Substitute Creature

by Charles Gilman

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means that she can be made whole. She can regain her true form. She can walk and play and ride a bike; she can be a living, breathing thirteen-year-old girl who can leave this prison and never look back. All I require is a replacement. A body and soul to take her place.”

  “You mean me?” Robert asked.

  “No, of course not. You’re more useful to me here. But perhaps there’s someone else.”

  “I don’t know anyone willing to give up their body.”

  Tillinghast shrugged. “Perhaps this person doesn’t volunteer.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  He took the candle and led Robert across the school to the end of the east corridor, where a pair of doors led to the outside. Tillinghast tossed the ancient-looking vial at the doors and it vanished in midair, swallowed by a gate that was nearly invisible.

  “I’m proposing that you lead a companion down this hallway,” Tillinghast explained, “and then that person wanders through this gate by accident.”

  “Accident?” Robert asked. “You mean, you want me to trick somebody?”

  “There’s no pain involved. We simply take the body, and the person’s spirit is imprisoned. In a very large and comfortable urn.”

  “I don’t know anyone who deserves that.”

  “Oh, I bet you do,” Tillinghast said. “There has to be someone you don’t like. Someone who’s unfriendly to you. Disrespectful to your mother. Someone in this school right now.”

  Robert didn’t have to think long. “You mean Lionel Quincy?”

  Tillinghast winked. “We’d settle for him.”

  “No way. I couldn’t.”

  “He thinks he’s better than you. Always bragging about his money and his house in the Heights. And his amazing father. The 87th Most Powerful Titan in the Tech Industry. I say it’s time to teach Lionel a lesson.”

  “He doesn’t deserve to be imprisoned.”

  “Neither does Karina. But life isn’t fair, Robert. Some of us have bad luck. What I’m proposing is trading one body for another. A nice girl goes free. A spoiled brat gets punished. Where’s the injustice?”

  Robert couldn’t answer the question. He felt it was wrong, but he didn’t know why it felt wrong. Tillinghast had managed to make a wrong choice sound right.

  “It’s all very simple. You’ll find an excuse to lead Lionel down this hallway. The boy isn’t bright; he’ll believe anything. And the gate will take care of the rest. We’ll be waiting on the other side to relieve him of his vessel. And Karina will be free of this place at last.”

  Robert shook his head. “Lionel doesn’t deserve it.”

  “Think of it as an extended detention. A punishment. Would you agree he deserves to be punished? Doesn’t Karina deserve her freedom?”

  Robert looked down at the valentine. On the front of the card was a picture of Garfield with hearts exploding from his head; the caption read “I’m CRAAAZY for you!” He’d wanted to get Karina something nice for Valentine’s Day, but now the card seemed silly and inconsequential. What she really wanted, more than anything else in the world, was to be free of Lovecraft Middle School once and for all.

  “It feels wrong,” Robert said.

  “Why don’t you sleep on it?” Tillinghast suggested. “Sometimes tough choices seem easier by the light of day. I’ll leave the gate open just in case.”

  “What happens in the morning?”

  “You and your friends walk out the door. Minus one, of course. Either Lionel or Karina. Whoever stays behind is up to you.”

  When Robert returned to the gymnasium, the rest of his group was still asleep. He tiptoed back to his tumbling mat and pulled the theater drape over his body.

  Even though he was exhausted, he had trouble falling back to sleep. He couldn’t stop thinking about Tillinghast’s offer. Doesn’t Karina deserve her freedom? A nice girl goes free. A spoiled brat gets punished.

  Where’s the injustice?

  Robert tossed back and forth for a long time. Eventually he drifted off, but only for an hour or so. When he opened his eyes, the clock over the scoreboard read 6:05. Lionel and Glenn were still sleeping, but Mac was gone. Robert pulled on his shoes and went to look for him.

  Out in the hallway, he heard the distant noise of a hammer striking nails. Robert followed the sound to the student woodshop. There, Mac was standing over a workbench with three long planks, joining them with a cross-brace.

