Two records were already out. The Vienna Philharmonic doing Wagner, or the Sonics’ first album. He already knew that today was a day where he'd be lacking in focus. He needed a jolt. He put on the Sonics.
He closed his eyes and slid the headphones into place. For a little while, everything faded away. The list of things in his mind of worst case scenarios disappeared. He was in the belly of his nest and he was safe.
He thought he heard something. He ignored it. Not now, goddamn it. The monsters in the closets could wait, and nothing from outside could have made it through his security. He was imagining things. These were the few minutes of the day that were his, sometimes the only part of it he could salvage. He wasn't going to let them slip away.
He did open his eyes, eventually, as a concession to being careful. He recognized Rob from pictures; he'd looked into him when he'd moved into town. Fat Rob, was the name they gave him. The other two were strangers.
The three of them came at him from all directions, like wolves. Clumsy wolves, but they were enough. He tried to fight but he couldn't. One of them had rope.
#
Andrew sat in the chair and stared at the window until the counselor stepped into the office. He walked over to his side of the desk and sat down.
“Andrew, I called you here to talk about something very important. Is there anything you’d like to tell me before we get going? If there’s something I should know, it will be better if you tell me ahead of time.”
Andrew had gotten the note asking for this meeting at the beginning of the day, and he still wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be about. He shook his head no. The counselor nodded.
“All right then. Andrew, you haven’t been doing very well lately. Your grades have been slipping, and many of your teachers have come to me with concerns. They say that you seem tired in class, distracted. Also, you don’t seem to be interested in anything going on at school. Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”
Andrew didn't say a word.
“All right then. Andrew, I think you’ve been using drugs. What do you have to say to that?”
#
Andrew saw Josh at lunch. They absolutely could not stop laughing.
“I think he thought I was a dealer or something,” Andrew said, once they’d recovered a little bit. “He kept asking me about what things were like back in Chicago.”
“Wow, Andrew. Do you have a connection?”
“God, just be quiet. I just hope he doesn’t call my grandma. Let’s go up to the attic, we still have some time left.”
Josh got up and patted his backpack. “Yeah, I figured out some stuff last night. Let’s go.”
Andrew snapped his fingers twice. The familiar wrapped its tentacles around his shoulder. They got up, emptied their trays, and moved towards the exit.
Jeremy and his friends were leaning against the wall by the window, talking to each other. They shut up as Josh and Andrew got closer.
Josh turned towards Jeremy as he walked past.
“Booga booga,” he whispered.
They all flinched. Josh laughed as he and Andrew stepped into the hall. They walked away from the cafeteria and turned a corner.
“Are you ever going to get sick of that?” Andrew asked.
“I don’t think so. That guy’s been making fun of me since the third grade. It’s great. Nobody messes with me anymore.”
“I wonder why the counselor bothered me and not you,” Andrew said. “You don’t have any more friends than I do and your grades are worse than mine by now.”
“What can I say, I come from a good family.”
They reached the stairwell and climbed to the top. The door to the attic was secured with a padlock. Andrew kneeled down, whistled the melody, and kissed the lock. They went inside.
“All right,” Josh said. “You got the pills?”
Andrew shook out a single pill from the bottle and took a wooden ruler with a metal edge out of his binder. He put the edge down on the middle of the pill and leaned against it. The pill broke in half.
Josh flipped the book open to a blank page and took his half of the pill. Andrew swallowed his half, and suddenly the page wasn’t blank anymore. It was filled with rows of letters and numbers. They weren’t glowing or anything, they just hadn’t been there before.
“The code’s real easy once you can see it,” Josh said. “It talks a little bit about the diagram. I was right, it is a protection spell. You spill a few drops of blood onto each of the places you want to protect, then you draw up the diagram just right and put some blood down onto the circle in the middle. Once you’ve done that, you’re imprinted onto the place. Whenever someone is in trouble near the place where you spilled the blood, a messenger comes to get you.”
“Those floating blue things are called messengers.”
“Yeah, that’s what the book called it. You don’t have to follow it if you don’t want to, you just close your eyes and wait for it to go away. But if you do follow it you don’t get tired, you don’t get lost. It gives you all the energy you need to get to wherever you need to go.”
“So we got plugged in when we put our blood into it.”
“Yeah.”
“We probably should have figured that out before we did it.”
Josh shrugged. “Yeah, probably.”
It was almost time for class. They put their stuff away and moved for the door.
Just as they were about to step out, something changed in the air behind them. Slowly, silently, they turned around. There was a red sphere floating in the middle of the attic.
“Close your eyes, Andrew,” Josh said.
Andrew took another step closer. Josh grabbed him from behind, covering his face with his hands and pulling him backwards. Andrew tore himself loose and pushed Josh away, but when he turned back the messenger was gone.
He looked back at Josh. “Why did you do that?”
