by Tom Upton
Unless something went wrong.
“Jack,” I called out, keeping my voice low.
But there was no answer. Great, I thought, sure that he wasn’t there. I should have been relieved, but instead I resented the hell out of him. He’d talked me into this harebrained scheme and for one reason or another he bailed out on me. That should have been a good thing, except, alone or not, I didn’t want to be doing this anyway. What was I? The guardian of all tree-hugging bitches?
I stooped over and started to duck-walk under the bleachers. I made it halfway down the length of the bleachers, but never stumbled across any sleeping idiot. I found a spot where I could sit, resting my back against the wall, and wonder what to do. I had no watch, so I wasn’t exactly sure of the time. It was late, but how late? Had everybody left the building? Was Carl the janitor still lurking around?
While I was trying to figure things out, I heard the gym door open and shut. The lights didn’t go on, and a moment later, I heard stirring under the bleachers as Jack crawled toward me. He stopped about four or five feet away and then seemed to settle down to wait, completely unaware that I was nearby.
At first I sat there quietly, listening to his excited breathing and the rustling noise his gym bag made as he shifted it around. Who is this dude? I wondered, for about the thousandth time in the past two days. I avoided reading him, so he remained something of a mystery to me. Was he just some guy obsessed with the paranormal? Did he really have the hots for me? Or was it some combination of both? I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know. In any case, he would lead to problems and/or disappointments.
Finally I said, “You’re late.”
Though I didn’t speak loudly, he issued a startled yelp—a rather girlie-sounding startled yelp— and there was sudden movement followed by the loud thunk of skull hitting thick bleacher wood.
He seemed to settle back down again, uttering a low “Ouch.” He was probably holding his head in the dark. For a second I genuinely felt sorry for him.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Why am I hitting my head whenever you’re around?” he asked.
“You should take a hint—associating with me will only lead to pain.”
“No, seriously, lie to me.”
“Oh, in that case, it’s probably because of my scintillating personality and the allure of my curve-less body.”
He chuckled in a pained way.
“I thought you’d be in the locker room,” he said.
“Yeah, that didn’t work for me. What time is it, anyway?”
“A little before ten,” he said.
“Where were you?”
“Drama club rehearsal ran a little long.”
I rolled my eyes. “Drama club? Figures.”
“What? You have something against drama?”
“Just about everything,” I said. “Listen, can we do this thing, and then get out of here?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Carl is still in the building. I saw him in the auditorium before I sneaked over here.”
“Well, how long is he going stay?”
“I figure another half hour or so.”
I sighed. “I feel like an idiot, sitting here.”
“Hey, I’m sitting here, too.”
“But it must be normal for you to feel like an idiot,” I said, and instantly regretted it. “Sorry,” I muttered.
We sat in the darkness, under the bleachers in the gym of a closed school. It was a stupid place to find myself. But it was sort of peaceful. Nobody was around, except for Jack, and, really, it was as though he wasn’t even there, because he was keeping quiet and I was blocking out his thoughts.
I folded my arms in front of me, and shut my eyes. With any luck, I would doze off and the waiting wouldn’t seem so long.
I heard Jack stir as he shifted his gym bag on the floor. He settled down right next to me, his shoulder bumping mine.
“Hey, don’t touch me, seriously,” I warned him.
“It was an accident.”
“Then be careful. It’s not a good thing to touch me.”
“Why?”
“Because,” I said, trying to be patient, “physical contact with anybody causes me to see things about them.”
“I don’t mind,” he said dully.
“I know you don’t mind. You ever think that maybe I do mind?” I thought I sounded a bit harsh, so I lightened my tone and said, “Look, touching is bad for me. I can block out people to a certain extent. Actually, I’m getting quite good at that— I have a fair degree of control. But if I have physical contact with another person, I have no control at all. I’m, like, forced to see things about them. Sometimes, it actually hurts.”
“Hurts? You mean you feel pain?”
“Not physical pain. That wouldn’t be so bad—that I could handle.”
“So you can never touch anybody?” he asked, and I thought he finally might be realizing that having paranormal abilities wasn’t such a great thing.
“No, never,” I said.
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“I’m used to the idea. I’ve known for some time that I’ll never get married or have kids or any of the things other people take for granted.”
“No kids? You serious?”
“Yeah, totally. I’m horrified at what happens if somebody brushes against me in a store. Sex?—my head would probably explode. So, no, no kids in my future.”
Jack was quiet for a while, probably trying to process what I had told him.
“Well…” he said. “Exactly what happens?”
To me, this was a highly personal question. I should have been offended, but, really, this was just Jack, right? It seemed all right for him to ask, and for me to answer. “Nothing good,” I said. “I pick up on peoples’ memories mostly, their most intense memories, which are usually traumatic. I feel extreme grief or sorrow or fear. One time I was walking down the street and I bumped into this woman. She wasn’t watching where she was going. Just that one brief contact… The woman’s four-year-old son got hit by a car and killed a week earlier. I couldn’t stop feeling the agony she felt. It wouldn’t go away. I didn’t know how to stop it. I almost…”
“Almost what?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Just be careful not to touch me.”
