Darkness Creeping

by Neal Shusterman

  “What are you doing to them?” shouted Cody. “What’s going on here?”

  “Bodywork and scheduled maintenance, of course,” said Farnsworth over the awful wails around him. “How can a person be expected to grow without their maintenance appointments?”

  “You’re killing them!” yelled Cody.

  “Nonsense, our surgeons are the most skilled in the universe,” said Farnsworth cheerfully. “These kids will be patched up and back to their old selves by morning—and without a single scar from the experience.”

  “But I don’t need surgery. I don’t WANT surgery,” Cody insisted.

  “Why should you be different from everyone else?” asked Farnsworth. “And besides, you dowant it.” He smiled. “You do want to grow, don’t you?”

  Cody felt weak and sick to his stomach. “You mean . . . this happens to everybody?”

  “Of course it does,” explained Farnsworth. “Nobody remembers, though, because we erase it from their memory.” Then the smile left Farnsworth’s face, and he shook his head sadly. “Of course, every once in a while the memory erasing doesn’t quite work. It’s a shame, really—those poor kids are ruined for life, and all because they couldn’t forget the Growth Ward.”

  Cody was still trying to digest what Farnsworth had just said, when he was rolled into a bright area where a group of surgeons waited. Their faces covered with masks, they anxiously flexed their fingers like pianists preparing for a concert. As Cody stared in horror at them, he noticed that there was something about those surgeons—something not quite right, but what was it? Keeping his eyes glued on them, Cody knew if he looked at them long enough, he’d figure out what it was that made them look . . . different.

  “It says here, we’re adding half an inch to your forearms today,” Farnsworth said, glancing at his clipboard again. “And a whole inch to your thighbones. Good for you, Cody! We’ll have you caught up to those other kids in your class in no time!”

  Cody turned to see a silver tray next to the operating table. On it were a few small, circular bone fragments, no larger than LEGO pieces.

  One of the eager surgeons grabbed a small bone saw from the tray and turned it on. It buzzed and whined, adding to the many unpleasant sounds of the great galactic operating room.

  The surgeon said nothing and moved the saw toward Cody’s leg, and the others approached him with their scalpels poised.

  “No!” Cody cried. “You can’t operate without anesthesia! I have to have anesthesia!”

  Farnsworth chuckled. “Come now, Cody, where do you think you are, at the dentist? I think not! Growing pains are a part of life, and everyonehas to feel their growing pains. Everyone.”

  Cody screamed even before the instruments touched his body—then he suddenly realized that it didn’t matter how loud he wailed. For he had finally figured out what was wrong with those surgeons. They couldn’t hear him. They had no ears.

  I need to remember . . .

  I need to remember . . .

  I need to remember . . . what?

  An alarm tore Cody out of the deepest sleep he had ever had. There was a memory of a dream—or something like a dream—but it was quickly fading into darkness. In a moment it was completely gone, and all that was left was the light of day pouring into his room.

  “Wake up, lazybones,” said his mother. “You’ll be late for school.”

  Cody felt good this morning. No—better than good—he felt great, and he couldn’t quite tell why. He stood up out of bed and felt a slight case of vertigo, as if the floor were somehow farther away from him than it had been the day before. His legs and arms ached the slightest bit, but that was okay. It was a goodfeeling.

  “My, how you’re growing!” his mother said as he walked into the kitchen for breakfast. “I’ll bet you’ll grow three inches by fall!”

  And the thought made Cody smile. It felt good to be a growing boy.

  ALEXANDER’S SKULL

  Every once in a while I’ll have a dream that becomes a story. I had dreamed that I received a package in the mail—the very package from this story. I woke up at two in the morning screaming. Since I couldn’t get back to sleep, I wrote a story that took the dream to its logical conclusion.

  By the way, if you read my novel Red Rider’s Hood, you’ll notice I borrowed the ending of this story.

  ALEXANDER’S SKULL

  It started with my mom, many years ago.

  My mom has a temper, you see, and one of the things that really got her up in a rage was the post office. If something took too long to arrive at our house, she would bawl out the mailman, as if it were his fault. If a card she sent missed somebody’s birthday, she would go to the post office and demand her postage back.

  The thing that irritated my mom the most about the post office was misdelivered mail, and she had a good reason for that one: the Mortimer Museum.

  It was just dumb luck that the guy who founded that strange little natural history museum had the same last name as we did. We weren’t related, my dad always reminded me. Still, without fail, a few times a year we would end up with a package at our doorstep that was supposed to go to the museum.

  For my mom, it was just another postal nuisance—until the birthday incident. Then it became a regular obsession with her.

  I was about four or so. It was my mom’s thirtieth birthday, and we had relatives and friends from all over the county show up to surprise her. Everything was going along just fine until she started opening the presents—first the ones from people who were there, then the ones that had come in the mail.

  Perhaps if she had looked at the address on the package, it might not have happened, but she didn’t. So, right in front of more than forty guests, in the middle of a birthday party, my mother opened a box, reached in, and pulled out an armful of African centipedes.

