The Storyteller (5 page)

Alistair turned to me and said, “Mom will get you up to date. It's better that way.”

They were simple words, but he said them in a way that made it seem like I was his little sister instead of his big one. They were comforting and yet made me feel small at the same time. Whatever they were, they managed to shut me up.

Minutes later, Dad and Alistair were out the door, side by side, wearing matching knit caps that Nana got them last Christmas.

A few minutes after that, it was Mom and me walking outside. She didn't really say anything until we were crossing the driveway. It was as if she was scared the house was bugged and we could only talk in the open air.

She took a breath and said, “Your brother shot Kyle.”

I kept walking because I expected her to say more. But she didn't. I could hear her breaths, like a phone's busy signal but in her chest.

“So what's going to happen to Alistair?” I asked.

“Ms. Kern is his lawyer for now, but we might have to hire someone who's more experienced in these situations.”

“What type of situation is it?” On the inside, I was cursing myself for joking about this in my diary yesterday. On the outside, I was shaking. I put my hands in my pockets.

“It was an accident,” Mom said. “He and Charlie had been playing with the gun in that old clubhouse of Kyle's. Kyle tried to wrestle it away from them and it went off. Alistair ran home to call 911, and Charlie must have run off somewhere.”

“Whose gun was it?” I asked.

“Ummm…” Mom put a hand on my shoulder. “It was Alistair's. With the whole Fiona thing, he was worried. He wanted to protect himself.”

“How the hell did Alistair get a gun?” Mom hardly blinked when I said
hell
. What does a swear matter when your twelve-year-old son packs a pistol?

“That's the next step,” she said. “Figuring out who's really responsible here. The person who gave Alistair this gun. He won't say. He's made up some story that's too strange to believe. He's probably scared to tell the truth, but it's important that we find out. It might be the key to finding Charlie. So that's what he and Dad are doing right now. Talking to the police about it.”

I figured it had to be Kyle's gun. Kyle was the type of guy to have a gun, the type to spin it around on a finger and wink at you and say, “Let's get dangerous, toots.”

Okay. That's a weird thing to write. Do guys really call girls
toots
? Probably not, but the fact remains that if any guy around here would have a gun, then that guy would be Kyle Dwyer. But why would Alistair be afraid of admitting that? Kyle isn't in the position to be doing much of anything to anyone.

“Will they arrest Alistair?” I asked.

“Right now, it's still a conversation,” Mom said. “Speaking of which. What did you two talk about the other day?”

I put my hand in my coat pocket, where Alistair's envelope to the mysterious Jenny Colvin was buried. I wasn't going to tell Mom about that. I decided to tell her the odder bit, the bit that got Alistair excited in the first place. I didn't have to lie in that case. “Wombats,” I said.

“What?”

“Seriously. Wombats. When I said I was gonna write a story about a glowing wombat, he was interested. I don't get it either.”

We had reached the entrance of the school at that point, and a school bus drove by going about fifteen miles per hour. Even though we were walking in the grass about five feet from the curb, Mom put her arm over my chest to protect me until it was long gone.

“Alistair didn't say anything about a boy named Luke Drake, did he?” she asked.

The name sounded familiar, but I had no idea why. “No. Who's he?”

“It's about something Alistair told us he saw once,” she said as she kissed my cheek, which meant she was leaving me here. “It's not important.”

Not important? Yet she asked about him.

 

TONY THE GUN

There once was a gun named Tony. He was a sweet little gun, a please-and-thank-you sort of gun. He lived with his parents in a gun shop on a highway leading away from a big city. His parents were an Uzi and a sniper rifle, but you would never have guessed that. Tony was tiny. A popgun is what customers called him. As in,
Look at that darling little popgun! Perfect for a beginner! Or for a lady's purse!

Five bullets fit in Tony, and he liked bullets because they were smooth and made him feel less hollow, but since Tony lived in a gun shop, he had only been loaded a few times, and only in the back, by the owner, who sighed as he did it, saying, “Your time will come. Just you wait. Someone will find a use for you.”

