The Storyteller (14 page)

“Well,” I said, pushing the plate to the side for a moment, “if I'm going to understand what's happening in our family, then I deserve to know the details.”

Dad sighed. “You certainly do. And I'm sorry we haven't been more forthcoming.”

“Hallelujah!” I threw up my arms, and Mom dropped the spoon into the serving dish, the clang of metal on ceramic saying what she wasn't willing to say herself: that she hated being overruled, that she hated that Dad always decided when it was the right time for me and Alistair to know anything.

Dad either didn't notice or didn't care. Because he turned to me and asked, “Do you remember the Luke Drake disappearance?”

Milo's confession had brought some recollections back, but only hazy ones. Feelings more than anything. “Sort of,” I said. “I was really young, right?”

If Mom was going to be overruled, at least she was going to get a few words in. “You were four, almost five,” she said. “Luke fell into the Oriskanny when he was out playing with Milo. Luke was twelve, I think. A good-looking kid. Milo was probably fourteen. Always seemed a bit weird to me.”

“And what did Alistair see? If I was four, then he was, like, two … or three?”

Dad nodded at my guess and said, “Alistair claims—”

“Claims,” Mom echoed. “Important word.”

“Yes,” Dad replied. “Memories, especially from when you're young, aren't always reliable. And what Alistair remembers is seeing Luke Drake's body. In the river, near Uncle Dale's cabin. Do you remember that cabin?”

“Of course,” I said. “It was … rustic.”

“Well,” Dad said, “Alistair claims he didn't realize what he was seeing until recently. He rode a bike out there to find out if he could confirm his memory. And while he was searching the riverbanks, he says he found the gun, buried and hidden in a metal box. An ammo can.”

I turned from the table to check the hallway that led to Alistair's room. It was empty. “But he lied about the gun. Kyle confessed. It was Kyle's gun all along.”

“Most stories, especially difficult ones, are a mix of truth and lies,” Dad said.

“But why would Alistair lie about the gun?” I asked.

Mom raised her eyebrows. Like mother, like daughter. Same thoughts, same concerns.

Dad might not be a psychiatrist. He might not know all the science. But he is a guy people with problems talk to. He's supposed to have answers and he tries to have answers, but sometimes, it's obvious that he's grasping at straws. Like this time, when he said, “He's scared. He's confused. He's seen things he can't unsee and he doesn't know what to say.”

Scared and confused were the opposite of how I'd describe Alistair these days. He was confident in the things he was telling me. The only time he seemed flustered was when he was talking about the Littlest Knight. And that wasn't really doubt. That seemed to be guilt. When he was silent, it was for a reason.

“You think he was covering up for Kyle because he was scared? Because he's confused?” I asked.

Mom sighed. Dad shrugged and nodded at the same time.

“And Milo Drake?” I asked. “Why him? Why now?”

“The police weren't sure whether to believe Alistair's story about seeing Luke's body all those years ago,” Dad said.

“We all want to believe your brother,” Mom added. “But, as you know, he's been saying strange things. And if he's telling one lie, then he's probably telling more.”

Dad jumped back in and said, “To confirm Alistair's story, the police visited Milo Drake. Alistair told them what clothes Luke was wearing when he saw his body, so they asked Milo if he remembered what clothes Luke was wearing the day he fell in the river.”

I took a bite of potatoes and peered over Dad's shoulder into the living room at the TV, which was off. We were in the dark. We had no idea what other discoveries the police had made since we'd sat down for dinner.

“So did they?” I asked.

“Did they what?” Mom replied.

“Confirm?” I asked. “About Luke's clothes.”

Dad shrugged again, but didn't nod this time. “Never told us whether they did or didn't. Once Kyle gave his more believable side of the story, I suppose it didn't matter what Alistair said. The gun was Kyle's. Luke is long gone. And now with Milo … Well, this is how police work goes. You poke around, ask questions, and sometimes you dredge up something you don't expect.”

