by Bob Bannon
“Bye,” he said, not noticing that he was smiling as well, or that he had put his hand up and given a small wave, before looking at his hand and dropping it quickly.
He watched them drive away in Doctor Wong’s silver car and then continued on towards the tree-house, deciding to ride in the street and getting off the sidewalk.
XIX
Eric woke up precisely at eight o’clock to his alarm and had slapped the snooze button twice. At eight-ten, his mother knocked on the door and ordered him up. She had decided she was going to drive him to school before she went to work because she thought it was too cold to wait for the bus. On days when he heard that, he immediately woke himself up and started getting ready. He loathed the school bus, as did most of the kids who rode it. If he wasn’t ready precisely on time, his mother would threaten to leave him behind and he’d be forced to take the bus. He never tested her on it. It was bad enough he had to ride the bus to its stop near the mall after school, which was about all he could take of it.
After he showered, dressed and rummaged for a sweater in his closet, he grabbed the last of his books from his desk and shoved them in his backpack. That’s when he noticed the microscope.
It was off and unplugged, but the boys had forgotten to throw away the slide with the blood sample on it. He picked it up to toss it in the trash can, but he stopped when he looked at it. The sample wasn’t red any more, like it should have been. Instead, it looked almost like black ash.
He quickly plugged in the microscope and turned it on. Fortunately, the microscope’s software program was still running, so he quickly adjusted the sight and snapped a picture of the sample.
Instead of looking anything like blood cells, the sample was just a series of octagonal-shaped threads.
His mother called up the stairs to alert him that breakfast was on the table. He turned off the microscope and left the image on the computer, but turned off the screen again. He’d check the internet after school to see if there was a match somewhere for what these new cells looked like.
It would certainly explain why police couldn’t find any physical evidence at the places Adam, the Ape-Man, had broken into. Even if he was harmed during the robbery, by the time the authorities reached the scene, there would just be this ashy compound. No one would be looking for that, even if it stayed together and wasn’t blown away like dust.
He wanted to tell Jonah about it immediately, but he remembered the walkie-talkies didn’t reach the tree-house. He’d have plenty of time for research since he wouldn’t see Jonah for three days.
He ate breakfast too fast and was ready to go at the exact same time as his mother.
When he got to school, he found Emma Wong waiting in the hall at the entrance to the school. She had been talking and giggling with a group of popular kids but when she saw him come in, she immediately came straight at him. He kept walking without even acknowledging her. She kept up next to him.
“Did you decide if you’re going to the dance?” She asked. “You’re going, right?”
He stopped and looked at her. “Why would I go to a dance?” He asked.
“If you don’t go, Jonah won’t go. And it’s too late for me to find anyone else,” she explained. “Please?”
“The only thing I want to do less than going to a dance by myself is going to a dance with you and Jonah,” he said.
“Then ask somebody,” she said, hopefully.
He looked at her wide-eyed, his mouth made a sharp ‘o’ and then flattened. It unconsciously did the same thing again as Eric searched for words to describe how insane that sounded, and then continued toward his locker. She followed.
“Okay,” she said. “Then just go with us. I’ll dance with you. I’ll make it super fun. I swear.”
He didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and he knew Jonah wanted to go. He was going to feel entirely left out, but that wasn’t exactly something new. It might make his mother happy too, it was a major school event, and he usually made a point of ignoring major school events.
He got to his locker and rested his forehead against it, letting all of these things roll through his mind. He rubbed his eyes under his glasses and then exhaled slowly.
“I’ll ask him about it when I see him,” he mumbled.
She lit up like a like a light bulb and jumped up and down, hugging her books to her chest. She let out a small high-pitched noise and then stamped her feet. “So you’ll go!?” She asked excitedly.
Eric rolled his eyes as he opened his locker and nodded his head, completely defeated. “Yeah, yeah,” he said quietly. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
“Thank you!” She said and grabbed his arm. “Thank you! Thank you!”
She spun on her heel and caught up to her friends Courtney and Heather, who were waiting for her down the hall wondering what in the world could make her so excited about Eric MacIntyre.
Meanwhile, Jonah had just stopped at the end of Main Street. His hands were freezing. He remembered trying to ride his bike up and down the street of his house with no hands. The attempts had failed miserably. He’d seen people on television do it, but he seemingly didn’t have the balance for it. Now he wished he’d practiced more.
He stopped the bike and jammed his hands in his pants pockets and shivered. There was something odd though. There was the green gem; he remembered putting that in his pocket. There was some change from his bus trip, he had expected that. But there was something else. When he pulled it out, he saw that it was a crumpled one-hundred-dollar bill.
It took his breath away. He’d never seen one before. It was the most money he’d ever seen in his life, and, at the moment, having any amount of money meant so many different things to him. He could buy food. He could buy hot chocolate. Maybe he could get on a nice warm bus that could take him the rest of the way to the woods. This money was a means of survival.
