As they trudged through Peach Hill Park for hours, Madison pretended she was not more athletic than the other two girls. She had a good idea of how to get to the top of this small mountain -- more of a hill with aspirations, thus the name -- but Skyler insisted she knew where she was going. Mackenzie implicitly agreed with whatever Skyler said and had since they all got to high school. As far as Madison could tell, that was the entirety of Mackenzie's personality now: Skyler's echo. Still, Madison wasn't about to openly defy Skyler, who managed to pack more intimidation into a pair of size zero cargo shorts than physics should have allowed.
Madison tried to convince herself against trusting her intuition that this wasn't the quickest route. She hadn't been to this park before, and a side path with a far steeper slope did not imply that it went up. When this failed, just as an experiment, she tried and failed to convince herself that she shouldn't be concerned that they continually ignored the colored trail markers or the occasional map nailed to a wooden sign. It was more scenic this way.
"Could we turn around?" Madison asked after some minutes of trudging, only to arrive at an intersection they had ignored twenty minutes before, wiping a bit of sweat from her brow with the hem of her Xir t-shirt before she could consider the indelicacy of it. Mackenzie and Skyler didn't think Xir was cool anymore, not since the singer went missing, but that made them so much cooler: the mystery of it all. The band was kind of cool when they were just a local band that started getting played everywhere -- even though the singer's mom and grandmom were also singers, so that was kind of nepotism. Now, they were legends. (Madison wasn't sure Kestrel, the lead singer, was a member of the 27 Club, but she had looked about that age.) Madison thought it must be worth hiding out or whatever Kestrel was doing right now, just to know that people would talk about you forever.
Wearing band t-shirts was a step up from last year when she wore the shirt of a different cria from Alpaca Tweenz every day until the other girls started calling her Thunder Tail, who was her favorite of the cria. The girls in her class started punctuating it with farting sounds, led by Skyler.
"No, Maddie," Skyler said with the hilt of her sarcasm, "We can't turn around. Unless you think you want to walk back on your own? Does the baby think she wants to do that? Hm?"
Mackenzie's eyes went momentarily wide at the blonde girl, her commander. Skyler shook her head, a silent convention Madison of which she was on the outside.
She knew better than to ask for clarification. Skyler had already tried to pin her as immature. She didn't need to have "paranoid" added to the charges against her. It was cool enough that they wanted to hang out with her. It would make her life in school about a thousand times easier if the other kids continued seeing her hanging out with Skyler. She wasn't going to be a wuss about it now.
Madison stopped under an apple tree to let the other girls catch up. This place was an orchard before being partly abandoned to the wild. There were paths mowed through, but the caretakers had no interest in harvesting the fruit, not when they allowed poison ivy to grow along the roots. She thought she heard something about pesticide soaking the ground, but she didn't give much credence to what might as well have been an urban legend meant to keep people from wandering too far from the paths. Madison reached up for an apple that, while not cosmetically pleasing, tasted fresh and crisp upon the first bite. Seeing this, Skyler rolled her eyes all but audibly. After a moment of checking Skyler's expression, Mackenzie gave a theatrically exasperated sigh that ended with the word, "Lame."
Madison checked her watch. The Hello Kitty on the face assured her that they had only an hour more before her mother would be picking them up at the foot of the hill. "Guys..." she began nervously.
Skyler cut her off with an annoyed shake of her head. "Madison, do you even want to hang out with us?"
"Yeah..."
"Then why do you keep whining and trying to stop us from enjoying ourselves? This is exactly how you were in middle school, you know. Just sucking the life out of everything."
Madison bit her lip. "I didn't mean to... to suck, but my mom-"
"She'll wait for us, right?" asked Skyler, the venom gone from her expression, replaced in a moment by a sweetness that almost glistened. "Here, give me your phone."
Madison fished it out of her backpack and handed it over, eager to please. Skyler wrote something on it with her deft thumbs, then put it into her own pocket.
"Give me my phone!" Madison insisted, a whine in her voice despite herself.
"No, not until we get to the top of the hill," Skyler answered, hefting her backpack and walking fast. "Maybe move your fat thighs, and we'll manage that before dawn, hm?"
"What did you write to my mother?" she asked when she closed the gap between them, which took all of four steps. Hefting her enormous backpack, Mackenzie toddled after. It seemed ridiculous that the other girls lugged such huge bags up here for a walk that was only supposed to take a few hours. Madison brought only a water bottle and a few granola bars and felt overpacked.
Skyler gave a toothy smirk, her blue eyes bright yet empty. "It told her that this was taking longer than we thought and she should give us another hour."
