But most of all, we were aware of Annelise’s desperate need to fix her image.
It was wonderful to be able to see so much. But we were frightened by what Grandma had done. She must have diluted the swamp water with beer, but it was still highly toxic stuff she had been dumping down our throats. Sure, it was logical that drinking it would give us even more special powers. But it was also logical that it could kill us. Was her intention to wipe us out or to help us? And if she wanted to help us, how did she know it was safe to do it this way?
There was only one way she could be sure. She had already been drinking large quantities of swamp water herself. We knew at once that this was so. We knew it precisely because we could not see the answer in Grandma’s mind.
We stood on the vibrating balcony of her factory. We could see everything in a lot more detail than I had before. The old knitting machines, shiny again, clashed in intricate patterns below us, producing yards and yards of delicate silvery weblike fabric; the tireless spiders, responding to nods from Grandma, scurried to keep the machines oiled and polished. With our heightened powers, we sensed that there was a message, a plan, being woven into the fabric.
But we couldn’t read it. Only if Grandma’s power were superior to ours would she be able to hide anything from us. She smiled in approval at our deduction. And then she was gone. She would never allow us to see everything.
But Annelise, tiny Annelise, who had been given no big dose of swamp water to drink, was powerless to shield anything from us. We could read her completely. I had been wrong about the burning coals. Our image of Annelise changed, becoming clearer and more complex.
I had already figured, with Grandma’s help, that Annelise’s insatiable need for admiration was where she was vulnerable. But now we were so far above her we understood how fragile and weak it made her. She was more pitiful than Lindie had realized. She had no concept of friendship; her journal was her only confidante, and that was why she told it so much. Other people existed only to bolster the delicate mirror of her self-image. And if the support of their admiration was taken away, the mirror would warp, and become distorted and ugly, and eventually shatter—like a picture window bursting in a hurricane. Annelise would do anything to keep that from happening.
We understood her weakness now, and we had a lot of ideas about how to use it. But Grandma was faster.
“Oh, don’t go, Bruce,” Annelise was saying. She wanted this scene to be as publicly humiliating to Lindie as possible.
“Yes, please stay, Bruce,” Grandma said, suddenly breaking out of her paralysis and becoming her usual animated self again. She set down her beach bag and pulled a sheaf of papers out of it. “I have something fascinating for everybody.”
Annelise didn’t like the way Grandma was interrupting Lindie’s confession. Annelise’s mirror, already crooked and unsteady, began to tremble. “Excuse me, Grandma. Could you wait with that stuff until Lindie finishes? Then we can talk about the Winstons,” she said in a sweet, condescending tone, shooting a silent threat at Grandma.
“But you don’t understand, darling,” Grandma said. “Everything that matters is right here.” She waved the sheaf of papers in the fresh ocean breeze.
“Oh, Grandma, what is all that?” Annelise said, a trace of impatience showing in her voice.
“Never you mind,” Grandma said. “Believe me, everyone will get a kick out of it.”
The mirror began to rock dangerously, its reflection of Annelise distorted now, one side of her mouth bulging up almost to her eye, her nose and nostrils widening in a snoutlike way. “But …,” Annelise said, “but you couldn’t have—”
“Yes, dear, I copied your notebook,” Grandma breezily told her.
In the mirror, Annelise screamed.
“Annelise left this notebook on the porch yesterday,” Grandma began.
“It’s just creative writing, from school! And I didn’t leave it there. Grandma stole it from our house.” Annelise looked frantically from one person to another, breathing hard. She was making a monumental effort to ignore her grotesque, piggish face in the mirror. “Grandma stole Jared’s notebook, too. She used them to blackmail us to get something she wanted—just the way she stole something from the Winstons and blackmailed them to sell their house.” She turned on me, knowing I couldn’t lie. “Right, Jared?”
Suddenly everybody’s attention was focused on me.
“Oh, come off it, Annelise,” I said confidently. “I saw you leave that notebook on Grandma’s porch yesterday. Grandma didn’t steal our notebooks or blackmail anybody. She never said anything about visiting the Winstons. Why do you keep making things up? Everybody already knows you lied about Eric.”
Of course, the family believed me. They knew I couldn’t lie.
So why was I suddenly lying so easily now? There could only be one answer: Drinking the swamp water had given me this ability.
