Meddling Kids E-Book

Edgar Cantero

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A nostalgic and subversive trip rife with sly nods to H. P. Lovecraft and pop culture, in the vein of It and Stranger ThingsA nostalgic celebration of horror, friendship and many-tentacled, interdimensional demon spawn. In 1977 the Blyton Summer Detective Club unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster—another low-life fortune hunter who would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those Meddling Kids.By 1990 the former detectives are haunted by strange, half-remembered events that cannot be explained by a guy in a mask. Andy, the once-intrepid tomboy now wanted in two states, wants answers. To find them she will need Kerri, the former kid genius now drinking her ghosts away in New York with Tim, an excitable Weimaraner descended from the original canine member of the club. They will also have to get Nate, the horror nerd currently residing in an asylum. Luckily Nate has not lost contact with Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star who was once their leader… which is remarkable, considering Peter has been dead for years.The time has come to get the team back together and find out what actually happened all those years ago. It's their only chance to end the nightmares and, perhaps, save the world.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Part One: Reunion

Part Two: Relapse

Part Three: Collapse

Part Four: Panic

Part Five: Annihilation

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

A Novel by

EDGAR CANTERO

TITAN BOOKS

Meddling Kids

Print edition ISBN: 9781785658761

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658778

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: April 2018

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2018 by Edgar Cantero. All rights reserved.

This edition published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2018.

Additional art by Jordi March

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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It starts when you pull the lamp chain and light doesn’t come. Then you know you will never wake up in time, you will not make it to the end of this paragraph alive. Desperate reassuring thoughts try to rise over the panic in your head: it’s okay, you don’t need lights, you are practically awake already. You are lying on your bed, you can guess the familiar shape of the side lamp in the morning twilight and hear the old radiator clunking in the night; you are safe. It’s just that the lamp doesn’t work. But you want it to work; you need to dispel the darkness and let certainty outline the room so the things outside know you’re awake and won’t dare enter, and you pull the chain again and again, and you recall the lamp switch has failed before (has it?), and look, the lightbulb really is trying, though it barely manages to seep a wan glow, and it’s not enough to flash the room out of the shadows, but who needs more, the lamp says, you’re here, this is your room, I am your lamp, that’s your radiator going clunk in the night, that’s the same old closed door beyond which things might lurk and breathe skinless and eyeless, but you can rest, we promise we don’t exist really, lie down. Or are you lying down? Because you think you’re up on your elbows, but your arms aren’t feeling the weight now that you focus on them; in fact, your eyeballs are not moving, and then you try to say “hey” but your throat isn’t responding either, so you cling to the sheets (Do you? Are your fingernails truly scratching the linen?) and you struggle to emit a sound, make your vocal cords vibrate, push some air through your windpipe, just feel your fucking windpipe, for God’s sake, shout and wake up the slumbering blob that is you on your bed, sleeping, dreaming, at the mercy of drooling things outside the closed door, and you pull pull pull pull pull the chain and the lamp insists, I can’t, it’s a technical fault, but I promise you you’re awake, look at me, I’m your good old lamp, I’ve never lied to you, the chain has failed before, you know this, you should install a real switch you can snap on and off, and that’s when you realize your bedside lamp never had a chain. Furthermore, there’s no radiator in the room that can go clunk. It’s their footsteps (clunk), and the door is already open—try to shout—they’re in your room—try to shout—they’re creeping up your bed (clunk), stretching toward you (clunk), squamous ice-cold webbed fingers aiming for your spine—try to SHOUT!

* * *

Her own scream woke her up. It probably woke the whole block, really. She could still hear it resonating in the shoebox width of the room while her racing heart geared down from sprint to marathon and senses swept her surroundings, checking up on reality (of course this is your room, you dimwit, look at how cold and smelly and dampened by bureaucratic rain-pattering and faraway sirens it is). It had not been a bad scream, Kerri judged by the echoes of it. Not so much an eeek, a mouse kind of shrill as a strong, hard-boiled holy mother of fuck.

Tim’s grave, silent stare seemed to confirm it: On really bad nights she would wake up to the dog on the bed, barking away the nightmares. Today he was just sitting by, eyes level and fixed on her, an At ease, soldier expression on his face.

She sat up in her unheated room, lit by the TV static sky, and touched the ice-cold window glass. Real sensations, all of them. She wondered how dreams managed to deceive her every time; they were so blatantly dreams in retrospect, the fake stimuli so dim and shallow. She caressed Tim’s head: his short fur, his wet nose, his whiskers. It was all too complex to be fabricated.

“How do you stay sane, Tim?” she asked him.

Tim whimpered, olivertwisting his pale blue eyes.

Kerri gave him a flirt-acknowledging smirk and allowed him to hop inside the spartan cast-iron-framed bed. She sat against the wall, flipped through the dozen books on the solitary shelf, opened one paperback, and retrieved the newspaper clip.

The teen sleuths grinned back at her across thirteen years, from the sunny grayscale shores of Sleepy Lake, 1977.

* * *

“Do you still see them?” asked the shrink.

Nate, crash-landed on the armchair opposite, threw back a dehydrated stare.

“Your friends, I mean,” Dr. Willett clarified. “Are you still in contact with them?”

Nate took a drag of his cigarette clutched between Band-Aid-wrapped fingertips, stalling for the end of the session.

“My cousin Kerri calls from time to time. She went to study biology in New York, and she stayed there. I see her once or twice a year. Her mom still breeds Weimaraners back in Portland.

