Between Worlds

by Skip Brittenham

  Oblivious to her narrow escape, India looked up from her worksheet and saw Marshall holding a test tube above her head.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, bewildered.

  “Nothing,” he replied, pushing the test tube firmly into the holder on Jim’s table. “Jim, do us all a favor and try not to touch that again. You’re not smart enough to play with chemicals.”

  The students around them snickered, and a few even broke into spontaneous applause. His teacher, oblivious to the unfolding adolescent drama, lifted his head to see what was happening, then noticed the time.

  “Class dismissed,” he called out as the bell rang. “Put your projects in your cubbies. We’ll finish up on Wednesday.”

  Jim stared at Marshall, gaping in disbelief as the rest of the class began to shuffle their papers and projects. The inexplicable confrontation and demonstration of Marshall’s athleticism made him feel like a bat had been applied to the back of his head.

  Marshall smirked, then bolted out the door, heading for his locker.

  CHAPTER 48

  THAT WAS . . . THAT WAS . . . awesome, Marshall thought a few minutes later, as he strolled across the gym’s wooden basketball court. He heard the sounds of dribbling, followed by the faint whoosh of something speeding toward him, so he instinctively spun around. Three basketballs were on a collision course with his head. He shifted slightly to the right, and the first one ripped by his left ear. He stopped the second one with his right hand and grabbed the third with his left.

  Jim and his two closest friends were standing in a neat row, throwing arms still extended. Marshall smirked and decided on the spot to name the three amigos the Wit brothers—Jim was Dim, and the others were Nit and Half.

  With a smooth, powerful lateral movement of his right arm, he whipped a basketball back at the surprised gang. It smacked into the gym floor a couple feet in front of Nit, then ricocheted into his solar plexus, bowling him over. The basketball rebounded into Half’s chin, clipping his head back so sharply that he tumbled roughly to the ground.

  Two down, Dim to go, Marshall thought, grinning.

  His face reflecting the first hint of fear, Jim bent his knees into a basketball player’s defensive crouch, with his hands pushed out to grab or deflect the remaining ball.

  Showing off, Marshall spun the basketball on his right index finger, then let it slide into his palm. He rocketed it up so high that it disappeared into the shadows cast by the gym’s rafters. It bounced off the ceiling and rushed down, smacking Jim squarely on the forehead. He collapsed onto the floor, goggle-eyed, sucking for breath like a goldfish tossed out of water.

  Zen calm, Marshall patiently crossed his arms over his chest, waiting to see what would happen next.

  Jim scrambled awkwardly to his feet. His forehead sported an ugly red welt, and his face had contorted into a mask of fury. He charged toward Marshall with his right fist cocked back and up, screaming and cursing.

  It seemed to Marshall that the dimwitted fool’s body was moving toward him in slow motion. When Jim was just a foot away, Marshall agilely sidestepped so Jim’s fist breezed by its intended target: his face. Then Marshall swift-kicked Jim in the rear as he flew past. The perfectly timed blow knocked Jim off his feet, and he landed hard on his back. Dazed, he popped up off the floor faster than common sense dictated and stumbled awkwardly toward Marshall, struggling to keep his fists up.

  Marshall went on the offensive. He rushed forward, grabbed Jim’s right wrist, and before his opponent could react, used it as a lever to jerk him forward while driving his left elbow into Jim’s exposed sternum. Jim howled in agony and fell to his knees.

  The other two Wit brothers had regained their footing, but stood back out of harm’s way, watching with mute horror as their friend was being methodically whipped. They were too afraid—or too smart—to jump in and help.

  Any opponent with half a brain would have thrown in the towel and begged for mercy. But Jim was different. Like a zombie on steroids, he lurched to his feet again, readying himself for one final, desperate gambit: a blind, wobbly, head-down bull rush. Because Jim was, well, really Dim, Marshall decided it would be easy to play the same trick again, so he waited for him to get close enough, then dodged aside. Before Jim’s body skidded past his, Marshall landed a lightning-quick left-right combo to his ribs. Jim buckled over, then vomited up his lunch on the gym’s shiny floor.