  “Good morning,” Mac said. “You want some coffee?”

  “I don’t like coffee.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”

  Mac resumed working and Robert sat down to watch. He finished nailing the cross brace and then used an old-fashioned hand drill to bore two small holes into the planks. Mac fed a rope through the holes and knotted it, forming what looked like a handle.

  “What are you making?” Robert asked.

  “It’s a sled.”

  “You’re going sledding?”

  “Your buddy Glenn is going sledding,” he explained. “If he can’t walk out of here this morning, I’ll tow him to a hospital using this rope.”

  “What about the rest of us?” Robert asked.

  “Come on,” Mac said. “I’ll show you.”

  He grabbed his coffee and then led Robert up to the top floor of the school. They walked through the teacher’s lounge—past all the furnishings Robert had admired the day before—and then Mac opened the door to the balcony and they stepped outside.

  The sky was blue, the sun was shining, and their view of Dunwich extended all the way to the ocean. Between the school and the water were shops, houses, restaurants, and churches, all buried beneath huge billows of snow. The roads were invisible; the plows had yet to clear them. Robert had never seen anything quite like it.

  “Wow,” he said.

  Mac pointed to the forest on the edge of school property. “See that trail through the trees? It’s about a mile into town. Pretty gentle downhill slope. We’ll hike through there and pull Glenn on the sled.”

  Robert felt it was important to act as if nothing strange had happened during the night. “What about Miss Carcasse?” he asked. “Will she fit on the sled, too?”

  “Miss Carcasse is dead,” Mac said. He pointed to a mound of snow at the base of the building. “When all this stuff melts, they’ll find her body buried beneath that drift. But you know that already, right?”

  He flashed a wicked grin, and Robert stepped away from him, half-expecting to see horns sprout from his forehead or membranous wings burst out of his back. At once, all the weird rumors surrounding Maniac Mac made sense. No wonder he hadn’t mentioned the strange scratches on the generator to anyone else—he’d been working for Tillinghast all along!

  But there was one thing Robert didn’t understand: “If you’re working for Tillinghast,” he asked, “why do you care so much about getting Glenn to a hospital? Why build a sled?”

  Mac laughed. “If I worked for Tillinghast, I wouldn’t be mopping floors and scrubbing toilets. No, Robert, I’m trying to stop him. You and Glenn aren’t the only ones.”

  Robert leaned against the railing, relieved, as Mac proceeded to share his story. He was one of the few laboratory assistants to have escaped the explosion at Tillinghast Mansion thirty years earlier. He was just sixteen years old at the time; he’d been hired to mop up in the laboratory after school for five dollars an hour. “I knew your friend Karina back then, but of course she doesn’t recognize me anymore.”

  After the explosion, Mac spent the next three decades haunted by the awful things he had witnessed in the laboratory—and dreading the day Tillinghast would return. “I suffered from nightmares, insomnia, you name it,” he explained. “I wanted to talk to someone, but who would believe me? The monsters, the alternate dimensions, it all sounded insane. People thought I was bonkers.”

  Over the years, Mac had
tried numerous jobs—shipbuilding, carpentry, fishing, lobstering, house painting—and failed at all of them. His life was a mess. He had moved into an abandoned ice cream truck in a junkyard near the coast, where he spent his days gathering aluminum cans to redeem for nickels.

  “But the day this school opened, I knew Tillinghast had found a way back, so I resolved to get here as quickly as possible. I took a job that gave me a set of keys and complete access to the building. And I’ve been working here ever since. I clean the desks. I shovel the snow. And I look for weaknesses in his plan.”

  Robert was astonished. “So you know everything?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But I know how you and Glenn ended up on that ledge yesterday morning. I know why Karina can’t hold a fork at dinner. I know that Miss Carcasse summoned all the Old Ones into the school.” He lowered his voice. “And I know about the deal, Robert. I know what Tillinghast offered you last night.”

  “You do?”

  “When you sneaked out of the gym, I followed you. I watched those creatures nearly devour you. And then I tracked you and Tillinghast to the guidance office. You cannot help him, Robert, do you understand me?”

