Darkness Creeping

by Neal Shusterman

  And then Mom walked off to help some other customers. I almost said something, but what good would it do? I was the only one who remembered the twins. To everyone else, it was as though they had never existed.

  “You’re lucky,” said my friend Corinne, who was rummaging through our stuff as well. “You’re lucky you’re an only child. I have to share everything with my little brother.”

  And then Corinne picked up the many-colored quilt, which lay folded across a plastic teeter-totter.

  “I should give this to my brother to replace that disgusting old security blanket he carries around the house,” said Corinne. “How much do you want for it?”

  I thought about it. I thought about it a long time. And in the end I let her have it.

  “Take it,” I told her. “It’s free.”

  And why not? Who was I to stop the quilt on its journey through this world? And besides . . . misery loves company.

  SAME TIME NEXT YEAR

  I love time-travel stories, but there’s something about them that always bothers me. There is one very simple fact about time and space that time-travel stories always ignore. I wanted to write a story that would take that fact into account, and show what would really happen if time travel were possible. . . .

  SAME TIME NEXT YEAR

  In a vast universe, toward the edge of a spinning galaxy, on a small blue planet flying around the sun, in a place called Northern California, lives a girl who is quite certain that the entire universe revolves around her. Or at least she acts that way. In fact, if an award were given out for acting superior, Marla Nixbok would win that award.

  “I was born a hundred years too early,” she often tells her friends. “I ought to be living in a future time where I wouldn’t be surrounded by such dweebs.”

  To prove that she is ahead of her time, Marla always wears next year’s fashions and hairstyles that seem just a bit too weird for today. In a college town known for being on the cutting edge of everything, Marla is quite simply the Queen of Fads at Palo Alto Junior High. Nothing and nobody is good enough for her, and for that reason alone, everyone wants to be her friend.

  Except for the new kid, Buford, who couldn’t care less.

  Buford and Marla meet on the school bus. It’s his first day. As fate would have it, the seat next to Marla is the only free seat in the bus.

  The second he sits down, Marla’s nose tilts up, and she begins her usual grading process of new kids.

  “Your hair is way greasy,” she says. “Your clothes look like something out of the fifties, and in general, you look like a Neanderthal.”

  Several girls behind them laugh.

  “All else considered, I give you an F as a human being.”

  He just smiles, not caring about Marla’s grade. “Hi, I’m Buford,” he says, ignoring how the girls start laughing again. “But you can call me Ford. Ford Planet.”

  Ford, thinks Marla. She actually likes the name, against her best instincts. “Okay, F-plus—but just because you got rid of the ‘Bu’ and called yourself ‘Ford.’”

  “Didn’t you move into the old Wilmington place?” asks a kid in front of them.

  “Yeah,” says Buford.

  The kid snickers. “Sucker!”

  “Why? What’s wrong with the place?” asks Ford innocently.

  “Nothing,” says Marla, “except for the fact that it used to belong to old Dr. Wilmington, the creepiest professor Stanford University ever had.”

  Ford leans in closer to listen.

  “One day,” says Marla, “about seven years ago, Wilmington went into the house . . . and never came out.”

  Ford nods, not showing a bit of fear.

  “Personally,” says Marla, trying to get a rise out of him, “I think he was killed by an ax murderer or something, and he’s buried in the basement.”

  But Ford only smiles. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he says. “There’s a whole lot of weird things down in our basement.”

  Marla perks up. “Oh yeah? I wonder what sort of research was this Professor Wilmington doing when he disappeared.”

  Ford smiles, and then stares straight at Marla. “By the way,” he says, pointing to her purple-tinted hair and neon eye shadow, “you’ve got to be the weirdest-looking human being I’ve ever seen.”

  Marla softens just a bit. “Why, thank you, Ford!”

  Marla peers out of her window that night. Through the dense oak trees she can see the old Wilmington house farther down the street. A light is on in an upstairs window. She wonders if it’s Ford’s room.

