The Slice

by Greg Taylor

  “Well, what do you think, Calanthe?”

  Calanthe didn’t answer at first. She seemed to be soaking in the silence of the room.

  “What do I think?”

  “Yeah, your first day of school. What are your impressions?”

  “I think … the students are very excitable.”

  Toby laughed. “Yeah, they tend to be, I guess. Especially compared to what you’re probably used to.”

  “It is very subdued where I come from. We are never allowed to act … boisterous like this. We would be severely disciplined if we did.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about anyone disciplining you here. You did great today, Calanthe. You really did. You totally aced it.”

  Calanthe’s expression asked for an explanation of aced it.

  “The grading system Annabel talked about yesterday? A, B, C, D? If you get an A in a subject, that means you aced it.”

  “So that means good. ‘Aced it.’”

  “More than good.”

  Toby held his hand up for a high five. Calanthe reached over and hit Toby’s hand, the resulting smack echoing off the blackboards.

  “Okay, that’s still a little too hard.”

  * * *

  “Where’s our girl?”

  Using the bleacher seats as steps, Strobe approached Toby and Annabel, who sat in the front row of the bleachers overlooking the football field. It was the prearranged spot for them to all meet after school.

  “Well, where is she?” Strobe repeated as he sat next to Annabel.

  Toby pointed toward the ground. Strobe frowned, looked down, and saw Calanthe lying on the concrete in the dark, shaded area beneath the bleachers.

  Strobe laughed. “What’s goin’ on? What’s she doing down there?”

  “Sleeping,” Annabel said.

  “Sleeping…”

  Annabel nodded.

  “Let me get this straight. After attending her first day at Triple H, Calanthe decided to take a nap on the hard concrete beneath the bleachers.”

  “The day finally caught up to her,” Toby said. “She’s totally exhausted, man.”

  “Have either of you checked her pulse lately?”

  “Poor girl,” Annabel said as she looked down at the sleeping Calanthe.

  “How’d she do today?” Strobe asked.

  “Great,” Toby said. “Like I told her at the end of the day, she totally aced it.”

  “Excellent. How long we gonna let her stay down there? We’re gonna miss our buses.”

  “I’m going to call my mom in a little to bring us home,” Annabel said. “You can go now if you want, Strobe.”

  “I think I will. We gettin’ together tonight?”

  “I say we give Calanthe the night off. We’ll do our next boot-camp session tomorrow.”

  “She looks like a little girl down there,” Strobe observed. “A clueless little girl. Like there’s nothing wrong in her world.”

  “Right now, there isn’t,” Annabel said. “She’s here, with us. Safe and sound.”

  The trio stared at Calanthe for a moment, then Strobe nodded. “Okay, then. See you all tomorrow.”

  Strobe waved as he went up the bleachers. Toby and Annabel stayed where they were, sitting protectively on the bleachers above Calanthe. It wasn’t long after Strobe had left when Toby noticed something.

  “Annabel, check it out.” Toby was staring down at Calanthe. After Annabel’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness below the bleachers, she was alarmed to see that Calanthe’s body had begun to jerk sporadically. It appeared the girl was in the grip of a nightmare. Toby had already grabbed his backpack and was heading down the steps to the track that ran around the football field. Annabel quickly followed him.

  The two had to duck their heads to get under the first couple of rows of bleachers, but were able to straighten up as they approached Calanthe. She was still under the spell of her nightmare; her sudden movements accompanied by an occasional burst of indecipherable language. Annabel and Toby knelt down on either side of Calanthe.

  “Should we wake her up?” Toby asked.

  Annabel didn’t answer. She was staring in alarm at Calanthe’s face, neck, hands.

  Toby was speechless when he saw what Annabel was looking at. Calanthe’s skin was slowly becoming translucent and revealing her underlying muscles, veins, and arteries!

