He sure was!  It identifies him as Samuel Lane, age 43, picture and description consistent with the guy you just killed.  It gives his address, a street in Raymond, New Hampshire.  He's got some keys, too, do you want those?

Nico's never heard of Raymond; the GPS says it's about an hour and a half away.  Sure, let's give that a shot.  If it doesn't work out, he'll just find a nice graveyard and do his declaration there.

He'll scoop up the license and the keys, plus any random cash, and start driving south.

There's not much traffic in this direction, in the afternoon on Easter Saturday.  In not much time at all, you're pulling into your enemy's driveway.

It turns out that the heart of your enemy's power is a little one-story house, painted yellow with a sunken garage.  The windows are arranged in groups of two, all across the front facing.  The blinds are all drawn.  There's only one obvious door, facing the street.

(twos, stable strength, growth out of fertile soil, the joining of opposed forces to a common purpose, dominion...)

Nico probably shouldn't bring more of his magical tools across this threshold than he has to; then again, there are some things he can't bear to leave behind.  He'll fill his shoulder bag with just the three Tarot decks, two high-precision thermometers, a lighter, a candle, and a half-full water bottle.  The rest of his tools can wait in the car.

He'll pull in his aura all the way, just so none of the neighbors pay him any attention, and breathe through a few breaths to make sure he's got it stable.  Then he'll get out of the car, walk over to the one door (one, ace, first force, fixed point, pure unshaped potential...) and try out his new ring of keys.  Do any of them fit the dead wizard's lock?

The keys are a little clumsy in your fingers, but the third one works.  The door opens onto a picture-perfect American living room: big comfortable couch and recliner chairs, oriented around a huge TV.  There's a bookcase over the couch; at a glance the titles are all classics and pop sociology.  Through a hallway to the left a kitchen is just barely visible, gleaming white.

He's had this body for three weeks how are the fingers still a problem?!

But OK, fine, this setup is less wizard-y than expected but on reflection it makes sense.  This is a small town in New England; Nico doesn't have to meet the neighbors to know that they're curious as cats, behind their bland Yankee exteriors, and they wouldn't be put off by something as simple as a set of closed blinds.  The more occult stuff, the real heart of the house, won't be out in public view.

He'll shut the door and walk around the living room a little bit, trying to read the traces of the old owner's attention.  He should be able to do that much, even through this crappy body.

Sure.  But in this room there's not much to find: a few traces of attention on the TV, a little more on one of the recliners.  Nothing on the bookshelf.

The kitchen is a little better.  Everything's painted a sterile white but he does use it, especially the big four-burner stove.  The dishwasher is about half-full of dirty dishes, mostly glasses and little bowls.

But the bulk of his attention was focused on something under your feet somewhere; you can feel it even through the floor.

Oh really now.  Okay, let's look around for the basement stairs.

It turns out that they're in the pantry.  The door isn't hidden, exactly, just sort of not obvious in the shadow past the shelves of dry goods.  It's locked, but one of your new keys unlocks it.

Yeah, let's see the wizard's lair.  He opens the door and walks through, all senses on alert.  There probably aren't any traps -- it's hard to set a magical trap that will outlive you, and dangerous to set a mundane one in your own home -- but there are any, they'll be right here.

No traps, just a warm, earthy smell, like an old forest on a warm spring day.  Narrow stone steps with a clearly home-made wooden handrail lead down, weirdly far down, into a wide unfinished basement stuffed with rough wooden shelves and tables, covered with books and papers and bags.  It's lit with a dozen rock-crystal lamps, not arranged to any plan you can see, powered with a sprawling octopus of power strips and extension cords.  As your eyes adjust you realize that while there are lots of shelves and work surfaces, there's only one chair, a cheap little folding job in front of an animal cage.

There are a lot of animal cages, actually, strewn throughout the space, and they're all occupied.  All local animals, it looks like: just at first glance you see squirrels, magpies, a goose, and two small housecats sharing a bigger cage near the stairs.

All of them are watching you, unblinking.