Like the rest of the family, Annelise didn’t know that. She stood frozen in place, too horrified to think of what to do.
“Naturally I opened the notebook, not knowing what it was,” Grandma went on explaining to the others, walking toward Aunt Grace, her hands busy with the papers. “As soon as I read a page, I knew it was my duty to make copies, to share it with everybody else.” She thrust a sheet of paper at Aunt Grace. “Here, Grace. You’ll just love this part about Amy.”
“Mother!” Uncle George protested. “If that’s something personal of Annelise’s, you better just stop this foolishness and give it to me.” Uncle George wanted to read it, of course, but he didn’t want anybody else to.
Grandma shrugged. “It’s just fiction—according to Annelise.”
Aunt Grace frowned, not taking the paper. “But still, I’m not sure it’s right to … uh …”
“Oh, come on, Grace!” Grandma said, with a throaty conspiratorial chuckle. “I know you’re dying of curiosity.” She dropped the paper in Aunt Grace’s lap.
And Aunt Grace grabbed it quickly, before the wind blew it away, and began to read.
“Here, Eric. This one’s for you,” Grandma said brightly, handing him a sheet. “And Bruce! What a lucky coincidence I made an extra copy of this page, where she writes about you and what she did to Dee-Dee.”
Of course, Bruce would tell everyone in the neighborhood about Annelise’s journal. Grandma turned away from him, waving the papers again. “George and Beatrice! Have I got a bundle of goodies for you two!”
Annelise’s mirror exploded, her self-image splintering into a million knifelike shards of glass. “She’s lying! It’s a fake! She wrote it herself!” Annelise shouted, rushing toward Grandma to try to stop her from giving copies of her journal to her parents.
“If it’s a fake, then what are you so upset about, dear?” Grandma asked her, whipping the papers into Uncle George’s hand. Annelise grabbed for them, but Uncle George was a lot bigger than she was and held them out of her reach, reading as he did so.
“But Grandma and Lindie, they—they …” Annelise’s voice faded. There was nothing she could do. Her threats against Grandma and Lindie were useless now. Her journal would confirm how sick and dangerous she was. No one would ever believe a word she said again.
Uncle George, Bruce, Eric, and Aunt Grace were reading Grandma’s specially selected pages of the journal avidly. And Annelise, too upset to shield herself, was being sliced by their outrage and repugnance. She just couldn’t take the pain. She stumbled in a confused zigzag path across the sand, trying to escape from their thoughts. Her worried mother went after her; her father kept on reading.
Grandma, Lindie, and I were part of the action on the beach; we also watched it from a vast distance.
Thanks for the beer, Grandma.
My pleasure.
The three of us were thinking about what it was going to be like for Annelise now. Her parents would probably send her to some school for criminally disturbed teenagers, a highly disciplinary place where her every move would be watched. She would almost ce
rtainly be under psychiatric care, which she would detest. And being a reader, she would be constantly slashed by the terrible things people were thinking about her.
Will she ever get better? Lindie wondered.
Maybe, Grandma told us, and vanished into her factory.
Lindie and I were alone together in our open house by the river. We had all the time we wanted. We could fix it so ten hours went by in our own world while only a nanosecond passed on the beach.
But we weren’t relaxing. As much as we disliked Annelise, we were worried about the suffering she was in for now. We would be very clearly aware of her pain, because of our special powers. It would hurt, we would try to avoid it as much as we could, but we still probably wouldn’t be able to resist sneaking in and taking an occasional peek at what she was going through. We also knew we’d have to be dealing with the shock waves in the family for months to come, and that would be no fun at all.
At the same time, we couldn’t help feeling pretty smug.
Because of our superabilities, we would have no problem hiding our relationship from the rest of the family. Our lives, stretching out endlessly, would be whatever we chose to make them. We didn’t know exactly how much power we had, only that we had a tremendous amount of it. There seemed to be almost no limit to our ability to read people.
But we knew we had to monitor ourselves. We had to remember Annelise. If we forgot, we could become more dangerous than she had been. After all, Lindie had committed fraud with her SATs.…
And you lied, Jared, Lindie reminded me. I mean, it was for a good cause. But it was still the first time you ever lied.
I know. I’ve got to … think about that.
It was a lucky thing there were two of us, two minds together more alert than one, each of us there to keep the other from slipping. Not allowing our power to corrupt us was really our only problem.
