The Storyteller

by Aaron Starmer

  I’d like to say I had no other choices, but I probably did have other choices besides the one I made. Still, the one I made worked, and that’s all that counts.

  “Gimme that!” I shouted. Then I bit him on the shoulder.

  He dropped you on the ground while howling “Gawww!” and I scooped you up, Stella, and into my backpack, which I threw over my shoulder.

  As I sped off down the hall, I called out, “Don’t ever try crap like that again!”

  And he cried back, “We’re not breaking up, are we?”

  TUESDAY, 12/19/1989

  EVENING

  I’m worried. What else is new? My grip on sanity worries me. These coincidences worry me. What I did to Glen worries me. The fact that I’m not funny anymore worries me. I used to joke with you more, Stella, didn’t I? There are always punch lines to be found in life, and my inability to find them these days worries me. But you know what worries me the most? The same thing that worries everyone. They’re not back yet.

  It’s been six weeks since Fiona up and vanished. One month since Kyle was shot and Charlie went missing. Lies. Stories. Speculations. They’ve all muddied the waters. And nothing is worked out. Not really.

  What has Alistair been waiting for? What has he been doing? My switch is flipped. He needs to keep it flipped!

  Actually, I’ll tell you what Alistair has been doing. Seeing Dr. Hollister. I don’t know what they talk about because my parents aren’t even supposed to know that. Not unless lives are at risk.

  But lives are at risk, aren’t they? And yet I can’t exactly go up to Dad and say, “So Alistair told me that Fiona’s and Charlie’s souls are trapped somewhere inside of him and I sorta, kinda, maybe … believe him.”

  I’ll be the one seeing the psychiatrist. I’ll be the one locked away, because at least Alistair has an excuse. At least he’s seen some disturbing things. Me, I’m simply willing to suspend some disbelief.

  But for how long? If something doesn’t happen soon, my switch might be flipped back. So this morning, when I bumped into my brother coming out of the bathroom, I asked him, “Any more word from Jenny Colvin?”

  “No,” he said in a low voice. “I’m exploring another option.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Remember,” he said, just like he’d said before.

  I guess I have your help with that remembering part, don’t I, Stella? And what I’ll remember about today is that it’s the day Kyle returned home. In a wheelchair. His parents pushed him quietly and slowly up the snowy driveway and bumped him into the door frame as they entered a house where there’d been two cold and empty bedrooms for the last month. At least, that’s how I imagine the scene.

  Mom was the one who saw it. Driving by on her way home from work, she watched the Dwyers put one broken piece back into their broken family.

  “He may walk again someday,” Dad said. “Let’s hold out hope on that account.”

  We were in the kitchen when he said that, just my parents and I. Alistair had shut himself away in his room again. They hadn’t told him that Kyle was home yet. We all knew there was a good chance that Kyle wouldn’t be coming home on his own two feet, but we didn’t want to accept it until one of us saw it. Now one of us had.

  “How do you know he might be able to walk?” I asked.

  “Word gets around the hospital.”

  Word didn’t get around the school. Or at least it didn’t get to me today, because I didn’t really speak to anyone. Ever since I bit Glen, he’s been keeping his distance. Mandy has been too, which is a bit weird, but then again, she’s Mandy. When I saw her in the cafeteria today, she waved me off and said, “Sorry, I don’t have time to annoy you right now,” and headed to the exit with half a cellophane-wrapped sandwich in her hand.

  When you spend a day not talking to people, you begin to see its appeal. You don’t have to explain yourself. You don’t have to ask questions or seem interested. You don’t have to listen to your brother tell you stories about alternate dimensions and then call random girls in other hemispheres and wonder constantly what the hell is happening to your brain, which you were pretty sure was a pretty good brain, once upon a time.

  What you can do, and what you will do, is this: you will write more about the wombat.

  THE PHOSPHORESCENT WOMBAT, PART III

  Hamish lay dead at the bottom of the ravine.

