Dissembling and Dissemination

or alternatively: That's Not How You Do Zumba

Sam slapped her phone down on the counter hard enough to make Tucker nervous. "He's a wendigo."

"A what?"

They were in Sam's kitchen, having decided to spread the risk of opening a hellmouth through repeated summonings over a larger geographic area. Tucker's house was cursed enough. Plus, Sam's house was empty on Tuesday afternoons—her mom's charity thingies kept her out of the way.

"A wendigo," Sam repeated. "It's a monster from Algonquian tradition. Supposedly, if you break a taboo, you turn into this insane thing that consumes human flesh."

"Okay?" Tucker allowed. "Your evidence. Lay it on me."

"Schulker is a hunter; he's from Eastern Canada, where the legend originated; and the case he was suspected in involved the cannibalization of two hikers."

"Okayy…."

"And wendigos are thought to symbolize greed and destruction of nature. Schulker is a hunter."

Tucker shot her a sidelong glance. "Stop bringing your crazy vegan sensibilities into my murder investigation. Was the dude even Algonquian?"

"No clue," Sam admitted. "But why would a curse like this only apply to people from one, like, language group?"

"I don't know, didn't you say something during our first summoning about how you think the key to the supernatural is belief?"

"Tucker, I was completely talking out of my ass."

"Fair." A pause. "So we have an extremely unlikely theory. How does this help us?"

"Line of questioning?" Sam smirked. "It does give us an excuse to make more jokes about eating people around Danny."

Tucker swung his Converse against the wood panelling beneath the pristine dark marble of Sam's parents' counter and snorted involuntarily. "Sam, do not antagonize the unpredictable paranormal creature we just met." He glanced around, taking in an overabundance of natural light gleaming off of various polished metal kitchen instruments. Sam's kitchen had glass sliding doors taking up most of one wall, looking out into her sprawling backyard, which was kept from sprawling too much by high, dark hedges. Most of the yard was covered in immaculately maintained lawn, but the ferns toward the back bordered on chaotically overgrown, and there were a few ripped-up patches of lawn where squirrels had buried things, or unearthed them. Tucker liked Sam's backyard a lot better than he liked her house. He got the feeling she did, too.

"You know, if Schulker is a supernatural monster…." Sam twirled idly on socked feet. She was clearly more accustomed than Tucker to the slidiness of the walnut hardwood floor; Tucker slipped at least once every time he was over. (Granted, not all of those "accidents" were unintentional.) "That could be the reason he was targeted."

"Then what about the other victims? You went over to Kwan's house and ate his mom's popcorn. She most definitely was not a monster!" Tucker found himself a little affronted for this woman he'd never met. "And besides, you said that I only said that Skulker wasn't human during the mini-trance."

"Dude, I don't know! I'm just theorizing!" Sam almost glared.

Woah. That was weird. They both took a breath.

Into that quiet, a doorbell rang.

Sam spun again, grinning. "Yes!" She hurried dangerously fast out of the kitchen and down an equally slippery hallway.

By the time Tucker'd pulled back on his beret and caught up, Sam had already opened the door to admit their reluctant guest. Danny stood in the doorway with a backpack over one shoulder, fidgeting with a small orb full of silvery liquid. He visibly startled when he spotted Tucker over Sam's head.

"Heyyy, dude." Tucker advanced slowly down the entrance hall.

"Hey, man, you okay?" Danny had switched in an instant from glaring to concerned. With a start, Tucker realized that the last time Danny had seen him had been during the whole fainting episode. Sam must not have filled him in.

"Oh, yeah. It was a psychic thing." Tucker would have shared more, but he was caught off guard by the question, and Sam pounced on his momentary pause like a housecat on a sunbeam, finally free to ask a million more questions of their best and only source on the supernatural. "So what makes a summoning work? Do you have to have someone's specific runes? And does it have to be Nordic runes?"

