Page 19 of The Boo Next Door

"Okay," I tell her, hauling the ratchet strap tighter, one professional to another, because we've been through a lot together, she and I, and most of it was my fault. "Nobody dies tonight. Again."

Beetlejuice has been recalled indoors under emergency powers, and he protests this from the kitchen window with his whole body, a black smear of outrage against the glass. "You're a house cat now," I yell at the window. "It's a storm. Read the room." He yells back something I'm glad I can't translate.

The rain arrives sideways. Not autumn rain. Ocean rain, cold as a lawsuit, and the light drops out of the afternoon all at once like somebody billed the sky. I get the drapes lashed, get the table lift dropped to its lowest position and pinned, get the skeleton troops flat in the grass in a formation Gary would call cowardice and I call load management, and I'm actually winning, that's the thing, I'm two straps from done — when I hear it.

A sound like a ship coming loose. From next door.

I look over the fence, and the dragon is trying to fly.

The tarp Grady rigged over the wing frames has torn loose at one corner and turned into a sail, and it's pulling against the winch line with every gust, and the whole two-story skeleton is rocking on its base like a thing deciding. And Grady's up the ladder in the rain at the shoulder joint, fighting the shackle one-handed, and the math is right there for anyone who's rigged a show outdoors: the next big gust takes the tarp, the tarp takes the wing, and the wing takes the ladder, and the ladder has a person on it.

I don't decide anything. That's the truth of it, whatever I said later. My body is over the fence gate with a ratchet strap while my brain is still doing paperwork.

"Left tie-down," I yell up through the rain. "Give me your slack and stop fighting the tarp. Cut it. It's just plastic, let it go."

"It's holding water off the servos⁠—"

"It's a sail, Grady. Your servos can dry out. Your skull can't. Cut it."

A beat. The wind leans on both of us. And then his knife's out and the tarp goes, whipping off into the dark like a ghost quitting the business, and with the sail gone the dragon stops fighting, and I get my strap on the low anchor and crank it while he re-shackles the wing, and between the two of us the skeleton sits back down on its base like nothing ever happened.

He comes down the ladder soaked through. Looks at the strap. Looks at me — drowned, furious, trespassing.

"Your porch," is all he says, and we both go.

Because it's my turn. The wind's swung again and the séance parlor is inhaling harder now, one of my anchor points tearing free of the rotten fascia he warned me about, the whole drape wall bellying like a lung, and I grab the flapping strap while he does the thing I couldn't have done — puts one boot on the porch rail, goes up the corner post bare-handed in the rain, and pins the failed anchor with his whole weight until I can re-route the strap to the good post, the one with the longer lag bolt, the one I mounted where he told me to.

"Left cleat," I call, and he's already on it. "Other left."

"This is the other left."

"Stage left. Everything in my yard runs stage left, it's a whole discipline—" and the wind takes the rest, and it doesn't matter, because his hands are already where the words were going, which is the entire month in one image, and the strap comes tight, and holds.

The parlor stops breathing. The medium settles. Somewhere behind the drapes the table lift, pinned and safe, gives one small mechanical sigh, and the two of us stand in the ruin of my lawn in the roaring dark, chests going, absolutely destroyed, four hands on the same strap.

Across the street, with a rip we can hear over the wind, the Hendersons' reaper achieves independence.

It goes over their fence still inflated, nine feet of billowing polyester death, and proceeds down the middle of Foxglove Lane at a stately pace, scythe first, like it has a meeting. We both watch it go. Neither of us moves. There's a version of us from two weeks ago that lets it fly to Vermont out of spite, and a version from some future I'm not examining that sprints after it in the rain, and tonight, soaked and shaking, we are exactly in between.

"Storm can have that one," Grady says.

"Agreed. It's the storm's problem now."

The reaper rounds the corner by the green and is gone, off to frighten a different zip code, and I'm still laughing when the streetlight explodes.

Not dramatically. Transformer somewhere up the line, one blue flash over the hill, and Foxglove Lane goes dark from end to end. His floodlights die. My porch light dies. The whole grid of our little war just — out. Nothing left but rain and the Hendersons' reaper across the street, deflating in the wind with a sound like a whale's last opinion.

"Shed," I hear myself say. "It's closer than either house and I'm not doing your kitchen right now."

He doesn't ask what's wrong with his kitchen. There's nothing wrong with his kitchen. There's just something about it being his that I can't do while soaked, in the dark, with my hands shaking from cold or whatever I'm calling it.

The shed door sticks the way it's stuck since nineteen eighty. You lift, then push. He watches me do it — lift, push, like a combination, like a family recipe — and something crosses his rained-on face too fast to read in the dark, and he follows me in out of the roar, and pulls the door shut, and the storm goes from everywhere to outside, and it's black as a pocket, and it smells like her.

Lavender and sawdust and machine oil. Fourteen years of Halloween in one lungful. I hear myself take the breath and hold it.

"Okay?" His voice, low, close, careful.

"I haven't really been in here yet." My hands find the workbench in the dark, the vise, the dish of screws exactly where the dish of screws lives. "I opened the door my first week and shut it again. It's the last room that still — she's still in the air in here. That's insane. Don't tell anyone I said that."