He heard footsteps behind him. Grandpa had woken up and followed him upstairs.
“The spiral aftereffect!” Isaac said with excitement.
“That particular model was almost as hard to find as the Menger sponge,” Grandpa said, then yawned.
The white disk with the black line spiraling down into it was much bigger than the toy Grandpa had given him when he was five. It was about a foot in diameter. There was a dial with numbers from one to ten on the two-foot-long handle. Isaac picked the spiral aftereffect up, stared at the disk, and turned the dial that made the disk spin—which one you chose determined how fast it went. It turned slowly at first, and he watched as the black line began moving down into the disk, away from him, pulling him along with it. He turned the dial farther, until the disk was spinning faster and faster. Now he felt he was falling into it, and he actually stumbled forward.
“Look away from it now,” Grandpa told him.
Isaac followed his instructions. When he looked away, the table seemed to zoom toward him. It was so disorienting that he fell to his knees, closing his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the table had stopped moving.
“Effective, isn’t it?” Grandpa said with a slight smile. “If you stare at a moving object in a particular direction for even a short time, stationary scenes you look at right afterward appear to move in the opposite direction. Some people call it the waterfall effect. If you stare at a waterfall for about a minute, and then look at the rocks at the side of the waterfall, the rocks appear to be moving upward.”
It actually made me fall down, Isaac thought.
He couldn’t get it out of his mind that he had fallen down after looking at the spiral aftereffect.
Grandpa put his hand to his chin. “Maybe you could use it to your advantage?”
“Yeah!” Isaac said, excited now. “The way I see it, Dr. Ciano must be the one who’s ordered the amputation. So maybe I could somehow cause her to have an accident—something that would get her out of the way for a while, which would delay the amputation. That would give us time to get Mom out. Nobody would believe a toy could do that. And Grandpa … it was all your idea!”
Isaac and Grandpa both started laughing. It wasn’t the situation that was funny—they were laughing because they had just solved a problem together. This is how Grandpa and I used to laugh together before he got sick, Isaac thought. He realized how much he had missed those times.
There was just one thing missing.
Vera.
FTER THEY STOPPED LAUGHING, GRANDPA looked around at all the boxes. “There! I knew I made a point of saving the box the spiral aftereffect came in. Good thing nobody was dumb enough to throw it out.” He went across the room to get it, and Isaac thought, I wanted to throw that box out.
Grandpa handed it to Isaac. “You get the spiral aftereffect and do what you need to do with it … I need to take a nap.” He was slipping away again. His periods of alertness were sporadic.
In his room, Isaac turned his attention to the mirror box. He wanted to try an experiment using it and the spiral aftereffect. He knew that if the spiral aftereffect appeared in the mirror, Joey Haynes would be able to see it.
Isaac started spinning it inside the box.
The phantom limb slid into the mirror. After a moment it began to shake, as if the spiral aftereffect was making it dizzy. A phantom arm, dizzy? Was it possible? This spiral aftereffect was so large that it took up all of the mirror. Isaac stopped spinning the disk, put it back into his left hand, outside the box, and carefully laid it on his desk. He had wanted to get Joey’s reaction to it before he did anything else.
The phantom limb slapped its hand excitedly on the floor of the box, then made a thumbs-up gesture. Isaac knew this meant the phantom limb was very happy now because the trick was something that Isaac had discovered on his own and showed to Joey.
Isaac withdrew his hand from the box. The phantom limb held up three fingers. It made an OK sign with its thumb and index finger, waved happily, and disappeared.
Isaac sat on his bed with the spiral aftereffect and began studying it more closely. He had to understand exactly how to spin it at the right speed to make the right effect.
Looking at the numbers on the disk, he began turning the dial. At one, it spun quite slowly, and there was not much of an effect. At two, he began to see the line slide slowly down inside the disk. He went up to four, and now the line was really spinning down inside it. Isaac dared to turn it all the way up to ten. The effect was so strong that it pulled him right off the bed.