  Marshall looked up and beckoned to the two stunned rubbernecking Wit brothers, who both fled the scene like ducks at the first blast of a shotgun.

  “I guess we’re done here, Jim,” Marshall said with a smile. “I hope you don’t have to ‘make me’ tell you what to do again.”

  CHAPTER 49

  STUDENTS WEREN’T ALLOWED to keep their phones on while they were in the school building, but Mayberry had never been good at following rules. Her history teacher, Ms. Kendall, was just discussing a World War I battle when Mayberry’s phone vibrated. She slipped it out of her pocket and glanced down.

  It was from Marshall: Com2 nurse’s offc, 911.

  In class, she texted back.

  911!!!!

  Mayberry tucked her phone away and raised her hand. Ms. Kendall used her pointer to acknowledge Mayberry.

  “May I please be excused? I need to go to the nurse’s office.”

  Ms. Kendall’s lips turned down. “There are only fifteen minutes of class remaining, Mayberry. Do you think you can—”

  “I think I might be sick, Ms. Kendall,” she said. “I mean . . . vomit.”

  Ms. Kendall wrinkled her nose and waved her out with the pointer. “Feel better, dear.”

  Mayberry gathered her books and boogied down to the nurse’s office. As usual, the nurse wasn’t there, because there was only one nurse to serve two school districts. Mayberry wasn’t happy about rushing to see Marshall the second he beckoned, especially considering how he’d been acting. As she entered the nurse’s office, she saw Marshall sitting on the edge of the examining table, swinging his legs back and forth, looking loveable and cute. In spite of herself, she smiled a little.

  “Okay, I’m here,” she said frostily. “What’s the emergency?”

  Marshall jumped off the table and walked over to Mayberry, looking down at her with his warm brown eyes. “First of all, I want to apologize. I’ve been rude, or avoiding you, and I’m really sorry.”

  Mayberry rolled her eyes a little. This was a good start. “Okay. Apology accepted.”

  Marshall leaned back against the table. “I need to tell you what just happened. Jim was tossing a test tube of acid around and would have shattered it on this girl’s desk and smoked her, but I went all superhero and snatched it out of midair.”

  “That’s . . . unusual.”

  “After class, Jim and his friends tried to jump me, but I kicked his ass and scared the hell out of his buddies.”

  Mayberry’s eyes widened. “You’re saying that you snatched acid out of the air, then beat up Jim. Maybe you’ve turned into an X-Man or something.”

  “Show me your back,” Marshall said, twirling a finger around.

  “Excuse me?” Mayberry said.

  “Just humor me and let me look at your back for a second?”

  “Okay, okay,” she said. She turned and allowed him to stretch down the fabric of her sweater to expose her upper back.

  A shiver coursed through Mayberry’s body as Marshall touched her between the shoulder blades.

  “It’s there,” he said softly.

  “What’s there?”

  “Monga’s mark.”

  “No way,” she said, thinking, How does he know about Monga?

  “Look in the mirror.”

  Confounded, she maneuvered until she could see her back in the mirror. In the middle, three inches above her bra strap, was a red swirl.

  “I have one that looks exactly
the same,” he said, turning around and lifting his own shirt to show her. “I think we actually went to Nith.”

  Mayberry’s mind blazed as she recollected flashes of all the “dreams” she’d been struggling to forget. The Sleviccs, Monga, Co-Co. It was if she and Marshall had lived and forgotten a whole lifetime together.

  He pulled his sweater down and turned around. “You didn’t say Who’s Monga? or What’s Nith?”

  Even though Mayberry had been confused by the bizarre images and her feelings for Marshall before, now she was really struggling to keep herself together. Magic wasn’t real. Science was real. She groped for a sensible response, but finding one was like trying to hold on to water shooting from a fire hose.

  “Things you believe can manifest physically,” she countered. “Lots of people have psychosomatic illnesses—they think they’re sick, so they exhibit real symptoms.”

