White Rabbit Society Part One

by Brendan Detzner

  He split the difference and just didn't answer. Rob got the point and kept going.

  "Low profile. I got it. Anyway, you get the point." He finished his root beer. "Weird things happen all the time. Most of the time, nobody sees them."

  #

  Andrew’s grandmother pulled up to the curb in front of the tanning salon twenty minutes after he hung up the phone. Andrew climbed into the front passenger seat and fastened his safety belt.

  His grandmother was wearing a gray dress. She didn’t ask a single question as they drove home.

  They pulled into the driveway. Andrew waited until his grandmother had retreated to her bedroom, and then slipped out.

  When he finally made it to the gazebo, he saw that several boards had been pried off of one of the walls. He looked down into the hole.

  “Shadow!”

  The hole was empty. He climbed down inside, poked around, spoke to random objects. Nothing happened.

  He walked back to his grandmother’s house. As he walked towards the front door, he saw the black briefcase leaning against the front steps.

  #

  When Andrew got to school the next morning, the students were all standing outside the building in the playground. His teacher rushed out and grabbed him by the forearm. She brought him through an opening in the chain-link fence that surrounded the school and put him in line with the rest of his class.

  They were taken into the building, one row at a time, down a flight of stairs and into the basement. They whispered to each other, anything louder and a teacher would shout to quiet them down. The lights were dim, the bulbs covered with dust. All Andrew could see were shelves, old desks, electrical boxes, warning signs.

  By the time Andrew reached the bottom, the rest of the basement had already been filled. There was a long line of students in front of him and a teacher behind him, blocking the exit. There was more talking now, but not much. Andrew got down on his knees and covered his head with his hands.

  The teacher by the stairs was listening to the radio. She’d set the volume very low, so that the students wouldn’t be able to hear it, but Andrew was close enough that he still could. Static burst through the transmission.

  “Stay in your homes…”

  “…Emergency services…”

  “…several feet off the ground…”

  “…yellow, also green…”

  “…we’re being… it’s…”

  “…ambulances, firefighters, and police…”

  “…decayed… raining…”

  “I don’t know what to tell you people at home…”

  “…come alive…”

  “…my God…”

  Time passed. The radio began to yield less disturbance, but although the words were clearer the people on the other end had less to say. Whatever had happened was finished now.

  Andrew looked up at his teacher. Her hands had been clenched around her kneecaps, and had now loosened, unconsciously, like a piece of rubber shrinking or expanding to answer the temperature.

  #

  Paul met Hard Chris at a sushi bar, which was a first for him. It was the first time he'd ever seen Chris without Jeremiah; whenever there was a gathering, they arrived and left together. Paul wasn't sure what it would be like to deal with Chris one-on-one.

  As it turned out, it was uncomfortable, but not for any of the reasons that Paul might have thought. Chris was Hard Chris because of how he negotiated, he was not a people pleaser, but this wasn't really a negotiation. I buy you a meal, we talk, you answer some questions, I maybe owe you a favor later, that was it.

  Without anything to argue about, Chris didn't quite look comfortable. He was like a little kid forced to sit through church.

  There was no point in making small talk.

  "Why don't they know?" Paul asked. "We're not special. Anybody could do what we do. Why doesn't word get out?"

  "There are a few standard answers to that." Chris sounded bored. "People don't care. People don't want to deal with things that don't make sense to them. The whole thing is too dangerous and unpredictable and weird to ever be something that lots of people want to know about. There's no incentive for people in on the secret to share. People are too stupid, not smart like us, so they don't get it. Those are the usual ones."

  "Do any of those sound right to you?"

  "They all sound fine, but they're not enough by themselves. What I know for sure is that when some guy comes around who starts learning things and talking about how he's going to be the one to go big, to get on television or whatever, then before too long we stop seeing that guy."

  "You stop seeing him."

  Chris finished his salmon roll. "Just like that. But it's hard to say why. People disappear all the time, right?"

  #

  There was a fleet of cars surrounding the school, their parents waiting for them. Andrew was able to slip away without anyone noticing.

  His grandmother was sitting in the front living room, watching television. She turned her head as Andrew came through the front door and stared at him like he was something supernatural, an angel from heaven. He walked over to her side and put his hand on her shoulder. She squeezed it as hard as she could.

  They were showing pictures of downtown, the same downtown his Uncle Paul had brought him to last night and that he had spent the last part of the summer exploring. He hardly recognized it. The buildings had been cut into geometric pieces and reassembled, incorrectly but with a strange precision, as though a plan had been set in motion and then abandoned. The street was lined with tall glass cylinders. The sidewalk oozed back and forth like melted wax down the side of a candle. Everywhere there was smoke.

  The men and women living and working within the radius of the destruction were unharmed— they had found themselves suddenly elsewhere, with no memory of how they’d been transported or what had taken place. There’d been only one person to rescue, a man they’d found standing in the middle of a major intersection, physically unharmed, but mute and unresponsive. They had to carry him away on a stretcher. They briefly showed a picture of the man’s face. It was Uncle Paul. The ice in his eyes had melted.

  Andrew looked down at his grandmother.

