The tires peeled out in the mud as I drove us around the parked cars, almost tipping us over into a drainage ditch. “Are you guys okay?” I said, my eyes darting back and forth from the road to their hands, necks, and faces. “Did they bite you? Did the tape worms come out of their arms?”
“We didn’t see any tape worms,” May said. “No one bit us or anything. But they put these little black bubbles on our feet that kept us from running. But those disappeared when they made that big yellow bubble.”
“I think we just got extremely lucky. But we’ll have to ask Lou about those black bubbles, if there are any side effects. Don’t forget. How did they find you, anyway?”
“They just showed up at the bakery.”
“You went back to the bakery!?”
“I needed to check on a few things.”
“You promised to wait. Oh my God. Don’t go back there again? Please.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. This lady Blanche is insane. She wants to infect the whole world with her cackle—basically turn everyone into her. And for some reason, she needs my rekulak to do it.”
Em chimed in, “Is that the giant centipede thing that was in my dream?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a fox in my dreams now. She talks to me.”
In the past, I might have responded with something patronizing like, “That’s really cool,” or, “Is it a nice fox?” But now I knew better. Em’s dreams weren’t dreams at all, but whorls. She’d seen the rekulak in them before I’d even been infected by it. Now she was seeing a talking fox. So with all sincerity, I asked, “Is it a nice fox?”
Chapter 6
SHERYL IN HER FLEECE robe and cushioned chair, the quilt with the same pattern as the shower curtain, “The Price is Right” playing on the TV, and my towering rekulak all faded away, and I was back in the room of mirrors, sitting across from Em, with the shower-curtain Omen Totem draped over the table between us. Em held a pencil and notepad.
“Nathan George,” I said, and she wrote it down.
Lou would not have approved of what I was doing, but he wasn’t here. Morning had come and gone. He hadn’t called, and he wasn’t answering his phone. If he didn’t come back—if Kaliah didn’t come back—my family and I would be on our own. I needed to prepare for that.
I’d researched the Friends of Blanche Duluth on the internet but had found nothing, no record of the cult, no record of the memoirs Blanche had mentioned, and no record of the death of Blanche and her followers during the 1964 Christmas Flood that Hugo had told me about.
Before all this, I’d done a lot of research on the flood for my tour. In my introductory speech, I would quote an article from the Times-Standard, a local newspaper: “The’64 flood was caused by a deadly combination of weather events that dumped massive amounts of snow in the mountains, followed by warm rains that melted the snow and inundated local watersheds in a matter of hours. [. . .] The flood cut a huge swath of destruction across the North Coast, killing 29, causing millions in damage and cutting off entire communities from the outside world for months.”
Accompanying the article were black and white photographs of the destruction and aftermath: washed-away houses, trees, and bridges, families on boats motoring through flooded streets. I’d included them in my pamphlet.
But what did all of it have to do with my family—now—forty-nine years later?
I needed to know more about this cult. That was why I kept going back into the shower curtain whorl. Even if I corrupted it, some information was better than none.
I’d entered it three times since lunch, and each time I’d withstood the pain a little longer, seen a little more. With Em taking notes, I’d retrieved three more names from the Humboldt Historical Society’s donation ledger, along with two phone numbers and one address. I’d left four corruptions behind that should have been wreaking havoc on the accuracy of the memories, but they just sat on the floor or wandered down the hall and kept to themselves. I never noticed any changes in the loop.
“I’m bored,” Em said in an accusatory tone, and glared at me.
“You are?” I couldn’t remember her ever saying that to me before. “I was beginning to think you never got bored and were unique among children.”
“I am unique among children,” she said, defensive. “When can I go back to school?”
“Soon, I hope. I’m working on it.”
She twirled the pencil with her fingers, then rubbed the eraser on the back of her hand, where I noticed for the first time an ugly red burn. I reached over the table and grabbed her wrist. “Stop that,” I said, horrified. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Look at your hand. Why did you do that?”
She looked down and pouted. “I don’t know. For fun.”
“For fun?”
I let go of her wrist and mentally took a step back. She had been traumatized by the recent events and changes in her life. She had a disease of nightmares. She had been held captive. And she had been taken from her school, her home. She didn’t need my anger and disappointment.
I stepped around the table, kneeled, and asked her for a hug. She looked confused, and I doubted my instincts, but she consented, and I held her and told her I was sorry. “It’s okay Uncle Charlie,” she said.
I leaned back and desperately searched my mind for something comforting to say until I came out with this: “When I was your age, I broke my arm riding my bike. I told your mom I was never going to ride a bike again. But she wasn’t having it. She made me ride my bike to school the next morning with a cast on. She
