“You serious?”
“Yes. We faced guys in costumes before. And we always had the good sense not to kill them, but to expose them. Shoot first, ask later may be standard procedure for police in Compton, but it’s not gonna be mine.”
“You both talk like he can be killed,” Nate challenged.
“He can be killed, Nate,” Andy affirmed. “The wheezers killed him once. (Points in the general direction of the mauled east wing.) If that necrodouchebag thinks I’m any less nasty than those wiggly spider-armed motherfuckers, he’s got a Pennaquick Telegraph Breaking News Edition coming.”
“That was a good line,” Peter admitted.
Andy stepped forward and rounded on them. From Tim’s lower perspective, the smoldering yellow disk of the attic window shone around her head like the nimbus of a shotgun-and-pickax-wielding angel.
“Listen to me. This is nothing like the last time. At all,” she spoke, challenging the team to argue it. “Last time we were kids. We came here scared, full of good intentions, trying to solve a mystery. And Daniel Debo?n used us. He bullied us.”
She blew the strand of hair off her face, then changed her mind and nodded it back on. This was a special night.
“We’re not kids anymore. We’re not taking shelter in the haunted house—we’re going into the house to drag the haunter out on his sorry ass. Are you with me?”
Myriad tiny voices within Kerri’s hair went yeah like a Rage Against the Machine chorus as Kerri cocked the rifle, lips pursed to keep the fury within.
Nate tautened up, gripped his weapon, and snorted his fear back in.
Tim barked as happily as a dog ever did.
The interior of Debo?n Mansion blinked awake, startled at the first blast at the doors, and the portraits and sets of armory stared in disbelief at the front entrance as the pickax burst through the lightcrack, severing the lock, and Andy kicked her way in, moonlit and angerstruck, doors shattering the decoration behind as she shouted at the shocked furniture:
“Blyton Summer Fucking Detective Club! Anybody home?”
Kerri and Nate came to flank her right after, rifles aimed at the horrified haunted house.
Tim scurried between them, promenaded across the hall, stopped by a decorative suit of armor, and peed on it.
KERRI: That’s the spirit, boy.
—
Nate’s flashlight surveyed the area while Andy struck a match. Fat, healthy-looking flame. The carpeted stairs to the second floor stared down at them like Old West bank clerks would at very loud, untidy robbers.
“Does anyone else think it’s strange that someone lives here, yet the door is still locked from the outside?” Nate polled.
“I don’t know.” Andy shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“It kind of appeals to the detective bit in ‘Blyton Summer Fucking Detective Club,’ doesn’t it?”
“Right.” She nodded. “Well, we’ll make sure he fills us in during his hog-tied villain exposition. Up we go.”
“Wait!”
Andy froze halfway to the first step.
KERRI: This guy wants us to come upstairs and find him.
ANDY: Yup. Pretty much my plan, coincidentally.
KERRI: We shouldn’t be doing his bidding. He knows we’re here; he’s got the light on to entice us. He’s expecting us. We should do something different, throw him off-balance.
ANDY: Good point. Nate?
NATE: (Shrugs, points distractedly at Kerri.) Brains.
ANDY: Right. (Gazing around.) Okay, got it.
She stepped back from the stairs and led them through the double doors on the left, into the living room. Dead hanging curtains and embarrassed furniture squinted at their light beams.
Andy lit a match, okayed the flame, then stumbled upon an oil lamp on the mantelpiece and chose not to let the match waste. The colors of the room (bright hues, even conservatively joyful) stirred back to life in the tottering light.
“Nice,” Kerri sarcasm evaulated. “Good to be home.”
Even though the house had been officially abandoned in 1949 (except for a bout of illegal squatting from Wickley in ’77), it had obviously fallen behind with decorating trends back in the early 1920s. The present tenant was clearly uninterested in catching up. In fact, the whole room was uncannily identical to their memory of it. Kerri could have sworn that no one had stood below the breeze-rocked chandelier since their own terrified teenage selves—and the impression it made on her was exactly the same. That bone-ringing familiarity was more unsettling than every haunted house cliché.
Nate even jolted when he peeked over his shoulder and recognized the face over the mantelpiece. Above the dead fireplace hung the somber oil portrait of Damian Debo?n, the founding father. The man posed in flamboyant 1860s fashion, leaning on a crescent-bladed sword, like an ambiguous yet proud symbol of a previous career that had granted him the present status. He was the only thing in the room not to seem intimidated by their intrusion. Still, Nate could detect the scandal in his black eyes: the hateful, cryogenic look a Reconstruction-era gentleman would reserve for punks and lesbians.
The likeness, however, wasn’t nearly as frightening to Nate as it had been to his eleven-year-old self—not even in the dim light of the oil lamp and the candelabra that Andy had just kindled. It was just brushstrokes on canvas. And the room, he noticed, wasn’t that big. Rediscovery shrinkage.
Kerri checked the painting, then looked across the room at an ornamental shield on the wall. Visual memory or imagination placed two swords crossed on top of that shield, not dissimilar to the one in the portrait, but there was only one now. She spotlighted it, and she could outline the ghost of its twin in the dust.
She was about to point this out when she saw Andy sliding a vinyl record from its sleeve. She delicately alighted it on the gramophone (one of those with an external horn like something a Tolkien character would blow into and expect horsemen to rush in), wound up the device, tampered with some switches, and carefully landed the needle on the first track.
It seemed miraculous enough that the old contraption sputtered any sound at all—that of dust and scratches and the tungsten needle coughing. When the music came, it could hardly compete with the noise, but it came nonetheless, in the shape of a forgotten soprano’s rendition of Tessera.
“What the fuck are we doing?” Kerri inquired in the name of pretty much every living and inert thing in the house.
“I bet you he wasn’t expecting this,” Andy answered confidently.
She propped the shotgun next to a sofa and sat down, spraying disgruntled dust into the cosmos. Tim did not hesitate to follow suit.
It was dark, and hostile, and downright frightening, but they had camped in worse places. Even lived in worse places. And the broken opera was starting to get comfortable in the room, and Andy loved camping anyway.
Nate browsed the bookshelves, picked something that seemed both ancient and innocuous, and took it to his newly assigned armchair.