Page 21 of The Boo Next Door

The horrifying part is, I think I have.

Chapter 8

Grady

She said she's going to destroy me, and I've been smiling about it for two days, which Ravi says is a medical condition.

Friday morning, the street looks like October lost a fight. Branches down the length of Foxglove, three shingles off my ridge, her gutter hanging by a philosophy. The reaper is gone entirely — last confirmed sighting pinned to the church doors, after which Father Muldoon, per the group chat, blessed it and let it go. Somewhere over the state line, a nine-foot death is starting a new life.

Lila's in her yard at eight with coffee, assessing damage in yesterday's flannel — mine, I notice, the one I put around her shoulders on the walk back from the shed, which she has not returned and I have not requested. Her medium survived the night. So did the dragon, sitting back on its base with its wings pinned like a bird that's thought better of the whole endeavor. Two armies, intact, and their generals meet at the fence like heads of state.

"Ellis." Businesslike. There's a high color on her cheekbones that wasn't issued by the wind.

"Merriweather."

"I've prepared terms." She sets her coffee on the fence post. "One. What happened in the shed happened. I'm not doing the thing where we pretend it didn't, because I'm bad at it and you have one facial expression, so we'd be caught by Tuesday."

"Agreed."

"Two. It changes nothing competitively. Cold war resumes November first. Until then, ceasefire — strictly strategic. We have a children's attraction to run and a town watching us like appointment television."

"Agreed."

"Three." Here the terms lose a little altitude. She picks the coffee back up. Holds it like a shield. "Three is — I don't have a three. I ran out at two. I was going to say three, no more kissing, and then I decided not to include lies in the treaty. It's a short treaty."

Something happens in my chest, tectonic.

"Counteroffer," I say. "Three. Dinner. My kitchen, since you've got a grudge against it. Tomorrow, after the Walk."

She looks at me a long moment over the coffee. The cat watches from her porch rail, tail curling, a notary.

"The kitchen thing isn't a grudge," she says. "It's that your kitchen smells like you, and I lose administrative control." She turns to go survey her medium, flannel swinging, and calls back over her shoulder, "Three is accepted. It's a bad treaty, Ellis. Neither of our lawyers would sign it."

The Walk almost kills me, and not in any of the ways I'd planned for.

Saturday, six p.m., four hundred children and their handlers funnel through a gym we rebuilt in nine days, and it runs — I'll say it — flawless. Her fog banks hang exactly where she said they'd hang. The pinch point bunches the kids at thirty-two inches of chaos, and the chain-lift monster steps in behind the last one on the garage-door track, every group, on cue, and the screams come through the tunnel wall like a wave hitting a jetty, scream into laughter, every time, the whole machine of it doing the thing she told me in the garage: the safest fear you'll ever feel.

I run the lift and the exits. She runs the fog and the floor. We trade signals over the crowd all night — two fingers, cut the fog; flat hand, hold the group; a thumb across the throat, which in her sign language means kill the cauldron bubbler, Ruth's crockpot is walking. By eight o'clock we're not two operators anymore. We're one system with four hands, and everybody in that gym can see it.

The monster itself is the probie, volunteered by a unanimous vote he wasn't present for, sweating inside nine pounds of foam and burlap that Lila built on him like a bespoke suit. Between groups he lifts the head off and stands there in the tunnel dark, steaming like a racehorse.

"How do I look?" he asks me, somewhere around seven.

"Terrifying."

"The little ones keep hugging me."

"That's the demographic. Recalibrate."

"One of them called me the good monster." He puts the head back on, nine pounds of dread with a voice coming out of it small and pleased. "I'm the good monster."

Ravi's on the floor working crowd flow in his gear, because nothing herds a gymnasium like turnout pants, and every time he passes me he finds a new channel for the same broadcast. Nice teamwork. Cute signals. You two rehearse those. At seven forty he catches me watching her direct a fog bank instead of watching my own exit, and he doesn't say anything at all, which from Ravi is the loudest one yet.

The bike-helmet kid comes through with the six-thirty group. No helmet tonight — a witch hat, worn with the gravity of dress uniform. She finds me at the chicken exit afterward and delivers her verdict with both hands around a cider.

"I didn't use the pumpkin door."

"Didn't think you would."