“Andy just left. At sixteen or so, she threw a backpack over her shoulder, left home, and jumped on a train to . . . I don’t know, find herself or whatever. She was always the complex one. I think she calls Kerri sometimes, or sends her postcards.

“Peter was the golden boy. He stayed in California to finish high school; he planned to attend the Air Force Academy, follow Captain Al’s steps . . . and then at sixteen he got discovered by a casting agent. He did movies, became a big star.”

He snorted, put out the cigarette, and dropped the tone of his voice.

“Then he overdosed on pills and died in a hotel room in L.A.”

In another city in another state, Kerri stroked the pulp-quality paper on which the Pennaquick Telegraph was printed, its pores, the jagged edges of the page. Real sensations, like this cold room and the coarse army blanket and Tim’s ears brushing her thighs. This did happen. This piece of paper says it. “Teen Sleuths Unmask Sleepy Lake Monster.” “Uncover Criminal Plot.” “Haunting Debunked.” We did it.

“Do you miss them?” Dr. Willett prompted.

Nate gazed at the window. It was March, but still winter. That’s what the last thirteen years had been: a very long winter.

“Nah,” he said. “We were kids. Childhood friends don’t last forever. I mean, who holds on to the past for that long?”

* * *

Thomas X. Wickley’s own thirteen-year-old copy of the Pennaquick Telegraph, stained with blood and urine, burned inside his breast pocket during the parole hearing.

“You were charged with fraud, attempted burglary, kidnapping, and child endangerment. And you pleaded guilty to all four. Is that correct?”

“Yes, it is.”

Thirteen years.

“Now, you know kidnapping is the most serious of these charges. And yet it’s also the one for which you could have more easily pleaded innocence. You were aware that this crime in itself, kidnapping a minor, added ten years to your sentence?”

Thirteen fucking years.

“I was,” he answered.

His hands on the table didn’t even shudder at the number. They stayed still and gnarled like ancient trees, mumbling in grumpy voices, Thirteen years, you say, boy? That’s nothing!!

It was true. He never had any plans for those thirteen years anyway. Not since things went awry in Blyton Hills.

“Mr. Wickley? I was asking, would you mind retelling for us the circumstances of that charge?”

“Not at all,” he said, in the tone both weary and secretly glad to be asked of every old man who has a chance to tell a story, no matter how embarrassing. “My . . . perceived rivals at the time were teenagers. Children. During that night at the house on the lake, they split up to cover more ground. I saw the chance to seize one and I did. She’d accidentally fallen through a trapdoor and I found her in the basement. I gagged her and tied her up. I didn’t even consider she was only a little girl. I was blinded by greed. I am no danger to those children anymore. I don’t hate children.”

He stopped well before being carried away into saying he liked children. Words must be picked carefully in a parole hearing.

“You are aware, of course,” the commissioner said, “that those kids are no longer children.”

They giggled. The kids in the picture did, with their shiny hair and bucktoothed smiles. He heard them through the breast pocket of his orange jumpsuit.

He scoffed out of the gaffe: “I am sure I am not a danger to them, whatever their age.”

It burned him. The newspaper was scorching through his breast pocket.

“They were doing the right thing,” he said. “They weren’t meddling. They were the good guys.”

The commissioner leaned back in his chair just as the quietest, meanest member of the board saw it fit to intervene. “Still, the circumstances are aggravating. Here you are, doing fifteen years on account of being captured by four teenagers.”

“And a dog,” Wickley added.

“Yes, and a dog. That must have been a blow to your ego. You had problems with other inmates because of it. Some resentment would be altogether reasonable.”

Wickley looked down at his hands again, admired them upon finding them perfectly calm. Dry and undaunted, like tree trunks in the gentle breeze that carried the giggles of four teenagers. And a dog.

“What we mean to say is that there was, so to speak, some insult added to injury in the way you were apprehended. Actually, the word in the police report is ‘snared,’” the commissioner read. “By means of a contraption involving . . . ‘a high-speeding serving cart, two flights of stairs, and a fishing net’?”

Wickley watched him frown, briefly striving to pry an image out of the type, while the giggling in his own breast pocket grew into a television laughtrack.

“So, whatever—what we mean to say,” the man resumed, “is that some extra concern about you taking revenge is not unjustified.”

The prisoner drove his right hand to his heart. Violently. Slapping the picture silent.

“Gentlemen. I staged a haunting in an old mansion and dressed myself as a giant salamander to scare people away. I was captured by four teenagers and a Weimaraner. And I am sixty. Do you seriously believe I pose a threat to anyone?”

The board members chortled. The commissioner started putting away his papers.

* * *

Five days and nineteen hours later, he made parole.

The riveted iron doors opened the following Monday and sun shone on Wickley’s arid face, on the sentinel turrets, on a reservoir-sized puddle on the cobblestone road.

He put his box of belongings at his feet, took out the crumpled pack of Raleighs and lit one with the second-to-last match from his Sambo’s giveaway matchbook. The first drag tasted rancid, and yet periorgasmically good. The legendary afterjail cigarette.

Smoke curled away in the sun like a flower out of the animated film Yellow Submarine.

He unfolded the newspaper page he’d transferred from his orange jumpsuit to his civilian jacket pocket, next to a movie ticket stub for The Eiger Sanction. The grinning children in the picture met sunlight again.

