“If this is going to work, you and I have to do it together. We’re different from CR and Zeeko, Benji. You know that, don’t you?”
Benji felt warmth spread in his chest. He nodded.
“We won’t joke about what is happening,” Ellie said. “Or deny it because it’s scary. And the one thing we absolutely will not do is forget. We won’t forget that that there is no instruction manual for the impossible. We have to swear to be absurdly careful and totally honest with each other, Benji Lightman, okay?”
“Of course,” Benji said. “I swear.”
She seemed to search his face. She must have liked what she found there, because she extended her hand, which he shook. “I got the school’s camera,” she said. “So I guess let’s go record history or whatever. Pics or it didn’t happen, am I right?”
7
As they drove through the night toward the quarry, Benji thought about the House.
The House’s rusty front door had shrieked like a demon as it opened. He walked down the hall; creatures skittered within the walls. Spinney had said he had to spend two minutes alone in the living room. Benji stood as still as possible in that casket-dark room, counting one-Mississippis, his LED wand quivering in his hand—
A door across the room banged open and an actual ghost came roaring toward him.
“COME TO THE BASEMENT, LIGHTMAN!” it moaned. “COME STAY WITH ME FOREVERRRR!”
Benji, of course, freaked. He tried to flee but tripped on his own feet, falling down on his beloved wand, snapping it in two.
The ghost began to laugh. It raised its hand. Which held an iPhone.
“You are such a woman,” Shaun Spinney said, pulling the sheet off his head. He kept the phone pointed at Benji.
He’s recording me, Benji thought. He sprinted into the hall, but Spinney’s friends stood in the front doorway, trapping him, their laughter booming. CR, Zeeko, and Ellie raced in behind them, their faces matted with dirt (Spinney’s friends had pinned them to the ground). Ellie had said she would try to make it, and it turned out she had.
“I’m so sorry, Benji,” Zeeko said, about to cry. “I tried to scream, I really tried.”
“You dickwads,” Ellie said furiously. “Screw you! You hear me? Go to hell!”
And CR, this homeschooled kid who was always so awkward and timid and kind, glared at Spinney with a look like black ice.
“What are you doing?” CR said.
“Uploading your little friend, is what I’m doing,” Spinney said, grinning with half his mouth. “Lightman, you’re gonna be one viral-ass video.”
It was over. Benji would be a loser forever. The internet does not forget.
“Put the damn phone down,” growled CR.
And Benji noticed something: CR had a stone in his hand.
CR’s arm cocked fiercely back, like the hammer of a gun. His whole body hauled forward with frightening power and grace, launching the stone down the hallway with a song of wind. The stone hit its mark, smashing into the center of the phone’s screen. The phone flipped from Spinney’s fingers, then vanished into a black hole in one of the rotting floorboards.
The world went silent with amazement.
Spinney blinked at his hand. Spinney’s friends blinked at him.
CR’s huge eyes echoed the same awe and fear Benji felt.
How. Did you. Do that? Benji silently asked.
CR, with one shoulder, shrugged: I. Got no. Idea.
“What the ass just happened?” Ellie whispered, shaky-voiced.
Spinney seemed to decide his phone wasn’t going to teleport back into his hand. He raised his gaze to Benji and his friends, and the compressed rage on his face made Zeeko actually whimper.
“Shit,” Spinney said philosophically, “I guess I’m gonna destroy you guys. You first, Little Lightman.” He stepped toward them.
CR snatched up another stone.
Spinney, seeing this, stopped.
“That’s not his name,” CR said. “Banjo, you tell this guy your real name, man.”
All at once, everything inside of Benji, all the anxiety and terror that normally formed the shape of him, rushed away with a flood of wind and light. He reached for the magic in his pockets.
“My name,” he said, “is Benji . . .”
His palms reemerged, bearing two tiny squares of flash paper.
“. . . Freakin’ . . .”
