Unwritten Rules of Impossible Things
by Tom Lichtenberg
Copyright 2010 by Tom Lichtenberg
One
Later, when the Dark Rider was once again known only as Phil, he wouldn't want to talk about what happened that summer. Of course, the Dark Rider was never much of one for talking anyhow. He was more of a traveler. He'd been born and raised right there in Spring Hill Lake, spent all his life so far in a dingy little house by the old wharf with his mom and dad. To put it more properly, he shared the same house, but hardly saw much of them. Pete and Marina Galvez weren't the traditional family types. They'd achieved a sort of equilibrium by rigorously avoiding each other and their son. Pete put in long, irregular hours in a warehouse near the old abandoned railway station. Marina worked the night shift as a waitress at a restaurant in the fish market. Marina's expected arrival home was always Pete's cue to leave. Pete's return coincided with Marina's exit. In this way they'd managed to remain married for more than twelve years.
For eleven of those years, they'd had a son to work around. Early on they'd tried to get by using neighborhood teenage girls to raise him, but these too often simply left the baby alone to fend for himself, and then demanded raises on top of that. They tried some old women too but eventually tired of their griping. So it was that by the time he was nearly six, Phil was pretty much left to take care of himself as best he could, and he did pretty well. By then he was already swimming in the river, climbing trees, scrounging for food in dumpsters, and looting every unguarded building for various parts and equipment. He was what you would call a taker-apart-er. Anything that was made of more than one separate piece was fodder for his special skills at deconstruction. At first he wasn't all that interested in putting them back together, and his bedroom became a mountain of assorted bits and pieces of things. Later on he started assembling them in new and interesting ways.
Everybody around knew about Phil. A range of social workers paid regular calls to make sure he was trying to remain in school. His teachers complimented him on his handwriting, over which he took great pains. Local shop owners left their scraps and junk in prominent locations both in order to get rid of the stuff, and to dissuade him from invading their store rooms and ripping them off further. He was quick, and stealthy as a feral cat. He was always a bit tall for his age, and amazingly thin no matter how much he ate, and he did eat a lot. Local girls were always putting out plates full of goodies on the chance that he might come by, especially one named Karly, whose dad owned the local donut shop. Karly would hide herself behind the screen door to the alley, peaking out to catch a glimpse whenever she expected to see him. You had to be alert for the Dark Rider. He'd come wheeling by on his skateboard out of nowhere and before you knew it, whatever had been there was gone. He could sometimes hear Karly giggling behind the door but he never even stopped to say hi. The Dark Rider had his own plans. He got the name from his hair, which was black and thick as a mop, and his clothes, which were always as dark as his hair. The Dark Rider went barefoot whenever he could, which was everywhere he went except school.
It was the summer before the sixth grade, and the Dark Rider wasn't planning to go. He couldn't imagine a good enough reason to. He was a kid who knew how to learn for himself. He was a regular at the library, which had everything he needed for his own self-education. His major interests those days were mechanics and physics. He'd become more and more interested in inventing things, beginning with the motors and widgets he'd started attaching to his vehicles. His bicycle had auto-location and voice-activated braking. His skateboard had auxiliary solar power and remote controlled velocity. His roller blades had self-adjusting torque. The Dark Rider wanted a car and he wanted to build it himself, and he wanted it to be small, self-powered, non-polluting and one hundred percent biodegradable. All of this was going to take study, and time, and salvaged materials. The boy had no time to be wasting in school.
Mostly the Dark Rider was fine by himself. He didn't have close friends, and didn't feel lonely. There was always someone he could nod to if needed. He'd gotten by all those years on facial expressions and a handful of words. He knew that girls liked him, but he wasn't much bothered by that. The boys kept their distance for the most part. Most of them feared him but would never admit it. Even the older ones secretly wanted to be him. He wasn't much known for conversation, so it was a startled Marcus Holmes who suddenly found the Dark Rider standing beside him one late afternoon by the grocery store.
"Yo Marcus", the Dark Rider said, and Marcus looked at him and shyly said,
"Yo"
"You're not going to believe what I saw", the Dark Rider continued, and he lingered, waiting for Marcus to prompt him. Marcus already had his hands full with his little brother Ben, who was trying to "borrow" some lollipops from the basket by the fruit stand out front.
"Sorry", Marcus said, grabbing his brother's hand and yanking it away from the candy.
"Ow, that hurt", Ben protested and twisted away. Ben was already seven, three years younger than Marcus, but sometimes he acted like he was still four.
"Geez", Marcus sighed and looked back up at the Dark Rider looming beside him.
"What'd you say?" he inquired.
"You're not going to believe it", the Dark Rider repeated, but this time he didn't wait further for Marcus to ask what. The Dark Rider had something to tell someone, and this was rare enough. Marcus already felt lucky to be the one who just happened to be around.
"Up around Cantwell's", the Dark Rider said, "You know where I mean?"
"The smoke shop", Marcus replied, and the Dark Rider nodded.
"You got it", he said. "There's a house down the street on the left."
"The ghost house?", Marcus asked.
"Cross the street". The Dark Rider shook his head. Obviously Marcus didn't know his left from his right.
"The one with the dogs", Marcus guessed, and the Dark Rider nodded.
"That's the one."
"What about it?", Marcus asked. He knew that house pretty well, having to go by it to school every day. The two big dogs that lived there would always charge the fence and bare their teeth and slobber and bark and scare the heck out him and his brother.
"Those are mean dogs", Ben added, who had come over to stand by his brother to listen.
"You been over there lately?", the Dark Rider wanted to know.
"Like yesterday?", Marcus told him.
"Well, I don't know if it was in there yesterday."
"What was in where?"
"The big honking antelope!" the Dark Rider said. "They got this giant antelope in the bedroom."
"A giant cantaloupe?", Ben screwed up his face to ask. Ben even talked and looked like a toddler sometimes. Marcus often wondered if the kid would ever grow up.
"Antelope", the Dark Rider told him. "Like a moose. Like a big old giant moose."
"That's impossible", Marcus replied. He was a very practical boy. With Marcus, either a thing was possible or it wasn't, and if it wasn't, there was no point in thinking about it. Although nearly a year younger than Phil, they had been in the same class forever, since Marcus' step mother had had the foresight and resolve to see that he skipped over kindergarten and went straight into first grade at five. As young as his brother was for his age, Marcus was always old for his own. Other than the fact that the two were utterly different in each and every meaningful way, they looked exactly like brothers. No one would ever even doubt it for a moment. They had the same close, tightly curled hair, the same big brown eyes, the same smooth dark skin, the same small mouth, even the same straight and purposeful stride.
"I'm telling you", the Dark Rider said. "You've got to come and see this thing."
"Yeah", Ben cheered, ever eager for anything new.
"We're supposed to get back with this stuff", Marcus said, gesturing at the bag of veggies and fruit he was holding.
"It's not much out of your way", the Dark Rider told him. "Come on! You got to see it."
"Well, okay", Marcus started to say but the Dark Rider already knew that he would, and had sped off before him. Marcus was a little annoyed because he wanted to go home and get back to his video game, but a the same time, an invite from the Dark Rider wasn't something that happened any day, and a moose in a bedroom had to be something to see. Ben was already sprinting ahead, so Marcus had to hustle to catch up.
"Impossible", he muttered to himself. "There's never been anything like that."
Two
Marcus didn't like running so he was already in a bit of a mood by the time he caught up to the other boys, who were already backing away from the fence as the two big dogs charged, jumping up against the metal gate and trying to push it open with their paws and their snouts. The gate rocked back and forth but didn't give way. Nevertheless, Ben was crouching behind Phil, who was doing his best to appear brave. Those dogs were foaming at the mouth, especially the tan one, which barked less and was all the more frightening for it.
"There. See? There it is!", Phil was shouting as Marcus puffed along beside him. He looked over at the house but didn't see anything right off. It was just another one-story ranch-style bungalow like every other on the block, distinguished only by its hideous brown stucco exterior and the cheap wire fence which looked like it wouldn't stand up to those dogs much longer.
"I don't see nothing", Marcus muttered, and Phil yanked his right arm and pointed it in the direction of the smallest window on the left. Marcus thought he could see a vague dark shape in there, but there was too much light. He couldn't tell for sure.
"See it now?" Phil badgered him, and Marcus admitted he did see something, just to be agreeable. Phil wasn't buying it.
"No you don't", he dropped Marcus' arm. "If you did then you would. I mean, you'd know it."
"I see it", Ben volunteered, peeking out from behind the Dark Rider's back.
"Maybe it's the angle", Marcus said, and he stepped to one side, then took another step forward, and tilted his head this way and then that. All of a sudden, there it was.
"Fantastic!", he breathed. "What is that thing?"
It was huge. The room it was in didn't look like more than a closet that has been turned into someone's office. He could see a little desk in the back, tucked in among some bookshelves which were only half-filled with fat, leaning books, but the moose dominated the scene. It was fully seven feet high, at least, and was a whole half of a beast, with curving, winding horns reaching up to the ceiling, a giant head and the front half of the torso. The head was facing away from the window, at an angle, so you could only just barely make out that the beast had been cut neatly in half, had only two legs and a backside propped up by a stand. It was complete with brown fur, with huge eyes, a black nose, but it wasn't a moose. It sure wasn't an antelope, or a deer, or any other thing that Marcus could say.
"I got to find out what that is", he declared, with a sigh.
"It's a freaking moose or something", Phil told him but Marcus replied with a shake of his head.
"Ain't no moose", he said. "No antelope neither. Definitely from Africa, I can tell you that much. Look at those horns. Where do you think they got it?"
"Why did they get it?", Ben wanted to know, and the older boys laughed.
"Nobody's got a moose in their house", Phil pronounced, denying the very reality they witnessed that moment.
"It's sure weird", Marcus agreed. This was not that kind of neighborhood. Not that kind of city, for that matter. They never heard of any hunters around there, or people rich enough to go on safaris. The people they knew pretty much stuck around. Maybe they had an old boat they would take on the river sometimes. Maybe they souped up a car and would go on the track. Sometimes they'd go up to the lake in the summer and camp in the trees, but otherwise, nobody ever went nowhere as far as they knew. They themselves had never been out of the city that they could remember. Marcus and Ben lived on the water, on a very old houseboat their father had come across a long time ago, but that thing stayed moored to the dock and its motor hadn't even been worked on in years.
"You know the people who live there?" Marcus asked, and Phil shook his head.
"But I'm going to find out", he said. "I'm going to be checking this out. You can count on it."
This was already the most time that Marcus had even spent around Phil, and the most he had ever heard him say. It was feeling like time to get home.
"Well", Marcus told him, "you let us know when you do, all right?"
"Sure", Phil said, "I'll let you know", and he stood there, staring at the thing. He couldn't get enough of it.
"See ya, then", Marcus said, and pulled his little brother along. The dogs had already stopped barking but were guarding the gate, one on each side, panting heavily. Phil didn't pay any attention to them. He was almost as if in a trance, and remained there, half an hour or so after the other boys left, until he also finally woke up, and went off.
Three
It was later than he thought by the time Marcus returned with his little brother to their floating home. Their step-mother, Kristen O'Leary, was already there, waiting on deck for the boys and the vegetables they'd been charged with bringing home for dinner. She grabbed the bag from Marcus as he came up the plank and without a word of greeting spun around and went inside.
'Uh oh', Ben muttered, 'Kristen's mad', and Marcus nodded. They could tell her moods from a mile away and Marcus was already prepared for this one. Next, he knew, would be the lecture about how she didn't deserve this, how accidental, how arbitrary, how absurd her life should be pegged to this crappy old houseboat and these two little boys - who weren't that little any more and were bound for nothing but trouble - just because of that man, their no-good father, that fatal charmer Pearson Holmes, who'd gone off and got himself turned into toast in a mess of a car wreck, and of course their mother was even more to blame, that wretched Marla Rainbow Sky or whatever she called herself, stupid hippie chick who went off God knows where leaving her infant and toddler with that irresponsible, criminal dad, and who stepped in to change little Ben's diapers? And who stepped in to read Marcus to sleep every night? And who stepped in, as if she had no other cares in the world and nothing else better to do than to raise a pair of abandoned brats who couldn't even bring the zucchini and jalapenos home on time?
Kristen O'Leary, that's who, and they'd better believe it, and they ought to know better, and it was a damn shame, just a dirty no-good rotten shame that she loved those boys so much and always had and always would, no matter what. Marcus had kept something back in his pocket, a little special gift he'd grabbed for just such an occasion, and he stepped carefully into the kitchen where the utterances above were on their third and fourth rounds of repetition, and he took the little jar out of his pocket, and placed it gently on the counter where Kristen would be sure to encounter it on her next foray to the sink.
"What's this?", she interrupted herself, eyebrows arched in surprise. She picked up the small glass vial and turned it around. It bore no label, and contained some kind of herb or seasoning.
"Well?" she turned to Marcus and couldn't help but smile. "What is this time?"
"You have to guess", he reminded her, and Ben, behind him, couldn't help but giggle. Kristen unscrewed the lid and took a deep whiff of the contents, but shook her head.
"Some combination", she mumbled. "Some cardamom, for sure. Cayenne? No. Coriander. Cumin. Black Pepper. Clove? Middle Eastern, I'd say. A specialty. Am I close?"
"Very close", he nodded. "Mr. Ahmad called it Ras el Hanout. His own secret recipe. He wouldn't tell me everything that was in it. Did you smell the cinammon, though?"
"I thought it was nutmeg", she replied and he nodded.
"Nutmeg, too. It's got a lot of good things in it."
"Then I'll use it tonight", she told him. "I hadn't decided on seasonings anyway. Come and help", and with that, her spell was broken, and the evening flipped from foreboding to fine.
This was not the case with Phil. He always tried to time his arrival home with the changing of the guard, but when he got there, after riding his board aimlessly for a few more hours, his mom was still getting ready for her shift, and his dad had not yet arrived home.
"Can't be waiting all night", his mother declared when she caught Phil trying to sneak in unnoticed through the back door. "There's stuff in the freezer", she informed him, as usual. There was always stuff in the freezer, Phil thought. She doesn't need to tell me, and what is she waiting around for anyway? This stupid game, pretending to be a family when it's time for a little guilt trip.
"Thanks, mom", he said out loud. This was sure to put an end to the scene. It was all she wanted, to be able to tell herself she had done her duty as a parent and received the proper acknowledgement.
"Later then", she called after him as he bounded upstairs four steps at a time.
"Later", he replied, and by the time he reached his room he could hear the front door closing below. There would be a minimum of half an hour before his father arrived. He tried to make sure of that, doing his part to keep the family together by keeping them all judiciously separate. In his room he went straight for his touch desk, turned it on and started swiping his way to the blueprints section of his online collection. He flipped through the alphabetically organized section of half-baked ideas, contemplating working on one of them. He just wasn't sure which. He was thinking about collapsibles, inventions that could take up less space than theoretically possible. This was one of his favorite fantasies, to invent a car, for example, that could be folded up and stuffed into a bike rack. Wouldn't that solve a lot of parking problems? It was merely a matter of molecular re-ordering. There's so much empty space between and within the atoms that compose all substances. Phil considered it to be inevitable that someone would figure out how to use that space more efficiently. Why shouldn't he be the one to do it?
The chemical composition of the objects involved might be a critical condition, he reasoned, as he set the car notion aside for the moment. It would be more reasonable to first think of something made up of a simple set of chemical components, and work on the problem from that end. Or perhaps, he thought, maybe I should work on the folding operation of one particular chemical first, and tackle it from that angle? This would take a little more knowledge of chemistry, a little more knowledge of physics. He was already studying when his father's arrival was announced by the slamming of that same front door, and the stomping around in the kitchen, and the opening and closing of the refrigerator door, and the popping of the beer can tab, and the beep beep beep of the microwave a few minutes later when the old man's frozen pizza was ready. Phil understood that he would not be disturbed, but left alone to his own devices, a thought whose literal interpretation brought a sly smile to his face. My own devices, he thought, are going to the coolest of all time. Phil understood that reality is what it is, but he wanted, more than anything, to create what was not.
Four
It was nothing more than a whim. A boy couldn't spend all his time inventing, so he looked up 'African antelope images' online and soon discovered what the moose really was - a Greater Kudu Bull. The horns were unmistakable. As he later narrated to Marcus, the next evening as the two were on their way to the stake out, the Kudu is a native of Eastern and Southern Africa, a woodland creature vulnerable to hunters because of the way it stops and stares at predators pursuing them; like a deer caught in the headlights, these poor beasts doom themselves by whatever it is they're thinking when they do that.
"But what kind of asshole would kill an endangered species, then stuff it and stick it in his living room?" Marcus grunted.
"Maybe he just bought it", Phil suggested.
"Maybe we'll find out", Marcus said, although that didn't seem likely, They weren't planning to go knock on the door and ask the guy, if the guy was even home. They'd never seen him. Nobody they asked had ever seen him either. Everyone knew about the dogs, but the dogs had not been known to venture out from their yard, nor had a car ever been known to pull in or out of the carport next to the house. It was, it turned out, a complete mystery to many of their friends and even their friends' parents, some of whom had made inquiries, some of whom had gone on previous stake-outs, some of whom had gone so far as to ask the local sheriff, who informed them it was none of their damned business. Even the usually nosy animal control people refused to get involved. The dogs looked perfectly well-fed and were properly contained behind a regulation fence, There was nothing they could do, even if they wanted to, even if there was a reason to. Pinky McClaren, a snooping teenager who lived two doors down, told Phil he had even asked the gas and electric man about the place, and received the startling information that the house was not hooked up to the main. No electricity? It seemed impossible. Pinky had noted the lights turned on in various rooms on numerous occasions. Perhaps the people had their own internal power supply, the gas man told him. It was possible they used a generator. Some people do that.
"Pinky says he's lived there all his life and has never seen anybody go in or out of that house", Phil told Marcus. "He also says the dogs never change. Ever since he was a little kid it's been the same dogs, same size, same age, same bark, same everything. He even thinks they might not be real dogs."
"What does he think they are then?" Marcus asked.
"Projections", Phil told him. "Holograms."
"That should be easy enough to test", Marcus said. "Put a stick through the gate, see if they grab it. If they do, they're real. You could feel them tugging."
"Good idea", Phil said. "Let's do that", and it was the first thing they did when they arrived at the house. Marcus had found a long stick, a branch four feet long and not too thick to fit through the bars. The black dog came charging at the gate and yanked the stick right out of Marcus' hand so fast he didn't even feel it.
"Got to be a real dog", he exclaimed, staggering back a few steps. The other dog was pushing against the gate and slobbering as it barked. It seemed the dogs did not like to be tested, or teased. The boys retreated across the street until the dogs finally quieted down and resumed their usual stations on either side of the gate.
