“But what is Thtaggoa?” Andy asked, careful not to trip on the name.
“Who knows,” Nate said, shrugging it off. “A deposed god. A fallen alien. According to horror authors, one of several primordial chaos entities that used to rule the earth and now lives underground, cast away by rival spirits, in the nightmare city that its hideous slave race built below a location that was once revealed to a possessed Arab as the Sea of Yottha: what we call Sleepy Lake. And there Thtaggoa lies sleeping, bound by magic, waiting for the day it will be summoned back and set loose on to the world, and when that happens…” He abandoned the sentence.
“What?” Kerri prompted. “What comes next?”
Nate shrugged again, showing his empty hands. “I guess apocalypse.”
An anticoda of background conversations and Cyndi Lauper underscored the word.
“Apocalypse,” Kerri parroted, scratching an imaginary itch on her forearm. “That’s a big leap from sheep smuggling.”
“Wait,” Andy tracked back. “You said ‘it will be summoned back.’ By who?”
“Whom. Well…” Nate puffed, searching for inspiration. “Shit, I don’t know. Demonic cults, deranged wizards, Nazis…the Illuminati…If it’s specific names you want, Damian Debo?n comes to mind.”
“Because he owned some books?”
“Let’s say if he wanted to summon a primeval leviathan from its millennial slumber, he’s got the right bibliography.”
“But you said earlier no one alive today can read the books,” Andy argued, shepherding the gang out of the gloom. “Right? And maybe Debo?n could, but he’s dead.”
“Yeah, well, about that,” Nate said, stiffening back up. “Uh…I might have brought him back.”
“Good. Well broken,” Peter judged, leaning back on his seat, a single-stroke grin inked on his square face.
The girls took a minute to chomp through Nate’s line.
“Oh-kay,” Kerri spelled. “Uh, care to elaborate?”
“Sure,” he said with a sigh. “Look, one of the books I saw in that attic thirteen years ago was the Necronomicon. It’s—”
“I’ve heard about it,” Kerri stated icily.
“Good.” He explained to Andy instead: “It was written by an Arab who had visions of…the world as it once was and the beings that ruled it. According to Old Acker, this book is supposed to contain instructions to communicate with entities beyond our existential plane. It tells how to raise a spirit out of salts distilled from human remains: textbook necromancy. In Debo?n’s lab there was a pentacle—”
“Painted in blood!” Andy jumped in, recalling.
“No,” Nate said disappointingly. “Pentacles only need what’s called a ‘blood signature’—that’s like…a caller ID, a piece of yourself you put forward to claim control over the pentacle; you don’t need to draw the whole thing in blood; that’s a myth.”
“Good thing we established that,” Kerri commented, legs stretched on her seat. “I hate it when people mix superstition into strict demonology.”
“Look, I’m just saying how it’s supposed to work. Dunia said her father used to talk to people in his lab, that she heard him questioning them. That makes sense: to learn everything he needed to raise Thtaggoa, Debo?n had to consult many before him, and I think this is how he did it: by finding their remains, distilling their salts, and summoning their spirits; as long as they were trapped in the pentacle, he could coerce them, he could torture them. I saw the urns and the pentacle myself. But the main point is, if he was able to bring the dead back to life on a regular basis, what stops him from making arrangements for bringing himself back in case of an accident? He could have prepared the essential salts from his own body and left everything ready to be raised again. Think of it as a backup copy. A safety net.”
“He’d still need someone to summon him back,” Andy pointed out.
“Right. Well, remember the last night of the Wickley case, when we were in the mansion, searching for clues?”
“Yes,” Andy picked up. “We’d split up in pairs; I was with you and Sean, and Peter was with Kerri…(She points at Kerri.) But then Peter lost you.”
“I fell through a secret trapdoor,” Kerri recalled. “And I landed in the coal room, where the lake creature—I mean, Wickley in his fucking costume—grabbed me and tied me up.”
“Peter came running upstairs saying he’d lost you, and we all split up again to look for you. His idea. And I found you, but a lake creature—”
“Wickley.”
“No,” Andy objected. “A lake creature was coming after me, so I took you into the dungeon, and we shut ourselves in.” She swallowed, her mouth dried up like she’d just climbed a mountain. “And there wasn’t one lake creature. There was a horde.”
Kerri lowered her eyes, her left hand instinctively pining for Tim. The dog noticed and gently kissed her palm.
“Right, well,” Nate resumed, impressed with their progress, “while all that was happening downstairs, I had discovered the attic and Debo?n’s lab. And there was a workbench full of pots with powders in them, and a pentacle on the floor, and the Necronomicon opened on a lectern in the middle of the room. And the Necronomicon was written in Arabic, I think, with handwritten notations in English around it, like a pronunciation guide, and I started to read it…and I might have read it aloud.”
The girls clicked out of the spell, and for a second just gaped at the implications of that line.
“Way to fucking go, Nate,” Andy evaluated.
“Okay, wait,” Kerri started, “Nate, now you’re speculating.”
“No, listen, I swear something happened. There was like this dark green smoke coming out of one of the urns, and I felt a presence around me.”
“Nate, that’s crazy!”
“How can you—you just dissected a monster, for fuck’s sake!”
“The monster is real; you’re talking magic!”
“Yo, the what is real?!”
The whole table, canine included, turned to Joey Krantz, who had uttered the last line. This was immediately followed by a second realization—that they had been talking way too loud again.
Conversations around them started to rekindle.
“Sorry I interrupted,” Joey said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you all day: Is it true about the thing you found at the lake?”
What puzzled Andy the most was not the excited half of the tone, but rather the concerned half.
“Who told you that?” Kerri asked him.
“Oh, it’s all around. Copperseed told Mr. Quinn, who told Irene, who told Deaf Anne, who told Will Martin, who told Mr. Moretto, I think.”
Kerri stopped to wonder how the information continued to flow past someone called “Deaf Anne” while Nate took over. “Yeah, we caught the lake creature.”
“Shut up!” Joey whisper-cried. “So it’s true! There’s something up there!” He couldn’t stop going from one to another. “Are you all okay? Copper said it was nasty.”
“We’re fine,” Kerri said. “Nate shot it.”
“Really?” Joey bro-fisted Nate’s shoulder. “That’s awesome. Mystery always has a way of finding you, eh?”