With all his strength, Benji collided his hands above his head. A flash of heat and all at once he was bearing a bouquet of flame. He said, “. . . BLAZE—”
But he never got to finish. His small fireball had inexplicably transformed into a tower of flame that rocketed heavenward. Shouting, he looked up and saw something horridly amazing. The cobwebs overhead had caught fire. The flames spiraled upward, greedily consuming the cobweb, and once they kissed the ceiling, the blaze fwooshed, fanning across the bone-dry ceiling and walls.
“WHAT THE EFF-WORD? WHAT THE EFF-WORD?” Zeeko screamed.
Smoke flooded the hallway with almost supernatural speed. Shaun Spinney, that great and noble soul, plowed into Benji, shrieking, “Let me out, bitches!” Spinney’s cohorts likewise trampled Benji, disorienting him in the smoke.
“This way,” CR coughed somewhere behind him.
Benji followed the voice. After a few moments, he staggered out the front door into the blessedly cool air of dusk. CR and Zeeko were just ahead of him on the porch. (Spinney and company were fleeing across the lawn like they thought the House was about to explode.)
“C-call nine-one-one, Zeeko,” CR said as he ran down the porch steps. “B-Banjo, what’re you doing?”
Benji was still on the porch, staring at the front door. Over the roar of the inferno, he could hear someone gasping for oxygen inside.
Ellie.
He dashed back into the House. An invisible wave of heat seemed to singe his throat and lungs. He stumbled down the gray vortex of the hall, calling her name, his head swimming from the smoke. I’m going to pass out, he thought, then four magical words from school flew into his head: Stop, Drop, and Roll.
The lower air was marginally clearer. He crawled in the direction of a weak cough, and found Ellie facedown on the floor in the living room. She had passed out.
“Ellie!” he said, shaking her. “Hey, Ellie, come on!” Her eyelids flickered open briefly, her gaze glassy and confused. Groaning with exertion, Benji put her rag doll–limp arm over his shoulder and stood.
But the House suddenly gave a great screaming BOOM! The floor beneath Benji quaked. To his left, floorboards flew upward like a volcanic blast. Authorities later theorized that the fire had lit some kind of natural gas pocket under the house.
Benji half ran, half dragged Ellie back into the front hall, where the smoke had changed from gray to flame orange. Which way is the door? He gambled on going left, speeding now, coughing so hard his throat seemed to rip. He reached out blindly ahead of him, found a hard round surface. Doorknob! he thought, and tugged the door open.
Despite the blaze, he went cold with terror.
He’d opened the door to the cellar. He could see the rotting stairway, could see the crater down there in the earthen floor where the explosion had occurred. Emerging from that crater, Benji saw what could only have been a horrid hallucination in his last moments of consciousness: a real ghost, a silhouette like a man but twisted and malformed and hideous. The dark man reached for him. . . .
A funnel of black smoke spiraled out of the cellar. Benji swooned, darkness encroaching at the edges of his vision. The next thing he knew, CR was dragging him and Ellie across the porch and onto the front lawn, telling him the fire department and Papaw were on their way. Benji gave a thumbs-up, said, “’Kay,” and knew no more.
Now, driving with Ellie, the memory didn’t bother him anymore.
He’d always told himself that the embarrassment was just a prologue to something wonderful. Part of him had whispered that all that dreams-come-true talk was kids’ bullshit, and that
Benji was being selfish for even wanting it to be true. But now he felt that maybe, just maybe, it had been carrying him to this, to the saucer.
When they arrived at the quarry, CR (who had driven his own truck here) went to get the tow truck at the front gate. He was jumpy and not eager to talk. Ellie popped a fresh memory card into the camera and said, “I’m going to go find the best spot to film.” She headed up a nearby slope that rose to a summit twenty feet above the lake; from the top, she’d have a panoramic view of the quarry.
For a minute, Zeeko and Benji were alone, looking over the frozen lake. It looked exactly the same as it had last night, the hole the same size and everything. Benji glanced over and noticed that Zeeko seemed uncharacteristically tightly wound, too.
“Hey,” Benji said, “you know this is going to be great, right?”
“Maybe. It’s pretty scary. I want to help you guys, I love you, but messing with drones is serious biz.”
