Teek

by S. Andrew Swann

  The man kept smiling, kept his hand out, and even began to reach for identification. He wore a secure cloak of authority around himself, and his tone of voice said that everything was going to be fine.

  Alarm bells sounded in Carol’s head, and she backed up, nervously, saying, “I- I’m afraid you have the wrong person, Agent Jackson.”

  “It’s just a few questions, Ms. Boyle—”

  Carol wasn’t listening anymore. She turned and started walking briskly away from the man, toward the elevators. Suddenly a younger man, in cowboy boots and a blond ponytail turned around and grabbed the shoulder of her blouse. “Come on, Miss. The man just wants to talk to you.” The man spoke with a Texas accent, and that was enough to panic Carol. She had left all her nightmares in Texas.

  She slammed her foot down on the man’s shin hard enough to half-remove the heel of her right shoe on the edge of his boot. The cowboy said “shit.” and let go long enough for her to start a limping run to the elevators.

  Just before she reached them, the doors on the right one opened, revealing a man in a dark suit. He looked directly at her. The man took a step forward and Carol threw her case at him as she turned toward the fire stairs.

  She slammed the door open and started running down the concrete steps. She heard the door open again, and she heard two more sets of footsteps echo down toward her.

  She had lost her case, but she still had her purse, the money, her keys. If she could just make it to her car.

  Please, God, don’t let them have Allie. Punish me for my mistakes but not her—

  She passed three floors and was rounding a fourth, when the fire door next to her suddenly exploded open, and the cowboy with the ponytail reached for her.

  Elevator, he beat me on the elevator.

  She tried to dodge around him, and almost made it. He grabbed at her arm and caught the right sleeve of her blouse. It was enough to stop her movement, but her momentum was still forward and her left arm and leg swung out over the stairs.

  For just a moment, she was precariously balanced on her right heel, supported by the tension the cowboy had on her sleeve, dangling over a flight of concrete steps. She looked into the man’s eyes and felt the knuckles of her left hand brush the steps below her.

  She brought her free hand up to reach for a guardrail, and, at the same time, the man swung his free hand to grab something more substantial than cloth. Both movements came too late, as cloth tore and the loosened heel gave way under the weight.

  Carol cried, “Jesus,” as she fell.

  Barney said, “Shit.”

  Carolyn Ann Boyle tumbled backwards down the stairs, leaving Barney holding the sleeve of her blouse. She landed, unmoving, face-down at the foot of the stairs.

  “Shit,” Barney repeated, as two sets of footsteps caught up with him.

  EUCLID HEIGHTS, OH: Tuesday October 26, 1999

  11:48 AM

  It was close to noon when Allison walked out of her mother’s bedroom. She had no idea what to make of it all. Everything— Mom, Dad, herself, the rules of the universe— everything had changed. Worst of all, she couldn’t understand why Mom kept this from her.

  If Allison had known what she’d been capable of, would she have hurt Chuck as badly as she had? Could she have done something less destructive if she had known what she was doing?

  What could she do?

  Dozens of images came to Allison unbidden, from books and movies. She had seen enough evil portraits of paranormal abilities for her to feel terribly uncomfortable. Exploding heads from Scanners, the flying cutlery from Carrie, whole houses exploding in Firestarter…

  David even had a tape of a Japanese film, Akira, a cartoon where an adolescent telekinetic had managed to destroy Tokyo.

  No. There have to be limits.

  She found herself wandering around the house, cradling Babs, her mind a whir of fictional imagery.

  There was a Dean Koontz novel where a telekinetic caused earthquakes, manifested otherworldly monsters, and had nearly driven himself insane with his ability.

  Could it be that Mom didn’t tell her because she was scared of her?

  Allison had done a good job of scaring herself. What if she could lay waste to a city?

  “Hold it.” Allison stopped and looked at herself in the mirror over the living room mantle. She stared at herself and tried to force some reality back into her head. She knew she was prone to get romantic and overblown in her fantasy life. That just meant that she had to make an extra effort to retain some sort of control on the speculation.

