and they could tell when I wasn't going to answer.

Outside the family, it came from Globotech.

"It's from Globotech," my father told Mrs. Fimple across the street at eight o'clock that night, hands in his pockets, very calm, in the voice he used for flat tires and the IRS. "A goodwill gesture. After the recall. You remember, Barbara—the toys. The window. They sent a man with a check." He looked at the limo in his driveway. "Apparently they felt the check wasn't enough."

"They sent you a limousine?" said Mrs. Fimple.

"They sent Randy a limousine," said my father. "He was very traumatized by the toys."

"Oh," said Mrs. Fimple. "Oh, the poor thing."

"You lied to Mrs. Fimple," I said later in the kitchen, over leftover meatloaf.

"I lied to Mrs. Fimple," said my father, eating a piece of meatloaf off my plate. "You didn't. Rule One is yours; it's not mine. I'm allowed to lie to Barbara Fimple. I've been lying to Barbara Fimple about how much I like her casseroles for twenty years." He chewed. "I'll call the DMV in the morning. I'll tell them Globotech. I'll get it registered, and insured, and I'll find out if you need a special license to drive something that long, which I'm guessing you do." He looked at me. "And if anybody from Globotech ever calls to ask why there's a Globotech limousine in my driveway—"

"Then what?"

"Then I'll tell them," said my father, "that I'd very much like to speak to Mr. Warren Pryce. About the toys." He took another piece of meatloaf. "And see what he says."

I looked at him.

"Dad," I said. "That's actually kind of brilliant."

"I'm an actuary," said my father. "I know how insurance works. And blackmail." He pushed my plate back to me. "Eat your meatloaf."

Much later—after Tatum had finally been allowed to sit in the driver's seat for twenty minutes with the engine off and the radio on, making noises, and had gone home; after Martha had been allowed to sit in the back with the Devas and turn the little reading lights on and off forty times (San-D in her lap, Cham-P exploring the leather seat like a new country, Jum-P asleep in a cupholder, and Maga-Z, inevitably, found inside the locked glove compartment with no explanation); after Mom had gone to bed saying a limousine, Ted, a limousine to nobody—I sat in the den in the green light of the monitor with the modem's scream turned down.

Mom had left a brochure on the desk. A glossy college brochure with a photograph of a quad on the front, brick buildings and green grass, students on blankets under trees, a white steeple, and the name across the top in navy-blue serif letters:

WINDSOR COLLEGEWindsor, Ohio

And a Post-it note on it in Mom's handwriting:

Spring break. April. You need to see colleges. Your father says Ohio has more than one. - Mom

P.S. Kristen lives in Ohio.

P.P.S. I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying.

I looked at it while the monitor hummed—the quad, the steeple, the students on their blankets in the sun. A school where, in another life, in a movie, a boy who looked exactly like me had stood on a lawn in broad daylight with a boombox playing and been dragged into a news van and stabbed to death.

I put the brochure down and opened the guestbook. At the bottom, from that afternoon, from somewhere in Michigan, was a new entry, lowercase and careful, typed by somebody who'd thought about every word.

— j., detroit: how do you stop something that only walks. it never runs. it just walks. it looks like people. sometimes people i know. nobody else can see it. it's always coming. i'm not crazy. i'm not on anything. please.

I read it three times. Then I picked the brochure back up and turned it over to the map on the back. Ohio, and Michigan sitting right on top of it, and Detroit an hour past the state line.

Spring break, I thought. April.

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