“It’s not a drone, Zeek. You’re the smartest guy I know. You have to know how ridiculous that is.”
Zeeko looked at the ground. “Yeah. Perhaps, Benji.” He met Benji’s gaze, his eyes filled with a kind of solemnity that made him look older. “The Bible talks about chariots of fire in the sky, you know. They’re called angels in the Bible, but some people—mostly crazy people on cable TV—think those passages refer to aliens. Look, my faith in God is big enough to allow for the possibility of alien life. None of this changes the really important things about my life. But if that thingy down there really is from another world, I just hope everyone else is ready for it. If you make people get rid of one belief, you better have another one to replace it.”
“People will believe that life is capable of beautiful and amazing things, right? This is like a miracle fell out of heaven.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘it fell’ so much as ‘it was blown up,’” Zeeko said, grinning a little.
The tow truck pulled up behind them. Benji gave Zeeko a pat on the shoulder and directed CR to back up to the end of the hill just above the shore. CR turned off the ignition, hopped out, and grabbed something out of the bed of his own pickup.
“What’s that?” Benji asked.
“It’s you, Banjo,” CR replied. Actually, of all things, it was a wooden Radio Flyer sled.
CR set the sled on the edge of the frozen lake and then fetched a huge stack of disc-shaped lead weights from his truck, the kind you put on bench-press bars. The words BEDFORD FALLS FIELD HOUSE were stamped on the rims of the weights. “How much you weigh?” CR asked.
“One-thirty-something. Why?”
As CR loaded 130-something pounds of weight onto the sled, Benji understood. The sled was going to test the strength of the ice before Benji ventured out onto it himself. “Dude!” he exclaimed, genuinely touched by CR’s concerned forethought. “That’s super smart, man! Thanks!”
Something seemed to flit over CR’s face like a dark cloud. CR shrugged. “Had to be smart eventually, I guess!” he said with a laugh. He produced several bungee cords from his jacket, which he proceeded to loop around the weights and the sled, tethering them together. Then he attached the big metal hook from the tow truck to the back of the sled.
It was almost time. Benji turned to face the overlook. “Ellie?” he called.
“Benji Lightman?” Ellie replied.
He raised a make-believe camera in his hand. “Action.”
CR kicked the loaded Radio Flyer out onto the lake.
The sled glided, its runners making ice-skate sounds. The tow truck’s long metallic cord, which ran from the truck’s winch to the hook attached to the sled, unspooled as the Radio Flyer traveled. When the sled was a few feet from the crater where the saucer had gone down in the center of the lake, CR pulled a lever on the winch, stopping the sled just short of the lip of the crater. There was the faintest crackle sound, and Benji tensed, fearing the ice was about to give way and send the sled plunging.
But it didn’t. “Phew!” Ellie said from the summit.
As they reeled the Radio Flyer back toward the shore, Zeeko said, “You’re sure about this, right?”
“Absolutely,” Benji replied.
“We got no choice, Zeek,” CR said.
Once the Radio Flyer was back, CR handed Benji the hook, which was so heavy Benji had to suppress an oof! “Okay, Banjo, if you can get the hook to actually snag the drone, great. But as long as you can just get the hook to touch it, we’ll still be okay, I think. Once I throw the switch back here, the electromagnetic power will turn on, and the hook’ll connect to the drone and we’ll be able to drag it out.”
“Got it,” Benji said. He became aware of a considerable number of butterflies in his stomach.
He turned toward the lake. He’d spent so much of the day anticipating this moment, but now that it was at hand, he was surprised by a momentary urge to delay. It’s just nerves. And excitement. And nerves. He exhaled forcefully, cheeks puffed, pushing out some of the anxiety.
The ice crackled under his boot as he stepped onto the lake. For the first few yards, he moved with eggshell caution.
The area surrounding the crater was webbed with cracks. Benji decided to set the magnet on the ice and kick it ahead of him, just to be safe. The ice crackled as the magnet skidded across it . . . and then, ploop, the hook fell into the dark water of the crater. The metallic cord attached to the magnet sped as it descended to the depths, and Benji had a crazy and bizarrely hilarious image of an astounded Inuit fisherman pulling his fishing line from an ice hole and finding a flying saucer hooked to the end of it.
