Shawn stumbled out of the closet.

"Now Don't get mad.." Bobby said. Gathering his bearings, Shawn saw that Ralph was no where to be found.

Shawn emerged from the closet pale, wide-eyed, and clutching the Book to his body in a vice grip. He looked around his room blearily, as if not sure where he was before seeing Bobby snapped him out of his reverie. "What happened!?" Shawn's tone was almost panicked; after what he'd seen, he immediately jumped to the worst.

OOC: Is Shawn still covered in blood, or was the Circus kind enough to hose him off before they sent him home?

Shawn, still covered in a splatter of blood like he had spent the day at a slaughterhouse, lurched forward as Bobby met him midway into the room, the two shrouded in the complete darkness of the night.

Bobby stil hadn't noticed Shawn's appearance in the darkness  and spoke as if everything was normal. As if the first thing Shawn would be thinking about was what Bobby was concerned about. What Bobby was thinking about. Whatever Bobby had done.

"It's Ralph." Bobby started to explain.  "I couldn't take him anymore. So, I got rid of him." Bobby justified.

"What I did was I..." Bobby was close enough to see Shawn now. See the Book clutched in his hand. See the gore sprayed all over his face, the bits of skin an dried blood that clung to Shawn's hair. And above all, the pale, shocked look on Shawn's face.

"Ughhh!" Bobby jumped. Two steps back. "Are...are you....dead?" He asked stupidly. "Or hurt? Or dead and hurt?? Don't be dead! Don't be a Zombie! It's my fault! I should have never let you go alone!" Bobby said, reaching his own morbid conclusions upon seeing Shawn's face and appearance.

"I'm okay. I-it's not mine." Shawn didn't sound okay, but that was more emotional damage than physical. He was slowly coming around now, back to a world where he had bedtime and parents and chores, and didn't watch other kids die while they begged him for help. "What did you do to Ralph?"

Bobby stood there wide-eyed and mouth open.

"It's not..not...yours." He stammered, dumbstruck at Shawn's appearance, having only been around the world of bedtime, parents and chores for quite sometime. Shawn remembered that Bobby had told him that he hid in the bushes while Will had gone into the evil Circus.

"It's...not yours." Shawn said again stupidly.

Then, as if still dumbstruck and staring at Shawn's gore-covered body, Bobby said one word that was neither a confirmation of Shawn's question nor a refutation of it. Instead, it sounded like he was speaking in a soft, feint voice, Bobby's mind in a distant land away.

"Ralph." He said.

"I don't want to talk about it right now, okay?" Numbly, Shawn looked at Bobby, then started to walk over to his dresser. He needed to get out of these clothes. Maybe once he got clean, he'd be able to feel things again. "What happened to Ralph?"

"Alright" Bobby said and Shawn could here him sit down on his own bed.

"I moved him. I moved him across the street to the neighbors house. I gave him two cans of food and a magazine. He's in the basement you've got to understand Shawn. He was making all of this noise. Your parents would've found him. He's in your neighbors house. Well, they used to be your neighbors. Now it's empty, which makes it perfect."

Shawn shuffled over to his dresser and pulled out a clean shirt and shorts before starting to peel off his gore-encrusted clothes. He felt a twinge of relief that Bobby hadn't done something worse, but this was still something he'd have to deal with. "And what happens when the food runs out and Ralph comes back home?"

"He can't." Bobby said. "He can't come back. I locked him in there. And I put three cans of beans in there with him, all with the tops removed." He said proudly, as if he had thought it out.

"One for each day. You see? It's a great idea! He stays there, and then we don't get in trouble. Also, we can bring a lot of kids back, save more of them, without having to hide them from your parents."

"And when the three days are done?" Shawn finished changing, and actually felt marginally better, but he could still feel the dried blood on his face. He'd have to wash up before his parents saw him. Wash away the last moments of Roger, who'd begged him for help before he - Shawn tried to focus back on what Bobby was saying. "My parents are going to notice that Ralph isn't here anymore."

Bobby was really dead-set on the idea. He pressed Shawn, trying to come up with a convincing argument as to why this should be the way forward.

"Listen" he started, spreading his hands to his sides, all innocence. "I know it isn't the best set up, but it does give us some wiggle. We can just lie and say that Ralph ran away. And if the police ask, we'll lie to them too. Then, we can sneak out in the middle of the night, or when your parents are gone during the day, and you're at school, I can go across the street and check on 'ol Ralpy to make sure he's OK. I can even take him for a few walks around the neighborhood. Then, when we save someone else from the Clowns, we can use that person to babysit Ralph. It might also save the kid, because if he goes out on his own, there's no telling if the Clown with the cleaver will come back with her scary car and get him. There aren't any closets in that basement and he won't be near the Book. " Bobby reasoned.