  “Okay, but how did we both dream the exact same dream and both create the same marks on our backs?”

  “I can’t explain that,” Mayberry said, shaking her head. “But, as far as Jim goes, maybe it’s just that you finally got pissed enough to do what you could have done all along. Look, Marshall, we both know Nith couldn’t have happened. We thought we were there for over two weeks, but we were only asleep for sixteen hours.”

  Marshall leaned back on the examining table and closed his eyes, thinking. “Maybe the tree exuded a pheromone that made us hallucinate together or something? My memories are so clear . . . and they seem so real.”

  “Mine do too,” Mayberry said, taking his hands in hers and squeezing. “We’re a little crazy, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, pulling her in close. “I think we’re the sanest people around.”

  Mayberry tilted her face up, bringing her lips tantalizingly close to his. He leaned down, and kissed her, just as he had in the dream. She clearly remembered the feel and taste of his lips, and their intimacy seemed perfectly natural and right. This was all . . . to say the least . . . very surprising. But the how and the why still eluded her bewildered brain.

  CHAPTER 50

  WORD OF JIM’S astonishing debacle spread through the school like wildfire. No one was unhappy that the bully had been exposed as a mere mortal, but they were shocked to hear who had delivered the ass-kicking. The next day, many of the boys nodded respectfully when they crossed Marshall’s path, and more than one of the girls looked him over.

  After scrutinizing him with fresh eyes, they decided that he was much cuter than they’d recalled, and a few found reasons to talk to him. Girls had never before given him even a whiff of attention, and he had no idea how to behave, so he smiled and made awkward chitchat, but otherwise tried to ignore them.

  After their final class, Mayberry and Marshall met and strolled hand in hand over to her house. Yesterday, after they’d kissed, and then kissed some more, she’d brought him up to date on her strange test results and wanted to show him what she’d found.

  Since Mayberry’s mom and dad were still away, when Marshall came over, he settled comfortably into her mom’s desk chair. He leaned in and booted up one of the computers while Mayberry sat in front of a worktable and did the same.

  “I’ve been thinking about the DNA problem you described, and I did a few hours of research for you last night,” Marshall said. “Scientists studying ancient bone fossils use CT scanners to find organic molecules. Then they use DNA mapping to investigate them at the molecular level. They can find DNA fragments that are hundreds of millions of years old—pollen, spores . . . things like that. They even extracted DNA from a mummified hadrosaur.”

  “I’ve read about that Jurassic World stuff,” Mayberry said, warming to the idea that he had worked so hard last night to help her.

  “The School of Environmental Sciences in England has the leading experts on this,” Marshall said, rolling the chair back and forth while he spoke. “Last night I sort of . . . hacked my way into their data banks and poked around.”

  “You did what?”

  “I have no idea how to decode it all, but I can pull it up right now,” he said. “It could help.”

  Ping.

  The data came through seconds later, and Mayberry opened the first PDF, which exhibited an artist’s rendering of a prehistoric tree. She closed it and opened another image: an apatosaurus browsing on the foliage at the top of a towering palm. All the images had DNA samples attached in a separate data packet.

  Mayberry recalibrated her mom’s equipment to compare the DNA from the ancient fragments to the DNA samples she’d taken from the aspen trees and walking stick. Once she did, she determined that there were numerous differences, especially with the walking stick’s DNA sample, which didn’t match anything they had. But at least with the other samples, there were similarities, too—more than she’d found with anything that lived on Earth now. Could the samples from the aspen grove’s trees that were attached to the main root ball organism really be that old? Hundreds of millions of years old? Older? That’s what this data implied. She showed Marshall the results.

  “That’s amazing,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Mayberry said. “Amazing in the purest sense of the word. Meaning completely implausible. I’m not doing the analysis wrong; it’s just that the results make zero sense, especially for the big tree in the center, whose DNA doesn’t correlate to any other species, including the other aspens in the grove.”

  “Yeah. Well, there’s a lot about DNA we don’t understand, right? More than ninety-seven percent of human DNA is the same as the DNA in apes. It’s the three percent that makes humans unique.”

