The Book of Lies - Brad Meltzer [63]
“Oh, okay,” I say, crouching behind her as she shines the light and draws a horizontal line across the baseboard where the roof and floor meet. There’s a few ancient mousetraps and cobwebs and some tiny black droppings, but like the rest of the attic, it’s empty. “So instead of searching for old comic books, we’re now searching for God’s patterns?”
“The patterns are already there,” she says, squatting like a catcher on a baseball team and turning her sword of light up toward the dark wood rafters. “From federal agent, to the homeless van . . . why’s there such a need in your life to protect people? Why do you think you found your dad lying in that park last night? You think that’s all coincidence? Or better yet: that this is just some dumb search for Superman or the imagined Mark of Cain? You and your dad . . . This is your battle, Cal—the one challenge you’ll keep repeating until—”
She stops.
“What?” I ask, craning my neck up and following her gaze. “You find something?”
She points the light up at the rafters, not far from the top of the chimney.
“Serena, what is it?”
She doesn’t say a word.
“Serena—”
“There,” she whispers, pointing upward with the flashlight. I follow the flagpole of light up through the shadows of the rafters. Bits of dust sprinkle down like snow in a settling snow globe. But I don’t see—
Krrrrrk.
The sound is soft. Like a squeak, or some extra weight on a plank of wood.
She’s still silent.
“What?” I ask. “Is it a mouse?”
Thdddd.
To land that hard . . . That’s no mouse.
I jump at the sound. It’s up in the rafters.
Above our heads, on our far right, a narrow rain shower of dust cascades from the rafters. Whatever it is . . . we’re not alone in h—
Thddd-thdddd-thdddd.
Serena screams. The flashlight falls. And a thick black shadow swoops in, then disappears, leaving tiny waterfalls of dust on our right, then above us, then on our left.
Still hunched over, I grab Serena’s wrist and tug her back the way we came. The flashlight twirls behind us like spin the bottle, flickering bursts of light all across the attic. Up in the rafters, there’s one last thud. Straight ahead of us.
“Gahhh!” Serena yells, freezing right there.
This time, I see it also—lit by the attic entrance in the floor—two deep-set eyes: one glowing black, the other milky white, where it’s been injured. Behind it, a thick fleshy tail dangles down.
I catch my breath and almost laugh. Across from us, perched up on a rafter just past the open hole . . . “Serena, it’s just a possum.”
“I know what it is! I don’t like possums!”
“Can you please relax? Possums play dead; they don’t attack,” I insist, stepping forward to—
“Hsssss!”
“Y’hear that? That’s a hiss! It’s hissing!” she yells, her palms wide open and facing each other as though she’s holding the ends of an invisible loaf of bread. She cringes like my aunt when we once found a snake in the toilet.
“That’s not a hiss,” I tell her. “That was—”
“Hssssss!” it squeals again, baring tiny triangular teeth and raising its ears and fleshy tail.
“Okay, that part was a hiss,” I admit.
“It thinks we’re food!”
“Will you stop, it doesn’t—”
There’s another sound behind us—skrrch-skrrch-skrrch. At first, I almost missed it. But as I turn around and check the rafters, I see what the possum’s really after: the small straw-and-leaf nest that sits just above our heads. Two tiny shadows peek out. Aw, crap. “She wants her babies.”
“Babies!? Where!?” Serena shouts, wriggling wildly as if an army of millipedes were crawling underneath her skin. She tries to run, but she can’t. The possum’s directly above the hole in the attic floor. “Nuuuh! Cal, you have to do something!”
“Wait, what happened to facing life’s challenges and your nice big speech?”
“That had nothing to do with giant cannibalistic rats that just escaped from Middle Earth! Look at those mucous eyes! Please, Cal! I’m serious!”
I laugh again, but I hear that tone in her voice. Next to me, her whole body’s shaking. Her