The Devil's Cauldron by Michael Wallace Page A

Ariel has a fish tail! I like WALL-E. He isn’t a princess, he’s a robot.”
    She didn’t say anything and he felt stupid. Worse, a few of the other residents looked at him. A bald man in a wheelchair muttered something in Spanish.
    “I’m not from Costa Rica,” Eric said, feeling testy. The man was making fun of him, he knew it. “I don’t speak that, I speak American.”
    “He said you should go look for your team,” another resident said. She talked with a funny accent. “Meggie can’t answer you.”
    “Who is Meggie? Oh, Meggie!”
    Excited, Eric reached into his pocket and pulled out Wes’s cell phone. He turned it on. It glowed up at him, but he stared, confused. In a moment it went dark and still he looked at it. What? What was he supposed to do? Frustration bubbled up inside him and he ran his fingers through his hair. Several long seconds passed and he pulled at the roots until his scalp hurt.
    Most of the time Eric was happy and cheerful. He wasn’t like his friend Bruce, who got kicked out of the group home because he broke all the plates. And he was pretty smart compared to some of the people at Riverwood.
    But he wasn’t fooled. He knew what he was. He’d known for a long time. Sometimes, he could almost understand. Things would be there—conversations, stories, movies—and he would listen and stare and almost, almost grasp it.
    “I’m a dumb-dumb,” he muttered. “A stupid dumb-dumb.”
    He felt guilty saying it. “Wes told me not to say that,” he told the lady. “It’s bad for you. That’s called SELF-ESTEEM.”
    Then he remembered one of the other things his brother told him and shut up. “When you’re in there, you can’t talk out loud, Ruk,” Wes had said. “You have to talk inside your head. Always inside your head.”
    Eric promised, of course he had. But he forgot. He always forgot.
    “Find the pretty lady,” Wes said before they brought him to this place to go on a secret spy mission. “This is her picture. Her name is—” And here Eric’s memory went hazy, together with the other things Wes told him. Lots of important stuff, Eric was sure. “When you find her, take out my phone and—”
    And what? It was important. He remembered the gleam in his brother’s eyes and the way Becca squeezed his hand and told him . . . something. Something important.  
    Eric put away the cell phone. He could call his brother later. Right now, he had to think like Sherlock Holmes.
    He was almost distracted again by the butterflies that swirled around his head like blue and green and gold leaves falling from a tree, then he remembered, and looked back at the pretty lady. She still wasn’t moving. Why not? Had he figured that part out yet?
    “Wait,” he said. “I think they told me your name. Um, I think it starts with an M, like Mr. Incredible. Mary? No.” Eric tugged at his ear.
    “I told you,” the woman who’d spoken to him earlier said. She had big eyebrows and really skinny nostrils. “Her name is Meggie, and she can’t talk at all.”
    “Please be quiet. I’m talking to the pretty lady. Meggie. Oh, yeah.” He looked back to Meggie. “I am supposed to do something. Do you remember? I can’t, I’m a stupid dumb-dumb. That’s what everyone knows. Not my brother. He says I’m smart like Sherlock Holmes. He and Becca got married. She’s pretty, like you. She has a baby growing in her belly.”
    Meggie’s eyes had been drifting away. Eric knew that look. When people were bored and only pretending to listen. But when he mentioned Becca’s baby, her eyes whipped around again.
    “Do you like babies?” he asked. “Me too!”
    Eric stared at her for a long moment, trying to think. Why couldn’t he remember what he was supposed to do? If something happened, he could remember. Like in the Scarlet Band, when Sherlock Holmes found that a death adder was biting people. But when someone told him something, it didn’t stick. Wes told him something. Becca told him