“What if somebody didn’t have terrible memories?” Jack asked.
“Everybody has terrible memories.”
“I don’t.”
“Believe me, you do—buried somewhere. What time is it, by the way?”
There was a flash of green light as he checked his wristwatch.
“Ten-fifteen.”
“That’s all.”
“Yeah,” he said, and was quiet for a long moment, before asking, “I was wondering…”
“Go ahead,” I said. I wasn’t reading his mind, and yet I knew what he was about to say. You couldn’t explain something to him: you had to show him.
“What?”
“Take my hand,” I said impatiently, “before I change my mind.”
I held my hand out toward him, and he groped around in the dark until he found it.
“Are your hands always this cold?” he asked.
“I’m like walking death. Haven’t you noticed? Now shut up,” I said. His memories were already flashing through my mind. They seemed pretty harmless. Falling and skinning his knee… followed by crying. Six stitches on the inside of his upper right arm, after he’d tripped and put his arm through the window of his basement door. “I see that you’ve always been a klutz,” I commented, and the images kept coming. His parents fighting over something, which caused him a moderate degree of anxiety, which I could now feel. “You stole money out of your mom’s purse to buy a CD?”
“It was the new Avril,” he said. “I had to have it.”
“Hmmm. You weren’t even that guilty.”
“It was Avril,” he said, as though that justified stealing.
“Okay, here we go—who is Caroline?”
“Freshman crush,” he said with disdain.
“Boy, did she do a number on you! I feel like strangling her myself. She actually said you reminded her or her father? That is so cold!”
“But all in all, it’s not so bad, is it?” he asked.
“Wait. Wait. Your grandfather died—that’s getting pretty bad. You were very sad. You were close to your grandfather. He took you fishing. He took you to the Cubs game… a lot. And—Oh My God!” I cried, feeling a sick surge of adrenaline. My head buzzed. I could barely breathe, the panic I felt was so extreme. I jerked my hand out of his.
“What? What is it?” he asked.
“You saw your dog get hit by a car?”
“Yeah, but he was okay.”
“But you didn’t think he was okay when it happened.”
“No, but the vet operated on him, and—”
“—cut off his leg!” I finished for him.
“He’s alive,” Jack offered. “He hops around pretty good, too.”
“You don’t get the point, do you? You think your memories aren’t so bad, but still you have a dead grandfather and a three-legged dog. That’s enough to make my skin crawl.”
He fell quiet for a moment, and then asked carefully, “You see anything else?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said mildly. “I’m causing you a lot of angst. Right now, my hands are shaking because of your angst. I know you’re not making it up or exaggerating, but I still find it hard to believe.”
“I think maybe it was one of those love-at-first-sight things,” he mumbled. It sounded like an apology.
“I don’t believe in love-at-first-sight. I think you just have terrible taste in girls, or some kind of unusual mental condition. Just try to put it out of your mind. If it persists maybe your doctor can give you some kind of medication. It’s never going to be possible,” I said, and then added, as sort of an offering, “After we find this tree-hugger, we can be friends. I’m down with that. We can have lunch together, and hang out.”
“What if I can’t be your friend?” he asked.
“Then we have a problem. It’s either friend or enemy. I’ve told you way too much. That’s my fault, not yours, and I’m sorry for being so—weak.”
“You just need somebody to talk to,” he said.
“I don’t need anybody,” I said. “I just made a mistake by blabbing everything to you.”
Just then the gym door creaked open, and the lights came on. Light filtered through the bleachers and cast stripes of shadows across us.
Jack appeared puzzled and panicky. He looked over at me, and I shrugged my shoulders.
I got on my knees, and peered over a length of thick wood. What I saw was grosser than most of the things that flashed through my mind. Carl, the janitor, was plodding across the basketball court. The guy weighed a good 350 pounds, and all he wore were white boxer shorts and a pair of flip-flops. His huge stomach hanged over the waistband of his shorts, and white curly hair covered the expanse of his chest. He waddled over to the sideline, grabbed a basketball off the rack, and started dribbling it out onto the court.
I sat back down next to Jack.
“Marvelous,” I said in a vicious whisper.
We both listened to the lonely thud-thud-thud of Carl dribbling.
“You got to be kidding,” Jack whispered.
The basketball thunked as it bounced off the rim.
“Can’t you do something?”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know—like plant a suggestion in his mind to go home.”
“I can’t do that. I can only read what’s already there. I’m not Obi Wan Kenobi, you know.”
“Well, can you tell how long he’s planning on staying?”
I concentrated for a few seconds, and then snorted softly. “The dude thinks in German.”
“Figures.”
“Well, he won’t be too long. Did you ever take a good look at him? He’ll get tired, right?”
“I sure hope so,” Jack said.
We waited, and then mercifully, after about fifteen minutes, Carl called it quits. He returned the basketball to the rack, and headed for the door. The lights in the gym went out.
We were in the dark again, but something was wrong. There was a soft groaning all around us. The bleachers were slowly rolling in on us.
“He hit the switch!” Jack cried.
