Hellhole (16 page)

“I have been
roasting
here. Stick a meat thermometer in me, Max. I am
well done.
”

“I'm so sorry, Mom—the thermostat was broken—”

“You think?” Her voice was shrill, mean. Max couldn't remember the last time she'd yelled at him like this. “I couldn't even stand up, thought I was going to pass out! And here you come breezing right in, even had time to take off your shirt—”

Max looked down at his bare chest. “That wasn't—”

“I tried calling you, but the phones are out! Why are the phones out?”

“There was a problem with the phone company, I'm working on it—”

She rolled her eyes. “Full of excuses. Surprise, surprise.”

Max wanted to figure out what on earth was making her act like this, but his first priority was to calm her down before her heart exploded. “Hang on a second, Mom, okay?” He darted a few feet into the room, grabbed the hot-water bottle at the foot of her bed, then ducked back out, as if she might bite if he got too close.

He ran into the bathroom across the hall and turned on the cold water full blast. He let it run for a full minute, getting it as cold as it could go. His worried, sweaty face stared back at him in the mirror.

What is going on?

When his unhelpful reflection couldn't provide an answer, he splashed some water on his forehead, filled up the bottle, and walked back across the hall.

“Mom?” he said softly, peeking his head in. “I got a cold compress.”

She beckoned him closer with an impatient wave of her hand. Snatching the bottle from him, she held it to her forehead, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. When she opened them again a few seconds later, the fury was gone.

“Thanks, Max,” she said wearily. “That feels great.”

He sat down on the bed and rubbed her hand. “I'm sorry the phones are broken. I'm sorry I let it get so hot.”

“It's okay, hon.”

“It's not okay! What if it had gotten so bad you'd—”

“Well, it didn't, and I'm fine.” She gave him a weak smile.
She looks so old,
Max thought. “What's this on your hand?” She feebly held up his wrist and, in doing so, caught a glance at his watch. “And it's only two o'clock—why aren't you in school?”

Max felt it would be rude to point out that if the phones had been working, she would have pulled him out of school anyway. “I had free period at the end of the day,” Max lied, hoping she'd drop the thing about his hand. “Got out early.”

“Ah.” For a moment she looked as though she were trying to remember her first question, but then let it go. “I'm sorry I yelled at you, hon. I got pretty damn cranky there for a minute, didn't I?” She shook her head, bemused. “Don't know what came over me.”

Max tensed as something occurred to him.
This is Burg's doing. And if he came up from the basement to crank up the heat, maybe he even came into her room again . . .

“What's wrong, Max?” she asked when his hand tightened around hers.

“Nothing. I'm . . . just trying to figure out what happened with the thermostat. No one, like, broke into the house or anything, right? You didn't hear anything weird?”

He tried to say it with a bit of laughter, which she miraculously echoed. “No one broke into the house, you little paranoid. And I didn't hear anything weird, but then again I was asleep for a large portion of the day. Missed the Showcase Showdown and everything.”

“Hmm.”

She gave his hand a squeeze. “Guess it's just a mystery, huh?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Max could no longer speak using words, because the words he wanted to use were not the kind that could be said in his mother's presence. As soon as he finished fluffing her pillow and opening the windows to get a breeze going, he stormed back down the stairs, preparing to unleash a verbal blitzkrieg upon his dickwad houseguest.

Lore stood up when she saw him barreling across the room. “What's up?”

“Burgundy Shit-for-Brains tried to fry my mom alive. Let's go kick his ass, shall we?” He opened the door to the basement and stood there panting, his snowy-white chest puffing up and down in a barely contained rage.

She joined him at the top of the stairs. “Your nostrils are flaring.”

“Good.”

They pounded down the stairs to find an empty sofa. Rumpled snack bags were strewn about the floor, and the owner of some hair salon was screaming on the television. From the crack under the storage area door, a sliver of light poured out, along with a rousing chorus of
“Jeff, the Gooorton's Fiiishermaaannn . . .”

Max tried the door. It was locked.