  His little red sports car burned, but it didn’t glow as brightly as Luna did. When the ambulance, fire trucks, and police cars arrived, they had no idea what they had found. They stood on the edge of the ravine, scratched their heads, pulled off their sunglasses, rubbed their eyes, and put their sunglasses back on.

  “Let’s call in … Who do we call in?” the sheriff asked.

  “The government?” the fire chief asked.

  “Do either of you have the government’s phone number?” the ambulance driver asked.

  “I know a guy who knows a guy, I guess,” the sheriff said, and he went back to his car and got on the radio.

  Luna, meanwhile, started to crawl from the wreckage and up the ravine. She knew that Hamish was dead and she was weeping uncontrollably, but she also knew that she needed to hide somewhere. For years, Hamish had been hiding her. Because she was no longer the harmless, dimly lit Mr. Nickelsworth. She was now a force of nature, a radiant dynamo, and surely there would be people who would want to exploit her.

  When the helicopters arrived an hour later, Luna was near the top of the ravine and the police and first responders had fortified themselves behind some boulders—some with their hands shielding their eyes, others with their shaking guns drawn.

  Men in protective suits came out of the helicopters. They wore dark goggles and carried guns with tranquilizer darts. They fired into the glow, basically without aiming, but eventually they hit Luna. When she stopped moving, they closed in with nets and a cage.

  Since her glow was so bright that it would blind a pilot, it would’ve been dangerous to transport her in the helicopter. So they called in a tank with an enclosed compartment in the back. Even the tank wasn’t entirely effective. As it rolled away from the scene, thin beams of light leaked from the tiny cracks around the screws and seams of the machine. It looked like a rolling Chia Pet, with light for hair.

  The tank took Luna as far as the nearest port, where she was loaded into an airtight shipping container and placed on a barge. A tugboat pulled the barge to an oil rig about one hundred miles offshore.

  Only this wasn’t a regular oil rig. It was designed to look like one, but it was actually a place where the government performed its most top-secret experiments. Submarines, warships, and fighter jets circled the place to keep it secure. And in a chamber near the bottom, about fifty feet below the surface of the sea, they stored Luna.

  “They” were a collection of the nation’s best scientists, who lived on the oil rig and employed the world’s best technology. Using infrared cameras mounted in the chamber, they examined Luna from afar. Luna’s glow was not on the infrared spectrum, so she didn’t look like an orb when viewed through the cameras. The scientists could make out her true shape from her body heat.

  “I’m not sure this is an alien,” remarked the chief scientist, Gladys Gershwin, as she examined the very distinctive creature that waddled around the chamber.

  “Looks a bit like a wombat to me,” said the second in charge, Hogan Hogoboom, a man who had spent a chunk of his childhood in Australia.

  “Isn’t that Mr. Nickelsworth?” said the youngest in the group, an awkward but brilliant young geneticist named DeeDee Delaney.

  “Who’s Mr. Nickelsworth?” everyone asked.

  And DeeDee brought them all back to her cabin, where she had a VCR and a bunch of videotapes. She showed them episodes of Pocketful of Hullabaloo.

  “It’s from seventy-five years ago, at least,” she said. “I’m surprised none of you have heard of it. I guess I’m the only junkie for the classics.”

  There was a
zoologist named Yan Yeager on the rig and they called him in for his expertise. The infrared cameras could only show so much, but the thing that puzzled Yan Yeager the most was Luna’s age. “How could this possibly be the same wombat from your television show?” he said. “A wombat can live twenty-five years tops. Maybe this is an offspring.”

  DeeDee begged to differ. Even in infrared, Luna looked exactly the same as when she was on TV. The shape of her nose, the size of her ears, every bump on her body. “That’s the same wombat, only she didn’t glow this much back then,” DeeDee said. “If you’re such an expert, maybe you can explain the glowing.”

  Yan scratched his chin. “We might have to call in a chemist for that.”

  They called in a chemist. “Beats me,” she said.

  They called in a physicist. “Beats me,” he said.

  They called in almost every scientist on the rig and got a chorus of beats me.

