Loyalist To A Fault , livre ebook

Loyalist to a Fault
EVAN MUNDAY
ECW


I’m on a boat!
– The Lonely Island

Broke Into the Old Apartment
Many mysteries open with a heinous crime in progress. Yet so few begin with the hero — in this case, the plucky and darkness-loving thirteen-year-old October Schwartz — committing said crime. How heinous this crime actually may be is up for debate.
It was a cold morning in early January, when October Schwartz found herself about to steal a telephone from an abandoned building — which more closely resembled a pile of wood randomly nailed together — strangely named the Crooked Arms. You are probably asking yourself, Why? Has October developed some sort of crippling gambling addiction to competitive curling (faithful followers of the Dead Kid Detective Agency’s exploits may remember October’s short stint on her school’s team) for which she now must thieve and pawn antique telephones to cover her debts?
The truth is, perhaps, even more sinister. As established in our previous pulse-pounding installment, the Crooked Arms was the childhood home of October’s dead Scottish friend Morna MacIsaac, and the old telephone on the lobby’s front desk may be, bafflingly, the one connection October has to her long-absent mother, aside from a snazzy ankh necklace she often wears. During the Dead Kid Detective Agency’s investigation of Morna’s century-old death, a voice on that telephone provided clues and advice at pivotal moments, and it was only once the case was closed that October suspected the voice might belong to her mother.
That was why she had to steal the phone.
Under other circumstances, October would have simply continued to visit the Crooked Arms to speak with the faintly rasping voice she thought might belong to her missing mom, but there were two key issues: 1) since October had asked the voice if it was her mother, the voice had stopped talking entirely; and 2) the Crooked Arms was scheduled for demolition the following day.
In under twelve hours some construction company — more like a de struction company (am I right?) — was going to go Godzilla and make the Crooked Arms its own personal Tokyo, and October was certain there wouldn’t be any phone left by nightfall. She couldn’t let that happen, so larceny it was. She’d broken into places before while on a case, and she had technically assaulted someone with a broom, so she wasn’t that concerned about adding petty theft to her rap sheet. She was collecting crimes the way an eager Boy Scout accumulates merit badges.
October trudged through the mid-January foam mattress of snow. Snow hadn’t fallen in over a week, but given that the Crooked Arms was condemned, nobody seemed too concerned about shoveling its walk. And October was alone, as she wouldn’t be able to revive her dead friends until the end of the month, what with the lunar cycle and the weird mystical undead rules governing the dead kids and all that. October had her dead friends’ ghostly guidelines mostly sorted out: The dead kids arise from their graves only during the full moon and return upon the appearance of the next full moon. (They stick around for about a month. This rule is clearly the most important in the current situation.) The dead kids can become tangible and intangible at will, passing through the world of the living or interacting physically with it as they so choose. The dead kids are invisible to nearly all living people, but certain people — those who have experienced untimely, mysterious deaths in their close family or friends circle — are sometimes able to see them. The dead kids can harm each other and themselves with no pain or lasting consequences. Severed arms will grow back. While they can physically interact with living people, they cannot knowingly harm them. Punches don’t land. The dead kids are to remain ghostly corpses until their unfinished business — namely, finding justice for their terrible childhood deaths — is complete. (This was the theory, at least. October had solved Morna’s case in December and she still seemed to be kicking around, so this rule might be a little hand-wavy.)
October tucked her mittened hands into the armpits of her black peacoat, carefully sidestepped the plastic orange construction netting, and plunged her boots where she assumed a staircase must be under all that snow. When she reached the building’s battered front door, she was astonished to find it locked. The burnished brass doorknob just wouldn’t give, though it had been unlocked throughout December whenever she and the dead kids had been here to investigate Morna’s death.
Instead of trying to kick in the door, October found a loose two-by-four on the front porch, glanced around in a totally not suspicious way, then smashed one of the ground floor windows, which was already partially broken. October made sure the frame was clear of all those jagged little glass teeth before she hoisted herself up and tumbled into the lobby. She’d had about her lifetime’s fill of broken glass when she and her friends Yumi and Stacey were in a telephone booth when it was tipped over, thank you very much.
Seeing nothing in the darkness but some glittering shards of glass and her own breath, October produced a flashlight from her coat pocket and flipped it on. This process was not as easy as it sounds, as October was sure if she took off either of her mittens, she’d lose both her hands to frostbite. Either that, or she’d have a flashlight forever fused to her hand, which actually wasn’t that bad an idea, as far as detective work goes. Still, the light went on, illuminating the words “Asphodel Meadows” graffitied in red on the wall. Almost instantly after turning on the flashlight, October could have sworn she heard footfalls from upstairs. October figured they were probably squirrels or (less adorable) rats nesting in the abandoned house, but given her track record, you’d think she’d have been more suspicious.
As quietly as she possibly could, October crept over to the black telephone resting on the desk under the “Asphodel Meadows” tag. In her huge boots, October’s “creeping” fell somewhere within the “Metallica ballad” volume range. And given that she’d just smashed her way into the room like a confused seagull, sneakiness was not really the order of the moment. She picked up the receiver of the phone and tried one last time to communicate with the scratchy voice at the other end.
More shuffling came from the floor above.
“Am I alone here?” October whispered into the receiver. More than her mom’s voice, she would have given her collection of black eyeliner for any voice — Mr. Santuzzi’s, that lady from The Nanny — to say “yes.”
The shuffling sounds moved to the far corner of the lobby. October tried to angle her neck so she could see into the room above via one of the holes in the ceiling. October had been attacked by three men armed with baseball bats while searching the Crooked Arms, and the ensuing fracas had added a few new skylights in the first floor of the tenement building. Still, all she could see through the holes were shadows.
“Is there someone upstairs?” October asked, feeling more paranoid by the second. “If this is Kirby or one of you kids, I’m going to be so mad.”
But the phone remained silent and uncaring. It wasn’t out of character for the dead kids to prank her, but she had no idea how they would have raised themselves to orchestrate such an elaborate escapade.
“Okay,” she relented. “Bye, Mom … if it even is you …”
With a final click of the receiver, October crouched down to find the cord and yank it out of the wall. Almost on cue, a riotous crash rang out from the floor above, like someone had knocked over a wardrobe filled with mirrored clothing. (Which is something I think we can all assume wasn’t included among the furnishings at the Crooked Arms.) October’s stomach dropped and she felt her underarms begin to dampen. That was no squirrel. Or it was a man-sized squirrel, which would bring its own set of massive problems.