As if on cue, the phone began buzzing. Skyler lifted it out again, looked at the screen, and put it back into her pocket as Madison reached for it.
Madison thought better of arguing. She continued trudging up the hill, hoping one of these paths would take them to the top. Then she could have her phone, and the two most popular freshmen in her high school would stop snickering behind her back.
It was another half hour before they reached the apex, at which was a bench in a clearing of trees. Still, the view was humbling, even to Madison's fourteen-year-old mind. She began wondering aloud what landmarks and buildings in the distance might be, which mountains they faced, when Mackenzie leaped on top of her, knocking her to the ground. Madison's head hit on a fist-sized rock. Her hair grew wet from a gushing head wound.
Mackenzie straddled her, her legs clenched around Madison's thighs to prevent her from moving. Skyler gripped Madison's wrists above her head, her candy-pink nails digging into her flesh. Madison wriggled, but she wasn't frightened until Mackenzie pulled a kitchen knife, sharp and thin, from her backpack and placed it on Madison's stomach, just below her ribs. She writhed away, the blade scratching into her with almost no effort, digging into her to provoke a rivulet of blood to slide into her shirt.
"Tell me to do it," Mackenzie demanded, looking at Skyler, almost desperate. "Tell me to cut her open so that Mr. Nobody will take us with him." She dared a look down at Madison's face but consciously avoided her eyes. "Tell me to make us worthy in his sight."
Skyler looked between the prone girl and Mackenzie, holding the knife in a white-knuckled grip. Which looked more panicked by what was happening? "Do it," she finally said, pushing Madison's arms into the grass enough to scrape her own knuckles, looking away as the knife plunged in again and again, as Madison's screams echoed unheard over the miles.
"Seventeen times," Veronica Vale said again. "It is nothing short of a miracle of ineptitude that they managed to miss every major organ."
Jason Coran made a noncommittal noise in his throat, continuing to drive north, his mind more occupied by the road than her reiteration of the case, not a week old. Better papers than theirs -- and he would struggle to name a worse one that wasn't outright fiction or propaganda -- had already reported every available salacious morsel. If he turned the radio on -- even to a station that was not talk radio -- someone would be there to rehash dirt to help further imprint on him the horror of what had happened to that little girl. Still, Veronica was a reporter, though she might have corrected him had he said aloud that she was a journalist, and Jason knew they liked to talk.
"I'm not saying that little Madison Monroe is in the clear. Short of Biblical intervention, you don't get to play the part of a cutting board and walk out of the hospital the next day. Critical condition, last I heard, but responsive. Not saying much that isn't obvious or worth hearing her whine -- god, does that girl's voice grate on me -- but responsive."
"Good," Jason answered when the silence between them seemed to take on a heaviness, and he realized he was supposed to say something to confirm he was still participating in this conversation. "Lucky girl."
"Yeah, lucky with enough holes in her, you could strain spaghetti. More like the girl holding the knife had never cut anything more than cake in her stupid little life."
"Kids can be cruel," he replied, not thinking. He wasn't sure if the content of what he said mattered to her, so long as it allowed her to continue her rant.
"It wasn't just kiddy cruelty. I was a raging bitch at that age, and don't think I brought a fileting knife into the woods." She was quiet for a moment; the only sounds were the drone of the van on the road, the cars on the Taconic passing them at intervals, until she continued, "Supposedly, this was all for Mr. Nobody."
He knew this. Everyone knew this because it was the juicy headline for articles that didn't need anything more. "Isn't that from a video game or movie or something?" he said, but he wasn't sure it convinced her.
"I mean, yes, but not at first. He is Bloody Mary or Candyman. The only difference is, these kids killed over Mr. Nobody. I don't think anyone cares enough to do that for other games you play to make your friends piss their PJs."
He cleared his throat. "Except they didn't. They tried to kill. I'm not buying that it was some spooky story. It isn't video games, not heavy metal or rap. It's people wanting to kill. Nothing more." As if to punctuate this or abridge the conversation, he pushed on the radio, but the station was static.
"Little girls don't want to kill. Be vicious to one another, absolutely, but not like that out of nowhere." She pushed the radio off again. "It's always stories that get in people's heads. You call it religion, and you stab someone over imagining a fictional character differently than you do."
"But to become proxies of a creepy meme? That's not exactly equivalent to a holy war, Veronica. You are being needlessly reductionist. There is a dramatic difference between religious strife and stupid kids."
"The only difference is that it is so new."
He scoffed, but he didn't feel as dismissive as he sounded. "I don't think anyone is going to spend their Sundays at the church of Mr. Nobody."
