I will come back. Stay where you are and hold on, because I will come back. I love you.
—Ben
He drank a bottle of water in one gulp and stuffed the letter inside. When he walked out of the tent with the bottle, a nearby crow snatched it up from his hand and absconded with it. Really? A crow? The crow was probably delivering the letter to Satan incarnate. He went back inside, ripped off a sheet from the legal pad, and wrote DAYS at the top. Then he made fourteen marks. Tomorrow night, he would mark the fifteenth. Off came the boots and socks and pants and shirt. Ben set them by the bed and then slipped under the soft duvet, which swallowed him up and seemed to heal all of his superficial pains. He was resting inside a fog of opiates. Quickly his eyelids went limp and there was nothing but sweet, thick blackness.
• • •
He felt a nudge on his shoulder.
“Ben. Ben. You awake?”
Was that Tony? Tony Watts? That’s what Tony Watts always said anytime you slept over at his house. You’d just trade “You awakes?” until the morning broke and you hadn’t slept at all. But that was twenty-five years ago . . . no wait, twenty years . . . no wait, five . . . no wait, what were we talking about? It’s Saturday, right? You’ve been looking forward to this sleepover all week.
Ben woke up in a tight, red sleeping bag. He was wearing striped boxers and a loose black Metallica T-shirt. They were in a basement. Not some magical tent library, but Tony Watts’s mother’s basement. Burnsville, Minnesota.
1990. Yes, the year was 1990. That sounded right. Ben felt around his body. He was younger. Softer. No wait, you were always this young and soft. No scar on his face. But why would you have a scar on your face? He turned and there was Tony, with the floppy black bangs, lying right beside him in a bag of his own.
“You awake?” he asked Ben again.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “You?”
“Yeah. My old lady’s asleep now. I gotta show you something.”
Tony stood up and shook off the sleeping bag. This was how any thirteen-year-old exited one: They never zipped down and stepped out. They just stood up and walked out of the thing, like popping out of a shopping bag.
Mrs. Watts’s basement was unfinished except for the small guest room the boys could use anytime Ben slept over. The guest room had everything they needed: two sleeping bags, a tape deck (Tony had the best tape collection. . . . Ben liked to crack open the cases and study the clear plastic cassettes, memorizing track times), a crappy TV, and a Nintendo console. Mrs. Watts let them bring down pizza and snacks and pop if they wanted, because she was cool like that. Tony’s dad was always away, maybe for good. Tony said his dad was in the Middle East, inventing a new kind of Coke can that had a special insert that would turn the Coke ice cold the second you opened it. No refrigeration necessary. Ben thought that would be awesome.
Outside the guest room was a typical utility space, lined with a workbench and all of Mr. Watts’s tools, which went unused for long stretches. There was also an old pinball machine over in the corner. They played it for hours at a time, so focused on the game that Mrs. Watts often didn’t even bother to bid them goodnight during sleepovers. She would just leave them in their gaming trances.
But on this night, Tony wasn’t interested in the pinball. He led Ben up the shaggy carpeted stairs and into the living room, over to Mr. Watts’s liquor cabinet. Then he bent down and grabbed a bottle of clear liquor out of it.
“Peach schnapps,” he said triumphantly.
“Whoa.”
“That’s not all.” He reached in deeper and pulled out a flimsy plastic shopping bag, then held it open for Ben to see. “Check it out.”
Black cats and bottle rockets. A whole shitload of them. They could blow up a car with that much ammo.
“We can’t use them close to the house because my old lady will wake up,” Tony said. “But we can go to the park.”
“Shit, yeah.”
Their sweatpants were still on the living-room floor, right where they left them. Mrs. Watts had been too tired to pick them up or to nag the boys to do likewise. They quickly got dressed and slipped on their sneakers (always pre-tied—the back of Ben’s sneakers were ripped apart because he kept smashing them with his heel, trying to wedge his feet in without bothering to untie the laces) and Windbreakers.
“Do you wanna hold the booze?” Tony asked. It was an important question. The most important question.
“I’ll hold the fireworks,” Ben said. “You hold the booze.”
“Don’t drop the fireworks, yo. The ground’s probably wet.”
“I won’t. Swear to God.”
“All right. Shhhhhhh!”
They cracked open the front door. The Watts family cat didn’t make a scene of it. Then they slipped out into the seemingly endless subdivisions of Burnsville. It was a utilitarian suburb. The rich asshole kids didn’t live here. This hood was for the average white kids, and it went on for miles. You could walk block after block without ever hitting a highway or major boulevard. In this neighborhood, late at night, everything felt possible, especially to a thirteen-year-old.
At the end of Cobble Drive was a small playground shielded by a tiny creek and some woods. It would give them just enough cover. Along the way, Tony paused at a random house and ripped some flowers out of the ground.
“Watch this.”
He stuffed the flowers into the mailbox and the two of them ran like hell down the hill toward the park.
“Dude!” Ben whispered. “That was fucking crazy.”
“You gotta try it. It’s fucking sweet.”
So Ben did. Right before the park, he uprooted some more flowers and then threw them on the hood of a BMW parked outside a house. They couldn’t stop giggling.
