Stranger in the Woods

by Geof Johnson

  “Lordamighty,” he groaned. “Not really. I’ve tried a couple of times, but it puts me right to sleep. It’s the most boring thing I’ve ever tried to read. And the writing is so tiny and crammed together that I can barely make out what he’s saying half the time.”

  “Can I have a look at it? You said I could, when we first found it.”

  “Zach.” His mother fixed him with a stern look. “How are you going to have time to read through that dreadful thing and still do your homework? And you’ve been trying to read that Civil War history book, too. I think your plate is full right now, don’t you?”

  Grandpa raised his eyebrows. “Civil War history? You’re reading that? That’s still a touchy subject around here. Is that for school?”

  “No, it’s a…it’s just something I saw in our library and I thought it might be interesting.” He shrugged one shoulder. “You know, it’s our heritage and everything.”

  “There are few folks around here who don’t want to admit the war’s over. Fellows like Marty Ross. He’s got a Confederate flag bumper sticker on the back of his truck, and another one that says I’m not racist. I hate everyone.”

  “That man is awful,” Zach’s mother said. “I feel bad for the Ross kids because they are related to him.”

  “Me too,” Zach said. The conversation had veered so far off the subject of the lab log that Zach wasn’t sure how to tactfully steer it back, so he tried the direct approach. “Grandpa, you never said whether or not you’re going to let me borrow Uncle Nicholas’s book.”

  Grandpa faced Zach’s mother and said, “What do you think? Do you have a problem with it?”

  “I don’t know.” She pursed her lips. “Zach, you still haven’t said why you’re so interested in it.”

  Zach’s mind raced as he tried to think of a plausible reason, besides the real one. “I…he was my relative and everything, and he must’ve been doing important research, don’t you think? I kinda want to know what it was. After all, he did make a living at it. He must’ve come up with at least a few things that were worth something.”

  “I guess his work is no longer classified by the government,” Grandpa said. “I don’t think he would’ve left me the book, otherwise.”

  “So…is that a yes?”

  “Unless your mom says no.”

  Zach’s mother gave him a steady look before saying, “Just don’t skip the homework.”

  “I won’t.” Zach fought back a smile. “Can I get the book tonight, Grandpa?”

  “I ’spose. We’ll go back to my house after dinner and get it. I gotta feed Beepee anyway.”

  Beepee, who had been lying quietly beside Zach the whole time, perked up at her name and thumped her tail against the floor. Zach glanced at her and thought, It’s a good thing she can’t talk, because she might know the real reason why I want the book.

  * * *

  Zach blinked his eyes open when he felt something rubbing his shoulder.

  His mother’s gentle hand.

  “Honey,” she said, “you fell asleep with your light on. Why don’t you put the book away and call it a night?”

  He mumbled that he would, and she kissed him on the head and left. He closed Uncle Nicholas’s log, which had been open to page three. He had started reading it as soon as he’d gotten into bed, but hadn’t made it very far. The script was so dense that he had to focus extra hard on it, and the prose wasn’t exactly riveting. The first few entries were dry accounts of what Uncle Nicholas had done in his lab on those particular days, accompanied by inexplicable series of numbers and details about arcane equipment.

  Zach set the heavy, leather-bound tome on his bedside table and stared dully at it, wondering how long it would take to find anything useful in it, or if he even would. He realized he could be wasting his time, but something told him that the answer to Bo’s problem lay hidden in those yellowed, musty pages of spiderlike writing.

  * * *

  The Ross kids caught up to Zach the next morning at school by his locker. Jason checked to see if any strangers were listening, and apparently satisfied they weren’t, said in a low voice, “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “You know what.”

  “The book,” Shelby added.

  “Oh, that.” Zach knew what they meant all along. He didn’t want to admit that he’d fallen asleep after just two and a half pages of reading the log. “I haven’t found anything in it yet. I’ll look at it again as soon as I can.”

  “Right after school,” Justin said firmly.