The names in the second paragraph were highlighted in faded yellow: Peter Manner, Kerri Hollis, Andrea “Andy” Rodriguez, Nate Rogers, Sean. Peter Manner’s name was struck out in pen. That had been a recent addition; he’d overheard the news in the library two years ago. “Peter Manner, the kid in that flick with Lisa Bonet, he OD’d,” some convict had said, followed by the usual condescending platitudes on the rough lives of child stars and whatever. If bad fortune had struck out the other three names too, their deaths never made it to the prison grapevine. Not everyone stars in a Christmas blockbuster movie after all. The dog would most likely be a strike-out too, but lacking any official confirmation, Wickley would rather wait.

He further browsed the box for his father’s wristwatch and strapped it on. He was due to check in with his parole officer in two hours.

He picked up his box and crossed the street to a nearby pub.

* * *

They’d changed the label of his favorite beer. Also that of Coca-Cola bottles, the red background now shattered in the furiously sharp-angled pattern of the new decade. Two men by the window table were talking baseball, and Wickley, sitting at the bar, didn’t recognize a single name. He was going to light himself another cigarette when the barman approached and said, “Sir, you can’t smoke in here.”

He stared at the guy’s afterimage for a while before he tipped the cigarette back into the package and continued drinking. At least he’d called him “sir.”

The Pennaquick Telegraph clip lay unfolded on the counter while he enjoyed his beer. The verb is not an overstatement—he was really enjoying it. Now and then he side-glanced at the picture for no reason in particular. Perhaps because it was one of the few familiar things he could turn to: the panting dog, the smiling children. Even the dead one was smiling. Christ, even the deputy sheriff was smiling. The only one not smiling in that photo was him.

He glanced at the mirror across the counter. The old man there looked remarkably weary for someone who had spent thirteen years shelved in a cold, dry place, but not thirteen years older than the one in the newspaper. He had been blessed with one of those faces that age rapidly through the first three decades, but later remain relatively unchanged throughout adulthood. He continued not to smile now, but he somehow looked better than the detainee in the picture. Having lost the salamander costume helped.

The highlighted names stared up at the ceiling fan. He looked down at his hands and gnarled fingers slumbering on the counter, as unfazed as they were during the interview. They really didn’t give a damn.

He stayed on his stool, drinking in little sips, listening to a new but not bad song playing on the radio. One of the men by the window loudly rejected the idea of a player Wickley had never heard of being a better pitcher than one he remembered perfectly well.

Delicately, Wickley grabbed the newspaper clip, held it up, crumpled it into his hand, lit the last match in the book and burned it. The barman grunted at this act of arson not covered by the nonsmoking sign.

Wickley sprinkled the ashes on the floor and left for the restroom.

* * *

Life out of prison is full of easily overlooked luxuries, such as using a public urinal without having to check your back. He smiled at that adage as it shaped in his mind, and took pleasure in reading the ageless poetry scribbled on the tiles and trying to aim at the little pink spongey cube near the drain.

Thirteen goddamn years.

He was free.

Without the warning of a toilet flush, the door to the stall behind him slammed open.

“Good morning, Mr. Wickley.”

He knew then, by the sudden suspension of all lower bodily functions, that his subconscious mind had recognized the voice. Even thirteen years and a puberty later.

He spun on his feet and corrected his visual line upward and choked at the face of the bully confronting him—the dark-browed figure filling and brimming over the ghostly contour of a smiling memory.

“Andrea ‘Andy’ Rodriguez!” he blurted out.

The woman blew a bang of black hair off her face. “Andy. My name’s Andy.”

“I am not allowed to talk to you,” he protested. “I just got outta jail.”

“Really? Me too,” she said, checking her freebie Coca-Cola digital watch. “They must have noticed by now.”

He tried to sidestep her; she blocked his way. Wickley quivered, his fortitude crumbling at the sight of his own hands surrendering to shakes.

“I did my time!” he whimpered. “I paid my debt to society!”

“Hell yeah, you paid it, and with interest. Explain that to me. Thirteen years in a high-security prison with no visitors, for what? For putting on a costume and chasing kids around a tumbledown house? Are you kidding me?”

“I kidnapped one of you.”

“Please.”

“I staged a haunting. I made an elaborate scheme for fraud.”

“You are the fraud, Wickley. You’re nothing but a careless gold digger. You want me to believe you went to all that trouble just to scare people? The mystic symbols? The dead animals?”

“They were props.”

“The hanged corpses? The things in the basement?!”

“All props.”

“Steven fucking Spielberg could not have made props like that and you know it! It wasn’t you!”

“It was! And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you med—”

“Liar!” She clutched his neck and shoved him into the wall, shattering some tiles with the back of his head.

One of the baseball talkers entered the restroom at that moment and stopped dead at the sight.

On the left, standing, Andrea “Andy” Rodriguez, 25, in big military boots and a white tank top, turns to camera as she lifts a squirming old man two inches off the floor.

“Fuck off,” she growled, and the intruder obediently retreated.

Wickley was gagging, writhing, kicking the air. Andy turned back to him, face slashed by the obstinate bang of hair, a furious and not fully devoid of self-satisfaction smile in her lips.

“I was twelve years old in ’seventy-seven and I beat you; now I’m twenty-five and you’re old and weak; just imagine the ways in which I can humiliate you. Tell me, why did you confess?”

“I did it.”

“Bullshit. Why did you take the blame?”

“I did it. I made my costume out of a diving suit. It was a good costume.”

“No, it wasn’t, really.”

“I set everything up. I made the lights fade and the house shake.”

“No, you fucking didn’t!” (She slams him to the wall.)

“I did, and you were terrified. (Sniggering in pain.) You pissed your pants.”