He looked at Lore. She nodded. “You gotta do it, man.”

Max nodded back. With a deep breath and a reminder that this day had already been so embarrassing there was no point in stopping now, he reared back, raised his leg, and kicked at the door with all his puny quad muscle might.

The door exploded open. Granted, the thing was basically a piece of particle board, and his heroic display would have been a lot more impressive if the door had been made of a solid chunk of mahogany, but still. The door was open and he, Max Kilgore, had kicked it open. With his foot.
HIS MIGHTY FOOT
.

He stopped to shoot a triumphant look at Lore, but she'd already stepped into the room, unmoved by his tremendous display of plywood butchery.

Max's secret projects had been relegated to the far corner of the table. In the center was a mess of his modeling plaster, with big, gloppy drips leading up to where Burg was sitting.

Burg turned in his seat and promptly burst into laughter. “Check out Snow White over here!” he screeched, nudging Lore and pointing at Max's chest. “Next time, warn me so I can put on my sunglasses—”

“
What
. . . are you doing?” Max asked.

Burg wiped his hands on a towel. Sitting before him were two perfect plaster replicas of his own horns—every stubby, ragged inch. “Thought I'd make some models of my own fine specimens. Why should Carmine get all the glory?”

“Who's Carmine?”

Burg pointed to the far end of the table, where the model of the fossil from Ugly Hill lay. “The original owner of that horn over there. Well, the
real
horn, not your sucky fake one.”

“Wait—the fossil is
a devil horn?
” Max asked, forgetting for a moment that he was supposed to be blindingly furious at the guy.

“Yep. Recognized it immediately. Ole one-horned Carmine Sassafrass. Was up here, oh, back in the 1700s, I think? He's a legend back home. Got into a tiff with a local mob and lost, breaking off his horn on the way back home. But not before taking out the better part of the village.”

Max looked at Lore, who'd gone pale. “Well, thanks for the history lesson,” he said, “but don't mess with my stuff anymore. Why did you come in here in the first place?”

“I was
booored,
” Burg said, sauntering back into the den and plopping down on the sofa. “You have, like,
two
video games.”

Max put his hands on his hips. “Oh, and cranking up the heat to unbearable levels wasn't enough fun for one afternoon?”

Burg chuckled to himself. “Well, yes, that
was
fun. But I required more.”

“Well, guess what?” Max towered over Burg, blocking his view of the screaming hairdresser. “You are officially evicted! We found you a house, and you're moving in tomorrow!”

Burg looked at his fingernails, seemingly uninterested. “It's not a trailer, is it? Because I specifically requested a full-fledged house. With a hot tub.”

This stole the words right out of Max's mouth, so he just stood there for a moment, huffing and puffing in a holding pattern. “How did you know it's a trailer?” he eventually said.

Burg let out a groan. “Ugh! I knew this was going to happen. This is exactly what Verm had to go through, isn't it?” he said to Lore. “Well,
I'm
not a pushover like he is.
I'm
not going to settle.”

Max looked at Lore. Her face had gone translucent. “What's he talking about?” he asked her. “Who's Verm?”

Burg looked back and forth between the two. A smile doused with pity slipped onto his face. “Oh, sweetheart,” he said to Lore in a cloying voice. “You haven't told him?”

“Shut up!” Lore shot back, panicked. This was the most emotion Max had seen out of her since—well, since they met. “I'm not doing this again. Not for some lard-ass douchedonkey—”

Max loudly cleared his throat and grabbed Lore by the elbow. “Lore? A word?”

He pulled her up the stairs and closed the basement door behind them, resisting the urge to kick it shut with his mighty foot. “What is he talking about? And what are
you
talking about? You're not doing this ‘again'?”