He thought immediately about going back to Red’s Diner for hot chocolate with marshmallows swimming in it, but there would be the inevitable questions about why he wasn’t in school. And even with the home-schooling excuse, wouldn’t it seem odd that his dad would drag him out to such an early, chilling morning meeting?
He was just about to go anyway and deal with whatever questions came up when he thought of the gas station with the mini-mart, the one where Devlin had stopped the robbery. He could buy food there, and it would get him inside long enough to at least warm up.
He shoved the bill back into his pocket, deep, so he wouldn’t lose it, and then got back on the bike and headed for the gas station.
He left the bike leaned up against the outside wall by the door and went inside. It was indeed much warmer than it was outside. The old man behind the counter looked up just long enough to register he was a person, and then went back to reading his newspaper.
Jonah walked casually down one of the four aisles and then back up the next one. He had no idea where to start. The third aisle was medicine for headaches and colds, so he didn’t need anything from there. At least that narrowed the field.
The fourth aisle had a selection of chips in a variety of sizes and next to that was a wall full of sodas and bottled waters.
He went back to the first aisle and started looking more seriously at what was there. He found a variety of food options – there were bags of rice and cans of tuna fish, but then he spotted some microwave meals. Their containers were small bowls that you put directly into the oven, so you didn’t even need a bowl to serve them in. He found that there were four bowls of macaroni and cheese and four bowls of cheese ravioli on the shelf. He swooped all eight off the shelf and then continued to look, but he found he had no room to carry anything else.
He went and put the bowls on the counter by the register, but stopped the old man when he put down his newspaper.
“I’m still looking,” Jonah said.
“Umm…yup,” came the response from the man, who went right back to his paper.
When Jonah went back to the aisles
, the thought suddenly struck him that he already knew he couldn’t ride the bike without his hands, and now he was buying food. He’d have to be very careful about what he bought if he was going to get back to the tree-house.
He went back to the aisle with the snacks and grabbed a smaller bag of potato chips, then turned to the soda cooler and selected two cans of the diet soda that the MacIntyre’s had. But as he slid the cooler door closed, he noticed a sign that said two-liter bottles were only ninety-nine cents. Jonah didn’t know how much the cans would cost, but that was clearly more soda than the two cans he had in his arms for just one-dollar. He returned the cans and picked up a two-liter bottle of the same soda.
He went back to the counter and put the two items with the microwave bowls, but the man seemed to ignore him this time.
“I’m ready now,” Jonah said, clearing his throat.
The man folded his paper and rang everything up. The total came to just over twenty-two dollars. Jonah handed him the one-hundred dollar bill. The man looked at the bill and then looked at Jonah. He held the bill up towards the light on the ceiling.
Jonah’s heart skipped a beat. Did he think it was fake? What would he do if he thought it was fake?
But the man immediately brought it back down to the counter and seemed to scribble on it with a marker. Then he rang the purchase through on the register and started counting out Jonah’s change. The man counted just under seventy-eight dollars and laid it and the change on the counter. Jonah scooped it all up and put it in his pocket. The man then placed all the items in three plastic bags. Jonah picked those up and left the store.
The two-liter bottle actually felt quite heavy walking around with, but the handles seemed sturdy. When he got to the bike, he slid the plastic bags over the handlebar of the bike. It wasn’t going to be easy to balance, but it wasn’t going to be impossible to get back to the tree-house if he held the bags in place.
As he was getting on the bike, he looked up the street and noticed that Mister Kingsly, who owned the hardware store, was sweeping in front of his store. Jonah had read about Mister Kingsly in the news reports about the break-in there.
Jonah suddenly wanted to go buy something at the hardware store since he had some money. He couldn’t exactly walk up and pay the man for the electric blanket, but he wanted to at least spend some money there.
He pedaled the bike over to the store and leaned it against the outside wall. He was a little concerned about leaving the bags of food, but there didn’t seem to be enough people out today that someone could run by and swipe them. Still he moved the bike in front of the large store window, which had been replaced and painted so that arching capital letters spelled out HARDWARE in green with a thin brown border around each letter.
“Good morning,” Mister Kingsly said brightly as he moved to allow Jonah to place the bike by the window.
“Good morning,” Jonah answered. He balanced the bike upright and then went inside. He was greeted to the sound of a bell above the door.
There was an odd smell to the place, like old paint mixed with something else. The aisles here were almost floor to ceiling, giving the small shop an almost claustrophobic feel. Jonah moved up one aisle and then down another. He had no idea what to buy. He didn’t necessarily need hardware. He wondered briefly if he should have let Angelo, the architect, come in here and shop instead. Maybe he would need something to finish off the tree-house.
He was toward the back of the store when the bell at the door sounded again. As he turned, he saw Mister Kingsly coming down the aisle with his broom.
“Can I help you find anything?” Mister Kingsly asked.
Jonah honestly didn’t know what to say. He was frozen and his eyes scanned both sides of the aisle when they fell upon a pair of gloves.
“Oh. No,” Jonah said to him walking towards the gloves. “That’s what I was looking for.”