  Fumbling to get his cell out of his coat pocket, Toby quickly took several pictures of Calanthe’s face and hands. Just in time, too. As suddenly as it had begun, Calanthe’s attack, or whatever it was, was over. Her skin was back to normal. But Calanthe was still in the midst of her nightmare. When she started to talk in her sleep, Annabel leaned down close to her lips.

  “What’s she saying?” Toby asked.

  Annabel shook her head. She wasn’t sure. But then she looked up at Toby.

  “What? What is it?”

  “I think she said…” Annabel listened again. “Slice.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what it sounded like. Slice.”

  “Slice. Anything else?”

  “That’s all I could make out.” Annabel looked at Calanthe with concern. “Probably just talking nonsense. She’s dreaming, after all.”

  After a few more disturbing verbal outbreaks, Calanthe’s nightmare appeared to be over. She had returned to her child-like, peaceful sleeping state.

  “Whew!” Toby sat back on his haunches with a relieved sigh.

  “Yeah, this is a bit exhausting, isn’t it?”

  “Kind of makes you wonder what’s next, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  Toby and Annabel fell silent as they kept a wary watch on Calanthe.

  “Sometimes?” Annabel said. “When I look at Calanthe? Like right now?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, this might sound weird, but sometimes Calanthe reminds me of some of the characters in the books I’ve been reading for English.”

  “What books have you been reading?”

  “Wuthering Heights. The House of Mirth. I just started Turn of the Screw.”

  “Never read them.”

  “The main characters are these … well, they’re doomed heroines, really. You can just sense that things aren’t going to turn out well for them.” Annabel’s eyes suddenly widened in dismay. “I can’t believe I just said that. Forget I even mentioned it, okay, Toby?”

  “No, it’s okay, Annabel. I think I know what you mean.” As soon as Annabel had compared Calanthe to the heroines in her book assignments, Toby knew she had hit on the thing he had tried to capture in his notebook drawing. There was that certain something in Calanthe’s eyes—it had haunted Toby from the moment he met her—that gave Calanthe the aura of a tragic heroine.

  “You’ll never tell her I said that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “And I didn’t really mean it, you know? Because the thing is, a tragic heroine always has a character flaw that causes her downfall, right? And Calanthe doesn’t have a flaw like that, she really doesn’t, and—”

  “Annabel … Annabel. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  Suddenly, Calanthe stirred. When she opened her eyes, she didn’t seem to know where she was. Instantly panicking, she jumped to her feet and backed away from Annabel and Toby.

  “Calanthe … it’s us.” Annabel held out her hands toward Calanthe in a “calm down” gesture.

  Calanthe looked wildly back and forth at Annabel and Toby.

  “You just had a little nightmare,” Toby said. “Everything’s fine now.”

  Calanthe continued to back away from Toby and Annabel. After her bruising nightmare, she clearly needed a moment to reorient herself to her new world. Her new life. A couple of deep breaths later, the breaths matching her odd heartbeat cadence, and Calanthe appeared to be back to normal.

  “Okay?” Annabel asked.

  Calanthe thought for a moment about Annabel’s question. Then she said, “Yes. I am here, with you. I am ok
ay.”

  What a relief, Toby thought. ’Cause just a minute ago you looked like a live version of one of those see-through bodies I saw on my museum field trip last year!

  11

  It was the dead of night.

  Compared to the buzz of activity during the daylight and evening hours, New York’s Central Park Zoo was oddly dream-like at three A.M. in the morning. The majority of the animals in the zoo kept daylight hours and slept during the night, just like the humans who took care of them. Some, however, such as the two-toed sloth, came alive in the dark. It was their time to cut loose, so to speak.

  But on this night, all of the animals seemed to be up and about.

  “What’s wrong with these guys?” the night guard grumbled to himself as he walked into the Central Garden area of the zoo. The animals were clearly agitated. The snow monkeys’ screeches echoed from the Temperate Territory. The parrots were going nuts inside the Tropic Building. Even the polar bears were getting into the act. The guard had never heard the roars coming from the direction of the Polar Circle in all the time he’d worked at the zoo.

