Other Worlds

by Jon Scieszka

  Agent B: I don’t recall that.

  Supervisor: You don’t recall that? It’s the last thing the doctors remember before they woke up in an empty apartment. Empty except for your team, I mean.

  Agent B: Keep in mind that the doctors had just been assaulted by Steven—excuse me, by Agent S. They may have been temporarily confused. It’s all in my report.

  Supervisor (consulting file): And apparently she called out the name “Toto.” Were you aware of anyone on the premises she might have referred to as Toto?

  Agent B: Of course not. It would have been in my report.

  Supervisor: There’s something else: How do you think Agent R learned to navigate the Boat? She was only a kid on the trip to Earth.

  Agent B: She must have been watching.

  Supervisor: You should know. It was your job to watch her.

  Agent B: (no response)

  Supervisor: You’re a trained engineer, Agent B, isn’t that right?

  Agent B: (no response)

  Supervisor: Did you teach Agent R how to drive the Boat?

  Agent B: We had a lot of time on our hands.

  Supervisor: You realize that without the Boat we’re all stranded here? You do understand that, Agent B?

  Supervisor: (no response)

  Supervisor: I hope you have plans. Our resources are limited. You can’t expect us to take you in after what’s happened.

  Agent B: Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.

  Supervisor: Where will you go?

  Agent B: I have something lined up.

  Supervisor: Where did these empanadas come from?

  Agent B: A friend stopped by earlier.

  Supervisor: How the heck do you have friends? You’re deep undercover as a house pet.

  Agent B: Are we done? I have to pack.

  Supervisor: One last thing: No one can figure out how Agent R boarded the Boat without a key. It should have been impossible.

  Agent B: It certainly is a puzzle.

  Supervisor: My records indicate that you have a set of keys to the Boat. They aren’t much use now, but I’ve been told to collect them.

  Agent B: (no response)

  Supervisor: Can you produce those keys, Agent?

  Agent B: I seem to have misplaced them.

  Supervisor: You’re stating that you have misplaced the keys?

  Agent B: Alex and Aidan played with them on occasion. You remember—my trainees.

  Supervisor: Played with them?

  Agent B: Training exercises.

  Supervisor: Agent B, we are on the record here. Can you or can you not locate your keys to the Mothership?

  Agent B: I cannot tell you the precise location of my keys. End of story.

  Supervisor: End of story?

  Agent B: End of story.

  A DAY IN THE LIFE

  BY SHAUN TAN

  THE KLACK BROS. MUSEUM

  BY KENNETH OPPEL

  When the train arrives in Meadows, it seems to Luke to be just like all the other forlorn places they’ve stopped along the way.

  Over the PA system a woman says, “Ladies and gentlemen, our station stop will be longer than scheduled. A freight train has derailed up the track. We’ll be here roughly five hours.”

  Five hours. What’s five more hours in an already endless trip?

  “Want some fresh air?” his father asks.

  Luke looks out the window. There is a gravel parking lot beside the weather-beaten station. Curling shingles, water dripping from a busted downspout. Across the road are several bleak houses whose front windows look onto the tracks. In one window he spots an elderly couple sitting side by side on lawn chairs, peering out. The man raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes.

  “See that?” Luke says to his Dad. “This is big excitement in Meadows.”

  They step off the train. The air has a bite to it. There is snow on the rooftops, and on the grass. Luke looks back at the train, the rolling torture chamber that’s been taking them across the country. He’s spent two nights aboard it already. It is March break and Dad has decided this would be a good trip for them to take together. Mom’s with Olivia in Fort Lauderdale. Luke wishes he were on the beach in Florida, looking at palm trees. There would be girls to look at too. As it is, he is the youngest person on the train—not counting the crying baby that belongs to the exhausted couple from England. Even his Dad is young compared with most of the passengers.

  “I didn’t want to come on this trip.”

  “You’re loving this trip,” his father says distractedly.

  “If you say so.”

  His father sighs and looks at him. “Not at all?”

