Page 29 of The Bad Weather Friend

“I do not know,” Mengistu whispered. “I never saw Prescott naked.”

“I never saw him naked, either,” Jurgen said.

Mengistu said, “I quite assure you, Ineverwant to see another human male naked, only girls.”

“Only girls,” Jurgen said, and Benny hastened to agree in a voice that was as cracked and shaky as he’d expected theirs to be.

“Is he dead?” Jurgen wondered.

Mengistu said, “I suspect a grave injustice has been done here, very grave indeed, even considering that the victim might be a self-adoring, preening snob like Prescott Galsbury.”

Below, the self-adoring, preening snob turned his head away from the wall, swiveled it farther than any human head should be able to swivel, not a full hundred eighty degrees as might a young girl possessed by a demon and tasked with terrorizing millions of moviegoers, but plenty far enough to look over his shoulder and up at the skylight, an unearthly silver-green radiance in his eyes.

“It’s Galsbury. We’re totally screwed,” Jurgen declared, and with one hand he clutched Benny’s arm, as if he needed human contact in this inhuman moment, although he might have intuited that Benny was about to bolt to his feet, lose his balance, and tumble off the roof. With his greater strength, Jurgen anchored his roommate.

“No, no. We are not yet screwed at all,” Mengistu said. “Unless, of course, the headmaster’s wife discovers we have witnessed this handiwork of hers.Thenwe are screwed.”

Over the tempestuous hammering of his heart, Benny barely heard himself say, “Handiwork?”

Galsbury proved not to be chained or nailed or otherwise fixed to the wall. He was hanging there by some insectile feature of his palms or with the aid of an uncanny power. His body flexed as if he had developed joints where no joints had been previously. Without arching his back, his legs still straight behind him, he snapped his feet forward, planted the soles of them on the wall, and ascended like a four-legged beetle, making his way with impressive suctorial talent.

Although Benny hadn’t screamed either when he’d seen his father shot in the back or on any of the numerous occasions in hisunusual childhood when a scream would have been appropriate, he wanted to scream now. Not being practiced at screaming, however, he was able to make only a wheezing noise like an asthmatic in desperate need of a medicinal inhaler.

As best he could, Mengistu used the Tac Light to track Galsbury to the top of the wall, where he moved out of sight.

“Where did he go?” Benny asked.

“Onto the other half of the sloped ceiling,” Mengistu said, “beyond the ridgeline of the roof.”

“What’s he doing?” Benny asked.

“Coming to see us,” Jurgen suggested.

“So I do believe,” Mengistu concurred.

There and then, Benny decided never to ask a question to which he didn’t already know the answer. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“We can’t,” Jurgen said, holding fast to him.

“There is much we can learn from this encounter,” Mengistu said. “Much we need to know.”

Prescott Galsbury—what the boy had become or maybe was still becoming—crawled partway onto the skylight and peered up at them through the double thickness of glass. Pale, hairless, moist, with gray lips and yellow teeth, he was terrifying, disgusting. Yet he remained human enough in appearance that Benny also felt pity for him. Whatever else Mrs. Baneberry-Smith might be up to in her hellish laboratory, she was the entomologist equivalent of H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau, and the remote campus of Briarbush Academy was the equal of mad Moreau’s island. Benny and his companions knelt transfixed at the skylight, stricken dumb and paralyzed by horror—until Galsbury spoke, his voice muffled bythe glass but his request clear enough. “Please, please feed me,” he said. “Feed me. Feed me.Feed me!”

All concerns about falling off the roof were in that instant forgotten. The three boys scrambled across the cast pavers as if they, too, were part insect. How they got onto the ladder and in what order they descended and with what ungodly racket Benny could not say. In what seemed like an instant, they went from roof to terra firma, the beam of Mengistu’s Tac Light stabbing this way and that, here and over there, as if he expected to find that they were encircled by mortal threats.

Fright left them incapable of defense; they were jelly-spined morsels of bug food waiting to be torn apart by enormous mandibles. Nevertheless, they remained aware of the peril that they would bring upon themselves if they left evidence of their adventure, and they didn’t flee pell-mell into the night. Benny had no memory of taking down the extension ladder or putting it away with the borrowed Tac Lights, but suddenly he and Jurgen and Mengistu were exiting the groundskeepers’ storage building. In a frenzied stealth, they made their way back to Felthammer House, where nightmares coiled under their pillows, waiting for them to fall asleep if they could.

WHAT HAPPENED TO FAT BOB IN THE GARAGE

Standing with Harper at the brink of the laundry, Benny stared across that room at the connecting door to the garage. He was unable to banish the absurd fear that, by an amazing series of connections and transfers occurring over a decade, a further-evolved version of Prescott Galsbury now occupied the strange box in one of the empty spaces beside his Ford Explorer. That was highly unlikely because the prince of this world has so many horrors to promote that there isn’t time to repeat one as specific as Galsbury, considering that repetition results in a diminishing effect.

“Well,” Harper said, consulting her wristwatch.

“Yeah,” Benny agreed.

“I don’t like this silence.”

“It’s better than screaming.”

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