Danny shifted, still uncomfortably standing on the stoop. "Uhh, okay. You need someone's combination of symbols or their blood to summon them involuntarily. The 'number' can be in a lot of languages–I think regular Arabic numerals might even work in a pinch–but the language has gotta be really old, and the more letters or numbers the better, statistically speaking. You can also get them to agree to come with an offering of some sort that's, like, specific to them."

"Wait, back up–blood?"

He gave her a cautious look, apparently considering his next words carefully. "Yeah, dead man's blood has a lot of…interesting qualities."

If this was allowed to continue, they'd never make it through the door. Tucker scanned their surroundings for a distraction. "What's that?" He pointed at the silver ball.

"I asked him if he had something with mercury. Something better than a thermometer," Sam piped up, positively beaming.

Danny, in contrast, scowled. He stepped past Sam, over the house's threshold. (Tucker made a mental note to ask Sam if she'd said anything at all inviting-y. For science purposes.) "You're way too cheerful for two people blackmailing a guy into performing a séance."

"Woah, we are not blackmailing you!" Tucker squeaked just a little on "not." Then he reconsidered and darted a glance at Sam as she closed and locked the door. "Are we?"

They all started migrating at a more sedate pace down the hall, Tucker making sure not to brush into Danny and risk another psychic trance/damsel-in-distress fainting spell. "Okay, I may have implied some things," Sam admitted without a smidgen of actual remorse on her face. "But he chose how to interpret those implications."

"So I'm not being blackmailed?" Danny stopped and raised a dubious eyebrow, leaning backpack-first against one creamy wall.

"It's all a matter of interpretation."

"No. No, we are not blackmailing you. We're not going to reveal you. We promise," Tucker reassured him hurriedly. "Pay no attention to the maniac with the black lipstick."

Danny seemed a bit stumped by this turn of events. "Oh. Okay? Uh, then I really think you should not be doing this. This thing you're about to do? Like" –he turned to Tucker– "you, at least, have to realize this is crazy."

Sam gave him a look. "Weren't you just saying that this is what you do?"

"I mean, yeah, sure, I've fought a dead serial killer before. But a living one is entirely different!"

Tucker started to clarify that the killer wasn't necessarily alive, but he was cut off by a skeptical Sam. "Wouldn't a living one be easier?" she asked.

Danny glared at her. "It'd better be. The dead one kicked my ass," he muttered. Tucker let his point drift off into the emptiness of Sam's spacious living room.

He also let himself drift toward the back of the group, considering which bag of supplies to pick up as Sam gave Danny an abbreviated tour of the first floor. Tucker had always found her habit of going into hostess mode funny, and a little endearing. She did it at school, too; she loved giving freshmen directions. It was also, weirdly enough, the only habit Sam had that reminded Tucker of her mom. (That's why he'd never mentioned it to her—he didn't want her to try to stop.)

Eventually, they all grabbed plastic grocery bags of candles and herbs and tromped upstairs to Sam's mom's personal gym. It was a quarter past 5, twilight just setting in deceptively slowly. A golden sort of early evening, rather than a purple one; the kind favored by lazy bees and honeysuckle vines rather than night-blooming flowers and cactus buds. Inside the gym, that type of evening translated to long amber shadows on light wood floors, and glowing faces looking out, startled, from the huge mirrors covering one wall. The whole room was about 30 foot square, the mirrored wall adorned with the stereotypical ballet handrail (probably the result of wishful thinking on Sam's parents' part) and the adjoining one with large, austere windows, looking out on the same backyard view as the kitchen. Sam kept up a constant stream of questions as they set everything down.

Once Sam had chalked out a preliminary circle on the floor, several feet wider than the last one, Tucker started setting candles around the outside. Danny leaned against the door and glowered uncomfortably for a minute before giving in and helping Tucker out.

"For the record," he commented when Sam paused for breath, "I'm only doing this because in the only-somewhat-likely event that this summoning did work, I would be yoinked inside the triangle again anyways."

"What about us not getting murdered? Doesn't factor into your motivations at all?" Sam prodded absently from her place on the floor.