Wrong, Grandma cackled.
She was right, as always. We did have another problem.
Grandma had drunk more swamp water than either of us; she had more power than we did. And Grandma was plenty smart. To rub it in, she pulled us deeper into her factory.
Machines rumbled and clanged. And now we could read part of the information stitched into the weblike pattern of the fabric, the older fabric, already woven and fed out of the machines. The patterns told us that for the last month Grandma had known about the boating accident, and Eric’s sunburn, and Annelise’s obsession with other people’s opinions. Grandma had searched for a way to protect people from Annelise, especially me and Lindie, her favorites.
The pattern changed as we moved along toward the machines, studying the fabric, keeping away from Grandma’s spider employees. Here the weaving was irregular, unsure. This was where Grandma had taken a risk. She had gambled that putting Annelise in the swamp, making her painfully aware of what people were really thinking about her, would cripple her—as soon as her journal went public. She wasn’t sure it would work.
But the gamble had paid off. The fabric became tight and orderly again. We read about how part of Grandma’s plan had been to make us stronger than Annelise by secretly feeding us swamp water. If Annelise ever tried to use her powers in a dangerous or malicious way again, we’d be able to outmaneuver her. That would keep her in check. In this way Grandma had prevented Annelise from wrecking many lives, as she otherwise would have done without any special power at all.
We approached the noisy machines and craned our necks to see the fabric that was now being woven. We didn’t dare get too close to those plunging needles. But we were near enough to see that this new pattern was illegible to us. Not only was it unfinished, but it was in another language; we could read no information in it at all. At least we were smart enough to understand why. This was the part she was still working on, the part that hadn’t happened yet. She would never allow us to know anything about that.
She dropped us from the booming factory back into the peacefulness of our house. Crickets chirped; water lapped gently in the evening hush. Soon it would be night.
Was Grandma’s factory her real self, or was it just a game she was playing with us? We didn’t know. But at least she did seem to be on the right side. The patterns she had allowed us to read were basically good things she had accomplished.
But her methods were not exactly humane. There must have been a less punishing and vindictive way to stop Annelise. Grandma hadn’t asked our permission to feed us swamp water. And the other things she had done—robbing the ATM, blackmailing the Winstons—were far from benevolent. We realized that she had somehow kept that part of the old fabric hidden from us. Grandma was ruthless and amoral, and she was in control.
And now the serenity of our house trembled like the darkening surface of the river, as we realized how much we didn’t know. The ATM cards, for instance. Just picking the numbers from people’s brains wasn’t enough to rob the bank. How had she gotten the cards away from people without their being aware of it right away? It was also suspiciously convenient that Bruce had been there on the beach today, to spread the news about Annelise. And then there was the question of the swamp water: How had Grandma known it was safe to drink it? And why wasn’t it poisonous? We didn’t have a clue.
OK, we had power. What we didn’t have was protection from Grandma.
But we both felt Grandma’s attention was elsewhere for the moment. “How much do you think she can do?” Lindie whispered, glancing around, hoping Grandma couldn’t hear us.
“Almost anything,” I whispered back, feeling as tense as Lindie about this conversation. “I wonder what her next move is going to be.”
“Do you think there’s any way we can hide from her or try to protect ourselves?”
“There might be,” I said apprehensively. “I mean, she can’t be constantly spying on us every minute. There’s only one of her, after all. So maybe we can—”
Suddenly we sensed skittering above us, a tiny noise, and jumped nervously up from the floor mats. Then we laughed. It was only a little spider, busily weaving a silvery web up in the rafters.
That was a relief.
About the Author
William Sleator (1945–2011) was an American science fiction author best known for his young adult novels. Raised outside of St. Louis, Missouri, Sleator was the eldest of four children. After graduating from Harvard University with a degree in English, he moved to England for a short time, where he played music for ballet classes and developed the ideas for Blackbriar, his first novel. For many years, he was the rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet.
Sleator is the author of over thirty books, including The Angry Moon, which was awarded the Caldecott Medal and nominated for the National Book Award, as well as the quasi-autobiographical science fiction thrillers: The Night the Heads Came, Others See Us, and Oddballs. In his later years, he split his time between Boston and rural Thailand.
Author photo © 2002 by Abrams
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1993 by William Sleator
Cover design by Angela Goddard
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1909-5
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Others See Us Page 11