  Luke shrugs. Shrugging is very efficient. It could mean anything. Mom says it’s rude.

  “So what’s your idea of a good time?” Dad wants to know.

  “Just staying at home, chilling, hanging out with my friends.”

  “You can do that anytime.”

  Another shrug. “It kinda sucks. There’s nothing to do.”

  “I’ve told you, it’s a trip I’ve wanted to take for a long time.”

  “Cause you’re blocked.”

  He sees his father inhale and frown. His father’s a writer and hates that word. “Possibly.”

  “I don’t see why I had to get dragged along.”

  “Well, you can’t always get what you want,” his father says, and then starts singing the Rolling Stones song. Luke hates it when his father does this. Whenever his father thinks Luke’s complaining too much, he starts singing, looking very soulful and intense, and snapping his fingers in time.

  “Please stop,” says Luke.

  “But if you try sometimes,” his father sings, “you just might find, you get what you need.”

  They walk to the edge of the parking lot. The road goes nowhere in both directions.

  “What’re we going to do for five hours?” asks Luke.

  A big tractor trailer pulls out of the parking lot, revealing a white sign posted by the road:

  KLACK BROS. MUSEUM

  15 MILES NORTH

  His father sees it too. “I love it,” he murmurs. “Klack Brothers Museum. I wonder what kind of stuff they have there?”

  “It’s probably farm equipment.” He’s been dragged to such places on school field trips.

  “I can take you, if you like,” says a voice behind them. It’s a man in a pickup, the window rolled down. “I’m going up there.” He jerks a thumb at the back of his truck, which is filled with plastic-wrapped cases of drinks and chocolate bars. “I supply their snack bar. It’s only a fifteen-minute drive.”

  Luke fake smiles and looks to his father to make an excuse. But his father says, “You’re sure it’s no trouble?”

  “No trouble.”

  Luke stares, silent with surprise, at his father. His father is not impulsive by nature, but lately he’s been doing uncharacteristic things. Long walks at night. Swimming. Trying to teach himself guitar. He says these things are meant to “unlock” himself.

  “What about the train?” Luke reminds him.

  “We’ve got five hours,” Dad replies. “You keep telling me how bored you are. Let’s go see something new.”

  “They’ve got some real interesting things up there,” says the driver.

  “How would we get back?” his father asks, with more of his characteristic caution.

  “I’ll be there a couple hours. I do their plumbing too. I’m coming back this way if you want to catch a ride with me.”

  “Sounds perfect,” says Dad.

  It rises from the empty prairie like a mirage, a perfect little village of stone buildings and fences and barns.

  “Weirdest thing, isn’t it?” says their driver. “These two brothers, they came out from England about a hundred forty years ago and they ran a circus for a while. Then they decided to build a village in the middle of nowhere. They built a big manor house for themselves, and a school house. There was a racetrack and a cheese-making shop and some li
vestock, and they waited for people to come. But the railway built too far to the south and wouldn’t give them a spur line. So after a while it became a ghost town. One of the relatives turned it into a museum about fifteen years ago.”

  Luke has a sinking feeling there will be old ladies in white caps and pleated dresses telling him how to churn butter. Odd, slow-talking men in barns will show him how rope is made. If he’s lucky a blacksmith will bang on a horseshoe.

  “Incredible story,” Luke’s father says, looking around.

  His father and the driver make small talk. They drive through a gate and pull up outside a little cottage with a thatched roof. A sign says, Tickets Snacks Gifts. Luke can’t help noticing that there are only three other cars in the entire parking lot.

  “You’ll get your tickets in here,” says the man. “And I’ll be leaving about five o’clock.”

  “Thanks very much,” Luke’s father says. “Much obliged.”

  Luke winces. He can’t believe his father just said “much obliged.”

  “Maybe there’s a cowboy hat you can buy,” Luke says as they walk in.

  His father gives him a withering look.

  White plastic tables and chairs are scattered around the room. A few shelves display dismal local history books with black-and-white photos of fields on the covers. There is a Coke machine and a rack with some chips and chocolate bars on it. An elderly man behind the counter greets their driver.