"Well, you do still owe me ten bucks for the slushees."

Once the pentacle (this time with, Tucker noticed, a few more sigils of some sort inside and outside, and a bowl of the silvery herb that had affected Danny easily accessible within) and triangle were completed, the candles were lit and reflecting off the floor, and the gym absolutely reeked of sandalwood (with faint undertones of something more cloying, older, that Danny claimed made his nose itch), Sam and Tucker finally stepped into the circle. Danny threw them one more dirty look, sighed, and stepped with exaggerated caution into the triangle, settling onto the floor cross-legged. Tucker understood that throwing up ghosts on demand was not anyone's idea of a fun after-school activity, but he still thought the attitude was a little unwarranted. They'd given him a pretty roomy triangle this time, with room for about six Dannies to sit comfortably. Just as Sam had unlocked her phone and was opening her mouth to start the versicle, he seemed to remember something. "Oh, yeah, sorry, before you start, I should probably remind you, I know my ghost form is a little disturbing? So, like, if I change suddenly, just...don't freak out."

"Dude, I'm already freaking out," Tucker not-entirely-joked. "Freaking out is the baseline right now."

"Fair. Uh, then I guess just don't run? I'm very fast, and I can smell fear."

Sam and Tucker regarded him in identical abject horror.

"Kidding! I'm kidding! I mean, I am fast. And I guess technically–anyway, I swear, 'ghost me' is internally more or less 'regular me.' There is zero possibility I'm gonna hurt you."

Tucker plopped carefully into one of the open spaces in the pentacle. "You know how I was acting before like I wasn't very scared? This is making me very scared!"

"Okay! Okay, my bad, just say the evocation, Sam."

Sam gave him one more weird look and then started into the versicle. "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in!" she proclaimed in a ringing tone Tucker recognized as her finishing-up-a-particularly-good-rebuttal debate voice. She quickly tapped her phone screen, pulling up a different tab. "Papa Legba, Saint Peter, Hermanubis, Keeper of the Gate, Lord of the Hidden Road Between Life and Death, I call on you…." Nothing visibly changed, but Tucker could feel a shift in the air, like the pressure change indicating the onset of a cold front. Danny subtly poked a finger into the space above the chalk line and winced when it rebounded, shaking out his hand at the wrist.

"...For I would traffick with the departed."

For a count of ten, all was still.

Then Danny's eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell sideways onto the floor. He started choking, loudly, and shaking with increasing violence. Tucker, watching with a kind of horrified, detached fascination, saw light start to burst from his body once, then twice, only to just as quickly extinguish. Danny himself remained apparently human, fighting to hold himself up on his forearms as the seizures accelerated and something splattered out of his mouth and nose and onto Sam's mom's hardwood floor beneath him.

After a few seconds of uneasy eyeing, Tucker set aside the potential dangers of breaking silence and whispered to Sam, "Dude, this does not look right…Is he okay? Is this supposed to happen?"

"No idea." Sam stepped carefully to the edge of the circle nearest the triangle, revulsion and fear tugging at her lips. The last ray of sunlight through the windows glanced off the near edge of her face, turning her temple and the arc of her cheek into something flat and artificial, the curving side of a violin with black hairs for strings. Then the light slipped off, and away.

Danny was fully on the ground now, curling around horrible, hacking coughs. The pool of ooze and gristle on the floor with him flowed and writhed. Tucker's heart pounded hard enough that he felt shaky on his feet; he could barely hear his breath. Then, with a start, he recognized the breaking-glass noise from the last summoning, at first hidden behind the retching but steadily becoming louder, until he was forced to cover his ears. Out of the corner of his eye, by dim candlelight, he saw Sam do the same. He closed his eyes on instinct, and terror.

When he opened them, the candles were out and the hunter was in the circle.

Tucker's nightmare sense went crazy as the ambient temperature dropped about thirty degrees. Schulker himself was also icier than the last two times. Dim, skittering moonlight revealed in flashes the tiny icicles hung from his beard, and his fingers, hanging where he'd hooked his thumbs in his belt, looked purple. Frostbitten.

