The Storyteller (18 page)

It's safe to say there's so much I still don't understand. I could ask Alistair questions, and I did ask Alistair questions, but they led to more questions.

The most important one I had last night was, “What can I do to help?”

“Remember what I tell you,” he said. “In case I forget.”

So today, I've been trying to remember, trying to put all the pieces in their right places and keep them there. Which meant I was distracted, so distracted that I'm surprised I didn't walk into the lockers during the migrations to and from classes. Glen certainly noticed. Between third and fourth periods, he joined me on my way to math and said, “You're not talking much today.”

“I've got a lot on my mind,” I said.

“My dad says that psycho's mind blacks out,” Glen replied.

“What? Who?”

“Milo Drake,” Glen said. “My dad talked to an editor at the
Bulletin
who said that Milo Drake told the police that he ‘loses time.' He'll get in his car and drive somewhere and then end up at home and have no idea what happened. That's why he confessed. He really did think he snatched Fiona and Charlie, but then forgot about it.”

“He's not well,” I said.

“Sufferin' succotash!”
Glen said with a cartoony lisp. “That might be the understatement of the century. Any guy who scoops up roadkill and buries it in his yard is as nutty as a fruitcake.” He put a finger near his temple and spun it around and whistled the sort of tune that plays at a circus when a clown rides in on a tiny tricycle.

“Does your mind have a filter?” I asked.

“Like a pool?” he replied. “Don't think so. If it does, I should probably get it cleaned.” He laughed as if this were incredibly funny, which it wasn't.

“I mean, do you say everything that pops into your head?”

“Hmmm … yes,” he said. “It's called honesty.”

“It's called annoying,” I responded.

He'd been cheery up to that point, but I must have hit a nerve, because his tone got distinctly peeved. “Hey,” he said. “Why are you talking like this? You'd better tell me today is Opposite Day.”

I stopped midstride. “What?”

“Up is down. Dogs are cats, that sort of thing.”

“Did you really bring up Opposite Day?”

“Yeah, so? It's not a real thing, in case you didn't get the memo.”

My backpack was hanging off one shoulder, and it was so heavy that all I had to do was shrug a little and it slid down my arm to the floor. I unzipped it and pulled out my diary.

That's right. You, Stella! Out there and exposed in the hall at Thessaly Middle! I opened you up to the page where I had written my latest story, the one titled “Opposite Day.”

“Look,” I said with my index finger crushing the title.

Glen squinted. “So?”

“I wrote this
last freaking night
!” I said. “You don't understand, I'm writing about Opposite Day, you're talking about Opposite Day, and there has to be a reason why and—”

He snatched the book out of my hand. “So it's, like, a story?” he said. “You write stories?”

“Yes,” I said. “But not for you.” Then I reached to rescue you, Stella, but he blocked me with his back and hunched over so he could give the story a closer look.

“We're in a relationship,” he said. “All of this stuff should be for me too. We should be sharing everything with each other.”

I didn't realize how strong Glen was until I was trying to wrestle you away from him. He bobbed and spun and bumped me with his shoulders as he tried to read more.

“Come on!” I shouted. “Give it back!”

You'd think a crowd would have gathered or a teacher would have stepped in, but it must not have looked like a big deal. Maybe it looked like we were having fun. A game between a boyfriend and girlfriend. Maybe that's how it felt to Glen. But to me it felt like life and death.

I don't think Glen had the chance to read more than a sentence or two of the story, but then he started flipping through the pages and seeing other things I'd written. “Wait a second, wait a second,” he said. “Is that my name in here?”

I'd like to say I had no other choices, but I probably did have other choices besides the one I made. Still, the one I made worked, and that's all that counts.

“Gimme that!” I shouted. Then I bit him on the shoulder.

He dropped you on the ground while howling “Gawww!” and I scooped you up, Stella, and into my backpack, which I threw over my shoulder.

As I sped off down the hall, I called out, “Don't ever try crap like that again!”

And he cried back, “We're not breaking up, are we?”

