Teddy

I snuck out of the pizzeria in the middle of the night, while everyone was sleeping. I haven’t done this in a while, but I worked out a pretty good workaround for escaping the boarded up doors and windows thing.

No, I’m not going to tell you. It’s my secret.

But Once I was outside, I wasn’t really in the mood to walk around anymore. I truthfully didn’t know what I was in the mood to do. So, instead I climbed up on the roof of the pizzeria and sit down. Seemed like a lot of effort to get out to only decide to go up and sit on top of the pizzeria.

I know. It’s just one of those restless nights, I guess.

But I didn’t have to wait long to find something to do, actually, it didn’t take long for me to find someone to follow.

From the side of the pizzeria, Mort emerged from the shadows. He was walking kind of slow, kinda like he was in a daze, and he started shuffling his feet in a most unexpected direction.

Toward his old house.

I crawled down from the roof of the pizzeria and stayed back quite a ways, following the slow moving gnome in front of me. I was pretty sure Mort was sleepwalking. I was also kind of worried that he might get attacked. So I pull out my bow and arrow, notching the arrow just in case I needed to throw sharp sticks fast.

Though he was heading toward his house, he’s taking a kind of a shortcut way, not really going the regular route of streets or sidewalks. Which is smart. It’s easy enough to get attacked by monster as it is. You don’t want to give them an obvious… an easy attack zone.

Whatever, you know what I mean. It’s the middle of night and I’m not used to being up this late anymore.

But something happened when we got to Mort’s Street. He was walking down the sidewalk of the wrong side of the street.

I felt my eyebrows bunch, and my forehead scrunched up, and I’m looking around thinking, What the hell is he doing?

I’m not overly close, but when I see him climbing up what’s left of the stairs to his neighbor’s porch, I speed up. This was the porch of Mrs. Hendershot. Her house exploded, so there was nothing left of it—except for the steps up to and including the floor of the porch.

The porch that used to have her beloved gnome, Winston perched on it.

Mort, Mrs. Hendershot, and Winston, had a long, antagonistic history.

One of Mort’s only signs of teenage mischief/rebellion had come in his hatred for Mrs. Hendershot’s garden gnome.

He had taken to stealing the thing off her porch. He would hide it on her property, or hide it on someone else’s property—sometimes painting things on him like a mustache, or repainting him altogether to make him look like something else.

Like a penis.

Let’s just say that Mrs. Hendershot disliking Mort would be a huge understatement. She’d called the police on numerous occasions, and the only thing that had saved My friend from truly getting in trouble with the law was the fact that the gnome had only cost $19.95. A good $20 less than the threshold for an actual petty crime.

This did not quell Mrs. Hendershot’s ire toward Mort, and she had spent a lot of time complaining to his parents about him.

Oddly enough, about a year ago, my friend simply stopped with the garden gnome chicanery. Mort still hated him, and wanted to do things to him that he chronicled often and loudly during our video game chats. But he never again bothered with the ugly.

Interesting side note: about a week ago Wood told me that Georgina was related somehow to Mrs. Hendershot. And now, watching Mort climb up the steps to Mrs. Hendershot’s demolished porch, hitting his knees and crying out in a mournful voice that was not his own, that he missed his Gertrude. Well, I was starting to think Mrs. Hendershot wasn’t strictly non-magical. Definitely not a Muggle. And maybe she had done something to the gnome that my friend was now inhabiting. Something that had kept him from harassing the gnome any further.

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I would have to ask Georgina to look into this personally. And that was something I really, truly didn’t want to do. Truthfully, I didn’t want to go anywhere near my brother’s girlfriend. For one thing, how close they had become was pretty creepy. I blamed myself for not having seen this coming. Wood said that he had had a crush on her for years. I should’ve seen that. That’s what brothers do, right?

Maybe I could have stopped it before… well, before this all had happened.

But I wouldn’t have been able to stop the aliens. And though it creeped me out, I would never want to take away my brother’s happiness.

Even with a psychopath.