"There's a light on in that room", Marcus noted, and they saw the Greater Kudu bull clearly outlined, lit up from behind as the evening grew darker.
"Woah", Phil said. "That thing's amazing."
"Uh huh", Marcus agreed. The street was quiet, its sidewalks deserted except for Marcus and Phil. They stood there as night fell, gazing at the stuffed beast which seemed to grow larger and larger in their eyes.
"I think it moved!", Phil whispered at one point. He really did think so. The head seemed to shift to the left, to turn on its neck a little in their direction.
"No", Marcus whispered back. "That's impossible."
"I think it did", Phil said, but he wasn't so sure.
"I should be getting home", Marcus murmured, but he didn't want to leave. Nothing was happening. He knew that. Nothing was going to happen. It wasn't like him to be out like this. Ben would be wondering where he was, not to mention Kristen. Usually Ben went everywhere he did. He'd just happened to be taking a rare nap when Phil had come by the houseboat, urging Marcus to come with him, just for a few minutes, just to see. Marcus had left reluctantly, but he knew that Ben would be asleep for hours, and anyway, Kristen was home so it would be okay. Still, Marcus felt weird, standing out there on the sidewalk in the dark, looking at a giant stuffed moose or whatever it was, feeling like time was standing still, but no, not that time was, but that he was, literally and in some other strange way that he was standing still and that even though time had clearly not stopped - the stars had come out and you could even see one or two amidst the glow of the city lights - that it had stopped for him, and for Phil, as it maybe had too for those never-aging dogs, and he was almost hypnotized, or something, by that stillness, until, suddenly both of the boys were startled by a sharp sound like a gunshot that made them jump. The dogs turned their heads to their house as a light came on in another room in there and a shadow moved across the wall.
"There's someone in there", Phil breathed, and he strained to catch a better glimpse, but the shadow was gone and the light went off, only to be followed by another light coming on in another room in the back of the house. Marcus heard something behind him and turned around. He had forgotten that they were standing in front of the notorious 'ghost house'. This house was more readily seen to be uninhabited, because there was no fence and there were no dogs, and the windows were partly soaped up, and the roof was in bad shape, the driveway was cracked and broken and the yard was merely dead weeds. It seemed less spooky now than its neighbor across the street, except, as Marcus turned, he saw its front door slowly and creakily swing open. He nudged Phil.
"Holy", he whispered. "Look at this!"
Phil followed Marcus' pointing arm to the ghost house and the door, and immediately began moving towards it.
"Where are you going?" Marcus called after him.
"We've got to go in", said Phil.
"Are you crazy?" Marcus shouted. "That's the freaking ghost house."
"I don't care", Phil said. "Look, I brought a flashlight just in case."
"Just in case of what?", Marcus was thinking, but the answer had already occurred to him. Phil had been planning to sneak into the moose house. The dogs had changed his mind about that, but he was still in the sneaking mindset.
"I'm going home", Marcus announced, but he didn't go home. Phil was already at the door, already stepping inside, already inside, and Marcus was not going to abandon him now. He followed. Phil had turned on the flashlight and Marcus, just entering the door, could see the empty, carpetless living room, the cobwebs hanging from the corners of the ceiling, the half-painted walls, some rusty old cans on the floor.
"Nothing here", Phil said in a normal tone of voice. "Nothing to worry about. Just an empty house."
"Sure", Marcus said, and it smelled exactly like that. He could detect the scent of the mold and the mildew, the dust and the mouse turds, the dampness and the remnants of wood stain. His nose did not pick up any trace of haunting spirits, and he wondered for the first time if anyone could smell a ghost.
"What's with ghosts anyway?" he wondered out loud. "Wouldn't they have anything better to do?"
"It's just their nature", Phil said dismissively. He was interested in impossible things, but not in tired old cliches. "Zombies eat human flesh. Vampires suck blood. Ghosts haunt. It's what they are. It's what they do", he added, laughing.
"If there was any such thing", he said, moving towards the kitchen, Marcus behind him, and as Marcus stepped out of the living room, a curious thing occurred. The lights in that room turned on.
"Holy!" Marcus repeated himself. "Look at that!"
"How'd you turn on the lights?" Phil asked, "I didn't see any switches".
"I didn't", Marcus said. "They just went on."
"Right", Phil snapped, thinking that Marcus was trying to fool him. He pushed by Marcus and stepped back into the living room, and the instant he did so, the lights went off again. Phil backed into the kitchen again, and the living room lights went on again.
"Weird", he whistled, and this time he stood where he was and inspected the walls around the living room, but saw no switch, nor even an electrical outlet. The lights were recessed into the ceiling, four of them evenly spaced.
"Must be some kind of sensor", he decided. "Nothing to worry about. Motion-detected, I guess. Negative polarity maybe, which is why it's doing the opposite of what it's supposed to. You'd think they'd go on when you enter the room, not when you exit. Hmm."
Phil considered the situation for a moment, then motioned for Marcus to follow him out of the kitchen, into the little pantry on the side. As they did, the kitchen lights came on the moment they left that room, and as they re-entered it, a small light in the pantry turned on as the kitchen lights went off.
"They got the whole place rigged like that", Phil declared. "Interesting."
He resumed his search of the rest of the house but aside from the lights they found nothing out of the ordinary, nothing at all in fact. After the few minutes that took the boys returned to the living room and noticed its view of the moose house across the street. Although the windows were soaped, they were only partially, so they had a cloudy view of the Greater Kudu Bull. They also noticed now that the lights were on again in the room next to the moose, the room directly opposite from the one they were standing in, but still they could not see anything or anyone inside it.
"Help me open this window", Phil said, and together they tugged at the frame which seemed to have been painted shut.
"Let me chip it off", Marcus volunteered as the window didn't give. He pulled out a small pocket knife and ran the blade through the paint joining the top and bottom pane.
"That ought to do it", Phil nodded, and as they tried again they could feel a little movement.
"More over here", Phil instructed, and Marcus broke through some more paint on the sides.
"Go", Phil said and they pushed one more time, and the window went up, and as it did, a curtain came down in the window in front of the bull.
"Wow", Marcus said. "What was that?"
"Close it", Phil ordered, and they pulled the window down. The curtain across the street went back up, and there was the bull again, clearly outlined in the room lights.
"Open", Phil said, and the process repeated. Several more times they did the same thing. Each time as they opened the window in the ghost house, a curtain came down in the moose house. Each time they closed it back down, the curtain went up.
"I've got a theory", Phil said. "Come on, back to the kitchen", and as they returned to that room, as he predicted when they got there, as the living room light in the ghost house went on, the living room light in the house across the street, went off.
"They're somehow connected", Marcus volunteered, but Phil didn't answer. He was formulating a theory. It had something to do with the lights, of this he was sure. Windows and curtains, though, that didn't fit. The noise they first heard, when this door was opened, maybe that door had closed? There were no curtains in this house. There were disparate facts, unrelated. Lights and lights, that was something. Doors and doors, he could see that. Windows and curtains, though, this is where he was stuck.
"Maybe there's an underground passage", he suddenly said, but a brief inspection found no door leading below. The house was all on one floor anyway; two bedrooms, a bathroom, the kitchen and pantry, the living room, and nothing else. There was no basement. A trap door perhaps? Phil inspected the floors all through the house room lights going on and off on his trail. Marcus remained in the living room, staring out at the moose house, hoping to see something rational, like a person. There was nothing. The moose and the dogs, the single lamp in that room. The underground passage idea made no sense to Marcus in any case. He was thinking it was more like magnetic, like some kind of field, but what did he know? He was only ten years old and, unlike his friend, didn't really believe that science was any of his business.
And then he saw them.
"Phil," he shouted. "Phil, come here! Quick!"
Five
They were in the living room, across the street, not just shadows now, but physical forms, actual beings. Marcus and Phil stood and stared as the other two appeared at the other window, staring back at them.
"They're not whole", Marcus whispered.
"Something's wrong", Phil agreed as they couldn't take their eyes off of what was happening over there. The 'things', whatever they were, were growing from the top down. At first only their heads were there. Then necks, then shoulders, then torsos. Marcus and Phil couldn't see below the window sash but knew, could sense the hips and legs and feet being formed even as they watched. But the body parts that were there were still being put together, as if drawn or painted. Hair was setting, then mouths and ears more distinct, and the more they grew, the more they looked familiar, the more they looked ...
"Like us!", Phil gasped, and as he breathed again his counterpart began to breathe on the other side, and as Marcus put his hands to the side of his face, so the other Marcus put his hands up to his own newly formed face and felt it, for the first time, in wonder. The boys were speechless now, and in the few minutes it took for the others to become real, the originals were as if rooted to their spots. They did not try to move but would have found, if they had tried, that they could not. It was the others who moved first, the others who walked to their door, opened it, and as they opened it, the front door of the ghost house slammed shut. Marcus and Phil barely noticed. They watched as the copies of themselves came out into the driveway, walked up to the gate, and climbed over it as boys will while the dogs remained stationed and silent on either side. Marcus and Phil, the replicas, walked off down the street while Marcus and Phil, the originals, followed them with their gaze, and as the others disappeared from sight, the two boys sank to the floor of the ghost house, fallen into a deep, deep sleep.
All night they slept, and all day the next day too. They looked so quiet and peaceful lying there on the dusty and deserted floor, breathing calmly and deeply as if dreaming of nothing but good times. Marcus even had a trace of a happy smile on his face, and Phil looked more rested and more at peace than he had ever looked before. It was as if they were both getting the sleep of a lifetime, a slumber that washed away all the wounds of their lives, all traces of any regrets or misgivings they might have had, all bad feelings, all bad thoughts, all gone now and gone forever, replaced by only sunshine and warmth and ease and happiness.
Marcus was the first to stir, around sunset, nearly twenty hours after he had first gone unconscious. It was the breeze which awakened him, a breeze coming from the front door which was now ajar once again. If it hadn't been dusk, but later at night, he would have thought he'd been sleeping for only some moments, but the light in the sky informed him at a glance it had been much longer than that. He shook his friend by the shoulders until Phil, too, awakened and sat up.
"We've got to get out of here", Marcus told him, and the boys wasted no time scrambling up and running out of the house, not even noticing the lights flashing on and then off one more time as they left, or the door slowly closing behind them. Across the street the moose house was just as they'd encountered it for the first time the evening before, with the Greater Kudu Bull all lit up in the twilight, the dogs by the gate, and no other signs of any life in the property at all.
"What happened?" Phil said, rubbing his eyes and yawning.
"I've got no idea", Marcus said, "but it looks like we might have lost a day."
"At least", Phil agreed. That thought hadn't occurred to Marcus, who quickly looked down at himself to see if he had perceptibly aged. If they had lost more than a day, it might as well have been weeks, or months, or even years!
"We've got to find out", he said, and the boys took off running as fast as they could down the street, both agreeing without words to head for the corner market where the newspaper box on the sidewalk would tell them the day and the year. Phil got there first, being older and faster, and shouted out loud some words he would never have thought would have given him such joy.
"It's only Wednesday", he yelled, which meant they had only lost that one single day.
"Kristen's going to be furious", Marcus said, panting as he stopped at the corner.
"I'd better get home right away", he added, and started to run off, but Phil grabbed his collar and held him.
"Just a minute", he said, and Marcus relented and stopped.
"Did you see what I saw?" Phil asked, and Marcus nodded.
"Another Marcus and Dark Rider", he said.
"They might be still out here", Phil noted.
"I have no idea", Marcus shook his head. "I don't know what to think. Maybe we didn't see what we saw? Maybe there was some chemical in that house?"
"Like a drug?" Phil pondered. "Hallucination, you mean?"
"Yeah, and then we passed out", Marcus said.
"I didn't feel anything weird", Phil replied.
"Me neither", said Marcus.
"I didn't smell nothing".
"Me neither", said Marcus again.
"I don't think it was that", Phil said.
"Me neither", said Marcus, reluctantly, again.
"Okay", Phil told him, after a pause. "I guess you can go home now. We'll have to think about this. I wouldn't tell anyone, though."
"Okay", Marcus sighed with relief. He didn't want anyone to know, not yet. There was something that made him want to keep it a secret, though he didn't know why. It seemed important, and as he headed home, half walking half trotting, he tried to think of what he would say, what he could possibly say. That he'd spent the day at a friend's house? Lost track of time? But for nearly twenty four hours? It was hard to believe. Maybe not as hard to believe as the truth, or what seemed to be that, but still, Kristen was never going to buy it, and what about Ben? How could he ever keep anything from him? Ben would know right away if he was telling the truth, or a story. Ben knew all about Marcus and his stories.
Six
Marcus approached the houseboat cautiously, trying to determine the best course of action. Should he try and creep up the gangplank and sneak into the porthole to his bedroom? Should he boldly stride through the front door as if nothing unusual at all had happened? Should he slouch in, hands in pockets, apology all over his face? It didn’t matter. He guessed he was going to be in trouble no matter what, so he resolved to face it right up front, be as honest as he could, and take the hit. Kristen might be really, really mad, but he could deal with it. Hadn’t he braved the worst before? Well, to admit the truth to himself, there had never been a situation like this, and he didn’t know what to expect. He certainly didn’t expect what he found.
Settling on the slouching approach, he slinked into the houseboat and there, at the table, sat Kristen, and Ben, and a giant. Huge and sweatier than Marcus thought humanly possible, young Officer Mike Gramm loomed over the table; the others looked like mere ants compared to his bulk. His thin, wet hair was nearly the same navy blue as his policeman’s uniform, and his small dark eyes pounced on Marcus even before he’d taken two steps in.
“Here’s the boy now, I presume”, Officer Mike grunted, heaving the rest of his bulk around in the rickety aluminum card-table chair. Kristen jumped out of her seat and ran to Marcus, stopping just short of her instinctive hug, and pointing an index finger instead at his nose.
“Marcus”, she nearly shouted. “Where on earth? What on earth? Are you all right? Do you know what we’ve? Why didn’t you call? Where the heck?”
“Let the boy speak”, Officer Mike interrupted, waving his burly arms in the air. “Over here, boy. Come on, take a seat.”
“His name is Marcus, not Boy”, Kristen corrected him, but the officer paid no attention. Marcus dutifully came where he was told, sat where instructed, and looked straight into the officer’s face. The man was sneering at him. He felt it. This cop was bad news.
“Out with it, boy”, He spat. “What have you and your friend been up to? Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ve been seen. Yes, you have”, and he pulled out a sheet of paper containing a grainy brown photo and waved it around. Marcus couldn’t make anything of it. Kristen, who had returned to her chair, strained her neck to see, but it was Ben who spoke up.
“That’s the Dark Rider”, he yelped, then became quiet all at once, as if realizing he had done something wrong. The officer stared closely at the little one, whom he’d apparently been ignoring completely up to that time. He sized him up quickly, then returned his attention to Marcus.
“Philip Galvez. You know him, right? Don’t deny it. Don’t bother. You know him.”
“I know him”, Marcus admitted.
“You were with him last night, weren’t you, boy?”
Yes”, Marcus gulped.
“And what did you do with this Philip Galvez?” Mike was leaning over the table now, his fat greasy face only inches from Marcus’.
“Nothing.”
“Right. Nothing. Don’t fool with me, boy”, the officer warned. “You were seen, like I told you. This photo right here? It was taken last night. Late last night. By the watchman over at the old Hedgely Ironworks. You’re telling me you don’t know anything about that?”
“That’s right”, Marcus said after a pause. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“And the glass factory, round about dawn. I suppose you can’t fill me in on that either?”
“Right”, Marcus said.
“Wrong”, said the cop. “You were seen, you two boys, running away. What were doing down there? Why were you out, in the middle of the night, down in the warehouse district anyway? What’s two young fellows got to be doing down there at that time? That’s what I keep asking myself. Up to no good, is the only thing I come up with. Up to no good, am I right?”
“I don’t know”, Marcus swallowed. This was not going well.
“So you tell me your story now”, officer Mike said, and sat back with a grin like he already knew what his answer would be.
“We were just hanging out”, Marcus said. “We lost track of time, fell asleep. I never slept so much or so long in my whole life, really. We just woke up, just a short time ago. I swear, it’s the truth. We were sleeping.”
“Sleeping, eh?” Officer Mike shook his head. “And where was it you boys were ‘sleeping’ as you say.”
“Not far from here. Pretty close. Somewhere safe. We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“That would be a first for your friend”, Mike Gramm told him. “Do you know what I mean? Yes, I do think you do. Philip Galvez”, he repeated and pulled out a little black notebook and flipped a few pages.
“Let me see, yes right here. Truancy, check. Vagrancy, check. Suspicion of burglary, check. Wanted for questioning. Check. Seems like he’s filled up a page in my book, and him only just ten, or is it eleven? No matter. One more line in my book, one tiny mistake, that’s all it will take and your friend here is going to juvie. You want to be messed up with that? I don’t think so, boy. Everyone says you’re a good boy. A nice boy. A smart boy. Why are you hanging around, like you say, with a loser like that?”
“Phil’s awesome!”, Ben spoke up again, then shrank back in his seat at a glare from the cop.
“We didn’t do anything wrong”, Marcus insisted. The large officer rose to his feet.
“Well, you’re back”, he said, looking at Kristen. “I guess that’s all we can do for right now. You wanted him back. Now you’ve got him. I’d teach him a lesson, myself”, he added, but held up his paws and continued, “not that I’m specifying any particular action. It’s not in my line.”
“Thank you officer”, Kristen said as she followed him out to the dock. “I really appreciate your help”.
He waved away her words and ambled back down to the street and waddled away. He had parked his car around the corner in order to keep a low profile, and not warn the kid in advance. He had his suspicions, but then again, didn’t he always?
In the kitchen, Marcus braced himself for round two, but this one went easy. Kristen was so relieved about his return that all she could do was shake a little and cry. He had no idea, he couldn’t have known, why didn’t he call, she just kept repeating how worried she was, how late she’d stayed up, how she’d fretted all day and waited and waited and couldn’t go in to the store and it cost her a sick day and on and on for awhile. Marcus hadn’t eaten in more than a day but he wasn’t even hungry. All he wanted was to get away, so he begged off, said he was tired, went into his room and crawled up to his bunk. Ben followed shortly and lay down on his own.
The boys remained quiet for some time, Ben listening to his older brother’s breathing to determine his state, Marcus staring up at the ceiling. How could he sleep? Hadn’t he just been sleeping all day? That photo. The things the cop said. He’d been seen? How could he have been seen? What did it mean? All at once, his brother spoke up.