 

T
UESDAY
, 12/19/1989

EVENING

I'm worried. What else is new? My grip on sanity worries me. These coincidences worry me. What I did to Glen worries me. The fact that I'm not funny anymore worries me. I used to joke with you more, Stella, didn't I? There are always punch lines to be found in life, and my inability to find them these days worries me. But you know what worries me the most? The same thing that worries everyone. They're not back yet.

It's been six weeks since Fiona up and vanished. One month since Kyle was shot and Charlie went missing. Lies. Stories. Speculations. They've all muddied the waters. And nothing is worked out. Not really.

What has Alistair been waiting for? What has he been doing? My switch is flipped. He needs to keep it flipped!

Actually, I'll tell you what Alistair has been doing. Seeing Dr. Hollister. I don't know what they talk about because my parents aren't even supposed to know that. Not unless lives are at risk.

But lives
are
at risk, aren't they? And yet I can't exactly go up to Dad and say, “So Alistair told me that Fiona's and Charlie's souls are trapped somewhere inside of him and I sorta, kinda, maybe … believe him.”

I'll
be the one seeing the psychiatrist. I'll be the one locked away, because at least Alistair has an excuse. At least he's seen some disturbing things. Me, I'm simply willing to suspend some disbelief.

But for how long? If something doesn't happen soon, my switch might be flipped back. So this morning, when I bumped into my brother coming out of the bathroom, I asked him, “Any more word from Jenny Colvin?”

“No,” he said in a low voice. “I'm exploring another option.”

“What can I do to help?”

“Remember,” he said, just like he'd said before.

I guess I have your help with that remembering part, don't I, Stella? And what I'll remember about today is that it's the day Kyle returned home. In a wheelchair. His parents pushed him quietly and slowly up the snowy driveway and bumped him into the door frame as they entered a house where there'd been two cold and empty bedrooms for the last month. At least, that's how I imagine the scene.

Mom was the one who saw it. Driving by on her way home from work, she watched the Dwyers put one broken piece back into their broken family.

“He may walk again someday,” Dad said. “Let's hold out hope on that account.”

We were in the kitchen when he said that, just my parents and I. Alistair had shut himself away in his room again. They hadn't told him that Kyle was home yet. We all knew there was a good chance that Kyle wouldn't be coming home on his own two feet, but we didn't want to accept it until one of us saw it. Now one of us had.

“How do you know he might be able to walk?” I asked.

“Word gets around the hospital.”

Word didn't get around the school. Or at least it didn't get to me today, because I didn't really speak to anyone. Ever since I bit Glen, he's been keeping his distance. Mandy has been too, which is a bit weird, but then again, she's Mandy. When I saw her in the cafeteria today, she waved me off and said, “Sorry, I don't have time to annoy you right now,” and headed to the exit with half a cellophane-wrapped sandwich in her hand.

When you spend a day not talking to people, you begin to see its appeal. You don't have to explain yourself. You don't have to ask questions or seem interested. You don't have to listen to your brother tell you stories about alternate dimensions and then call random girls in other hemispheres and wonder constantly what the hell is happening to your brain, which you were pretty sure was a pretty good brain, once upon a time.

What you can do, and what you will do, is this: you will write more about the wombat.

 

THE PHOSPHORESCENT WOMBAT, PART III

Hamish lay dead at the bottom of the ravine.

His little red sports car burned, but it didn't glow as brightly as Luna did. When the ambulance, fire trucks, and police cars arrived, they had no idea what they had found. They stood on the edge of the ravine, scratched their heads, pulled off their sunglasses, rubbed their eyes, and put their sunglasses back on.

“Let's call in … Who do we call in?” the sheriff asked.

“The government?” the fire chief asked.

“Do either of you have the government's phone number?” the ambulance driver asked.

“I know a guy who knows a guy, I guess,” the sheriff said, and he went back to his car and got on the radio.

