She squished the cigarette, and for a while she seemed to just contemplate her own scenario, while Nate sat and Andy stood staring at each other, both feeling their guts wither and die.
“Thank you,” Andy managed to voice after a full minute, and she quickly grabbed the cumbersome book and gestured Nate to move on. A gag reflex had to hold on at her throat to let the following words squeeze through: “We’ll be leaving now; you’ve been very kind.”
Even Tim thought the visit had been awkwardly brief, but no one asked him. He trotted past their hostess apologetically, and Dunia barely had time to react and walk them to the door.
Not ten seconds later they were back in Mrs. Morris’s garden and hurrying toward the amber Chevy, whose color for the first time didn’t seem bright enough to Andy’s eyes. The taste of lead was building up to her palate. She tried to spit, but her mouth was dry.
She started the engine, stepped on the gas, and heard Nate say, “Oh my God.”
She checked on him after the first turn—his blue eyes like mere pilot lights, the grimoire dropped between his legs.
“This is impossible,” she said, instantly surprised at how desperately wrong her voice sounded. “Nate, we’re not possessed.”
“We were. We were the living vessels,” Nate mumbled.
“We were not! You said the avatar can’t leave the pentacle!”
“I was inside the pentacle. Maybe. I can’t remember where the lectern was. The salts were on the workbench to my left, inside the pentacle too. When I raised the avatar, it poured itself into me. It was set up that way.”
“But what about us?! I never stepped inside the pentacle!”
“You didn’t need to. It was in me already,” Nate said, rubbing the distracting shadows off his face. “Just go through the events again. After I read the spell, I saw the smoke rising, I got really scared, and then…there was a tremor.”
“We noticed that downstairs.”
“The next thing I know, Peter is waking me up and pulling me by the arm.” He rubbed his right shoulder. “That’s when it transferred to him.”
“I had found Kerri tied up when the tremor hit,” Andy remembered. “I set her free, but then the creatures came up. We hid inside a dungeon—maybe it was a cellar, I don’t know.” Andy replayed the memory, and suddenly swerved to dodge a van that had been blaring at them for two blocks. “We could hear them, scratching the walls.”
“We heard you two crying. When Peter and I got there, the creatures were gone. Peter opened the door.”
“Kerri hugged Peter.”
“And so it got into Kerri. And then somehow…”
“I took Kerri’s hand.” She bit her lip, the realization slapping her face with thirteen years’ worth of stored potential energy. “But why? Why would it take us?”
“It didn’t; we were just vessels. It was trying to get to its source.”
“What source?”
“The body, Andy! Debo?n’s body! We were sharing an isle with it.”
“But we never saw or touched Debo?n’s body,” Andy argued, but the strength of her arguments, like her voice, had long ago begun to falter. A living vessel was too broad a definition; it only required imagination. A tree is a living vessel. Worms are living vessels. Suddenly every artery of ivy spidering up the front stairs and over the roof, every weed in the garden, gained meaning. Any blade of grass was a breeze away from the others, every bramble was connected to another bramble, every tree root was part of an underground network serving a single purpose.
And there, beneath an unmarked marble slab under the vault of a willow, the source just waited.
“We were just a transport,” Nate summed up. “It went right through us.” He swallowed, the skin on his neck bristling up at the sight of the ice-cold sweat drop that was coming down. “I did this to us.”
Peter sat tranquilly in the backseat with his legs spread open, ignored by the dog.
PETER: It’s okay to cry, Nate. Everyone here knows you’re a pussy anyway.
NATE: Shut up! Just fucking shut up!
ANDY: Nate! (Steers onto Main Street past a honking truck.) What the fuck, man, who are you talking to?!
NATE: (Diving into his palms.) Shut up! Christ, shut up!
ANDY: Nate, c’mon, man! We can fix this!
(Tim sticks his head between the front seats, trying to soothe the boy.)
ANDY: We just wandered in. It was a trap, Nate. We just…fell for it. It could have happened to anyone. We…(Her hand tries to grasp a word, fails, and falls back, slapping the wheel.) We were the meddling kids.
(Nate reemerges from his hands, eyes inflamed.)
“Nate, please, pull yourself together, okay?” Andy begged. “We need you. Please.”
“I killed Peter.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Let’s just say thirty sleeping pills, a bottle of vodka, and Nate killed Peter,” Peter suggested.
“Nate, you didn’t!” Andy insisted. “Peter killed himself, okay? We were all used by—”
Right there the final piece fell into place, and the picture could not have been more disturbing.
“Then the guy in the cloak…”
“It’s Debo?n,” said Nate. “In his old body. And he wants the rest of his soul back.”
A car screeched two inches away from Andy’s window as they drove past the school sign. She floored the brakes. The station wagon swung around, throwing Tim against the window as inertia made them U-turn, screeching to a stop right in front of the school.
Andy keyed the engine off. Her own heart boomed almost as loud.
Joey Krantz knocked on her window. Andy registered the can of Coke in his hand.
“Hey. You call that driving?”
Nate and Tim stumbled out of the car. Andy took the soda from Joey and led the troops up the front steps of Blyton Hills Elementary.
“So what are we doing now?” Joey inquired.
“I don’t know,” Andy responded.
“What are you gonna do about the lake creatures?”
“I don’t know.”
(The school doors crash open, the cast marching in.)
JOEY: I was thinking I could drive you back to the lake and—
NATE: We can never go back to the lake.
JOEY: Why not?
NATE: (Ignoring him, paces up to Andy.) He wants us. That’s why he’s sending us messages. He needs us there, in the house. We only got off the isle today because he didn’t count on Joey.
ANDY: I didn’t count on Joey!
JOEY: Who’s after you?
(They stop in the middle of the hallway, Tim missing the cue and walking on before realizing.)
ANDY: (To Joey.) Daniel Debo?n might be…(She checks Nate, then rephrases.) Daniel Debo?n is alive.
JOEY: No way! (Astounded.) God. Did you guys know he descended from a witch that was burned in Salem?
NATE: FUCK SALEM!!
ANDY: (Resuming the hike.) What do you suggest we do?
NATE: We run. We should have never come back. All this time he’s been gathering strength, and what’s inside us are the only bits of him that he’s missing. We must stay away. Peter did the right thing.
ANDY: Peter?! Peter did the right thing?! He killed himself!
NATE: And that’s a bit of Debo?n’s soul that Debo?n will never recover.