Josh opened his eyes. “Because I don't want you to get killed? Like my brother did the last time we wandered into something and didn't know what was going on?”
The bell rang.
“Come on, we’re late.”
Josh left. Andrew waited a minute before he followed him down.
#
The moment Shadow let him into the gazebo, Andrew started talking. He didn’t even pause until they were well into their first game.
“Maybe it was nothing. Maybe the messenger shows up even if somebody just stubs their toe or something. Then it would’ve been stupid to ditch school to run after it.”
Shadow moved a rook, didn’t say anything.
“But that’s stupid. Paul never would’ve set it up to have those things bother him for something that wasn’t important.”
“Your move.”
Andrew glanced down at the board and moved a pawn. Shadow captured it with her bishop, putting Andrew in check.
“But what do you think, Shadow?”
“I’m not sure what the question is.”
Andrew tried to think of how to put it. “Is it okay to let something happen that might hurt someone, even if you don’t know for sure and it’s not your fault?”
Shadow hesitated before she answered.
“That’s a complicated question. I don’t know.”
They kept playing for a little while longer. Shadow won. They started another game.
“Maybe I should tell him,” Andrew said.
“Tell who?”
“Josh. About you. About everything.”
Again, Shadow didn’t answer. They finished their game. Andrew got up.
“I have to go.”
“All right. Do you have any math homework?”
“No, we’re having a party instead of class tomorrow. She just told us today, it was a surprise. I’ll stop by tomorrow, all right?”
Shadow knew what a surprise was; Andrew had explained it to her once. It was when somebody did something somebody else di
dn’t expect.
“All right.”
Andrew rose up through the floorboards, up into the sunlight. He jogged back to his grandmother’s house.
#
Dinner was pasta that night. Andrew was most of the way through his second helping before he said anything.
“I got my English essay back. I got a B.”
Andrew’s grandmother looked up from her plate.
“I didn’t know there was an English essay.”
Andrew pushed his chair away from the table and got up. He’d left his backpack on the couch in the living room. He came back with his essay and gave it to her. It felt funny; he’d never done this before. He wasn’t sure whether or not she’d care, if this were even something he was supposed to do.
She looked at it like she was checking over a tax form, and for a moment Andrew regretted even bringing it up. Then she looked up and smiled at him.
“This is very nice, Andrew.”
She got up and turned towards the refrigerator. It didn’t have any magnets on it— she opened up the junk drawer, looked through it until she found one, and put Andrew’s essay up on the fridge.
She sat back down.
"I’m very proud of you.”
Andrew didn’t know what to say to that. His grandmother cleaned her plate and put it in the sink.
“I’m feeling a little under the weather, so I’m just going to watch the news and go to bed. Could you put the dishes in the dishwasher when you’re done?”
“Sure,” Andrew whispered, as she left the room.
He sat at the kitchen table for a minute, without eating anything, got up and put everything away. He poked his head into the T.V. room and saw his grandmother leaning back in the chair with her eyes closed. He went upstairs, worked on his homework for a little while, flipped through one of Paul’s books.
He was happy, really happy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt like this. But he wondered what his grandmother would think, if she’d known about what had happened.
He fell asleep. A few hours later his grandmother knocked on his door and woke him up.
“Andrew…” He couldn’t see her face very well in the darkness, but he could tell she was upset.
“… just come downstairs, Andrew. I fell asleep with the television on, and I woke up… you need to come see.”
He followed her down to the T.V. room. The news was on, some kind of emergency report. Somebody had died outside a late night convenience store a few miles away. He’d been torn in half. A security camera saw the whole thing happen, but not what had done it. The first part of the tape only showed the man rising into the air; they wouldn’t show the rest of it on T.V.
Andrew’s grandmother touched his shoulder with her hand.
“Promise me you won’t go out until everything is all right,” she said.
“Yes, Grandma.”
There were a lot of things he hadn’t let her know about, but he’d never lied to her before.
She went back to bed a few hours later. Andrew swallowed one of the pills from the bottle under his pillow, tip-toed down the stairs, grabbed a flashlight from the basket by the front door, and left the house. He had his familiar follow a few feet behind him; he turned around every few seconds, looking up at the sky and down at the ground, but he didn’t see anything.
He ran into the park, climbed the stairs of the gazebo and waited for Shadow to bring him down. He waited and waited. He jumped up and down on the floorboards. Nothing happened.
He shined the flashlight down on the floor of the gazebo and saw a message neatly carved into the wood.
I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING. I’M GOING TO BE GONE FOR A LITTLE WHILE. IT’S A SURPRISE.
-S
#
Andrew ran back home. He went upstairs and checked to make sure that his grandmother was still asleep. Then he went back down and searched through the kitchen until he found a container full of salt. He lifted up the welcome mat by the front door, laid down a thick line going across the doorway, and put the welcome mat down on top of it. He did the same thing at the back door. He went back inside and tried to get some sleep.