  Just because the rules had changed, didn’t mean there weren’t any rules at all.

  And, movies to the contrary, there was nothing in Mom’s parapsychology books that showed anything approaching the destruction of a house, much less a city. Allison smiled at herself in the mirror, proud that she could keep some semblance of reason when the world had obviously gone insane.

  She winced at that thought, and stuck her tongue out at herself. She shouldn’t undercut her own sanity with thoughts like that. When it came down to it, she had two choices. Either she had gone nuts and literally anything could happen, or she still lived in a rational world with natural laws.

  Despite the fact that she seemed to have been misinformed about what those laws were.

  “That means,” Allison said to her reflection, “that the more reasonably and consistently this teeking behaves, the less chance I’m crazy.” She looked down at Babs and said, “That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  That logic led to the conclusion that she had to find out how reasonable and consistent her teek was. After a little thought, Allison went through the house, gathering a number of objects and putting them in a paper bag. The expedition took her through her room, the study, and the kitchen.

  When she had filled her bag, she tried to think of where she’d conduct her experiments. It really shouldn’t be in the house, some of the stuff she’d gotten was potentially messy—

  Especially the kitty litter.

  But Mom had made her promise to stay in the house. Allison didn’t want to disobey her mother. Mom would be upset, probably too upset to discuss the things they needed to discuss. Allison could too easily see important things, like meeting her father, and the gaps in her family history, being sidetracked for the typical mom-daughter fight, “you promised to stay inside—” “but, Mom, I didn’t want to soil the carpet with the power of my mind.”

  Excessive silliness during grave events is a sign of a disturbed mind.

  Allison figured she’d earned the right to be disturbed.

  Eventually, Allison compromised. Since the basement was too crowded with boxes, laundry, and furnace, she decided to go and play in the garage. Technically the garage was still “the house.”

  Allison put on a fleece-lined denim jacket, and remembering Mr. Franklin’s rules on lab safety, borrowed a pair of her mother’s sunglasses in lieu of safety goggles.

  As she walked to the garage, she saw her neighbor, Mr. Luvov, washing one of his three cars. Luvov lived in the other half of Allison’s house. He was a recent Russian immigrant, in his late forties, spoke with a thick accent, and was probably one of the most thoroughly American people Allison had ever met. Mr. Luvov would probably enjoy her civics class.

  He stopped hosing down his Ford pickup— Allison thought he had aspirations to be a redneck— and smiled beamingly at her. “Pleasant day, Miss Allie.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Luvov.”

  “Should you not be in school? You are home too much for your studies.”

  Allison sighed. “I’m suspended.”

  “This is not right. Perhaps I call, make protest?”

  Mr. Luvov had a passion for writing letters to the editor, calling radio talk shows, speaking at public meetings. Allison had no question that he was sincere. She shook her head. “Don’t bother, it’ll work itself out.” I wish. “Thanks anyway.”

  “Is nothing. Education is important. This I tell my boys, b
ut—” He shrugged and began the hose again. “I want smart children. I get boys who watch cartoons.” He turned to Allison as she passed. “You are young. Tell me why my boys like Beavis and Butt-head? I do not understand.”

  The incongruity of the question made Allison laugh. “I don’t know why anyone likes that show, Mr. Luvov.”

  Mr. Luvov shook his head as if there were some things American that he never would understand. He was probably right.

  Allison walked to the garage at the end of the driveway. It was detached from the house, set far enough back in the house’s yard so that Mr. Luvov could park all three of his cars in half the driveway and leave enough room for Mom to use her half of the garage.

  Allison put her bag down and opened the garage door and walked in, closing the door behind her. It was a two-car garage, one space occupied by Mr. Luvov’s Jeep Cherokee.

  That man and his cars, Allison thought.

