Tales From Beyond the Brain

by Jeff Szpirglas

  One or two students were brave enough to take a few tentative steps toward the reading group.

  “Don’t…” Maya started. Then her mind flared with pain. Mr. Wexler and the boys were stabbing at her head from the inside.

  Join us, or them, if you choose, but think about who will win this war.

  Maya reached deep into her mind. She could hear other voices swimming through her thoughts. So many of them were full of anger and hate. They were the voices of people who had been laughed at, picked on, cast aside.

  But there were other voices too. Voices of people who wanted to take a stand against the Mr. Wexlers of the world. These voices were almost drowned out by the roar of the angry voices, but they were there.

  Maya knew what she had to do.

  Behind her, Mr. Wexler and the boys were using their powers to pick up the pencils in the room and suspend them in the air. Maya saw their sharpened points, all aimed at her, and gulped.

  They wanted to get rid of her. Maya obviously posed some kind of threat to Mr. Wexler, Andrew and Noah. She didn’t know what she could do. All she knew was that they had to be stopped. She’d have to do something to startle them, to scare them enough that their minds reeled for a moment.

  Maya looked up and saw the lights.

  She dropped the cloud she’d wrapped around her mind to protect it from Mr. Wexler. Immediately she could feel Andrew and Noah start to squeeze their thoughts around her, like a python to prey.

  Maya cried out but concentrated her thoughts on the lights.

  She flexed.

  The lights blazed like fires. The bulbs shattered. Glass rained down on the classroom. Students screamed.

  The pencils dropped to the floor.

  The horseshoe table had slammed back to the floor too. Mr. Wexler and the boys were clutching their heads in pain. The rest of the students began running out of the room, screaming and yelping with fear.

  But the reading group wouldn’t be in pain for much longer. Mr. Wexler and the boys would get their strength back soon, unless Maya stopped them first.

  She focused her mind on the floor. With a quick thought, she scooped up the sharpened pencils and lifted them in the air.

  Maya gulped.

  She thought very carefully about what she was doing. There were others like her, right now, thinking the same horrible thoughts. Knowing they had no other choice.

  Maya closed her eyes, took hold of the pencils, aimed them at the others in group and

  Made.

  Them.

  Move!

  EVIL EYE

  “Can you open your eye for me?” The doctor’s voice was calm and soothing. But Jane’s eye was burning. It felt like someone had struck a match against it and held it there while the flame lit. She shook her head.

  “Jane,” the doctor said, “I need to see your eye before we can figure out what’s wrong with it—”

  “It hurts, that’s what’s wrong with it!” Jane could barely keep back the tears. She was almost crying because she was scared, but mostly because her eye felt like a volcano.

  Jane had been on a school field trip. The whole class had taken a bus to the old cemetery on the edge of town. People rarely visited it because it was so old. There hadn’t been a funeral service held there for years. It was overgrown with weeds and half-dead trees, and it stank of rotting things. Jane’s class had come to make rubbings of the tombstones.

  They were each supposed to get rubbings of the names and dates from at least three tombstones. Then they would search through the library to find information about the dead people. Jane’s teacher, Mr. Schmelp, had said it was important for the students to learn some local history. He was a bit strange.

  Jane had taken her time in the cemetery. She’d walked past the thorn shrubs to the far end of the graveyard, leaving her class behind. Hiding in the shadows was a crumbling tombstone. The letters had been softened by wind and time, but Jane could make out the inscription: HERE LIES SHAWN CRUMB. Mr. Crumb’s tombstone was leaning against the rusted iron fence. Jane didn’t want to touch it. She was afraid it might fall apart in her hands.

  But then she felt the urge.

  It was as if the tombstone was calling to her somehow. Jane stepped forward, trying to figure out why she’d singled out this one grave. She closed her eyes, and that’s when she noticed the sound, so faint it was at the very edge of her range of hearing. Almost like a whisper. Almost like words, even. But they were too hard to hear. She had to get closer to the tombstone.