Luna, meanwhile, started to crawl from the wreckage and up the ravine. She knew that Hamish was dead and she was weeping uncontrollably, but she also knew that she needed to hide somewhere. For years, Hamish had been hiding her. Because she was no longer the harmless, dimly lit Mr. Nickelsworth. She was now a force of nature, a radiant dynamo, and surely there would be people who would want to exploit her.

When the helicopters arrived an hour later, Luna was near the top of the ravine and the police and first responders had fortified themselves behind some boulders—some with their hands shielding their eyes, others with their shaking guns drawn.

Men in protective suits came out of the helicopters. They wore dark goggles and carried guns with tranquilizer darts. They fired into the glow, basically without aiming, but eventually they hit Luna. When she stopped moving, they closed in with nets and a cage.

Since her glow was so bright that it would blind a pilot, it would've been dangerous to transport her in the helicopter. So they called in a tank with an enclosed compartment in the back. Even the tank wasn't entirely effective. As it rolled away from the scene, thin beams of light leaked from the tiny cracks around the screws and seams of the machine. It looked like a rolling Chia Pet, with light for hair.

The tank took Luna as far as the nearest port, where she was loaded into an airtight shipping container and placed on a barge. A tugboat pulled the barge to an oil rig about one hundred miles offshore.

Only this wasn't a regular oil rig. It was designed to look like one, but it was actually a place where the government performed its most top-secret experiments. Submarines, warships, and fighter jets circled the place to keep it secure. And in a chamber near the bottom, about fifty feet below the surface of the sea, they stored Luna.

“They” were a collection of the nation's best scientists, who lived on the oil rig and employed the world's best technology. Using infrared cameras mounted in the chamber, they examined Luna from afar. Luna's glow was not on the infrared spectrum, so she didn't look like an orb when viewed through the cameras. The scientists could make out her true shape from her body heat.

“I'm not sure this is an alien,” remarked the chief scientist, Gladys Gershwin, as she examined the very distinctive creature that waddled around the chamber.

“Looks a bit like a wombat to me,” said the second in charge, Hogan Hogoboom, a man who had spent a chunk of his childhood in Australia.

“Isn't that Mr. Nickelsworth?” said the youngest in the group, an awkward but brilliant young geneticist named DeeDee Delaney.

“Who's Mr. Nickelsworth?” everyone asked.

And DeeDee brought them all back to her cabin, where she had a VCR and a bunch of videotapes. She showed them episodes of
Pocketful of Hullabaloo
.

“It's from seventy-five years ago, at least,” she said. “I'm surprised none of you have heard of it. I guess I'm the only junkie for the classics.”

There was a zoologist named Yan Yeager on the rig and they called him in for his expertise. The infrared cameras could only show so much, but the thing that puzzled Yan Yeager the most was Luna's age. “How could this possibly be the same wombat from your television show?” he said. “A wombat can live twenty-five years tops. Maybe this is an offspring.”

DeeDee begged to differ. Even in infrared, Luna looked exactly the same as when she was on TV. The shape of her nose, the size of her ears, every bump on her body. “That's the same wombat, only she didn't glow this much back then,” DeeDee said. “If you're such an expert, maybe you can explain the glowing.”

Yan scratched his chin. “We might have to call in a chemist for that.”

They called in a chemist. “Beats me,” she said.

They called in a physicist. “Beats me,” he said.

They called in almost every scientist on the rig and got a chorus of
beats me
.

Still, every scientist wanted to study this curious specimen. Together, they constructed a robot with infrared cameras for eyes and they sent the robot into the chamber to run tests on Luna.

They poked, prodded, shaved, bathed, jiggled, wiggled, and even tickled the wombat. They took blood, hair, and droppings and looked at them under the microscope. They showed inkblots to Luna and they put a microphone in their observation room that transmitted all of their conversations to a speaker in Luna's chamber. They wanted to see how she would react to voices and sounds.

They were especially curious to know how she had survived the car crash. So they got rough. They tried to see how far they could push and punish Luna. Why not, right? They didn't really have any hypotheses. They were throwing paint at a canvas and hoping to come up with art.