“I saw you too”, Ben quietly said. Marcus leaned over from the top bunk and looked down at the boy, who lay on his back, keeping perfectly still as if that would help him somehow.
“When?” Marcus asked.
“This morning when I went out to play. I thought I might see you, and I did. I saw you and Phil, but just for a moment.”
“Where?”
“On the tracks”, Ben replied. “You were running.”
“Where?”
“To the old freight train bridge. I thought that I saw you go up. It was funny.”
“Why?”
“Because you were in front. You know what I mean? You were both carrying stuff, in some kind of sacks, and you were both running, but you were in front, way ahead. That was weird because, I don’t know. You could never run faster than Phil. Not ever. But there you were, running faster than him. I didn’t tell anyone. It didn’t seem right. I wanted to follow you but Kristen called me back in.”
Marcus rolled back onto his bed, and sighed. He was beginning to get the picture. They had been seen, all right, but ‘they’ wasn’t them. It was ‘them’.
Seven
Marina Galvez knew one thing for sure. She should have listened to her nose because even before that so-called honeymoon was over she couldn't stand the smell of him. In fact, one of the main reasons she went to work at Uncle Shrimpie's was to dominate the odor of their home. She was raised in the school of ‘you made your bed so you’ve got to lie in it’, and so lie in it she did. The entire family was a lie. Way back when she was still as short as she was now but a whole lot lighters, and Mister Pete (as he was known even then) made the biggest impression on her little girlie brain. He knew how to fix most anything, and how to smile with big white teeth, and how to make the other boys curl up and run away. Pete would come driving down the street in his fully customized silver El Camino with the blue flames licking up from the bumpers, and when he came to a stop at the corner where she was standing, waiting to cross the street, he leaned out the window and hollered.
“You devil you!”
Marina blushed to the seat of her pants and of course she hopped right in when he pushed open the door, and of course it was a whirlwind romance and how was she to know, a girl of seventeen only and with no experience of the world, that this man was not the right man for the woman she would become. She was only becoming that woman now. Foolish to have that child at that age. What did she know about children? No more than she wanted to, and the other girls they paid who likewise failed to raise the boy were just the same as her. But she found her way, little by little, by ignoring what she didn’t want to see and moving along as if she was free to do whatever she pleased. Pete didn’t care. He’d come to hate her as much as she grew to loathe him.
She'd made herself a nice, independent life, working the night shift, having the house to herself most of the time, spending a lot of her weekends either sailing on the river with Alexei Zuprevin, the elderly Russian mathematician, or studying topographical maps with Hercules Suarez, a gentle young chef with an impeccable and quite suitable mustache. There were minor romances with a customer here and there, a girlfriend or two now and then to play cards with, compare outfits with and just chat. The traditional family had melted away, relatives moved on to Texas and Florida, leaving practically no one behind. Her own child was a stranger to her. She kept telling herself she was doing her job, keeping the kitchen all filled up with food and the boy had his room after all, and the stuff that he asked for - not much and hardly ever - she bought him and was glad to at that.
How had she missed his whole childhood? This was the question that blared through her brain as she stood in the hallway that morning. Phil and Marcus walked in the front door and she saw her own son for the first time in years. Oh my how he’d grown! He was taller than her. Well, of course he was that. Marina was only five two. Phil must have been taller for years and yet now she was shocked and she stared at the boy in a daze. He didn’t say anything to her but started to walk right on past, towards the stairs.
“Philip”, she blurted out, hands on her hips. The boy stopped, and turned slowly to face her.
“My boy”, she declared, and tears filled her eyes. The Dark Rider cocked his head slightly.
“Can I do something for you?” he asked.
“Why, I” Marina started to say and then stopped. She couldn’t think of the words. She felt like a spell had been broken, all the years fell away and she was a child again, full of a baby and feeling it kick, and holding her hands on her belly, she said.
“It’s just been so long since we talked.”
“Not now”, Phil replied, and started walking away.
“No, wait”, she called out, and he stopped once again, Marcus standing beside him.
“Who’s your little black friend?” she asked and immediately felt like an idiot. What kind of thing was that to say?
“I mean, your friend?”, she quickly retracted, but Marcus and Phil merely looked at each other and shrugged. Looking back at his mom, Phil replied,
“We have things to do. To not be disturbed. Please?”
“Oh”, Marina said with a sigh, and the two boys took that as a ‘go’ and moved on. They marched up the stairs to Phil’s room, and Marina slowly followed to the foot of the staircase.
“Would you boys like some soup?” she called up, but there was no reply, just the sound of Phil’s door closing softly.
Marina walked into the kitchen and began making soup anyway, tortilla soup, the way her mother would make it. My mother, she thought for the first time in years. How come I’ve forgotten my mother? How the years go on by, how we make these cocoons, and then stick ourselves in them and never peek out. Who am I now and why am I here? The whole house seemed quiet and cold.
A half hour went by without thinking. She carried two bowls full of steaming hot soup carefully up to Phil’s room and knocked gently, but there was no answer. She put the bowls down, and opened the door. They were gone. She didn’t know how they had left without her noticing. The window was open. Maybe they went out that way. Marina giggled at the thought of the boys sneaking out, making the two story jump to the lawn. It’s what she would have done at their age. She noticed that Phil’s desk computer was on and stepped over to take a quick look. That was interesting. Blueprints. A notepad with handwritten squiggles. A folder with pages stuck out. Marina sat down and leafed through it, amazed at the things she was seeing. She knew nothing about engineering and yet, it was somehow not foreign to her. She felt light, almost giddy. So that’s how it is, she said to herself, and she read and she read and she smiled as she thought.
Eight
Most mornings Marina would have a little breakfast, do a bit of reading and go to bed, but this morning she was all abuzz with a crackling sort of energy. She stayed up in Phil’s room, absorbing information for a few hours, and then got busy with her own ideas. She grabbed a notebook and a pencil and, sitting on the floor surrounded by piles of random junk she’d pulled out of his closet and from under his bed, was rapidly taking notes and jotting down equations. The hours flew by and she was still at it when her son arrived home around sunset.
At first she didn’t even notice he was in the room. He had appeared in the doorway and, surprised to see his mom there, had tip-toed in trying not to disturb her. He thought he could reach the desk without making any noise or knocking over any of the sorted collections on the floor, but he just knicked a teepee of bicycle spokes with his heel and they came clattering down, alerting Marina.
“Philip”, she announced, looking up from her work.
“Mom”, Phil cautiously replied.
“I’m so glad to see you”, she said, putting down her work and scrambling to stand up.
“Okay?” Phil murmured. This was not expected. For one thing, what was she even doing there, and for another, why was she, as she put it, so glad to see him? And what was that smile on her face, and wait a minute, was she actually trying to hug him? She was. It was weird. And now she was attempting to plant a kiss on his cheek. Phil pushed away, backed away toward the door.
“Are you all right?” he questioned her.
“I’m wonderful”, she told him, and she held out her hands in a gesture to indicate that he could relax, that she wasn’t going to hurt him.
“Where’s your friend?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“That boy who was with you this morning. And how did you two get out of here? Did you really go out through the window? I was only offering soup, you know”, and she laughed merrily, a sound that Phil could never recall having heard before in his life. It was nice. Her eyes were sparkling and her smile made him feel, feel something.
“We’ve got to talk”, she declared, and bent down to retrieve her notebook and pencil.
“Not now”, Phil tried to tell her. He wanted to check his computer, now more than ever. She had seen him and Marcus - not them, he understood, but the others - and they had been here, in this room, just today?
“What were my friend and I doing?” he blurted out, realizing how stupid it sounded as soon as he said it.
“I don’t know”, she answered directly. “You wouldn’t let me in the room, but you left your touch desk on. You were looking at some interesting things, that’s for sure. Come and look”, and she led him over to there. Phil whistled softly at the screen. His blueprints of course were familiar, but what were those scribbles? They looked like some sort of graffiti, a three-dimensional script in shades of blues and greens. There was a pile of them and as he swiped through, one after the other, he saw that no two pages contained the same patterns, but that all were connected, in a progression.
“Kind of like a flip book”, his mother commented, and Phil looked up at her, quizzically.
“Sure”, she said, “like a flip book, but not in regular space or time. See here?”
She used two hands to manipulate the images on the screen, pulling and spinning and pinching the virtual pages until it seemed to Phil they were popping straight out of the desk like a three-D projection, but still it meant nothing to him, it was some kind of optical illusion.
“It’s a natural language”, Marina shrugged. “A conversation in frosted glass. I don’t quite follow, but it looks like an argument to me. Or maybe not exactly an argument but as if someone was talking to himself and taking sides, a discussion. Over here there’s the rationale for justifying an action. On the other side, there, is some doubt. The colors are levels of heat, of intention. Do you know what I’ve done?” she interrupted herself.
“Over here”, she continued, and dropped down to her hands and knees and crawled over to a pile of what looked like assorted white laundry. Phil stared after her, wondering if his mother had any idea how insane she’d just seemed. He looked back at the desk but the heap she had pulled out of the screen had subsided and was once more the flat plain scribbling he’d originally seen.
“Over here”, she repeated, and grabbing some empty tuna fish cans, a plastic toy wrench and some fabric, her fingers began weaving together a sort of small vehicle.
“It needs some more color, of course”, she admitted, “but the principle’s solid. You see? A flying car, with lint for the wings. You bring it together with two-sided tape. Not ideal, I admit. I’m working on a theory for a cloud-like containment. That way you wouldn’t have to worry about flow.”
She tossed the thing up in the air, and it flew. It flew briefly, that is, flapping its furry little wings a few times, then gliding quite gently down to the floor. Marina watched after it calmly and was actually quiet for a minute while she mentally calculated more thrust in the aft.
“Mom?” Phil suggested. She didn’t answer. She began rapidly scribbling more notes in her book. Phil returned his attention to the computer. He noticed that his folders were opened, that his drawings were scanned, but whether by her or the others he had no way of knowing.
“Mom?” he repeated, and this time she looked up.
“Is this the way it looked this morning?”
“Pretty much”, she replied. “I tried to put everything back the way I found it. You know your molecular collapsing can’t work, by the way, don’t you? It’s nice to dream of impossible things, but some times they are really impossible.”
“I guess”, Phil shrugged. He didn’t mind that she’d looked through his plans, or even that she had a critique, but he had to admit she was right, and that bugged him. In all of these years, he had never once known his mother to have any interest whatever in anything he did. Why now all at once? And had she always been interested in sciencemath? How come he hadn’t known?
“I like what you’re doing with wheels”, she added, looking up from her notebook. “The trick is going to be what happens when you’ve achieved a friction coefficient near zero. How’s it going to stop? You’d need a material that could be in two states at once. Some sort of rubberized metal, maybe.”
“I was thinking polycarbonate”.
“Too stable”, she quickly replied. “I was thinking more metamorphorically. Not actually IN two states at once, but quantumly suggestible. I’d give it more thought.”
She returned her attention to her notebook.
“Don’t you have to be doing to work?”
“Called in sick”, she told him, not looking up. “Too much to do, anyway. I might not even go back. Oh, I have to talk with Alexei. Excuse me”, and she jumped up, ran into the hall and picked up the phone. Moments later he could hear her speaking in Russian.
“Is this really my mother?” he said to himself, and as he peered out of his room and watched her jabbering away, he couldn’t be sure. It looked like his mother. It sounded, sort of, like her. He realized with a jolt that he’d been avoiding her as much as he felt that she’d been keeping her distance from him all these years, and that he really didn’t know her at all.
Nine
He stood by the window, staring out into the night. He’d looked through enough of the documents in that mysterious folder to know that he was out of his depth. forced to realize that all his meager years of dabbling and experimenting were mere amateur hour. Sure, he was only eleven, but he’d felt so much older every time he’d pulled something off. Now he knew there was far more in just this tiny corner of the galaxy than he would ever be able to comprehend. Those weren’t notes scribbled at random on those pages, those were dissertations from beyond all human experience. He just felt it, and had that feeling confirmed almost immediately, with the arrival of two of his mother’s friends.
Marina brought Alexei Zuprevin and his companion, Janet Boltch, straight into Phil’s room, and with barely an introduction to her son showed them over to his desk. Phil found himself squished up against that window by the sheer bulk of the Boltch woman, a giantess both in height and girth, who could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty to judge from her wide flat face and thin brown hair. She was wearing what looked like just an ordinary white bedsheet turned into a robe of some sort, and open-toed sandals revealing long, thick unpainted nails. Her hands were thick and calloused as if she were a carpenter, and her voice was loud and strong as she tried to dominate the screen. Yet she deferred to the even taller but quite slender and bent old man, Zuprevin, who stank like a cigar factory and was continually brushing away his thick white hair from his lean, narrow face. His voice was as soft and indistinct as hers was the opposite, but they seemed to understand each other perfectly.
Marina stood back with a smirk on her face as if she had pulled of some sort of secret triumph. In fact, she was pleased to be on the verge of stumping her tutor and his brash associate. How many years had she had to listen to their lectures, only vaguely understanding a small percentage now matter how hard she studied on the side. Alexei had been urging her to go to college for years now, He saw something in her that no one else had ever seen, and she appreciated that, but never had the confidence to follow through. Janet Boltch was an obstacle in that department, seeming to scoff at the idea of the poor immigrant waitress ever amounting to anything in this world. Marina had a special scorn for Boltch, though she knew that Alexei admired and respected her immensely. Now the pair were rifling through the documents with grunts and groans of surprise and wonder. Finally Alexei stepped aside and asked Marina to show him what she’d described on the phone as multi-dimensional graffiti.
She went up to the desk and repeated her performance of earlier that evening, causing an eruption of weird shape and light to leap from the table as she massaged and tweaked it in the air. Her face was filled with a glorious joy as she pulled and poked and turned the towering mass to the total astonishment of everyone else in the room.
“And you say this has meaning?” the old professor asked.
“It’s a replay”, she said, “a recording of what my son and his friend were discussing here today, only not as it was in the visible realm, but almost in shadows, the essence in relief.”
“What?”, Janet Boltch was brief in her commentary.
“I don’t know how to explain”, Marina admitted.
“Never mind that”, Alexei said, as Miranda let the ‘conversation’ relapse and subside into its original two-dimensional for.
“I’m afraid it’s too far beyond anyway”, he continued, and now looking up at Phil, he directed a question at the boy.
“Marina’s child”, he said, “I would like to know how you came up with this”, he said, pointing at a particular page on the desk.
“This”, he explained to Marina, “is an equation, a fractal exponential of pi which resolves into a finite value, and constitutes the properties of a four dimensional wormhole.”
“Which”, Janet Boltch butted in, “can only be realized physically in a ferrous silicate, of course”.
“Of course”, Marina said, looking concerned.
“You’re talking about time travel?”, she added.
“Possibly”, the old man replied. “Now tell me, Marina’s child, how it is you know about this?”
Phil felt suddenly very warm, standing there in that rather small room filled with all these strange grownups, their odors and sounds. It was time, he understood, to tell the the truth, so he did. He explained about the moose in the house, and the house across the street from the house with the moose, and the lights in the rooms, and the windows and the curtains, and the doors, and the others.
“That wasn’t me you saw”, he said to his mother, “and it wasn’t my friend. It was them”, he concluded. The grownups were quiet for several long moments, and then Alexei let out a sigh and exclaimed,
“Now it begins to make sense.”
“It does?”, Phil asked, but nobody heard him. Janet and Alexei started jabbering at once, and Marina got very excited as well, and as if they were one the whole group of them bustled out of the room and down the stairs into the kitchen, where Marina set about making tea, and warming up biscuits. Alexei and Janet sat down at the table and continued their discussion in Russian, and Phil, who had followed slowly behind, realized that he understood nothing of what they were saying, as little as he understood about what he had seen on his own computer, and the whole house seemed different, as if it was not the home he had known all his life. He stood in the living room, between the stairs and the kitchen, uncertain of what he should do. It was already midnight, but he felt more awake than ever before. He felt like he would never sleep again.
There was a knock on the front door. Phil went over and opened it, and there on the sidewalk stood Marcus.
“I saw your lights on”, Marcus said, and Phil nodded.
“Come on, let’s go”, he answered, and stepped outside, quietly closing the door behind him.
Ten
An excellent translation would be required to capture the discussion occurring in that kitchen that night, but the actual terms and nomenclature used are beyond the limited capacity of the present narrator, so a rougher rendition will have to suffice.
“There was a definite sense of panic in the holistic conversation”, Marina said.
“That would explain the muddiness of the palette”, Janet considered.
“There was some disorganization in the general thinking”, agreed Alexei. They had been sketching out the three-dimensional vision which Marina had extracted from the computer. As an imagistic representation of an internal dialog such as none of them had ever seen before, it was difficult to make something of it.
“There was also some mention of hurry”, Marina tossed in. “There had been a long wait.”
“Their efforts had been sporadic”, Alexei concluded from some evidence not apparent to the others.
“Why do you say that?”, Janet pressed him.
“There were dates on the pages in the folder”, Alexei replied. “Those pages were not as you might say uploaded as usual, the way you or I might click on a button and browse and select. They were transferred into the machine by telepathy.”
“That’s quite a statement!” Janet nearly shouted. “Where is your proof?”
“There was no last touched data in the folder. The files had appeared all at once, out of nowhere, and yet, there were dates in the pages themselves. And the progression of the research, one could see. The ideas that led to another were separated, sometimes by very long times.”
“I didn’t see any of that”, Janet said. “What I saw was raw calculations. Did you notice they used a strange value for the constant ‘e’? It differed from ours from the seventeenth demical place onward.”
“Gravitational distortion”, Alexei said, frowning. He took another sip of tea and nodded wearily.
“That would seem to be the central problem”, he added. “Everything circles around it. In wonder”
He was interrupted at this point by a loud bang, which turned out to be the front door slamming, and the stomping of heavy feet, which preceded the appearance in the kitchen of a strong-looking man with thick black hair and bloodshot eyes.
“Who are you people?”, he demanded, “and what are you doing in my house in the middle of the god damn night?”
“That’s just Pete”, Marina said, standing up from her chair where she’d been between Alexei and Janet. Even standing, she was barely taller than those two were, sitting.
“Oh, ‘Just Pete’ is it?”, Pete demanded, lurching another two steps into the room. “Just Pete who owns this house? Just Pete who lives here? Just Pete your worthless husband? That’s what you really meant to say, am I right?”
“Pete”, Marina sighed, “Do you mind? We won’t be long here. These are my friends”.
“Friends is it?”, Pete yelled. “Why then howdy! Howdy-do! Welcome to my humble abode, friends of my wife.” He staggered toward a cupboard and began rummaging around, looking for a bottle of something.