  Enough sunlight filtered in to see by, so she set her bag on the table that ran the length of the rear of the garage. Allison’s half of the table was empty except for bottles of car stuff— anti freeze, oil additive, wiper fluid and such— stacked at the far end. The empty space was a contrast to Mr. Luvov’s half which was an ecstatic jumble of tools, rags, and miscellaneous junk.

  The first thing Allison pulled out of the paper bag was Babs. Babs was more moral support than part of the experiment, so Allison looked for a clean place to set her down. She finally perched the stuffed rabbit on the hood of the Jeep.

  Then she lined up the other things in her bag.

  First she took out a sheaf of Dixie cups and lined up six of them. Then she filled them with various materials she’d gotten from the kitchen. Bottled water in the first one. Barely liquid corn syrup in the second. A few glops of grape jelly in the third. Salt in the fourth. Kitty litter in the fifth. A dozen sugar cubes in the last one.

  Allison’s first idea was to see exactly how slippery things were to her teek sense. Babs, in reality a fairly solid, fluffy creature, had felt like Jell-O when Allison had levitated her.

  Once she had the cups lined up, Allison stood back and said to Babs, “here goes.”

  She wondered if she should close her eyes. She decided not to.

  The sugar cubes were first. Again she had the sense of mental fingers running across too-spongy matter. When she finally seemed to get a grip on the cup she was concentrating on, she lifted, gently.

  Obligingly, the whole cup lifted off the table.

  “That’s not what I want at all.”

  She lowered the cup from its hover and tried to think smaller. The mental sense slipped through the walls of the cup like it was melted wax. The individual cubes of sugar seemed to be cubes of wispy foam rubber. It was very hard for Allison to think herself into surrounding the cubes. Her mind seemed to slide through them. A cube slipped through her grasp and fired itself out of the cup, shattering on the ceiling of the garage.

  It made her head ache.

  Eventually, after a moderate effort, the cubes seemed embedded in her mental web, and she could raise them out of the cup.

  The mass of cubes moved as a group wherever she willed them. However, she found that there was no way she could make individual cubes move independently of one another. She tried to make a single levitating cube rotate, but the whole mass would spin around a common axis, each cube in orbit around a common center.

  The best she found she could do was “let go” of individual cubes. That she could do very selectively, to have them bounce off their fellows and land on the table below. On an impulse she let go of all the cubes but one on the top and one on the bottom. The structure of the handful of cubes collapsed like a house of cards, leaving the two floating cubes of sugar, their relative positions intact. Allison frowned and tried to push the cubes closer together. She couldn’t. It was like the cubes were embedded in some invisible lump of clay, and all she could do was push the clay around.

  She stepped up and took hold of one of the cubes with her hand and yanked. The yank was accompanied by a bizarre sense of a similar, and slightly painful, tug inside her skull.

  She expected her mental grip on the rogue cube to be lost. It wasn’t. The “clay” seemed forgiving, and when Allison let go of the cube, it still hung there in midair, three feet away from its cousin. Allison tried to teek the cubes again.

  As before, they wanted to maintain their relative positions.

  Allison tried to grab cubes off the table, and managed to, but once they were in her mental grip they maintained constant separation. She just could not move multiple objects relative to each other unless something else intervened, like her reaching out with her hand and grabbing one.

  Allison dropped the cubes to the table, wiped her forehead, and swept the cubes back into the cup.

  Her physics teacher would be proud of her.

  Allison pulled a small yellow pad out of her pocket and wrote on it, “Teek Rule #1: You can’t teek different objects in different directions.”

  How can I word this? she thought. She plagiarized some language from her physics textbook. “Teek embeds things in its own reference frame, then it moves the frame. Within the frame the objects remain stationary relative to each other.”

  She looked at the note and smiled. She could write a textbook. For completeness’ sake she added, “unless acted on by an outside force.”

  Now that sounds like a law of nature.

  She could see one consequence of that right off. She couldn’t bend any spoons. Not unless she was holding one end firmly in her hand.