Okay that's wildly impressive.  Nico isn't an animal expert but he's pretty sure that if you put this many animals in a basement, it doesn't smell like an old forest on a warm spring day.  And it's still working!  Crazy.  Unless they're constructs instead of real animals, he guesses, which would be wildly impressive for a totally different reason.

Nico will wander around a little bit, peering at any books or papers that happen to be visible, checking on the animals-or-constructs-or-whatever-they-are.  Do they have food and water?  Is there more around for them?  Does everybody have enough?  Are any of them thirsty?  And, ah, what of the inevitable consequences of feeding and watering your animals?  Or is there a magical solution to that?

All the animals have water, but some of their food dishes are empty.  Some of the bags turn out to be animal food, just standard pet store fare.  Wandering around you find even more animals: a sparrow, a fox, and a family of rabbits, too, kept in another large cage with a sort of hamster-maze construct to hop around in.  But again, they're all just watching you.

The books are mostly in Latin, with a little Hebrew thrown in for spice.  Lots of diagrams: some anatomical sketches of the brain from various angles, a few of the top bit of the sephirot, some totally obscure.  Almost everything is in the same handwriting.

There is no magical solution to animal poop, or at least this particular practitioner didn't have one.  There's a plumbing hookup in one corner of the basement, with a big industrial sink, that seems to be the basic plan.

Nico's Qabalah sucks; there's no way he's going to understand this in any depth.  If he had a week to translate everything, and check his own sources, and read the experiment logs (this guy obviously kept experiment logs, measuring the exact amount of divine light shone onto each brain area, or whatever Qabalistic magicians do), then, honestly, probably he still wouldn't get it.  On the traditional wizard-to-psychic scale Nico is mostly a psychic, whereas this guy was obviously pure wizard.

Traditionally this is one of the big drawbacks of killing a fellow practitioner: they'll never get a chance to explain all the cool stuff they were working on.  If Nico's plan works...but it's too early to think hard about that.  Stay with the checklist, focus on what's in front of you.

The wizard/psychic divide is deeply false, as you well know.

Well, yes, but it's shallowly true.  Nico has ever written an experiment log, when he absolutely couldn't escape it, but in the back of his mind he still wonders what he lost by making it.  He's not worried that knowledge will get away from him if he doesn't write it down, he's worried about chopping off all the parts he doesn't know how to frame in human words.

A true alchemist, of course, would just fuse the two halves of the binary and do both.

Speaking of that, Nico will go around refilling the different food bowls, if he can figure out which foods go where.  And he'll clean the cages too, he guesses, if any of them are in really bad shape.  Then he'll address his audience:

"Okay, everybody, here's the deal.  I need you to witness a ritual.  It should take about ten minutes, unless something strange, ah, unless a different strange thing than I expect happens."  Something about this is taking him way back, to class presentations in school, total enforced attention without any sign of interest or understanding.  "All I want from you is your attention, just like you're giving me now.  After that, I'll make sure you're taken care of."

Any reaction from his audience?

"Total enforced attention without any sign of interest or understanding" sums it up pretty well, actually.

Good enough.  Nico will clear a space on a table, somewhere close to the middle of the room, and start laying things out.

First the two startlingly expensive thermometers, on either side of the workspace. They take a little fumbling, before he figures out how to turn them on, but they have to go first to give them time to calibrate. Second the water bottle, set on the far side of the table, in plain view. Third the candle; Nico thinks a minute, then clears all the books and papers off of his chosen table, instead of just shoving them to the side.

Last, at least for this step: one absolutely worthless Tarot deck, as a control.

The deck is cartoon animal themed. According to the packaging, it's suitable for children five and up. Nico cuts the deck, and gives it a few slow riffle shuffles. The cards are awkwardly big, maybe so the intended audience can't choke on them, but this body should be good at handling cards, even if it's still clumsy with keys (after three weeks).

He lights the candle, shuffles the deck overhand while the smoke curls up to the ceiling, then deals himself three cards, face up.