He quickly looked around the room. Everything in his room was converging toward him. It was as though the whole room was about to crush him. The feeling was very real, all because the spiral aftereffect took up his whole field of vision. The speed at ten would have to be used against the person who was endangering Vera and himself, he decided. The sensation would easily knock someone over.
When the sensation stopped, Isaac put the spiral aftereffect into its box and went back to the mirror box again. He felt sleepy.
He knew what was coming.
But this time he was looking into a different bathroom, not clean and white and perfect like the first one or rustic like the second. There was old-fashioned wallpaper and a flowered shower curtain. The linoleum on the floor was worn. And there was nobody in the room.
Then he heard the door open and, a moment later, the lock click. A young girl appeared in the mirror, holding up a plastic baby doll that was about eight inches long. Its clothes had been removed.
The little girl was so short that only her head and her arms with the doll appeared in the mirror. Her face was still blurred.
“Bad baby! I told you not to do that,” she said so softly that Isaac could barely hear her. She had locked the door and now she was whispering: she didn’t want her parents to know what she was doing in there. “Bad, bad baby!” she said again. Then, with her tongue pushed slightly out of her mouth, she began twisting one of the doll’s arms. She twisted the arm around backward and pulled at it, grunting slightly. There was a slight crack, but the arm remained attached. She kept pulling, harder and harder, until the arm was at right angles to the doll’s body. With one final burst of effort, she snapped the arm off.
The little girl beamed, as happy as if it were Christmas morning. She dropped the severed arm into the sink. “Oh, my dear little baby,” she suddenly cooed as she lovingly rocked the doll, “Mommy will make everything OK now.”
Isaac was shocked by the little girl’s cruelty and then by her elation. The image faded, and he was looking into the mirror box again. The phantom limb had returned and was trying to tell him something. It held up three fingers, as it had done before, and shook them at Isaac.
“Three?” Isaac said out loud.
The phantom limb shook in disagreement. It held up three fingers again.
Isaac tried again. “Third?” It made him think of the games of charades his parents had sometimes played at their dinner parties. From upstairs, he had listened to them guessing and laughing. This, however, was deadly serious.
“Three’s company?” Isaac suggested.
The limb shook itself in exasperation.
What on earth was the limb trying to say? Everything the phantom limb had shown him so far was important, so this must be important too. He would have to figure out its meaning in relation to the little girl—whoever she was—and her amputation of her doll’s arm.
He quickly pulled his hands out of the mirror box. The phantom limb folded its fingers down over its palm in a sorrowful gesture, and left. Isaac put the box in the closet right away.
He went downstairs to do something about dinner. Grandpa was not asleep on the couch, as Isaac had expected. Instead, he was looking at a copy of Scientific American. Isaac told Grandpa what the phantom limb had done, how it was trying to tell him something. He also told him about the “mirror dream” he had just had.
“But it’s not ‘three,’ ‘third,’ or ‘three’
s company,’” he said.
“Hmm …” Grandpa squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, thinking hard. “Well, it could be ‘triptych.’ Or ‘troika.’ Maybe even ‘triad,’” he suggested.
“What’s a triad, exactly?” Isaac asked.
“I … I seem to remember it might mean two different things,” Grandpa said. “I think it could be a musical term for a particular three-note chord.”
“Well, Joey Haynes did play the piano,” Isaac said. “But how could that connect with the little girl mutilating her doll? What’s the other meaning of triad?”
“Any group of three, like three closely related people.”
“I wonder if that’s what the phantom limb meant. But which three people? It still doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Grandpa shook his head and sighed. “I can’t stop thinking about that little girl and her doll. Whoever that girl is, she’s sick—and dangerous. We’ve got to get your mother home. Fast.”