  Like Marla, Ford is trapped out of his time, only hebelongs in the past, and she belongs in the future. It’s not as if she likes him or anything. How could she like him—he is a full geek-o-rama nausea-fest. But she can use him. She can use him to get a look at all those dark, mysterious machines in his basement.

  Marla smiles at the thought. Using people is a way of life for her.

  And so the very next afternoon, Marla fights a blustery wind to get to Ford’s house. By the time she arrives, her punked-out hair looks even worse, for the wind has stood every strand on end. She likes it even better now.

  “Thanks for coming over to help me study,” says Ford as he lets her in. “I mean, moving in the middle of the school year sure makes it hard to catch up.”

  “Well, that’s just the kind of person I am,” says Marla. “Anything I can do to help a friend.”

  Marla looks around. The furniture is so tacky, it makes her want to gag. The living-room sofa is encased in a plastic slip-cover. Ford’s mother vacuums the carpet wearing a polka-dot dress, like in I Love Lucy. For Marla, it’s worse than being in a room filled with snakes.

  “It’s noisy here,” says Ford. “Let’s go study in my room.”

  Marla shudders. Who knows what terrors she’ll find there?

  “How about the basement?” she asks.

  “It’s creepy down there,” says Ford.

  “You’re not scared, are you?”

  “Who, me? Naw.”

  Marla gently takes his hand. “C’mon, Ford . . . we need a nice quiet place to study.”

  Ford, who has taken great pains not to be affected by the things Marla says or does, finally loses the battle. He takes one look at her hand holding his and begins to blush through his freckles. “Oh, all right.”

  While the rest of the house has been repainted and renovated, the basement has not changed since the day Wilmington disappeared. All of the old man’s bizarre stuff is down there. Maybe Wilmington himself is down there somewhere, just a dried-out skeleton lurking behind a heavy machine. What if they were to find him? How cool would that be?

  As they descend the rickety stairs, Marla grips Ford’s hand tightly, not even realizing she is doing so. Ford’s blush deepens.

  “Gosh, I thought you didn’t even like me,” says Ford.

  Marla ignores him, blocking out the thought, and looks around. “What is all this stuff?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out,” says Ford.

  Everything is shrouded in sheets and plastic tarps. Strange shapes bulge out. They look like ghosts, lit by the flickering fluorescent light. There is a warped wooden table in the middle of it all. Ford drops his schoolbooks down on the table and a cloud of dust rises. It smells like death down there—all damp and moldy. The walls are covered with peeling moss, and they ooze with moisture.

  “We can study here,” says Ford, patting the table. But Marla is already pulling the sheets off the machines.

  Whoosh!A sheet flutters off with an explosion of dust, revealing a dark, metallic, multiarmed thing that looks like some ancient torture device.

  “I wouldn’t touch that,” says Ford.

  Marla crooks her finger, beckoning him closer. Her nails are painted neon pink and blue with tiny rhinestones in the center of each one. She leans over and whispers in Ford’s ear, “If you really want to be my friend, you’ll help me uncover all these machines.”

  Ford, his
blush turning even deeper, begins to rip off the sheets.

  When they’re done, a cloud of dust hangs in the air like fog over a swamp, and the machines within that dusty swamp appear like hunched monsters ready to pounce. All they need is someone to plug them in.

  Ford sits at the table and studies the old professor’s notes and lab reports. But Marla is studying something else—the knobs and switches on the grotesque and fantastic devices are what grab her attention. They might not find Wilmington’s body down there, but Marla is happy. This is already more interesting than anything she has done in quite a while.

  She joins Ford at the scarred table, going through the professor’s old notes page by page.

  Hyperbolic Relativistic Projection.

  Metalinear Amplitude Differentials.

  It makes little sense to them, and Ford has to keep looking things up in a dictionary.

  At last, with the help of the professor’s notes, they’re able to figure out what most of these machines are supposed to do.