UUUUUUUGH. Why does the raccoon look like it's floating upward? Why a fishing pole? Why is everything apparently happening in a hurricane? Why a crown of fishbones? FISH LIVE IN WATER, THEIR BONES INVERT THE WHOLE MEANING OF THE CARD!

Tarot cards can be dangerous. Even a glance at a card from a powerful Tarot deck can damage a person's psyche, if they're vulnerable in the right ways. Apparently exceptionally weak cards can have the same effect! What a great thing to know.

But really, it's good that Nico feels this way. Each card is supposed to represent an Archetype, one of the big, simplistic mental entities that make up the human psyche -- or were created by the human psyche, no one really knows -- and that exist outside this layer of reality. They pay attention to things that resemble themselves, is the key. If you make a good symbolic representation of the Thing humans call The Fool, then that Thing will start to focus on it, and Foolish things will happen. Put several such representations together, and they'll interact, often in ways humans find hard to predict. But that's still the best way to use them, because the Archetypes by themselves are usually more trouble than they're worth. The Fool walks along the edge of a cliff -- unguided he inevitably falls. The Ace of Wands pours out power -- but doesn't try to channel or control it. The Eight of Cups walks away from a nourishing situation, just before it collapses or dries up -- but you can't spend your whole life doing that.

Anyway, the key point here is that there's no way in the world that any of these cards are drawing any attention on their own. The only way that could happen, he thinks, glancing nervously at the candle smoke, at the water bottle, at the thermometers, is if some of the Archetypes are already paying attention to him personally. If that's the case, then the fact that he spread the cards tonight, cards bought with the oldest and purest money there is, ought to provoke a reaction.

There are simple things that happen, when that attention begins to gather. Water that doesn't quite sit level. Candle smoke that puddles in the center of the table. Unexplained chills and drafts.

Well?

The water is flat in its bottle, the candle smoke is curling upward, the two thermometers are reading a steady 74.2 degrees.

Okay.  Good.  Great.  Nico sweeps up the cards, hopefully forever, and puts them back in his bag.  On to the second test.

The second pack he pulls out is one he's used many times before, one of the first he ever painted himself, based on the classic Rider-Waite deck from the early 1900s.  These designs were the gold standard for decades; Carl Jung is supposed to have treated a depressive, once, by showing him a Ten of Cups from this deck at an appropriate moment.  But it's still an old deck, not powerful at all compared to the third one he's carrying, and he's seen the symbols too many times to be worried that they can push him around.  And just in case, he's wearing that borrowed body.

The first spread was just Nico scouting out the psychic landscape, doing a little dowsing.  This time it's real divination.  He alternates riffles and overhand shuffles, slows down his breathing and clears his mind of everything but his question.  Splits the cards into four even piles, a quarter at a time rather than three half cuts, and lays them out in a diamond, north-south-east-west.  He flips the top cards over, one at a time, and asks:

"Where shall I open the gate?"

The Northern card turns easily, almost pops off the pile into your hand:

The Southern card is slower, smoother, like it wants to flip but only along the exact trajectory it's already chosen:

The Eastern card is just heavy, turning in your hand like long, skinny lead brick:

The Western card doesn't fight you, but as you turn it you have a sudden sense of vertigo, as though the whole room is turning with you.  The water in the bottle sloshes sideways, so strongly that it wobbles, tips, and falls sideways.  As the card falls into place the sensation vanishes.  The water bottle jolts a little, and rolls onto the floor.

Yes!  Yes!  Yes!

Nico can read a spread like this as easily as he reads English.  He's supposed to be outside during the day (the Sun in the south, a source of energy, doubled fire alignment), alone (stability from the two in the north reversed by the upside-down card, a warning against performative enjoyment, the Hermit to the east, connection and communication denied), near here (passivity of the four of cups, reflection rather than action), and at the intersection of all four elements (the alignment of the cards and compass points, the progressive dislocation of the spread).  It should be easy to find a spot tonight, with the GPS or just driving around, and then he'll call his two henchmen down from the lake and they can finish setting up.  The rest is going to be easy!