School was cancelled along with everything else. He watched the news all morning. They showed empty streets, people crammed inside their hotel rooms, empty buildings.
Andrew called Josh’s cell at exactly twelve o’clock. He picked up on the first ring.
“Andrew?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Did you put salt by the doors of your house?”
“First thing I did.”
“All right.”
They were both quiet.
“This isn’t our fault,” Josh said.
“I’ll go alone if I have to.”
The phone was silent for a moment.
“All right. What are we going to do?”
#
Luke pressed his hand against Thomas’ forehead and closed his eyes. The memories came pouring out. He saw crowded airplanes, long train rides, rented cars; he tried to find something more interesting, but he could feel Thomas redirecting, playing a shell game.
“You’re fighting me,” Luke said. “Maybe you’d rather I set loose another one of your pets.”
Trains, planes, rented cars. Thomas stayed focused. Luke pushed harder but they were deadlocked.
"There's only one way this can go," Luke the Bastard said. "We have nothing but time."
Thomas knew it was pointless to try to reason with him, but in the space of his mind he slipped once and reached out. He visualized a child, lighting matches and throwing them casually over his shoulder in a room filled with bright red cartoon dynamite.
Luke laughed at that.
"You don't know who you're talking to," Luke said. "I like matches."
Thomas slipped again, and visualized a hundred closed closet doors being pounded on from the inside. Luke just kept on laughing.
CHAPTER 14
#
They agreed to meet at midnight in the park. Andrew slept all afternoon. When night came and his grandmother went to bed, he gathered his supplies. The books, the pill bottle, salt from the kitchen, a flashlight, a pen. He found a Swiss army knife in the drawer with the pens and decided to take that too. He put everything into his backpack. At eleven o’clock he took a pill and left the house.
The streets were empty; the only sounds were the crickets and the wind brushing the leaves together. He kept his eyes on the windows of the houses, but all the curtains were drawn, nobody was looking out. His familiar crawled along the sidewalk, stretching out and coming together again, always swaying just out of the way of his feet. When he got to the park, Josh was waiting for him, leaning against a tree with his thumbs slipped under the straps of his backpack.
The first part of the plan was pretty simple. If the thing they were looking for was anything like the creatures they’d seen before, it would glow blue for anyone who’d taken a pill, at least as long as there was no light. To pick up that man the way it had, it had to be pretty big, and it had come from overhead. So all Josh and Andrew had to do to find it was find someplace where they could look down on the whole town.
They started walking. Andrew still remembered where the church was from when Jeremiah had taken him there, but he hadn’t realized how much longer the trip was on foot. They were downtown somewhere when they heard tires on the road; they ducked between two buildings and waited until the noise was gone before they kept going. Other than that, they didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anybody.
The front door wasn’t even locked. They went inside. There were windows lining the walls, letting the moonlight shine on the pews and on the pulpit, and a door leading to the bell tower in a far back corner. The door was locked. They opened it and climbed the stairs.
The church was built on top of a river bluff. From the top of the tower, you could see everything for miles around. A
ndrew remembered when his parents brought him to the top of a skyscraper one night; there were giant windows on every side of the observation deck, a hundred other buildings piled on top of each other all around, the giant empty lake to the east and the soft yellow grid to the west. There was nothing like that here; the lights died and came back, gently twisted in every direction, slowly sliding out of place, falling from the surface of the darkness all around them.
“Do you see it?” Josh asked.
Andrew turned to the north and then he did see it, a blue shape, drifting back and forth like a kite. From this distance it was about the size of a penny.
“It’s really far away,” Andrew said. “It’s going to take us forever to hike out there even if we don’t get lost on the way. What if it moves?”
“We’ll have to get there faster,” Josh said.
“How?”
“We’ll drive.”
Josh was already on his way back down the stairs before Andrew could say anything.
#
There was a dark van with tinted windows parked next to a mailbox down the street from the church. Josh looked both ways and ran towards it.
“Josh, this is a really horrible idea.”
Josh whistled a tune and kissed the car door. The door unlocked; he opened it and climbed into the driver’s seat.
Andrew ran around to the other side of the car.
“This isn’t even going to work,” he whispered to himself.
The car started a moment later. Andrew opened the passenger door. Josh was grinning like a demon.
“I tried it out on my parents’ car a couple of days ago,” he said. “It’s the same as the locked door trick. You just kiss the ignition and the engine starts. My brother used to let me drive his truck, it’ll be easy. There’s not even any traffic.”
“I don’t want to get arrested.”
“Me neither, but instead of staying at home where that wouldn’t happen, I’m out here helping you. Let’s go.”
Andrew glanced back at the church, then he got into the car and fastened his seat belt. Josh didn’t bother with his. He pulled the car onto the road.
White Rabbit Society Part One Page 12
