Page 49 of The Bad Weather Friend

“I believe that to be highly unlikely,” said Mengistu. “I am not a fatalist, Benjamin, merely a realist. Which is why I brought with me this pressurized can of Spectracide insect killer that I liberated earlier today from the janitorial-supply closet in our dormitory. The nozzle is set onSTREAMrather than onSPRAYand promises a range of twelve to fifteen feet. I do not expect that it will kill a human-insect hybrid of Galsbury’s size. However, if the unfortunate creature should attack with the intention of devouring us, I have some confidence this will repel it and allow us time to flee with our limbs and virtue intact.”

“Ten months ago,” said Jurgen, “I managed to steal this chef’s knife from the kitchen and conceal it under a loose floorboard in my closet. I didn’t know what the hell I’d need it for, but I knew sooner or later my survival would depend on having it. I just didn’t figure it would be anything as weird as Bugboy.”

“Should the Spectracide fail to deter the creature,” Mengistu said, “it will fall to you, Jurgen, to use your cutlery to slash at whatever seems the most vulnerable part of the hybrid’s anatomy. You have an opportunity to be most heroic, but I do not envy you enough to trade my insecticide for your knife.”

Their faces mostly shadowed in the dim moonlight that found them through gaps in the pine limbs, Jurgen and Mengistu regarded Benny expectantly.

“Today,” Benny said, patting his jacket pockets, “I bought four candy bars in the school commissary. A Clark Bar, an Almond Joy, a Hershey’s bar, and a Reese’s cup. See, after a lot of thought, I decided that when Galsbury said, ‘Feed me,’ he didn’t necessarily mean with our own flesh and blood. I’m hopeful he’s still human enough to have a sweet tooth. If we can befriend the guy, you know, maybe persuade him to join forces with us, thenwe have a chance of somehow getting him in front of the media to expose the crimes—the evil—of the headmaster, his wife, and Briarbush Academy itself.”

His friends stared at him in silence for a longish moment, and then Jurgen said, “Man, you sure do march to the beat of a different drum.”

“I like to be positive, give everyone the benefit of the doubt no matter who or what they are.”

Mengistu said, “I find it most impressive that you have made it to your thirteenth birthday.”

“If we’re all alive tomorrow,” Jurgen said, “I’d like to hear more about how you’ve gotten this far, Benny.”

“Meanwhile,” Mengistu said, “if Bugboy should perhaps take us by surprise and if you are his first target, I would suggest that the chances of your candy plan succeeding will depend entirely on offering him the Reese’s cup first.”

“Definitely the Reese’s cup first,” Jurgen agreed.

“Under no circumstances,” Mengistu warned, “should you start with a Clark Bar.”

“Under no circumstances,” Jurgen emphasized.

Thus armed and with basic strategy in place, they raced off into the meadow, approaching the laboratory on an arc trajectory, the better to avoid any searcher who might be posted in the dark between Felthammer House and Mrs. Baneberry-Smith’s little shop of nightmares.

Although no more than a can of insecticide, a kitchen knife, and four candy bars stood between Benny and a potentially horrific death, he ran through the night in a state of euphoric exaltation. Indeed, he didn’t understand the reason for his exhilaration when the prospect of a gruesome death was very real. Eventuallyhe would come to realize that he was inebriated not as a delayed effect of aspirin dissolved in Coca-Cola, but because he had drunk the rarest of all wines, the wine of true friendship, which until now he had never known.

By the time the boys arrived at the laboratory, the searchers had followed their probing lights into the grove of silver firs.

The front door had been torn off three of its four hinges and hung askew. Something had broken out of the building, and the odds were against the escapee having been something like an exotic spider the size of a tarantula or an Amazon rainforest butterfly.

“Bugboy broke out,” Jurgen said, and no one disagreed.

It might have been commonsensical to creep into the nearby groundskeepers’ building to borrow Tac Lights of their own, as they’d done the previous night when they had laddered themselves onto the roof of Catherine Baneberry-Smith’s wicked domain. However, in spite of their high intelligence and keen recognition of peril, common sense wasn’t central—or even peripheral—to this outing. They were in a swoon of adventure and derring-do and camaraderie. Although Mengistu had declared that one of them might die this night, none of them believed the worst could happen. Besides, if they employed Tac Lights, the search team would see them, and that might be worse for them than encountering the thing that had been Prescott Galsbury.

Their eyes had dark-adapted to a night with a lean moon, for there were stars aplenty. If they ventured into the silver firs and stayed close to the posse in pursuit of Bugboy—although not close enough to be detected—the lights of those searchers would provide an adequate view of what events might unfold.

In part, they had rushed into the night because they recognized a moral obligation to end or ameliorate Galsbury’s suffering. That motive, if not forgotten, had become an appendix to the larger issue of curiosity, a virtue that had allowed humanity to rise from caves to the surface of the moon, while also resulting in deaths beyond counting. Then there was the attraction—the thrill—of all things mysterious, dark, hidden, and occult. Especially for young people trapped and being propagandized in the stupefying depths of modern education, the unknown and the unknowable offered the possibility of discovering the meaning of life that they had thus far been told did not exist.

Across the mowed yard, through the tall grass, they fled the humdrum. They crept into the forest, through an undergrowth of snowy woodrush and ribbon grass and bead fern, cautiously drawing closer to the search party, which by now they were able to count. There were four men and Mrs. Baneberry-Smith.