"Well, thank you very much for the call!" Schulker enthused in a voice that rasped and echoed in equal measure. "I took care of our little…access problem" –he gestured to Danny, who Tucker hadn't noticed was lying on the floor behind Schulker, apparently dead to the world (heh, it was so petrifying it was hilarious)– "so we should be able to talk at length, little seer. You got a question for me?"

Shit. Tucker hoped Danny was alright. Now he had yet another reason to end this as soon as possible, beyond the looming, increasing risk of a premature heart attack. "Uh. Yes. Sir. So, uh, were…." Tucker licked his lips. "Were you a wendigo?"

There was silence in the room for a minute, beyond the cracking of ice. In the dim light, Schulker was less a person and more a huge mound of grey and black. A mountaintop in silhouette–the suggestion of a head–tilted slightly to the side and considered Tucker for a long moment.

Finally, the spirit looked down. Tucker's eyes started to adjust to the low light, revealing that he had taken his thumbs out of his belt and was examining his fingernails. "Wechuge, actually. Bigger, smarter, harder to do in, and more of a possession sorta situation usually. I didn't want to play by their rules, so I made me a contract. But eh, technicalities." He smiled. It was just barely visible. It was not a nice smile.

Tucker was keenly aware of how hard he was shaking. Sam shifted, stepping subtly in front of him and brushing against his arm. He could feel that her hand was sweaty, but her voice didn't waver as she raised her chin regally and pronounced, "Who killed you?"

The hunter idly scratched his beard, dislodging a few beads of ice and a small flurry of snowflakes to melt on the carpet. "Dunno. Prey knew its stuff, though. Went through the whole campfire rigamarole 'n whatnot. And after all that work I put into gettin' stronger."

"Uh…" Tucker dared another quick glance at Sam. No dice. For the first time (but not the last), Tucker wondered why they didn't bother coming up with interview questions before going to all this trouble. Finally, he settled on "Is there anything else you'd like to, uh, tell us?" His voice cracked hard on "tell."

The hunter's smile stretched wide, like a dog's. Something squirmed in his purple gums. "There's a storm coming, kid. We can feel it, over here on our side–or at least I can, thanks to my friend. I smell it, through the rot. Ozone and abracadabra and all that merde."

"Uhh." Sam's voice was high and thin. "Could you be more specific?"

"Maybe I wanna wait and see how it plays out."

Tucker nodded. Swallowed. The room dropped another few degrees, and the gym floors had started to become caked in black frost. Tucker decided enough was enough; his gut didn't like the way Schulker was looking at his throat instead of his eyes, the way one boot edged just over the chalk line. "I–okay. Th–thank you. Now, um, sir, could you, um, please leave?"

The boot crossed the line.

The hunter stalked out of the circle and slowly forward until he loomed over Tucker, who found himself as frozen as the man's beard as he watched, wide-eyed. The hunter stopped right in front of him, looming overhead so Tucker could better appreciate the almost animalistic planes of his face. He laughed once, scorn heavy in his tone. "Happy to oblige, little seer." He turned, knelt, and pressed his thumb flat between Danny's eyes, and then he was gone, the only trace of his presence melting slowly on Mrs. Manson's floor.

The candles snapped back to life.

Their glow, though Tucker couldn't decide if it was cheery or eerie, at least illuminated their immediate surroundings. The dark shadows in the corners of the room contained nothing but shadow, and the mirror wall reflected only their own wide eyes, faces lit orange from beneath. Tucker started to step toward Danny, who was still slumped on the floor, but Sam grabbed his arm. Her fingernails dug into his skin. "Wait. The door isn't closed yet."

Sam hacked up her lemon with a shaky hand and recited the gate-closing verse, tossing around a few generous handfuls of the herb from her bowl for good measure as she snuffed the candles. They both hesitated for a moment on the boundary line of the darkened circle, looking around. Silent, empty space had never seemed so perilous. They teetered on the edge.

