White Rabbit Society Part One
”White Rabbit Society Part One" by Brendan Detzner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License
Cover by Wesley Wong (http://www.weswongwithyou.com)
CHAPTER 1
#
Paul had meant to sleep, just for a little while in case the old man checked in on him, but it was all he could do to lay still. His heart was beating like a jackhammer. It’d been there all day, when he’d woken up in the morning and had breakfast and swept the floor of the library. Today’s the day, today’s the day.
He opened his eyes. His room was dark except for the bright green numbers on his alarm clock. Ten fifty-nine turned over to eleven o’clock. The old man had been asleep for at least an hour. Today’s the day, tonight’s the night. Now’s the time.
He got out of bed. He’d already packed, books and clothes in his briefcase and everything else in the pockets of his jacket. He kneeled down and put his face up close to the doorknob. There was a glyph carved into the brass, nine small circles and another larger one surrounding them. He took a sheet of tracing paper and a piece of yellow chalk out of his pockets, pressed the paper against the doorknob, and followed the pattern with the chalk. He pressed his hand against the paper and said the magic word. His fingertips got warmer; he could feel the electricity flow through his body, down his legs to his toes. When he pulled the paper away, the symbol wasn’t on the doorknob anymore. The metal was smooth, like new.
He got up and opened the door, closed it, opened it, listened for footsteps coming down the hall. Nothing. He smiled so wide that he could feel the strain at the edges of his mouth, ducked back inside, grabbed his briefcase, and crept down the hall to the library room.
He could hear it as he stepped inside, rustling through the stacks, flowing invisibly like a liquid or an avalanche from place to place. It felt cold and wet as it touched his foot, then warm and prickly like plant bristles as it reached up his leg. He took a plastic bag full of white powder out of his jacket pocket and dumped it on the floor. The invisible creature pulled away, and the white powder slowly disappeared, drained from the top down. Paul reached down to the floor and felt it, a gently shifting mass under his fingers, happily insensible.
“You’re coming with me, buddy.” He opened his briefcase and dropped the quivering mass inside.
He grabbed a couple more books off the shelves, slid them in next to the ones that were already there, and snapped the briefcase shut. He left the library and went downstairs. He took the steps slowly, laying down his feet from heel to toe along the edge of each one. The basement was a long concrete hallway with a row of identical metal doors on either side. There were fourteen of them, all of them closed and locked. There were people walking the earth who would’ve died for a glimpse of what was behind any one of them, just to know that they were there, just to know that they weren’t crazy. Paul took out a key from the pocket opposite the one where he’d kept the plastic bag, walked up to the third floor on the right and unlocked it.
He opened the door, closed it, opened it again, waited for the sound of stomping feet upstairs. Nothing. Paul was already smiling. The old man probably shielded these doors with every trick he knew, probably had it set to fry the brain of anybody who tried to break in, but he never thought about someone just stealing the damn key.
Sitting on the floor inside the room was a glass jar filled with sand. Paul took a closer look at it. There was something rising up from the midpoint where the sand leveled off, a shape the size of Paul’s fingertip, like a tiny water tower turned upside down. Paul turned the jar upside down and right side up again. The shape slowly rose back up from under the sand, until everything was like it had been before.
He left the house with the jar in one hand and the briefcase in the other. He walked past the pool, through the woods. There was a barbed wire fence surrounding the property. Paul took a white pill out of his pocket, put it between his lips and swallowed. He closed his eyes, waited until it was gone, and opened them again. Hovering in the air a few inches above the fence was a string of blue lights. Paul reached down, picked a stick up off the ground, and threw it over the fence. The air was filled with blinding light, and the stick vanished without a trace.
He took a metal bar out of his jacket and a pair of wire cutters out of his pants pocket. He held the bar by one of the ends and reached up and touched the string of lights with the other. His knees shook, he bit his lip. The metal was cold enough to burn and cut. He said the magic word. Nothing happened. His hand was shaking. He said it again; he shouted it over and over until it hurt too much and he dropped the bar and fell to the ground. He looked up. The blue lights were gone. He shook out his hand, threw the briefcase over the fence, tucked the sand jar under his chin, and climbed up. He cut the end of the barbed wire closest to him and let it swing down out of his way. He straddled the top of the fence for a second before he jumped down.
The ground hit his feet and the jar fell out from under his chin. He caught it with both hands, didn’t realize what it was he’d done until after he’d done it. He looked back up. The blue lights were back like nothing had happened. For a moment he wondered how much time he’d had to spare, but only for a moment. He was out. He’d made it.
He walked along the highway. The houses got closer and closer together until he was downtown, right by the flower shop and the barbershop and the grocery store and the shoe store, all closed at this time of night. The traffic signals were all blinking red.
The park was surrounded by streetlights and pitch black in the middle; the grass rose and fell gently like a still picture of the ocean. There was a gazebo on the north side of the lot, bordering the center. Paul made his way towards it. He climbed the ramp to the stage and kneeled down on the floorboards. He put down the briefcase, unscrewed the lid of the jar, and flipped it over. The sand fell through the cracks in the floorboards and disappeared.