“Let’s have a celebration!”, he shouted. “It’s not every day I meet friends of my wife hanging out in my house in the middle of the night. This calls for a party, yes sir!”.
He found a bottle of Tequila and plunked it down on the counter, then turned to a cabinet to search for some glasses.
“Better be going”, Alexei murmured, and then he and Janet both started to rise. Pete swung around quickly and stammered,
“Wha, wha, where are you going? The party’s just starting! Sit down, lovely friends of my wife. Have a seat. I’ll bring you some glasses. I know they are here. We can have a great time, sure, why not?”
“Thank you”, Alexei told him, “but we have somewhere to go and must hurry.”
“Oh, hurry now, is it? I don’t know about that. Didn’t look like you was in any hurry a minute ago, until I got here. Now it’s a hurry. I see. I don’t think so”, he said, and he rushed over and tried to push the old gentleman down in his seat. Janet Boltch stepped between them, however, and stopped Pete’s advance. He looked up at her stony wide face, and whistled and said,
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything uglier. Ever”, and started to laugh. Janet was not very amused. She grabbed hold of his shirt with both hands, and lifted the stocky man up to the ceiling.
“I don’t like you”, she said. “And you’re drunk. I’m going to put you down now, and you’re going to stay where I put you.”
Pete blinked a few times and tried to look down at his feet, which were dangling somewhere around Janet’s knees. Marina was gathering the notes they had made, and her keys and her purse and, with Alexei in tow, skirted out around Janet and Pete and reached the front door. Once she saw the two were outside, Janet swiveled around and lowered the man, putting him down in the chair where Alexei had sat. Pete was still speechless. Janet poured him a cup of tea and pushed it toward him.
“Drink this”, she instructed. Then she stalked away proudly and joined the others, who were getting into Marina’s car. Pete stared at the teacup and frowned.
“Some friends of my wife”, he muttered. “Some wife.”
Eleven
“What a jerk!”, Janet said as she climbed into the front passenger seat, and Marina nodded.
“I think I’ve had enough”, she muttered as she began to back out of the driveway.
“We must be going to moose house now”, Alexei piped up from where he was squished into the back seat of the small economy car.
“Right”, Marina said. It was only a few blocks away, according to Phil’s description. Marina was pretty sure she knew the place, and even thought she knew its owner, a man named Burleson who used to buy fish at the market. He had a wife who was a total shrew, if she remembered correctly. The wife was one of those people who like nothing better than to glare at strangers. She was another little dumpling, around the same size as Marina, but had a built-in arrogance twice her size. Mrs. Burleson was rumored to have had a child and put it up for adoption rather than raise it herself, although she was a nurse. Most people think of nurses as kindly and caring people, but Mrs. Burleson was a different kind entirely. She was more of a hospice nurse, helping her patients move along to the next stage as efficiently as possible. That left Mr. Burleson for Marina to think about. Jerry, was it? Jerry and Jessica, she thought they were called. Jerry Burleson was in mechanical repairs. Air conditioners, she recalled. They were ordinary people, as far as Marina could tell. Unhappy, it seemed, but otherwise plain.
Their house was one of those pre-fab jobs, the whole block was out of a kit that some developer plunked down in a month’s worth of building. The houses were all in pairs, opposites laid out across the street from each other, so that when you looked out your window you could imagine you were seeing your own house over there. It was a concept development, but people didn’t like it, and soon the homeowners were customizing their places, putting in new garage doors, altering the paint jobs, and changing the colors of their roofs.
“This is the street”, Marina said out loud as they turned onto it. She had been right, and at the end of the block, there stood the Burleson’s place. She parked next door, and the three of them got out of the car. Marina led the procession to the front gate, and shrank back immediately as the dogs charged, barking and slobbering.
“Mean dogs”, said Alexei.
“Let’s cross the street”, Janet suggested, and as they did, the barking subsided, and they could study the house in the quiet. The light was still on in the room with the Greater Kudu Bull, and no others were. Alexei whistled low.
“Is hideous thing to be having in house”, he clucked.
“There’s no accounting for taste”, agreed Janet.
“It’s just a stuffed creature”, Marina shrugged. She’d seen worse. One time she saw a stuffed owl - the entire big bird - in a bathroom over the toilet. She had seen chandeliers made of ossified dragonflies. She once knew a woman who’d had all her pets stuffed; seventy years of stuffed cats lined the hallways of the old lady’s house. And then there was people’s ideas of art. Once you started to think about that, what was a moose or whatever it was? Mere bad taste.
“I don’t get it”, she said.
“You mean what’s with the moose?” Janet asked.
“Or the house”, Marina said. “Why the house?”
“What about this one?” Alexei asked, and he pointed to the one they were standing in front of, the ghost house, as the boys called it, whose door was wide open and whose lights were all out.
“Phil said the weird stuff started happening only after they went inside there”, Janet said.
“So we should go in?” Marina asked, but the two others were already heading that way. Marina stopped back at her car first and fetched a small flashlight from the glove box, then she hurried to catch up with her friends. By the time she had reached them they were already inside and had experienced the effect of leaving the living room for the kitchen, and having the lights go on then. Janet examined the wall for light switches, as Marcus and Phil had done previously.
“It’s pretty much how he described it”, she said, and she went through the motions that Phil had described; walking from room to room, opening the window and seeing the curtain come down in the moose house, closing the window, and the curtain going up. As the three gathered there watching these interactions, they saw the living room light coming on over there, and the tops of three heads begin to take shape. They stood, feeling more and more frozen to the spots where they stood, as the faces emerged, and they saw that the faces were their own, and the bodies that unfolded below were their own, and a sensation of weight came over their eyes.
Twelve
“We’ve got to be careful”, Marcus told Phil. “There was a cop at my house. My stepmother called him. She thought I was missing or something. Anyway, he says that he knows you and you might be in trouble.”
“Fat cop?” Phil inquired. “Stupid looking. Kind of greasy?”
“That’s him”, Marcus confirmed.
“Officer Mike”, Phil shrugged. “I don’t care about him. He’s told lies about me before this time, I know. Guy’s got it in for me, but he’s going nowhere. Other cops told me. Nobody listens to him.”
“Even so”, Marcus said. “We need to watch out. They’ve got photos.”
“Really? Of us?”
“Not us. Them”, Marcus said.
“What I meant”, Phil replied. “The other us, them. Whereabouts?”
“The Ironworks”, Marcus told him, “And Officer Mike said something about the glass factory too. Said we were seen, or someone was seen, I don’t know.”
“Maybe we should go there”, Phil suggested. They had already decided to avoid the moose house. They didn’t want to get caught in that trap again. Now they were shuffling down the street, in no hurry, having been unable to decide what to do, where to go.
“Who were those people?” Marcus wanted to know. “At your house?”
“Oh, some friends of my mom”, Phil replied. “Or I think so, at least. They seemed to be friends. The old guy is some kind of genius, according to mom. Or he used to be back in the day. The other one, I don’t know what she is. My mom seems to think she’s important.”
“So what were they doing there?”
“Trying to figure it all out”, Phil said. “They were saying some crazy stuff, about aliens and wormholes and bending gravity.”
“Bending?”
“A lot of fancy equations”, Phil said. “It’s all math. You can do anything with math, the old guy was saying. Prove anything. Go anywhere. Do anything. You can make the whole universe as small as a pebble, or as big as infinity if that’s what you want. With math you can draw any picture, say any saying, prove everything and even prove nothing.”
“So what do they think happened to us?”
“We were turned into copies”, Phil said, and Marcus just laughed.
“We already knew that”, he said. “We didn’t need any genius to tell us.”
“And they said that whoever did it was limited to the thing that they copied. Like since they copied a kid, meaning us, they could only do the things we can do, they could only use our bodies and brains the ways that we can, but I don’t know if I really believe it.”
“My little brother saw us”, Marcus remembered. “He said we were running and that I was going faster than you.”
“No way”, Phil said. “I can beat you anytime.”
“I know”, Marcus said, “ but it’s like you were saying. If they could only do what our bodies can do, than how could I be going faster?”
“Maybe you’ve got it in you”, Phil shrugged. “But the things that I saw on my computer, no way I could have put written that stuff.”
“Maybe you’ve got all that inside you”, Marcus said with a smile.
“Where were we running”, Phil asked, and when Marcus informed him about the old bridge, Phil suggested they go there, and Marcus agreed. It wasn’t too far and they had nowhere to go anyway. Still, they stuck to the shadows and took some back alleys just in case Officer Mike was out prowling around. As they got closer they also got quieter, as if that somehow would help. Each had a feeling they were getting warmer as they neared the source of their replicas destination.
The old bridge had been abandoned for years, like the entire railroad freight business itself. Once upon a time their town had a lively harbor and an active train system, but that was all gone long before even their parents were born. Abandoned buildings remained, some of them turned into warehouses, but mostly left rotting away. Marcus and Phil stepped quietly around broken up streets and discarded rubbish. People used this area as an informal landfill, dumping their junk whenever and wherever they felt like. The yards and the alleys were filled with old cars and appliances, piles of rusting metal and faded plastic. It was hard to proceed without noise through the place, but Marcus and Phil did their best. Approaching the bridge they moved slower and slower, and as it loomed up before them they even felt chills. Their imagination was getting ahead of their senses. In clear daylight they would have been mocking themselves for these uncalled-for night terrors, but in the darkness everything can seem ominous and strange.
“I don’t know”, whispered Marcus. “This is creepy.”
“I know”, Phil agreed, and for a moment the boys were tempted to just turn around and leave, run as fast as they could away from that bridge, but then Phil saw something, swaying and glinting, dangling above them, catching the moonlight.
“What is that?” he whispered and pointed it out. As Marcus looked up, he saw more of the same kind of thing; objects swinging slowly between the bridge girders and beams.
“Looks like bottles”, he said.
“And tools”, Phil added. They inched onto the bridge itself, looking down to avoid falling between rails, and up to try and see what those things were up there.
“Tied on the bridge”, Marcus said.
“With twine”, Phil said.
“We couldn’t do that”, Marcus shook his head.
“Maybe we didn’t”, said Phil. “Maybe that stuff was already there”.
There must have been dozens of bottles, tied at various lengths so they did not knock into each other, swaying in the breeze, and yet there was no breeze. Also there were random pieces of iron; solid bars, and fireplace pokers, and crowbars, and wrought gate pieces, these too were tied up with ropes and attached to the bridge. There seemed to be some kind of pattern - a certain number of bottles interspersed with these metallic objects - but not the same number each time.
“Maybe it’s some kind of art”, Phil suggested, and Marcus just shrugged.
“I’ve got no idea”, he admitted. “It’s weird, though. Especially in the dark. You can barely even see them all.”
“Must be more than a hundred”, Phil said. The boys were barely standing at the edge of the bridge and were about to go further on, to see just how far this pattern extended, when a light came sweeping up over them suddenly, and they heard the sound of a car nearby braking.
“Come on”, Marcus said, tugging at Phil. “It might be the cops. We’ve got to hide”
“Okay”, Phil replied and they hurried in the direction they came, and quickly found a spot behind a bulky old oven, not far from the bridge but well out of sight of anyone on it. Crouching down and scrunching together, they heard the sounds of footsteps approaching, and then they heard voices, voices which sounded familiar.
Thirteen
“It’s all here”, said the voice of Janet, and the voice of Alexei replied,
“This is good. Now maybe finally go home.”
“It’s been a long time”, said Marina.
“Enough talking”, Janet ordered as the three adults walked right past the place where the two boys were hiding. Marcus and Phil glanced at each other and both shook their heads. They both wanted to talk but knew that they shouldn’t. Marcus would have said the same thing as Phil. That is not Alexei, and that is not Janet, and that is certainly not really Marina. Marcus and Phil readjusted their crouches, inching forward to get a better look. The grownups were walking onto the bridge. Janet looked up and pointed, approvingly.
“Looking good”, Alexei said as Janet hushed him again. The stood in a line, Janet in the middle with Marina on her left, and Alexei on her right.
“Now for this”, Janet said, and she reached out her arms and grabbed the others by their waists. She pulled them close to her sides and then squeezed. The others got scrunched up against her, and still she squeezed tighter. That’s got to hurt, Marcus thought, but neither Marina nor Alexei made any sound as the much larger woman crushed them against her. She gripped harder and tighter and then the bodies of the others began to merge into her own. First their waists disappeared into her own waistline, then she adjusted her grasp to pull in their torsos and shoulders. She squeezed in their legs and finally their heads until there was only one person, just Janet. Phil barely kept from crying out, and might have done so had not Marcus put his hand over his friend’s mouth. To see your own mother absorbed just like that, it had to be hard, Marcus thought.
Who is this Janet? he wondered, but then already he knew that it wasn’t the human being Janet at all. It was the others, but maybe there was only one? It was so hard to know what was actually going on, especially when, moments later, the big body that had looked just like Janet began melting away, literally melting, peeling off in liquid sheets, and at the same time - Marcus didn’t know where to look first - the bottles on ropes that were tied to the bridge seemed to blaze all at once, as if they’d caught fire, and they all came moving together, towards the center, towards the spot where the creature was boiling, and the bottles came apart, or rather, split into sheets, and in a furious blast they shattered but instead of falling to pieces, they fell to a whole, in a sort of a bowl, surrounding the creature and catching its drippings.
The thing was all yellow now, nothing of Janet remained. It was yellow like a banana and lumpy like a poorly made pudding, and collapsing, more liquid than solid, the thing couldn’t stand, couldn’t keep hold of it shape, but threatened to distill into something that looked more like melted butter than anything else that Marcus could think of.
“The thing can’t stand up on its own. Our gravity’s too much for it”, Phil whispered before Marcus could hush him, but the thing didn’t hear, because the assorted bits of iron began clanging and clasping around the sides of the huge glass bowl as the pieces swung down and surrounded it, holding the whole thing together like the grate in a fireplace holds all the logs.
The bowl looked precarious, like it could all melt away, it was shimmering yellow and orange and blue, and the creature inside it was slishing and sloshing from one side of the bowl to the other. Marcus thought he could hear the thing moaning but it was probably all in his mind.
“It’s shrinking”, Phil said, and as Marcus looked closer he could see that the iron was tightening around the bowl which was now a complete enclosed sphere. It was definitely growing smaller, and tighter and somehow more solid. It was cooling and collapsing in on itself. Now the thing, which had been resting on the rails, began to lift itself up off the ground, and even as it shrank it rose higher and higher, until it was about six feet up in the air, and from maybe ten feet in original diameter had coalesced into the size of a baseball.
Phil started to move out from behind the old oven, and Marcus reluctantly joined him. It was getting harder to see the little thing. It was so small now, and no longer glowing. They ran onto the bridge and Marcus lost sight of the ball for a moment, and when he saw it again it was smaller than a golf ball, and still diminishing rapidly. The boys reached the spot where it was, now several feet over their heads, when it suddenly vanished without making a sound. It was gone, and all of the bottles, and all of the pieces of iron were gone, and all that was left were some ropes on the rails and the girders. The night was still dark, and it was all over.
Fourteen
““Is that really what happened?” a dubious Ben asked his brother.
“Sure”, Marcus casually tossed back. He was laying on the upper bunk very late one night. His little brother often had trouble falling asleep, and would keep them both up chatting for hours.
“It doesn’t seem too likely”, Ben grumbled.
“Likely? Ha!”, Marcus replied. “It’s for certain. That’s the way things work. There are rules.”
“Rules?” What rules?”
“Like, for what happens when you die”, Marcus went on.
“If you’re bad you go to hell”, Ben promptly responded.
“Right”, Marcus agreed. “And you know that hell is hot, and heaven is always cloudy. That’s just the way it is. Like with aliens. They have these super-sophisticated technologies that we can only barely imagine.”
“Just enough to make things up”, Ben supposed.
“I’m not making it up”, Marcus insisted. “Look, how come no one ever saw Phil’s mom again after that night?”
“She just left them”, Ben said. “That happens. It’s what our own mom did, isn’t it?”
“That was different”, Marcus said. “She wasn’t replaced.”
“Oh yeah? What about Kristen?”
“Never mind that”, Marcus avoided the subject. “No one ever saw those other two again either.”
“Okay, mister know-it-all, then what about the Greater Kudu Bull? Answer me that. You saw it, right? You were with us that first time. How come that old thin just disappeared, just vanished?”
“Sure”, Ben said. “That one’s easy. That Mrs. Turtleson told old Mr. Turtleson, look buddy, it’s either me or the moose”.
Both of the boys cracked up laughing, but then Marcus said.
“And the dogs too? It’s either me or the dogs?”
“They moved out”, Ben said. “Remember? That house was for sale, and the other one too. The ghost house. Ridley Finn moved into that place.”
“Yeah, stupid Ridley”, Marcus snorted. “I wonder if they ever found a light switch in there.”
“They were there the whole time”, Ben turned over and snickered into the pillow. “It was just some super sophisticated technology, I’ll bet.”
“You don’t believe me”, Marcus pretended to be shocked. “Me, your own brother, after all this time we’ve been together.”
“You’re a liar”, Ben said. “I know that much.”
“I’m not a liar”, Marcus said. “Not always, at least. Look, it’s exactly what I saw on the bridge. You can ask Phil. Ask the Dark Rider, anytime.”
“He doesn’t like to be called that anymore”, Ben replied.
“You see? It’s because of that night, because of what happened. Afterwards, we got in his mother’s car. The keys were still in it and the lights were still on. The battery would’ve drained out, but Phil started her up and drove back to that street.”
“He’s not old enough to drive”, Ben resisted.
“Not legally”, Marcus said. “But almost anyone can drive if they’re tall enough. And the moose was already gone, and both the dogs too. And the lights were all out and the doors were all closed, in both houses. We peeked in the front window of the ghost house and didn’t see anything.”
“You just said the lights were all out.”
“So?”
“So of course you didn’t see anything. It was dark.”
“Then he drove back to his place”, Marcus went on. “And I walked back from there.”
“Yeah? What was I doing?”
“Sleeping, of course”, Marcus told him. “Like you’re supposed to be doing right now.”
“How can I sleep, with all the excitement?”
“Right, like you never heard it before. How come I have to keep telling you this?”
“Because it’s more fun every time”, Ben giggled. “You keep changing it, every time. You weren’t even there. You were right here all the time. You’re making it up.”
“Oh come on”, Marcus snickered. “How would you know? You were asleep.”
“Like I’m supposed to be now”.
“Yeah, good night”.
