Page 42 of The Bad Weather Friend

Finally, Jurgen said, “I guess we’ve known for some time that no adult at Briarbush can be trusted.”

Benny sighed. “Our parents have consigned us to an asylum, not an academy.”

“A den of iniquity,” Jurgen said, “but not any kind of iniquity that might have a fun side. What if we call the county sheriff?”

Mengistu shook his head. “Not an option. Yes, we are three boys who, through hard experience, have gained a clear-eyed understanding of the troubling nature of humanity and the broken condition of the world. However—”

Benny interrupted. “I never thought of putting it that way. It’s true, and it’s not a bad thing to be wiser than our years, but it’s a little sad.”

“It’s very sad,” Jurgen said.

“Cease and desist right now. We will not engage in a pity party,” Mengistu said, and he continued on his previous track. “However, for all our experience, we are nonetheless boys, kids.When kids claim they have seen a pale, hairless man-bug with gray lips and yellow teeth, there is no chance whatsoever that the nine-one-one dispatcher will send out a SWAT team.”

The expression of this truth resulted in another silence that was broken only when Benny said, “We need a photograph of Galsbury. If we can get a camera, we go on the roof of the lab again and lure Galsbury to the skylight.”

Jurgen sank back in his chair. “They’ll think the image is Photoshopped.”

The silences were growing more frequent and longer.

Jurgen got three more Cokes from the refrigerator.

“No more aspirin,” Mengistu said. “My blood will be so thin, I’ll die of a paper cut.”

A possibility had occurred to Benny some time earlier, but he hadn’t immediately wanted to dwell on it. Undesired images crowded into his mind nonetheless, so he said, “Do you think Galsbury might have eaten Mrs. Baneberry-Smith?”

Jurgen clamped his hands over his ears as if to block out the grisly suggestion retroactively. “He took the job in the lab to have a chance to hump her, not devour her.”

“His needs might’ve changed with his physiology.”

“Well, she probably would taste a lot better than her cookies.”

“Her cookies were okay,” Benny said, “even if they smelled like mushrooms.”

As usual, Mengistu brought logic to the discussion. “If the headmaster’s wife was eaten by a monster of her creation, that would have resulted in considerable commotion even at Briarbush Academy. There has been no commotion. There has not been so much as a faculty meeting to discuss who will teach Mrs. Baneberry-Smith’s course in the history of fifteenth-century Italy.Faculty meetings always get ferociously noisy. We would have heard the uproar.”

Jurgen sank even deeper in his chair. “Here’s another thing that’ll make you soil your shorts if you think about it too much. In books and movies, when there’s a laboratory full of monsters or a hotel full of murderous ghosts or whatever, it always ends in fire. It has to end in fire, everything and everybody burned up, so the threat is eliminated.”

“Sometimes the place is nuked,” Benny said.

“I’d rather be nuked, vaporized in an instant,” Jurgen said, “than slowly burn to death.”

“We are not going to be either nuked or burned,” Mengistu said, as if he could fold fate to his liking as easily as dollar bills. “At least not within the next day or two. Or even three. Meanwhile, the moral issue of Galsbury’s suffering remains before us. We must continue to think about that overnight and arrive at a course of action by tomorrow.”

Although wise beyond his years, Mengistu Gidada could not see the future. The violent resolution of the Prescott Galsbury problem occurred later that very night, after lights-out.

(I must tell you Spike notes that the final lines of this chapter are an example of a plot device called “foreshadowing,” which is useful for setting the mood and creating an atmosphere of uneasy expectation. Spike suggests that if you are in a readers’ group, you might want to make this a point of discussion and compare these lines to the dialogue of the three witches in the first act ofMacbeth.)

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

After Handy Duroc had spilled his guts, figuratively speaking, he was left in the kitchen in a bespelled state, in the arms of Jill Swift—and she in his embrace—in a classic dance position. The only details incongruous with the romantic tableau were the expressions fixed on their faces. His was a mask of terror, hers a torment of rage.

Spike considered the duo and then adjusted Duroc’s right hand, moving it from the small of Jill’s back to her butt, where it had been when they were swanning around the kitchen earlier. “The instant they become motile, their expressions will change. His terror will be forgotten, as will her rage, and they will flow right in step with this excruciating music, engaged in their grotesque vertical seduction as if we had never interrupted them.” He shuddered. “It’s in moments like this, in observance of specimens like these, that I am deeply grateful that craggles have no organs of reproduction.”

Only minutes earlier, Benny could not have conceived that a time would come when Jill would not seem like a perfect package of total wonderfulness, to be longed for even after she’d rejected him so decisively. Now the sight of her made him shudder, made him want to laugh and, oddly enough, weep a little for her, all at the same time.

Benny and Harper followed Spike through the house and out by way of the broken front door. By the time they were crossing the courtyard, under the bright and glowering moon, Handy and Jill had returned to the dance.

Having come from Boca Raton, Florida, in a crate, Spike took an almost childlike delight in driving the Explorer. “There’s nothing quite so invigorating, sofreeing, as piloting a gasoline-powered vehicle along an open road. Years from now, when all the vehiclesare electric, when tens of millions of acres of Earth’s surface have been destroyed by open-pit mining for the enormous quantities of lithium and cobalt and nickel and copper required for EVs, when thousands of new landfills have been crammed full of batteries that can’t be recycled and are leaking horrifying toxins into the water table, when thousands of square miles of windmills have made extinct hundreds of species of birds with disastrous environmental effects, I will still—always, always—remember this special and exhilarating night, chauffeuring you two hither and yon in the dogged pursuit of justice, my destiny buddies.”

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