Tony sure hoped so. Someone found a use for his parents. They were sold to a man in a camouflage jacket who came into the shop looking for some “pinpoint accuracy and elephant-stopping power.” Which left Tony alone, hanging in a display case next to pink holsters and pellet guns. Pellets guns were the worst. They all had names like Petey and Zeke and they thought that fart jokes were the funniest things, and Tony didn't like fart jokes at all. Not because they were rude, but because they were rarely funny.

One day, a little old lady came into the shop looking for something dainty, and the owner said, “I have just the thing!”

He pulled Tony from the display case and handed him to her. With a trembling hand, the woman raised Tony and pointed him at a mirror that hung on the other side of the shop. The sight of this hunched, frail little person clutching his handle made Tony afraid. What if she dropped him?

She didn't. Instead, she said, “I'll take it!” and slapped a wad of cash on the counter.

From that day on, Tony lived in the old lady's nightstand, next to a ball of rubber bands, a pill bottle, and her dentures (when she wasn't wearing them). It wasn't an exciting life, but it did have one advantage to life in the gun shop: he was loaded.

“I'm very important,” Tony told the ball of rubber bands as often as he could.

“Then why are you in this drawer with us?” the ball responded.

“She's waiting. She'll use me. She has to.”

It was a long wait. Or what felt like a long wait. In the drawer, it was hard to tell day from night. Especially when the old lady stopped opening it to take out her dentures. Months passed. Possibly years.

If you lose track of time, you lose track of your mind. You don't go crazy necessarily, but your thoughts wander. They go on permanent vacations. So when the drawer finally opened one day, and light finally poured in, Tony had forgotten what light was or even what
he
was.

A hand reached into the drawer and pulled him out. The hand had nineteen fingers, and each finger had six knuckles. It raised Tony and pointed him across the room at a dusty and cracked mirror.

In the reflection, there was a creature the type of which Tony had no words for. Maybe it was an animal he'd never seen before. Maybe it was an alien. Maybe it was something he once knew of, but had forgotten.

Whatever it was, it was weird and gross, with a bulbous head and knobby knees. It turned Tony away from the mirror and pointed him at another weird and gross creature that stood on the opposite side of the room. The two creatures babbled gibberish at each other as Tony felt his trigger being pressed down.

A click.

A spark.

Then a bullet rocketed through Tony and the second creature fell to the floor.

I remember,
Tony thought.
I'm a gun. A glorious gun! And this is what I've been meant to do all along!

The first creature shrieked and turned Tony around to look down his barrel. The creature's five eyes were wide with curiosity. They say curiosity killed the cat. Whether that's true or not doesn't matter because, at the very least, it killed this thing. With the barrel pointed in the center of its five eyes, the creature pulled the trigger again and another bullet came rocketing from inside Tony.

I'm a gun! A spectacular gun!

As the creature crashed to the ground, Tony flew from its hand and landed on a rotting dresser next to a window. The two creatures lay dead on the floor. In the bed, there was a skeleton, presumably the remains of the old lady who had bought Tony so long ago. In the yard, which was a sea of giant weeds, sat some sort of spacecraft.

For eons, Tony remained in that room. He never saw a man, woman, or creature again. But soon the dresser collapsed from the rot, and the weeds in the yard became trees, and the house fell down around him. The spacecraft crumbled too, and then oceans rose and covered Tony and the rubble. And when the ocean dried up, lava melted Tony and he became part of whatever was left of the Earth.

His last thought was a happy thought. Sure, he was dying alone, but he had served a purpose. He had shot a bullet from his barrel. Two bullets, actually, and both had hit their targets.

He had done his part.

 

T
UESDAY
, 11/28/1989

AFTERNOON

They didn't take Alistair into custody. That was an option, since he's making a crazy claim about the gun. He says he found it in a box, buried near the Oriskanny. He actually took them to the spot, a bend in the river somewhere. They asked him why he was digging there, and he said he was looking for something.