“Good night, liar.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Yeah, right.”
by Tom Lichtenberg
Copyright 2010 by Tom Lichtenberg
One
Later, when the Dark Rider was once again known only as Phil, he wouldn't want to talk about what happened that summer. Of course, the Dark Rider was never much of one for talking anyhow. He was more of a traveler. He'd been born and raised right there in Spring Hill Lake, spent all his life so far in a dingy little house by the old wharf with his mom and dad. To put it more properly, he shared the same house, but hardly saw much of them. Pete and Marina Galvez weren't the traditional family types. They'd achieved a sort of equilibrium by rigorously avoiding each other and their son. Pete put in long, irregular hours in a warehouse near the old abandoned railway station. Marina worked the night shift as a waitress at a restaurant in the fish market. Marina's expected arrival home was always Pete's cue to leave. Pete's return coincided with Marina's exit. In this way they'd managed to remain married for more than twelve years.
For eleven of those years, they'd had a son to work around. Early on they'd tried to get by using neighborhood teenage girls to raise him, but these too often simply left the baby alone to fend for himself, and then demanded raises on top of that. They tried some old women too but eventually tired of their griping. So it was that by the time he was nearly six, Phil was pretty much left to take care of himself as best he could, and he did pretty well. By then he was already swimming in the river, climbing trees, scrounging for food in dumpsters, and looting every unguarded building for various parts and equipment. He was what you would call a taker-apart-er. Anything that was made of more than one separate piece was fodder for his special skills at deconstruction. At first he wasn't all that interested in putting them back together, and his bedroom became a mountain of assorted bits and pieces of things. Later on he started assembling them in new and interesting ways.
Everybody around knew about Phil. A range of social workers paid regular calls to make sure he was trying to remain in school. His teachers complimented him on his handwriting, over which he took great pains. Local shop owners left their scraps and junk in prominent locations both in order to get rid of the stuff, and to dissuade him from invading their store rooms and ripping them off further. He was quick, and stealthy as a feral cat. He was always a bit tall for his age, and amazingly thin no matter how much he ate, and he did eat a lot. Local girls were always putting out plates full of goodies on the chance that he might come by, especially one named Karly, whose dad owned the local donut shop. Karly would hide herself behind the screen door to the alley, peaking out to catch a glimpse whenever she expected to see him. You had to be alert for the Dark Rider. He'd come wheeling by on his skateboard out of nowhere and before you knew it, whatever had been there was gone. He could sometimes hear Karly giggling behind the door but he never even stopped to say hi. The Dark Rider had his own plans. He got the name from his hair, which was black and thick as a mop, and his clothes, which were always as dark as his hair. The Dark Rider went barefoot whenever he could, which was everywhere he went except school.
It was the summer before the sixth grade, and the Dark Rider wasn't planning to go. He couldn't imagine a good enough reason to. He was a kid who knew how to learn for himself. He was a regular at the library, which had everything he needed for his own self-education. His major interests those days were mechanics and physics. He'd become more and more interested in inventing things, beginning with the motors and widgets he'd started attaching to his vehicles. His bicycle had auto-location and voice-activated braking. His skateboard had auxiliary solar power and remote controlled velocity. His roller blades had self-adjusting torque. The Dark Rider wanted a car and he wanted to build it himself, and he wanted it to be small, self-powered, non-polluting and one hundred percent biodegradable. All of this was going to take study, and time, and salvaged materials. The boy had no time to be wasting in school.
Mostly the Dark Rider was fine by himself. He didn't have close friends, and didn't feel lonely. There was always someone he could nod to if needed. He'd gotten by all those years on facial expressions and a handful of words. He knew that girls liked him, but he wasn't much bothered by that. The boys kept their distance for the most part. Most of them feared him but would never admit it. Even the older ones secretly wanted to be him. He wasn't much known for conversation, so it was a startled Marcus Holmes who suddenly found the Dark Rider standing beside him one late afternoon by the grocery store.
"Yo Marcus", the Dark Rider said, and Marcus looked at him and shyly said,
"Yo"
"You're not going to believe what I saw", the Dark Rider continued, and he lingered, waiting for Marcus to prompt him. Marcus already had his hands full with his little brother Ben, who was trying to "borrow" some lollipops from the basket by the fruit stand out front.
"Sorry", Marcus said, grabbing his brother's hand and yanking it away from the candy.
"Ow, that hurt", Ben protested and twisted away. Ben was already seven, three years younger than Marcus, but sometimes he acted like he was still four.
"Geez", Marcus sighed and looked back up at the Dark Rider looming beside him.
"What'd you say?" he inquired.
"You're not going to believe it", the Dark Rider repeated, but this time he didn't wait further for Marcus to ask what. The Dark Rider had something to tell someone, and this was rare enough. Marcus already felt lucky to be the one who just happened to be around.
"Up around Cantwell's", the Dark Rider said, "You know where I mean?"
"The smoke shop", Marcus replied, and the Dark Rider nodded.
"You got it", he said. "There's a house down the street on the left."
"The ghost house?", Marcus asked.
"Cross the street". The Dark Rider shook his head. Obviously Marcus didn't know his left from his right.
"The one with the dogs", Marcus guessed, and the Dark Rider nodded.
"That's the one."
"What about it?", Marcus asked. He knew that house pretty well, having to go by it to school every day. The two big dogs that lived there would always charge the fence and bare their teeth and slobber and bark and scare the heck out him and his brother.
"Those are mean dogs", Ben added, who had come over to stand by his brother to listen.
"You been over there lately?", the Dark Rider wanted to know.
"Like yesterday?", Marcus told him.
"Well, I don't know if it was in there yesterday."
"What was in where?"
"The big honking antelope!" the Dark Rider said. "They got this giant antelope in the bedroom."
"A giant cantaloupe?", Ben screwed up his face to ask. Ben even talked and looked like a toddler sometimes. Marcus often wondered if the kid would ever grow up.
"Antelope", the Dark Rider told him. "Like a moose. Like a big old giant moose."
"That's impossible", Marcus replied. He was a very practical boy. With Marcus, either a thing was possible or it wasn't, and if it wasn't, there was no point in thinking about it. Although nearly a year younger than Phil, they had been in the same class forever, since Marcus' step mother had had the foresight and resolve to see that he skipped over kindergarten and went straight into first grade at five. As young as his brother was for his age, Marcus was always old for his own. Other than the fact that the two were utterly different in each and every meaningful way, they looked exactly like brothers. No one would ever even doubt it for a moment. They had the same close, tightly curled hair, the same big brown eyes, the same smooth dark skin, the same small mouth, even the same straight and purposeful stride.
"I'm telling you", the Dark Rider said. "You've got to come and see this thing."
"Yeah", Ben cheered, ever eager for anything new.
"We're supposed to get back with this stuff", Marcus said, gesturing at the bag of veggies and fruit he was holding.
"It's not much out of your way", the Dark Rider told him. "Come on! You got to see it."
"Well, okay", Marcus started to say but the Dark Rider already knew that he would, and had sped off before him. Marcus was a little annoyed because he wanted to go home and get back to his video game, but a the same time, an invite from the Dark Rider wasn't something that happened any day, and a moose in a bedroom had to be something to see. Ben was already sprinting ahead, so Marcus had to hustle to catch up.
"Impossible", he muttered to himself. "There's never been anything like that."
Two
Marcus didn't like running so he was already in a bit of a mood by the time he caught up to the other boys, who were already backing away from the fence as the two big dogs charged, jumping up against the metal gate and trying to push it open with their paws and their snouts. The gate rocked back and forth but didn't give way. Nevertheless, Ben was crouching behind Phil, who was doing his best to appear brave. Those dogs were foaming at the mouth, especially the tan one, which barked less and was all the more frightening for it.
"There. See? There it is!", Phil was shouting as Marcus puffed along beside him. He looked over at the house but didn't see anything right off. It was just another one-story ranch-style bungalow like every other on the block, distinguished only by its hideous brown stucco exterior and the cheap wire fence which looked like it wouldn't stand up to those dogs much longer.
"I don't see nothing", Marcus muttered, and Phil yanked his right arm and pointed it in the direction of the smallest window on the left. Marcus thought he could see a vague dark shape in there, but there was too much light. He couldn't tell for sure.
"See it now?" Phil badgered him, and Marcus admitted he did see something, just to be agreeable. Phil wasn't buying it.
"No you don't", he dropped Marcus' arm. "If you did then you would. I mean, you'd know it."
"I see it", Ben volunteered, peeking out from behind the Dark Rider's back.
"Maybe it's the angle", Marcus said, and he stepped to one side, then took another step forward, and tilted his head this way and then that. All of a sudden, there it was.
"Fantastic!", he breathed. "What is that thing?"
It was huge. The room it was in didn't look like more than a closet that has been turned into someone's office. He could see a little desk in the back, tucked in among some bookshelves which were only half-filled with fat, leaning books, but the moose dominated the scene. It was fully seven feet high, at least, and was a whole half of a beast, with curving, winding horns reaching up to the ceiling, a giant head and the front half of the torso. The head was facing away from the window, at an angle, so you could only just barely make out that the beast had been cut neatly in half, had only two legs and a backside propped up by a stand. It was complete with brown fur, with huge eyes, a black nose, but it wasn't a moose. It sure wasn't an antelope, or a deer, or any other thing that Marcus could say.
"I got to find out what that is", he declared, with a sigh.
"It's a freaking moose or something", Phil told him but Marcus replied with a shake of his head.
"Ain't no moose", he said. "No antelope neither. Definitely from Africa, I can tell you that much. Look at those horns. Where do you think they got it?"
"Why did they get it?", Ben wanted to know, and the older boys laughed.
"Nobody's got a moose in their house", Phil pronounced, denying the very reality they witnessed that moment.
"It's sure weird", Marcus agreed. This was not that kind of neighborhood. Not that kind of city, for that matter. They never heard of any hunters around there, or people rich enough to go on safaris. The people they knew pretty much stuck around. Maybe they had an old boat they would take on the river sometimes. Maybe they souped up a car and would go on the track. Sometimes they'd go up to the lake in the summer and camp in the trees, but otherwise, nobody ever went nowhere as far as they knew. They themselves had never been out of the city that they could remember. Marcus and Ben lived on the water, on a very old houseboat their father had come across a long time ago, but that thing stayed moored to the dock and its motor hadn't even been worked on in years.
"You know the people who live there?" Marcus asked, and Phil shook his head.
"But I'm going to find out", he said. "I'm going to be checking this out. You can count on it."
This was already the most time that Marcus had even spent around Phil, and the most he had ever heard him say. It was feeling like time to get home.
"Well", Marcus told him, "you let us know when you do, all right?"
"Sure", Phil said, "I'll let you know", and he stood there, staring at the thing. He couldn't get enough of it.
"See ya, then", Marcus said, and pulled his little brother along. The dogs had already stopped barking but were guarding the gate, one on each side, panting heavily. Phil didn't pay any attention to them. He was almost as if in a trance, and remained there, half an hour or so after the other boys left, until he also finally woke up, and went off.
Three
It was later than he thought by the time Marcus returned with his little brother to their floating home. Their step-mother, Kristen O'Leary, was already there, waiting on deck for the boys and the vegetables they'd been charged with bringing home for dinner. She grabbed the bag from Marcus as he came up the plank and without a word of greeting spun around and went inside.
'Uh oh', Ben muttered, 'Kristen's mad', and Marcus nodded. They could tell her moods from a mile away and Marcus was already prepared for this one. Next, he knew, would be the lecture about how she didn't deserve this, how accidental, how arbitrary, how absurd her life should be pegged to this crappy old houseboat and these two little boys - who weren't that little any more and were bound for nothing but trouble - just because of that man, their no-good father, that fatal charmer Pearson Holmes, who'd gone off and got himself turned into toast in a mess of a car wreck, and of course their mother was even more to blame, that wretched Marla Rainbow Sky or whatever she called herself, stupid hippie chick who went off God knows where leaving her infant and toddler with that irresponsible, criminal dad, and who stepped in to change little Ben's diapers? And who stepped in to read Marcus to sleep every night? And who stepped in, as if she had no other cares in the world and nothing else better to do than to raise a pair of abandoned brats who couldn't even bring the zucchini and jalapenos home on time?
Kristen O'Leary, that's who, and they'd better believe it, and they ought to know better, and it was a damn shame, just a dirty no-good rotten shame that she loved those boys so much and always had and always would, no matter what. Marcus had kept something back in his pocket, a little special gift he'd grabbed for just such an occasion, and he stepped carefully into the kitchen where the utterances above were on their third and fourth rounds of repetition, and he took the little jar out of his pocket, and placed it gently on the counter where Kristen would be sure to encounter it on her next foray to the sink.
"What's this?", she interrupted herself, eyebrows arched in surprise. She picked up the small glass vial and turned it around. It bore no label, and contained some kind of herb or seasoning.
"Well?" she turned to Marcus and couldn't help but smile. "What is this time?"
"You have to guess", he reminded her, and Ben, behind him, couldn't help but giggle. Kristen unscrewed the lid and took a deep whiff of the contents, but shook her head.
"Some combination", she mumbled. "Some cardamom, for sure. Cayenne? No. Coriander. Cumin. Black Pepper. Clove? Middle Eastern, I'd say. A specialty. Am I close?"
"Very close", he nodded. "Mr. Ahmad called it Ras el Hanout. His own secret recipe. He wouldn't tell me everything that was in it. Did you smell the cinammon, though?"
"I thought it was nutmeg", she replied and he nodded.
"Nutmeg, too. It's got a lot of good things in it."
"Then I'll use it tonight", she told him. "I hadn't decided on seasonings anyway. Come and help", and with that, her spell was broken, and the evening flipped from foreboding to fine.
This was not the case with Phil. He always tried to time his arrival home with the changing of the guard, but when he got there, after riding his board aimlessly for a few more hours, his mom was still getting ready for her shift, and his dad had not yet arrived home.
"Can't be waiting all night", his mother declared when she caught Phil trying to sneak in unnoticed through the back door. "There's stuff in the freezer", she informed him, as usual. There was always stuff in the freezer, Phil thought. She doesn't need to tell me, and what is she waiting around for anyway? This stupid game, pretending to be a family when it's time for a little guilt trip.
"Thanks, mom", he said out loud. This was sure to put an end to the scene. It was all she wanted, to be able to tell herself she had done her duty as a parent and received the proper acknowledgement.
"Later then", she called after him as he bounded upstairs four steps at a time.
"Later", he replied, and by the time he reached his room he could hear the front door closing below. There would be a minimum of half an hour before his father arrived. He tried to make sure of that, doing his part to keep the family together by keeping them all judiciously separate. In his room he went straight for his touch desk, turned it on and started swiping his way to the blueprints section of his online collection. He flipped through the alphabetically organized section of half-baked ideas, contemplating working on one of them. He just wasn't sure which. He was thinking about collapsibles, inventions that could take up less space than theoretically possible. This was one of his favorite fantasies, to invent a car, for example, that could be folded up and stuffed into a bike rack. Wouldn't that solve a lot of parking problems? It was merely a matter of molecular re-ordering. There's so much empty space between and within the atoms that compose all substances. Phil considered it to be inevitable that someone would figure out how to use that space more efficiently. Why shouldn't he be the one to do it?
The chemical composition of the objects involved might be a critical condition, he reasoned, as he set the car notion aside for the moment. It would be more reasonable to first think of something made up of a simple set of chemical components, and work on the problem from that end. Or perhaps, he thought, maybe I should work on the folding operation of one particular chemical first, and tackle it from that angle? This would take a little more knowledge of chemistry, a little more knowledge of physics. He was already studying when his father's arrival was announced by the slamming of that same front door, and the stomping around in the kitchen, and the opening and closing of the refrigerator door, and the popping of the beer can tab, and the beep beep beep of the microwave a few minutes later when the old man's frozen pizza was ready. Phil understood that he would not be disturbed, but left alone to his own devices, a thought whose literal interpretation brought a sly smile to his face. My own devices, he thought, are going to the coolest of all time. Phil understood that reality is what it is, but he wanted, more than anything, to create what was not.
Four
It was nothing more than a whim. A boy couldn't spend all his time inventing, so he looked up 'African antelope images' online and soon discovered what the moose really was - a Greater Kudu Bull. The horns were unmistakable. As he later narrated to Marcus, the next evening as the two were on their way to the stake out, the Kudu is a native of Eastern and Southern Africa, a woodland creature vulnerable to hunters because of the way it stops and stares at predators pursuing them; like a deer caught in the headlights, these poor beasts doom themselves by whatever it is they're thinking when they do that.
"But what kind of asshole would kill an endangered species, then stuff it and stick it in his living room?" Marcus grunted.
"Maybe he just bought it", Phil suggested.
"Maybe we'll find out", Marcus said, although that didn't seem likely, They weren't planning to go knock on the door and ask the guy, if the guy was even home. They'd never seen him. Nobody they asked had ever seen him either. Everyone knew about the dogs, but the dogs had not been known to venture out from their yard, nor had a car ever been known to pull in or out of the carport next to the house. It was, it turned out, a complete mystery to many of their friends and even their friends' parents, some of whom had made inquiries, some of whom had gone on previous stake-outs, some of whom had gone so far as to ask the local sheriff, who informed them it was none of their damned business. Even the usually nosy animal control people refused to get involved. The dogs looked perfectly well-fed and were properly contained behind a regulation fence, There was nothing they could do, even if they wanted to, even if there was a reason to. Pinky McClaren, a snooping teenager who lived two doors down, told Phil he had even asked the gas and electric man about the place, and received the startling information that the house was not hooked up to the main. No electricity? It seemed impossible. Pinky had noted the lights turned on in various rooms on numerous occasions. Perhaps the people had their own internal power supply, the gas man told him. It was possible they used a generator. Some people do that.
"Pinky says he's lived there all his life and has never seen anybody go in or out of that house", Phil told Marcus. "He also says the dogs never change. Ever since he was a little kid it's been the same dogs, same size, same age, same bark, same everything. He even thinks they might not be real dogs."
"What does he think they are then?" Marcus asked.
"Projections", Phil told him. "Holograms."
"That should be easy enough to test", Marcus said. "Put a stick through the gate, see if they grab it. If they do, they're real. You could feel them tugging."
"Good idea", Phil said. "Let's do that", and it was the first thing they did when they arrived at the house. Marcus had found a long stick, a branch four feet long and not too thick to fit through the bars. The black dog came charging at the gate and yanked the stick right out of Marcus' hand so fast he didn't even feel it.
"Got to be a real dog", he exclaimed, staggering back a few steps. The other dog was pushing against the gate and slobbering as it barked. It seemed the dogs did not like to be tested, or teased. The boys retreated across the street until the dogs finally quieted down and resumed their usual stations on either side of the gate.