"They might spend their Sundays in a hospital. When the police arrested them, the chubby one, Mackenzie, said they did all this to prove to the world that Mr. Nobody is real."
Jason scoffed again. This time felt authentic, as though he could build confidence into these through repetition. "Good job there, kids. I don't think real things need the intervention of tweens."
"Hey, we're talking about it. That makes Mr. Nobody a bit weightier, right?"
He pressed on the gas, though they didn't need the speed. He could no longer see cars before and behind him. The engine revving soothed him, which was enough. "The last thing we need is for another kid to decide to stab up their friends because of this stupid ass story."
Veronica shrugged one shoulder, sitting back in her seat, her head on the window. "It will keep us employed."
"I'd rather we keep our jobs by talking about sewer gnomes and Ratman's wedding to the queen of the cave people."
Veronica sucked in her cheeks. As she had made clear on more than one occasion, she had a Master's in journalism from New York University. She was as far from the top of her class as she was from the bottom, partly because her means of research crossed the line into outright unethical. She only had a devotion to the truth, but not the subjects of her interviews. She would browbeat, lie, and seduce, but she got the answers she needed to take down powerful men and make the political hit list of both major parties.
Her professional downfall came when she made the mistake of believing she had a lead that was too good to be true, a memo that could cripple a foreign president. She acquired it by extorting a married man with pictures of him having a tryst with a floozy, conveniently played Veronica herself.
The internet ripped Veronica to shred for lacking a specialization in the typography of the mid-twentieth century, for not recognizing the minutia of fixed spaces and serifs that could not exist in a typewriter. She was mocked widely, discredited, and fired from her paper with no recourse but to crawl into a hole and die.
She did something worse. After the final indignity of being blackballed by every respectable publication in North America, the Weekly Inquiring Sun, a supermarket tabloid turned website, offered her a job at about a third the salary and a hundredth the prestige. She wrote about women married to Bigfoots, alien abductions, diet tips via witchcraft, and celebrity death conspiracies.
She only started working for the Weekly Inquiring Star Because it allowed her press credentials. She had no illusions. This rag did not hire her because they had respect for her as a reporter or a person. They hired her because doing so got them headlines in legitimate publications. It was. one more kick to Veronica's pride in publicly alerting the world she had gone from intimidating world leaders to explaining why Elvis was still alive and writing songs for Tupac.
She began as a skeptic, but she relented slowly to the truth. She did not fall whole hog into believing the dross beneath her byline, no matter what stands her employer contractually required her to take. As far as she was concerned, readers who subscribed to the tabloid for any reason other than to mock it were mentally ill or stupid. She decided that her job would be to reach this one percent with the unlikeliest thing of all: the truth, which she was in a unique position to provide as a disgraced woman. It was hard to believe that all these strange things happening in the world amounted to nothing more than coincidence. There was a great deal of strangeness out there, hiding in the tall grass of the mundane. It was her job to mow it down to reveal the genuine reasons.
She wasn't delusional. She did not believe she stood a good chance of being heard even if she found proof. She had the luxury that the paper would publish anything she produced so long as it was compelling. Her editor had not seen fit to employ much oversight in a year and was genuinely surprised she continued attempting journalism in the mire of the paranormal. Her colleagues regarded her with resentment or awe, depending on how comfortable they were with their own journalistically benighted state and the degree to which they bought into the lunacy. That is aside from Jason, her photographer and de facto assistant, who treated her with respect and sass in equal measure.
She doubted her editor believed word one of what he published, but he understood money. Where other tabloids fell to the compelling force of the internet, dying in droves, the Weekly Inquiring Sun grew stronger with Veronica on staff. She wondered if his refusal to fall wholly into farce was why they remained afloat. The publication seemed like a glimpse into a better world, where most anything had to make sense if you talked about it enough. There was a just god out there who kept dead celebrities alive and promised simple salvation to the devout and the credulous.
"People are pushing for the girls to be tried as adults, given the savagery," she said ten minutes later, as though the conversation had continued outside her head. Jason had assumed, her lids heavy from the sunlight and knowing she was in his capable enough hands, she had fallen asleep. "Maybe not murder," she continued, "closer to intentional homicide. They won't end up in the electric chair, that's for damn sure. Not in New York. Little white girls don't face real consequences, even ones who carve up their friend like a turkey."
He wouldn't take her bait as to the racism of the judicial system since he had no leg to stand on there. "They have a good chance of leniency based on stupidity, if not insanity." A thought struck him, and though it irritated him not to know her answer to something, he asked, "Do you think they really believe this?"