“That was Nate, not me! And it wasn’t you! (Her grip hardens, closing shut his windpipe.) Why did you take the fall?”

“Ack! G-g-g—”

“Tell me or I swear I’ll throw you in my trunk, drive to Blyton Hills, and dump my car into Sleepy Lake!”

“Ng . . . ng . . .”

“Why?”

“Ng’ngah . . . ng’ngah’hai!”

“WHY?!”

“Iä fhtagn Thtaggoa! Iä mwlgn nekrosunai! Ng’ngah’hai, zhro!”

Andy banged him against the wall and released her grip, gaping at the echo of the odious words that had made the hair on her arms stand and the sun dim, shocked by the blasphemy.

Slowly daylight returned, and a silence punctuated by dripping water pipes. The old man slid to the floor, leaving a little smear of blood from the back of his skull along the way.

“I wanted to go to jail,” he moaned, panting, clinging to consciousness.

Andy stood, full of hate, fists clenched, adrenaline trickling down her temples.

“I wanted them to lock me away,” Wickley sobbed. “I had to get away from that place. I can’t go back. I don’t want to go to that devil house ever again! Never!”

And he sank his head in his palms and broke into tears. Sitting on the floor in a public restroom, crying grown-up sobs.

Andy snorted back the fury, panting, and flushed the urinal for him.

“You won’t. Good-bye, Mr. Wickley.”

And she stormed out, feeling not the least sorry for the pathetic old man left crying on the floor. Because he was right: he would never have to go back to that house.

Lucky bastard.

PART ONE

REUNION

She flung the door open to clamorous nonreaction, silhouetted down to a bulky jacket and a baseball cap, the blue wind blowing away the title card. Dramatically opening doors was one of Andy’s few natural talents, one she had perfected in the last thirteen years while roaming over the country. She could push or pull or even slide a door open and either go entirely unnoticed or make all heads turn and music stop, at her will. She even succeeded in causing the latter effect in a concert hall, during a Van Halen gig. It’s all in the wrist, really.

This time she’d gone for incognito: the country singer continued to wail in the jukebox, the beer-drinkers didn’t sense her, a couple of pool players hardly glanced in the direction of the EXIT sign in the second it took her to canvass the place. She had to step forward—Insert close-up shot of military surplus boots abusing the floorboards—to locate the person she’d come to fetch behind the counter, blocked by a group of cough-a-chuckling workmen.

In profile, Kerri Hollis, 25, bends over to retrieve two beers from the icebox while mindfully ignoring the appreciative growl the workmen address at her posterior, where the orange lavafall of her hair ends.

And here the country music faded out a little, at least in Andy’s ears, triggered only by this: Kerri turning to serve the beers, her curls swinging around and cheering gleefully like kids on a carousel. It was a minor entry in the list of Kerri’s innumerable talents. Her hair had this joyful quality about it, in the way it trailed after her as she rode her bike downhill or dove off a rope swing. Andy used to admire it even when they were kids; it had already reached the border between her back and the end of her back back then, though it needn’t be too long for that, and it breathed and moved like it had a life of its own, or many. Andy used to imagine each individual strand with tiny cartoon eyes and a perennial kawaii smile, happy to participate in Kerri’s adventures, to witness every moment in the life of that promising child. When she stood in the rain, her hair welcomed the water. When it was sunny outside, it kited behind her as she ran, sparkling, greedily storing up solar energy like it planned to run a plane factory. When she sat down and read a book, which she did more often than any child and most grown-ups Andy had met, you could see her hair glowing with stored sunlight, humming quietly, shushing strangers. When they last saw each other five years ago at Kerri’s university, she had bound her hair in a ponytail while they toured the campus. She released it only briefly in the cafeteria, and Andy could have sworn she heard a collective gasp as she shook it loose. Those must have been four tough years for her hair. Now it was free at last, and Andy heard its happy song even through the depressing country music and the orcish grunts of the ape-men surrounding her.

It took another minute for Andy to notice a second novelty: Kerri wasn’t wearing her glasses. That was strange. Merriment and catastrophe ensued whenever Kerri lost her glasses during an adventure. She used to be defenseless without them. Now, however, she looked ready to battle.

She looked like she was halfway through the battle, actually. And losing.

Andy watched her in the mirror behind the bar, talking to the last man in the pack. “And for you?”

“I’ll have a beer too.”

A silence like a tropical cyclone formed above them, Kerri glaring at the guy with glasses-less, hateful eyes.

She turned and bent back down to the icebox, and the ogling and sneering through munched cigars resumed: “Oh yeah” . . . “There you go” . . . “That’s what I’m talking about.”

Andy claimed a stool at the other end of the bar, head low, left hand toying with the charm she carried in her pocket. Discreet as her entrances could be, she often had trouble keeping a low profile for too long, especially in crowded places. To counter this, she used this security blanket of sorts.

A second, completely unnoticed bartender materialized from the shadows, slapping Andy’s claimed acre of counter with a cloth. “Name your poison.”

“Coke.”

“Coke?”

“Make it Diet.”

The bartender left, an unfocused mustached blur.

“How about something to eat,” one of the men croaked at Kerri.

Kerri’s reflection stood in the mirror, dirty rag over her shoulder, arms akimbo, orange hair hushing expectantly. “What would you like, Jesse?”

“I don’t know,” said the alpha male. “Something hot.” The pack punctuated the jape with a timely snigger.

Don’t engage, Andy attempted to telepath forward.

