The body entangled in black robes fell to the floor, on the faded lines of the ancient pentacle.
Kerri covered her mouth to block a sob so brutal it would have destroyed her throat on its way out.
Andy exhaled, and so much of her was lost in that breath that her legs quivered and she fell to the floor and her left hand dropped the pickax and her eyes burned with the pain of what she had done.
Tim, the only one trying to understand what had actually happened, trotted out to sniff the body.
A minute of silence was cut short by Nate’s muffled screams.
Andy tried to pull herself up and failed. She tried again, tears blurring at the sight of Peter Manner dead on the floor. She staggered across the room and tore the gag off Nate’s mouth.
Nate gulped in some air and returned it with his first words: “It wasn’t him.”
Andy was just realizing they had overlooked something big when Tim, his nose to the floor, homed in on the cupboard. The cupboard opened. Tim looked up and wagged his tail.
Dunia stepped out and stroked the dog’s bloodied head, a curved sword in her other hand and the most peaceful expression on her face.
She scoped the room, checking the body on the floor, then Andy, then Kerri, then Nate, and she shrugged.
“Well. I won’t say everything went exactly as I planned, but…close enough.”
“Who are you?” Kerri asked.
“Dunia Morris?!” Andy answered.
“Oh, Debo?n’s fine,” Dunia dismissed with a wave. “Whatever.”
“It was her!” Nate shouted from his corner, still tied to the beam, red with anger and possibly near-suffocation, but mostly anger at the woman strutting around the room. “She brought us here! She needed us to come!”
“Yup. Guilty,” she said, resting gracefully on the workbench.
“We are the pentacle! Not this one, the whole island—the four of us and her, we made the pentacle! She took our blood signatures thirteen years ago! The tooth was Peter’s,” he told Kerri. “And she had your hair too, from the barbershop! And Andy’s blood! And I haven’t been to the rocks, but I bet there’s something of mine too!”
“Used gum and saliva,” Dunia clarified. “Good thing you’re good little campers and dispose of your trash properly. Mother Earth thanks you.”
“But…What did she…Fuck, why?” Andy settled on.
Dunia drew her cigarette case from her leather pants, opened it, and produced a cherry lollipop. She put it in her mouth and shrugged coquettishly, grin-biting the stick.
“Because the ritual requires five,” Nate narrated for her. “Like the glyphs at the bottom of the mines said: five priests to open the gate and release Thtaggoa. Only we weren’t priests. She just stole samples from the four of us to form the pentacle and then she lured us to the isle! We weren’t meddling kids; we were pawns. She probably caused the tremor that made our boat capsize, so we would be trapped here and be part of the ritual without us knowing.”
Dunia leisurely paced the room, entertained by his rancor.
“You were bound to come,” she said. “How could Blyton Hills’ teen sleuths fail to visit the local haunted house?”
“And she would’ve gotten away with it,” Nate resumed, “if I hadn’t resurrected her father by mistake!”
Dunia stopped on her feet, wincing like the record had scratched.
“What?”
She eyed the gang as if trying to identify the smart one and despairing.
“God, okay. Sorry. My fault. Sometimes I forget I’m dealing with the Blyton Summer Detective Club, not the FBI.”
“I read your spell book,” Nate told her. “I raised his avatar and it used us!”
“No, you didn’t,” Dunia said with a scowl, at the same time that Tim began growling at the door.
“I did! I resurrected Debo?n,” Nate cried.
“Debo?n wasn’t dead!” she snarled. “I am Damian Debo?n!”
Tim burst into riotous barks, oblivious to the mainstream focus of attention—the little owl-eyed woman parading among them.
“You…what?!” Kerri half-phrased.
“That’s impossible,” moaned Nate. “I brought Debo?n back!”
“Please,” Dunia droned. “Avatars and resurrection—not the same thing. Resurrection is impossible. Believe me. (Pointing at Peter’s corpse wrapped in black on the floor.) That’s the closest I ever got, and he was little more than a puppet.”
NATE: But I saw your book. I read the spell!
DUNIA: Don’t flatter yourself. You read my notes.
NATE: I saw smoke rising from an urn on that bench!
DUNIA: Said the kids who spent their childhood running from losers in costumes.
NATE: We have all the symptoms you listed: the nightmares, the bitterness, the feeling of being lost!
DUNIA: I just described any twenty-five-year-old ever, you self-centered twit! (Gracefully turning, leaving Nate to shatter behind her back.) I’m afraid the only evil that possessed you was Generation X. It’s a shame, really, what youth has come to. When I was your age…(Pause. She pops the candy out of her mouth, tastes her own lips, then retreats.) Bah, forget it. You wouldn’t even believe where I was when I was your age.”
She drifted toward Andy, stroking the Weimaraner’s back en passant. He was still growling threats at the door. And the worse part was something was threatening back from the other side.
Nate, Kerri, and Andy stood wordless. Night was falling apart.
“The world has changed a lot,” Dunia went on through a deep sigh. “But people are the same. A few keep pulling the wagon of progress while the rest just truck along. Always the same ignorant, pitchfork-wielding mob. Easily scared. Easily cheated. They started growing suspicious once, so I chose to leave and come back as my son. Oh, nothing noteworthy—it’s been done before. But two decades later, they start harboring suspicions again—you’d almost think they’re getting wiser. So I try the same trick with a flourish: I die and come back as my daughter, and voilà! Cheated again! They don’t even know how easily you can do the switch today!”
She stopped in front of Andy, scanned her from bottom to top.
“You might be interested—ask your doctor.”
Andy unexpectedly brought the shotgun between them, hardly restraining her trigger finger.
“I’m gonna give you something to ask your doctor about, bitch.”
KERRI: NO! Andy, don’t shoot!
Dunia put the lollipop back in her mouth and smiled, watching Andy scourging her brain for a valid reason not to open fire.
“Oxygen,” Kerri cued. “The air in this room is saturated with oxygen. If you light a spark it could blow up.”
Dunia yielded to a chortle.
ANDY: You’re kidding.
KERRI: No. Oxygen is flammable. We can’t shoot in here.
The chortle paved the way to frank, disrespectful laughter.
“Weee! Look how everything falls into place!” Dunia said, delighted at the infinite hatred under Andy’s brow. “C’mon, you gotta see the humor in this!”
On a side note, the door came off its hinges and slammed on the floor.