Isaac knew that. But he still didn’t know how he was going to zap Dr. Ciano with the spiral aftereffect. When—and how? He had to catch her off guard, so she’d injure herself and have to be away from work for a while. But everybody at the hospital was so vigilant. The whole idea seemed impossible.
And he wondered: Who was the woman who had “accidentally” come into Vera’s room? Why had she smiled at him so strangely when she saw him right after the endoscopy? It was almost as if she knew what had happened to him.
After dinner was over and he was back in his room, he puzzled over the whole situation as he sat at his desk, trying to concentrate on his homework. He was falling way behind in his schoolwork and would probably fail his upcoming tests. But he couldn’t concentrate on any of it. All he could think about was how he could use the spiral aftereffect and get Vera out of the hospital before anything really terrible happened to her.
He remembered the sensation of his own room closing in on him. It had been very scary. Escaping from a room that was getting smaller and smaller made him think of something else he had seen in his collection: the Menger sponge—the cube that was made out of holes and had infinite surface area and zero volume. If you were inside it, every space you entered would be smaller than the one you had left.
His head began to nod. It was only nine thirty in the evening, but he’d had a long and eventful day. Maybe if he went to bed now he could get up early and concentrate on his homework then. He undressed, turned off the overhead light, and got into bed. He tried to read a little more, but his eyes kept slipping shut. The book dropped out of his hand. He fell asleep with the reading light on.
And then he had a dream. He was in Vera’s room at the hospital. But the room had no window. A fire was burning in the wastebasket. Bright flames jumped from the wastebasket and ran up the curtains next to the bed. Vera was lying in the bed, asleep. She was drugged again. Isaac remembered the little girl he had seen in his mirror box dream and the way she had seemed to be preparing to start a fire.
In his dream, Isaac tried the door. It was locked. Someone had started the fire and then locked them in the room.
He looked up frantically. On the blank wall he could see the Menger sponge. He pushed his hand against the wall. His arm went through it easily. He could go into the Menger sponge! The room there would be smaller, but it would not be on fire. He had to pull Vera into the Menger sponge and out of the burning room.
He lifted Vera out of the bed. She was as light as a feather. He slung her over his shoulder and moved toward the wall, one arm holding her, the other held in front of him. His arm went right through the wall. They were going to get out!
But when Vera’s leg touched the wall, it wouldn’t go through. Isaac had access to the Menger sponge, but Vera’s inert body didn’t. Vera was trapped in the room. He couldn’t save her. He felt the flames against the back of his legs. Vera’s hair was engulfed in flames now. He pushed her against the wall again and again, but she couldn’t fit through it. They were both going to burn to death.
At that moment, he woke up. Luckily, he managed not to scream and wake up Grandpa. He lay in his bed panting, still filled with the horror of the dream.
The nightmare had been bizarre and terrifying. But it still meant something. It was telling him, with more force than ever, what he already knew: he had no time, and he had to act now.
He was wide awake and anxious. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. He looked at his watch. It was four thirty A.M. He had to make a plan for using the spiral aftereffect. He had to do it today, after what he had just seen in his dream. He had to use the spiral aftereffect on whoever had put in the amputation order—Dr. Ciano or whoever was responsible. He had to get to the hospital.
Where, he figured, more trouble would be waiting for him.
Isaac skipped breakfast and went directly to the hospital. He didn’t see Candi at the nurses’ station. It must still be the night shift. He went to Vera’s room and found that she was sleeping. He wanted to get out as quickly as possible, but he felt he should stay and try to learn more. He began washing his hands. He thought he heard muffled footsteps. But before he even had a chance to look, he was jabbed again, and darkness slammed down on him.
This time he woke up sooner—he was still in the elevator. This one wasn’t so small. It was big enough to hold a gurney. He struggled to sit up and look. He could see that the button for the basement was lit. When the elevator doors opened, the orderly pulled the gurney into the small dark corridor he hated so much.
“What’s happening?” Isaac asked, his voice rising in panic. After the endoscopy, he knew this was going to be torture.