“Oh, man,” Tony said. “That car is totally shit on now.”
“Yeah.”
At the park, Tony opened the bottle of schnapps. “You wanna sip first?”
“Nah, man,” Ben said. “Your booze. You get the honors.”
Tony stared at the bottle. “I dunno, man. My old lady will freak out if she notices.”
“Don’t be a puss. Drink it!”
“All right! All right! But when I give it to you, don’t drink, like, too much. Like, my mom shouldn’t be able to tell any was gone.”
“Are you gonna drink it or not?”
Tony took a sip and made a face. “It’s not bad!” he lied.
“Wow, you really drank it.”
Tony passed the bottle to Ben. He hesitated.
“Do it, bro,” Tony said.
“This is crazy, man.”
“Who’s the puss now? You gotta drink.”
Ben took a swig. As first liquors go, it wasn’t so terrible. He had sniffed his old man’s vodka once and recoiled. But this . . . At least someone tried to give the liquor some flavor, you know? It really did taste like peaches. Now Ben was feeling mellow and loose.
“Dude, I think I’m fucked up,” Ben said.
“Dude, me, too.”
“This is so awesome.”
Ben took a really big swig from the bottle. A Mrs.-Watts-will-notice swig.
“YO!” Tony shouted, grabbing at the bottle.
Ben was cracking up. “What? I just wanted a little more.”
“You fucker.”
“Pour some water in it. Your mom won’t know.”
“My ass, she won’t. I’ll have to pour some booze into it from another bottle.” He swiped the bottle back from Ben and took a big swig of his own. Off to the side of the playground, there was an empty Coke can lying on the ground. Tony went over and picked it up.
“Is it time to fuck some shit up?” he asked Ben.
“Oh, yeah.”
They loaded a dozen bottle rockets into the mouth of the can and twisted the fuses together. Then Tony took ou
t a small cardboard matchbook that he had snagged from a complimentary basket at the local Perkins. He tried lighting three matches in a row, failing on every attempt.
“Shit, man.”
“Lemme try,” said Ben. He grabbed one of the matches and flicked it against his thumbnail. It blazed up instantly. Tony was in awe.
“Dude, how did you do that?”
“It’s my little secret.” He handed the match to Tony, who lit the megafuse. It burned bright and metallic and now the rockets were flying out of the can, whistling up into the trees and out into the field. They didn’t expect the fireworks to be quite so loud. Thirteen-year-olds are poor planners that way.
Tony screamed out, “Holy shit!” and fled up the hill, with Ben close behind. They couldn’t stop laughing. Ben looked back at the exploding can and could have sworn he saw a living-room light go on. They turned down a new street and the explosions died down. Then Tony took out the black cats, all neatly packaged together in one bundle, ready to light. They found a tin mailbox with nothing inside it.
“You do the honors this time,” Tony said. So Ben did the thumb trick (he’d learned it from his old man), and then threw the lit bundle into the box, cracking up as they sprinted away from it. When it blew, it sounded like someone had dropped fifty pots off the side of a building. They were dying laughing now. Ben could barely run with his stomach muscles pulling double duty.
And then . . . sirens. They heard them and saw the flashing lights reflecting off the cheap aluminum siding off one of the houses at the top of the hill. Now they panicked.
“Oh, fuck,” Tony said. “RUN!”
The sirens grew louder as the boys zigzagged through the hood, aiming for the darkest lanes to duck into. The cops were hunting them. At one point, Ben turned and saw the headlights of the cop car shining on him, boring into him like a pair of all-seeing devil eyes. Ben and Tony made one sharp turn and then another and then ducked between two small ranch-style houses on a darkened Lafayette Road and ran deep into the trees, deep enough to get Lyme disease five times over. They huddled behind a huge maple and sat there for minutes as the sirens grew closer and then more distant and then closer and then more distant again, with the occasional flash of red and blue light coming off the leaves. But after a while, everything calmed back down. The cops were gone.
“Holy shit, dude,” Tony said.
And then they cracked up again.
Back at the Watts house, they performed an easily detectable bit of alchemy, pouring a small amount of vodka and cognac into the schnapps bottle and then pouring some rum into the cognac to make sure everything came out even, and then carefully replacing the all the bottles where they found them.
They were too full of adrenaline to sleep. They needed a few rounds of Nintendo for a cooldown period.
“Dude, I’d bang Jenny McDowell so hard,” Tony said, mashing his controller.
“Me, too.”
“How many thrusts you think you’d last?”
“Two.”
“No way, dude. Not a chance. I wouldn’t even get a thrust in. I’d just be near her, and then thppppppppp. . . .”
“Give yourself more credit.”
“And what about Tina Hansen? Oh, my God, dude. Tina Hansen, dude.”
Ben laughed as the two basked in their collective triumph. They had boozed and blown stuff up and no one had caught them doing it. They had pulled it off.