  Still, every scientist wanted to study this curious specimen. Together, they constructed a robot with infrared cameras for eyes and they sent the robot into the chamber to run tests on Luna.

  They poked, prodded, shaved, bathed, jiggled, wiggled, and even tickled the wombat. They took blood, hair, and droppings and looked at them under the microscope. They showed inkblots to Luna and they put a microphone in their observation room that transmitted all of their conversations to a speaker in Luna’s chamber. They wanted to see how she would react to voices and sounds.

  They were especially curious to know how she had survived the car crash. So they got rough. They tried to see how far they could push and punish Luna. Why not, right? They didn’t really have any hypotheses. They were throwing paint at a canvas and hoping to come up with art.

  For years, they recorded their observations, but couldn’t determine anything significant other than the fact that Luna was a wombat who glowed and whose body was impervious to the following things: dry ice, acid, flamethrowers, lava, bullets, chain saws, bubonic plague, and those machines that crush cars at the junkyard.

  Meanwhile, Luna was listening to their voices through the speaker and figuring out quite a lot about them. She was growing brighter in more ways than one. On the surface, she was sedate, enduring whatever tests they put her through and waddling around without complaint. But that was only because she was formulating a plan, and when her plan was finally ready, she put it into action.

  She did something the scientists found particularly strange. She starting drinking water, lots and lots of water. For years, she only went through a hamster bottle a day, but all of a sudden, the robot had to refill her bottle once every few hours.

  Which was strange enough, but here’s the strangest thing: she wasn’t peeing.

  The scientists could write off the glowing and her ability to withstand death as mutations, but the ingestion of liquid without the expulsion of liquid seemed impossible. From the infrared, they could tell she wasn’t overheated and sweating the liquid out.

  “So where did all the water go?” DeeDee asked after the fifth day of constant drinking and not a drop of pee.

  “I guess she’s got a big bladder,” Yan said.

  Gladys, Hogan, and all the other scientists laughed, but it was actually the most accurate observation anyone had made about Luna. She did have an exceptionally large and exceptionally flexible bladder. Also, she was exceptionally determined.

  Because on the sixth day, she let loose. When she did, she had what it took.

  She got up on her hind legs and peed on the walls. But she didn’t pee like some dog that wasn’t housebroken. She peed with purpose.

  The thing about infrared light is that it displays heat. Luna’s glow did not produce heat, and other than the robot, she was the only thing in the chamber. The only hot writing source she had was pee. And she needed enough to write the message:

  I AM LUNA, A PERFECTLY FINE WOMBAT, AND I HAVE A SOUL.

  A stunned silence gripped the scientists. No one had expected this.

  DeeDee spoke to Luna through the microphone. “Luna. Can you understand us, Luna?” she asked.

  Luna had enough pee left to write YES.

  The scientists gasped. “Get that wombat a drink!” Gladys commanded.

  * * *

  For the next few months, they spoke to Luna. To give her bladder a rest, they devised a gadget that looked like a pacifier with a laser on the end. Luna could hold it in her mouth and write on a board that would absorb the heat. The scientists could see the writing using their infrared cameras.

  Luna’s vocabulary was limited, but she was able to tell them her basic story, confirming that she was indeed Mr. Nickelsworth and explaining that she didn’t know where she was originally from or why she was the way she was. She was just Luna, a phosphorescent wombat.

  There were many discussions—in private, of course, away from Luna’s ears—about what to do with her.

  They had studied her about as much as they could and they observed that her glow was getting even brighter, so bright that it was penetrating the walls of her chamber. She would have to be moved, but they couldn’t imagine where.

  “I have an idea,” said a marine biologist named Hiroto Hangawi.

  Hiroto blabbed on and on about the importance of the oceans and how that related to the survival of the planet—blah, blah, blah, science talk, science talk—but what his plan for Luna basically came down to was this:

  Luna might’ve been a wombat, but she was also the brightest light source anyone had ever encountered on Earth. Not to mention the fact that she seemed to be immortal, or exceptionally resilient, having lived at least one hundred years and having survived a horrific car accident and their rigorous tests. Hiroto wanted to send her to the darkest corner of the Earth: the bottom of the ocean.