  “Gotta do homework, first, or my mom will ground me.”

  “Give us the book, then.”

  “Grandpa said not to take it out of the house. It’s really his book, anyway.”

  “Then you need to hurry up with your homework and get to it. If there’s nothing in there that matters, we need to know soon, so we can come up with a new plan. We’ve gotta help Bo get home before the mark on his arm turns completely black.”

  * * *

  Zach had to look at his watch twice, just to be sure. Five thirty? Already?

  He was sitting at his desk in his room, doing math homework, and he still had a short story to read for English Lit. He turned in his seat and eyed the laboratory log book, still waiting on his bedside table where he’d left it the previous night. I won’t get to look at it today at this rate.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and shouted, “Too much homework!”

  His mother appeared in his doorway moments later. “Do you need some help?”

  “No.” He scowled at his open math book: solve for x in the following equations. “I have to be able to do it myself. We have a test on Friday, and Mrs. Hastings gave us forty problems to solve for tomorrow, and I’ve also got to do some reading for Lit because we might have a quiz.”

  “Do you wish I hadn’t signed you up for advanced classes?”

  “No, it’s not that. This isn’t any harder than what I was doing last year in my old school, it’s just that my teachers give out assignments all at the same time. It’s like they plan it that way.”

  “Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with. I’ve going to get dinner ready.”

  He waved goodbye without looking at her and turned his attention back to the math book. Get it done, Zach. Get it done.

  Chapter 28

  Zach loved Friday afternoons. School was out for the weekend, and he didn’t have any homework on this particular one, so he used the time to plow through the log book again.

  He’d made little progress so far, and grumbled to himself as he sat down at his desk with the old journal. He checked his watch: 4:30. I’ve got a couple hours before dinner. I’ll give it ’til then and call it a day.

  After an hour of struggling with the cryptic and nearly illegible entries, Zach began flipping pages and looking ahead, just to see if anything relevant jumped out at him. Near the mid-point of the book, he stumbled on a detailed sketch of a cylinder that looked like the ones in the lab. A caption beneath it read: Wireless Personnel Transport. Next to it was a note from Uncle Nicholas. Curse General H! Requirements are too demanding. Accommodating taller troops in full gear puts too much strain on field capacity. Third coil burnout this month!

  Zach felt his pulse quicken and studied at the sketch closely. I bet this is how Bo got here, through this thing. I’ve got to call the Rosses now. Hope they paid their phone bill.

  Zach was relieved when Justin answered after the third ring. Zach said, “I found something. Can you come over?”

  “Mama said we gotta stay home ’till she gets off work, and she probably won’t let us go out after that.”

  “You need to come over tomorrow as soon as you can.”

  * * *

  Zach opened the front door on Saturday morning for his friends. “Good timing,” Zach said when Jason, Justin, and Shelby stepped inside. “My mom’s gone to run errands.”

  “So what do you have to show us?” Jason said.

  “It’s in
my room.” Zach led them upstairs and opened the log book on his desk, then pointed to the drawing of the cylinder. “Recognize that?”

  “It’s in the lab, isn’t it?” Justin asked.

  “There are two of them, remember? Uncle Nicholas called them Personnel Transports. From what I’ve been able to figure out so far, the U.S. Army was hiring him to come up with a way to electronically move troops around, which I guess is so that they wouldn’t be exposed to enemy fire during battle.”

  “Holy shmoly,” Justin said. “He was going to zap soldiers around, like poof.” He flicked out the fingers of one hand. “That’s pretty wild stuff.”

  “Uncle Nicholas built the two cylinders and was trying to transfer little stuff from one to the other, just that short distance, but he was having a bunch of problems.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Shelby said. “That’s something out of a sci-fi movie.”

  “Not only had it never been done before, but the Army’s brass wanted the system to be able to handle its biggest soldiers, in full gear, including a helmet.” He put one hand on top of his head. “Which made them even taller. Uncle Nicholas complains about that in a couple of places in the log. He says it made it too hard to generate the appropriate field, whatever that means. Stuff kept burning out and blowing up.”