  Jane took out a piece of paper and a crayon. She leaned forward.

  That was when Matteo had pushed her. Matteo always pushed people, especially girls and especially Jane.

  Jane didn’t go face-first into the dirt like Matteo had probably planned. But she did catch her foot, and it twisted as she fell, which caused her head to slap against the grubby tombstone. When Jane hit the ground, she felt her eye start to swell immediately. Mr. Schmelp had called her mom, who’d raced home from work and taken her to the hospital.

  Now Jane was sitting on an observation table, on a crinkly paper sheet. The sheet was big enough for at least three tombstone rubbings. But Jane couldn’t think about that now.

  The doctor shone a light at Jane’s face. She clenched her eyelids shut.

  “If you open your eye for me, maybe you’ll get a lollipop.” How old did he think she was? Jane opened her other eye to see if the doctor was joking.

  The doctor forced her bad eye open with his thumb and index finger and shone a light into her eye. Jane clenched her teeth. Her eye felt like it was going to explode out of its socket. If it did, Jane hoped it would explode all over the doctor.

  “I thought so,” the doctor told Jane’s parents, sitting nearby. “She’s scratched her cornea.”

  Scratched cornea? That sounded bad.

  The doctor patted her on the back, but Jane didn’t feel any better. “You’ll be fine,” he reassured her. “But I’m going to have to ask you to wear a patch for a day or two.”

  Then the doctor put some drops into Jane’s eye and covered it with enough gauze and tape to make her head look like a mummy’s. “I’m sure you’ll be right as rain in no time,” he said.

  He didn’t give Jane a lollipop.

  “Who the heck is that?”

  “I think it’s Jane.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She looks like a pirate.” The last voice was Matteo’s. He put his hands on his hips, screwed one eye shut and turned to the others. “Arrrrr. We’ll make her walk the plank before the bell rings.”

  “You’re such a weirdo, Matteo,” Erin told him. Then the bell rang. Matteo pushed Erin onto the pavement and lined up for class.

  Mr. Schmelp told the class that they were having a math test. Everyone had to take it except Jane. She wasn’t allowed to read while she had the patch on because she might strain her eye. Jane started to think that maybe this whole eye-patch thing wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

  Plus, she got to watch Matteo write the test.

  Matteo had been staring at his paper for over ten minutes.

  Jane smiled as she watched Mario look from the clock to his paper. Then he looked back at the clock. He chewed on the end of his pencil. He ran his fingers through his hair. He put his hand up to ask a question. When Mr. Schmelp shook his head, Matteo lowered his hand.

  He tried looking over the shoulder of the girl in front of him for the answers, but Mr. Schmelp was still watching him.

  Matteo turned around to see Jane smiling. “What are you looking at, Long Jane Silver?” he asked. The whole class burst out laughing. Jane wasn’t smiling anymore. And her eye started to sting again.

  That night Jane had one of those dreams where you can see yourself floating away from your body. For a brief moment she was staring down at herself. Then she turned and floated away through the space under the door.

  Jane wasn’t too sure how she could fit through that space, but this was a dream, and in dr
eams you don’t worry about the rules. Now Jane was floating down the staircase. Through an open window. And then she was outside.

  The darkness cloaked the street like soot in a chimney. Jane felt the chill of the night and wanted to shiver. Most of her dreams happened in flashes. When she woke up, it was hard to remember the details. But this dream was so vivid. She seemed to be floating down the street toward her school.

  A pair of headlights emerged at the end of the street. Jane immediately swerved and took shelter behind some nearby bushes until the car drove past. When the red taillights disappeared behind her, Jane came out from behind the bushes and continued to float on. Something was telling her to be cautious. Was it because she was on the street in the middle of the night? Was something stalking her out there in the darkness? Jane felt the chills again, only this time it had less to do with the temperature.