  “When she returns, we can find other uses for her,” he said. “But for now, we are sitting on top of the ocean. If we can’t learn anything more about her, let’s see if we can learn more about our planet.”

  There was a vote and Hiroto’s plan won by a hair. A hair was enough.

  “We should at least inform Luna about what she’s getting into,” said DeeDee, who had grown quite fond of the wombat and had voted against putting her in such obvious danger.

  “Of course,” Hiroto said. “It’s essential. Because she must tell us what she sees.”

  So they explained to Luna that they’d be sending her into the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench. The Mariana Trench is nearly seven miles down, over a mile lower than Mount Everest is high. It is terrifyingly cold and dark, and the pressure would crush almost every living thing on Earth. At one point, a heavy-duty exploratory submersible had been sent to the bottom to collect data. The two men inside reported they actually found signs of life at those seemingly inhospitable depths, but what they didn’t tell the general public was that they also found a hole.

  They only revealed the information about the hole to a small collection of scientists, Hiroto Hangawi included. This was because the hole frightened them. Its shape was not natural. It was the shape of a body, with arms, legs, and a head. Like a little human. Which probably meant that they weren’t the first intelligent beings to reach such depths. They didn’t know what was in the hole, or how deep it was, but they knew it was too deep for their submersible to withstand, and that didn’t matter anyway, because it was also too small for any submersible, even a tiny one, to fit through.

  But it wasn’t too small for a glowing, indestructible wombat.

  “Will you see what’s in that hole for us, Luna?” Hiroto asked.

  “I will,” Luna said by writing with her laser pacifier.

  “Only if you want to,” DeeDee said.

  “I want to,” Luna replied.

  This was the truth. For years, she had stayed hidden in that barn. For years, she had been locked in that chamber. When she was Mr. Nickelsworth, at least she gave the world some smiles and laughter. She still felt the need to contribute in some way. This was the best she could do. />
  They designed a harness constructed from the world’s most indestructible materials mixed with bits of Luna’s fur and skin for extra strength. They made multiple thin cords out of the stuff too, each one at least fifteen miles long. They wove the cords into a tether, attached it to the harness, and put the harness on Luna.

  On account of the fact that, even underwater, Luna was too bright to provide photographic images, they had to rely on her telling them what she saw when she came back. That is, if she came back. They’d do their best to get her down as far as they could. The submersible that originally found the hole would be her guide. They clipped her to it, set the coordinates, and turned on autopilot.

  “The submersible will unclip you as soon as you hit a depth of thirty-six thousand feet,” Hiroto said. “Once you reach the hole, you’re basically on your own.”

  “And you’re okay with that?” DeeDee asked.

  “I’ve always been on my own,” Luna said. “This is what I was meant to do.”

  “Good girl,” Hiroto said, and he sent the robot in to attach Luna’s harness.

  Without thinking, DeeDee hurried after the robot, and the other scientists didn’t know what was happening until she was in the chamber, hugging Luna.

  “You’re a wonder, Mr. Nickelsworth,” DeeDee cried. “Worth a billion dollars, at least.”

  She couldn’t say anything more, because the light was so bright that it knocked her unconscious. And by the time DeeDee woke in the rig’s medical center, the submersible was unclipping Luna at the body-shaped hole.

  DeeDee was blind.

  Luna was as far away from humans as she’d ever been.

  TO BE CONTINUED …

  WEDNESDAY, 12/20/1989

  AFTERNOON

  Like Justine Barlow, that human magnet for dead baby birds, I, Keri Cleary, have decided to start jogging. Supposedly, it’s good for your head as well as your heart, and both of mine need a bit of help. School was uneventful, and the news is yet another crapfest (we’re fighting with Panama now?). So I put on a sweat suit, hat, and gloves. I grabbed what I thought was my Walkman and hit the slushy streets.