  The scream could be heard throughout the county. She took her hand, shrieking, and flung the centipedes across the room, where they landed on slices of birthday cake and in people’s hair. The angry centipedes began to bite, and panic erupted. Needless to say, the party was ruined. The centipedes scattered so far across the room that we were still finding them in dark corners weeks later.

  The centipedes, of course, were supposed to go to the Mortimer Museum for their exotic insect exhibit, and not to the Mortimer family. The post office, naturally, bent over backward and took full responsibility, offering to give my mother free postage for the rest of her life if she would just never mention it again. But it was too late.

  From that day forward, we were at war with the museum and the post office. The poor mailman went to great pains to make sure we didn’t get any of the museum’s mail, but sometimes something slipped through. When it did, whatever it was—whatever it was—we kept it. Soon we had quite our own little museum in our basement: fragments of dinosaur bones, a meteorite, petrified wood.

  But nothing we ever received was like the package we got one Halloween.

  You have to understand, Halloween is a very special holiday for me. Most of the year I get teased for being sort of creepy and spending so much time alone, but on Halloween I can be myself and it’s perfectly normal!

  So that night I was in a rush to get out and stalk through the streets like a ghoul, striking terror into the heart of anyone foolish enough to answer their door, when a package arrived on our porch. I took it inside and quickly tore off the brown paper, pulled open the box, and like an idiot, reached inside to find out what it was.

  My hand touched something cold, hard, and dirty. I quickly pulled my hand back and saw that it was covered with something black and sooty.

  “Mom?” I called, feeling the shivers already climbing up past my elbow to my shoulder.

  Mom came downstairs, took one look at the box, and heaved a big sigh. Then she peeled back the paper to reveal what at first looked like a dark rock. But when she reached in to pull it out, she came face-to-face with a human skull.

  It was old—it must have been—because it was
black and covered with ash. It was missing its jawbone.

  “No way!” I said, not sure whether to be disgusted or excited. “It must be for the exhibit on Early Man.”

  Mom looked into its empty eyes bravely. “Splendid. Just what we need for Halloween. I’ll go get a candle.”

  That night, the skull sat on our porch with a candle inside its empty head, like a human jack-o’-lantern.

  Like the other things in our basement, this was something we were going to keep—no matter how much the museum wanted it back. But the museum never came asking for it, and instead of ending up in the basement, it ended up in my room.

  I can’t say why I wanted the skull in my room. I was a little bit scared of it, but not as scared as I thought I would be. I liked the way it sat on my shelf and watched me. Also, since I didn’t have many friends, it made me feel less alone.

  My dad would look at the skull and shake his head. “Alex,” he would ask, “how did you get to be so strange?” That’s what he said when I first got Octavia, my pet tarantula, and when I decided that I would wear only black to school.

  “If you’re going to keep that thing, Alex,” he said, “you ought to clean it.”

  So I did. I carefully wiped out the ash and polished the cold, hard bone until it was a smooth granite gray. Then I put it back on my shelf next to Clovis, my Venus flytrap.

  Late at night, when I couldn’t fall asleep, I would look at the skull. It seemed to be holding some kind of vigil in the dim moonlight, watching me as I watched it. Who were you?I would ask. Were you a caveman? Were you killed by a mastodon during the hunt? Or are you the missing link?The skull, to whom

  I wanted to give a name but somehow never could, never answered—it just sat there, watching silently.

  Several weeks later it disappeared.

  I spent an hour searching for it all around the house. Mom wasn’t very helpful. “You’re so disorganized,” she said. “I always told you you’d lose your head if it weren’t attached to your neck.”

  The skull wasn’t in the basement, or in any of the bedrooms or closets. I knew there had to be a sensible explanation. Turns out the explanation was so sensible it was disappointing.

  You see, my dad is a dentist, and his office is right across the street in a little minimall. When I went out to see if he knew what had happened, I saw my skull sitting there propped up on the dental chair, like a patient who had been X-rayed one too many times.

  “Sorry. I should have told you,” said Dad. “I borrowed him to recalibrate my X-ray machine. It’s been giving me trouble.” He showed me a dozen X-rays of the skull, all blurry and out of focus. He took one more shot with his big camera and handed me back my skull.

  “This should do it,” he said. “Thanks.”

  When he developed the X-ray a few minutes later, the teeth were in absolute clear focus, just like any other dental X-ray . . . so much like any other X-ray that Dad seemed a little bit disturbed. He went over to the skull and picked it up from the pillow it was resting on.

  “You say he was prehistoric?” asked Dad.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, he must be. Why else would he be going to the museum?”

  Then Dad flipped the skull over and looked at the upper teeth, all of which were still there. He poked at them with a dental instrument. “Since when did prehistoric man have dental fillings?” he said, raising his eyebrows at me.

  That afternoon I went down into the basement and found the box the skull had come in. Inside, I found the original wrapping. The faint brown lettering was not addressed to the museum, as we had thought. It was addressed to me—Alexander Mortimer.

  There was a return address, but no name. The return address simply read 475 St. Cloud Lane, Billingsville.

  It was a Saturday, so I decided to ride my bike over to Billingsville, only about ten miles away. I just had to see who had sent me this skull, and why.

