Page 42

42

As They Prepare to Visit Pastor Larry, the Amigos Recall a Thanksgiving Horror

Part 1

So there they were, fourteen years old, none with a supportive family to which they could turn for help.

Often when a bad thing has happened and perhaps something worse is expected, people say they are waiting for the other shoe to drop. During the two uneventful weeks following the Liberty Park encounter with Wayne Louis Hornfly, when he had eaten the head and surely then the body of Bjorn Skollborg, the amigos waited for the other shoe to drop. Hornfly warned them that Skollborg’s fate would be theirs if they didn’t cease conducting surveillance of Pastor Larry and looking into his background, that they would be safe if they obeyed. They had respected that warning at least for the time being, but they did not believe that a creature like Hornfly, who could somehow devour a head in less than a minute, could be relied upon to keep his word. Sooner than later, a big shoe would drop.

Trusting Hornfly would be as stupid as accepting an invitation to Dracula’s castle after being assured that your host has such an allergy to your blood type that he will go into anaphylactic shock and die again if he consumes so much as a drop. It would be as stupid as including the Frankenstein monster in a state dinner at the White House under the assumption that he possesses perfect table manners and is a witty conversationalist. During those two weeks when the amigos felt constrained from further investigation, they came up with scores of as-stupid-as comparisons. They had to do something or go mad. They also spent hours speculating on what kind of creature could do what Hornfly had done. What was his biology? What were his origins? Where did he dwell when he wasn’t reading stories about blood, pain, mayhem, cruelty, murder, and mass death in Pastor Larry’s library? Why did he refer to himself as “we” and “us” instead of “I” and “me”? What did he mean by “Beta is smart. Alpha is stupid,” and what were Alpha and Beta?

By Thanksgiving Day, they had exhausted themselves in fruitless speculation and were frustrated by being afraid to act. Sometimes they sat together in weary silence, as if all the brainstorming had washed everything out of their skulls.

Their mood improved by the time they got together at Spencer’s house on Thanksgiving morning. The previous afternoon, they had gone grocery shopping. They intended to prepare a holiday feast together.

Bobby’s foster parents, the Pinchbecks, were indifferent as to whether he stayed home for the traditional fish sticks and boiled potatoes.

Ernie’s mother found Thanksgiving such an offensive idea that she chose to fast on the day and had no intention of cooking for her son. “There are numerous frozen comestibles at the supermarket. I will provide you with funds to purchase whatever indigestible items young people of your age are foolish enough to consume. If you must give thanks for something, thank the food-processing conglomerates who keep the market freezers full of insalubrious edibles that will in time destroy your heart while in the short term providing just sufficient calories and nutrients to sustain life. Is that a plan that you feel comfortable with? Shall I fund this endeavor?”

Rebecca’s grandparents were on vacation in Key West with the friends they loved to hate, a hatred revealed only in shrewd and subtle ways when face-to-face but expressed with withering viciousness when not in their company.

And of course it was Spanksgiving at the Church of the Sacred Erogenous Revelation.

The amigos had psychologically processed all of that and were comfortable with the plan for the day. Because they had been pretty much looking after themselves for years, each had experience with kitchen chores and some culinary skills. The preparation for a feast, which took hours, was never tedious, never seemed like labor. They were together. They liked one another. They were having fun.

You might be saying to yourself or shouting at the page, How can they be having fun when there’s a monster threatening them? That is one of the most admirable things about human beings. Even in the dire circumstances of war, people tell jokes; they laugh at their folly and at the idiocy of their enemies, even at their leaders. Laughter inspires hope, which is essential if we are to have any chance of survival. Only in movies is everything mercilessly grim once the monster arrives on the scene. In life, one of our best weapons against fear, therefore against monsters, is to mock them. After all, Rebecca called Wayne Louis Hornfly a “despicable turd,” yet she and her friends were still alive.

So the amigos sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, shared stories from their lives, and laughed. The food was abundant and delicious. However, in keeping with a previous narrative decision, it will not be described. Suffice it to say they were stuffed and happy.

As they cleared the table and washed the dishes, they discussed Hornfly, a subject they had been avoiding. The conversation evolved until Bobby remembered something from the encounter with the monster in Pastor Larry’s library back in September, an odd detail in Hornfly’s rambling so incomprehensible that he had forgotten it.

“ The third floor ... comatose people ... ”

“There’s no third floor on the rectory,” Rebecca said.

“That’s what I told Hornfly. He said Alphas did things to people on the third floor.”

“What things?” Ernie asked.

Bobby strove to remember. “He didn’t say. He told me I was too stupid to live. He was even more rude than scary. He said if ... if I were comatose, they would find nothing in my tiny brain.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“The Alphas, I guess.”