  “Afternoon, Wilfred.”

  “Uriah. I brought these folks up from the train.” Their driver turns to them. “This is Uriah Klack. He owns the place.”

  Uriah turns his attention to Luke and his father—staring hardest at Luke.

  “We’d like to see the museum,” Luke’s father says cheerfully.

  “How old’s the boy?” Uriah asks.

  “Fourteen.”

  “Twenty dollars, please.”

  Uriah Klack reminds Luke a bit of Grandpa before he died: tall, like his bones are too big for his skin. His face is a bit sunken in, and his cheekbones stand out like knobs of shiny, polished wood. His knuckles bulge.

  “You’ll want to start in the manor house,” says Uriah Klack. “Turn right out the doors.”

  Flanking the gravel drive to the big house are rows of carts and ploughs and farm machinery so dull that Luke doesn’t even bother to pause. His father casts a steady eye over it all—as if it means anything to him. His father’s never so much as planted a carrot seed.

  “This would be the big plough,” his father says in the solemn tones of a museum guide, “and next to it here, the medium-sized plough. . . .”

  Luke grins. “And then we come to the rusty, broken-down plough. . . .”

  “The first tractor used on the farm. . . .”

  “And this would be the barbed wire collection.”

  There’s something a little frightening about the way it’s all displayed neatly on a plywood board, all the different types of lethal knots labeled.

  “Some very fine samples,” Luke says solemnly.

  “An excellent collection,” his father concurs.

  They laugh together. It’s one of the first times in days. This isn’t so bad, Luke thinks. He can tell his friends about the lamest museum ever when he gets back.

  The manor house is an impressively large stone pile. The lower floor is all trestle tables covered with little things. To Luke it looks like a school craft fair: miniature carts and horses, model farm buildings and general stores with ancient tinned goods arranged around them. There are Native dolls interspersed with Disney toys, an ancient cash register, a worker’s time clock. The village is ghostly with all its frozen dolls and wooden people—like things that were stolen from a century of dead children.

  “Is there anything they didn’t collect?” Luke wonders aloud.

  “Stamps. I don’t think I’ve seen any stamps.”

  “It’s not really a museum at all, is it?” Luke whispers.

  His father shakes his head.

  “It’s just a bunch of stuff.”

  Luke heads upstairs alone and meanders down the main hallway. Most of the rooms are cordoned off, and you can look inside at the furniture: a bed, a dresser with a washbasin atop it, a rolltop desk and chair, musty old books on top. There are lots of mannequins dressed in period clothing. The plaster is chipped on their faces and hands, and some of their limbs don’t seem to connect properly, sticking out at awkward angles, making them seem restless.

  Luke keeps checking the time on his phone. He doesn’t want to miss their ride back to the station. There’s not even reception out here. He passes only one other family, and the girl looks as bored as he does. They stare numbly at each other in mute sympathy. As lame as the train is, the idea of being stranded out here is even worse.

  When he enters a large parlor, his eyebrows lift with interest. It’s set up like a circus sideshow, divided into many stalls with tattered but colorful posters over each one: “Cordelia the Human Snake!” and “The Cardiff Giant!” and “The Indestructible Heart!” Eagerly, Luke moves from stall to stall. The human snake is a disappointment, just some big scraps of snakeskin crudely sewn together into a torso. The Cardiff Giant is more impressive—a huge body encased in a stone slab. It reminds Luke of those fossilized people they recovered from Pompeii after the volcano erupted. The indestructible heart is the creepiest of all. It floats inside a big tank of murky water. It looks pretty real to Luke, plump and moist. A little card underneath reads: “The heart of poet Percy Shelley, which remained undamaged even after the body was cremated! Sometimes it gives a beat!”

  At the far end of the sideshow is a windowless wooden shack. A sign over the door says: “Ghost Boy.”

  Luke tries the door and finds it locked.

  “That’s extra,” says Uriah Klack, appearing suddenly to Luke’s right. He smells like clean laundry and cough drops.