The old man’s voice rung out in his head, the whole lecture coming back to him. He wondered if it would always be like this, if he’d ever really get away.
“… it is unusual in that while it spends most of its life cycle on the other side, when it does come to our world it does so naturally. The best analogy I can think of is an amphibian that lives on land, but lays its eggs in the water. They come here and take a physical shape from whatever’s available to shield them while they develop. The combination of potency and malleability is what makes them so dangerous for…”
Yeah, Paul thought to himself. Dangerous. Someday he’d come back here. It was starting now, his life, his real life. He could make plans. In the meantime, there was a bus heading south for Chicago in an hour. He had enough money to pay for the ticket and about twenty dollars more.
Fifteen years went by.
#
The first week in August, Andrew was taken to his grandmother’s house in Branville by his parents. He was only supposed to stay for a little while, a week, then two weeks, then a month, then until school started. It was then decided that maybe he should stay a little while longer. His parents were fighting; for a while they were going to get divorced, now maybe they weren’t. They needed some time to themselves. And Andrew’d been having a tough time, he wasn’t doing well at school. It might be good for him to have a change of scenery.
All of these things were agreed upon without Andrew’s grandmother Cynthia quite agreeing to them. The first time she saw Andrew in her living room she panicked. Seeing him in Chicago, sitting under the tree at Christmas or sitting at the table at Thanksgiving, it hadn’t soaked through for some reason, but looking at him now a fire bell rang in the
back of her mind.
Andrew was clearly a member of her family, he had the blonde hair that still cropped up sometimes, the big hands and the long arms and the flat nose and the slight chin. His face reminded her of somebody else, somebody she was not yet prepared to think about. But even if it hadn’t, he would have frightened her. It was his eyes, his expression. She looked at him and wasn’t sure anyone was looking back. This child is broken. He’s fifteen years old, he should see me, he should look back, he should say something. He’s like a vegetable. The image hit her, broadcast across the breadth of her mind like an image on a screen. Mr. Potato Head. Don’t leave him here. He’s broken. He has a potato for a head. I’m sorry. I know I didn’t do a good job with you, I wasn’t good enough, I know, I’m sorry, but please don’t leave him with me. He has a potato for a head and I don’t know what to do.
Cynthia didn’t say a word of that. She sat in her living room with Andrew’s parents and drank coffee she’d made and ate coffee cake and talked, and she did not contradict a single thing they said, and when they left, Andrew stayed.
She was able to get things moving by making them sandwiches, but before too long the sandwiches were gone and they were stuck with each other. Neither one of them knew what to say. The house was full of pictures and figurines and old furniture. There was a bank of windows facing the street, curtains that Andrew’s grandmother always kept drawn. Everything smelled like cleaning supplies. Andrew noticed the smell and his grandmother no longer did.
He asked if he could go for a walk. She thought about it for a moment. She told him that it wasn’t a good neighborhood and that he needed to be careful, but that if he wanted he could go to either the library or the park. The park was farthest away from the house, so that was where he went.
He went to the gazebo as soon as he saw it and ran up the stairs, pounding on the wood, feeling the blood rush up through his knees. He’d been crammed in the back of a car all morning driving up here, listening to public radio and answering his parents’ questions. He was ready to burst out, to tear down walls and break windows, his heart pounding and his lungs heaving, and he jumped up hard, and he waited for the soles of his feet to smack against the platform.
He fell.
He landed hard on thick concrete. He opened his eyes; it was dark, he was laying on the foundation of the gazebo, there was a crate full of old tennis rackets next to his foot. He looked up, saw the sunlight peeking in through the cracks in the floorboards, looked down again, and immediately started coughing. The air was so dirty he could hardly breath, could hardly see this thing in front of him. A scarecrow, or a machine; he saw the shape of it first through the dust, like a six-foot tall water tower turned upside down. It did not occur him that it might be alive.
It moved. Its head started spinning, and the dust was pushed to the ground by an unseen force.
“Hello?”
He wished that it wasn't so dark. The moment that the thought crossed his mind, the air in the room was suddenly filled with the smell of bleach, in and out in less than a second, leaving nothing behind. Light appeared from nowhere; he could see everything inside the chamber as though it were open daylight.
He took another look at the monster.
“Did you do that?”
He got no answer. Its head had stopped spinning, and it was as still now as it had been before.
“I need to leave here. My grandma is going to be worried.” He was startled to find that this was something he actually cared about. He didn’t know why, and didn’t ever expect to. Andrew’s feelings usually caught him by surprise. “Can you make a way out for me?”
The wall directly to Andrew’s left vanished, revealing a cross section of the dirt beneath the park. There was a strip of sky at the top just big enough for him to crawl through.
“Thank you,” Andrew said. As he reached up, he saw the thing’s neck bend, suddenly and sharply, like a dandelion stem in a vase. He didn’t know what that meant, but felt obliged to say something.