The headmaster’s wife wasn’t dressed as demurely as she did at school functions, nor was she in laboratory whites. She wore black boots, black jeans that looked as if they had been sprayed on, and a black T-shirt with a V-neck suggesting breasts that would qualify her for a ten-page spread in one of the smutty magazines that Vigor Maitre peddled to students at an unconscionable markup from the cover price. Although she was engaged in abominable and insane experiments, though she had transformed Prescott Galsbury into Bugboy, though she made cookies of questionable ingredients and gifted them to students with perhaps wicked intent, she was at the moment more alluring than Benny had ever imagined she could be, her golden hair streaming like an oriflamme that would hypnotize men to go to war for her. She stirred in Benny an unworthy desire.

However, one thing about the woman was so scary that it ensured Benny wouldn’t have unchaste dreams of her. In addition to the Tac Light in her left hand, Mrs. Baneberry-Smith carried a bullwhip in her right and seemed impatient to use it on someone, anyone. As she moved, she now and then lashed out. The end of the whip flared in the backwash of light, suggesting it was tipped with steel, and fir-tree needles erupted off a shaken branch or the bark of a trunk was scored or fern fronds were severed. This seemed to be an odd weapon, unsuitable for a monster hunt—unless she had no fear of Bugboy and had good reason to believe that, with the whip, she would be able to subdue the beast and force it into captivity. She certainly looked fearless as she strode with great authority through the undergrowth like the Roman goddess of the moon and the hunt, Diana, abroad without her wolf pack.

The four other members of the posse were armed more appropriately, two with shotguns and two with what might have been AR-15s. They were big guys with hard faces. Benny had never seen any of them at Briarbush. They wore body armor, and they didn’t seem to be as fearless as Mrs. Baneberry-Smith. They advanced more cautiously than she did, so that she repeatedly had to stop and wait for them, impatiently cracking her whip. With the Tac Lights that were fixed to their weapons, the gunmen warily probed the tree limbs overhead and the wild shrubs that grew tall where the conifers relented. When the firs gave way to other evergreens, and the search party was drawn deeper into the woods, the men appeared to grow more nervous at every swale in the ground and every cresting hillock and every rock formation behind which something might be lying in wait, their anxietyrevealed by the way the Tac beams jittered or swooped abruptly toward some imagined movement or sound.

The gunmen’s anxiety inspired them to sweep the night behind them with their lights almost as often as they reconnoitered the way ahead. That prudence complicated the pursuit Benny and his friends had undertaken, requiring the boys to shrink back farther than they would have liked. They hurried in a crouch from one point of cover to another, sometimes crawled, sometimes dared to dash openly and upright, grateful for the fog that began to gather in the vales between the series of ever-rising slopes.

Eventually, Benny was amazed at how far they traveled before it occurred to him that the great danger wasn’t Bugboy. They were less likely to be gutted by a Lovecraftian horror than to be mistaken for Prescott Galsbury and shot by the posse. So intoxicating was this adventure—the chase, the unknown, the danger, the courage required of them!—even the realization that he could be gunned down at any moment didn’t diminish his enthusiasm for their mission. He had read in a magazine that the human brain didn’t finish developing until the age of twenty or thereabouts, and he had taken offense at that claim. Now he knew it was true. The reckless abandon with which he continued to throw himself into the pursuit, his determination not to appear cowardly to his friends—it was totally nuts. He was deranged. They wereallderanged, their brains not yet equipped with adequate risk governors, reason overwhelmed by hormones, swept away by the fantasy of a heroic quest, andit was soooo great.

Crouched between Benny and Jurgen in a vale where fog pooled, with the four gunmen and Baneberry-Smith maybe twenty yards upslope in clear sight, Mengistu indicated a mass of dense shrubbery about ten yards ahead. “Mountain pieris,”he whispered, evidently having identified the plant when the Tac Light beams had played over it. Mengistu taught himself all manner of things that he wasn’t required to learn, that no one else had an interest in learning. As one, they rose out of the fog and broke for the next point of cover.

The boys were halfway to the mountain pieris when something came down out of a tree behind the gunmen, apparently making not a sound to alert them. Silhouetted against the light of the Tac beams, the pale creature was veiled in shadow. It seemed to be similar to what the boys had seen in the laboratory the previous night, though changed in ways Benny couldn’t fully perceive. For sure, the thing was bigger, almost twice the size of Prescott Galsbury, and it had more limbs or appendages or whatever. At the sight of it, the boys halted halfway to the pieris, and Benny meant to shout a warning, but the new-and-improved Bugboy was lightning quick. It seized one of the gunmen, who screamed in terror and agony, unable to fire a shot before he was hauled off his feet. The beast had not entirely descended from the tree canopy, but seemed to depend from it by one or more limbs. It reeled itself up and out of sight, with the gunman in its fierce grip.

As the bloodcurdling scream cut off with a fatal abruptness, four flashlight beams played through the dense canopy of tree limbs, seeming to track a target as the three remaining shooters opened fire with two rifles and one shotgun. With a fervor equal to any that amalemad scientist could have exhibited, Mrs. Baneberry-Smith shouted, “Stop! Stop, damn you, you’ll kill it, you fools!” But the gunmen failed to obey her, having determined that their survival required them to make the thing very dead indeed. Thunderous gunfire echoed through the forest, and evergreen debris showered down, and Crazy Catherine cracked herwhip in a high dudgeon, and the three boys stood shocked and for the moment paralyzed. The snatched gunman reappeared, falling out of the trees in three installments—first the body, and then an arm, and finally the head. The bullet-riddled former resident of Felthammer House followed its prey, slamming hard to the earth, on its chitinous back, its four legs and two armlike limbs twitching. The pale and horrid creature seemed to be trying to right itself and commit further mayhem. However, the two riflemen possessed extra magazines, and the guy with the shotgun had a supply of spare rounds. Gross bug bits and thick gouts of slime spattered across the forest floor in such abundance there could be no doubt the threat had been eliminated.

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