Nico takes a few deep breaths, tries to tamp his spreading elation down to something more reasonable.  The cards are dangerous; you want to approach them with a tranquil mind, always.  But he's so close!  He flips the four cards back over, piles them back together.

Oh, by the way, what were the thermometers doing?

73.2 degrees to the left, 75.7 degrees to the right.

Time for the third deck, then.

Conventional alchemical wisdom says there's only so good a Tarot deck can be.  Nobody thinks the Rider-Waite deck is the best possible representation of the core building blocks of the human mind, it's just that if you want better symbols a human has to paint them, staring at them for hours or days while picturing them perfectly.  Not a lot of people can improve on Rider-Waite; hardly anybody can paint 78 cards and still retain enough personality to remember why they're doing it.

Nico had to invent a whole new method, painting a dozen cards at once to keep any particular one from digging into his mind too deeply.  Even then, this last deck took him two years and almost half a million dollars of highly customized image-editing software, supplied by a confused team of freelance programmers from Poland.  The details could fill a book, if Nico ever had the patience to write one, but the gist is that he drew them all on a computer according to his own sense of what was right, printed and laminated them with his own customized equipment, and has never seen or precisely visualized a whole card from the deck.

They're big for playing cards, probably longer than your hand.  Between that and the lamination you'd think they'd be hard to shuffle, but they're not: they like to stick together.  Cutting them can be difficult.  Once, as an experiment, Nico peeled off the top card and tried to throw it away.  A stray breeze caught it, inside his sealed workshop, and dropped it right back on top of the deck.

He keeps them in a lead box when he's not using them.

He lays the deck face-up on the table, his palm over the top card, and smears them over the table, just the top-left corners showing.  Then, just like it says on his checklist, he declares his intention:

I will break in the doors of hell and smash the bolts; there will be confusion of people, those above with those from the lower depths. I shall bring up the dead to eat food like the living; and the hosts of dead will outnumber the living.

He wanted to learn it in Akkadian, the language the Epic of Gilgamesh was originally written in, four thousand years ago.  But no one knows it; the sounds scholars make when the speak Akkadian to each other are all lies, guesses to make it easier to talk about the language.  English will have to do.

A lot more people spoke it than ever spoke Akkadian, anyway.

The animals hated that!

The basement explodes with noise: cats snarling, geese hissing, and cages rattling,   The rabbits are screaming like you tried to kill them.  They're just making animal sounds but you imagine you can hear them saying, "Go!  Get out of here!  You don't belong in this town!"

This takes Nico back to his school days too, back before he learned to make his weirdness productive, to stand in front of crowds instead of just outside them.  He won't bother putting everything away properly, he'll just pinch out the candle, grab his bag and deck, and flee up the stairs.  Then he'll take a minute, leaning against the door, and run a little energy up and down his spine and vagus nerve until he has himself back together.

It's ok, he reminds himself, that he feels this way.  Alchemists can't have any buried trauma; to refine yourself you have to know yourself.  But unburied trauma is allowed, temporarily.

Gradually, as your nerves settle, you become aware that someone's knocking on the front door.

Now what.  There's only the one door (right?) but Nico could flee out a kitchen window...but no, his car is parked out front.

Ok.  Fine.  He'll put his deck away in its lead box, but he'll pull out the Tower first, and put it in his pocket.  Just in case.

Who's at the door?

The Raymond, New Hampshire police force is not in the habit of sending a car over every time Missus Emery thinks she saw a stranger.  Raymond is a small New England town, yes, but there are limits.  But usually she thinks she saw someone planning to break into the graveyard down the street and steal the bones, or do heathen rituals, or whatever bad people get up to in graveyards.  "A strange car is parked outside Mr. Lane's house" is actually pretty mundane, for her, which wraps around and makes it weird again.

And Mr. Lane himself is a bit of an enigma, in fact.  Bought his house for cash 12 years ago.  Allegedly had people out west in California, or maybe in Florida; rumors disagreed.  No close friends, no visible means of support.  Maybe a writer, maybe a retired stock broker; rumors disagreed about that, too.  Pays neighborhood kids to keep up his lawn, instead of doing it himself.  Nothing illegal about any of that, of course.  Just odd.