Then Danny coughed and pushed himself up. "Sh—shit, what…happened. What—" He bolted upright, looking around wildly. "Where is he?! Is he still here?" His eyes glowed green, and his movement, as he pushed himself to his feet with his fists clenched, was just a little too smooth.

"We think—" Tucker gulped, spoke louder. "We think he's gone. We banished him."

"Okay. I'm just gonna. Just gonna check." He shot them another careful look, and then with a flash of white light Danny was replaced by the thing from the first summoning. In the dark, his skin glowed like a dim paper lantern; his facial features were indistinct except for the pitch-black suggestion of that wide, wide mouth. It moved as he spoke, in a crackling voice. "Okay. Don't freak out. I don't see him, or feel him. I think he's gone."

When no answer followed this reassurance, he twirled back like a beta fish to find Sam and Tucker openly staring at him. Something abruptly changed in the way he stood; though he'd never left the ground, he seemed to get heavier, settling more firmly into his gravitational niche. The light brightened and extinguished again, and human Danny was back in the other thing's place, green eyes like a glowstick in the dark.

Sam was the first to recover this time. She swallowed. "Well then." She swallowed again. "Uhh, I guess we'd better get rid of this circle. Before my dad gets home. Did anyone remember to pack Clorox wipes?"

Tucker didn't take his eyes off Danny. With painstaking slowness, he stepped out of the circle. Paused for a moment. Sprinted for the light switch.

Under fluorescents, it all seemed a little ridiculous: the arcane figures scrawled on the gym floor where Sam's mom did Zumba, the kid from school who joked that he made MUN a "paranormal activity," and even Tucker's own slowly subsiding heart palpitations. He laughed once, a little hysterical, a little embarrassed. "Nope." He turned, paused. "Hey, Danny?"

"Yeah?"

"Sch—...the ghost who was just here, he said he did something so you couldn't, like, portal him away or whatever. And then you had some sort of seizure and didn't transform. Um. Has that ever happened before?"

"...No."

"Huh," Sam said, traces of a shaky rattle still audible in her voice. "Maybe because he was a wechuge?"

"Wait, he was a what?"

Sam looked at a squinting Danny, suddenly nonplussed. "Well, we knew he was something. Tucker psychic-ed it."

"Tucker psychicked–" Danny ran a hand through his hair. Took a moment. Breathed. "For god's sake, share your information!"

~(*0*)~

"Seriously? Ghosts just kind of tell you things?!" Danny groaned. "This is so unfair. I complain about my vital condition not coming with an instruction manual, and then Tucker's ability is that he literally is a cosmic instruction manual. Or at least a scavenger hunt hints sheet."

"That's the way the cookie crumbles, my friend," Tucker ventured, perhaps less hesitantly than he might have earlier in the evening. Sam and Tucker were sitting on Sam's bed at 7 p.m., excavating a box of Double Stuf Oreos. Danny perched precariously above them, on top of Sam's tall headboard. Sam's room was mostly a purple-and-black nightmare, with occasionally the merest suggestion of taste-–the subtle lilac walls, for example, or the round rug woven from various textiles that added just enough color to deter accusations of dichromaticism. A striking painting of a field at late sunset was framed next to a poster of a middlingly popular death metal band hailing from somewhere with fjords, and on the adjoining wall a window revealed dark trees, their limbs swaying in a low wind. As Tucker made his way absently through another Oreo (sugary inside layer first, of course. He and Sam had fought many battles over this. Again, Sam had no taste), he watched his phone screen darken as the outgoing call to his cousin connected. He hit the speaker button with his pinky.

The ringer filled the room like the sound of a tiny, tinny jackhammer at work. Thunk. "Hey."

"Hey, Tristan," Tucker said false-cheerily. "How's life as a kebab?"

"That was extremely insensitive."

"Yeah, I just had to summon a ghostly cannibalistic monster because you procrastinated. I'm not feeling sympathetic."