  “Sure does, Marshall. So what we have here, folks,” she proclaimed, her cadence and voice mimicking that of a carnival barker, “is a giant tree that is hundreds of millions of years old. And guess what else? It looks exactly like an ordinary aspen, but it isn’t one . . . so it must be wearing a clever disguise.”

  CHAPTER 51

  THEY STARED AT EACH OTHER for a second and then Marshall said, “Let’s get back online and see what else we can find out about the Mystery Forest.”

  “On it,” Mayberry replied.

  She started digging. There were rumors and tall tales aplenty, but it was hard to figure out if any of the stories were grounded in reality. There was an article about a hiker who got lost inside the forest for weeks before he was finally found passed out on its edge, dehydrated, hypothermic, and starving, having walked holes in the soles of his shoes. That one might have been true. The story of a saucer-shaped spaceship hovering above the aspen grove and using a magnetic ray to suck up all the deer, rabbits, and birds in a one-mile radius was likely false. Both stories were hearsay.

  “Wow,” Marshall said, perplexed. He rolled the chair over to look at the computer screen.

  He’d found an article on the front page of the Eden Grove Gazette from about a year and a half ago. The headline was MISSING BOY FOUND. A big color photo in the middle of the page showed the headshot of a sharp-featured boy with an unruly shock of red hair, who had a smudge or maybe a birthmark on his right cheek. The photo’s caption read Aaron Fitzsimmons Rescued.

  Marshall summed up the contents of the newspaper article for her: “Aaron and his younger sister, Laura, were playing in Thomas Park, and Laura ran out onto the ice that covered the pond. The ice cracked, and she fell through. Aaron did everything he could, but she drowned.”

  “That’s sad,” Mayberry replied.

  “Yeah, but wait until you hear the rest. Aaron was really upset, and he left home to take a bike ride the day of Laura’s funeral. But he didn’t come back, and after twenty-four hours they formed a search party. A forest ranger found a kid’s tracks in the meadow by the Mystery Forest and followed them for miles, and finally found him deep in the Mystery Forest. Aaron was breathing, but he was in a coma. The ranger carried him out.”

  “The forest ranger who
rescued him couldn’t have been the guy we saw,” Mayberry said with a chuckle. “That dude couldn’t lug a grapefruit out of the forest.”

  Marshall leaned into the computer and touched the photo on the screen. “Look at him, Mayberry. Wouldn’t you say that Aaron looks a lot like Urrn? A younger version of him, obviously, but still . . . I thought Urrn looked familiar when we first met him, but I couldn’t quite place him. Aaron was a year behind me at school. And Aaron sounds sort of like Urrn, doesn’t it?”

  Mayberry’s skin began to crawl. It was impossible, but everything that had happened was impossible. “See if he’s still in a coma.”

  While Marshall’s fingers began flying over the keyboard, Mayberry decided to take a cookie-baking break. For once she was happy to be doing it, not trying to bury a bad day.

  CHAPTER 52

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, Marshall snatched a fresh cookie from the plate Mayberry offered, gulped it down, and grabbed another. He smiled. “I’ll make the next batch of cookies—promise.”

  “Sure,” said Mayberry.

  Marshall pushed back from the desk. “So . . . Aaron is alive and still in a coma. A blogger who works at Methodist United says his parents visit him all the time. It’s weird—he’s brain-dead, but his body kept growing normally and his muscles didn’t wither away—which never happens.”

  “Wait a minute,” Mayberry said her brain kicking into overdrive. “We know our bodies didn’t come with us when we went to Nith, because when we got back, our clothes were clean and you were wearing the glasses you’d lost on Nith. We did bring back those marks Monga made on us—but he used magic for that. Hypothetically, suppose the Wishing Tree took our minds to a world in another dimension, where they inhabited shadow bodies or clones or something. Our Earth bodies stayed under the tree, and it would seem to people here like we were in comas and brain-dead, too, until our minds woke up back in our Earth bodies.”