"They had backpacks with granola bars and photos of their family."
"Mr. Nobody stories are all 'Oh, here is this creepy historical event. Look, Mr. Nobody was overturning chemical tanks at Bhopal and directing airplanes to military bases.' Who would buy that?" After he said this, he knew that he had tipped his hand. He had done more research than she liked from him, but it was unavoidable. He couldn't continue playing off as though he just thought Mr. Nobody was from a video game.
"Teenage girls," Veronica answered, whip quick. "I was one, remember. We believe in anything to make our lives exciting. I mean, Salem witch hunts prove that."
"But this isn't a witch hunt. We aren't talking about some ageless folk myth. That cat-faced monster is only maybe five or six years old, right? He's not public domain. He's still owned by whoever made that first picture of him. That's why we don't have a trilogy of shitty movies about him on cable TV, only amateur stuff on the internet."
"Yeah, but that guy, Joey James, publicly said he doesn't feel like Mr. Nobody's creator. He feels like his manager because the ideas were already out there and not in his control."
"Well, that's going to spread a myth worse."
"Whatever else the girls meant to do, they are doing a fine job of that," said Veronica, sounding excited. "Do you know what the text said? The one Skyler sent to Madison's mother?"
He did, but he thought it better to play along again in hopes she would forget his previous display of awareness. "What?"
"'I belong to Mr. Nobody now. I didn't want to go with him, but his smile terrified me and comforted me.'"
A chill worked its way to the back of Jason's neck. In the two years of his partnership with Veronica, he had more of these creepy feelings than he had in the thirty-one years prior. "He is a Photoshop that losers on the internet build stories around. Without a kind of salvation attached to him, how will he take on the... the magnetism of religion? Everyone will forget him in a couple of years at most, you'll see."
"Unless people kill for him."
Jason wet his lips in consideration, reciting, "'Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.'"
"Who said that?"
"Zora Neale Hurston."
"Damn, that would make a good opening for this piece." Veronica sniffed. "Eh, we'll run it past legal."
"It's just a game of make-believe that went too far, Veronica. Let's not take a scary story seriously, okay?"
"Everything that happens to us that isn't a natural process is a story. It is all that gives us meaning to continue living. Without stories, we are just animals fulfilling base urges. It sounds boring as shit to go through our days without constructing a narrative to make sense. Yes, the process can go wrong, very wrong, but that doesn't make the process itself bad. The girls did all they could to satisfy their narrative. It's not normal to kill people, but I'm not going to pretend it couldn't make sense. To them, it probably made perfect sense. What we are trying to do now, that's satisfying a narrative just as much. We want answers because they will make our world simpler. It will give us an ending to the story so we can pretend that this isn't the sort of thing that is allowed to happen."
"I read Stephen King as a kid, stuff way more twisted than that, too. It would have been insanity to take away my library card, to force the library to take the blame if I axe murdered my family after reading The Shining. We're journalists," he said, seeing the fractional smile on Veronica's face at the word and his claiming it for himself. He was not a journalist, only a talented photographer without a significant portfolio and expert tag-along.
"What's the other spin? That the girls are mentally ill. It takes a special kind of broken to stab someone. Psychiatrists will goddamn vivisect the girls in the coming weeks. We'll see how broad a label they get depending on the quality of the doctors and their parents' lawyers. It is intellectually lazy to say they're mentally ill because the only detail we know about them is that they committed an act of startling violence. People do that every day, and they aren't all shipped off to the asylum. We give some of them medals. "
Jason laughed at her cynicism without meaning to. He still readily took her bait, but a part of him liked to. She had decided they were friends the first day she met him, which he had taken for misplaced flirtation, but that wasn't it. She had a forceful personality -- she could not have ruined her career otherwise -- and wouldn't accept contradiction, no matter how he tried.
"There is a small difference between these girls trying to kill for an internet demon and, if I am catching your implication right, police and soldiers killing because the state ordered them to."
"Either way, people are acting worshipfully toward something abstract, aren't they?"
"If you don't want to get your article shit-canned, leave that out of the final. Boss Man likes the cops."
"I don't think these girls are crazy," Veronica said, as though this were the argument and Jason was on the losing side.
"Then what are they?"