"Damn, you summoned something?" Tristan sounded interested in spite of himself. "What did you learn?"

"Very little," Sam monotoned.

"Yep," Tucker confirmed. "We wanted to run some theories by you, though. 'Cuz we're–I guess we're kind of running out of ideas?"

"Go ahead."

Tucker bit his lip. This was going to be awkward. "Okay, so Sam suggested that the killer is going after people who have been convicted or suspected of crimes. Schulker and Technus both were, and you, and Sam said Amber was sketchy?"

There was a pause. "I've never been charged with anything."

"Yeah, but there was that thing with that girl...a while ago…."

Tristan's tone abruptly changed. "Are you kidding me?!" he gritted out. "I put that behind me, you know it was a mistaken—"

"I know, I know!" Tucker cut in. "But this killer might not know! Okay? That's all we're saying."

An audible breath came through the phone. Then another, this one less labored. "Oh. I guess...I guess that does kind of make sense...Amber was a low-level dealer for a big chunk of my grade and the one above it. Mostly prescription pills, but she could get you weed and some other stuff if you asked for it." Tristan paused. "But the only people who would really know that, and know about my thing…are people from school."

There was a horrified silence, and then Danny breathed, "A student?"

"Or a teacher. Or administration," Sam added.

Tristan chuckled softly, likely in disbelief at how preposterous their lives had become. Or maybe Tucker was just projecting. "Yeah…and I always caught a lot of whiffs of the paranormal around Casper. If I were you, I would start by just keeping an eye out for people acting weird." Tucker shifted on the bedspread. Sam held half an Oreo hovering near her head, apparently forgotten. "Uh, by the way, who's that with you?"

The temperature in the room dropped a few degrees. Literally. Tucker directed a dirty look at Danny, who cringed and mouthed "sorry." He cleared his throat and focused his attention back on the phone in his lap. "Nobody...nobody important."

Now Danny was glaring. Tucker shrugged exaggeratedly and mouthed "what did you want me to say?!" Sam snickered into her Oreo.

"Really?" Tristan started. "Because he's giving me the psychic heebie jeebies even just over the phone—"

"You've been super helpful, thanks so much, bye!" Sam leaned over Tucker's lap and ended the call.

Danny gathered in his socked feet and then stood up on Sam's headboard, pacing back and forth and absently running fingers along the ceiling a few inches above his head. Tucker had a sudden, wild impulse to throw an Oreo at him, and see if that would short out the freaky preternatural grace. "So it's someone at school," Danny reflected. "I don't think I'm gonna be much help since I don't know what's normal there yet, but I have a limited sense for when undead stuff is nearby, and I could do some invisible snooping."

That was a quick about-face–apparently Danny was now completely on board with their investigation. Tucker wasn't going to be the one to mention it. "How many kids are in the school, 550 or so?" he asked instead. "We can probably rule out freshmen, and maybe sophomores."

"Yeah, my money's on a teacher," Sam mused.

Danny stopped abruptly, frowning. "Wait, but how could it be someone from Amity if the first two murders happened in Chicago?"

Sam and Tucker groaned in unison. Sam bounced to her feet, almost sending the Oreo box to the floor, and turned to face the bed. "This is so irritating! Every time we come up with a decent theory, there's one or two details that completely destroy it. I don't know if it's because we just don't have enough information about the victims or because we're missing something big, but it's immensely frustrating." She gesticulated with extra force on "immensely."

Tucker took a calming breath and dug his toes into the fringe on Sam's rug. "I think we need to stop theorizing until we have some actual data. We're trying to fit the facts to our theories, but we don't even have enough facts." They considered for a minute. On Tucker's left, the windowsill halved a rising moon, and the silhouetted trees tossed more urgently, a few notches below panic. Just a few.

Danny dropped soundlessly to the floor. "Okay, so let's make a plan. We're going to get more information, we're going to figure it out, and then we're going to nail this scumbag to the wall."

Tucker waited a second, then prompted, "...By telling the police."

"The police. Right. Definitely."