  Jason scratched his jaw and looked at the book. “We ought to take this out to the woods and show it to Bo, then maybe it’ll jar his memory and he can say for sure if this is it.”

  “We can’t, but I thought of something better.” Zach held up his cell phone. “I can take a few pictures of the lab with this, and we can show them to Bo. The hard part will be talking my grandfather into letting us in there. He’s got the only key.”

  Zach and his friends gathered on his grandfather’s front porch while they explained what they wanted, and his grandfather stood in his doorway and listened, the old man still unshaven and wearing his slippers.

  Grandpa shook his head when Zach finished. “I don’t see why you want to go down there. What’s so special about that lab, all of a sudden?”

  Zach had no answer, and a wrench of panic seized his stomach while he struggled to think of one. Fortunately, Shelby said, “He wants to post a picture of it on Facebook. We thought it would be a cool thing to brag about to his friends back in Raleigh, ’cause they think they’re such hot shots, living in the big city and everything. I bet none of them has a laboratory in their basement.”

  “No, probably not.” Grandpa rubbed his stubbly cheek and eyed them for a long moment. “Let me shave and put on some shoes and I’ll let you in there.”

  Zach practically vibrated with anticipation as he and his friends watched Grandpa fit the key into the lock of the steel door to the lab. Grandpa turned it and it clicked, but before he opened it, he looked over his shoulder at Shelby. “It’s still gonna be musty in there. Do you have your inhaler?”

  She patted her pants pocket and nodded. “I don’t think I’ll need it.”

  “Have you had any asthma attacks lately?”

  “Not in a while.”

  Zach knew exactly how long it had been. She hadn’t had one since she’d gotten the special treatment at Bo’s cabin. Zach knew she hadn’t needed her inhaler, either, but kept it with her as a precaution.

  Grandpa gestured with his head toward the light switch beside him. “Get that, will you?”

  Zach flicked it on, Grandpa opened the door, and they went inside. It was just as Zach remembered it. Cobwebs stretched across everything like ancient laundry. Dusty electronic devices with dials and meters and switches filled the benches, and in the center of the room was the ominous-looking contraption with the towering cylinders.

  “Messy,” Justin said, “isn’t it?”

  Shelby rubbed one fingertip across the top of a metal equipment case, leaving a narrow streak through the dust. “We should clean it up sometime.”

  “Ugh.” Grandpa surveyed the room. “It would take a month, looks like.”

  “Not if we did it together.”

  He gave Zach a sideways glance, and Zach knew what he was thinking. He doesn’t want to fool with it. He thinks it’ll be too much work.

  “Let’s not worry about that right now.” Zach pulled his phone from his pocket. “I just want to take a couple of pictures and get out of here.” He held it up and snapped a few random shots before focusing on his real subject, the Wireless Personnel Transport.

  He clicked the photo and started to put his phone back in his pocket, but Grandpa said, “Don’t you want to get a couple of your buddies? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to put on Facebook? That’s what this is for, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Zach realized that he hadn’t taken any pictures of his new friends, and he hadn’t posted anything in days. Or has it been weeks? He handed the phone to his grandfather. “Take one of us together in front of one of the cylinders, please.” He showed Grandpa what button to press, and he snapped the photo of them and showed it to them.

  “Looks good,” Jason said. “Now let’s get out of here. I feel a sneeze coming on.”

  * * *

  Zach wore his old backpack as he and his friends hiked through the woods with Beepee in search of Bo.

  “I hope we don’t have to go far before we find him,” Justin said.

  “Or he finds us, more like,” his brother added.

  The weather had turned cooler over the last two days and the sky was a clear, deep blue, hinting at the coming of autumn, making the walk more pleasant. Zach hardly noticed. All he could think about was what Bo’s reaction would be to the photos on Zach’s phone. What if he doesn’t recognize anything? If the lab isn’t the room we’re looking for, then what will do?