And there is that missing kid.  The Merrill boy, Ken, Keith, no, Kyle Merrill.  No reason to expect him to be here, or even alive at all, for all they'd talked around it with the boy's father.  Mysterious, though.  The last kid they lost was that poor girl who drowed herself, six years back now.  No mystery there; her parents moved away, afterwards, and good riddance.  But Kyle's folks were good people.

And now that Officer Radley is driving past, sure enough, there's a strange car in the driveway, an old blue Toyota with Massachusetts license plates.  Mr. Lane drove a Ford, Radley seems to recall, big enough that you could hardly miss it, but it's not here now.

Radley came out here without a partner, like they always do when they want to soothe Missus Emery down.  He's tempted to get on the radio, call for backup, do things right...but no.  His boss already razzes him for reading Stephen King; if he lets himself get spooked by a stray car he'll be hearing about it for months.

Better just to get it over with.  Radley parks his car, blocking in the Toyota, and walks up to the front door and knocks.  

The cops are here?!  They shouldn't even know the wizard's dead yet, how could they -- probably they don't.  Probably this is something else.

This is fine, he can talk his way through.  Nothing he's carrying is illegal, and any weird stuff in the house clearly isn't his responsibility.  He doesn't live here, he's just, let's think, the dead wizard's nephew, visiting from Ohio.  Nico was born in Ohio, he can sell that even if the cop was born in Youngstown, or something absurdly unlucky like that.  Worst case, the body he's wearing isn't even his.  Whatever he does here doesn't have to be foolproof, it just has to hold up for one more day.

He'll set down his bag by one of the recliners, then pull open the door.

"Oh, hi officer, how can I help you?"

The kid looks familiar.  Probably a local, though he can't place the name.  16, 17, somewhere in there.  Real composed.  Most kids are a little shy of the uniform at first, Radley finds, but not this one.  Odd, just odd.

"Afternoon, son," he hears himself say.  "You mind if I come inside?  This might take a minute."  There's no strategy behind this, just instinct: no matter what, it's always best to do things behind closed doors.

"Uh, sure, I guess.  Come on in."  Over the cop's shoulder, he'll check for a second one in the car, then step aside and wave him in.

"You want a glass of water or something?  I should tell you, if you came to talk to my uncle, he won't be back until later."

Uncle, huh?  Not a lot of family resemblence there, Sam Lane was a big blonde guy.  Damn it, why is he so familiar?

"That's funny, I didn't know Sam had any siblings.  I always thought he was an only child."

"He had a younger sister, at least.  She died when I was little, maybe he doesn't like talking about her?"

That doesn't quite scan, to Radley.  The kid's a little too eager to explain himself, a little too aware that his story might sound like bullshit.

"Well, it's good to meet you, Sam's nephew.  I'm officer Radley."

Ugh why hasn't he said what the problem is.

Nico can't remember the name on his stolen driver's license.  He's probably only looked at it once this whole time, and he's been busy.  "I'm Nick, uh, Nick Tempesta."  Okay, Nico's fake dad is Italian apparently.

Those "uh"s aren't doing it for Radley either.  Too controlled somehow, like hearing a dog say "woof" instead of barking.  He nods in a friendly way, walks around the kid a little like he's headed to the kitchen, and tries like hell to think who he reminds him of.

"And what brings you here to Raymond, if you don't mind my asking?"

No one ever says they mind; they think it sounds suspicious.

He absolutely minds but you're not supposed to say that, are you.  "I, uh," what's a story a small-town cop would find sympathetic, "I got in a fight with my stepmom.  Uncle" what was his name "Samuel said last time that if it happened again he'd put me up for the weekend and give everybody a chance to cool off, you know?  He even gave me a key, see?"  He roots it out of his pocket as evidence.  "I'm not running away, honest; I'm driving back tomorrow night."

