Meddling Kids
Edgar Cantero
It starts when you pull the lamp chain and light doesn’t come. Then you know you will never wake up in time, you will not make it to the end of this paragraph alive. Desperate reassuring thoughts try to rise over the panic in your head: it’s okay, you don’t need lights, you are practically awake already. You are lying on your bed, you can guess the familiar shape of the side lamp in the morning twilight and hear the old radiator clunking in the night; you are safe. It’s just that the lamp doesn’t work. But you want it to work; you need to dispel the darkness and let certainty outline the room so the things outside know you’re awake and won’t dare enter, and you pull the chain again and again, and you recall the lamp switch has failed before (has it?), and look, the lightbulb really is trying, though it barely manages to seep a wan glow, and it’s not enough to flash the room out of the shadows, but who needs more, the lamp says, you’re here, this is your room, I am your lamp, that’s your radiator going clunk in the night, that’s the same old closed door beyond which things might lurk and breathe skinless and eyeless, but you can rest, we promise we don’t exist really, lie down. Or are you lying down? Because you think you’re up on your elbows, but your arms aren’t feeling the weight now that you focus on them; in fact, your eyeballs are not moving, and then you try to say “hey” but your throat isn’t responding either, so you cling to the sheets (Do you? Are your fingernails truly scratching the linen?) and you struggle to emit a sound, make your vocal cords vibrate, push some air through your windpipe, just feel your fucking windpipe, for God’s sake, shout and wake up the slumbering blob that is you on your bed, sleeping, dreaming, at the mercy of drooling things outside the closed door, and you pull pull pull pull pull the chain and the lamp insists, I can’t, it’s a technical fault, but I promise you you’re awake, look at me, I’m your good old lamp, I’ve never lied to you, the chain has failed before, you know this, you should install a real switch you can snap on and off, and that’s when you realize your bedside lamp never had a chain. Furthermore, there’s no radiator in the room that can go clunk. It’s their footsteps (clunk), and the door is already open—try to shout—they’re in your room—try to shout—they’re creeping up your bed (clunk), stretching toward you (clunk), squamous ice-cold webbed fingers aiming for your spine—try to SHOUT!
—
Her own scream woke her up. It probably woke the whole block, really. She could still hear it resonating in the shoebox width of the room while her racing heart geared down from sprint to marathon and senses swept her surroundings, checking up on reality (of course this is your room, you dimwit, look at how cold and smelly and dampened by bureaucratic rain-pattering and faraway sirens it is). It had not been a bad scream, Kerri judged by the echoes of it. Not so much an eeek, a mouse kind of shrill as a strong, hard-boiled holy mother of fuck.
Tim’s grave, silent stare seemed to confirm it: On really bad nights she would wake up to the dog on the bed, barking away the nightmares. Today he was just sitting by, eyes level and fixed on her, an At ease, soldier expression on his face.
She sat up in her unheated room, lit by the TV static sky, and touched the ice-cold window glass. Real sensations, all of them. She wondered how dreams managed to deceive her every time; they were so blatantly dreams in retrospect, the fake stimuli so dim and shallow. She caressed Tim’s head: his short fur, his wet nose, his whiskers. It was all too complex to be fabricated.
“How do you stay sane, Tim?” she asked him.
Tim whimpered, olivertwisting his pale blue eyes.
Kerri gave him a flirt-acknowledging smirk and allowed him to hop inside the spartan cast-iron-framed bed. She sat against the wall, flipped through the dozen books on the solitary shelf, opened one paperback, and retrieved the newspaper clip.
The teen sleuths grinned back at her across thirteen years, from the sunny grayscale shores of Sleepy Lake, 1977.
—
“Do you still see them?” asked the shrink.
Nate, crash-landed on the armchair opposite, threw back a dehydrated stare.
“Your friends, I mean,” Dr. Willett clarified. “Are you still in contact with them?”
Nate took a drag of his cigarette clutched between Band-Aid-wrapped fingertips, stalling for the end of the session.
“My cousin Kerri calls from time to time. She went to study biology in New York, and she stayed there. I see her once or twice a year. Her mom still breeds Weimaraners back in Portland.
“Andy just left. At sixteen or so, she threw a backpack over her shoulder, left home, and jumped on a train to…I don’t know, find herself or whatever. She was always the complex one. I think she calls Kerri sometimes, or sends her postcards.
“Peter was the golden boy. He stayed in California to finish high school; he planned to attend the Air Force Academy, follow Captain Al’s steps…and then at sixteen he got discovered by a casting agent. He did movies, became a big star.”
He snorted, put out the cigarette, and dropped the tone of his voice.
“Then he overdosed on pills and died in a hotel room in L.A.”
In another city in another state, Kerri stroked the pulp-quality paper on which the Pennaquick Telegraph was printed, its pores, the jagged edges of the page. Real sensations, like this cold room and the coarse army blanket and Tim’s ears brushing her thighs. This did happen. This piece of paper says it. “Teen Sleuths Unmask Sleepy Lake Monster.” “Uncover Criminal Plot.” “Haunting Debunked.” We did it.
“Do you miss them?” Dr. Willett prompted.
Nate gazed at the window. It was March, but still winter. That’s what the last thirteen years had been: a very long winter.
“Nah,” he said. “We were kids. Childhood friends don’t last forever. I mean, who holds on to the past for that long?”
—
Thomas X. Wickley’s own thirteen-year-old copy of the Pennaquick Telegraph, stained with blood and urine, burned inside his breast pocket during the parole hearing.
“You were charged with fraud, attempted burglary, kidnapping, and child endangerment. And you pleaded guilty to all four. Is that correct?”
“Yes, it is.”
Thirteen years.
“Now, you know kidnapping is the most serious of these charges. And yet it’s also the one for which you could have more easily pleaded innocence. You were aware that this crime in itself, kidnapping a minor, added ten years to your sentence?”
Thirteen fucking years.
“I was,” he answered.
His hands on the table didn’t even shudder at the number. They stayed still and gnarled like ancient trees, mumbling in grumpy voices, Thirteen years, you say, boy? That’s nothing!
It was true. He never had any plans for those thirteen years anyway. Not since things went awry in Blyton Hills.