  “He says Lionel deserves it.”

  “He’s tricking you. Lionel’s got problems, just like everybody else. They’re just different from yours.”

  “Some problems,” Robert muttered. “It must be really tough living with a millionaire dad in the Heights.”

  “It’s tougher than you know,” Mac said. “I want to help Karina just as much as you do. But we’ll have to find a different opportunity.”

  “The gate’s still open,” Robert said. “He said he’d leave it open in case I changed my mind.”

  “The gate will always be open. You’ll spend your whole life hearing from men like Tillinghast, men who want to offer you rotten deals. But you don’t ever want to take them. Even if it means you have to push a broom for the rest of your life.”

  Robert looked out at the horizon. Far below them, in the seaport village of Dunwich, the first snowplow was lumbering up Phillips Avenue, carving a path through the town’s main thoroughfare. Bewildered gulls circled the sky, searching for roosts that weren’t covered with snow.

  “It doesn’t seem very fair,” Robert decided.

  “Life’s not fair,” Mac told him. “But helping Tillinghast makes it worse, not better.”

  A lone gull hovered in front of them, beating its wings. The poor bird looked exhausted. Robert cleared some snow off the railing so it would have a dry place to rest.

  “Could I try your coffee?” he asked.

  Mac passed him the cup. “Help yourself.”

  Robert took a sip and immediately choked on the harsh, bitter flavor. It tasted like he was drinking mud. He spit it out over the side of the balcony.

  “This is awful!”

  “You get used to it,” Mac said.

  Mac and Robert went downstairs and found the rest of the group in the cafeteria: Karina, Lionel, Mrs. Arthur, and even Glenn. He was still wrapped in blankets but was sitting upright at a dining table, surrounded by six different boxes of cereal. He filled a bowl with Cheerios and Raisin Bran and a sprinkle of Mini-Wheats. “Breakfast is all you can eat,” he told Robert. “Only the milk’s all frozen, so you have to eat it dry.”

  “You’re all right?” Robert asked.

  “I’d feel better if I wasn’t dressed in a marching band uniform,” he said. “Couldn’t you find a baseball jersey or something?”

  “It was a busy night,” Robert said. He noticed his mother hurrying over, so he didn’t go into details. “I’ll tell you later.”

  Mrs. Arthur looked panicked. “Have either of you seen Miss Carcasse?” she asked. “I’ve searched the whole building, but I can’t find her anywhere.”

  Mac had already prepared a story to cover the disappearance. “She stole my keys while we were sleeping,” he explained. “She unlocked the door to the gym, and then she went out the front door.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m guessing she tried to walk home.”

  Mrs. Arthur gasped. “Oh, the poor woman! I knew she wasn’t thinking clearly. We have to go find her!”

  “There’s no way,” Mac said. “The snow’s covered her tracks. We just have to hope she ended up in a safe place.”

  “Seems pretty unlikely,” Lionel said.

  Everyone glared at him, and he gestured to the white drifts piled high against the cafeteria windows. Some of them were five or six feet high. “I mean, look at all that snow. She’s probably buried under a ton of that stuff. Frozen like a Popsicle.”

  “Enough,” Mac said. “Show some respect.”

  Lionel shrugged, poured himself a bowl of Frosted Flakes, and began shoveling cereal into his mouth. “I’m just saying it’s her fault for not waiting. I told her my dad would send someone. There’s a million users on PerfectPrice who would be happy to come get us.”

  “No one is coming,” Mac insisted. “We’re going to eat a big breakfast and then hike into town. I’ll pull Glenn on a sled.”

  “I can walk,” Glenn said, standing up and throwing off the blankets to prove his point. “I’ll be fine.”

  Karina, on the other hand, didn’t look so sure. She would need an excuse to stay behind when the others left—but what would it be?