  The one with a metallic eyeball looking down from a tall stalk is a waterless shower that can dissolve dirt from your skin by sonic vibrations. But according to Wilmington’s footnote, it doesn’t work; it dissolves your skin, instead of the dirt.

  The device with iron tentacles growing from a steel pyramid is supposed to turn molecular vibrations into electricity. It works, but unfortunately it also electrocutes anyone who happens to be standing within five feet of it.

  Another device—a hydrogen-powered engine—was supposed to revolutionize the automotive industry. According to a letter the professor received from the chairman of one of the big car companies, the engine nearly blew up half the plant when they turned it on.

  In fact, none of the things Wilmington made worked properly. Not the refractive laser chain saw, or the lead-gold phase converter, or even the self-referential learning microprocessor.

  “No wonder no one from the university ever came by to collect all this stuff,” Marla complains. “It’s all junk.”

  Then Marla sees the doorknob. She hadn’t noticed it before because it’s in a strange place—only a foot or so from the ground, half hidden behind Wilmington’s nonfunctioning nuclear refrigerator.

  When Ford sees it, his jaw drops with a popping sound. “A tiny door! Do you think Wilmington’s shrunk himself?”

  “Don’t be a complete gel-brain,” says Marla, brushing her wild hair from her face. “It’s just a root cellar. But Wilmington might be in there . . . what’s left of him, anyway.”

  The temptation is too great. Together they push the heavy refrigerator aside, grab the knob, and swing the door wide.

  An earthy smell of dry rot wafts out, like the smell of a grave. The door is two feet high, and inside it is pitch-black. Marla and Ford crawl into the root cellar and vanish into darkness.

  Through ancient spiderwebs they crawl until they find a dangling string. When they pull it, the room is lit by a single dim bulb that hangs from an earthen ceiling six feet from the ground.

  There are no dead bodies down there. The smell is a sack of potatoes that have long since gone to their maker.

  But what surrounds them is enough to make their hearts miss several beats.

  Razor-sharp gears, knifelike spokes, and huge magnets are frozen in position. The entire room has been converted into one big contraption, and in the center of it is a high-backed chair, its plush upholstery replaced by silver foil.

  It looks like the inside of a garbage disposal,thinks Marla.

  In the corner sits a pile of dusty notes, and on a control panel is an engraved silver plate that reads:TEMPUS SYNCRO-EPICYCLUS

  “What is it?” wonders Marla. She looks to Ford, whom she has already pegged to be a whiz at this scientific stuff.

  Ford swallows a gulp of rotten, stale air. “I think it’s a time machine.”

  It takes a good half hour for them to find the nerve to actually touch the thing. Ford sits on the floor most of that time, reading Wilmington’s notes.

  “This guy has page after page of physics formulas,” Ford tells Marla. “He must have thought he was Einstein or something.”

  “But does it work?” she asks.

  Ford furrows his brow. “I have no idea.”

  “There’s one way to find out,” she says, grabbing Ford’s sweaty hand.

  Together they run upstairs and find the perfect guinea pig; Ford’s baby sister’s teddy bear, Buffy. They bring Buffy down and set him on the silver chair.

  “I don’t know,” says Ford. “Maybe we ought to know everything about this machine before we start throwing switches.”

  “You can’t ride a bike unless you get on and pedal,” says Marla, “and you can’t travel through time unless you throw the switch!”

  “But—”

  Marla flicks the switch. The gears begin to grind, the electromagnets begin to spin and hum. They duck their heads to keep from being decapitated by the spinning spokes. Static electricity makes Ford’s greased hair stand on end like Marla’s. The dangling bulb dims.

  There is a flash of light, and Buffy the bear is gone, leaving nothing behind but the stinging odor of ozone in the air. The machine grinds itself to a halt.

  Ford and Marla are left gasping on the ground.

  “In-totally-credible!” screeches Marla. “Now let’s bring it back!”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” explains Ford, catching his breath. “According to Wilmington’s journal, time travel only works one way. You can go forward in time, but you can never come back.”