Or had they? That’s not really what happened that night, was it? You didn’t get away. Quite the contrary. Remember? On that night, you two ran between the houses and past a Rottweiler on a chain, and then Tony screamed at it for kicks. Turned out the chain gave that dog a considerable amount of slack. So it jumped up and bit your face off. That’s what happened. The animal pounced on you and mauled you, digging into your lower eyelid and ripping straight down. And you begged the dog to stop, praying it could understand your commands. You were screaming for mercy at the top of your lungs, and yet Tony didn’t help at all. No, Tony kept running. In fact, Tony ran away even faster because he was scared the dog would attack him as well. Then the cops burst into the yard and shot that dog dead.
That’s what happened. Remember now? You could feel your face being torn away until there was a loud POP and the Rottweiler slumped down on top of you, dead and bleeding. Remember how it filled your nose with its last few hot breaths? Next thing you knew, you were inside an ambulance, blind in one eye, the paramedics openly discussing whether or not you’d ever see out of the bad eye again. After the fact, the doctors told you that if you had arrived at the hospital ten minutes later than you did, they wouldn’t have been able to save it. Ninety-seven stitches. They threaded ninety-seven coarse black stitches through you. Remember how prickly they felt? Your face was a cactus for five days.
The cops got Tony, too. They tracked him down and delivered him back to a very angry Mrs. Watts, who pulled Tony out of school the next Monday. Then the police cornered you in your hospital bed, asking you about the flowers, and about how much you had to drink. And they didn’t give a shit about your face being ripped off either, because cops are dicks. There were gonna be lawsuits: against the Watts family, and perhaps against the police for killing the dog. You never saw Tony again after that, remember? That was the last night you two ever hung out together. That happened, didn’t it? Wasn’t that how it all went down? Wasn’t this . . .
Ben woke up in the massive tent library, his teeth clenched tight. He felt his face and drew his finger along his scar, which still remained. Next to his bed, he saw a half-drained bottle of peach schnapps.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE CURIOUSLY UNDEAD
That wasn’t all. High up among the stacked shelves of ancient volumes that lined the walls, one faded book was sticking out, the kind you might yank on to reveal a secret passageway. Ben got out of bed—he felt oddly hungover—and walked over to the shelf. There was an old wooden ladder, mounted to a top rail, that slid back and forth across the stacks, so you could reach the highest shelves. He pulled it over and climbed up to retrieve the book:
Dr. Abigail Blackwell’s Gallery of the Curiously Undead.
“Mrs. Blackwell?”
The tome was in rough condition—the pages tattered to the point of falling apart. But there was one page that was dog-eared. The spine cracked open to the marked page naturally, as if the book had been resting open on it for years and years.
It was a reference section, divided into categories: Lords, Sentients, Brainless, etc. He read through some of the descriptions on the page:
Regenerators—Normal-looking humans who have the ability to grow back anything that’s been chopped off, including their heads. Cannibalistic.
Smokes—Small black clouds that have bright white eyes. Can roll over a man and asphyxiate him to death with their poisonous ash. Mute but highly intelligent.
The Skinless—Zombies who appear as skinless human beings. Deaf. Blind. Turn the living skinless merely by touching them.
Jellies—Gelatinous organisms that aim to absorb and smother.
Head Spiders—Spiders that possess human heads in the middle instead of a body. Possess a poisonous bite that causes paralysis. Once paralyzed, they slowly devour the body until only the head is left, which then sprouts spider legs. Brainless.
Mouth Demons—Vile creatures with multiple mouths all over their bodies. One bite from a Mouth Demon causes a mouth to grow where the wound once was. Brainless.
Each entry included strategies for killing the creatures involved, but here the text grew faded and illegible at certain points. He could make out only some of the defense techniques. Regenerators, the tome said, could be killed only with fire. The Skinless could only be killed by throwing salt on them. The Jellies were vulnerable to hot liquids, even plain hot water. And the Head Spiders had to be stabbed, or doused in a mix of “thyme and gingerroot and monkfish liver oil.”
Stabbing seemed easier. Mouth Demons needed their mouths filled with something, but the ink disappeared before Ben could figure out what that something was.
But the entry that really caught Ben’s attention was the description of a creature named Voris.
Lord. Eyes are pitch black, save for the pupils, which Voris can use to shine a light bright enough to burn through virtually any living being. Winged. Bloodless, but possesses skin so hot to the touch that it can cause victims to burst into flames. Will kill or possess any human who gets in his way.
I just saw something that had wings come out of that castle.
The only way to kill Voris, the book said, was to kill him in his sleep by feeding him a “glowing solution.” A poison. Ben looked at the ingredients:
Curry powder
The dead tissue of another undead being
The dead, stewed tissue of a human
The next ingredient on the list was illegible, but the final element of the poison was not:
A drop or two of peach schnapps.
Ben dropped the book onto the floor.
“Oh, God.”
He knew a place where he could find curry powder. He knew a place where he could find the dead, stewed tissue of a human. He knew exactly where he needed to go, and he remembered the seed bag and the hint Crab gave before deserting him:
She’s only ever eaten humans.
• • •
Back to Fermona’s mountain he went, with the book and the tent tucked neatly into his bag. There was one merciful part to retracing his footsteps: The mirage of his house was now gone. He didn’t have to watch Peter spraying the lawn in his jammies and drenching his own shoes, laughing gaily all the while. Whoever put him on the path had spared him that torture, and for that he was grateful.