"There's a light on in that room", Marcus noted, and they saw the Greater Kudu bull clearly outlined, lit up from behind as the evening grew darker.
"Woah", Phil said. "That thing's amazing."
"Uh huh", Marcus agreed. The street was quiet, its sidewalks deserted except for Marcus and Phil. They stood there as night fell, gazing at the stuffed beast which seemed to grow larger and larger in their eyes.
"I think it moved!", Phil whispered at one point. He really did think so. The head seemed to shift to the left, to turn on its neck a little in their direction.
"No", Marcus whispered back. "That's impossible."
"I think it did", Phil said, but he wasn't so sure.
"I should be getting home", Marcus murmured, but he didn't want to leave. Nothing was happening. He knew that. Nothing was going to happen. It wasn't like him to be out like this. Ben would be wondering where he was, not to mention Kristen. Usually Ben went everywhere he did. He'd just happened to be taking a rare nap when Phil had come by the houseboat, urging Marcus to come with him, just for a few minutes, just to see. Marcus had left reluctantly, but he knew that Ben would be asleep for hours, and anyway, Kristen was home so it would be okay. Still, Marcus felt weird, standing out there on the sidewalk in the dark, looking at a giant stuffed moose or whatever it was, feeling like time was standing still, but no, not that time was, but that he was, literally and in some other strange way that he was standing still and that even though time had clearly not stopped - the stars had come out and you could even see one or two amidst the glow of the city lights - that it had stopped for him, and for Phil, as it maybe had too for those never-aging dogs, and he was almost hypnotized, or something, by that stillness, until, suddenly both of the boys were startled by a sharp sound like a gunshot that made them jump. The dogs turned their heads to their house as a light came on in another room in there and a shadow moved across the wall.
"There's someone in there", Phil breathed, and he strained to catch a better glimpse, but the shadow was gone and the light went off, only to be followed by another light coming on in another room in the back of the house. Marcus heard something behind him and turned around. He had forgotten that they were standing in front of the notorious 'ghost house'. This house was more readily seen to be uninhabited, because there was no fence and there were no dogs, and the windows were partly soaped up, and the roof was in bad shape, the driveway was cracked and broken and the yard was merely dead weeds. It seemed less spooky now than its neighbor across the street, except, as Marcus turned, he saw its front door slowly and creakily swing open. He nudged Phil.
"Holy", he whispered. "Look at this!"
Phil followed Marcus' pointing arm to the ghost house and the door, and immediately began moving towards it.
"Where are you going?" Marcus called after him.
"We've got to go in", said Phil.
"Are you crazy?" Marcus shouted. "That's the freaking ghost house."
"I don't care", Phil said. "Look, I brought a flashlight just in case."
"Just in case of what?", Marcus was thinking, but the answer had already occurred to him. Phil had been planning to sneak into the moose house. The dogs had changed his mind about that, but he was still in the sneaking mindset.
"I'm going home", Marcus announced, but he didn't go home. Phil was already at the door, already stepping inside, already inside, and Marcus was not going to abandon him now. He followed. Phil had turned on the flashlight and Marcus, just entering the door, could see the empty, carpetless living room, the cobwebs hanging from the corners of the ceiling, the half-painted walls, some rusty old cans on the floor.
"Nothing here", Phil said in a normal tone of voice. "Nothing to worry about. Just an empty house."
"Sure", Marcus said, and it smelled exactly like that. He could detect the scent of the mold and the mildew, the dust and the mouse turds, the dampness and the remnants of wood stain. His nose did not pick up any trace of haunting spirits, and he wondered for the first time if anyone could smell a ghost.
"What's with ghosts anyway?" he wondered out loud. "Wouldn't they have anything better to do?"
"It's just their nature", Phil said dismissively. He was interested in impossible things, but not in tired old cliches. "Zombies eat human flesh. Vampires suck blood. Ghosts haunt. It's what they are. It's what they do", he added, laughing.
"If there was any such thing", he said, moving towards the kitchen, Marcus behind him, and as Marcus stepped out of the living room, a curious thing occurred. The lights in that room turned on.
"Holy!" Marcus repeated himself. "Look at that!"
"How'd you turn on the lights?" Phil asked, "I didn't see any switches".
"I didn't", Marcus said. "They just went on."
"Right", Phil snapped, thinking that Marcus was trying to fool him. He pushed by Marcus and stepped back into the living room, and the instant he did so, the lights went off again. Phil backed into the kitchen again, and the living room lights went on again.
"Weird", he whistled, and this time he stood where he was and inspected the walls around the living room, but saw no switch, nor even an electrical outlet. The lights were recessed into the ceiling, four of them evenly spaced.
"Must be some kind of sensor", he decided. "Nothing to worry about. Motion-detected, I guess. Negative polarity maybe, which is why it's doing the opposite of what it's supposed to. You'd think they'd go on when you enter the room, not when you exit. Hmm."
Phil considered the situation for a moment, then motioned for Marcus to follow him out of the kitchen, into the little pantry on the side. As they did, the kitchen lights came on the moment they left that room, and as they re-entered it, a small light in the pantry turned on as the kitchen lights went off.
"They got the whole place rigged like that", Phil declared. "Interesting."
He resumed his search of the rest of the house but aside from the lights they found nothing out of the ordinary, nothing at all in fact. After the few minutes that took the boys returned to the living room and noticed its view of the moose house across the street. Although the windows were soaped, they were only partially, so they had a cloudy view of the Greater Kudu Bull. They also noticed now that the lights were on again in the room next to the moose, the room directly opposite from the one they were standing in, but still they could not see anything or anyone inside it.
"Help me open this window", Phil said, and together they tugged at the frame which seemed to have been painted shut.
"Let me chip it off", Marcus volunteered as the window didn't give. He pulled out a small pocket knife and ran the blade through the paint joining the top and bottom pane.
"That ought to do it", Phil nodded, and as they tried again they could feel a little movement.
"More over here", Phil instructed, and Marcus broke through some more paint on the sides.
"Go", Phil said and they pushed one more time, and the window went up, and as it did, a curtain came down in the window in front of the bull.
"Wow", Marcus said. "What was that?"
"Close it", Phil ordered, and they pulled the window down. The curtain across the street went back up, and there was the bull again, clearly outlined in the room lights.
"Open", Phil said, and the process repeated. Several more times they did the same thing. Each time as they opened the window in the ghost house, a curtain came down in the moose house. Each time they closed it back down, the curtain went up.
"I've got a theory", Phil said. "Come on, back to the kitchen", and as they returned to that room, as he predicted when they got there, as the living room light in the ghost house went on, the living room light in the house across the street, went off.
"They're somehow connected", Marcus volunteered, but Phil didn't answer. He was formulating a theory. It had something to do with the lights, of this he was sure. Windows and curtains, though, that didn't fit. The noise they first heard, when this door was opened, maybe that door had closed? There were no curtains in this house. There were disparate facts, unrelated. Lights and lights, that was something. Doors and doors, he could see that. Windows and curtains, though, this is where he was stuck.
"Maybe there's an underground passage", he suddenly said, but a brief inspection found no door leading below. The house was all on one floor anyway; two bedrooms, a bathroom, the kitchen and pantry, the living room, and nothing else. There was no basement. A trap door perhaps? Phil inspected the floors all through the house room lights going on and off on his trail. Marcus remained in the living room, staring out at the moose house, hoping to see something rational, like a person. There was nothing. The moose and the dogs, the single lamp in that room. The underground passage idea made no sense to Marcus in any case. He was thinking it was more like magnetic, like some kind of field, but what did he know? He was only ten years old and, unlike his friend, didn't really believe that science was any of his business.
And then he saw them.
"Phil," he shouted. "Phil, come here! Quick!"
Five
They were in the living room, across the street, not just shadows now, but physical forms, actual beings. Marcus and Phil stood and stared as the other two appeared at the other window, staring back at them.
"They're not whole", Marcus whispered.
"Something's wrong", Phil agreed as they couldn't take their eyes off of what was happening over there. The 'things', whatever they were, were growing from the top down. At first only their heads were there. Then necks, then shoulders, then torsos. Marcus and Phil couldn't see below the window sash but knew, could sense the hips and legs and feet being formed even as they watched. But the body parts that were there were still being put together, as if drawn or painted. Hair was setting, then mouths and ears more distinct, and the more they grew, the more they looked familiar, the more they looked ...
"Like us!", Phil gasped, and as he breathed again his counterpart began to breathe on the other side, and as Marcus put his hands to the side of his face, so the other Marcus put his hands up to his own newly formed face and felt it, for the first time, in wonder. The boys were speechless now, and in the few minutes it took for the others to become real, the originals were as if rooted to their spots. They did not try to move but would have found, if they had tried, that they could not. It was the others who moved first, the others who walked to their door, opened it, and as they opened it, the front door of the ghost house slammed shut. Marcus and Phil barely noticed. They watched as the copies of themselves came out into the driveway, walked up to the gate, and climbed over it as boys will while the dogs remained stationed and silent on either side. Marcus and Phil, the replicas, walked off down the street while Marcus and Phil, the originals, followed them with their gaze, and as the others disappeared from sight, the two boys sank to the floor of the ghost house, fallen into a deep, deep sleep.
All night they slept, and all day the next day too. They looked so quiet and peaceful lying there on the dusty and deserted floor, breathing calmly and deeply as if dreaming of nothing but good times. Marcus even had a trace of a happy smile on his face, and Phil looked more rested and more at peace than he had ever looked before. It was as if they were both getting the sleep of a lifetime, a slumber that washed away all the wounds of their lives, all traces of any regrets or misgivings they might have had, all bad feelings, all bad thoughts, all gone now and gone forever, replaced by only sunshine and warmth and ease and happiness.
Marcus was the first to stir, around sunset, nearly twenty hours after he had first gone unconscious. It was the breeze which awakened him, a breeze coming from the front door which was now ajar once again. If it hadn't been dusk, but later at night, he would have thought he'd been sleeping for only some moments, but the light in the sky informed him at a glance it had been much longer than that. He shook his friend by the shoulders until Phil, too, awakened and sat up.
"We've got to get out of here", Marcus told him, and the boys wasted no time scrambling up and running out of the house, not even noticing the lights flashing on and then off one more time as they left, or the door slowly closing behind them. Across the street the moose house was just as they'd encountered it for the first time the evening before, with the Greater Kudu Bull all lit up in the twilight, the dogs by the gate, and no other signs of any life in the property at all.
"What happened?" Phil said, rubbing his eyes and yawning.
"I've got no idea", Marcus said, "but it looks like we might have lost a day."
"At least", Phil agreed. That thought hadn't occurred to Marcus, who quickly looked down at himself to see if he had perceptibly aged. If they had lost more than a day, it might as well have been weeks, or months, or even years!
"We've got to find out", he said, and the boys took off running as fast as they could down the street, both agreeing without words to head for the corner market where the newspaper box on the sidewalk would tell them the day and the year. Phil got there first, being older and faster, and shouted out loud some words he would never have thought would have given him such joy.
"It's only Wednesday", he yelled, which meant they had only lost that one single day.
"Kristen's going to be furious", Marcus said, panting as he stopped at the corner.
"I'd better get home right away", he added, and started to run off, but Phil grabbed his collar and held him.
"Just a minute", he said, and Marcus relented and stopped.
"Did you see what I saw?" Phil asked, and Marcus nodded.
"Another Marcus and Dark Rider", he said.
"They might be still out here", Phil noted.
"I have no idea", Marcus shook his head. "I don't know what to think. Maybe we didn't see what we saw? Maybe there was some chemical in that house?"
"Like a drug?" Phil pondered. "Hallucination, you mean?"
"Yeah, and then we passed out", Marcus said.
"I didn't feel anything weird", Phil replied.
"Me neither", said Marcus.
"I didn't smell nothing".
"Me neither", said Marcus again.
"I don't think it was that", Phil said.
"Me neither", said Marcus, reluctantly, again.
"Okay", Phil told him, after a pause. "I guess you can go home now. We'll have to think about this. I wouldn't tell anyone, though."
"Okay", Marcus sighed with relief. He didn't want anyone to know, not yet. There was something that made him want to keep it a secret, though he didn't know why. It seemed important, and as he headed home, half walking half trotting, he tried to think of what he would say, what he could possibly say. That he'd spent the day at a friend's house? Lost track of time? But for nearly twenty four hours? It was hard to believe. Maybe not as hard to believe as the truth, or what seemed to be that, but still, Kristen was never going to buy it, and what about Ben? How could he ever keep anything from him? Ben would know right away if he was telling the truth, or a story. Ben knew all about Marcus and his stories.
Six
Marcus approached the houseboat cautiously, trying to determine the best course of action. Should he try and creep up the gangplank and sneak into the porthole to his bedroom? Should he boldly stride through the front door as if nothing unusual at all had happened? Should he slouch in, hands in pockets, apology all over his face? It didn’t matter. He guessed he was going to be in trouble no matter what, so he resolved to face it right up front, be as honest as he could, and take the hit. Kristen might be really, really mad, but he could deal with it. Hadn’t he braved the worst before? Well, to admit the truth to himself, there had never been a situation like this, and he didn’t know what to expect. He certainly didn’t expect what he found.
Settling on the slouching approach, he slinked into the houseboat and there, at the table, sat Kristen, and Ben, and a giant. Huge and sweatier than Marcus thought humanly possible, young Officer Mike Gramm loomed over the table; the others looked like mere ants compared to his bulk. His thin, wet hair was nearly the same navy blue as his policeman’s uniform, and his small dark eyes pounced on Marcus even before he’d taken two steps in.
“Here’s the boy now, I presume”, Officer Mike grunted, heaving the rest of his bulk around in the rickety aluminum card-table chair. Kristen jumped out of her seat and ran to Marcus, stopping just short of her instinctive hug, and pointing an index finger instead at his nose.
“Marcus”, she nearly shouted. “Where on earth? What on earth? Are you all right? Do you know what we’ve? Why didn’t you call? Where the heck?”
“Let the boy speak”, Officer Mike interrupted, waving his burly arms in the air. “Over here, boy. Come on, take a seat.”
“His name is Marcus, not Boy”, Kristen corrected him, but the officer paid no attention. Marcus dutifully came where he was told, sat where instructed, and looked straight into the officer’s face. The man was sneering at him. He felt it. This cop was bad news.
“Out with it, boy”, He spat. “What have you and your friend been up to? Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ve been seen. Yes, you have”, and he pulled out a sheet of paper containing a grainy brown photo and waved it around. Marcus couldn’t make anything of it. Kristen, who had returned to her chair, strained her neck to see, but it was Ben who spoke up.
“That’s the Dark Rider”, he yelped, then became quiet all at once, as if realizing he had done something wrong. The officer stared closely at the little one, whom he’d apparently been ignoring completely up to that time. He sized him up quickly, then returned his attention to Marcus.
“Philip Galvez. You know him, right? Don’t deny it. Don’t bother. You know him.”
“I know him”, Marcus admitted.
“You were with him last night, weren’t you, boy?”
Yes”, Marcus gulped.
“And what did you do with this Philip Galvez?” Mike was leaning over the table now, his fat greasy face only inches from Marcus’.
“Nothing.”
“Right. Nothing. Don’t fool with me, boy”, the officer warned. “You were seen, like I told you. This photo right here? It was taken last night. Late last night. By the watchman over at the old Hedgely Ironworks. You’re telling me you don’t know anything about that?”
“That’s right”, Marcus said after a pause. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“And the glass factory, round about dawn. I suppose you can’t fill me in on that either?”
“Right”, Marcus said.
“Wrong”, said the cop. “You were seen, you two boys, running away. What were doing down there? Why were you out, in the middle of the night, down in the warehouse district anyway? What’s two young fellows got to be doing down there at that time? That’s what I keep asking myself. Up to no good, is the only thing I come up with. Up to no good, am I right?”
“I don’t know”, Marcus swallowed. This was not going well.
“So you tell me your story now”, officer Mike said, and sat back with a grin like he already knew what his answer would be.
“We were just hanging out”, Marcus said. “We lost track of time, fell asleep. I never slept so much or so long in my whole life, really. We just woke up, just a short time ago. I swear, it’s the truth. We were sleeping.”
“Sleeping, eh?” Officer Mike shook his head. “And where was it you boys were ‘sleeping’ as you say.”
“Not far from here. Pretty close. Somewhere safe. We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“That would be a first for your friend”, Mike Gramm told him. “Do you know what I mean? Yes, I do think you do. Philip Galvez”, he repeated and pulled out a little black notebook and flipped a few pages.
“Let me see, yes right here. Truancy, check. Vagrancy, check. Suspicion of burglary, check. Wanted for questioning. Check. Seems like he’s filled up a page in my book, and him only just ten, or is it eleven? No matter. One more line in my book, one tiny mistake, that’s all it will take and your friend here is going to juvie. You want to be messed up with that? I don’t think so, boy. Everyone says you’re a good boy. A nice boy. A smart boy. Why are you hanging around, like you say, with a loser like that?”
“Phil’s awesome!”, Ben spoke up again, then shrank back in his seat at a glare from the cop.
“We didn’t do anything wrong”, Marcus insisted. The large officer rose to his feet.
“Well, you’re back”, he said, looking at Kristen. “I guess that’s all we can do for right now. You wanted him back. Now you’ve got him. I’d teach him a lesson, myself”, he added, but held up his paws and continued, “not that I’m specifying any particular action. It’s not in my line.”
“Thank you officer”, Kristen said as she followed him out to the dock. “I really appreciate your help”.
He waved away her words and ambled back down to the street and waddled away. He had parked his car around the corner in order to keep a low profile, and not warn the kid in advance. He had his suspicions, but then again, didn’t he always?
In the kitchen, Marcus braced himself for round two, but this one went easy. Kristen was so relieved about his return that all she could do was shake a little and cry. He had no idea, he couldn’t have known, why didn’t he call, she just kept repeating how worried she was, how late she’d stayed up, how she’d fretted all day and waited and waited and couldn’t go in to the store and it cost her a sick day and on and on for awhile. Marcus hadn’t eaten in more than a day but he wasn’t even hungry. All he wanted was to get away, so he begged off, said he was tired, went into his room and crawled up to his bunk. Ben followed shortly and lay down on his own.
The boys remained quiet for some time, Ben listening to his older brother’s breathing to determine his state, Marcus staring up at the ceiling. How could he sleep? Hadn’t he just been sleeping all day? That photo. The things the cop said. He’d been seen? How could he have been seen? What did it mean? All at once, his brother spoke up.
“I saw you too”, Ben quietly said. Marcus leaned over from the top bunk and looked down at the boy, who lay on his back, keeping perfectly still as if that would help him somehow.
“When?” Marcus asked.