Oh no, what if the cop wants to talk to his fake parents.  Is there a number he remembers that he's sure no one will pick up at...

It's the phrase "running away" that makes it click, for Radley. Dark hair, skinny, little hints of Chinese ancestry in the nose and chin. This kid looks like a teenage Abe Merrill, is what, and lately Abe is better known as "the missing kid's dad". Four out of four members of Raymond law enforcement agreed that poor Kyle was probably dead, but he could just have run away, and stayed away. "Nick Tempsta", Radley's hairy ass; this kid's name is Kyle. When Radley can get a minute he'll check the picture on his phone, just to be sure. Or no, not "just to be sure", he's already sure. Just because that's what you do.

Run away, stayed away, and then popped up at Sam Lane's place for some goddamn reason. Running from something? Hiding from something? He disappeared in Boston, so maybe drugs? How did Lane pay for this nice house, anyway? Radley is starting to get excited; clearly something's gone wrong, here, and for once he might be able to fix it before anything bad happened. Thank you Missus Emery, he thinks, for showing me this. I'll patrol that damn graveyard every day in your honor.

He circles back around. Takes another look at the kid, tries to casually put himself between him and the door. He looks tired, Radley thinks. Tired, and too skinny. But he doesn't act tired, does he. Mark down another point in the "drugs" column. And his accent is weird, you'd never guess he grew up here. Trying to hide? Should have dyed your hair, he thinks, but he's real glad he didn't. To think he almost missed this!

Radley thinks a second more, picks an angle. "That makes sense to me," he says easily. "My boys don't fight with my wife much, but they're just five and nine, and anyway she's their real mother. It makes a difference. Everyone says it gets bad when they're teenagers, and then it gets better. You're, what, seventeen? I remember seventeen. Everything big, everything urgent, world fulla disasters and opportunities. I did some dumb stuff, I don't mind telling you, but seventeen's a good age for that."

How is this landing?

Nick Tempesta can be seventeen, sure. Nico's not really giving the speech his full attention, he's too busy trying to figure out what could have drawn the cop here in the first place. It's belatedly occuring to Nico that Samuel the wizard might have had mundane henchmen, just like Nico does, and set them to guard his house while he was up at the lake. That would be pretty paranoid, Nico's almost sure his ambush was a total surprise, but what if Officer Friendly here is a delaying action, meant to hold him in place for a counterattack?

He has to think of a way to get rid of this guy, without drawing any more mundane attention. Would the basement be enough of a distraction?

So, not landing. Fine, let's get direct.

"Look. I know your name's not Nick. You're Kyle Merrill, Abe's kid, Beth and Barney's grandson. You had to know someone might recognize you, if you came back. You didn't even dye your hair, for Chrissake. I think deep down you wanted some help. I want to help you, Kyle. But you have to tell me what's going on."

...is his body's name Kyle? It might be! But, like. He grabbed this kid in Boston. Why would his hometown be in New Hampshire? Why would it be this exact tiny town? WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

That's an interesting point, actually, "random coincidences" in alchemy often aren't. But he can't think about it now. There's zero chance the cop will let him out of sight, not now that he's solved a kidnapping, or whatever he thinks happened to Nico's borrowed body. Can he invent a story so good that the cop will have to go charging after it immediately, and give Nico a chance to slip away?

Nothing's coming to mind. Nico doesn't have time for this; his checklist just has three more items but they're big, and now he's thinking he wants to have everything wrapped up on Sunday morning, before too many more things have a chance to go wrong. Let's get this done and clear out. He'll have to ditch the car just in case, but he knows where he can get another...

He looks down. "You're right. And it's kinda complicated, but if you look at this you'll mostly get it. Then I'll answer your questions if you want." He reaches into his pocket, slowly and carefully, and pulls out the Tower.

It's a little annoying how careful the kid's being.  What does he think, that Radley's going to shoot him?  But whatever.  Probably he's about to see a photograph, maybe of something too unpleasant to talk about.  He takes a step closer and leans in to get a good look at whatever Kyle's trying to show him.

