“Kleptomania?”
“Oh, it’s a thing? Shit. I owe someone an apology.” His right hand played with Kerri’s lighter. Such devices were discouraged in the ward. “Anyway, how are you? How’s…Tim, was it?”
“Fine! Fine, he’s three already. A bit unruly, but honoring his ancestors. He’s in the car right now.”
“Oh, good. The whole family’s here,” he said, just the teensiest bit overacted. Enough for Andy to hold her frown for a little longer. “So what’s the occasion?”
“Well…” tiptoed Andy. “We came for you. We’re putting the band back together.”
“Oh, really?” he said in interested-mom pitch. “What’s come up? A damsel in distress? Sheep smugglers?”
“No, we…we’re reopening the Sleepy Lake monster case.”
—
A thrush on the lakeshore looked up toward the horizon spiked with fir trees and took flight with an agitated wingbeat.
—
Nate continued to smoke, the ghost of a smile on his face. His eyes pinged Kerri just once, enough to be persuaded she was into it too, and returned to Andy.
“All right. Let’s do it.”
He squished the cigarette in the flowerpot and sat up, avid for orders.
Andy and Kerri didn’t move for another minute.
“So…” Andy began, and resumed, much later, “You okay with this?”
“Hell yeah. About damn time, if you ask me.”
The girls sidechecked each other in a brief reaction shot.
“In fact, I don’t know what kept me from taking the initiative myself,” Nate elaborated. “I mean, how much longer could we go on ignoring the elephant in the lake?”
“So, you’re willing to come?” Kerri asked. “To Blyton Hills?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.” Andy checked Kerri again. “So…We’re good to go?”
“I guess.”
No one stood up.
“Okay, let’s go then,” said Andy, willing herself onto her feet.
“Let’s,” said Nate, following suit.
“On our way! Gonna solve the shit out of that mystery!” said Andy, leading them out into the corridor. “Sleepy Lake won’t know what fucking hit it.”
“Hell yeah!”
“Where do you think you’re going?” said the head nurse.
They stopped at the end of the corridor, two inches from the stairway.
“Oh, right,” said Nate, noticing his yellow uniform. “That’s what kept me.”
The girls confronted the armfolded nurse behind the counter, an overacted frown on her face, like this was the weirdest thing she had ever witnessed in that building.
“But you committed yourself,” Kerri told Nate. “Can’t you just uncommit?”
“Mr. Rogers chose to put himself into our care until the doctors see it fit to discharge him,” the nurse intoned in her wild attempt for a sweet, diplomatic voice.
“Can’t he take a leave of absence or something?” Kerri wondered.
“You’ve been fucking with us,” Andy accused Nate.
“Partly,” Nate said. “I didn’t want to rain on your parade. I loved the we’re on a mission from God pose and everything. But I was serious about Blyton Hills.” He shrugged innocuously. “We should go.”
“Really?” Kerri still had trouble believing that.
“Sure. I’ve done a lot of thinking too. Shit, if there’s something we do in this place it’s thinking. It’s not all bouncing in padded cell rooms and riding wheelchairs to Waterloo,” he said with a flourish. “That’s Tuesdays.”
“But how are you gonna get out?”
“He needs a straitjacket,” Andy said, and repeated for the nurse on her way out, “Put him in a straitjacket.”
“Loved seeing you too,” Nate grumbled.
“I’m serious,” she told him. “And get a helmet. Tomorrow, high noon. We’re doing a reverse werewolf trap.”
And she grabbed Kerri by the wrist and left through the stairwell, leaving Nate standing on the limits of his privilege area.
“A reverse— Andy, wait! There is no skylight in here!”
—
Twenty-four hours later, Nate was sitting on his armchair, being bound.
“What are we doing?” Kimrean wondered.
“It’s a game. Buckle this up,” Nate said, wiggling his left shoulder. “Tighter.”
“I get it’s a game, but why aren’t we using Chuck the Plant as usual?”
“Because the orderlies said it’s wrong to play with the catatonics,” Craig grumbled. “Pull that strap! You’re doing it wrong.”
It takes two madmen to put a straitjacket on a third—the answer to an old philosophical question. The jacket itself had not been difficult to obtain; since Kimrean had been transferred to that floor, the orderlies always kept one on hand at the nurses’ station, just in case of a particularly heated argument with his inside voices. Safety devices are usually easy to borrow in psychiatric hospitals because of the staff’s mistaken assumption that patients won’t possibly find a way to use them to harm themselves or others. It takes a while in the yellow uniform to grasp the reach of a patient’s imagination for mischief. The helmet had been trickier to procure: Nate had had to steal it from the locker of the head nurse, who rode a scooter to work. It offered no jaw protection, just the skull, but it would have to do.
A bloodcurdling roar came through the TV’s low-fi speaker. It was Xira time again.
“The hounds of Tindalos have been released!” Adam and Princess Irya warned in unison.
“Back off!” Xira ordered, brandishing her ax.
Kimrean suddenly let go of the straps and gave Nate an asymmetric, squinting gaze. “Is that true? You’re leaving?”
Nate tried his best to stare back at either the green eye or the brown one. “Who told you that?”
“You are, aren’t you?” If anything, Kimrean sounded saddened to lose a playground friend.
Old Acker was slouching toward the armchairs. Nate, sitting with his knees up, acknowledged him with a nod. The straitjacket didn’t allow for much loquacious body language.
“Land of Deadly Shadows, eh?” Nate said casually.
“I wouldn’t dare go within a hundred miles of that lake” was heard from the thickness of Acker’s beard. “You must have your reasons.”
“I’ve got unfinished business to attend to.”
Acker nodded, then sat down in Craig’s armchair, since Craig was too engaged in an argument to notice. Nate closed in as well as he could, trying to conceal their conversation from daylight.
“The symbol you drew,” he said. “I’ve seen it before. Not in a fantasy paperback. It was a large, ancient book inside an abandoned house, on an isle in Sleepy Lake, thirteen years ago.”
Just a few volts of excitement tautened Acker’s spine.
“You read it?” he whispered, frowning as he guessed Nate’s age and did the math in his head. “But you couldn’t possibly.” Then a flimsy, Gothic smile warped his lips. “Oh, but it leaves an impression, doesn’t it? I know, I know. It’s been only a year since I leafed over the copy at Miskatonic University while it was being transferred. I used to teach anthropology there. I can only imagine what it could do to a child’s mind.”