I started opening drawers. At the bottom of the third one, I found a pencil box labeled “Training Bloom.” Inside were several small bottles with squishy, eye-dropper lids.
I opened one and squeezed a drop on my finger. As the pain-voices spread, I softly stepped across the room, plucked the shower curtain from the shelf, unfolded it, draped it over the table, and with my Pictionary poems, grafted to the pattern that held the meeting with Sheryl Glanton’s: “Elderberry Shimmer Stone. Tank Top Summer Bridge, Hamster Sawdust.”
And I was back in Sheryl Glanton’s living room, sitting between Kaliah’s murdered bond, Diane, and Sheryl’s intact totem library of award-winning quilts. Sheryl was in her chair. Nothing had changed about her. She still had the quilt in her lap. Price is Right still played on the TV. But now a man crouched by Sheryl, partially hidden by her lazy boy. He stood, and I saw his face.
It was my face.
He moseyed across the living room and into the kitchen, casually, like he was going for a snack. It was the corruption I’d left behind from the first time I’d entered this whorl. It disturbed me to see him here. All sorts of thoughts crossed my mind. How much of me was in him? Was he happy? Did he resent me for leaving him behind?
But I didn’t have time to worry about him. I could already feel myself corrupting this whorl again. I hurried and made the foundation gesture for Skepticism, which I’d discovered the last time I was in her, and I followed the pain from there, listening to Sheryl’s set up Diane’s murder with her fake concerns over what was happening at the Humboldt Historical Society.
Then we got to the part I came for: the ledger.
Sheryl handed it over, and this time I looked past the post-it note that read, “For the Memoirist,” and I studied the names. The action derailed me from the pain of the whorl, so I only had so much time before I was kicked out. I read the names one by one, repeating them back to myself. Then I came across one I recognized: Frank DiStefano, Lou’s son, the one I’d saved from the Zaditorian bite.
A cow mooed from the kitchen, and I knew what came next. A pool of scrill spread across the floor and up the walls, glowing blue. The rekulak shot out of it, crashing its massive head into the ceiling. Debris rained down. The Rekulak opened its jaws and doused me once again with its blue, foamy poison, the graft failed, and the whorl faded into the background of Lou’s basement.
My skin was covered in scrill. It was under my clothes as it had been the first time I’d been drenched with it. Some of it was falling off onto the floor. While I looked around for something to clean it up with, footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Lou called out before I could even see him, “I can smell what you did Doughboy.”
He opened the door and shook his head, then turned around and went back upstairs.
I followed. “Hey, I saw your son’s name on a ledger.”
“A ledger? No way, dude.” The guy was mocking me with a horrible California accent. “I’ll have to talk with him about that.”
“I’m serious. Why was his name on there?”
He stopped at the top of the stairs and loomed over me. “I don’t know what you think you saw in that whorl, but you can’t rely on it because, I don’t know, maybe you don’t know what you’re doing. You can’t just go in a whorl, corrupt it, and think you got the truth. Didn’t we agree on something? I could’ve sworn we did. Oh yeah, you said you’d do what I say, and in exchange, I’d help you.”
“That was before I knew you’d send me to bed before eight o’clock. You want me to train more? Then train me. Don’t send me to bed to watch TV.”
“I’m done with you.” He strode across the room. “You somehow screwed this thing up before we even got started.” He went out the backdoor and slammed it behind him.
A minute later, while I was washing my face in the kitchen sink, I heard him come back in. I dried my face with a towel and hurried to the living room as he opened the front door. A sheet of blue, almost-dry scrill slid off my arm and landed with a wet thump on the white carpet. I stepped in front of it, hoping he wouldn’t notice. A briefcase was at his feet. Bruce and Pam, the mummers from Naomi’s harem, stood beside him. He was putting a coat on Bruce like a mother preparing her child for the first day of school. From the vacant eyes, serene smiles, and silence of the two mummers, I gathered they were still under the influence of Lou’s potion he called Affectation Potpourri.
“Where did they come from?” I said.
“The mother-in-law out back,” Lou said. “What? Did you think I would let them go free?”
“Are you taking them somewhere?”
Lou sneered at Bruce and Pam and pointed a thumb at me. “A regular Einstein, this one.” The Mummers just continued smiling, and Lou turned back to me. “I’m done with you, Doughboy. First, you mess with my otalith? Then you screw up the only clue you have that can get you out of this mess? You don’t listen. I’m can’t help you. I’m going to break Kaliah out of jail. Then my debt is paid, and you’re her problem again. In the meantime, you and your family can stay here. That’s what kind of guy I am.”
“I’m going with you.”
Lou rolled his eyes. “Nope. Someones gotta stay here and make sure Em gets her medicine. You can’t trust your sister to do it yet. The otalith tincture’s in the cupboard above the