“Some hot wings?”

“That’d be nice.”

“Any sauce?”

“More than you can swallow, honey.”

The gang laughed with fat, bearded, smug-faced laughter. Andy risked a side glance at Kerri’s face. She was holding her stance, unfazed, hatred steadily growing toward a boiling point.

“You’re revolting, Jesse.”

Something, probably the nondescript bartender, went hey.

Andy squeezed the last drops of magic out of the charm in her pocket. The country singer continued to babble his own notion of romanticism like an idiot.

“I’ll check the kitchen,” Kerri said, departing for the door. A man leaned over the counter as she retreated.

“Some well-buttered buns would be nice too!” he said, and the comment was celebrated with mirth.

“Good one, Neil.”

“You know, because ‘buns’ as in ‘ass,’ right?”

“Yeah, gotcha. Clever.”

“Excuse me.”

The whole pack turned.

Andy had stolen the five yards from her stool and was now standing in front of the gang, her jacket left behind, folded neatly on the bar next to her Diet Coke. She flipped her cap aside to show her face. Mm-hmmed comments of sexual appreciation were quickly mitigated by squinting eyes and rising eyebrows—the usual mixed feelings a five-foot-six brown-skinned woman with boots and an attitude tends to stir.

The alpha male, previously identified as Jesse, took the lead. “Yes, how can we help you, miss?”

“Well, um . . .” Andy’s hands moved nervously, her eyes searching for the right words somewhere on the floor. “Uh, God, I’m sorry; this is awkward . . .”

“Not at all,” he said with a smile of many-colored teeth.

“The thing is, I am legally obligated to respectfully ask you to stop behaving like inbred dicks before I go on to beat the shit out of you.”

Silence. The kind upon which comedians would shoot themselves onstage.

“Are you now?” Alpha calmly said, his surprise concealed behind his Ray-Bans.

“Yes, well, you see, because I’ve had military training, and lots of experience gathered here and there, I’ve become so proficient in battle that on one occasion, after a brawl in a bikers’ joint in Sturgis, South Dakota, a judge dictated that I should not engage in a fight without giving a fair warning. In particular, my nut kicks are astoundingly accurate.” She waited for some feedback from the other side, then chose to continue. “Because, you know, when you get kicked in the balls, as I imagine you know from personal experience, your ballsack just gets squashed into your pelvis. Soft tissue and your clothes absorb most of the impact while the testes themselves are pushed to safety. Because testicles are some slippery little rascals,” she said, pulling her left hand out of her pocket and showing her lucky charm to the rest of the class. The men stared blankly at what very unambiguously looked like a plastic penguin.

“See, if you examine your scrotum,” Andy went on, “you’ll notice you are able to locate the nut, but if you try to pinch it, which is kind of painful . . . (She roughly squeezes the toy, making it squeak, and the lower half of the penguin bloat-pops out of her fist.) . . . it always squirms out of your grip.”

“Yes, mine do that,” one of the men said, wildly interested.

“Yeah, right? But here’s the thing: my nut-cracking kicks are literally nut cracking. The testes cannot escape the impact. At least one of them always bursts open, and sperm pours into your bloodstream and it’s a disaster area all over your netherlands. And you’ll never get that teste back, so your reproductive ability is lowered fifty percent for life. Not to mention it reportedly hurts like giving birth to a sea urchin through your pee hole. But I wouldn’t know that, of course.”

Alpha had been rubbing the bridge of his nose for a full minute already. “Sorry, I’m missing the plot; your initial point was . . .?”

“Yeah, my bad, I get carried away. My point was, seeing how you guys were harassing that waitress and being very vulgar, I wondered if you could stop behaving like . . . well, being inbred dicks.”

She paused, and then finished with a candid appeal:

“Just give me an excuse to thrash you.”

Alpha sighed, faking discontent. She stood still, chest and crossed arms swaying gently with her breath, full lips shut tight, repressing the joyful anticipation while she mentally captioned the whole gang. First row, sitting down, Alpha, six-four, black-and-red leathers, Ray-Ban aviators; second row right, Beta, six-two, jackknife under the belt; left, Gamma, six-foot, broken nose, pool cue; in the back, Delta, five-nine, grabbing a beer bottle.

“You see, sugar,” Alpha began, raising a slow, ominous hand toward Andy’s cheek. “I would love to fulfill your request.”

His fingertips stretched dangerously close to Andy’s skin.

“But you forgot to say the magic word.”

Atoms away now.

“Which is . . .”

* * *

Any passerby to the conversation would have mistakenly concluded that the magic word was “CRUNCH.” For that was the incredibly loud sound Alpha’s fingers made when Andy pulled them apart by five inches, measured from the ends of the middle and ring, virtually disabling those extremities for any purpose other than effusively greeting Vulcans.

Alpha attempted a hopeless slap in midscream with his left hand that she easily blocked with her forearm, and she was already driving energy to her right leg to launch the much-hyped semicastrating kick when the rest of the thugs forced her to abort.

Beta charged, making her lose her step, and threw a punch at her face. She dodged it, kicked him in the knee, and, as he bent in pain, grabbed him by the parts of the human skull most resembling an ergonomic handle and smashed his head against the counter, making room for Gamma to attack.

Except this one swung a pool cue, which she didn’t dare block. Instead she rolled to the floor, waited for the cue to swing back, and dodged it again, letting a chair slow it down, then grabbed it by that end, snatched it out of Gamma’s hands, and swung it all the long way around back to him. That gave Gamma time to duck himself. Not Alpha, though: the cue whacked him as he was tending his dislodged fingers, whiplashing head spraying spittle as far as the mirror.