“I’d like to come back. I just moved here and I don’t know anybody except my grandmother.”
The creature’s neck straightened out.
Yes, the creature was strange. No, it did not seem to obey the rules that Andrew had been taught about how the world worked. That night, eating dinner silently with his grandmother in a strange house, he thought about telling her what he’d found, and decided against it. She’d think he was crazy. Maybe he was crazy. It wouldn’t bother him too much if he was. But it might make things worse if people knew. Andrew didn’t want to mess things up, didn’t want to make waves.
At the same time, he knew he wanted to go back. The idea of having a secret excited him, even if it maybe wasn’t real, even if he was crazy. And the really exciting thing was that he was actually pretty sure he wasn’t crazy, that this was really happening. This was a secret, something unknown to the forces who had decided where he was going to live and what was best for him. It wasn’t boring.
Andrew came back the next day, and the day after that. His visits fit well into his schedule of going to the library to read comics and chess books and walking along the river and doing his grandmother’s grocery shopping and playing pinball at the bowling alley. He talked to it; uncertain of what to call it, he used the name and gender of his dog back home, which had died not too long ago.
Before too long, Shadow began to talk back.
#
Paul circled the hotel twice before he went in, once in the car and a second time on foot. He went inside. The bulletin board said that the White Rabbit Society was meeting in the Jefferson room in the basement, down the hall from the bar.
The door to the Jefferson room was closed. He opened it, slipped in sideways, and pulled it shut as quickly as he could. He turned around.
Nobody said a word. Everybody was looking at him. A dozen guys, older than him. Wrinkled suits, sweaters sprinkled with crumbs. Hair missing or unkempt or stuck in styles that went out decades ago. Worn faces, hungry eyes that are still suspicious of the food.
Paul had met a few of them. He'd heard of a few more. Everybody had two names, nobody had a last name. Luke the Bastard. Fat Rob. Jerry the Gentleman.
"I was invited," Paul said, not sure if that was what you said.
There are many kinds of silence. It can push, and it can pull. It can have waves like water, pushing or spinning. It can be shallow. It can be deep. It can send a message.
We don't know who you are, said the silence.
Paul put a book down on the table. It had a black leather cover and pages with yellow edges. The room shifted in the direction of the table like hair towards a balloon. Static electricity.
Paul did not speak, and was heard. You know me now.
CHAPTER 2
#
The big conventions weren't an everyday thing. They couldn't be, it would be too risky, people would stop showing up. So Paul still spent most of his time following up on leads. Old ads in weird magazines, rumors, one eight-hundred numbers that had a different answering machine message connected to them every week until some random day when they stopped working.
He was meeting a guy at a Tiki bar. The guy said that he had some books. The sign said that the bar wasn't going to open until the afternoon, but when he pushed on the front door it swung open.
It was dark inside. Paul went in. The place still smelled like pineapple juice, even at 11 o'clock in the morning.
"You Paul?"
There was a very short man with broad shoulders standing behind the bar. Until Paul could take a step sideways and the light changed, he didn't appear to have a neck. The man behind the bar was wearing a winter coat for no reason that Paul could tell and was holding a pistol. He pointed it in Paul's direction.
"Whatever you brought," he said. "I'll be having. For starters."
A bottle broke, somewhere in back of the bar.
"Look out behind you," Paul said.
"Do you rea
lly think I'm stupid enough to-"
#
September arrived. Getting used to a new school took a lot of Andrew's attention and he didn’t make it back to go and see Shadow until Friday afternoon. He dropped his backpack off at his grandmother’s, found her in the living room watching the news on television, and told her he was going for a walk. She didn't answer him, didn't look away from the TV.
He jogged to the park, ran up the stairs of the gazebo, and descended.
They played chess. Andrew had taught Shadow the rules, but she’d quickly gotten to be better than he was. Shadow’s head was made of concrete; it had three sides, three identical faces painted in three different colors, white like the paint of the gazebo above and orange like the leaves in the fall and brown like the roots of the trees. It was propped up into the air by a length of copper tubing, Shadow’s neck, which led down to a pile of gravel pounded out from the foundation below, and continued through it, emerging from its side and snaking outward.
The length of tube sticking out of her body ended in a strip of duct tape with a pair of long metal tweezers sticking out of it. The tweezers were hovering in between the knight and the rook.
“I don’t think that’s check, Andrew. I think that’s checkmate.”
Her voice appeared in Andrew’s left ear but did not seem to be traveling through space from any particular direction; it was as though he was wearing a pair of headphones and the right speaker was broken.
Andrew examined the board. She was right, he’d won without realizing it. She’d thrown the game; he never won unless she let him. She probably wanted to talk about something.
“Good match,” he said.
Shadow’s head made a single clockwise rotation, and the space around her eyes was momentarily shrouded by darkness. The chess pieces faded, losing their color and then their shape, and finally vanishing as they sunk down into the ground.
Andrew checked his watch. It was five o’clock. Shadow knew he’d have to go home in a few minutes.
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