  They found the white-haired giant waiting for them at the bridge he’d built over the creek. “Your faces seem serious today,” he said as they approached him. “Something of grave import must be on your minds.”

  Zach held up his phone. “We have something you need to see. We think this might be how you came to Earth. This might be the room you told us about.” Zach turned it on and showed him the pictures they’d taken earlier.

  Bo’s eyes were intense as he looked over Zach’s shoulder at the photos of the lab. His strongest response was for the one of the tall cylinder. “That looks familiar.” He reached over and tapped the screen with one long finger. “I think that is what I saw that day, forty-four years ago.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “As sure as possible, under the circumstances.”

  Relieved smiles broke out all around, and Zach slipped off his backpack and pulled out the framed photo of Uncle Nicholas and Aunt Winnie. “Is this the guy you saw?”

  Bo examined it briefly and said, “I believe so. Who is this man, and where is this place?”

  “It’s my great-great uncle, and the room is in my basement. It was his laboratory. Do you know what that is?”

  “It is a place for performing scientific experiments.”

  Jason gestured at the photo in Zach’s hand and said, “We think you were the result of one of them, one that didn’t go quite the way he expected.”

  Justin grinned. “Maybe this is your ticket back home, Bo.”

  Bo stared at them with a confused expression, and Shelby said, “Maybe we can fix it up and reverse the experiment.”

  The creases in Bo’s forehead deepened. “Do you have experience with such things?”

  “No,” Zach said. “That’s the tricky part. I think we’re going to have to tell my grandfather about you and get him to help. He used to have a TV repair shop, and he’s pretty smart about stuff like this. But you said for us not to tell anyone, so we’re asking if we can make an exception for him.”

  Bo stood silently for several seconds, then said, “Can I trust your grandfather?”

  “Of course.” Zach said. “Can we bring him out here to meet you? He won’t believe us, otherwise.”

  Bo put his hands on his hips and lowered his head, and he
seemed to be studying the loose rocks and brown, dried leaves and pine needles at his feet, until he finally lifted his gaze. “Bring him to this location. I will meet you here when I sense you have returned.”

  “That might be a bit of a problem. Grandpa has a bad knee and it hurts him to walk very far. Can we meet you closer to the road instead?”

  “I will meet you as close to the edge of the forest as I dare.”

  * * *

  Zach and his friends rode with Grandpa in his pickup truck to the woods, Zach in the cab with Grandpa while the twins and Shelby sat in the bed with Beepee. They had explained most everything as quickly as possible about Bo and talked Grandpa into going, reluctantly, to meet him.

  Grandpa turned onto the last street and grumbled, “I still say this is nuts.”

  “You won’t feel that way once you meet him,” Zach said.

  “If you weren’t my grandson I wouldn’t be doing this.”

  He parked next to the long barricade and everyone got out and began hiking into the forest, Jason in his usual position at the head of their column, Zach in the rear with Grandpa.

  Grandpa limped more than usual, and Zach suspected he was doing it to make a statement about how he felt about the whole affair. Shelby held Beepee’s leash and the dog trotted beside her, ears up, tongue out, tail wagging.

  “How far do we have to go, Zach?” Grandpa said after they’d only gone a short distance. “My knee’s not going to put up with much more of this.”

  “Not far. He said he’d meet us close to the edge of the forest, but we never see him coming. He kinda sneaks up on us.”

  It wasn’t long before Grandpa raised one hand and stopped, then flexed his leg and grimaced. “Hold up a minute. It’s hurting a lot right now.”

  They waited on the trail and scanned the forest for their tall friend, and after several minutes Grandpa said, “He’s not coming.” He gave Zach an unforgiving look, and Zach knew what he was thinking. He doesn’t believe us.

  Zach cupped his hand to his mouth to call for Bo, but was interrupted by a deep voice behind him. “I am here.”