There was a dull metallic clank! sound below. The cord stopped moving.
Stepping more gingerly than ever, Benji approached the crater and peered down. Except for a reflected sky, the water was completely black. He pulled out a flashlight CR had brought, ignited it, and looked into the water.
His heart leaped as a flash of the saucer glimmered in the murk. By rather awesome luck (or fate), the saucer looked like it really had been hooked: The hook had gone just slightly inside the hole in the hull.
“What’s going on?” CR shouted, so loud that Benji startled.
“It’s down there!” Benji called. “I think we hooked it!”
“Are you ready for me to turn on the magnet?”
Benji glanced up at Ellie on the summit. “Are we rolling, Ellie?”
“Yep!”
“Okay, Banjo,” CR said, “back up a couple steps, I’m throwing the switch! Three! Two! One!”
A moment of universal stillness, everything inside and outside Benji seeming to float suspended. The metallic cord twitched like a nerve, and he heard the thrumming crescendoing buzz of something powerful charging up. The cord swished in the water, stirring the stars out of their constellations.
Benji whirled to the shore. “You guys, it’s working!”
When the saucer and the hook touched this time, the sound was not a muffled clank! It was more like a cannon blasting underwater. Benji whipped back toward the crater, caught off guard by the violent sound.
The ice shuddered underfoot. He stepped backward, suddenly frightened. From the lake bottom, he saw a brief but blinding pulse of blue light, which painted a strange series of concentric circles on the ice around him. Ellie shouted in surprise. The circles vanished.
The water within the crater surged back and forth.
Benji could hear hectic movement on the lake bottom: the saucer shifting, bucking.
Around the crater, the ice began to split apart seismically.
Benji backed away faster now, faster—
“OH GOD, BENJI, LOOK OUT!” Zeeko cried.
Something was shrieking toward Benji across the face of the ice. The Radio Flyer. He was halfway to the shore, thirty feet out, and had to leap to the side to avoid the sled, which was moving across the lake apparently under its own power, like a twin-bladed missile. It shot straight past him and vanished into the ice crater, as if drawn to it magnetically.
�
�The junkyard!” he heard Ellie shout; she was running down the slope to the shore where Zeeko and CR stood.
“What?” CR replied.
“The junkyard’s going apeshit like last night!”
She was right. The trash heaps moaned and shuddered.
Under the ice, the saucer continued to whirl, to buck.
“BANJO, GET BACK HERE NOW!” CR said, and finally Benji headed back to the shore.
“CR, turn the winch on! Pull the saucer up! Let’s do this!”
“Are you sure?”
Not at all! “Definitely!”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” CR muttered. He threw the switch.
The lake caught on fire.
Or that was how it seemed. The instant the winch engaged, Benji could see it turn the saucer over, and the entire surface of the lake was seared with green light from below. The ice grumbled.
Spellbound, Benji stopped twenty feet from the shore.
And the saucer’s blinding tractor beam blazed into the sky.
For one stupefied moment, Benji gaped at the beam, which shot toward the moon like a beanstalk. A group of bats had been flying overhead and got caught in the light. They spiraled down toward the crater, shrieking.
As if from another world, he heard CR scream, “What is—is that a plane?!”
The ice was fracturing in every direction, pieces of the frozen plain collapsing into the black water as a whirlpool formed around the tractor beam. Benji fled for the shore as the whirlpool spread, feeling like a kid who has just pulled the bathtub plug and is horrified to his bones that he is going to be sucked down the pipe.
Where’s all the water going? If it’s going into the saucer, there’s no way it can hold it—
The saucer exploded.
The explosion sent water and metallic debris geysering high and hard out of the hole in the ice. Shock waves flew across the lake, fracturing the frozen lake completely once and for all; chunks of ice surged toward the shore. Benji had to scramble up the slope to outrun them.
Mr. Fahrenheit Page 7