  “It’s not even a full moon.” The three or four days before, during, and after a full moon definitely had an effect on the animals. But nothing like this. Nowhere near like this.

  The guard snapped on his flashlight as he approached the large outdoor tank that housed the three California sea lions. The sides of the tank were constructed of glass to enable visitors to watch the sea lions as they frolicked underwater. The underwater lights having been turned off hours before, the tank was now a dark, hulking silhouette in the night. The guard swept his flashlight across the rocky island in the middle of the water. No sign of the sea lions.

  “All right, all right already!” the guard yelled in irritation. “Calm down, will ya!” All of the screeching and yipping was getting to him. If anything, it had increased in volume. The guard explored the nooks and crannies of the rocky island that served as the sea lions’ home with his flashlight. Nothing.

  That was just so strange. Where could the sea lions have gone? The guard hadn’t heard anything about them being taken.…

  “What’s that?” the guard cried out, whirling in the direction of the strange sound he had just heard over his shoulder. His flashlight beam stabbed at the dark, illuminating nothing but the empty path that led back in the direction he had just come. The bushes on either side of the path started snapping back and forth as a sudden night wind kicked in.

  The guard was starting to get pretty spooked. He had the unnerving feeling that the entire park was coming alive around him. The animals’ frenzied cries. The dancing shadows from the windblown bushes. The sense that something was nearby. He could feel that something. But what? What was it? He couldn’t see anything!

  Then …

  With another startled cry of surprise, the guard yanked the gun from his holster and held it next to the flashlight as he focused on a spot to his left where he had seen a sudden movement. His eyes widened in fear and he backed off when he saw a ghost-like form materialize from the darkness and start toward him.

  What on earth is that? the guard wondered, alarm and panic threatening to short-circuit his already shaky nervous system.

  But wait … where was it? Like a magic trick, the shadowy form seemed to have suddenly disappeared.

  “AAAAHHHHGHHH!!!”

  The guard’s scream, an eruption from the pit of his stomach, burst out of him when an invisible force slapped him clear off his feet. The gun flew from the guard’s hand and skittered across the concrete path when he hit the ground. Desperately crawling after the gun, the guard looked around wildly for whatever it was that had just attacked him.

  Then something hit the lagoon with a loud splash. The guard looked over his shoulder to see … well, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Something was churning across the water, but the concussive splashing was the only thing visible to the guard.

  This isn’t happening, the guard thought feverishly. But it was. Whatever the thing was in the lagoon, it was invisible!

  As the animals continued to screech and bellow and warn one another about the horrible thing that was among them, the guard—still on his hands and knees on the ground—felt like his brain wasn’t working properly. His thoughts were jumbled, jagged, as though his synapses were trying to connect but simply couldn’t. The guard was able to perceive that something extraordinary was happening, something that would be very difficult to explain when he made the call to his superior back at his office.

  But as he got to his feet to head in that direction, the guard felt himself convulse, a delayed reaction to the mysterious attack he’d just experienced. He threw up violently, his coughing, rasping gags joining right in with the animals’ cries and screeches.

  Meanwhile, the rukh had already exited the zoo. Having finally awoken from its healing sleep, the zoo had been the creature’s first pit stop, a little nourishment for the journey ahead. Now there was one thing on the rukh’s mind, and one thing only.

  The girl’s scent.

  Pointing the way to Hidden Hills.

  12

  “You just drag this mouse … and click. See?”

  Calanthe stared in fascination as she watched the result of Toby’s click on the mouse, which was the YouTube Web site popping into view on the computer screen. To say Calanthe was speechless would be an understatement. The Internet neophyte had not said a single word since her very first computer session had begun a half hour before.