Shawn's feeling exhausted, so it was hard to come up with a counterargument, even though his instincts were telling him this was a terrible idea. "Mom and Dad will notice if food keeps disappearing..." It probably wasn't the most convincing or cogent objection, but it was the first one that popped up to him.

The press of Bobby's argument matched the throbbing in Shawn's head as somewhere a headache began to take root.

"But your parents have lots of food." Bobby pressed "And Ralph is small. Even if he missed a few meals, he'd be alright. He's tough. He's also a fat. So we would be helping him out to make him skinny again."

Then Bobby played his card.

"Listen. Ralph's been talking about going back into that place." Shawn knew that Bobby was talking about the Circus. "So we've got to keep him away."

Shawn got the distinct sense that Bobby played that very card, that he was being manipulated somehow. Then again, hadn't Ralph also said he wanted that blanket? Would he try to go back to the Circus alone?

"But we'd have to lie to the police. And if they found out, they'd send you away." Shawn assumed it'd be bad - he didn't really know enough about the law to tell if they'd send a ten year old to juvie. Maybe for a kidnapping they'd skip that and send you right to a real prison. Either way, his parents probably wouldn't let Bobby stick around after that.

"The police won't find out." Bobby sulked, reasoning now turning into a sloppy argument filled with emotion. "No one can find him. Not if we don't want 'em to." He huffed.

Then his true feelings came out.

"I don't like Ralph. And I'm tired of Babysitting him. We're just going to have to keep him there for now. He makes too much noise and he won't stop crying. He's a big stupid baby, and he ruins all of the Joe toys that I carefully put together. He kicks the toys and when he cries, I have to stop him from waking up your parents. I lie to them and say that it's me crying. I don't think your Dad likes me anymore!" That last sentence came out with a wavering voice, like Bobby was now on the verge of tears, the expression that he was on the outs of Shawn's family, while his own family was missing.

Shawn went over to Bobby's bed and sat down on it. In the dark it was hard to tell, but it seemed like he was next to Bobby. "We'll figure out something with Ralph, I promise. He's not going to be here forever, but we've just got to hold out a little longer. But locking him in the neighbour's house isn't going to work." He wasn't sure what to do or how to do it, but he knew he had to fix this somehow. No matter what it took.

"What about the Circus. Maybe we just send him back?" Bobby suggested. But Shawn could tell that his voice lacked the conviction of what he was saying, even as he said it.

"Do you really hate Ralph that much?" Shawn had witnessed what the Circus did to people firsthand just minutes ago, and he wouldn't wish that on his worst enemy.

"I don't know." Bobby said, realizing that the venom in his voice was probably just frustration speaking.

"But even if Ralph and I got along, we can't keep this up forever. He's bound to start yapping away about things we want to keep secret from your parents." Bobby leaned in.

"The Circus." He whispered to Shawn, lowering his voice for the first time conspiratorially. "He's already started to talk about it everyday. Especially about that blanket."

Shawn sighed and rubbed his eyes. All he wanted to do right now was sleep. "Maybe if we got him that blanket, we could convince him to stop talking..."

"It's a start." Bobby said with resignation. "But we can agree then, that it will be this way, until it happens." he pressed, not wanting to lose ground, apparently serious about keeping things the way they were, with Ralph across the street.
"It's just better that way." Bobby sighed, then he yawned.

"Let's talk about it tomorrow...OK? I'm getting tired."

"No, because then we'd have to explain to Mom and Dad where Ralph is. We've got to get him back tonight." Shawn just wanted to close his eyes and drift away, but he couldn't. Even leaving aside Ralph, he knew he had a lot of scrubbing to get the blood off of him before the sun came up.

"OK, OK" Bobby miffed, getting up from the bed. "But if we have to bring him back, you're responsible for keeping him quiet, and he sits on your side of the room, or sleeps or whatever."

"He's weird to you know. I think being at the Circus changed him somehow."

OOC: Shawn Joins Thread

Shawn: Bobby Must Forget

Assume Ralph was retrieved from across the street, and then Shawn returned to the Circus to make the deal for Ralph's blanket, acquire the Numbers Game and the TweedBerry