  Billingsville is a town with lots of old places and lots of new places. I got a map from the gas station, but try as I might, I couldn’t find St. Cloud Lane.

  “Ain’t no St. Cloud Lane in Billingsville,” an old-timer told me. “Not that I can remember, and I can remember quite a lot.”

  Eventually I gave up and decided to head home before it got dark. I rode through the winding trees of the new developments, wondering where on earth they were going to get all the people to fill these new homes.

  That’s when I saw it.

  On a pole on a corner where two streets crossed were two signs—St. Andrew and St. Cloud Lane.

  I sucked wind for a second, feeling kind of light-headed. Then I rode my bike down the lane. The entire street was filled with huge cement foundations, ready for construction crews. The homes on St. Cloud Lane had not yet been built!

  It was dark by the time I got home, and the cold day had slipped into a frigid night.

  “You missed dinner,” said Mom. “Where were you?”

  But I didn’t answer her. I went right down into the basement and straight to the package the skull had come in. I looked for the postmark on the package. October 28. But the year was smudged out, and there was no way of telling whether the package was mailed this year, last year . . . or some year that had not yet come.

  That night, back in my room, I stared and stared at my “friend” sitting on the shelf. I went up to him and looked deep into those hollow eyes, eyes that seemed so strange, and yet so familiar.

  At three in the morning I slipped out of the house and crossed the street. Snow was falling and sticking to the dry ground. There would be several inches by morning. My feet left dark prints in the thin layer of white as I went to Dad’s office. There, I unlocked the door with his keys and disabled the alarm.

  The X-ray machine looked like a one-eyed beast in the corner of the examining room. I tried not to look at it. I went to my dad’s office, and I looked around with my flashlight until I found the skull’s X-rays still sitting on his desk. I took the most focused one and put it in my jacket pocket. Then I went to the files, found the folder I was looking for, and pulled it out. It was filled with dental records and X-rays.

  I pulled out the skull’s X-rays from my pocket and compared them to the X-rays in the folder.

  They say you can identify human remains by dental records. It must be true, because the match was absolutely perfect.

  I took a second look at the name on the file, and finally understood why it had been so hard for me to find a name for the skull. It was because the skull already had a name—it was the name that appeared on the file.

  Alexander J. Mortimer.

  As I reached up and felt my own cheekbones, and the shape of my eye sockets, and the ridges on my own front teeth, I finally realized why that head bone sitting on my shelf had, from the beginning, felt so very, very familiar.

  In the morning Dad said we ought to take the skull to the police.

  “They have ways of identifying these things,” he said. “Who knows who it might be?”

  But I told him that I had already gotten rid of it. “I gave it a proper burial out in the woods,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  He looked at me and shook his head. “How didyou get to be such a strange kid?” he asked. Since my father was never the type of person to mess with matters involving human skulls, he believed me, and it was never brought up again.

  Only I didn’t bury it.

  I don’t know who sent me the skull. I don’t know how, but it was sent, and I am charged with its keeping. Dad thinks I’m spending too much time alone lately, and that maybe if we moved I’d make some friends. He’s heard that there are some nice homes in Billingsville—and he intends to buy one. I already know what our address will be.

  And so at night, when everyone else is asleep, I take the skull out of its secret hiding place beneath the floorboards of my room and I put it back on my shelf. Then I lie awake, gazing at my silent soul mate resting on that shelf and coldly wait for the day when I find myself on the other side of those da
rk, dark eyes, looking out.

  CONNECTING FLIGHT

  I tend to spend a lot of time in airports, since I travel a lot. I’m always amazed that airports actually function—there are so many things that can go wrong—and I’m not talking about the airplanes themselves—I mean all the issues with ticketing and booking. I once faced one of those computer glitches where two flights, one going east, and one going west, got confused and were scheduled to go out of the same gate at the exact same time. It got me thinking. I wrote the first draft of the following story while in flight. Freaked myself out, too.

  CONNECTING FLIGHT

  The narrow, doorless hall seems to stretch on forever.

  The bag slung across her shoulder seems full of lead.

  And the image of her parents waving good-bye still sticks in her mind.

  With a boarding pass in hand, Jana Martinez walks down a narrow, tilted corridor, toward the 737 at the end of the jetway.

  She tries to forget the strange state of cold limbo that fills the gap between her parents behind her and her final destination—Wendingham Prep School.

  It is only three hours away now—just a two-hour flight from Chicago to Boston, and then an hour’s bus ride. Still, to Jana, this empty time between two places always seems to last an eternity.

  She reaches the door of the plane, stumbling over the lip of the hatch, and a flight attendant grabs her arm too tightly. “Watch your step,” the flight attendant says, trying to help Jana keep her balance.

  Now, as she makes her way down the narrow aisle, Jana wonders if the flight attendant’s overly strong grip will leave a bruise on her arm. She is sure the cruel strap of her carry-on bag will leave her black-and-blue.

  The plane is divided by a single center aisle, and each row has three seats on either side. Jana finds her seat by the window on the right side of the plane. She has to climb over a heavy, pale woman to get there, and just as she finally settles in, her sense of loneliness settles in deeper than before.