“Sometimes someone leads you to a suspect that you didn't even realize was a suspect in the first place,” Mom added.

I imagined for a second a monster rampaging down the hallway, salivating, snarling, knocking family photos from the wall. Not a mud monster like the Dorgon in my story about Princess Sigrid. A ferocious demon of a thing, barreling toward Alistair's door. The Mandrake.

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “Are you saying that Alistair led them to Milo Drake for a reason? That he knew something about Milo but was too scared to tell anyone? And this was, like, his way of pointing a finger without actually pointing a finger?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We're as confused as you are, honey,” Dad said.

If only. I wanted to bring up Banar and the wombat stuff. I wanted to tell them that not only was I worried about my brother, I was worried about myself. But that would only confuse things more, wouldn't it? I had to slip it in somehow, though. Test the waters.

“Have you ever known anyone with the name Banar?” I asked them.

They both shook their heads. It didn't spark any sort of reaction other than indifference.

“Why do you ask?” Dad said.

“No reason,” I said. “I'm thinking about using it as a character name in a story, but I want to make sure it doesn't sound too weird.”

“Honestly,” Mom said with a sigh, “that's the least weird thing I've heard in ages.” Then she got up from the table and, without asking us whether we wanted to watch it or not, she turned on the TV.

 

THE McCLOUDS

High in the sky lived a family of clouds, and their name was McCloud. They were Scottish clouds. The father, Horace, was a wispy cloud, a cirrus cloud if you want to be technical about it. The mother, Electra, was a storm cloud. There were two daughters. The older and gentler one, Lorna, stayed close to the ground, hovering over hilltops and often masquerading as fog. The younger and more boisterous one, Stella, was thick and puffy, the type of cloud that inspired people to say,
That's a frog … or maybe duck … or a Studebaker.

For many years, they weren't a sad family or an angry family (even though the mom was stormy). They weren't a happy family either. They were merely a family of clouds, called the McClouds, and no one, outside of meteorologists, paid them much attention.

That is, until Lorna disappeared.

One morning, she told her parents she planned to linger over a valley and provide some shade for picnickers, which was something she often did. Good deeds made her feel, for lack of a better word, good. She practiced kindness as much as possible, but she was always home by dinnertime.

Except on this day. The next day too.

The McClouds were understandably worried. They asked friends to help them find Lorna, and a search party of clouds swept across the land. When that many clouds come together, it's called a storm front, and this one turned out to be a doozy. It flooded the coasts of every continent, leveling towns, killing millions, and causing mayhem.

And it was all for naught. Because they didn't find Lorna.

The other clouds gave up after a while. Then the McClouds gave up too. Lorna was gone for good, they figured. It was best to focus their energies on Stella.

Stella loved the attention. With Lorna out of the way, she was the star of the family. Her parents kept a close watch over her, but they also spoiled her. They did whatever they could to keep her close and happy. They couldn't bear to lose another daughter.

Meanwhile, down on the ground, leaders had gathered together.

“We must put an end to this catastrophic weather!” shouted the secretary-general of the United Nations when they held an emergency meeting of the world's top scientists. The scientists agreed. So they teamed up to create the greatest machine ever. It was basically a giant fan designed to blow all the clouds out of the sky.

The McClouds had no idea that this was happening, because they were spending all their time indulging Stella. Stella would puff into different shapes and her parents would flatter her.

“You look like a palace of pillows,” they'd say. Or, “You look like a bucket of popcorn.”

Keep in mind, compliments in the cloud world often revolved around fluffiness.

When the humans finally finished their machine, which they called the Ultra-Blow, they put it on Mount Everest and fired it up. All the other clouds in the world had already grown wise to the humans' plan and had slipped off and hidden in caves.

Not the McClouds, though. When gusts from the Ultra-Blow reached Scotland, it was nighttime and they were asleep. The force of the wind pushed the three clouds together and they melded as one. All their thoughts and emotions became intermingled. They became a singular soul.