Delta managed to do nothing before Andy stepped forward and bashed his head with the pool cue. Because you can’t just wait for every bad guy to come at you.

She moved toward the pool table as Gamma retreated and grabbed a new cue by the midsection. The healthy ratio of broken bones per second fell for a minute while he swung the cue in midair, windmill style like the purple-masked Ninja Turtle. The improvised staff whooshed loudly through the tobaccosphere of the room like a gigantic hornet from outer space.

Andy stood through the demonstration, a skeptical Little John look messing up the angle of her perfect frown.

“That’s not how you grab a pool cue.”

She grabbed hers properly, point forward, and Gamma wasn’t able to block before she jabbed his sternum, pushing him off his stance. A side hit to the temple put him on the ground.

Beta and Delta were ready for battle again when she jammed the cue in one of the table pockets and snapped it in two. She took the resulting clubs and went on to do her own exhibition of audacious stick-wielding.

Delta stayed put, clearly impressed at this point. Beta took avail of his position behind her to whip out a jackknife and charge. Sadly his warcry, inspired by the Hong Kong movie overtones the fight was taking, betrayed his strategic advantage.

Andy spun on one foot: right club straight to hit the blade-carrying arm, left club to the inside of his elbow, right to the torso, left to the temple, right to the face of Delta joining in from behind, left heel to Beta’s shin, right to Delta’s crotch, and simultaneous strikes with both clubs on two different heads, in time to face the enraged Alpha charging like a mad buffalo and throw both clubs away and at last fling up her left foot.

The music stopped. And conversations ceased. Among dogs. In a two-mile radius. Their ears pricked up at the piercing ultrasonic howl coming from a small bar far away.

Alpha dropped to his knees, then to all fours, finally down into the fetal position, his hands cordoning off the devastated area.

“Andy?”

Andy turned on her feet, fists raised, and that’s how Kerri saw her for the first time in five years.

That wasn’t the plan. Andy swiftly blew the bang of hair off her face and smoothed her top. “Hey.”

Kerri came hopping over the counter to hug her, ignoring the nondescript mustached blur of a bartender (and possible employer) offering his unsolicited opinion about the whole mess.

The last thing Andy ever remembered from that scene was being smothered in happy, cheering orange hair, pouring over her own shoulders like streaming confetti, mind overwhelmed by the mob of excited questions, taut muscles caught in the unexpected embrace. And the red cells inside her body, still drunk with adrenaline, gazed up in awe, dented shields and blood-dripping axes in their little hands, wondering where in the world did all this peace come from.

Then there was some heated dialogue between Kerri and the nondescript bartender, among threats to call the cops and the whimpering of neutered thugs crawling on the floor, and Andy later recalled hearing Kerri say “fuck this job” somewhere in the background and yank off her apron and throw it at her ex-boss’s blurry face, but all those bits were blurry themselves.

* * *

Next time she checked her surroundings, they were in another, louder bar having shots and peanuts, and Kerri wore a black-sleeved raglan shirt and smiled the loudest girl-smile ever.

“God, you were awesome!” she said. “I’ve been playing out violent scenarios with Jesse in my mind for months, and you just improvised that? It was so much better than anything I’d come up with!” She finished off a drink, then her grin narrowed into a proud smirk. “Girl, you’ve grown to your full potential. You’re everything I wanted to be.”

“Shut up,” Andy whispered, trying to hide behind the very tiny glass. It was becoming a night full of experiences she wasn’t used to. Alcohol. Praise.

Kerri signaled for another two shots in a gesture that seemed too vague and aimless to be of any consequence, but proved effective in under five seconds.

“So, apart from cleaning up the gene pool one asshole at a time, what are you up to?”

Andy shifted in her seat. “Well, not much. I hitchhiked for a while after I saw you at your alma mater. Took some jobs. What about you? I thought you’d be a biologist by now.”

“I am,” Kerri said. “We’re allowed to take off our lab coats on the Sabbath.” She waited for a reaction, then clarified. “Kidding. But I am a biologist; I got my BA two years ago. Not too glossy grades—the place where I did the internship sucked. And I had a falling-out with this guy who was supposed to tutor me during my senior year. You know, we were keeping it professional, but then we met at this crazy afterparty and we slept together, but we agreed it was nothing serious, so I slept with other guys, and he said it was okay, but then it wasn’t, and you know . . . Old story, right?”

Andy debated between saying “right” or just shrugging, and did neither.

“So you’re not doing any biology work now.”

“Well, no, not at the moment. I applied for some PhD programs, but I wasn’t lucky, and that bastard would not even give me a fake recommendation. And my GRE wasn’t dazzling either because . . . well, I can’t even remember taking it. So, anyway, I’m taking some time to put my shit together now. You know, ’cause a biologist’s got to eat. But soon I’ll start applying to colleges again, show my résumé around, get back on track.”

She idly inspected the half-full glass in her hand.

“Any time now.”

And she gulped down the rest of the drink.

* * *

The second place was fuller, dirtier, and louder, but Andy hardly gave any attention to these circumstances, except for the time Kerri tried to pull her onto the dance floor and she refused and stayed on the sofa, pretending to enjoy a rum and Coke while watching Kerri bounce and shake to Zulu electronica, orange hair splashing around like a Hawaiian volcano. And every time a guy approached her and spoke inaudible words at her, Andy would stiff her back up for a second, trying to mentally push the message in his direction: That’s Dr. Kerri to you, and no, she doesn’t want anything.