Either way, I was going to have to go talk to her. Because the voice coming out of my friend’s mouth was not his. And the uncensored grief that poured out of the little gnome made me take a step back.

I walked a few feet away. Winston deserved some privacy.

About a half hour went by when he suddenly stopped talking. I watched the gnome walk away from Mrs. Hendershot’s house, and followed him all the way back to the pizzeria. He ducked into the side of the building somehow—I guess he had his own secrets—and disappeared.

I shook my head. Should have known that in this screwed up world that there would be more than one thing living inside that gnome. But it also made me sad. Sad for Mort, that he had someone in there with him that he had no idea about. And sad for Winston.

I would guess that he had absolutely no agency over what happened to him and his body when Mort was awake.

And Mort barely ever slept.

***

About an hour later, I was walking around downtown, past town hall, past the police station, and past the somewhat glowing crater that had been the library.

I stopped to pay my respects to my favorite people in the world, besides my friends. The librarians who had died there.

Mrs. Brown.

Miss Pataki.

And Ms. Blankenship.

I found walking around town alone pretty strange. I used to walk around town by myself all the time, day or night. But that was before Mort… well, before he came back to life?

Resurrected?

Went gnome?

But since he came back I really hadn’t gone off on my own. And I don’t regret that. Having my friends back together again was all I really wanted.

I’d love to have my parents back again… to have everyone and everything back again. But that wasn’t going to happen.

I just had to be grateful that somehow I’d gotten Mort back, and all my closest friends were still alive and with me.

My leveling up, though, has definitely taken a nosedive. I’m still many levels above my friends, but I need to be at a much higher level if I want to be able to protect them.

So, as I crept around town, I kept my eyes peeled, and before I knew it I had found myself a small, though virulent, band of pseudo trolls dwelling in what was left to the salt pile just past the police station.

This is where we ran into Georgina for the first time, and her scary as hell cat. It was also where we had to fight the giant mama and babies Minecraft spiders.

I had to admit that had been pretty cool.

But these little pseudo trolls, who looked more like overgrown troll dolls, topped off with giant rainbow colored hair, were just strong enough that killing them would give me a nice level boost.

They fought violently and valiantly. But in the end, I harpoon them all with my arrows, chopped off the head of one of their number that was trying to strangle me, and then spent a few moments collecting my spent arrows.

Waste not, want not. Plus, I would need them later on for killing something down the line. That I was sure of.

On my way back to the pizzeria, I saw a ghostly glow coming from the alley we had found Clyde the electro chicken in last week. I wasn’t about to go on there looking for a fight. But a few moments later I did see that it wasn’t the chicken back there, but the glowing cube thing that floats around and devours things while they’re sleeping.

Just the thought of that made me want to scratch myself all over.

So I moved off, crossing across town so I was nowhere near the glowing cube, and before I knew it I was back at the pizzeria.

When I checked my dad’s old pocket watch, I realized I had only been gone for about an hour and a half, total. But it had been long enough to make me miss my friends.

I always missed my friends.

When I’d been at Mrs. Hendershot’s house, I had gone out on my way not to look across the street at Mort’s wreck of a house. I had gone there every day that he had been dead. I had stood outside that house, and I hadn’t gone inside. Not since the first time, not since I’d found his body.

Something inside me had broken that day. and I was sure it was never going to heal. Then he came back. Not completely as himself, but inside that little gnome.

I had known immediately. But even with him back, that something inside me that had broken has yet to heal.

I sat on the front step of the pizzeria, and I pulled a piece of paper out of my inventory. It’s a short story that Mort had wrote back in seventh grade. Mrs. Everhart had pinned on their refrigerator with a magnet. She had been so proud she had never taken it down.

It was about him and his friends, playing video games, and then getting sucked into a magical world with dragons, monsters, and aliens.

I remembered when he’d written it. I thought it was strange that he had thrown in the aliens alongside all the other pure fantasy aspects of dragons and monsters, and castles and such.

But now, reading it again, I had to wonder if my friend had seen this all coming.