Lore extricated herself from his grip. “You have no idea what you're getting into here, Max.” Her voice was getting louder. “He's just going to keep lying to you, manipulating you, and using you, and before you know it, someone's going to get
really
hurt—”

Max threw a nervous glance at his mother's bedroom door. “Lore, shh—”

“Don't you get it? This is what they do. They get everyone else to do their dirty work, then drag even more people in, make them complicit—”

His mom was going to emerge any moment, he knew it. “Come here,” he said, grabbing Lore's hand. He led her outside and into the backyard, where she stopped in her tracks. Everyone always stopped in their tracks when they saw what was back there.

“Why is there a killer whale in your yard?” she asked.

Max sighed. This explanation never got any saner. “It came with the house. The previous owners were big on antiques, and they got it from an old water park that had gone out of business. My mom thought it was charming and insisted we keep it. It irritated some of the neighbors, which made her want to keep it even more.”

“She wanted to keep it?”

“Collecting random nonsense is kind of her thing.”

The orca flashed a big fiberglass grin back at them. In one of its flippers was a cartoony-looking fishing pole, which really didn't make much sense when you thought about it. The paint had chipped in some places, but overall it really did look as if Shamu had been frozen in time and unceremoniously dropped from the sky into a suburban backyard.

Max climbed on top of the life-size creature, balancing himself with its dorsal fin. “Here.” He opened up a port on its back. “Step into my blowhole.”

“Ew.”

“Don't worry, it's clean,” said Max, pulling her up. “Mom sanitized it long ago. It was my playhouse when I was a kid. Like a tree house, but . . .”

“But a whale.”

“Right.”

Lore lowered herself into the belly of the beast and sat on the floor. “Cozy.”

Max joined her. “Wait, it gets better.” He reached up and pulled the blowhole closed. Sunlight from outside streamed in through the dozens of tiny rusted-out holes in the structure, creating a planetarium effect.

She looked so entranced, Max almost forgot that five minutes ago she had been ripping him a new one. But then he thought about what had just transpired in the basement, and he remembered he was supposed to be suspicious/confused/mad at her. “Why do you know so much about this stuff, Lore?” he asked. “About breaking and entering? Why do you own a crowbar and know how to use it? Why—”
Do it. Ask her.
“Why did I see a streak of black ash on the side of that green trailer?”

Lore spun her head toward him, her ponytail dancing across the wall. In the low light, her eyes looked even harder than usual. “What did you say?”

“It's the same as the one on my hand,” he said, holding it up to illustrate. “I just don't get it. I mean, have you been there before?”

Lore bit her lip, her face pained.

“I live there.”

Max blinked.

“Not in the green trailer—in the yellow one, the one with the patio lights,” she said. “The green one was . . .
his.
”

“Whose?”

She sighed and started to stand up, but that didn't work out too well. She sank back to the floor. “I lied to you, Max. Or—not lied, exactly. More like I left something out. A really big something.”

She looked up at him. “I did the same thing you did. I summoned a devil.”

“
What?
How?”

She dug her fingernails into her hand, then laid her hands flat on the curved inside of the whale, as if to steady herself.

In a small voice she said, “I told a lie.”

“What kind of lie?”

“That doesn't matter. I just did, okay?” She twisted her lips, her mind only half present. “He came up out of that old well near my house. Vermillion Wackersham. He made me find him somewhere to live, too. He was fine with the trailer, but otherwise he wasn't as easily satisfied.”

“Lore—”

“His Vice was beer,” she pressed on, as if stopping would hurt. “Couldn't get enough of the stuff. He made me steal it for him, just like Burg makes you steal snacks. And let me tell you, alcohol is a lot harder to steal than Doritos. I had to raid my dad's supply, then I had to go to a bunch of hateful senior parties just so I could sneak some into my bag, and finally I didn't know where else to get it, so . . .”

Max wasn't catching on. “So?”

She picked up Russell Crowebar and made a burgling gesture.

“Get out,” said Max. “
You're
the Booze Hound?”

She nodded miserably. “He didn't give me a choice! I broke into all the liquor stores in and around Eastville, then had to keep having to find new ones farther and farther away, had to sneak out, secretly borrow my dad's car. Not that he ever noticed,” she muttered.