“This morning when I went out to play. I thought I might see you, and I did. I saw you and Phil, but just for a moment.”
“Where?”
“On the tracks”, Ben replied. “You were running.”
“Where?”
“To the old freight train bridge. I thought that I saw you go up. It was funny.”
“Why?”
“Because you were in front. You know what I mean? You were both carrying stuff, in some kind of sacks, and you were both running, but you were in front, way ahead. That was weird because, I don’t know. You could never run faster than Phil. Not ever. But there you were, running faster than him. I didn’t tell anyone. It didn’t seem right. I wanted to follow you but Kristen called me back in.”
Marcus rolled back onto his bed, and sighed. He was beginning to get the picture. They had been seen, all right, but ‘they’ wasn’t them. It was ‘them’.
Seven
Marina Galvez knew one thing for sure. She should have listened to her nose because even before that so-called honeymoon was over she couldn't stand the smell of him. In fact, one of the main reasons she went to work at Uncle Shrimpie's was to dominate the odor of their home. She was raised in the school of ‘you made your bed so you’ve got to lie in it’, and so lie in it she did. The entire family was a lie. Way back when she was still as short as she was now but a whole lot lighters, and Mister Pete (as he was known even then) made the biggest impression on her little girlie brain. He knew how to fix most anything, and how to smile with big white teeth, and how to make the other boys curl up and run away. Pete would come driving down the street in his fully customized silver El Camino with the blue flames licking up from the bumpers, and when he came to a stop at the corner where she was standing, waiting to cross the street, he leaned out the window and hollered.
“You devil you!”
Marina blushed to the seat of her pants and of course she hopped right in when he pushed open the door, and of course it was a whirlwind romance and how was she to know, a girl of seventeen only and with no experience of the world, that this man was not the right man for the woman she would become. She was only becoming that woman now. Foolish to have that child at that age. What did she know about children? No more than she wanted to, and the other girls they paid who likewise failed to raise the boy were just the same as her. But she found her way, little by little, by ignoring what she didn’t want to see and moving along as if she was free to do whatever she pleased. Pete didn’t care. He’d come to hate her as much as she grew to loathe him.
She'd made herself a nice, independent life, working the night shift, having the house to herself most of the time, spending a lot of her weekends either sailing on the river with Alexei Zuprevin, the elderly Russian mathematician, or studying topographical maps with Hercules Suarez, a gentle young chef with an impeccable and quite suitable mustache. There were minor romances with a customer here and there, a girlfriend or two now and then to play cards with, compare outfits with and just chat. The traditional family had melted away, relatives moved on to Texas and Florida, leaving practically no one behind. Her own child was a stranger to her. She kept telling herself she was doing her job, keeping the kitchen all filled up with food and the boy had his room after all, and the stuff that he asked for - not much and hardly ever - she bought him and was glad to at that.
How had she missed his whole childhood? This was the question that blared through her brain as she stood in the hallway that morning. Phil and Marcus walked in the front door and she saw her own son for the first time in years. Oh my how he’d grown! He was taller than her. Well, of course he was that. Marina was only five two. Phil must have been taller for years and yet now she was shocked and she stared at the boy in a daze. He didn’t say anything to her but started to walk right on past, towards the stairs.
“Philip”, she blurted out, hands on her hips. The boy stopped, and turned slowly to face her.
“My boy”, she declared, and tears filled her eyes. The Dark Rider cocked his head slightly.
“Can I do something for you?” he asked.
“Why, I” Marina started to say and then stopped. She couldn’t think of the words. She felt like a spell had been broken, all the years fell away and she was a child again, full of a baby and feeling it kick, and holding her hands on her belly, she said.
“It’s just been so long since we talked.”
“Not now”, Phil replied, and started walking away.
“No, wait”, she called out, and he stopped once again, Marcus standing beside him.
“Who’s your little black friend?” she asked and immediately felt like an idiot. What kind of thing was that to say?
“I mean, your friend?”, she quickly retracted, but Marcus and Phil merely looked at each other and shrugged. Looking back at his mom, Phil replied,
“We have things to do. To not be disturbed. Please?”
“Oh”, Marina said with a sigh, and the two boys took that as a ‘go’ and moved on. They marched up the stairs to Phil’s room, and Marina slowly followed to the foot of the staircase.
“Would you boys like some soup?” she called up, but there was no reply, just the sound of Phil’s door closing softly.
Marina walked into the kitchen and began making soup anyway, tortilla soup, the way her mother would make it. My mother, she thought for the first time in years. How come I’ve forgotten my mother? How the years go on by, how we make these cocoons, and then stick ourselves in them and never peek out. Who am I now and why am I here? The whole house seemed quiet and cold.
A half hour went by without thinking. She carried two bowls full of steaming hot soup carefully up to Phil’s room and knocked gently, but there was no answer. She put the bowls down, and opened the door. They were gone. She didn’t know how they had left without her noticing. The window was open. Maybe they went out that way. Marina giggled at the thought of the boys sneaking out, making the two story jump to the lawn. It’s what she would have done at their age. She noticed that Phil’s desk computer was on and stepped over to take a quick look. That was interesting. Blueprints. A notepad with handwritten squiggles. A folder with pages stuck out. Marina sat down and leafed through it, amazed at the things she was seeing. She knew nothing about engineering and yet, it was somehow not foreign to her. She felt light, almost giddy. So that’s how it is, she said to herself, and she read and she read and she smiled as she thought.
Eight
Most mornings Marina would have a little breakfast, do a bit of reading and go to bed, but this morning she was all abuzz with a crackling sort of energy. She stayed up in Phil’s room, absorbing information for a few hours, and then got busy with her own ideas. She grabbed a notebook and a pencil and, sitting on the floor surrounded by piles of random junk she’d pulled out of his closet and from under his bed, was rapidly taking notes and jotting down equations. The hours flew by and she was still at it when her son arrived home around sunset.
At first she didn’t even notice he was in the room. He had appeared in the doorway and, surprised to see his mom there, had tip-toed in trying not to disturb her. He thought he could reach the desk without making any noise or knocking over any of the sorted collections on the floor, but he just knicked a teepee of bicycle spokes with his heel and they came clattering down, alerting Marina.
“Philip”, she announced, looking up from her work.
“Mom”, Phil cautiously replied.
“I’m so glad to see you”, she said, putting down her work and scrambling to stand up.
“Okay?” Phil murmured. This was not expected. For one thing, what was she even doing there, and for another, why was she, as she put it, so glad to see him? And what was that smile on her face, and wait a minute, was she actually trying to hug him? She was. It was weird. And now she was attempting to plant a kiss on his cheek. Phil pushed away, backed away toward the door.
“Are you all right?” he questioned her.
“I’m wonderful”, she told him, and she held out her hands in a gesture to indicate that he could relax, that she wasn’t going to hurt him.
“Where’s your friend?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“That boy who was with you this morning. And how did you two get out of here? Did you really go out through the window? I was only offering soup, you know”, and she laughed merrily, a sound that Phil could never recall having heard before in his life. It was nice. Her eyes were sparkling and her smile made him feel, feel something.
“We’ve got to talk”, she declared, and bent down to retrieve her notebook and pencil.
“Not now”, Phil tried to tell her. He wanted to check his computer, now more than ever. She had seen him and Marcus - not them, he understood, but the others - and they had been here, in this room, just today?
“What were my friend and I doing?” he blurted out, realizing how stupid it sounded as soon as he said it.
“I don’t know”, she answered directly. “You wouldn’t let me in the room, but you left your touch desk on. You were looking at some interesting things, that’s for sure. Come and look”, and she led him over to there. Phil whistled softly at the screen. His blueprints of course were familiar, but what were those scribbles? They looked like some sort of graffiti, a three-dimensional script in shades of blues and greens. There was a pile of them and as he swiped through, one after the other, he saw that no two pages contained the same patterns, but that all were connected, in a progression.
“Kind of like a flip book”, his mother commented, and Phil looked up at her, quizzically.
“Sure”, she said, “like a flip book, but not in regular space or time. See here?”
She used two hands to manipulate the images on the screen, pulling and spinning and pinching the virtual pages until it seemed to Phil they were popping straight out of the desk like a three-D projection, but still it meant nothing to him, it was some kind of optical illusion.
“It’s a natural language”, Marina shrugged. “A conversation in frosted glass. I don’t quite follow, but it looks like an argument to me. Or maybe not exactly an argument but as if someone was talking to himself and taking sides, a discussion. Over here there’s the rationale for justifying an action. On the other side, there, is some doubt. The colors are levels of heat, of intention. Do you know what I’ve done?” she interrupted herself.
“Over here”, she continued, and dropped down to her hands and knees and crawled over to a pile of what looked like assorted white laundry. Phil stared after her, wondering if his mother had any idea how insane she’d just seemed. He looked back at the desk but the heap she had pulled out of the screen had subsided and was once more the flat plain scribbling he’d originally seen.
“Over here”, she repeated, and grabbing some empty tuna fish cans, a plastic toy wrench and some fabric, her fingers began weaving together a sort of small vehicle.
“It needs some more color, of course”, she admitted, “but the principle’s solid. You see? A flying car, with lint for the wings. You bring it together with two-sided tape. Not ideal, I admit. I’m working on a theory for a cloud-like containment. That way you wouldn’t have to worry about flow.”
She tossed the thing up in the air, and it flew. It flew briefly, that is, flapping its furry little wings a few times, then gliding quite gently down to the floor. Marina watched after it calmly and was actually quiet for a minute while she mentally calculated more thrust in the aft.
“Mom?” Phil suggested. She didn’t answer. She began rapidly scribbling more notes in her book. Phil returned his attention to the computer. He noticed that his folders were opened, that his drawings were scanned, but whether by her or the others he had no way of knowing.
“Mom?” he repeated, and this time she looked up.
“Is this the way it looked this morning?”
“Pretty much”, she replied. “I tried to put everything back the way I found it. You know your molecular collapsing can’t work, by the way, don’t you? It’s nice to dream of impossible things, but some times they are really impossible.”
“I guess”, Phil shrugged. He didn’t mind that she’d looked through his plans, or even that she had a critique, but he had to admit she was right, and that bugged him. In all of these years, he had never once known his mother to have any interest whatever in anything he did. Why now all at once? And had she always been interested in sciencemath? How come he hadn’t known?
“I like what you’re doing with wheels”, she added, looking up from her notebook. “The trick is going to be what happens when you’ve achieved a friction coefficient near zero. How’s it going to stop? You’d need a material that could be in two states at once. Some sort of rubberized metal, maybe.”
“I was thinking polycarbonate”.
“Too stable”, she quickly replied. “I was thinking more metamorphorically. Not actually IN two states at once, but quantumly suggestible. I’d give it more thought.”
She returned her attention to her notebook.
“Don’t you have to be doing to work?”
“Called in sick”, she told him, not looking up. “Too much to do, anyway. I might not even go back. Oh, I have to talk with Alexei. Excuse me”, and she jumped up, ran into the hall and picked up the phone. Moments later he could hear her speaking in Russian.
“Is this really my mother?” he said to himself, and as he peered out of his room and watched her jabbering away, he couldn’t be sure. It looked like his mother. It sounded, sort of, like her. He realized with a jolt that he’d been avoiding her as much as he felt that she’d been keeping her distance from him all these years, and that he really didn’t know her at all.
Nine
He stood by the window, staring out into the night. He’d looked through enough of the documents in that mysterious folder to know that he was out of his depth. forced to realize that all his meager years of dabbling and experimenting were mere amateur hour. Sure, he was only eleven, but he’d felt so much older every time he’d pulled something off. Now he knew there was far more in just this tiny corner of the galaxy than he would ever be able to comprehend. Those weren’t notes scribbled at random on those pages, those were dissertations from beyond all human experience. He just felt it, and had that feeling confirmed almost immediately, with the arrival of two of his mother’s friends.
Marina brought Alexei Zuprevin and his companion, Janet Boltch, straight into Phil’s room, and with barely an introduction to her son showed them over to his desk. Phil found himself squished up against that window by the sheer bulk of the Boltch woman, a giantess both in height and girth, who could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty to judge from her wide flat face and thin brown hair. She was wearing what looked like just an ordinary white bedsheet turned into a robe of some sort, and open-toed sandals revealing long, thick unpainted nails. Her hands were thick and calloused as if she were a carpenter, and her voice was loud and strong as she tried to dominate the screen. Yet she deferred to the even taller but quite slender and bent old man, Zuprevin, who stank like a cigar factory and was continually brushing away his thick white hair from his lean, narrow face. His voice was as soft and indistinct as hers was the opposite, but they seemed to understand each other perfectly.
Marina stood back with a smirk on her face as if she had pulled of some sort of secret triumph. In fact, she was pleased to be on the verge of stumping her tutor and his brash associate. How many years had she had to listen to their lectures, only vaguely understanding a small percentage now matter how hard she studied on the side. Alexei had been urging her to go to college for years now, He saw something in her that no one else had ever seen, and she appreciated that, but never had the confidence to follow through. Janet Boltch was an obstacle in that department, seeming to scoff at the idea of the poor immigrant waitress ever amounting to anything in this world. Marina had a special scorn for Boltch, though she knew that Alexei admired and respected her immensely. Now the pair were rifling through the documents with grunts and groans of surprise and wonder. Finally Alexei stepped aside and asked Marina to show him what she’d described on the phone as multi-dimensional graffiti.
She went up to the desk and repeated her performance of earlier that evening, causing an eruption of weird shape and light to leap from the table as she massaged and tweaked it in the air. Her face was filled with a glorious joy as she pulled and poked and turned the towering mass to the total astonishment of everyone else in the room.
“And you say this has meaning?” the old professor asked.
“It’s a replay”, she said, “a recording of what my son and his friend were discussing here today, only not as it was in the visible realm, but almost in shadows, the essence in relief.”
“What?”, Janet Boltch was brief in her commentary.
“I don’t know how to explain”, Marina admitted.
“Never mind that”, Alexei said, as Miranda let the ‘conversation’ relapse and subside into its original two-dimensional for.
“I’m afraid it’s too far beyond anyway”, he continued, and now looking up at Phil, he directed a question at the boy.
“Marina’s child”, he said, “I would like to know how you came up with this”, he said, pointing at a particular page on the desk.
“This”, he explained to Marina, “is an equation, a fractal exponential of pi which resolves into a finite value, and constitutes the properties of a four dimensional wormhole.”
“Which”, Janet Boltch butted in, “can only be realized physically in a ferrous silicate, of course”.
“Of course”, Marina said, looking concerned.
“You’re talking about time travel?”, she added.
“Possibly”, the old man replied. “Now tell me, Marina’s child, how it is you know about this?”
Phil felt suddenly very warm, standing there in that rather small room filled with all these strange grownups, their odors and sounds. It was time, he understood, to tell the the truth, so he did. He explained about the moose in the house, and the house across the street from the house with the moose, and the lights in the rooms, and the windows and the curtains, and the doors, and the others.
“That wasn’t me you saw”, he said to his mother, “and it wasn’t my friend. It was them”, he concluded. The grownups were quiet for several long moments, and then Alexei let out a sigh and exclaimed,
“Now it begins to make sense.”
“It does?”, Phil asked, but nobody heard him. Janet and Alexei started jabbering at once, and Marina got very excited as well, and as if they were one the whole group of them bustled out of the room and down the stairs into the kitchen, where Marina set about making tea, and warming up biscuits. Alexei and Janet sat down at the table and continued their discussion in Russian, and Phil, who had followed slowly behind, realized that he understood nothing of what they were saying, as little as he understood about what he had seen on his own computer, and the whole house seemed different, as if it was not the home he had known all his life. He stood in the living room, between the stairs and the kitchen, uncertain of what he should do. It was already midnight, but he felt more awake than ever before. He felt like he would never sleep again.
There was a knock on the front door. Phil went over and opened it, and there on the sidewalk stood Marcus.
“I saw your lights on”, Marcus said, and Phil nodded.
“Come on, let’s go”, he answered, and stepped outside, quietly closing the door behind him.
Ten
An excellent translation would be required to capture the discussion occurring in that kitchen that night, but the actual terms and nomenclature used are beyond the limited capacity of the present narrator, so a rougher rendition will have to suffice.
“There was a definite sense of panic in the holistic conversation”, Marina said.
“That would explain the muddiness of the palette”, Janet considered.
“There was some disorganization in the general thinking”, agreed Alexei. They had been sketching out the three-dimensional vision which Marina had extracted from the computer. As an imagistic representation of an internal dialog such as none of them had ever seen before, it was difficult to make something of it.
“There was also some mention of hurry”, Marina tossed in. “There had been a long wait.”
“Their efforts had been sporadic”, Alexei concluded from some evidence not apparent to the others.
“Why do you say that?”, Janet pressed him.
“There were dates on the pages in the folder”, Alexei replied. “Those pages were not as you might say uploaded as usual, the way you or I might click on a button and browse and select. They were transferred into the machine by telepathy.”
“That’s quite a statement!” Janet nearly shouted. “Where is your proof?”
“There was no last touched data in the folder. The files had appeared all at once, out of nowhere, and yet, there were dates in the pages themselves. And the progression of the research, one could see. The ideas that led to another were separated, sometimes by very long times.”
“I didn’t see any of that”, Janet said. “What I saw was raw calculations. Did you notice they used a strange value for the constant ‘e’? It differed from ours from the seventeenth demical place onward.”
“Gravitational distortion”, Alexei said, frowning. He took another sip of tea and nodded wearily.
“That would seem to be the central problem”, he added. “Everything circles around it. In wonder”
He was interrupted at this point by a loud bang, which turned out to be the front door slamming, and the stomping of heavy feet, which preceded the appearance in the kitchen of a strong-looking man with thick black hair and bloodshot eyes.
“Who are you people?”, he demanded, “and what are you doing in my house in the middle of the god damn night?”
“That’s just Pete”, Marina said, standing up from her chair where she’d been between Alexei and Janet. Even standing, she was barely taller than those two were, sitting.
“Oh, ‘Just Pete’ is it?”, Pete demanded, lurching another two steps into the room. “Just Pete who owns this house? Just Pete who lives here? Just Pete your worthless husband? That’s what you really meant to say, am I right?”
“Pete”, Marina sighed, “Do you mind? We won’t be long here. These are my friends”.
“Friends is it?”, Pete yelled. “Why then howdy! Howdy-do! Welcome to my humble abode, friends of my wife.” He staggered toward a cupboard and began rummaging around, looking for a bottle of something.
“Let’s have a celebration!”, he shouted. “It’s not every day I meet friends of my wife hanging out in my house in the middle of the night. This calls for a party, yes sir!”.