  They all sat down to a breakfast of dry cereal and peanut butter crackers; all the other cafeteria foods were frozen solid. Glenn’s appetite was extraordinary; he consumed five bowls of cereal. Karina explained she was too upset about Miss Carcasse to eat anything. And Lionel continued to insist that hiking into town was a mistake. “We just need to wait a little longer,” he told the group. “I promise I can get you all out of here.” After several minutes of this argument, Mac became exasperated.

  “Look, kid,” he said, “your father may be rich, but he’s not a genie. He can’t move mountains of snow.”

  “He can do anything,” Lionel insisted. “If you’d read the September issue of Fortune magazine—”

  “I have read the September issue,” Mac said. “I read all about your father. He lives in New York City, right?”

  “That’s where his company is,” Lionel explained. “He’s got five hundred employees. You can’t run that kind of business from Dunwich.”

  “Wait a second,” Robert interrupted. “I thought your dad lived in the Heights. How’s he going to know about the storm if he lives in New York City?”

  “I left him five voicemails,” Lionel said. “Obviously he gets thousands of messages, and he can’t listen to all of them, but if I leave a bunch, he usually gets back to me.”

  “So who do you live with?” Mrs. Arthur asked.

  “My grandma and grandpa. They’ve got a huge house, nine bedrooms, with a Jacuzzi and a game room and everything. My new stepmom thought I’d be happier here than in New York.” Lionel shrugged. “Which is not true, but my dad agrees with everything she says right now.”

  “It sounds like a nice house,” Robert said, because suddenly he felt like saying something nice. He realized that Mac was right, that maybe he didn’t really know Lionel after all.

  “Well, I’m sorry, kid,” Mac said. “Your father sounds like a very important man, but I’m not going to sit here and wait for him to check his voicemails. We need to leave this school before we all catch pneumonia.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Mrs. Arthur said. “We need heat, dry clothes, and shelter. Our bodies can tolerate only so much—”

  Suddenly she was interrupted by a low, fluttering noise. At first it sounded like a bicycle tire spinning with a baseball card in the spokes. But the sound grew louder and louder until it shook the room like thunder.

  “What is that?” Mrs. Arthur asked.

  Mac looked up at the ceiling. “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s coming from outside!” Karina said.

  They all ran over to the windows, climbed onto the sill, and peered out over the drifts. The fluttering grew loud
er still, rattling the glass, shaking clouds of snow from the roof—and then a blue-and-white helicopter soared around the side of the school.

  “I knew it!” Lionel shouted. “I told you so!”

  The chopper disappeared around the side of the building and Lionel ran out of the cafeteria, racing down the central corridor to follow it. His voice was jubilant. “You guys didn’t believe me, but I was right all along! PerfectPrice to the rescue!”

  Mac ran after him. “Hold up!” he shouted. “Where are you going?”

  Robert ran after both of them. Mac was in an all-out sprint, racing to overtake Lionel. Robert didn’t understand why until they rounded a corner, moving full speed toward the doors at the end of the east wing.

  And then he remembered Tillinghast’s instructions: You’ll find an excuse to lead Lionel down this hallway … the gate will take care of the rest.

  But Robert didn’t need an excuse.

  Lionel was running to the gate on his own.

  It was waiting to collect him, invisible to the naked eye, like the unseen strands of a spider’s web.

  Robert ran faster. He had decided Mac was right, that Lionel didn’t deserve to be captured, even if he was mean and spoiled and sometimes very annoying.

  “Lionel, wait!” he called.

  But Lionel didn’t look back and didn’t slow down. “They’re looking for us,” he called back. “I’m going to signal to them!”

  “You can’t go that way!”

  Lionel was nearly at the exit. Robert had no chance of catching him. Mac was closer but still not close enough. Desperate, Mac dove forward, throwing himself at the boy and slamming him face first into a wall of lockers. Lionel missed the gate by inches but Mac couldn’t slow himself. He tumbled through the vortex, vanishing from sight, and the gate collapsed around him.

  Lionel fell to the floor, covering his face with both hands. Robert knelt down, and Lionel kicked him hard in the shins.

  “What’d you do that for?”