The Tower card traditionally depicts an isolated tower, struck by lightning and decapitated.  To either side we see falling figures, jumping out of or being flung from what was once a place of safety.  Nico's depiction shows the tower slightly tilted, and not quite centered in the frame, hinting that the foundation is unstable and that the whole building, and everyone in it, will soon come tumbling down.

Drawn in a spread, the Tower represents sudden, destabilizing change.  At its most hopeful it can presage freedom from a confining or oppressive structure (prison, a bad marriage, or the like), but to those who are satisfied -- or think they are -- it's very threatening.  The Tower is made of safety proven false, lies revealed, material wealth made useless, and weak foundations overthrown.  Whoever wrote that "Anything that can be destroyed by the truth should be" was standing very close to the essence of the card.

Radley's mind absorbs that image, and the Entity behind it.

Radley is satisfied.  His wife adores him, his kids are doing great, he's got a steady job in his hometown.  What more could a man want?

Watching the other guys play basketball Mary with the white ribbons Worcester college Sleeping in on Sunday Hiding the candy he'd stolen

Why did Kyle show him that?  Is he the tower, the falling man, the lightning bolt?  Which is it?

He takes a step back, away from the card away from Kyle toward the couch.  He needs to lie down There's pressure all around him like falling in the pool like covering up that Penthouse he doesn't know what it's like yes he does he needs to get out he needs to get away but he can't forget all this he has to

"Kyle, you, I, don't"  He closes his eys but it doesn't help, he's still picturing it, he contains it it contains him you can't not think about things you can't pull yourself up I wish I could fly wish I was rich only losers wish for things sonny you've got to live in this world not up above it

He tries to push it away again, but you can't push without something solid to stand on.  He tries to organize his thoughts, but he can't find anything to organize them around.  And who is "he", anyway?  The kid who found a baby bird on the ground and broke its wing trying to put it back?  Who stole a whole bag of halloween candy off the ground, and blamed the fat kid no one liked? The guy who dreamed about fucking Mary Waller, but asked out her friend instead because it seemed like she'd say yes?  The kid who sat on the toilet for an hour trying to poop so he could do it right, and cried when he failed?  Who wants to drive to see Mount Rushmore and doesn't think he ever will? Who who who who who who who

Far away, outside himself somewhere, he hears a clap of thunder.  Dangerous.  A sliver of something he's forgotten the name of opens his eyes for him.  It's plain white above him, bright, and for a minute he can't tell if the brightness is him or not.  He tries to pull it closer, and suddenly there's movement.  A hand.  There's a difference between him and everything else, he realizes again, watching it.  It's his hand, not anyone else's.

That much, at least, he knows for sure.

That seems like it worked pretty well!

He puts the card back in his pocket, taking care not to look directly at it.  Nico's a lot more together psychologically than some small-town deputy could ever be, and he has Kyle(?)'s mind for a buffer just in case, but still.  He'll leave the cop where he's lying; watching him crack up he'd been thinking he'd lay a trail of clues toward to the basement but it hardly seems necessary, when the cop's friends show up they'll search the place just on principle, right?  Nico would.

And speaking of the cop's friends, now it's really really time to go; between them and that random bolt of lightning, he's spent as much time in this house as he cares to.  He'll peek out the window first, just in case, but if the coast is clear he'll just calmly walk to his car, get in, and drive over the grass around the cop car and away.  As soon as he's on the street he'll fish the cell phone out of the glove compartment: it's a pain in the ass to use out here where the cell reception is so bad, but his henchmen are still at Lake Winnipesaukee, and since he apparently can't show his face in this town he's going to need at least one of them here.  Where should he leave his real body in the meantime, so that it's still ready to hand for tomorrow?

Thinking furiously, he turns left on to route 27, and drives away.

The Following Morning

The Easter sunrise service at Good Hope Church is always well-attended.  People get out of the habit of coming to church through the year, get lost in their material lives, and then try to make up for it all at once by getting up before dawn on Easter morning.  That doesn't work, but it can be the start of something that does, so Pastor Reed never gives them a hard time.

