Chapter 6: The Thing Incident at Nevermore
Clack. Clack. Clack.
Wednesday pushed the noise out of her head and let her fingers find their rhythm on the typewriter keys — steady, deliberate, merciless. Brass keys. Antique machine. The only truly reliable relationship she had maintained at Nevermore so far.
She was currently writing the death scene of her novel's secondary antagonist, who would be dismantled — slowly, poetically — by an apparatus of her own design involving corroded clock gears and a very specific tilt of the platform. It required focus. Precise attention to the mechanics of suffering.
Clack. Clack. Cla—
"AAAAAGH — WEDNESDAY! HELP! I'M DYING! THIS IS IT! THIS IS HOW I GO!"
The scream detonated from the direction of the bathroom with the force and subtlety of a car alarm at three in the morning.
Wednesday's fingers stopped. Hovered above the keys.
She breathed once, carefully, through her nose.
He cannot go a single day, she thought, with a kind of exhausted precision, without creating a situation that constitutes a public disturbance.
"WEDNESDAY! PLEASE! I CANNOT GET IT OFF! IT HAS CLAIMED ME! IT WON'T LET GO!"
The screaming intensified, accompanied by a wet, rhythmic smacking sound she couldn't immediately classify.
She placed her fingers back on the keys.
Clack. Cla—
The bathroom door blew open.
Vic came through it like a man launched from a cannon — face stretched in an expression of genuine, full-commitment terror — and made it approximately four steps before his pajama bottoms, bunched around his ankles, converted his sprint into something closer to a desperate controlled stumble.
The pajamas, for the record, were printed with distorted smiley faces above the text Good Morning, Despair.
They were currently serving as ankle restraints.
Wednesday's typewriter went silent.
Not because she was embarrassed. Wednesday Addams did not embarrass. She had sat through her parents' anniversary tango performances, her brother Pugsley's experimental detonations, and a family dinner that had involved a live medium and a tureen of something that looked back. Embarrassment was not a state she was capable of achieving.
What she was experiencing was a complete and total system failure — a brief, unprecedented moment where her mind produced no output whatsoever, like a switchboard that had been handed too many calls at once.
She identified this as suboptimal.
"WEDNESDAY! IT'S GOT A GRIP! WHAT IS THIS THING?!"
Vic stumbled toward her, trying simultaneously to move forward and look behind himself, achieving neither goal successfully.
Wednesday's rationality began its reboot sequence. Her hand moved automatically toward the nearest sharp implement —
— and then her eyes moved past Vic's face and found the actual source of the problem.
Attached to his left side, five fingers dug in with the commitment of someone who had found exactly what they were looking for and had no intention of letting go, was a severed hand.
It patted him. Rhythmically. Smugly.
Wednesday recognized it immediately.
Thing.
Her parents' emissary. The one she'd occasionally detected in peripheral vision since arriving at Nevermore — a presence at the edge of rooms, patient and watchful and entirely her parents' idea of subtle. It had apparently decided that today was the day for a formal introduction, and had selected this venue and format accordingly.
The flicker of something that had briefly passed through Wednesday's expression — something she would not acknowledge and could not name — evaporated completely, replaced by a vast, echoing numbness.
The production was not finished, however.
From somewhere at Vic's lower back, Venom surged up — that familiar black tide assembling itself into jaw and teeth and gleaming eyes — and Wednesday braced for the chaos component.
Venom was not panicking.
Venom was delighted.
One tendril held Vic's phone at an angle that could only be described as deliberately cinematic. A second, smaller tendril was actively working the screen.
"Hold that expression, Vic — yes, exactly that one — keep struggling, more authentic—" Venom directed, its gravel voice vibrating with the specific joy of someone who has found their calling. "Caption: 'Mysterious Entity Haunts Nevermore Student, Exclusive Footage' — hashtag CampusMystery, hashtag WhatIsHappening, hashtag JustNevermoreThings—"
It made an actual camera click sound with its mouth.
"VENOM! GET IT OFF ME! DON'T FILM IT!"
"We're rolling! This goes viral! TikTok split — sixty-forty, my sixty—"
"That is NOT—"
Wednesday sat very still and watched all three of them.
Her left temple had developed a pulse.
The Gothic aesthetic she had spent fourteen years cultivating — the precise architecture of darkness, the careful construction of an atmosphere that communicated do not approach — was being systematically dismantled in real time by a pants-less boy, a celebrity-obsessed alien, and a family member's disembodied hand with apparent boundary issues.
She breathed in. The air tasted like poor decisions.
Then she spoke.
"Vic."
One word. Flat. The temperature in the room dropped two degrees.
Every sound stopped.
"If that pale, apparently sunlight-allergic backside of yours comes within three feet of me—" her gaze moved over him with the detached clinical interest of a coroner reviewing paperwork — "I will instruct Thing to take up permanent residence. It will file hourly reports. I will receive them at midnight. In Morse code."
She shifted to Venom, whose filming tendril had frozen in place.
"If that footage appears on any platform — TikTok, YouTube, a community bulletin board, anywhere — I will locate every chocolate reserve you have. Including the ones behind the toilet tank." She let a beat pass. "I will melt them. Individually. In front of you. And I will use the remains to fertilize the most aggressively ordinary sunflowers on academy grounds."
She turned, finally, to Thing.
Thing had gone still. It was standing on its index and middle fingers in what was, for a disembodied hand, a fairly readable posture of someone who knew they had miscalculated.
"You," Wednesday said, her voice dropping into something quieter and therefore significantly more dangerous, "will remove yourself from my roommate's immediate vicinity. Right now. And then you will explain — in whatever method of communication my parents equipped you with — exactly what your assignment is. And why your operational judgment is apparently nonexistent."
The room did not breathe.
Vic's wail had lodged itself somewhere in his throat and could not find the exit.
Venom's tendril descended, slowly, to Vic's side. The phone screen went dark.
Thing released its grip with a small, definitive plop, dropped to the floor, walked on two fingers to the foot of Wednesday's bed, and sat there in the posture of a child waiting outside the principal's office.
Vic stood exactly where he was. Then, with the dawning awareness of someone returning to their body after a significant interval, he began the process of pulling his pajamas up, face cycling through several colors in quick succession.
Venom retreated into his collar, muttering something about "creative censorship" and "the death of independent media."
Wednesday sat back down at her typewriter.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
The rhythm resumed. Clean. Steady. As if the preceding four minutes had been a minor technical interruption and not a complete assault on every standard she held.
The room settled into the sounds of Vic restoring his dignity, Venom chewing audibly on what appeared to be its professional ambitions, and Thing shifting with quiet guilt against the floorboards.
At an angle that none of them could see, the corner of Wednesday's mouth moved.
Barely. Almost nothing. Less than a millimeter.
This place, she thought, her fingers finding the keys again, is an absolute disaster.
A nonstop, relentless, structurally unsound disaster built from one idiot boy, one shameless alien, and apparently my parents' idea of adequate supervision.
Her fingers paused above the brass keys for just a moment.
And I am, she acknowledged, with the reluctant precision of someone entering an uncomfortable finding into the record, beginning to adapt to it.
That, she decided, was the most alarming development at Nevermore since her arrival.
She resumed typing, and said nothing else, and did not look at any of them, and the corner of her mouth did not move again.
Probably.
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