  “That’s ridiculous! That’s not the way it happens in the movies.”

  “Maybe real time travel doesn’t work the way it does in movies,” suggests Ford.

  But to Marla it doesn’t matter at all. The point is that however time travel works, it doeswork.

  Ford looks to see where the dial is set.

  “According to this,” he says, “we sent the bear three days into the future. If the bear reappears in that chair three days from now, we’ll really know if this thing works.”

  “I hate waiting,” says Marla as she impatiently picks her rhinestoned nails.

  Two days later, Marla’s parents read her the riot act. That is to say, they sit her down and demand she change her ways, or else.

  “Your mother and I are sick and tired of you being so disrespectful,” says her father.

  “What’s to respect?” she growls at them. “Is it my fault I was born into a family of cave people?”

  That makes her parents boil.

  “That’s it,” says her father. “From now on you’re going to stop acting like the Queen of Mars, and you’re going to start acting like a normal human being. From now on, young lady, no more neon-blue lipstick. No more ultraviolet hair. No more radioactive eye shadow. No more automotive parts hanging from your earlobes. N-O-R-M-A-L. Normal! Do you understand me? Or else you get no allowance! Zero! Zilch!”

  “You’re so backward!” screams Marla, and she runs to her room and beats up her pillows.

  Alone with her thoughts, it doesn’t take long to decide exactly what to do. Without so much as a good-bye, she takes a final look at her room, then climbs out of the window and heads straight to Ford’s house.

  The sky is clear, filled with a million unblinking stars, and a furious wind howls through the trees. It’s a perfect night for time travel.

  “Marla,” Ford says. “I’ve been reading Wilmington’s notes, and there’s something not quite right.”

  “Don’t be an idiot!” Marla shouts in Ford’s face. “The machine works—we saw it! We’re going and that’s final.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” says Ford. “I’m not into future stuff, okay?”

  “It figures,” huffs Marla. “I’ll go by myself, then.”

  She pulls open the basement door and stomps down the stairs. Ford follows, trying to talk some sense into her.

  “There’s lots of stuff I’m still trying to figure out,” he say
s.

  “Oh yeah?” She whirls and stares impatiently at him. “Like what?”

  “Like the name of the machine,” Ford says. “It bugs me. Tempus Syncro-Epicyclus. I looked up the word ‘Epicyclus’ in the dictionary. It had something to do with Ptolemy.”

  “Tommy who?” asks Marla.

  “Not Tommy, Ptolemy. He was an ancient astronomer who believed the earth was the center of the universe, and the sun revolved around it!”

  “So?” she hisses.

  “So, he was wrong!” shouts Ford.

  Marla shrugs. “What does that have to do with a twentieth-century genius like Wilmington? At this very moment, he’s probably in the future partying away, and I plan to join him.”

  Marla impatiently crosses the basement toward the root-cellar door.

  “Marla, the last person to touch that machine must have been Wilmington—and it was set for three days! If he went three days into the future, why didn’t he come back?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I don’t know!” says Ford. “I haven’t figured it out yet, but I will! Listen, at least wait until tomorrow. If the bear comes back on schedule, you can do whatever you want.”

  “I can’t wait that long. I’ve got places to go!” shouts Marla.

  “You’re crazy!” Fords shouts back. “You’re the type of person who would dive headfirst into an empty pool, just to find out how empty it is!”

  Marla pulls open the root-cellar door, but Ford kicks it closed. The house rattles and moss falls from the peeling walls.

  “This is my house, and that means it’s my machine,” he says. “I won’t let you use it, so go home. Now!”

  Marla turns her Day-Glo-painted eyes to Ford and grits her teeth. “Why you slimy little sluggardly worm-brain! How dare you tell me what I can and cannot do! You think I care what you say, you Leave It to Beaverdweebistic troll? Marla Nixbok does what she wants, whenshe wants to do it, and if you won’t throw the switch on that machine, I’ll throw it myself!”