“Okay, so she dragged me toward a bunch of girls because I wasn’t making any friends. She put her hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘Kerri, this is Andrea.’ And I said, ‘Andy.’?”
“You grumbled, ‘Andy.’?”
“I did?”
“You were mad at somebody, probably at everybody, and very, very sulky. You looked like one of those evil kids in horror movies. Children of the Corn, Latina version.”
“Yeah. Children of the Coca Fields.”
Kerri laughed into her pillow. “That’s so racist!”
“I know; it’s my race, I’m allowed. So anyway, I grumbled, ‘Andy.’ And you stuck your hand forward, smiling, and said, ‘Hi, Andy.’ That was it. Never questioned it. Never looked at me funny. And then we bumped into Nate and you said, ‘This is my friend Andy.’?”
Tim had finished his supper and lay down at the foot of Kerri’s bed.
“I remember,” Kerri whispered.
“You probably don’t know—you surely didn’t know then—but that is rare. Meeting someone who not only respects it, but believes it.”
Kerri’s eyes were closed now, a peaceful expression declared in her lips.
“That’s what you and Blyton Hills represent to me,” Andy resumed, sotto voce. “And I want to win it back. For all of us.”
Leaves cracked under the tread of a furtive smile. “Joey too?”
“Yes, him too. I bet he never got out anyway; he’ll be an unemployed slacker. Worse than all of us.”
“Combined?” Kerri said dreamily. “Ex-con, mental, and alcoholic? That’s a lot of boxes ticked.”
—
In the next room, Nate sat alone on the left-side bed, hearing the merry humming tune that came from the bathroom.
Peter spat in the sink, rinsed his toothbrush (Nate’s toothbrush), and returned to the bedroom.
“Ah, the boys’ room again.” He slumped onto the other bed. “Should we draw a treasure map before it’s lights-out? Perhaps brush up on our sign language?”
“Get off my bed,” Nate said, without moving.
“Says who?”
“What did you tell Kerri on the phone?”
“Why? Jealous I said good-bye to her and not you?”
“I’m serious. What did you talk about?”
“It was private.”
“You have no idea.”
“I have no idea what I told Kerri on the phone?”
“You have no idea because Kerri didn’t talk to you on the phone,” Nate concluded, and he treated himself to a pill out of a prescription bottle and a sip of Orange Crush.
Peter kept observing him closely, slightly off-balance.
“What are those for?” he asked.
“Hallucinations.”
“Really? What are you seeing?”
“Right now? A moron who still wears bell-bottoms.”
“Do you think a pill is going to just make me puff away? Because I’m warning you, it took like thirty pillf laft time to make me paff away.”
Nate couldn’t help a sportive laugh. “Good one,” he acknowledged, capping the bottle. “But that’s the point. Peter passed away. You’re not Peter.”
“Come on! We’re the Blyton Summer Detective Club,” Peter protested. “When have you ever caught a bad guy without me? You are going to need my help.”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to get by without it. Get up.”
Nate had stood up and now he was taking over the bed opposite. Peter sprang swiftly on his feet, the remote possibility of someone walking in and finding him sharing a bed with another man being clearly inadmissible. No matter who hallucinated whom.
He peered down at Nate kicking off his sneakers.“Of course you’re the expert here, having lived among delusional people far longer than me, but don’t I sound pretty consistent to you for a hallucination?”
“Not really,” Nate answered. “You’d be surprised by the consistency of people’s delusions. If they were easily dismantled, they wouldn’t believe them.”
“But I look like me. Sound like me. Know what I know.”
“No, you don’t know what you know. You know what I know you know.” He faced Peter again. “Tell me what you told Kerri on the phone.”
Peter sat on the left bed, an unusual angle in his lips.
“That I loved her.”
“That’s what I think you told her,” Nate replied. “Because I am fabricating you. I am feeding you your lines. You’re just a figment of my subconscious, trying to tell me…something.”
“Tell you what?”
“I don’t know; do you need to ask me?”
He reached for the lamp switch and turned it off, lying still dressed on the bed.
“It’s irrelevant what you have to tell me,” he continued, “because I know consciously, without any doubt, that we are doing the right thing here. Andy is right. We must go to Blyton Hills, solve this case, and find peace. And that begins by ignoring our minds’ tricks. So I’m sorry but no, we will not be needing your help.”
Peter remained sitting, a wide-shouldered silhouette against the window.
“Okay,” Peter started, in the exact voice Nate recalled him using when laying out an attack plan. “So I’m just a hallucination, a subjective experience that—what?”
Nate had started laughing.
“The real Peter would never use the word ‘subjective.’ I mean, sorry, man, you were just a leader; Kerri was the brains.”
He gave time for his laughter to remit, then fell silent, a smile on his face. When he noticed a minute had passed, he wondered. He risked a glance toward the other bed.
The silhouette was still there.
“Okay,” it said. “I see it. You don’t need me. You guys got a new leader. And I’m a figment of your subconscious, so what can I possibly know? About Peter’s life. About Peter’s death. About what waits for you back in Sleepy Lake. About what he saw when you were too chicken-scared to look. About the massive, heart-withering evil you and your friends hardly brushed over while fighting a stupid yokel in a costume. The evil that will catch up with you as it caught up with me, Nate.”
“Shut up.”
“What can I know about the cold, like your body naked and buried in the snow, the infinite cold gripping you, burning you, numbing you, seeping through your pores, frostbiting your muscles, killing the marrow in your bones? About dirt being shoveled over your lips and nostrils, about centipedes scuttling into your ears and gnawing the inside?”
“Stay there.”
“About maggots living in your body, growing fat, eating their way out? About gigantic god worms sleeping in the center of the earth, curled up, miles and miles of a single primordial thing that will devour your house with you in it, and let you sink into the unspeakable sickness of its gut, Nate? You and Andy and your beautiful cousin burning alive in hell?”
Nate reached the light switch before Peter’s slithering hand reached him. It still was Peter, eyeless, rotten, worms pouring out of his mouth.
“It will kill you all.”
“Nate!”
—
Nate opened his eyes back to the ugly motel. Andy banged the wall between their rooms once more.
“Nate? Are you okay?” she said.
Nate sat up on his bed, clothes soaked in sweat.
“Yeah,” he said to the wall. “Bad dream. No problem.”
It took him another minute to notice he was back in the left bed.
Lying fully dressed on the right one, Peter crossed his legs and fixed his perfect hair.
“Yup. All together then. This is going to be great.”
PART TWO
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