Some of the Kinder Planets

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “I’ll bring him back,” he said.

  “No!” said the Stranger. His voice cracked a little. “He’s okay. He’s sleepin’. Truck’s warm.”

  Nobody in the Mori family knew what to do. Tony looked about ready to laugh. Ky glared at him. Tan shrugged and looked at Barbara. “It’s not too cold as long as he’s sheltered.” She nodded and Tan turned the stove back on. The. okonomiyaki were ready to flip. He flipped them. The Stranger stared at them. Maybe he thought they were the weirdest pancakes he’d ever seen. It’s hard to know what he was thinking. Then he looked around.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “The fifth line,” said Barbara, filling his cup. The Mori house is on the fifth concession line of Leopold County.

  “The fifth?” he asked. He stared around again. He looked as if he didn’t believe it. “The fifth?” He stared at Barbara, who nodded. He stared at Tan. Tan nodded, too. The Stranger kept staring at Tan, at his red pyjamas, his long ponytail, his bright dark eyes behind clear rimmed glasses. “Where am I?”

  That’s when the fax machine started beeping and the Stranger spilled his tea. Brad got him a tea towel but he didn’t seem hurt. He stared into the dark where the computer stuff is. There are hardly any walls in the dome.

  The fax machine beeps when a transmission is coming through. Then it makes a whirring sound and paper starts rolling out with a message on it.

  The boy watched the fax machine blinking in the shadows, because the lights were not on in the office part of the dome.

  “It’s just what my parents do,” said little Tony. The machinery was still a mystery to him, too.

  The Stranger looked at Tan again—all around at the dome. There’s a second floor loft but it’s not big, so the Stranger could see clear up to the curving roof and out at the rain pelting down. If there had been stars out he could have seen them. He seemed to get a little dizzy from looking up.

  “Sit,” said Barbara, and this time she made him sit on a stool next to the kitchen island. He steadied himself. To Ky he looked like someone who had just woken up and had no idea what was going on.

  By now the fax machine was spewing out a great long roll of paper which curled to the floor. The Stranger watched it for a minute.

  “I think we should get your father,” said Barbara in a very gentle voice.

  “No,” said the boy firmly. “He’s asleep, eh. We was at Bernie’s. You know Bernie?”

  But none of the Moris knew Bernie. “Cards,” he said. “Having a few drinks ... Christmas ...” He looked back at the fax. “What is this place?”

  Tan laughed. He flipped two okonomiyaki onto a warm plate and handed them to the boy. “Here. You look like you could do with something warm to eat.”

  “More to read?” asked the boy. He thought Tan had said more to read.

  Tan handed him the pancakes. “Try it,” he said.

  Ky went and got the spicy sauce. She poured a bit on the pancake and sprinkled some nori, toasted seaweed, on top. The Stranger looked at Ky and at the food steaming under his nose. It must have smelled funny to him. He looked around again. He was having trouble putting all this together. These strange sweet salty smells, these people all in red.

  “You never heard of Bernie?” he asked.

  “No,” said Ky.

  “Bernie Nystrom?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Over on the…” he was going to say where it

  was that Bernie Nystrom lived, but he seemed to forget. “Dad’s out in the car,” he said. “We got lost.”

  “Not a great night for driving,” said Tan, filling the Stranger’s cup with more steaming tea.

  “Saw your light there,” he said, squinting hard as if the light had just shone in his eyes. “Slid right out.” He made a sliding gesture with his hand.

  “It’s pretty icy,” said Tan.

  “Never seen such a bright light,” said the Stranger.

  Ky remembers him saying this. It rankled her. He made it sound as if their light had been respon­sible for his accident. Her mother winked at her.

  Tony looked like he was going to say something. Brad put his hand over his brother’s mouth. Tony struggled but the Stranger didn’t notice. The fax stopped.

  “You sure you ain’t never heard of Bernie?” he asked one more time. It seemed to matter a great deal, as if he couldn’t imagine someone not know­ing good ol’ Bernie Nystrom.