He picked them up and looked at them. They weren’t winter gloves, they were thick, black, work gloves used for gardening or picking up logs. There were several pictures on the advertisement next to the glove rack that demonstrated their use. Jonah tried one on and it was a little too big for his hand, but he intended to buy the gloves anyway. He turned and handed them to Mister Kingsly.
“That it?” Mister Kingsly asked.
“Yes, sir,” Jonah replied.
Mister Kingsly motioned for him to follow to the back of the store where the cash register was. He rang it up and the total came to ten fifty-seven. Jonah fished out a ten dollar bill and then heaped some change onto the counter and sorted out the correct amount.
Mister Kingsly was about to put the gloves in a paper bag, but Jonah stopped him saying he already had a bag to put them in outside. So Mister Kingsly simply handed over the gloves and his receipt.
“Thank you,” Mister Kingsly said.
Jonah nodded and walked back out to the bike. He almost immediately put on the gloves, but thought Mister Kingsly would think that would look odd, putting on work gloves instead of winter gloves. So he put the gloves in one of the bags, got on the bike, and rode to the next corner.
Once he was out of sight of the hardware store, he took the gloves out and put them on. They immediately warmed his hands. He was having slightly more trouble balancing the bike than he initially thought he would, so he also removed the two-liter bottle of soda from its bag and shoved it down the front of his coat. That seemed to work pretty well and he had no other problems getting back to the tree-house.
When he got there, he replaced the bottle back in its bag and put all three bag handles around the seat of the bike. He popped the kickstand, hoping the bike would stand in the leafy underbrush. Of course, the weight of the bags was too much and it immediately tipped over.
He went and got the rope from the tangle of vines hanging from the tree. He wrapped the rope four times around the bike seat and then tied it in a knot. He retrieved the second rope and found it was remarkably easy to pull the bike all the way up to the tree-house. Even when he stopped pulling, the rope would lock in place and the bike just hung in mid-air. He knew it was all the way at the top when he couldn’t pull the rope anymore.
He tied that rope back into the tangle of vines and pulled the other rope that would drop the ladder. Once he climbed up, he pulled the ladder back into place. He had to take a moment to observe that he was now perfectly safe and hidden away far up in this tree. The thought did give him a little bit of a thrill.
He walked over to the bike and maneuvered it onto the patio. He left it tied to the rope, but he pulled the plastic bags until the handles snapped, freeing them from the seat. He left the bottle of soda out in the cold air and then he walked inside.
The heavy velvet curtains were all still opened and the tree-house was quite cold. He put the bags down on the floor and went around pulling the heavy fabric at each window. As he did, the place seemed to warm by at least a few degrees, but that was probably just because the curtains blocked the wind. He plugged in the electric blanket and jammed its dial up as far as it would go. Then he took off his gloves and his coat.
That’s when he noticed the smell. There was something rotten in the tree-house. He went to the footlockers and looked around, then he examined the shelves above them. He couldn’t find where the smell was coming from until Grouchy went into his trademark frenzy of activity.
It occurred to Jonah that Grouchy wouldn’t have eaten since yesterday morning when he gave him bread. Jonah wasn’t used to having to be responsible for Grouchy at all. And whatever Grouchy had done in the pet carrier didn’t smell very good at all.
Jonah grabbed the bag of bread off the shelf and opened it. He grabbed three pieces of bread and then put on one of the gloves again. He shoved three pieces of bread through the fenced opening at the front of the pet carrier with his gloved hand, avoiding the manic raccoon at all costs.
There was no way he would be able to get Grouchy out of the tree-house by himself, and he doubted Eric would get close to the
thing if it smelled like that. He didn’t even want to be close to it. There was only one thing to do.
Jonah picked up the notebook that was still on the floor. He pulled the pen from the spiral and turned to a blank page. He turned the notebook sideways and wrote in large capital letters:
SORRY ADAM, GROUCHY BELONGS OUTSIDE
He moved to the middle of the room and put the notebook at his feet. He stared at his own writing and repeated the words to himself. He didn’t know if writing it down and concentrating on the words would do anything, but he wanted Adam to get the point.
He almost tried to start the change when he remembered what Eric said about the video camera. He actually did want to know what it looked like when he changed.
Jonah pulled one of the camping hammocks over to the television and set the video camera on it. He turned on the television and then the camera. When he hit the record button the television screen lit up with the image of the tree-house. He balanced the camera on the hammock so that it was pointing in the direction of where he would be standing. When he moved back to the spot in front of the notebook, he saw that he had made a pretty good approximation. It wouldn’t be a close up view, but he’d be able to see everything.
Now, he tried not to think about the camera. He stared at his right hand. He tried to visualize what it would look like inside his index finger if the nerve endings just started to shrivel up and move toward his palm he was concentrating on that, but his mind momentarily wandered to visualizing the nerve endings in each of his fingers doing the same.
Just at that moment, the fingernails on his hand shot into incredibly sharp talons and grew about an inch before they gently curved and came to a stop. His hand seemed to thicken as he watched it and dense black hairs sprouted from the back of his hand, becoming even thicker at his wrist and moving up his arm.