  “I have to go, all right?”

  “Andrew…” She struggled for the words. “I’m sorry. It’s not going to be like this anymore. I’m…”

  Andrew nodded. “All right, Grandma. But I have to go now.”

  Andrew pulled his hand free and ran out the door. She watched him leave without moving.

  #

  The hole in the wall was gone. Andrew walked up to the gazebo and brushed his fingertips against the paint. The gateway appeared, and he slipped through it.

  The lighting within the chamber had not changed— it seemed more solid, more permanent, than the walls themselves. Shadow was there, in her usual place. Andrew approached her. He could hear her thinking. Her voice appeared in his left ear.

  “How are you, Andrew?”

  “Shadow, what happened?”

  “It’s complicated. You should let it out of the briefcase.”

  “What?”

  “Your uncle kept one of his assistants in a briefcase. You should let it out. It lives on dust, you won’t need to feed it. It won’t hurt you.”

  Andrew considered that. “Okay, Shadow. Thank you. But I still need to know what happened.”

  She was quiet for a long time. The dull moan coming from her fingers grew softer. Only when it had become inaudible did she begin to speak.

  “Your Uncle Paul came back. I don’t remember the last time I saw him very well, I just remember that it was a long time ago, and I didn’t know how to talk yet. Yesterday he tried to give me instructions, but he already knew that he wasn’t going to be able to just make me do whatever he wanted.

  “He tried to make me to help him. He said that there were things he could teach me, things only he could know. He brought me outside to show
me. It was interesting, but he started showing me ways to hurt people, and I didn’t want to do that. I was scared.

  “I was scared that you wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore.

  “He got mad at me, and we fought. I tried not to hurt him too much, only as much as I had to…”

  Shadow’s neck had nearly doubled over, burying her head beneath the surface of her body.

  Andrew exhaled. “I’m still your friend, Shadow. He would’ve hurt other people if you hadn’t hurt him. What you did was okay.”

  Shadow’s neck began to straighten itself out.

  “Do you want to play chess?” Andrew asked.

  They played until it was time for Andrew to go home. Shadow won every game.

  That night, after dinner, Andrew went upstairs to his room, closed the door, dimmed the light, and opened his closet. He’d hidden Paul’s briefcase under a pile of dirty clothes.

  He opened the briefcase. It seemed to be empty. He reached into it tentatively; he could feel something there, pressing back against his fingertips, something hot, then cold, metallic and then slippery like a dog’s tongue.

  There was a pocket in the lining of the case. Andrew reached into it and pulled out two objects. One was the torn corner of a postcard. The other was a plastic pill bottle filled with white pills.

  He took out one of the pills and let it rest in his palm while he looked at it. He popped it into his mouth. It was sweet like cheap candy, and dissolved quickly under his tongue.

  He waited. He was curious.

  #

  Sometimes, often, people just didn't show up. Paul sat at the bar all night, waiting and thinking. Dreaming.

  He liked the secrets. He liked the adventure of unearthing, seeking, finding, gambling. He liked how nobody knew. But given enough time to sit and think, with nothing to interrupt him, he wondered how long it could last.

  He felt his familiar chase its own tail from its perch wrapped around his shoulder. He thought about what Chris had said. He wondered what it would like to be on TV.

  #

  In a farmhouse a few miles outside the city, a man in an orange bathrobe awoke to a crescendo.

  There was a bank of broadcasting equipment on the far side of his room. He got out of bed and walked over to the record player. The symphony was almost over— he took another record from the cabinet overhead and set it up on the opposite turntable. The orchestra’s last horn fell silent, and a Chuck Berry song started playing. The man in the bathrobe closed his eyes. He stood there for a couple of minutes, stroking the beard that covered the lower half of his face and smiling until the song was over. Then he put on another symphony.

  There was a computer monitor next to the mixing board; it had a dark blue screen and white block lettering that shifted down every few minutes as new stories arrived on the wire. A headline caught his eye and he read the story. He got up.

  He walked into the next room. There was a set of wooden cabinets lining the walls; he opened one of them, reached past a box of old camping equipment, and pulled out a portable television. He put it down on the floor in the corner of the room, plugged it in, and adjusted the antenna until he got a picture.

  The ruins of downtown were on every channel. The national guard had arrived, but were hesitant to move into the area. There was still smoke everywhere. The pictures on the screen seemed to be coming from some other planet.

  He turned the television off, unplugged it, and put it away. He left the house and walked along the footpath leading from his back door to the lake. The water was bright blue, sky blue, like a swimming pool, and was surrounded by glistening white sand. There was a wooden box planted into the ground near the footpath. Bolted to the top of the box was a display, a sheet of white plastic with a skinny LCD screen planted underneath it, an electronic thermometer. The lake was nearly twenty degrees warmer than it should have been.

  The old man turned away from the box and took a step forward. He leaned over, scooped up a handful of white sand, and threw it into the water. The sand did not sink as quickly as it should have. It hit the surface and began to fall, but was suddenly repulsed, driven up again. The tiny particles began to move, to spin like an underwater tornado, becoming more concentrated and easier to see. The tornado began to differentiate itself; smaller whirlpools branching off the main stem and changing their position, moving around, exploring.