“Back to square one. Who or what are the Alphas?”

Handing a washed plate to Ernie so that he could dry it, Rebecca said, “Did he mean these Alphas would cut open your head to examine your brain?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t make sense. A third floor where there wasn’t one. Alphas are stupid. Betas are smart. It was gibberish. At the same time he said he would crush me like a grape or else burst upon me and destroy me from the inside out with his filaments and felts. I was more focused on the threats than on the rest of it.”

As Ernie finished drying the plate, he said, “For two months, I’ve been trying to figure out that business about bursting on you and filling you with filaments and felts. It still sounds like nonsense. Can a monster be wacko?”

“They’re all wacko,” Rebecca said. She had not rewashed any dinnerware or flatware. She didn’t consider wiping out the sink with hand-sanitizing gel. She was unaware of the obsession that would one day grip her. “Being wacko is part of being a monster. Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre wasn’t just a homicidal psychopath. He was as delusional as a rabid monkey.”

“Can monkeys get rabies?” Ernie asked as he put the plate away.

Bobby said, “Why couldn’t they?”

“I just never heard of a rabid monkey.”

Rebecca said, “If they can send a monkey into space, then why couldn’t a monkey get rabies?”

That non sequitur caused Ernie to look at her askance, which he could do pretty well even though he had no intention of becoming an actor. “Who sent a monkey into space?”

“We did, the US, years and years ago. Sent it up before we sent up astronauts, just to be sure that weightlessness wouldn’t maybe cause a stroke or something.”

“That must have been one pissed-off monkey.”

Bobby said, “I wonder if a grizzly bear could get rabies. Or what about an elephant?”

“I wouldn’t want to be locked in a room with them when they were foaming at the mouth,” Ernie declared.

Since Bobby first mentioned the third floor and the comatose people, Spencer had been staring at a plate of pumpkin cookies with chocolate chips, as if he didn’t know what they were and was trying to puzzle out their purpose. In fact, a series of images were falling together in his mind, and he was converting them into words.

Now he said, “Where do you find comatose people? You find them in a hospital. How many floors does County General have? Three. How do you study a human brain? One way is scan it. Where do you find MRI machines and CAT scanners? In a hospital. County General is connected to the Keppelwhite Institute. Among Keppelwhite companies, some develop pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Then there’s Keppelwhite Neotech. I’m pretty sure Alpha and Beta are terms often used in medical research, including in the names of experiments.”

He looked up. Everyone was staring at him as though he had announced that he was not born on this planet.

“What I think we need to do,” Spencer said, “is I think we need to go to the hospital for a look around.”

“When?” Ernie asked.

“Now,” Spencer said.

“Isn’t that a little rash?”

“We can’t play this game according to Hornfly’s rules, on his—their—timetable. We have to show some initiative.”

“We don’t have to show it tonight,” Rebecca said. “We just had a heavy meal.”

“We’re all bloated and groggy,” Ernie said. “It was flavorful, but it was heavy. I won’t describe dinner. We all know what we ate. But already I feel like a nap.”

“Spencer’s right,” Bobby said. “We have to get our butts in gear. Those who nap die. If we don’t act, I expect Hornfly to kill me, if not necessarily tonight or tomorrow night, then a year from now or twenty-one years from now. We need to find him—them—and destroy him if we can.”

“Well,” said Ernie, “I guess if we’ve got to go to County General and poke around, looking for something weird on the third floor, this is a good time for it. Visiting hours will be over by the time we get there. The staff will probably be smaller on a major holiday, maybe not fewer nurses, but fewer everybody else.”

“If you’re all going,” Rebecca said, “then I’m going even though I’m bloated and gaseous and feel like my face is melting.”

“You still look really good,” Spencer said.

Bobby said, “Not that we pay any attention to how you look.”

“You better not. I’m just one of the guys.”

“What I meant,” said Spencer, “is that for someone bloated and gaseous and as haggard as you are, you look alert and healthy.”

Departing the kitchen to fetch the coats they had been wearing on this nippy November day, Bobby raised an issue that might seem peculiar but only reveals that even then he had a career in mind. “If this were a story instead of just real life, would it be better to break the chapter here or all the way after we find whatever there is to find at the hospital?”

“That’s a weird question,” said Ernie. “This is real life.”

“It’s just a thing I wonder about—how life sometimes goes by in long, slower passages and at other times moves ahead more like a series of shorter, quicker chapters. Wouldn’t it be more fun if life was all shorter, quicker episodes? Or when I’m older, will I want it slow?”

As they shrugged into their coats, Spencer said, “I don’t need to go philosophical. Being a nerd takes all the energy I have.”