There wasn’t enough time for us to scuttle along the wall to the end of the bleachers to escape.
For once my pitiful thinness came in handy. I was able to squeeze under one of the bleachers as they began to collapse. I rolled and bounced off a couple lower bleachers and landed hard on the floor. I got up, and I called out to Jack, “Where’s the button?” Before he could respond, I picked the answer out of his mind, and started running through the darkness toward the door.
I felt over the wall next to the door. When I caught the light switch I flipped it and the light fixtures above flickered on.
I saw the two buttons, one red and the other black, just beneath the light switch. I quickly pressed the red button, and the bleachers creaked to a halt. They were almost completely closed. I pictured Jack behind them, crushed like a bug. I saw blood gushing out of his mouth and ears. I saw his head flattened like a pumpkin under a car tire. I pressed the black button, and the bleachers started to inch forward and expand until they were fully opened again.
For a moment everything froze. I couldn’t read Jack, and thought for sure he was dead. I couldn’t move my feet, to go and check if I was all right.
Then he emerged from the far end of the bleachers. He was slightly hunched over, carrying his gym bag with one hand and holding his head with the other.
As he walked toward me I was furious. I wanted to punch and kick him. I hated so much that I had felt scared for him. I didn’t want to feel anything for him.
When he stopped before me, he was still holding his head.
“Don’t say it,” he said.
“Hiding under the bleachers,” I hissed. “What a dumb-ass idea.”
“Can’t we just get this over with,” he said meekly.
“Yeah, definitely,” I seethed, wishing my heart would stop hammering again the inside of my ribcage. “And after this we’re finished, I don’t even know you. Got it?”
I turn round and stormed out of the gym and into the dark hallway.
11
We made our way up the dark stairwell to the second floor. Jack was behind me with the flashlight, and as we jogged up the stairs, the beam of light made creepy jiggling shadows all around us.
We came out on the main second floor hallway. Before we headed for the girls’ room, we turned the other way and went to the end of the hall, where a large window overlooked the parking lot. We had to make sure Carl had left the building. We didn’t need any more surprises.
When we reached the window, we saw Carl’s beat-up red pick-up truck just as it started to rumble out of the dark lot. At least now we had the entire building to ourselves—just me, love-puppy Jack, and whatever creature lurked in the girls’ room.
***********
Jack wanted to enter the room first. How gallant! Maybe he was trying to make up for being such a nitwit. I found the gesture more annoying than endearing. I wondered if he would be so eager if I had told him that I heard something growling in there earlier.
“Go right ahead,” I said. I took the flashlight from him, so that he could open the door and slip between the two lengths of police tape. I really wanted something to be inside, something hideous and festering, to scare the beans out of him. Maybe that way he would finally get the message that this paranormal stuff wasn’t as cool as he believed—that it could be downright dangerous. Maybe, then, too, he would think of me differently, and leave me alone. But all this was wishful thinking; Jack was, at best, a very slow learner.
Once inside, he stood with his ba
ck to the door, holding it open for me.
I rolled my eyes, and gave the flashlight back to him. I slipped through the police tape easily.
It was only after the door shut behind us that I noticed how chilly the air was in the bathroom. Jack was moving the flashlight back and forth. The beam of light swept over the sinks and stalls and pretty pink tiled walls. I felt dizzy as I watched the light playing over everything. Finally I reached over and flipped the light switch next to the interior doorway.
Jack shrieked and squinted when the bright light filled the room.
“Somebody will see,” he complained.
“Nobody’s here,” I said.
“Somebody will see from outside.”
“If they do, they’ll just think somebody forgot to turn off the light.”
Reluctantly, he turned off the flashlight, and returned it to his bag.
We both wandered around the room, checking things out. Everything looked pretty normal to me.
“Hey, why’s the girls’ room so much nicer than the guys’ room?” Jack asked.
“Duh.”
“What? I really want to know.”
“If I have to explain that to you, then you are hopeless.”
“Well, I guess I’m hopeless.”
“My point exactly,” I said, and then asked, “Does it seem cold in here to you?”
He considered it a second or two. “Maybe a little. It must be chilly outside by now.”
“I think it’s a bit more than that.”
“Drops in room temperatures usually accompany the presence of a ghost,” he stated.
I stopped in front of him. “You read that in a book.”
He shrugged. “I heard that from a lot of sources.”
“Well, it doesn’t always work that way. Jerry shows up at home every single morning, and never once did I feel the slightest draft when he was around. Besides, this is different,” I said, “This isn’t cold spots. It’s the whole room. The coldness seems evenly distributed from wall to wall. Do we know which stall Mary Jo was in when she vanished?”
“No,” he said.
I crossed over to the first of the three stalls. I eyed it carefully. Everything looked safe, so I stepped inside. I felt the floor round the toilet base with the toe of my gym shoe, and the floor seemed solid enough. I leaned over and ran my hand over the wall behind the toilet. Other that feeling abnormally cool, the wall seemed all right. I repeated this process with the other two stalls, but discovered nothing that suggested it was possible a person could slip through to an alternate dimension or, for that matter, to any place else.