  Finally she was at the school. She circled above it like a hawk. The doors were probably locked. The windows were shut—

  No. Not all of them. One of the windows was open. Just a sliver. Just enough to let some fresh air in.

  Jane felt herself floating forward. There was no way she could fit through that tiny crack! She tried to stop herself from smashing through the glass, but this was a dream…

  Now she was in her own classroom, floating past the rows of desks to the heavy table that Mr. Schmelp used as a desk. Right on top was a bundle of papers from that day’s math test. All marked.

  Jane hovered over the table and stared at the questions. And the answers.

  The next morning Jane’s mother removed the eye patch. “I see you tried to take it off yourself,” she said, picking at a bit of the tape that had come loose.

  Jane blinked a few times and looked at herself in the mirror. Her eye seemed as good as new. The skin around her eye was pale and still a bit clammy, but it was nothing that a good scrub with a facecloth couldn’t fix. Jane blinked again, looked at her reflection and smiled. She could see again.

  Jane was still smiling at breakfast, when she brushed her teeth and when she left for school. A smile was still on her face when she lined up to go inside, when she took her coat off and went to her desk and even when it came time to sing the national anthem.

  The smile only faded when Mr. Schmelp came to her desk and handed her some stapled sheets of paper, turned over. “You didn’t think I would forget about you,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “The math test you missed yesterday, of course.”

  Jane turned over the papers and gulped. It was the test she had seen in her dream.

  The exact same test.

  Jane’s eye started to twitch, but she blinked it back under her control. Then a different sort of smile slid across her cheeks. She was going to ace this.

  Jane was still smiling when she came home that night, still smiling when she ate her brussels sprouts (much to the confusion of her parents, since she’d always hated brussels sprouts), still smiling when she finished her homework. Then she slipped into her pajamas and went to bed.

  Soon sleep overtook her, and Jane found herself in a dark room she didn’t recognize. As her vision adjusted, she could make out that it was a bedroom, a messy one, with cluttered shelves and clothes on the floor.

  Jane looked at the bed. She recognized the person tangled up in the covers.

  Jane woke with a start. She was sweating so much that her pajamas stuck to her skin like wallpaper. She was pretty sure she had just had a nightmare. She got out of bed to get a glass of water.

  The boy in the bed was Matteo. She could still see his room in her mind as clear as day. It was so clear she could even count the wrinkles in Matteo’s sheets.

  Jane filled the cup with water from the tap and gulped it back. The night light was on in the bathroom, so she didn’t have to flip the switch on. She looked in the mirror.

  Her hair was a mess, her eye was missing—

  Jane dropped the cup. It clattered to the floor, water spilling everywhere.

  She shut her eye—eyes! She shut her eyes.

  (She could still see Matteo’s room.)

  Stop thinking about Matteo’s room and open your eyes!

  Jane opened them. Messy hair, missing eye. Perfect. Perfect. Per—

  Why was this so perfect?

  Jane realized she must still be dreaming. All she had to do was go back to bed, pull the covers up over her head and sleep until morning. Then everything would be fine. She’d get up and brush her teeth and two eyes would be staring back at her from the bathroom mirror and—

  Jane clutched the cold porcelain of the sink.

  The picture in her mind—the one of Matteo’s room—was changing. She was floating up to the shelves on the wall. She was staring at them hard, like she was looking for something. What was she looking for?

  Jane shook the thought from her head. She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror and leaned in close. There was her eye socket, empty as a donut hole. With only the night light on, it was too dim to see anything beyond the darkness of the socket. Jane wondered what would happen if she turned on the bathroom light. Would she be able to see into her brain? She resisted the temptation to stick her finger into the gaping hole in her head. And besides, what would her mom and dad think when they saw her like this? Think of something else, she told herself. Her mind immediately returned to Matteo’s room.

  Then she saw it. She was hovering near a shelf above Matteo’s bed. It was a bookcase. The books were held in place by two heavy bookends, but they were very, very close to the edge of the shelf.

