“Shh! Keep your voice down!” Kerri giggled.
“I know, but come on! Oh, shit! I told you! I told you this is the only thing I’m good at!” She shook her head, tried to curse the adrenaline out of her system. Tim attempted to fit one of the bars into his mouth, but it immediately proved too much for his jaw. “This is…”
She turned, searching for an adjective, but got distracted by the way Kerri was looking at her.
“It’s awesome,” she settled with.
“Yeah.”
TIM: (Gazes queryingly at the girls in a close shot for padding.)
“I really liked your postcards from Alaska,” Kerri said. “And the late-night calls.”
“Good,” Andy puffed, tossing the ingot back into the coffin. “I really wanted to write more; I just…I never knew how to say things. I can’t write to save my life.”
“They were very nice postcards.”
“Right. Well, I promise I’ll write you something better one day. A great love letter like—”
—
Floorboards squeaked once more as shoes stepped over the mangled dead creature at the foot of the stairs where the carpet lay coiled up in a gored mess. The haunted house foyer gazed down at the cloaked figure coming downstairs to inspect the collateral damage.
Nate and Peter, crouching in a dark spot behind a sofa, waited for him to step into the living room.
NATE: Shh.
PETER: (Surprised.) Why the fuck do you tell me to shh for, asshole?!
—
“Andy?” Kerri tipped her shoulder. “Andy, you just stopped in midsentence.”
Andy blinked back to reality. She checked Kerri’s legs. “You were wearing those pants yesterday.”
“Uh…yeah. I only brought two pairs, and I’ve kinda outgrown my old bell-bottoms.”
“Peter’s love letter. You put it in your back pocket yesterday when Nate barged in on us.”
Kerri frowned, checked her derriere. “Damn. It must be all crumpled.”
“Show me,” Andy ordered, while she checked her own pockets once more.
—
PETER: Brilliant plan, Nate.
Nate gripped his rifle, ears ignoring the voice beside him and waiting for incoming footsteps, knees ready to catapult him out into the light at the right moment.
PETER: I mean, yeah, let’s just shoot the guy. He’s lived for like a hundred and fifty years, but surely no one thought of this before.
Floorboards sulkily greeted the host into the living room. Nate risked leaning out and taking a peek.
The cloaked figure stood by the phonograph, inspecting the lounge area where the kids had been chilling out. The candles were still burning, the area unscathed from the battle.
Nate observed him bending near the sofa and picking up a book. The Vampire Sorority series.
The necromancer flipped it open, his impressions mercifully concealed.
Nate jumped in frame and pointed the rifle at him.
“Freeze!”
The figure obeyed. In fact, he didn’t even bother to flinch. He just stood still, book in hand, awaiting further orders.
Nate was standing five feet from him. Good thing, because he wouldn’t miss the shot, regardless of how spectacularly the gun was trembling in his hands.
“Take off your hood!” he ordered, not caring about sounding scared. It felt good. He felt scarier when scared. “Show your face!”
The villain dropped the book and slowly turned to face him. Nate gritted his teeth, trying to make out the visage under the cloak.
—
“What’s wrong?”
“I just have a bad feeling,” Andy explained, laying the letter on the floor, and then, on the right side, flattening the last thing she’d fished out of her pockets.
Kerri leaned closer, and so did Tim.
—
“Hood!” Nate cried, the tip of his weapon inches away from the necromancer’s head.
The necromancer raised his hands, letting Nate notice his big, bone-white fingers, and grabbed the rim of his hood.
—
The neon-green light in Tim’s mouth adumbrated the long, beautifully penned letter headed by the words “Dear Kerri” on one side and the short missive “Good-bye” on the other.
Andy was about to ask, “Do you see any similarities?” but she needed only to read the transformation in Kerri’s eyes.
—
All the Dixie cup skin, Sahara lips, Titanic eyes, despair look in the world could not begin to masquerade his face. Peter Manner, 26 (24 of which alive), his tall, powerful frame clad in shapeless black, stares back at Nate from the wrong end of an assault rifle.
Nate’s hands stopped trembling. His muscles stopped aching. His mind stopped working.
All he could do was turn to his right for an answer.
And his own Peter—the one with perfect hair, in a letter jacket and jeans, standing right next to him, seemingly as amazed as he was—simply stood jaw-dropped for a minute and then acknowledged:
“Okay, this is awkward.”
Andy pickaxed the lock off the necrotheque door. It didn’t resist.
She checked Tim for approval: he seemed perfectly ready to leave their stronghold. She pushed the door, and the dog, glowstick in mouth, beaconed the way along an arched gallery.
“It can’t be,” Kerri objected, joining her as she stepped into the new tunnel, which curved off constantly to the right and climbed a step upward every few yards. “It can’t be him, Andy; Peter is dead.”
“Really? How do you know?”
“Because I know. Fuck, everybody knows; it was on the news!”
“Teen sleuths unmasking the Sleepy Lake creature was in the news too,” she mumbled resentfully, hurrying up the steps with the candelabrum in hand, like a distressed countess from a Walpole novel.
“But he died! He overdosed in his house in Hollywood; he was buried in L.A.”
“And you were at the funeral?” Andy challenged her.
“No, but…Christ, he was a celebrity! It’s like discussing whether Elvis is dead!”
“I’m beginning to question that too,” she said as they walked into the glowstick’s light-pool again. Tim was waiting for them to open the next closed door. Andy raised her pickax, then hesitated and tried the handle.
Tim led the troops in once more, highlighting the terra incognita. The chamber he mapped was circular, without any furniture. Candle stubs were wax-welded to the rock floor, arranged in a circle and connected by broken lines of bright red. Andy checked the candlewicks: cold as fossils.
“This kind of scene is getting old,” she said, crossing the room for the next door ahead. “Don’t waste your time—I doubt we’ll work out the details of a death in Hollywood while trapped under a house on an isle in a lake in Oregon.”
The next cave seemed to be drilled through solid rock. There was no masonry or beams; the door they had stepped through was the only man-made feature in the long gallery, which extended both to the left and right. Tim unilaterally chose the path to the right, which incidentally went uphill. Andy just shrugged and followed.
“For the record, I think you’re right,” she told Kerri. “Peter is dead. But that doesn’t change anything.”
“What do you mean?” Kerri panted behind her.