  Next she tried the kitty litter. The effort was much like that with the cubes, but the granules were much harder to get a grip on. It took her twice as long to lift a mass of litter from the cup, and when she tried to let individual granules go, whole sections of the cup-shaped mass would let go and spill on the table. She flicked the mass with her finger, and it collapsed in a heap on the table.

  It also caused more of a headache. Endurable, but she was glad when her efforts ceased.

  The salt was hopeless. The only way she could move it at all was if she allowed it to stay in the cup. She tried to embed the grains in her “teek reference frame” but they insisted in slipping through the cracks.

  She wrote down in the book, “Teek Rule #2: The smaller it is, the harder it is for me to teek it.”

  She expected the jelly to be even worse, but in fact it seemed easier to handle than the kitty litter. It came out of the cup in one easy glop.

  But when she tried to let part of it go, it all fell on the table with a messy splat. She cut the mound of jelly in half with the edge of the cup and tried levitating both mounds. They rose and she let the left one go. The left glob went splat while the right one remained airborne. She plopped the airborne jelly back into its cup and got the paper towels out of the bag.

  After cleaning the jelly, she tried the last two cups, expecting to make an even bigger mess, but she could barely sense the existence of the corn syrup, and her mind passed through the water as if it was air.

  She wrote down her third rule.

  “Teek Rule #3: You can’t teek liquids.” After thinking of the jelly, she wrote down, “The denser (more viscous?) the better.”

  “Well, Babs, we’ve ruled out spoon bending and exploding heads.”

  Allison moved the cups out of the way and removed an electronic bathroom scale from the bag. She placed the scale down on a clear spot of table and took out a small brass unicorn figurine she’d taken off her night stand.

  “I guess now we get to find out how much force I can exert.”

  She put the unicorn on the scale. The red digital display lit up and said “LO.”

  Allison concentrated on the unicorn, pushing it down, into the scale. She started gently, increasing the force as she went. Numbers began flashing. The “LO” was replaced by the number 15, and the digits began to roll. Twenty pounds. Fifty. One hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred.

  Within two second
s the display was maniacally flashing “HI” at her.

  Allison let go of the unicorn but the machine kept flashing “HI” at her.

  She rubbed her temples.

  Once the effort faded from inside her skull, she tried to pick up the unicorn. The brass was warm to the touch.

  It was firmly embedded in a dent in the scale. When she finally worried the unicorn loose, there was a hole the size and shape of its base sunk a quarter inch into the top of the scale.

  The display still flashed “HI” at her.

  “Oops.”

  Scratch one digital scale, she thought.

  There had to be more than one way to measure the force she could exert.

  Allison looked around the garage until she saw a stack of red bricks lining the inside wall on the other side of the Jeep. Simple enough. She’d pick up more and more bricks until she reached her limit.

  One brick, up and down, no problem.

  Two, likewise.

  She began multiples of five. Ten bricks, no sweat. Thirty and she could barely sense some effort involved. When she had the entire stack of available bricks a foot off the ground, she could sense the effort— a dull pressure at the back of her skull— but wasn’t near the limit at all. It had to be something like five hundred pounds she was levitating.

  She lowered the bricks and thought. She didn’t want to abandon this line of questioning yet…

  Her eyes lit on the Jeep.

  No. It’s Mr. Luvov’s car. I can’t hurt it.

  “I won’t hurt it. I bet I can’t even move it.”

  Her mental fingers reached out and stretched, enveloping the car. They found solid purchase on the metal, which was good, because trying to move it required a supreme effort. The second she tried to pull the Jeep upwards, her brain slammed on the razor edge of a migraine. Her heart began racing, sweat poured from her, and her breath began to burn in her mouth.

  The effort forced its way through her head in a burning wave. It was like trying to lift the car with her own hands. She could almost hear the mental muscles tearing. Then, as she watched, Babs, who’d been sitting, unmoved, on the hood of the Jeep, fell over.