  Jane shut her eyelids to see the picture more clearly.

  The books were angled against one bookend. She could see that the bookend was half on the shelf, half off. All she had to do was push some of the standing books over. A little nudge would do it. The books would fall like dominoes. The bookend would fall off the shelf—

  Matteo’s head was directly under the shelf.

  Don’t even think it! But she already was. That was just it. Jane was thinking it. Push it over. Just a little nudge—

  Jane raced out of the bathroom, thundered downstairs, jammed her feet in her father’s boots and ran out into the street.

  It didn’t take her long to get to Matteo’s, but by the time she got there her lungs stung from the cold. She looked around the house for a way in. The windows were shut. The curtains were drawn. The front door was locked. But nailed to the side of the house was a white trellis, overgrown with vines and creepers. Jane shook off her dad’s boots and began to climb. When she reached the window, she forced it open with one hand.

  Into Matteo’s room spilled Jane and the night wind. She tumbled to the carpet and was on her feet in a second. Matteo still lay in his bed, sound asleep.

  Jane caught something moving in the corner of her eye.

  It was the eye. Her eye. She could see herself staring at herself. Weird!

  For a moment Jane and the eye stared each other off. Matteo still hadn’t stirred.

  The eye floated toward her. Its pupil contracted to a tiny dot. Somehow the eye looked angry.

  Jane backed up until she was against the closet door. She flung it open. Clothes and toys spilled to the floor. Jane reached for the first thing she could find to defend herself with and clasped her palm around it.

  The eye saw it too, but it was coming so fast there was no time for it to escape.

  Thwack! Jane held a tennis racket in one hand.

  The eyeball flew back, hit the far wall with a thud (leaving a gooey splotch) and landed on the floor.

  Jane concentrated on the picture in her mind. It was dark. Clutching the racket, she inched her way forward. Still dark. Jane passed the edge of bed and noticed a pile of dirty clothes.

  She clutched the racket handle so hard she thought it might snap. She reached with her other hand toward the laundry. She would have to do this. She would have to pick up Matteo’s grubby shirt and use it to try to grab the eye.

  No. That would be to
o obvious. The eye would know—

  Jane stopped herself. This was ridiculous. She was in a boy’s room in the middle of the night, without any shoes, trying to catch her own runaway eye. And he was sleeping through all of it! For all she knew, she was probably still dreaming this all up and—

  The eye shot out of the pile and came flying right at her.

  Jane swatted at the eye again. Too little, too late. She knew exactly where it was headed. The shelf.

  Jane whirled around and dropped the racket.

  The eye hit the bookend. The bookend hit the books.

  Jane jumped onto Matteo’s bed. Matteo’s eyes shot open. He started to scream when he caught sight of one-eyed Jane above him.

  The books knocked into the other bookend.

  With all her strength, Jane pushed Matteo off the bed.

  It felt good to push Matteo for once.

  Then Jane leaped from the bed, so all the books could crush was a pillow.

  Matteo could only look at Jane the cyclops and point in horror. His eyes would not shut, even as the rest of the books spilled to the empty bed behind him. A few papers fluttered down after the books like confetti. Matteo’s eyes remained open as a draft from the open window made one of the papers zoom past Jane’s head. They would not shut even as the sharp edge of the page slashed across his open eye.

  Matteo shrieked and clutched his head with his hands. Just then his bedroom door was flung open. There stood his parents. Before either of them could even blurt out a “What’s going on here?” Jane was on the move.

  She couldn’t see the eye, but in her mind she could see an image of the neighborhood street, so she knew it had somehow escaped. She pushed past Matteo’s parents, bounded down the stairs and flung the door open. She stopped on the step for a moment, shuddering. She knew where she had to go.

  Jane entered the cemetery, and only then did she realize she’d been running barefoot. Her toes and the balls of her heels sunk into the mud, and she had to wrench her feet out for each step forward. She was going to need a bath when this was all over.