  “Is there someone we could phone for you?” Barbara asked. “Do you need a tow or something?”

  The Stranger was staring at the okonomiyaki. “Anita who?” he asked. At that, both Brad and Tony started giggling until Ky shushed them up.

  “A tow truck,” said Barbara, very carefully. “To get you out of the ditch.”

  The boy put the plate down without touching the food He rubbed his hands on his wet pants. He was shivering. Barbara sent Brad to get a blanket.

  “Could I use your phone?” the boy asked. Ky ran to get the cordless phone from the office area. There was a phone closer, but Ky always uses the cordless.

  You have to see this phone to imagine the Stran­ger’s surprise. It’s clear plastic. You can see the elec­tronic stuff inside it, the speakers and amplifiers and switches and everything.

  The Stranger stared at it, held it up closer to his eyes. That was when Ky thought of all the time travel books she’d read and wondered if this guy was from some other century. Then she remembered that he had come by truck. That’s what he’d said, anyway. She wondered if he had been telling the truth. He sure didn’t want anyone going to look for his father. Maybe he had been planning on rob­bing them? But looking at him again, she realized that he was in no condition to rob anyone. She showed him how the phone worked.

  “What’s your number?” she asked.

  “Don’t got no number,” he said. But he took the phone and slowly punched some numbers anyway. He belched, and a sour smell came from his mouth. Ky stepped back quickly, afraid that he was going to throw up.

  The phone rang and rang and no one answered it. Ky watched the Stranger’s face. He seemed to

  fall asleep between each ring and wake up again, not knowing where he was.

  “Neighbours,” he said, hanging up after about thirty rings. He looked suspiciously at the phone, as if to say, How could I reach anyone I know on a phone like that?

  Then he looked at Ky and her family. “Where am I really?” he asked.

  Brad came back with a comforter and Barbara suggested to the Stranger that he could wear it while she put his wet things in the dryer. He didn’t like that idea. But as nice as Barbara is, as small as she is, she can be pretty pushy, and she was afraid he was going to catch pneumonia. So the Stranger found himself without his clothes in a very strange house.

  Maybe it was then, to take his mind off wearing only a comforter, that he tried the okonomiyaki. He was very hungry. He wolfed down two help­ings, then a third. It was the first time he smiled.

  “Hey,” said Ky. “It’s almost Christmas. You’d better save some room for turkey dinner.”

  “What?” said the Stranger.

  “You’d better save some room for turkey dinner.”

  The Stranger stopped eating. He stared at the food on his plate. Ky wanted to tell him she was just kidding. She couldn’t believe he had taken it so seriously. She was going to say something, but then he asked if he could phone his neighbour again. He still didn’t have any luck. But now he seemed real edgy.

  Then the telephone answering machine in the office took a long message. It was a computer-expert phoning Tan, and he talked all in computerese, even though it was night time and two days before Christmas.

  The Stranger must have heard that voice coming from the dark side of the dome where the lights flashed. Maybe that was what threw him. Or maybe it was when the VCR, which had b
een on Pause, came back on by itself. Suddenly there were voices from up in the loft. Ky can’t remember what part of the movie it was when it came back on. Maybe it was when the angel jumped off the top of the bridge to save the life of the hero. Maybe it was a part like that with dramatic music and lots of shouting and splashing. Maybe the Stranger didn’t know it was just a movie on TV. Who knows what he thought was going on there? Maybe in his house there was no TV.

  He got edgier and edgier. He started pacing. Then, suddenly, he remembered his neighbour, Lloydy Rintoul.

  “You know Lloydy,” he said.

  Nobody did.

  “Sure,” he said. “Lloydy Rintoul.’’ He pointed first north and then east and then north again as he tried to get his bearings in this round House with its invisible walls.

  “You don’t know Lloydy?”

  The Stranger, despite his size, suddenly looked like a little lost boy. But then he shook his head and jumped to his feet.