Then they sat together again and continued talking, and Kerri’s white laughter glowed under the UV lights.

“That was Mr. Magnus!” she went. “He was stealing his own boats for insurance fraud! Who would ever suspect him?”

“No, the boats were spring of ’seventy-seven!” Andy insisted. “Captain Al took us scuba diving in Crab Cove! The time we went kayaking it was about the sheep-smuggling case.”

Kerri contemplated the memory. “Shit, you’re right! The werewolf and his sheep-smuggling network!”

“Can you believe we were scared of that guy?”

“God, the lowlifes we’ve encountered. Who the fuck smuggles sheep?”

“No one now. They know better since we busted them.”

“Seriously, we made the crime rate around Blyton Hills drop like ninety percent. Pity we didn’t spend summer here in New York; the Bronx would look like Sesame Street by now.”

They waited for laughter to remit, and Andy considered it convenient to force another sip of rum into her body, bite her lip, and bring up another file.

“Deboën Mansion and the Sleepy Lake monster.”

“Our last case,” Kerri said, after a quasi-unnoticeable pause. “God, someone should compile a casebook with all of these. ‘The Archives of the Blyton Summer Detective Club.’ Kids might like it.”

“You never would’ve read it,” Andy scoffed. “And by the way, what happened to you? Little Miss Not Ready to Confront the Sheep-Smuggling Werewolf Yet, Let’s Spend Another Week in the Library? And now you take over a dance floor all by yourself? And what happened to your glasses?”

“Okay, okay,” Kerri placated her, resting a brown suede boot on the seat opposite as she leaned back and articulated her defense. “One, contact lenses. And two . . . Well, college changed me.”

“But college was supposed to be a bookworm paradise!”

“God, you beautiful naive thing.” She drank, with Andy rendered helpless by that line. Then she added, slapping her knee, “What can I say? I changed.”

“We all did,” Andy agreed.

For a minute, silence somehow nudged itself into the deafening dance beat.

“I should have called you after Peter,” Andy said.

Kerri took a very obvious pause this time. Then she raised the bottle. “Fuck it. World’s for the living.”

And she finished off her drink, while Andy struggled to find meaning in that abstruse carpe diem.

* * *

The third place they hit felt even more crammed than the club, not much tidier, and surprisingly quiet. It was Kerri’s apartment.

As soon as Kerri unlocked the door, a bluish dash of a dog poured over them like a roomful of Marx Brothers.

“Hey! Look who wants to go to the bathroom!” she greeted. “I was talking about me, actually. Make way!”

She sneaked through a side door while Andy stared at the excited blue-gray hunting dog clambering up her leg.

“This . . . Is this Roger?”

“You’ve been out of the loop too long,” Kerri said offscreen. “That is Roger’s son Tim.”

Tim, 3 according to the Hollis family’s records, reacts to his name by standing down, as alert as his drooping ears manage to indicate, then seems to order himself “at ease” and lets his mouth open and his tongue unfold, panting proudly.

Even to Andy’s trained eye, Tim was the spitting image of Roger, the son of George and grandson of Sean. Sean, of Blyton Summer Detective Club fame, had died years ago in Portland, but he had been already a grandfather in the time he used to accompany the children in their adventures—the one grown-up on the team, founder of a lineage. All of them the same shade of blue gray, somewhat undersized for their breed standards, and maddeningly energetic.

“They all come through the male line?”

“Nope. George was a female, remember?”

A toilet flushed, and Tim tracked down his leash, ready to offer it to Kerri as she exited the coffin bathroom.

“My mom spoils them too much. I adopted Tim the last time I was home in Portland to teach him some discipline.” She attached the leash to his collar. “Gotta pop downstairs. Make yourself comfortable. There’s a bottle of vodka somewhere.”

“I’m fine.”

“You won’t be. That toaster is the only heating you get. Be right back.”

Kerri and Tim left, and Andy glanced over Kerri’s austere apartment, pondering the thinness of the line between glancing and snooping. Probably opening drawers marked the boundary, but there was only one and it was open already. Kerri’s garments lay scattered on the floor, pouring out of a yawning red travel bag. She checked the single bookshelf, unbelievingly: only a dozen books, most of them fiction. Not one pocket encyclopedia, not even a bird spotter’s guide. The walls in Kerri’s bedroom in Blyton Hills (the most awesome place in the universe) were fully dressed with bookshelves and butterfly display cases and maps of other continents. The cool ones: Africa, Oceania.

Reverently, she pulled down one of the book spines, an illustrated edition of Wyndham’s The Chrysalids—the same one Andy had read as a child in Blyton Hills, per Kerri’s recommendation. She opened it.

A familiar piece of paper fluttered down onto her lap. She picked up the newspaper clipping delicately and smoothed it on the book’s cover. It had been almost three years from the last time Andy had read the article, and yet her memory misquoted hardly a couple of words.

TEEN SLEUTHS UNMASK SLEEPY LAKE MONSTER

Nancy Hardy/Blyton Hills.—The reign of terror of the “Sleepy Lake Creature”—the elusive figure that has been scaring herdsmen and campers by the upper Zoinx River—was put to an end last weekend by some unlikely heroes, namely four children and a dog.

Peter Manner (13), Kerri Hollis (12), Andrea “Andy” Rodriguez (12), and Nate Rogers (11), along with their hunting dog, Sean, are credited with the capture of Thomas X. Wickley, from California, who was reenacting an old Indian legend as part of a convoluted scheme for burglary at the historic Deboën Mansion.

