She knelt to make the dog understand this was specifically for him, waited until Tim came close, and tossed the plastic penguin at his feet. Sunrays quickly spotlighted it in high definition.
Tim simply smelled the novelty, considering its edibility. Then Andy stretched forward and squeezed it gently. It squeaked.
Tim stepped back, the countenance of eighteenth-century gentlemen first meeting a time-traveler in his face.
For the next two minutes he continued to sniff the penguin from every conceivable angle, learned how to make it squeak by pounding it with his paw, learned how to stand on three legs to pound it, and finally took it in his mouth and hopped back into the car.
Kerri returned a little later, a cigarette between her teeth, marigold hair rejoicing under the new light.
“You know, in frontal view, it can almost pass for a sports car from far enough away,” she commented. She stopped a couple yards before the station wagon and tilted her head. “Not in profile, though; then it’s like a hearse for dwarves. It’d look cool with a black racing stripe.”
Then she glanced inside. Tim, lying on the narrow backseat, made the penguin between his forelegs squeak for her, an intense Can we keep it, Mom? look in his Dickensian orphan eyes.
“You gave him a squeaky toy?” she asked Andy.
“Yeah, it’s my, like, you know…a stress-relief thing. I thought it would help him focus.”
They read each other, then Andy dodged Kerri’s look and sneaked into the car.
“You suffer from stress,” Kerri said, getting in. It wasn’t so much a question as a line of questioning.
“Not stress, just—” Andy buckled up, pressed cancel on that sentence and started a new one. “They think I have aggression issues.”
“Oh. I hope you launched their gonads into orbit for their diagnosis.”
“I couldn’t,” said Andy, impervious to sarcasm. “It was the military doctors.”
“The military said you have aggression issues,” Kerri recapped. “Good. Not meaningful at all.”
—
Xira the Princess Warrior returned just in time to Actheon’s citadel during the commercial break and Adam shushed Craig, who had just initiated a tirade over Kimrean’s implausible sexual exploits. Nate did not share Adam’s passion for Xira, but found it an entertaining format. And Adam’s zealotry in itself was comforting, when compared with Nate’s hardly unhealthy penchant for the sword and wizardry genre. That was about the sum of the benefits of being institutionalized: living with crazier people helped put things into perspective.
“So, Blyton Hills,” said Old Acker.
The man had just sat down in the armchair next to Nate’s, his raspy voice entangled in the threads of his white beard. Nate checked him out, his astonishment only surfacing as a mere frown, as required by his veteran inmate persona. This was clearly in violation of the Geneva seating conventions.
“Uh-huh,” he replied.
“That’s in the Pacific Northwest, in the Cascades,” said Acker, glimpses of his old academic life poking through. “Near Sleepy Lake, is that right?”
“Indeed,” Nate pinged back, taking another drag.
“In the area the Walla Walla Indians called Land of Deadly Shadows.”
“I think even they agree to call it Oregon now.”
“Mentioned by Simón de Urribia in his Book of the Last World, whose American translator was burned during the Salem witch trials.”
“Christ, why does every single horror story have to make a connection with Salem?” Nate ranted. “It’s like, I don’t know, are you implying something actually demonic happened there? Because I’m sorry to tell you it was only a bunch of Christian fanatics burning women and being massive fuckheads; stop giving credit to their actions.”
Acker didn’t seem sidetracked. Instead, he added: “Named the Sea of Yottha in the Necronomicon.”
The last puff of smoke out of Nate’s mouth hurried away from the awkward silence.
“That book doesn’t exist.”
Acker did not reply. Instead, always at grandfather speed, he produced from his breast pocket a crayon stolen from the art room and a newspaper from the rack, and he started drawing in a margin. It began with two basic strokes, combined into a five-pointed star. Nate watched with badly faked disinterest as the little figure grew long, angry-angled branches, and tortured spirals, and arrowheads stabbing the original figure, nudging the sound of the TV into the background and causing sunlight to dim, and time to slow down, and Nate’s heart to suddenly adjourn the next beat.
Old Acker put away the crayon. Nate commanded his throat to swallow.
“That’s a fake,” he argued. “It’s from Clint Sorhein’s short story ‘The Secret Gate to Kathom,’ 1959.”
“That’s not where I got it from,” Acker teased, a wrinkled hand alluding to his beard and the yellow uniform that distinguished patients at Arkham. “I can tell you reading science fiction is not what landed me here.”
He peered over his spectacles and into Nate’s eyes.
“You’ve seen symbols like this before. You’ve been there. Things live at the bottom of that lake and under the hills. Ancient, corrupt things that are not granted the gift of death by their cruel gods.”
Nate breathed deeply, striving to pull his God, I’m surrounded by crazy people mask over his true fear.
“You’ve seen them, as the Indians did, stealing out into the world they once claimed. You felt, deep below the water, the heaving slumber of the quiescent monstrosity they call Father, whispering your name.”
“Rogers.”
Nate popped back into the asylum’s living room, unprecedentedly quiet. All the inmates’ attention was funneled into the hallway behind Nurse Angela.
“You have visitors,” the nurse announced.
“Ooh, women!” Kimrean pointed out.
Kerri peeked into the bleached living room.
Sitting in a grandmother armchair, clad in yellow, Nate Rogers, 24, caffeinated blue eyes and blond hair cropped to half an inch, stares back, holding the trembling ash ghost of a cigarette between his fingers.
“Hey, Nate.”
Every single crazy person in the room turned to Nate. He rose to his feet.
“Hey.”
Kerri took a breath, orange hair gathering strength, strode into the room, and hugged her cousin. Andy thought she heard Kerri’s curls sighing for real, objectively loud, until she realized it had been the other patients.
“Hi, Andy,” Nate greeted over Kerri’s shoulder, arms around her parka. “Long time.”
Kerri wished she had come to visit him sooner.
—
They switched to the nonsmoking parlor, where they could smoke and be alone. It was literally four papered walls around a table and three chairs. Nate had never stepped in it before, but he automatically knew how to use it; he took the solo chair at the far side of the table and let the girls sit across from him.
Andy had not seen Nate since he was fifteen. He didn’t look that different: pale, blue-eyed, more worn but still fragile. His body looked like it still had a growth spurt left to hit.
“So how’ve you been?” Kerri started.
“Groovy.” He dragged on one of her cigarettes and ashed it in a flowerpot. “Place is nice. Good people. Apart from those claiming a mental disorder that compels them to steal my socks.”