  “Lloydy, he’s got a tractor,” he said. “He’ll pull the truck out.” He started to leave. “I’ll just get him, eh.” He forgot he didn’t have any clothes on. Tan led him back to his stool. Barbara told him she’d check on the wash. Tan said they should maybe phone Lloydy first. But Lloydy didn’t have a phone, either. The people Ky knows in the coun­try all have phones and televisions. But there are people around Leopold County who have lived there longer than anyone and lived poor, scraping out a living on the rocky soil just like their fore­fathers and foremothers did.

  Maybe the kids were looking at the Stranger strangely then, because suddenly he got impatient. Ky said that he looked like a wild bear in a downy comforter cornered by a pack of little people in red pyjamas.

  “I’m gonna get Lloydy,” he said loudly. It sounded like a threat. It scared the Moris a bit. Barbara decided to get him his clothes even though they were still damp.

  And so the Stranger prepared to go. They didn’t try to stop him but they insisted that he borrow a big yellow poncho because it was still raining hard.

  Now that he had his clothes back on and his escape was imminent, the Stranger calmed down a bit.

  “I’ll bring it back,” he said.

  “I’m sure you will,” said Tan, as he helped him into the poncho.

  Ky went and got him a flashlight, too. It was a silver pencil flashlight she had gotten for her birthday. She had to show him how it worked.

  “I’ll bring this back,” he said to her.

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

  And then he was gone. He slid on the driveway and ended up with a thud on his backside.

  “He’ll have awful bruises in the morning,” said Barbara.

  She called to him to come back. She told him she would call for help. He turned halfway down the driveway and seemed to listen, but his hearing wasn’t very good even up close, so who knows what he thought she said. She did mention getting the police. Maybe he heard that. Whatever, he turned and ran away, slipping and sliding all the way. Tan considered driving him, but the ice was too treacherous.

  “What are the bets,” said Brad, “that we never see that stuff again?”

  THEY NEVER did. The Stranger never did return the poncho or the flashlight. In the morning the family all went out to the road. There was no truck there. Somehow, in his drunken haze, the Stranger must have found. Lloydy Rintoul or somebody found him or his dad woke up and got the truck out. It was a mystery.

  Ky tried to find Bernie Nystrom’s name in the phone book. There was no listing. The boy had never said the name of his neighbour and they already knew that Lloydy Rintoul had no phone, so there was no way of tracking him down. The Moris didn’t really care much about getting their stuff back, though. It was Christmas, after all.

  I saw the story in the National Enquirer in January. I was in line at the grocery store with my mother, reading the headlines of the tabloids. I enjoy doing that. There are great stories about tribes in Brazil who look like Elvis Presley, or some seventy-five-year-old woman who gives birth to twin dolphins, or families of eight who live in an abandoned filing cabinet. But this headline jumped off the page at me.

  TEEN ABDUCTED BY MARTIANS!

  Country boy undergoes torturous experiments

  while constrained in an alien flying saucer!

  Experts wonder: Who or what is Kerdy Dickus

  and what does he want with our moon!

  I don’t know why I flipped open to page 26 to read the story. I don’t know why I paid good money to actually buy the rag. Somehow I knew. And when I showed the picture on page 26 to Ky, she gasped.

  It was him. There was the Stranger showing the huge bruises inflicted by the aliens on his arms and ribs and thighs. He told of how he had seen a blinding light and the truck had been pulled right off the road by the saucer’s powerful tractor beam. He told of how the aliens had hypnotized him and brought him to their saucer. He told of the drugs they had made him drink; how they had tried to get his father, too, but he had stopped them. He told of the weird food they had made him eat and how it had made him throw up all the next day. His mother could attest to his ill health. “I’ve never seen him so green,” she said. “And he’s normally such a healthy lad.”

  It was his mother who had contacted the National Enquirer. She read it all the time and she knew it was a story that would interest them.

  His father, too, although he had managed somehow to stay out of the clutches of the aliens’ hypnotic powers, could attest to the attack on the car. And then—blackness. There were two hours missing out of his recollection of the night. The aliens had obviously zapped him.