It's not a day or a time for complicated messages.  He keeps it simple: Christ is risen, we live in the hope of the resurrection, the last enemy to be destroyed is death.  He puts the emphasis on "last" instead of "destroyed", this year, and lingers a little on the grief of the women before the tomb, and the fear of the disciples in the upper room.  He doesn't think people need to be reminded to be kind to the Merrills, or to support each other, but it will help to hear it anyway.  A lot of being a pastor is just helping people feel like being good is a normal thing to do.

This sermon isn't aimed at Sophie, particularly, but it kinda feels like it is. She and Kyle had been dating for almost four months when he disappeared, but no one knew except her and him. Mostly it was a secret from their dads, but the only way to keep a secret in Raymond is to tell nobody, literally not one single person, so they never did.

It would make sense if she were secretly grieving, but instead she's...not? She's not worried at all, actually? She's totally sure, in a way that she can't shake or explain, that she's going to see Kyle again.

She thought it was denial, at first. She's spent a bunch of time doing what she calls "standing outside herself", trying to walk around the feeling and get a look at it from different angles. It's so narrow and specific! Does she think he's going to come back and live in Raymond? She doesn't know. Does she think they're ever going to visit his treehouse again? No idea. Does she think she and Kyle are going to get married and have six kids? No, and she doesn't even want that with him, not now and maybe not ever. But is she going to see him again, and talk to him again? Yes, yes she is.

It doesn't feel painful, or frightening to think about. It feels like knowing a secret she can't figure out how to tell.

She wishes she could. His little sister Emily, especially, could really use some good news. Kyle would want Sophie to look out for her, since he can't right now, but every time she tries to imagine a conversation it goes so wrong. "Hi Emily, I know you a lot better than you know me because your brother talks about you all the time, and I just want you to know that he's not dead. No, I'm sure, I just can't explain why. How did I know him, given that he's a year older than me and not in any of my classes? Well, we were dating. It was a secret. We even had sex once! But it's not affecting my judgement here at all, promise!"

Ugh.

Sophie starts to feel bad about thinking about sex in church, but then she changes her mind. Thinking about talking about sex is different from thinking about sex, and anyway she was doing it to comfort the grieving, like the sermon said. And anyway she talked herself out of it.

The organist leads the congregation through the last hymn, then starts the outro.  Everybody clumps into little groups, mingling a little as they gather themselves to go out into the windy April morning and drive over to the school for the pancake breakfast.  The four Merrills, Sophie can see, are lingering by the outer door, talking with a friend of Mr. Merrill's.  Emily is, for the moment, off to the side and alone.

Sophie talks herself out of doing things a lot.  It's a bad habit, and she's trying to stop, except that stopping is really the opposite of what she wants to do, isn't it?  But you can't just "start", you have to start something specific.  Right now, with Emily, she should walk over and say...and say...

Mr. Merrill's conversation seems to be winding down.  Sophie's window is still open, but not for long!

If you can't come up with a good idea, just go with a bad one!

A test prep coach said that to Sophie's class last year, part of some advice about essay questions.  She meant it as a throwaway line, almost a joke, but Sophie's a little obsessed with it.  On tests she can apply it; in life it's harder.

She stands and watches the Merrills.

Emily might be watching back. She's got her hair down, dangling in front of her eyes, but she's facing the right way. What Sophie can see of her expression is stony.

Maybe she's mad at Sophie for some reason!

Shit, she thinks, and then oops, sorry God.

That's got to be projection. But still, she'll wait until the Merrills are safey out the door before she starts bugging her dad to leave. Her friends will be at the pancake breakfast; soon she can put this whole embarrasing incident behind her.

Aw, his daughter waited for him to be done talking to his friend Shiela before she asked to leave!

He raised a good kid.  He knew that already but it's still nice to see.  Sure, they can go get some breakfast.  He'll check his phone on his way out and see if his wife texted, but probably she's still asleep.  He'll have to see if he can make her up a to-go box, pancakes don't really work for that but maybe they'll have something...