He found a bottle of Tequila and plunked it down on the counter, then turned to a cabinet to search for some glasses.
“Better be going”, Alexei murmured, and then he and Janet both started to rise. Pete swung around quickly and stammered,
“Wha, wha, where are you going? The party’s just starting! Sit down, lovely friends of my wife. Have a seat. I’ll bring you some glasses. I know they are here. We can have a great time, sure, why not?”
“Thank you”, Alexei told him, “but we have somewhere to go and must hurry.”
“Oh, hurry now, is it? I don’t know about that. Didn’t look like you was in any hurry a minute ago, until I got here. Now it’s a hurry. I see. I don’t think so”, he said, and he rushed over and tried to push the old gentleman down in his seat. Janet Boltch stepped between them, however, and stopped Pete’s advance. He looked up at her stony wide face, and whistled and said,
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything uglier. Ever”, and started to laugh. Janet was not very amused. She grabbed hold of his shirt with both hands, and lifted the stocky man up to the ceiling.
“I don’t like you”, she said. “And you’re drunk. I’m going to put you down now, and you’re going to stay where I put you.”
Pete blinked a few times and tried to look down at his feet, which were dangling somewhere around Janet’s knees. Marina was gathering the notes they had made, and her keys and her purse and, with Alexei in tow, skirted out around Janet and Pete and reached the front door. Once she saw the two were outside, Janet swiveled around and lowered the man, putting him down in the chair where Alexei had sat. Pete was still speechless. Janet poured him a cup of tea and pushed it toward him.
“Drink this”, she instructed. Then she stalked away proudly and joined the others, who were getting into Marina’s car. Pete stared at the teacup and frowned.
“Some friends of my wife”, he muttered. “Some wife.”
Eleven
“What a jerk!”, Janet said as she climbed into the front passenger seat, and Marina nodded.
“I think I’ve had enough”, she muttered as she began to back out of the driveway.
“We must be going to moose house now”, Alexei piped up from where he was squished into the back seat of the small economy car.
“Right”, Marina said. It was only a few blocks away, according to Phil’s description. Marina was pretty sure she knew the place, and even thought she knew its owner, a man named Burleson who used to buy fish at the market. He had a wife who was a total shrew, if she remembered correctly. The wife was one of those people who like nothing better than to glare at strangers. She was another little dumpling, around the same size as Marina, but had a built-in arrogance twice her size. Mrs. Burleson was rumored to have had a child and put it up for adoption rather than raise it herself, although she was a nurse. Most people think of nurses as kindly and caring people, but Mrs. Burleson was a different kind entirely. She was more of a hospice nurse, helping her patients move along to the next stage as efficiently as possible. That left Mr. Burleson for Marina to think about. Jerry, was it? Jerry and Jessica, she thought they were called. Jerry Burleson was in mechanical repairs. Air conditioners, she recalled. They were ordinary people, as far as Marina could tell. Unhappy, it seemed, but otherwise plain.
Their house was one of those pre-fab jobs, the whole block was out of a kit that some developer plunked down in a month’s worth of building. The houses were all in pairs, opposites laid out across the street from each other, so that when you looked out your window you could imagine you were seeing your own house over there. It was a concept development, but people didn’t like it, and soon the homeowners were customizing their places, putting in new garage doors, altering the paint jobs, and changing the colors of their roofs.
“This is the street”, Marina said out loud as they turned onto it. She had been right, and at the end of the block, there stood the Burleson’s place. She parked next door, and the three of them got out of the car. Marina led the procession to the front gate, and shrank back immediately as the dogs charged, barking and slobbering.
“Mean dogs”, said Alexei.
“Let’s cross the street”, Janet suggested, and as they did, the barking subsided, and they could study the house in the quiet. The light was still on in the room with the Greater Kudu Bull, and no others were. Alexei whistled low.
“Is hideous thing to be having in house”, he clucked.
“There’s no accounting for taste”, agreed Janet.
“It’s just a stuffed creature”, Marina shrugged. She’d seen worse. One time she saw a stuffed owl - the entire big bird - in a bathroom over the toilet. She had seen chandeliers made of ossified dragonflies. She once knew a woman who’d had all her pets stuffed; seventy years of stuffed cats lined the hallways of the old lady’s house. And then there was people’s ideas of art. Once you started to think about that, what was a moose or whatever it was? Mere bad taste.
“I don’t get it”, she said.
“You mean what’s with the moose?” Janet asked.
“Or the house”, Marina said. “Why the house?”
“What about this one?” Alexei asked, and he pointed to the one they were standing in front of, the ghost house, as the boys called it, whose door was wide open and whose lights were all out.
“Phil said the weird stuff started happening only after they went inside there”, Janet said.
“So we should go in?” Marina asked, but the two others were already heading that way. Marina stopped back at her car first and fetched a small flashlight from the glove box, then she hurried to catch up with her friends. By the time she had reached them they were already inside and had experienced the effect of leaving the living room for the kitchen, and having the lights go on then. Janet examined the wall for light switches, as Marcus and Phil had done previously.
“It’s pretty much how he described it”, she said, and she went through the motions that Phil had described; walking from room to room, opening the window and seeing the curtain come down in the moose house, closing the window, and the curtain going up. As the three gathered there watching these interactions, they saw the living room light coming on over there, and the tops of three heads begin to take shape. They stood, feeling more and more frozen to the spots where they stood, as the faces emerged, and they saw that the faces were their own, and the bodies that unfolded below were their own, and a sensation of weight came over their eyes.
Twelve
“We’ve got to be careful”, Marcus told Phil. “There was a cop at my house. My stepmother called him. She thought I was missing or something. Anyway, he says that he knows you and you might be in trouble.”
“Fat cop?” Phil inquired. “Stupid looking. Kind of greasy?”
“That’s him”, Marcus confirmed.
“Officer Mike”, Phil shrugged. “I don’t care about him. He’s told lies about me before this time, I know. Guy’s got it in for me, but he’s going nowhere. Other cops told me. Nobody listens to him.”
“Even so”, Marcus said. “We need to watch out. They’ve got photos.”
“Really? Of us?”
“Not us. Them”, Marcus said.
“What I meant”, Phil replied. “The other us, them. Whereabouts?”
“The Ironworks”, Marcus told him, “And Officer Mike said something about the glass factory too. Said we were seen, or someone was seen, I don’t know.”
“Maybe we should go there”, Phil suggested. They had already decided to avoid the moose house. They didn’t want to get caught in that trap again. Now they were shuffling down the street, in no hurry, having been unable to decide what to do, where to go.
“Who were those people?” Marcus wanted to know. “At your house?”
“Oh, some friends of my mom”, Phil replied. “Or I think so, at least. They seemed to be friends. The old guy is some kind of genius, according to mom. Or he used to be back in the day. The other one, I don’t know what she is. My mom seems to think she’s important.”
“So what were they doing there?”
“Trying to figure it all out”, Phil said. “They were saying some crazy stuff, about aliens and wormholes and bending gravity.”
“Bending?”
“A lot of fancy equations”, Phil said. “It’s all math. You can do anything with math, the old guy was saying. Prove anything. Go anywhere. Do anything. You can make the whole universe as small as a pebble, or as big as infinity if that’s what you want. With math you can draw any picture, say any saying, prove everything and even prove nothing.”
“So what do they think happened to us?”
“We were turned into copies”, Phil said, and Marcus just laughed.
“We already knew that”, he said. “We didn’t need any genius to tell us.”
“And they said that whoever did it was limited to the thing that they copied. Like since they copied a kid, meaning us, they could only do the things we can do, they could only use our bodies and brains the ways that we can, but I don’t know if I really believe it.”
“My little brother saw us”, Marcus remembered. “He said we were running and that I was going faster than you.”
“No way”, Phil said. “I can beat you anytime.”
“I know”, Marcus said, “ but it’s like you were saying. If they could only do what our bodies can do, than how could I be going faster?”
“Maybe you’ve got it in you”, Phil shrugged. “But the things that I saw on my computer, no way I could have put written that stuff.”
“Maybe you’ve got all that inside you”, Marcus said with a smile.
“Where were we running”, Phil asked, and when Marcus informed him about the old bridge, Phil suggested they go there, and Marcus agreed. It wasn’t too far and they had nowhere to go anyway. Still, they stuck to the shadows and took some back alleys just in case Officer Mike was out prowling around. As they got closer they also got quieter, as if that somehow would help. Each had a feeling they were getting warmer as they neared the source of their replicas destination.
The old bridge had been abandoned for years, like the entire railroad freight business itself. Once upon a time their town had a lively harbor and an active train system, but that was all gone long before even their parents were born. Abandoned buildings remained, some of them turned into warehouses, but mostly left rotting away. Marcus and Phil stepped quietly around broken up streets and discarded rubbish. People used this area as an informal landfill, dumping their junk whenever and wherever they felt like. The yards and the alleys were filled with old cars and appliances, piles of rusting metal and faded plastic. It was hard to proceed without noise through the place, but Marcus and Phil did their best. Approaching the bridge they moved slower and slower, and as it loomed up before them they even felt chills. Their imagination was getting ahead of their senses. In clear daylight they would have been mocking themselves for these uncalled-for night terrors, but in the darkness everything can seem ominous and strange.
“I don’t know”, whispered Marcus. “This is creepy.”
“I know”, Phil agreed, and for a moment the boys were tempted to just turn around and leave, run as fast as they could away from that bridge, but then Phil saw something, swaying and glinting, dangling above them, catching the moonlight.
“What is that?” he whispered and pointed it out. As Marcus looked up, he saw more of the same kind of thing; objects swinging slowly between the bridge girders and beams.
“Looks like bottles”, he said.
“And tools”, Phil added. They inched onto the bridge itself, looking down to avoid falling between rails, and up to try and see what those things were up there.
“Tied on the bridge”, Marcus said.
“With twine”, Phil said.
“We couldn’t do that”, Marcus shook his head.
“Maybe we didn’t”, said Phil. “Maybe that stuff was already there”.
There must have been dozens of bottles, tied at various lengths so they did not knock into each other, swaying in the breeze, and yet there was no breeze. Also there were random pieces of iron; solid bars, and fireplace pokers, and crowbars, and wrought gate pieces, these too were tied up with ropes and attached to the bridge. There seemed to be some kind of pattern - a certain number of bottles interspersed with these metallic objects - but not the same number each time.
“Maybe it’s some kind of art”, Phil suggested, and Marcus just shrugged.
“I’ve got no idea”, he admitted. “It’s weird, though. Especially in the dark. You can barely even see them all.”
“Must be more than a hundred”, Phil said. The boys were barely standing at the edge of the bridge and were about to go further on, to see just how far this pattern extended, when a light came sweeping up over them suddenly, and they heard the sound of a car nearby braking.
“Come on”, Marcus said, tugging at Phil. “It might be the cops. We’ve got to hide”
“Okay”, Phil replied and they hurried in the direction they came, and quickly found a spot behind a bulky old oven, not far from the bridge but well out of sight of anyone on it. Crouching down and scrunching together, they heard the sounds of footsteps approaching, and then they heard voices, voices which sounded familiar.
Thirteen
“It’s all here”, said the voice of Janet, and the voice of Alexei replied,
“This is good. Now maybe finally go home.”
“It’s been a long time”, said Marina.
“Enough talking”, Janet ordered as the three adults walked right past the place where the two boys were hiding. Marcus and Phil glanced at each other and both shook their heads. They both wanted to talk but knew that they shouldn’t. Marcus would have said the same thing as Phil. That is not Alexei, and that is not Janet, and that is certainly not really Marina. Marcus and Phil readjusted their crouches, inching forward to get a better look. The grownups were walking onto the bridge. Janet looked up and pointed, approvingly.
“Looking good”, Alexei said as Janet hushed him again. The stood in a line, Janet in the middle with Marina on her left, and Alexei on her right.
“Now for this”, Janet said, and she reached out her arms and grabbed the others by their waists. She pulled them close to her sides and then squeezed. The others got scrunched up against her, and still she squeezed tighter. That’s got to hurt, Marcus thought, but neither Marina nor Alexei made any sound as the much larger woman crushed them against her. She gripped harder and tighter and then the bodies of the others began to merge into her own. First their waists disappeared into her own waistline, then she adjusted her grasp to pull in their torsos and shoulders. She squeezed in their legs and finally their heads until there was only one person, just Janet. Phil barely kept from crying out, and might have done so had not Marcus put his hand over his friend’s mouth. To see your own mother absorbed just like that, it had to be hard, Marcus thought.
Who is this Janet? he wondered, but then already he knew that it wasn’t the human being Janet at all. It was the others, but maybe there was only one? It was so hard to know what was actually going on, especially when, moments later, the big body that had looked just like Janet began melting away, literally melting, peeling off in liquid sheets, and at the same time - Marcus didn’t know where to look first - the bottles on ropes that were tied to the bridge seemed to blaze all at once, as if they’d caught fire, and they all came moving together, towards the center, towards the spot where the creature was boiling, and the bottles came apart, or rather, split into sheets, and in a furious blast they shattered but instead of falling to pieces, they fell to a whole, in a sort of a bowl, surrounding the creature and catching its drippings.
The thing was all yellow now, nothing of Janet remained. It was yellow like a banana and lumpy like a poorly made pudding, and collapsing, more liquid than solid, the thing couldn’t stand, couldn’t keep hold of it shape, but threatened to distill into something that looked more like melted butter than anything else that Marcus could think of.
“The thing can’t stand up on its own. Our gravity’s too much for it”, Phil whispered before Marcus could hush him, but the thing didn’t hear, because the assorted bits of iron began clanging and clasping around the sides of the huge glass bowl as the pieces swung down and surrounded it, holding the whole thing together like the grate in a fireplace holds all the logs.
The bowl looked precarious, like it could all melt away, it was shimmering yellow and orange and blue, and the creature inside it was slishing and sloshing from one side of the bowl to the other. Marcus thought he could hear the thing moaning but it was probably all in his mind.
“It’s shrinking”, Phil said, and as Marcus looked closer he could see that the iron was tightening around the bowl which was now a complete enclosed sphere. It was definitely growing smaller, and tighter and somehow more solid. It was cooling and collapsing in on itself. Now the thing, which had been resting on the rails, began to lift itself up off the ground, and even as it shrank it rose higher and higher, until it was about six feet up in the air, and from maybe ten feet in original diameter had coalesced into the size of a baseball.
Phil started to move out from behind the old oven, and Marcus reluctantly joined him. It was getting harder to see the little thing. It was so small now, and no longer glowing. They ran onto the bridge and Marcus lost sight of the ball for a moment, and when he saw it again it was smaller than a golf ball, and still diminishing rapidly. The boys reached the spot where it was, now several feet over their heads, when it suddenly vanished without making a sound. It was gone, and all of the bottles, and all of the pieces of iron were gone, and all that was left were some ropes on the rails and the girders. The night was still dark, and it was all over.
Fourteen
““Is that really what happened?” a dubious Ben asked his brother.
“Sure”, Marcus casually tossed back. He was laying on the upper bunk very late one night. His little brother often had trouble falling asleep, and would keep them both up chatting for hours.
“It doesn’t seem too likely”, Ben grumbled.
“Likely? Ha!”, Marcus replied. “It’s for certain. That’s the way things work. There are rules.”
“Rules?” What rules?”
“Like, for what happens when you die”, Marcus went on.
“If you’re bad you go to hell”, Ben promptly responded.
“Right”, Marcus agreed. “And you know that hell is hot, and heaven is always cloudy. That’s just the way it is. Like with aliens. They have these super-sophisticated technologies that we can only barely imagine.”
“Just enough to make things up”, Ben supposed.
“I’m not making it up”, Marcus insisted. “Look, how come no one ever saw Phil’s mom again after that night?”
“She just left them”, Ben said. “That happens. It’s what our own mom did, isn’t it?”
“That was different”, Marcus said. “She wasn’t replaced.”
“Oh yeah? What about Kristen?”
“Never mind that”, Marcus avoided the subject. “No one ever saw those other two again either.”
“Never saw them before”, Ben retorted. “We never even heard of them before. And how did they figure everything out just like that?”
“They’re geniuses. That’s what they do. It’s one of the rules.’
“Sure, the rules”, Ben said snidely.
“They’re geniuses. That’s what they do. It’s one of the rules.’
“Sure, the rules”, Ben said snidely.
“Okay, mister know-it-all, then what about the Greater Kudu Bull? Answer me that. You saw it, right? You were with us that first time. How come that old thin just disappeared, just vanished?”
“Sure”, Ben said. “That one’s easy. That Mrs. Turtleson told old Mr. Turtleson, look buddy, it’s either me or the moose”.
Both of the boys cracked up laughing, but then Marcus said.
“And the dogs too? It’s either me or the dogs?”
“They moved out”, Ben said. “Remember? That house was for sale, and the other one too. The ghost house. Ridley Finn moved into that place.”
“Yeah, stupid Ridley”, Marcus snorted. “I wonder if they ever found a light switch in there.”
“They were there the whole time”, Ben turned over and snickered into the pillow. “It was just some super sophisticated technology, I’ll bet.”
“You don’t believe me”, Marcus pretended to be shocked. “Me, your own brother, after all this time we’ve been together.”
“You’re a liar”, Ben said. “I know that much.”
“I’m not a liar”, Marcus said. “Not always, at least. Look, it’s exactly what I saw on the bridge. You can ask Phil. Ask the Dark Rider, anytime.”
“He doesn’t like to be called that anymore”, Ben replied.
“You see? It’s because of that night, because of what happened. Afterwards, we got in his mother’s car. The keys were still in it and the lights were still on. The battery would’ve drained out, but Phil started her up and drove back to that street.”
“He’s not old enough to drive”, Ben resisted.
“Not legally”, Marcus said. “But almost anyone can drive if they’re tall enough. And the moose was already gone, and both the dogs too. And the lights were all out and the doors were all closed, in both houses. We peeked in the front window of the ghost house and didn’t see anything.”
“You just said the lights were all out.”
“So?”
“So of course you didn’t see anything. It was dark.”
“Then he drove back to his place”, Marcus went on. “And I walked back from there.”
“Yeah? What was I doing?”
“Sleeping, of course”, Marcus told him. “Like you’re supposed to be doing right now.”
“How can I sleep, with all the excitement?”
“Right, like you never heard it before. How come I have to keep telling you this?”
“Because it’s more fun every time”, Ben giggled. “You keep changing it, every time. You weren’t even there. You were right here all the time. You’re making it up.”
“Oh come on”, Marcus snickered. “How would you know? You were asleep.”
“Like I’m supposed to be now”.
“Yeah, good night”.
“Good night, liar.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Yeah, right.”