  Then, suddenly, the force animating the water was depleted. The sand cloud slowed and began to sink, losing shape as it dissipated and fell out of sight.

  The man in the blue bathrobe sat down on his artificial beach and rubbed his eyes. He breathed deeply.

  “God damn you, Paul…”

  CHAPTER 4

  #

  By the time Paul saw the waitress, she'd already been looking at him. She wasn't even waiting his table, but it was a slow afternoon and she was stuck behind the counter, wiping things off and staring into space.

  He made eye contact with her, once accidentally, and a second time on purpose. He had a deck of playing cards on the table.

  "I'd like to show you something."

  She raised an eyebrow, smiled. He realized that he was nervous. It'd been a long time.

  #

  For most of Andrew’s life, “being busy” was synonymous with “spending a lot of time on things his parents wanted him to do.” He was busy on Christmas, he could be busy over the summer with camps and vacations, but he’d never been busy with projects he himself had started.

  In the two months after his uncle went into a coma, Andrew kept himself very busy.

  One of the things he spent a lot of time on was reading the paper and watching the news. He’d never done either of these things before, he’d never felt like they’d had anything to do with him. They sent in the National Guard first. They found one man, naked in the middle of the street, comatose. He was taken to a local hospital. They showed his picture once on the local news, but never again, and as time went on he was mentioned less and less often.

  As soon as the area had been swept, the soldiers retreated and the scientists came in. They looked first for dangers, then for explanations, and found neither— no radiation, no strange diseases, no black holes floating above the city. No clue how any of this had happened.

  The authorities stood firm for a while, holding a position at every street, scouring the wreckage for new information. But nothing was there. Explanations began to come from every quarter, scientific and religious, none of them any more or less plausible than the rest, and as time went on people stopped caring. Nobody had been hurt, and whatever had happened didn’t seem likely to repeat itself. New theories drifted further and further into the back pages of the newspapers, and before too long, the whole thing was just something else for late-night comedians to joke about.

  In spite of this, the crowd continued to grow. People came from all over the country, all over the world. They wanted to see what had happened. Keeping the area cordoned off was getting expensive, and the guardsmen wanted to go home.

  And so, a few weeks later, the borders were dropped, and the people were allowed back into downtown Branville.

  #

  Andrew walked into the cafeteria just as the bell rang and sat down at one of the corner tables next to the garbage cans. This was where Andrew and Josh usually sat. Nobody else wanted to sit here and their bench was never taken.

  The cafeteria was just as big as the one at his school back in Chicago, but only had about half as many students eating there at any given time. He heard people talking on his way in. People had relatives staying in their basements, people had parents who’d lost their jobs because the library or the bar where they’d worked no longer existed. They had plenty of space to separate into cliques— the black kids had a table, the athletes had a table, the religious kids had a table.

  Josh sat down across from Andrew and immediately started talking. Josh was smaller than Andrew, he wore dorky plastic glasses and shirt
s with collars. He always had a book. Andrew didn’t see him that much during the day, but on those few occasions that he had seen him somewhere else, at an assembly or in the hall, he never saw him talking much to anyone. For some reason Andrew was the exception. It didn’t bother him; it relieved him from the duty of having to keep up his end of the conversation.

  “So my dad’s been telling me about all the people that’ve been coming in since what happened downtown. Lots of weird people…”

  Andrew tuned out. It was the same stuff everybody had been talking about for the last two weeks. He excused himself to go get some food. He waited in line. They were selling burnt pieces of pizza for a quarter a slice. He bought four pieces and headed back to the table.

  As he stepped into the food line, he saw Jeremy walking down the aisle in his direction, flanked by two other boys. Jeremy was the kid from his classes that he had told Shadow about, that he hadn’t wanted to hang out with. Jeremy had a big head, and big hands, bigger even than Andrew’s, completely out of proportion with his body. It was the kind of thing anybody else would’ve gotten made fun of for. His face was always the same, two green eyes over a flat mouth that only opened when he was laughing.

  “Hey, Josh.”

  Josh stared down at his book.

  “We want to know about the guy at the hospital, Josh. Why won’t you tell us?”

  Josh looked up suddenly and looked toward Jeremy, toward Andrew. His glasses were like a cage, trapping his face.

  Jeremy grabbed the book out of Josh’s hands.

  This had happened before. It wasn’t something Andrew had to worry about; whatever it was about Josh that attracted their attention, Andrew didn’t have it. He could just sit down and say nothing until they were finished, if they wanted.

  He made a decision.

  “Give him the book back.”

  He felt a little sick to his stomach right after he’d said it, but it went away as quickly as it had come, and then he didn’t feel anything.

  He’d thought that this was going to be harder.

  Jeremy didn’t even bother to look in Andrew’s direction. The other two boys laughed. Andrew pointed at Jeremy and made a fist. Jeremy tried to say something, but nothing came. He couldn’t breathe. He brought his hand up to his neck, clawed ineffectively at something he couldn’t see. His friends stopped laughing. They weren’t sure what was going on.