Page 112 of The Whispering Night
She grabs a life vest from under the captain’s seat, and with the straps and foam, she locks the steering wheel in place. Then she scoots to the back of the boat.
To think, she stood here on this same platform only a few days ago and refused to toss out candy. Now she is about to aggressively launch pollutants into the lake.
Number of fish saved six years ago? Zero.
Number of fish saved today? Probably in the negative hundreds.
After all, Winnie caused asecondHummer to sink down to the lake’s substrate, where it can leak out toxic chemicals and gasoline for all of time. Well done, Little Environmentalist!
She finds her matches. The armor makes her clumsy; the cold even more so. She has to remove her gloves to get the flimsy box open. Then it takes her six tries and three ruined matches to get a flame going long enough for her to shove it into a crate of fireworks.Don’t try this at home,she thinks once she drops in the burning match, hefts up the open-top crate, and finally tosses it all overboard. It won’t float forever, but hopefully no fuses will catch inside the box before Winnie gets twenty… thirty… forty feet away…
The fuses catch fire.
And the display that follows is filled with so much Wednesday green—since it’s intended for after the Hunters’ Feast—it sears the color onto Winnie’s eyeballs permanently. Like, she’s pretty sure her irises are no longer brown but hazel. And while half the fireworks go rocketing into the sky, the other half definitely don’t make it out of the crate.
Thatshould get some Tuesday attention.
Winnie scoots back to the steering wheel, where she detaches a walkie-talkie from her belt. It has dried out enough now from its dunk in the lake to switch on. Chatter and static topple out of the tiny speaker.
Fireworks. North of the Little Lake. All Lambda units move.
There are other messages spewing out too, now that Winnie is nearer to the forest. These voices are muffled and broken by a spirit that doesn’twant to let them leave.Help—forest—manticore—spread—salamander—lightning—mist—
Well, shit. Winnie sure hopes this next part of her plan goes accordingly. She’s no Thursday, sohaphazardis a fair descriptor for the next few bullet points on her to-do list.
She hits the walkie-talkie’s transmit button. “Hey, Jeremiah!” she shouts. The wind tries to steal her voice. “Hey, J.T. J-Dog. Pickle-breath—you around for a chat?”
Winnie presses the speaker to her ear. Behind her, one final firework sparkles into the gray, clotted sky. A bursting circle of Wednesday green.
“Ms. Wednesday,” a voice answers momentarily. “I assume you just set off the fireworks?”
“Guilty as charged. Did you find Leona Morgan yet? Has she explained by now that we’ve got a spirit waking up in the forest?”
“She has, and it’s an interesting tale. About as interesting as all those Compendium facts you shared with me underground yesterday.”
Jesus,Winnie thinks.That was only yesterday?
“So I guess this means you don’t believe her?”
“Not particularly.”
Winnie groans directly into the mic. Jeremiah is excruciatingly predictable. Worthy of a Jeremian theorem: inputx, and he will always thinkyis a lie!
“Well, if you want to catch me, J-Dog, you’re going to have to come this way. I’m headed north. Swan float. Hard to miss.”
Winnie gives an emphatic wave toward the lights of downtown.
“Also, I’m going to guess you’re not getting the messages out of the forest right now. Otherwise, you’d probably believe what I’m telling you. So I’ll just give you the basics: it’s bad. Really bad. It sounds like the hunters are facing a manticore and a salamander right now. So you’re going to want to get back to the Tuesday estate and load up on all that shiny gear from your Masquerade displays.”
“Ms. Wednesday, turn around the pontoon boat.”
“No, J.T. Can’t do that.” Winnie frowns at a shadow forming in the nearby mist. Then water splashes.Kelpie,she thinks.Great.
“Also, you’ve got mist and nightmares incoming. So… you know: get ready.”
Winnie turns off the radio. The mist is so thick, she’s not sure her final message went through. Plus, she’s officially out of the Little Lake now. The banks are closing in on either side; the current is picking up speed. And to complicate things, the mist is quickly erasing all shoreline. Only the vague shapes of trees keep Winnie aimed in the right direction.
There are other vague shapes lurking in there too. They hulk and prowl, moving like zoo animals finally freed from their habitats. They parade south, toward Hemlock Falls.