"Playing out the narrative." Her eyes widened as much as her smile. "That's exactly it. They are playing. Hear me out. To them, this was all a game they had never announced as a game. Admitting you don't actually believe in spooky things isn't fun. That's the whole point of the Weekly Inquiring Sun when you come down to it. Here you have something perfectly ridiculous on its face, something that sends those chills and lets you pretend you live in a more exciting and purposeful version of the world because that makes you more exciting. So, they were both, Skyler and Mackenzie, playing this game, not knowing when the other would chicken out—not really knowing how the game would end. This wasn't the first time those girls brought people up there. They'd been doing it since the summer, so you'd think they would know the trails better. What I think--and this is pure speculation--is that they were playing this game each time, but they always backed down before the irrevocable consequences."
"What made Madison different then?"
Veronica's lips quirked down as she thought about this. "Nothing made her different. It wasn't about her, except maybe that she wanted to be accepted by these two little sociopaths so badly that she went for a hike. Did you read Mackenzie's confession?"
"Skimmed," Jason admitted.
"She said they meant to sacrifice Madison at least three other times that day. When they got to the park, they took her into this dark grove with all these old vines, but they didn't attack her. Then they said they were going to kill her in the Port-o-Potty at the bottom because the blood would all pour into the bottom."
"So why did they do it at the top? Because it would take longer to find the body?"
"No, you don't get it. It happened there because that's when Mackenzie asked permission. She hadn't before."
"Excuse me?"
"She needed to get the order. You have one girl giving the order but not stabbing, and the other is stabbing at someone else's order. In their minds, neither one is to blame, you see?"
He did, but he disagreed. "'I was just following orders'?"
"It worked, didn't it?"
"So, you've gone from these girls being monsters to Nazis."
"Hey, that's fair and balanced when it comes to our paper, bub. You'll be lucky if Boss Man doesn't make you draw swastikas on their foreheads. That's what's been getting to me about this. It isn't the photogenic culprits. It is that, given the right circumstances and a good story, this could happen to a shocking large number of impressionable and bored kids at almost any time."
"That's your headline: Could Your Child Be a Mr. Nobody Killer? The Answer May Surprise You."
"Given the right impetus, they could be."
Jason let off the gas, seeing the turnoff for Poughkeepsie in a mile. "I would hope not."
"Yeah, but it's not a mental illness. It's not some website. It isn't something we can just shut down and feel good about ourselves."
"If that was her confession, those girls had serious malice aforethought. You can't pretend you are mentally ill with planning like that."
"You know how parents check their kids' candy at Halloween because someone might put razor blades in apples or poison in unwrapped cookies?"
"My parents used to take it to the police stations to get x-rayed," Jason admitted. "It always seemed a little lighter on peanut butter cups when it got back."
"But you never actually had a razor blade in there. You never got poisoned, right?"
He furrowed his brow. "Of course not."
"Me either, but towns perpetuate this legend that kids are taking their lives into their hands for daring to eat any candy that an adult hasn't examined," she said. "But it did happen once in the seventies. This guy took out a life insurance policy on his kid and then put Pixy Stix full of strychnine in his bag. He hoped the kid would eat them, kick off, and he could have a fat payout while blaming a stranger."
"So, like with Mr. Nobody, a kid is in the hospital because of an unscrupulous person and a compelling story," said Jason. "The difference is that the candy myth is out there to protect children. Mr. Nobody isn't protecting anyone, except from having a urine-free bed."
"Maybe, yeah. And these two girls are a part of this myth now. They succeeded, didn't they?"
Jason nodded because she had made her point, and, before they investigated, he hoped she would not need to make it again. He was only a photographer, but she had a way of convincing him enough to get the pictures she wanted rather than the sort that objective journalism would require. It was as though thinking about an outcome made it more likely to happen. When dealing with a perforated freshman, there was no reality he wanted to have at his feet.
Jason began to turn off the exit. Veronica ordered him to stay on the road. "We're going to Red Hook."
"Why? The attempted killing happened here. That's where the story is."
"So, that's well in hand," she said more breezily than the situation demanded. She had this plan from the moment Jason sat in the driver's seat but waited until this last minute to unfurl it so he could not argue more. "We aren't going to overturn any stone that the big guys haven't there. No one will even let us into the park with a camera, so don't lie to yourself. Red Hook, though? It has had a crystal tree, mass killings, a supposed Bigfoot nest, and bugfuck weather. What we are looking for isn't in Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie is only a symptom. The disease is a few exits up."
"What disease?"
Veronica unfolded a ragged picture of an awkward-looking young lady, a competent sketch, which she stuck in front of his face as he barreled down the road at seventy-five miles an hour. He glanced at it and shoved it out of the way of the windshield.
"Who is that?"
"Someone called Shane. I got this in an email years ago, but it vanished from the internet after I printed it out. This is where we should start investigating. We need to get Shane in a room and beat her until she explains herself."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