Somewhere. Something.
Mom and Dad refuse to tell me the exact details.

“We're going to let the police investigate,” Dad said. “But we can't have information getting out at this point.”

“Who am I going to tell?” I asked.

Dad raised his eyebrows.

“I'm not telling Mandy,” I said.

Somehow, Dad managed to raise his eyebrows higher.

“Oh come on,” I said.

“Facts,” he replied. “Mom and I have agreed to tell you the facts of the case.”

“What if I ask Alistair?”

“Alistair has agreed to not discuss the case with anyone besides us and Ms. Kern.”

“So I'm the least important member of the family, then? Less important than Ms. Kern.” I think I said it to bug him, but when the words came out, I started to actually feel them. Like,
Yeah, why does Ms. Kern get more information than me? Because it's her job?

Dad gulped back his words for a second and started to shake his head, but then stopped. “We love you. So, so much. And don't think for a second that we don't, even if we sometimes get consumed with Alistair's problems.”

“How can I have anything bigger in my life than Alistair's problems? How can anyone?” I was shouting the words by this point.

Dad's job is to set people at ease, to give them a place to point their confusion and rage. But he didn't do his job. All he did was shrug.

EVENING

I finally tore open the padded envelope addressed to Jenny Colvin. How could I not? I haven't mailed the thing, after all. I still intend to. A promise is a promise, but the promise had nothing to do with not listening to it.

There was a tape inside, but nothing else. The label on the tape read:
PLAY ME
. I slipped it into my Walkman and lay down on the bed. The sound was fuzzy at first, and then Alistair's voice filled my ears.

“Greetings and salutations, Jenny,” Alistair said. “I hope this recording finds you and finds you well. You've gotta be wondering what it's all about, so I'll get right to it. You have been chosen, Jenny, out of … well … You're the only qualified candidate for this job. Do you know where the Steerpike Fountain is? Of course you do, it's a few blocks from your house. Every day at two p.m., I will open a portal there. When you're ready, step through and you will enter the Captured Worlds of Aquavania. It's where the rivers lead, where daydreamers like you have been trying to get for ages, where the swimmers go.

“An atlas and spacesuit will be waiting for you there, which will help you get to Quadrant 43. I'll get you as close as I can, but even I don't have control of everything. I'm still learning how to use my power. In Quadrant 43, you'll board a space station where you'll meet some kids named Chip and Dot. They're doing vital work. I was told that in your world you created something that extracts and projects thoughts. Well, these two are in the extraction business. Only they're extracting souls. Now they need to project them. They could use your intuitiveness.

“I suspect they'll be a bit prickly at first, but ask Chip about the pendant he wears. Tell both of them that you want to help them resurrect the Astronomer. They'll know what you mean, and they'll come around. Once you've gained their trust, I'd like you to tell them that I want to help too. They've gone to great lengths to protect themselves from me, which you undoubtedly understand. But I'm not a danger. I want to help. At the very least, they know that I've gotten rid of all the ciphers, and the Captured Worlds are a more peaceful place than they've been in ages. Now I'm trying to do what I can to get everyone home again. Werner, Chua, Rodrigo, Boaz … Fiona. Everyone.

“As for me, I go by many names. Alistair is one of them. And yes, you guessed it, another one is the Riverman. But I'm not after your soul. I would have gotten it already if I wanted it. Because I know what you need, Jenny. You need to be courageous. You need to be a hero. You need to be a swimmer. Now is your chance. I hope you take it.”

That was it. That was the entire tape.

What. In. The. Half. Baked. Hell!

I listened to it seven or eight times, trying to figure out what it was about. Each time I listened, I was more confused. Finally, I put the tape back into the envelope, sealed it up with Scotch tape, and stuffed it in my backpack.

NIGHT

I'd rather be in school. School!

What a pathetic thing to write. Kids everywhere should be calling for my head. “Nerd!” they should scream into the air like a bunch of Barbarians.