Page 83 of The Bad Weather Friend

“I was driven insane by the war.”

“What war was that?”

“The secret war I’m not allowed to talk about. They sent me here to Briarbush after the explosion because if I ever write a book about the creepy things I’ve seen here or talk to the media about it, no one will believe me, considering that I’m certifiably insane. Which is ironic, because I never lie.”

Benny’s life had so well prepared him to talk with a functional madman that he felt he was in the lap of destiny. “I’ve never heard of the Church of Earth.”

“I formed it,” said Brother Sunshine. “I am the pope, the only clergyman, and at the moment the sole adherent of the faith. But if the ETs from the planet circling Regulus ever break through to us, my church will swell in numbers and be the spiritual army that saves Earth from domination.”

“That’s a big responsibility.”

Brother Sunshine shrugged. “Someone has to do it.”

The night Bugboy had been killed, when Benny and his friends had been hiding in the mountain pieris, Mrs. Baneberry-Smith had referred to Regulus technology when talking to Agent Kimball.

“Brother, you said that you were sent here to stand watch ‘after the explosion.’ What explosion?”

“The headmistress was conducting an experiment, and something went wrong. She blew up herself and seven students. The ISA, which secretly owned Briarbush Academy, sent the remaining students home—those who had not been blown to bits—andfired the staff and closed the school forever. I don’t know what they did with the bits. I guess they scooped up the bits and sent those home, too.”

“When was that?”

“Four years ago next Tuesday.”

A chill climbed Benny’s spine. “The boys who were killed. Do you know their names?”

“I knew them once, but now I’m not so sure. I’d have to go through the files in the administration vault.”

“Do the names Mengistu Gidada and Jurgen Speer ring a bell?”

Brother Sunshine’s solemn expression cracked into a smile. “I know those names! I read about them when I was researching the school’s recent history. They didn’t die in the explosion.”

Relief flooded through Benny.

“They must have been very stupid boys. Those two numbskulls ran away into the forest,” Brother Sunshine continued. “During a storm. I can’t imagine what they were thinking. That’s a true wilderness. Sixty-two search-and-rescue specialists set out to bring them back, but no one ever found hide nor hair of those boys. Not a tooth or a fingernail. Neither a decaying nose nor a finger bone. Those two are deader than dead. Probably cougars tore them asunder and ate them and then shit them out a year before the explosion.”

THE FATEFUL BULLET

More than fifty years of a charmed existence had not inspired gratitude in Ms. Llewellyn Urnfield. Instead, she felt entitled to fifty more. She’d always gotten everything she wanted. The easy fulfillment of her every desire left her drifting somewhat due south of sanity, afloat on delusions of invulnerability and immortality. With maniacal confidence, she drew a pistol from under the counter, took it in a two-handed grip, and fired point-blank at Harper, no doubt intending to shoot Benny a second later and the google-eyed craggle with his heart in his hand two seconds after that.

Because Urnfield believed in nothing but herself and her power, she had no capacity to accept the existence of a supernatural being even when he performed miraculous feats for her. She dismissed him as nothing more than a close-up magician and card mechanic executing the equivalent of tricks with a stacked deck. Benny could have told her that a person, any person, is never at greater risk than when he or she believes in nothing other than himself or herself. Of course, if he’d tried to convince her of that hard truth, she would have shot him before he managed to say more thana person is.

When the pistol appeared, Benny thought the crack of the shot was also the sound of his last chance at happiness crashing to ruin. In the same instant, however, pulses of amber light radiated out of Spike’s dripping heart and whirled into Urnfield’s eyes. Not only did the crazed woman lock in position, a vicious sneer of contempt frozen on her face, but the bullet also was sidelined. It hung in midair, halfway between the muzzle and Harper’s face, its kinetic energy for the moment only potential energy, a paleplume of vapor continuing to mark the progress it had made from the gun.

As Spike retracted his eyes into their sockets and returned his heart to his chest, Benny let out a few syllables of sound alike to the whimpering of a dreaming dog having a nightmare. Then he found words. “Oh God, that was close, too close, the crazy damn witch!”

“It’s not done,” Spike said solemnly, almost in a whisper.

“What? What’re you talking about? You stopped it. You can do anything.”

“Look at Harper,” Spike said.

Benny turned his head to stare at her as she stood at his side. Like Llewellyn Urnfield, Harper was sidelined. Blue eyes gone wide at the sight of the pistol. Mouth open in a cry of alarm that she hadn’t been able to let out. One hand half raised to ward off the shot before it was fired.

On the second barstool, Virginia Woolf, the whippet, was as bespelled as her mistress.

The digital clocks on the ovens no longer counted off minutes. Benny looked at his watch and saw the second hand no longer swept from check to check. When Bob Jericho had been sidelined, when Handy Duroc and Jill Swift were bespelled, time continued its inexorable progress. Now time had stopped for everyone but him and Spike.

“What the hell is this?” Benny asked, the anguish in his voice suggesting that, subconsciously, he knew the answer to his question.

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