It's an odd thing to share someone else's soul and an even odder thing to share it with your family. But because of this, the mystery of Lorna was solved. Lorna had been there all along. Her sister, Stella, had absorbed her and had been hiding her deep in her billows.

Why did she do this? Simple. Stella was greedy and wanted all of her parents' love.

Damn you, Stella!
her parents were tempted to say, but saying that was essentially damning themselves. They were a single entity now, and the Ultra-Blow kept blowing them up and up and through the atmosphere and into space. And so it was that the cloud named McCloud hurtled into the void, disgusted with itself, bewildered by itself, in love with itself, like every family since the beginning of time.

Little-known fact: clouds freeze in space. And when McCloud froze, it stopped thinking and being. It ended up in suspended animation.

For eons, the frozen cloud traveled through space, until it came upon a young planet. As it was pulled in by the planet's gravity and hit the planet's thin atmosphere, McCloud melted and broke into thousands of little pieces, until it wasn't a family anymore, or even individual personalities. It was aspects of personalities: anger, confusion, compassion, and so on.

Back on Earth, there was no weather, for all the other clouds were forced to stay in hiding or face the wrath of the Ultra-Blow. However, on the young planet, where the remnants of the McClouds fell from the sky, there was always weather. Except it was thoughts and emotions that rained and snowed. It was the essence of a family that once was and would never be again.

The animals on the planet weren't much more than blobs in the sea, but they absorbed the precipitation and became intelligent and swamped by feelings both good and bad. They evolved, slimmed down, and grew arms, legs, and eyes. After a while, one feeling dominated their hearts and minds: anger.

Because in the end, that's what dominated the cloud named McCloud. Stella was angry with Lorna for being so kind and generous, something Stella couldn't manage herself. Lorna was angry with Stella for absorbing her. Horace and Electra were angry with the entire situation, but mostly with themselves for letting the situation come to pass.

The aliens channeled their new intelligence and anger. They built spaceships and set coordinates for Earth with one directive in mind: destroy everything. The land, the animals, the humans, the clouds. Everything.

Damn you, Stella. Damn you.

 

F
RIDAY
, 12/15/1989

AFTERNOON

I couldn't help myself. I turned on the walkie-talkie this morning. Not to talk to Glen, but to spy on Dorian Loomis, to find out if he knew things I didn't already know about Milo Drake. I figured the Loomis family probably had some inside information that hadn't been shared with the public. So I sat on my bed, headphones pressed to my ears, and I fiddled with the knobs and got nothing but static. Disappointed, I trudged through two inches of fresh snow to school.

At school, everyone was talking about bones. The news hadn't released any updates, and if my parents knew anything, they weren't telling me.

“I heard there's bones for at least five bodies out there, so my question is this: whose bones are the other bones?” Mandy asked with a cough as we sat on the benches in the locker room, lacing up our sneakers. She had spent the last couple of days at home with a cold, watching game shows and soap operas and every news update that interrupted them. “There are tons of other missing kid cases. Remember that boy last year on Long Island? Or that girl in California all over the news last summer? What's-her-face?”

“I don't know,” I said. “My only question is this: if everything went down like people think it went down, then how does Milo Drake snatch up Charlie? There's maybe fifteen minutes between when Alistair left the Dwyers' backyard and when the ambulance showed up.”

“Plenty of time to stuff a kid in the back of a van.”

“So what? Milo's hiding in the swamp? Or out in the street hoping to find some kid? It was pouring rain.”

“Well, if he got Fiona, then maybe she told him about Charlie too and he was hanging out near his house,” Mandy said as she hopped up and closed her locker. “Listen. I'm not a psychopath so I don't think like a psychopath, but I do know a few things about the yakuza.”

“The yakuza?”

“Come on,” Mandy said. “The yakuza? Ruthless Japanese swordsmen mafia types who you don't mess with? Everyone knows this.”

A few other girls had been listening in on our conversation and they provided the appropriate shrugs.