  “What’s the ghost boy?” Luke asks.

  “That’s my star attraction. It’s two dollars, just a little extra. I’ll let you both in for three.”

  Luke looks over to see his Dad approaching.

  “Sounds like a deal,” his father says.

  Luke’s pretty sure it’ll just be another ancient mannequin, but he feels a haunted-house thrill as Mr. Klack unlocks the door with his shaky hand. His father winks at him. He passes through the doorway. A single bulb casts pale red light through a Chinese lantern. Incense can’t quite hide the smell of mildew.

  There is a black lacquered chest against one wall, with many small square drawers. Chinese ginger jars are arranged on its surface, along with an incense burner, some kind of writing board, and ink brushes. The scattered plastic toys—a car, a helicopter—seem out of place. Tacked up are pictures of the Great Wall of China and mountains, looking like they were torn from calendars or magazines. In the middle of the room is a stool with a red cushion.

  “There’s no one in here,” Luke says, but just hearing himself say it makes the hairs on his forearm lift.

  “Maybe he’s on break,” his father chuckles.

  “He’s there on the stool,” says Mr. Klack.

  Luke stares. “I can’t see anything.”

  “Don’t look right at him,” says Mr. Klack. “Look off to the side for a bit.”

  Luke does so. In his peripheral vision, a smudge appears atop the stool. He glances over quickly, and it disappears. He looks off again, and this time the smudge gains definition and sharpens into limbs and a torso and the head of the Chinese boy, about his age.

  “Do you see it?” he asks his Dad.

  “That’s a clever trick. Some kind of video projection.”

  Luke glances overhead for a ceiling-mounted projector or a dusty beam of light. There’s nothing up there he can see. He studies the boy on the red-cushioned stool, staring sadly at the wall. He’s dressed in drab canvas trousers and a jacket. The collar and buttons look old-fashioned.

  “That’s a nice seat he has there, eh?” says Mr. Klack. �
�We had an armchair for him a while back, but he seems to like the stool better.”

  The ghost boy taps the heel of one of his scuffed shoes against the rung—it’s the only part of him that’s moving. His chest doesn’t rise and fall. But then his head turns and Luke knows he’s looking at him. Luke takes a few steps to one side, and the ghost boy’s head turns to follow. How’s this trick managed? It seems way too sophisticated for old Mr. Klack and his half-hearted museum.

  “We take good care of him,” says Uriah Klack. “All sorts of familiar things from his own country.”

  “Those are actually Indonesian,” Dad says, pointing at a pair of shadow puppets nailed to the wall. It’s the kind of thing Dad knows.

  “Yep,” says Mr. Klack, nodding. “Just wanted to make him feel right at home.”

  “Hello,” Luke says to the ghost boy, curious to know the limits of this illusion.

  “Doesn’t talk much,” says Mr. Klack. “Not since I’ve had him. My father said he used to talk sometimes. Probably got discouraged. Anyway, he only knows Chinese.”

  Well, that’s convenient, Luke thinks.

  “You’ve never had anyone here who speaks Chinese?” Luke’s father asks. Luke looks over, wondering if his father’s just playing along. Surely he doesn’t think it’s real.

  “In Meadows? We don’t get many people out here,” Klack says.

  The ghost boy opens his mouth and says something, so softly Luke can’t hear.

  “See?” says Mr. Klack excitedly. “He’s trying to say something to you. I had a feeling he’d talk to you. You’d be about the same age. Listen! he might try again!”

  The ghost boy’s lips part and he speaks once more. Luke thinks he makes out a foreign language.

  “I don’t know what he said.” Luke feels frustrated—he senses he’s being made a fool of and he doesn’t like it. But his skin is prickly with the possibility this is real.

  Luke sees his father walking all around the Chinese boy, studying him from different angles. He reaches out a hand.

  “He doesn’t like being touched,” Mr. Klack says simply.

  “Is that right?” Luke’s father replies.

  “There’s this thing he does,” Mr. Klack adds.