they wouldn’t. What could they do, against something like this? Assign her bodyguards? Trail her around? “But there’s other help out there, right? You said you called them.”
“I called for information. They’re not qualified to deal with something like this.”
“They’re not qualified? How the hell are you qualified? You’ve never dealt with anything like this before, you said you read everything in books. Maybe there are people out there who… like you said. Like back in the day. Who could shut the doors again when they’re being forced open. We should let them deal with it, we should—”
“I meant it,” she snapped. “They can’t. They’re more like librarians, they gather information about Them, that’s all. I don’t need librarians.”
“Hell no. You’re in way over your head if even half of this shit is true. You need an army, you need—”
“Listen,” she said, sounding strained. “I know you want grownups to rush in and deal with this. But they’ll only make things worse. Trust me. They won’t know what to do, they won’t even know where to start. No one does except me. And if they get involved and throw barriers in my way, I don’t even know what’ll happen next, and I’m the only one who can figure it out.”
I fell silent, stunned not only by the assertion but by her arrogance, even though I knew I should have been used to it by now. She sounded convinced, convincing. As if I had needed any more evidence after what had happened in the storeroom.
“All right. I’ll talk Mom into it somehow. But don’t call Rutger in just yet. I need to think,” I said.
“He’s not here. I asked him to run some errands.”
“What? I just heard him in the hallway.”
She looked up, rabbit-alert. In the silence, as you’d expect, as if in a movie, we both heard the long creak of a door opening. Which shouldn’t have been possible; no door in her house ever creaked. She was too sensitive to that kind of noise.
“Stay here,” she said, sliding off her stool.
“Like balls I’m staying here.”
CHAPTER SIX
WE MOVED INTO the empty hallway. Nothing. Just a hard, cold breeze where there should not have been, and a faint whiff of something both disgusting and familiar. “Oh, holy shit,” I blurted before I could stop myself. “If They get in here...”
“Yeah.” She put her hand flat on the wall, as if checking for a pulse. I shook my head, wondering why that should be the image I thought of.
I followed her at a fast dogtrot to first her workshop, where she unhooked the shoebox and tucked it under her arm, and I admitted that I was shocked to find it still there, then to Ben’s room. I felt safer as soon as we were bathed in the cool, green light, unsure why. I went to the tank and put my palms on the glass. Behind us, she dragged a gigantic toolkit up to a table, the box painted in battered black enamel just visible beneath dozens of old scratch and sniff stickers.
“They’ve been sleeping for a long time,” she said. “Waiting, even the ones who don’t know it, for the signal to come through. Drozanoth set off an alarm in 1945, when the Americans used the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because it thought They should come back before we destroyed each other and They had no one to rule. But They couldn’t enter then, and it made Them angry, growing more restless by the day, swimming up through sleep. Or over. Or... They don’t really live beneath anything, above anything, physically. They live... over there. Sleep over there.”
“So we must have changed the code on the door,” I said. “The last time They came. To keep Them out.”
She shook her head, cracked open the toolbox, and got out a set of screwdrivers with heads more complicated than anything I’d ever seen. “They’ll figure something out, I know They will. New, fresh magic is coming in from somewhere and Drozanoth wants nothing more than to turn the key when the time comes. And the time is coming. It might have the means to do what it wants soon. And it wants Them back. Wouldn’t you?”
“I find it extremely scary that I can hear you capitalize Their name,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Fucking this up,” she said. “But I was working on the surface calculations last night and...I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to make it again.”
“What?”
“They can’t have it.