  “Something ought to be done about this kind of menace!” said the father.

  According to the newspaper, the boy underwent several sessions with a psychiatric investigator after the incident. The investigator specialized in AATT: Alien Abduction Trauma Therapy. He put the boy in a deep trance and interviewed him at length. “Truth drugs” were administered, and all the results concurred: the boy had obviously under­gone a close encounter with alien beings. Under the trance the boy revealed some overheard con­versation that might, the investigator believed, partially explain the purpose of the aliens’ trip to earth.

  “This might be a recognizance mission.” Other experts in the field agreed. “But their long-term goal has to do with our moon and the saving of it. From what? For what? It is hard to tell.”

  One line had become imprinted on the boy’s mind. The only spoken part he recalled vividly from his close encounter.

  “Save the moon for Kerdy Dickus.”

  “Perhaps,” said the psychiatric investigator, “there is some alien purpose for the boy remembering this one line.”

  The article went on to give a pretty good account of the aliens, what they looked like, what their flying saucer looked like. But you already know all that.

  I HAD heard about the Stranger from Ky. That’s how I somehow recognized the story in the Enquirer. The next time I saw the Moris, I showed them the paper. But after they had all laughed themselves silly, we talked about it a lot.

  Should they try to find the Stranger, now that they knew his name? Even without a phone, they could easily track him down. Should the paper be contacted, so that the truth could be known? What about the psychiatrist who specialized in A ATT? The experts?

  “I wouldn’t mind getting my flashlight back,” Ky admitted, but she wasn’t really serious.

  And so they have never followed up on the story. Ky always imagines she’ll run into the Stranger one day in the nearby town. I hope I’m with her. Maybe I’ll be up there for her birthday. Maybe it will be raining. Maybe we’ll be coming out of a store and he’ll be coming in wearing the big yellow poncho. He’ll walk right by us, and Ky and I will turn just as he passes and whisper the magic words.

  “Save the moon for Kerdy Dickus.”

  Then we’ll hop in
our saucer and slip off back to our own world.

  The Hope Bakery

  WHEN HE was only five, Sloane wandered out of the back garden into the woods behind his house. He was gone for some time and everyone got horribly worried, but he arrived home before dark. He didn’t understand the greeting he got when he came back out of the woods. Everyone hugged him and kissed him and lectured him between hugs and kisses about not going off like that.

  Sloane asked if he was late for supper. He thought that was what all the fuss was about. Of course, nobody had bothered making supper because they were all out looking for him, and so they could only laugh between their tears and say, “No, you’re not late for supper.” They asked him, “What special thing would you like, sweetheart? Noodles, maybe? Hotdogs?” Sloane wanted mashed potatoes, and everyone agreed that would be very comforting.

  But then came the strange part. At dinner he produced a piece of paper from his pocket with the word HOPE on it. The paper was brown; the word was written in pencil.

  “Hope?” said his mother.

  “It’s where I was,” he answered.

  Mother and Father and Sloane’s older sister and brother all looked questioningly at one another and then at Sloane, who was too busy with his mashed potatoes to notice. The thing is, Sloane was only five, and although he knew his letters pretty well, he didn’t know too many words. But the writing was unmistakably his. He always put four cross­bars on his E’s.

  “You were at Hope?” his father asked, looking at the wobbly word on the very ragged piece of paper.

  “I thought you’d want to know where I was.” Sloane stopped eating long enough to extract a stubby pencil from his pocket. “Good I remembered this,” he said. “There was paper there, lots of it.” He looked around at everyone staring at him. “Don’t you know where it is?” he asked. Nobody did.

  Sloane said he would take them there. He tried once or twice, but he couldn’t find the right path.

  So nobody ever learned where Sloane had disappeared to on that scary afternoon when he was only five. The ragged little bit of paper with HOPE written on it stayed on the refrigerator door for a long time beside the shopping lists, the swimming schedules, the Hi & Lois cartoon, the crayon drawings of monsters.