She glanced at the end of the phone cord, seriously doubting she’d be able to plug it in at home, but there was no time to think about that now. No time to stare at the wall and wonder again what “Asphodel Meadows” meant. Something big and angry (or possibly just clumsy) was just beyond the darkened stairs before her. She wound the phone cord around her left hand, hopped over the window ledge, and took leaping strides through the snow until she was several massive-squirrel-lengths away from the Crooked Arms.


Dear readers, if October had any tiny remaining doubts that something in Sticksville was more rotten than a month-old banana, her mind was forever made up that evening. Historians of the supernatural — if such a profession does or ever will exist (fingers crossed) — may find it difficult to pinpoint when, exactly, grade nine student and founder of the Dead Kid Detective Agency, October Schwartz, realized her town had something very, very wrong with it. That night she stole a telephone from the decrepit old boarding house might be a good guess, but given that that moment was preceded by months of paranormal misadventures, it’s tough to be sure.
After all, it was only four months earlier that October had accidentally raised five kids — each about her own age — from the dead one night in the Sticksville Cemetery. Despite some initial trepidation about interacting with the ghostly youngsters, October soon formed a friendship with them, and since then, she and her dead pals had found no shortage of bizarre mysteries, crime, and skullduggery just steps from her front door. As you may remember from October’s last two escapades, she and her five dead friends are fairly good at solving mysteries, even if they often expose October to life-threatening dangers in the proc