A Legend Rekindled

This is not the first time that the so-called Blyton Summer Detective Club has taken on a case that had local authorities baffled. As frequent vacationers in Blyton Hills, the half-and-half Oregonian-Californian bunch is famous in town for its crazy adventures, which often end in the arrest of evildoers!

Recent sightings of a “monster” around Sleepy Lake had been a hot topic in Blyton Hills this summer. “Rumors of lake creatures are as old as they are typical of any large water mass,” says Deputy Sheriff W. Wilson, of the Pennaquick County Police. “I myself grew up hearing the old Walla Walla tales of ancient underwater spirits that crawl up the misty shores at night. But when hunters start finding alien tracks in the mud, you know something is amiss.”

“We just had to go and see those for ourselves!” young Nate boasts excitedly, a little daredevil who makes up in courage what he lacks in size. However, when they first visited the lake, they found more than tracks: they encountered the creature itself, and it had them fleeing away! “He gave us a heck of a scare!”

Summer Detectives on the Job

For Peter, the oldest of the gang and a natural-born leader, the mystery had just begun. “We found footprints in the forest that seemed to lead straight into the mines upriver. That was odd: What business does a lake creature have in an abandoned gold mine?”

It was at that point when the kids contacted their old ally, Captain Al Urich, a retired air force veteran living in Blyton Hills.

“I have had the pleasure to work with the Blyton Summer Detective Club before and I do my best to assist them whenever they require a grown-up’s point of view, or simply someone with a driver’s license,” Captain Urich joked.

Together, the children and Captain Urich searched the woods around Sleepy Lake and the abandoned mines. “I hope to become a biologist someday, so I was eager for a closer look at that creature,” says Kerri, the brains of the team. But the clues pointed to something bigger than a prowling monster: “We went to the library and learned that the mines were connected to the old Deboën Mansion. All our findings pointed to that house.”

The House on the Lake

Built during the Gold Rush years by a merchant-turned-prospector on a tiny islet in Sleepy Lake, Deboën Mansion has been shunned for years by townsfolk who still resent the family’s alleged ties with piracy and witchcraft. Rumors of a haunting have persisted since 1949, when a fire destroyed part of the building and forced the bankrupt family to sell the property and relocate in town. Ms. Dunia Deboën, last of her bloodline and the police’s main suspect in the case, refused to comment on this story.

Nevertheless, when the teen detectives finally dared investigate the house, they were in deep water. “Weather capsized our boat and we ended up stranded on the isle,” recounts Andy, who despite being a girl was never afraid to take refuge in the haunted house. “It looked like we were up for a night of frights!”

However, not only did the four friends overcome the thrills of that eventful night, but they also managed to set an ingenious trap for the fraudster himself. When police reached the isle the next morning, they found the missing children and dog guarding their astounding catch—the Sleepy Lake creature unmasked!

“Wickley had heard rumors about Deboën’s lost gold hidden below the mansion, and he took advantage of the creature myth to scare off people while he searched for the riches,” Peter explained, recapping a new entry in the exploits of the Blyton Summer Detective Club. Criminals of Blyton Hills beware—the children are coming back for Christmas!

Andy, her mouth filled with a sweet aftertaste, put the clipping back inside the book and the book back on the shelf, reassured. That was all she wanted to find.

Plus Tim. Tim was a welcome extra. Things were all going according to plan.

Tim and Kerri returned soon enough, the former going straight to the toaster Andy had turned on, the latter snatching the bottle of vodka.

“Shit, it’s cold,” she mumbled, crashing on the bed as gently as the Hindenburg in the very narrow gap between Andy and the wall. “Go ahead, take your shoes off. Let’s do a pajama party like the old times. We’ll build a pillow fort and ask the Magic Eight Ball who will we marry.”

“We never did that,” Andy complained, undoing her boots. “You wouldn’t do it; it’s too unscientific. Instead you tried to explain genetics to me to determine who we should marry to spawn superdetectives.”

“Hey, it works with dogs. Right, Tim?”

Tim sneezed in a very dignified Sherlock Holmes fashion. Kerri was sitting up against the wall, after she’d toed her suede boots off into oblivion. She took a big gulp of vodka and watched as Andy maneuvered out of her jacket.

“You know,” she said, “sometimes it crossed my mind that next time I’d see you, you would be a boy.”

Andy gazed at her, not completely off-balance. She replied, seriously, “Sometimes it crossed my mind there’d be no next time.”

“Fuck,” Kerri countered, Andy’s line gone seemingly ignored. “Sorry. That was inappropriate.” She would have added, It’s the alcohol speaking, but she knew better than blaming the voluntary ingestion of bottled faux pas for her mistakes.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s because you always wanted us to call you Andy and hang out with the boys. And you liked it when people took you for a boy.”

“I know.”

“And now, you know, I’ve been outside, met people . . . I talked to this guy once, a really handsome boy who had made the change, and I thought . . .” She paused, eyebrows arcing up a little farther in helplessness. “Am I sounding ignorant?”

“No, you never do.”

“I’ll drop it. I’m drunk.”

“It’s okay. I saw the world outside my Christian home too. I saw that it’s all right to be the way I am. It’s fine to be a girl and prefer jeans over dresses and mountain bikes over dollhouses.”

Kerri listened, hugging her knees. “Did we make it hard for you?”

“No,” said Andy seriously. “You were great.”