“MRI,” the orderly said, not explaining what that meant. “Here we are.”
The door that said MRI led to a suite. In the first room the orderly, who was tall and strong, helped him off the gurney and motioned to a desk. The woman behind the desk handed Isaac a form on a clipboard.
Isaac threw the clipboard to the floor. “There’s nothing wrong with me!” he said. “Someone’s trying to hurt my mother and get back at me.”
The orderly thrust the clipboard back at Isaac. “I’ll stand here all day until you sign this.”
Reluctantly, his hands shaking, Isaac signed the form.
The orderly did not leave—he was going to be there throughout the procedure, Isaac guessed, to keep him from escaping.
A man in a white lab coat emerged from an inner doorway. “Come with me,” he said. “First the locker room, where you change into a hospital johnny and lock up your clothes and valuables—your wallet, your watch, your keys, everything. Then across the hall to the MRI machine.”
“This is crazy!” Isaac shouted. “Who’s responsible for this? I said there’s nothing wrong with me.”
The man shrugged. “Orders from upstairs. We do what they say. This way, please.”
Isaac knew the hospital was short-staffed and that people were always rushing around and taking care of hundreds of patients. It would be easy for someone to sabotage a single patient.
Isaac wanted to run for it. He was sweating. But the orderly was right there.
The locker room was small, the lockers half-sized. The man left him alone after telling him the instructions, but the orderly stayed. Isaac took off his clothes and stuffed them into one of the small lockers. He had a terrible sinking sensation. This was going to be bad. He knew it.
The room across the hall had a control panel and a large window looking into the adjoining room, which contained a metal cylinder big enough for a person. Isaac couldn’t help thinking of a coffin. “You just go in there and the nurse will help you,” the man said. He was seated at the control panel. The orderly stood beside him, watching Isaac closely.
Isaac dragged himself into the room, his eyes focused on the metal cylinder. There was a hole in it big enough to go through, and a gurney to lie down on coming out from the hole. There was no doubt in his mind—he was going to have to go inside that cylinder.
He panicked.
He felt as if he was going crazy.
“I … I don’t have to go inside that thing, do I?” he asked the nurse, trying to keep his voice from shaking.
And then he recognized her. She was the odd woman who had “accidentally” come into Vera’s room, the same one who had smiled strangely at him after the endoscopy. What was she doing here? Was she part of what Isaac was beginning to feel was a conspiracy against him? Maybe the mystery woman and Dr. Ciano were in this together. And could there possibly be another person involved … making it a “triad”?
She smiled and touched his arm, as if she had known him for a long time. “It’s only for twenty minutes. Most people have no trouble at all. Just try not to move a single muscle so we can get some good pictures … or else we’ll have to do it again. Now, just lie down here.” She patted the gurney attached to the machine. The pillow for his head was right at the opening in the machine.
“I have to go in head first?” Isaac said, trembling.
The nurse smiled. “Just lie down here and get comfortable.”
Isaac could barely stifle a groan. He lay down on the gurney with his head on the pillow, his heart thumping so loudly it seemed to fill the room.
The nurse took some little rubber things and inserted them into his ears. “Earplugs. The machine gets a little noisy. Ready now?”
1saac wanted to answer, “Not on your life,” but how could he get away now? He could see the orderly, still guarding him, through the large window over the control panel in the next room. It was the only way out.
The nurse pressed a button somewhere. The gurney began sliding slowly into the cylinder. Every second Isaac felt his panic rising. He wanted to kick and scream, but if he moved, they’d have to do it all over again. He had no idea how much time was going by and how soon it would be over.
He’d been inside the thing for only a few seconds and already sweat was sliding down his forehead into his eyes, making them sting. But he couldn’t move his arm to wipe it away. He tried not to hyperventilate, so his chest wouldn’t move. He felt that at any second he was going to have a seizure, like Vera, or scream, or throw up.
The Phantom Limb Page 6