  “You know what, guys?” Annabel said, looking with concern at Calanthe. “I think we should have held off on the computer part of today’s boot camp. Calanthe’s looking a bit spacey to me.” Calanthe didn’t appear to have heard a single word Annabel said, confirming Annabel’s assessment that she had hit her limit.

  Two days had passed since Calanthe’s momentous first day at Triple H, the climax of which had been her strange transformation under the school bleachers. Calanthe had gone right to bed after dinner those first two nights and slept for twelve straight hours, just as she had on her first night in Hidden Hills. Toby and Annabel had decided not to discuss Calanthe’s nightmare with her or show her the pictures of her strangely translucent skin. All that could wait for another time.

  On Calanthe’s third day at HHH, however, she appeared to be getting stronger and more capable of handling the amped-up stimulation high school life was throwing at her. So the trio had held a second boot-camp session for Calanthe after school, covering yet more slang and other important aspects of high school life. Calanthe had blown right through her session, no problem, so the group had decided to throw in a quick computer lesson to wrap things up for the evening.

  “Maybe you’re right, Annabel,” Strobe said, smiling at Calanthe’s blank, spaced-out expression. “A couple of YouTube music videos might put her over the edge. But I do want to show Calanthe something before we sign off.”

  Strobe nudged Toby off his seat and took control of the computer. Calanthe focused on Strobe’s fingers as they flew across the keyboard. When he hit RETURN, a Web site called Earth Maps appeared on the screen.

  “You have maps where you come from, right?” Strobe asked Calanthe. Staring at the computer screen, Calanthe didn’t respond to Strobe’s question.

  “See what I mean?” Annabel said. “She’s totally out of it.”

  “Okay, okay. But trust me, this’ll be a good way to end the day. A geography lesson. It’s educational.” Strobe moved so that he was between Calanthe and the computer screen. “Earth to Calanthe…”

  Calanthe shifted so that she could see the computer, but then focused on Strobe when he once again interrupted her field of vision. “You have maps where you come from, right?” Strobe asked.

  Calanthe thought for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Get out. You’ve never seen a map?”

  “Yes, I have seen a map,” Calanthe replied slowly, as though it took some effort to recall the image. “The person I met in Canada ga
ve one to me.”

  “Okay, well, what you’re about to see is nothing like the map that person gave you.”

  Calanthe watched Strobe type a few words on the keyboard. When he hit RETURN, the screen morphed into a picture of the earth, a beautiful blue-and-white orb hanging in black space. “This is where we live, right? It’s called earth. Now, get ready for a really cool ride.”

  With Strobe at the controls, the all-seeing camera in the sky suddenly dove toward the earth. Within seconds the United States filled the screen. “This is the United States…”

  Strobe took the camera across the U.S. toward the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. “This is the northeastern United States…”

  The camera singled out the state of New York. “And this is where we met, in Central Park in New York City.” With an exciting visual flourish, the camera plunged into New York City and … presto!

  Close-up of the lake in Central Park.

  Totally enthralled by Strobe’s dramatic global tour, Calanthe smiled. “How did you?…”

  “Okay, now check this out—” Strobe interrupted. Calanthe studied what Strobe was doing with his fingers as he led the camera up and away from New York, across Pennsylvania and …

  Whooosh!

  Close-up of Hidden Hills, Ohio.

  “This is where we are now. This is our hometown of Hidden Hills.”

  Calanthe shook her head in amazement. She couldn’t believe what she had just seen!

  “Okay, now a little background on your new friends.”

  Calanthe’s eyes darted from Strobe’s fingers to the computer screen as the camera flew across the United States. “This is the Pacific Ocean,” Strobe said as the camera left land behind and blasted across the water. “And this … is where Annabel’s ancestors come from.” Strobe froze the image high over the country of Japan. “It’s called Japan.”

  Calanthe stared at the screen, then looked at Annabel. Annabel nodded. “My father was born there. He moved to the United States when he was around our age, actually. He met my mother here, in the U.S.”