скачать книгу бесплатно
The woman I loved was asking me for help! I felt like I could have found my way home from the dark side of the moon. “No problem,” I said with all the confidence of a lemming who thinks he’s headed for a nice day at the seashore. “Follow me. Come on!” And I started down the street.
Rowena hesitated a moment more, then turned away from Ted and started walking after me. He stared after her in shock for a moment, then waved his arm in a “g’wan!” gesture. “Your funeral. I’ll tell Dimas to send out search parties,” he shouted, then he laughed and pumped the air.
It must be nice to be your own audience.
Rowena caught up with me, and we walked on for a while in silence. We crossed Arkwright Park and headed north—I think—on Corinth.
Within six blocks I realized something very important: It’s good to know where you are, but it’s better to know where you’re going. Which I definitely did not—in a matter of minutes I was more lost than I’ve ever been. And, what was worse, Rowena knew it. I could tell by the way she was looking at me.
I was starting to panic. I didn’t want to let Rowena down. But I also didn’t want her to see me with egg on my face. So I said, “Wait here just a minute,” and I ran on ahead before she could say anything.
I was desperately hoping to find another street or landmark that I recognized. I turned the corner and saw a building at the end of the next block that looked familiar, so I started down the street—Arkwright Boulevard, next to the park—to make sure.
The weather in Greenville is weird at the best of times. It comes of being so close to the Grand River, which gave us the beer-brewing industry and the tourists who come down to walk the nature trail and to see the falls, but also gives us the mists that spread around the town whenever it gets chilly.
One of those mists started at the corner of Arkwright and Corinth. I headed straight into it, felt it beading cold on my face. Most mists thin when you’re in them. This one didn’t. It was more like walking through thick smoke, blinding and gray.
I just pushed through it, not really noticing it much— after all, I had more important things on my mind. From the inside of the mist I could see shimmering lights of all different colors. It’s weird what a town looks like when all you can see are the lights.
I turned the next corner onto Fallbrook and stepped out of the mist—and stopped. I was in a part of town I didn’t recognize at all. Across the street was a McDonald’s I’d never seen before, with a huge green tartan arch above it. Some kind of Scottish promotion, I guessed. Weird. I noticed it, but it didn’t really register. I was too busy thinking about Rowena, and wondering whether there was any way to explain what had happened that wouldn’t leave her thinking I was a complete idiot. There wasn’t. I was going to have to head back to her and confess that I had gotten us both completely lost. I was looking forward to it about the same way I look forward to a routine dental checkup.
At least the fog was almost gone when I got back to the cross street, panting and out of breath. Rowena was still waiting where I had left her. She was staring into the window of a pet shop, with her back to me. I ran straight across the street, tapped Rowena on the shoulder and said, “I’m sorry. Guess we should have listened to Ted. That’s not something you hear often, is it?”
She turned around.
When I was a kid—I mean, just a little kid, back in New York, back before we moved to Greenville, before Jenny even—I remember following my mom through Macy’s. She was doing her Christmas shopping, and I could have sworn that I barely took my eyes off her. She was wearing a blue coat. I followed her all around the store until the press of people scared me and I grabbed her hand. And she looked down. . . .
And it wasn’t my mom at all. It was some woman I’d never seen before, who was wearing a similar blue coat and had the same hairstyle. I started crying and they took me off to some office and gave me a soda and found my mom and it all ended happily enough. But I’ve never forgotten that moment of dislocation, of expecting one person and seeing another.
That was what I was feeling now. Because it wasn’t Rowena in front of me. It looked like her, as much as a sister might, and her clothes were the same. She was even wearing a black baseball cap, just like Rowena’s.
But Rowena had always been real vain about her long blond hair. She’d said more than once that she wanted to let it grow as long as it could and never cut it.
This girl wore her blond hair in a buzz cut—real short. And she didn’t even look like Rowena. Not really. Not when you were up close. Rowena’s eyes are blue. This girl had brown eyes. She was just some girl in a brown coat and a black baseball cap, looking at puppies in a pet store window. I was totally confused. I backed away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were someone else.”
She was looking at me like I had just climbed out of the sewer wearing a hockey mask and carrying a chain saw. She didn’t say anything.
“Look, I’m really sorry,” I told her. “My bad. Okay?”
She nodded without saying anything, and she walked away down the sidewalk until she reached the cross street, glancing behind her every few moments. Then she ran as if all the hounds of hell were after her.
I wanted to apologize for spooking her, but I had my own problems.
I was lost in downtown Greenville. I had gotten separated from the other two members of my unit. I had surrendered all my change. I’d failed Social Studies.
There was only one thing to do, so I did it.
I took off my shoe.
Under the inner sole was a folded five dollar bill. My mom makes me keep it there for emergencies. I took out the five bucks, put my shoe back on, got some change and got on a bus for home, rehearsing all the things I could say to Mr. Dimas, to Rowena, even to Ted, and wondering whether I’d get lucky in the next twelve hours and somehow manage to contract a disease so contagious that they’d have to keep me out of school until the end of the semester. . . .
I knew that my troubles wouldn’t be over once I got home. But at least I wouldn’t be lost anymore.
As it turned out, I didn’t even know the meaning of the word.
(#ulink_5f323fe8-2be6-5e76-bdb7-8b8b1ba19ed9)
I RODE THE BUS home in a daze. A few blocks after getting on, I stopped looking out the window and started looking at the back of the seat in front of me. Because the streets didn’t look right. At first there was nothing specific I could point out that bothered me; everything just seemed a little bit . . . off. Like the green tartan McDonald’s arches. I wished I’d heard about whatever they were promoting.
And the cars. Dad says that when he was a kid, he and his friends could easily tell a Ford from a Chevy from a Buick. These days they all look the same no matter who makes them, but it was as if someone had decided that all cars needed to be painted in bright colors—all oranges and leaf greens and cheerful yellows. I didn’t see a black car or a silver one all the way.
A cop car went past us, siren on, lights flashing: green and yellow, not red and blue.
After that, I kept my eyes on the gray cracked leather in front of me. About halfway to my street I became obsessed with the idea that my house wouldn’t be there, that there would be just an empty lot or—and this was even more disturbing—a different house. Or that if there were people there, they wouldn’t be my parents and my sister and baby brother. They’d be strangers. I wouldn’t belong there anymore.
I got off the bus and ran the three blocks to my house. It looked the same from the outside—same color, same flower beds and window boxes, same wind chimes hanging from the front porch roof. I nearly cried with relief. All of reality might be falling apart around me, but home was still a haven.
I pushed the front door open and went in.
It smelled like my house, not someone else’s. Finally I was able to relax.
It looked the same inside as well—but then, as I stood in the hallway, I started to notice things. Little things, subtle things. The kind of things you think that you could be imagining. I thought maybe the hall carpet was a slightly different pattern, but who the heck remembers a carpet pattern? On the living room wall, where there had once been a photo of me in kindergarten, was now a picture of a girl around my age. She looked a little like me—but then, my parents had been talking about getting a photograph of Jenny. . . .
And then it hit me. It was like the time I went over the falls last year, when the barrel hit the rocks and smashed, and suddenly the world was all bright and upside down, and I hurt. . . .
There was a difference. One you couldn’t see from the front. The annex we’d had built this spring—the new bedroom for Kevin, my baby brother—wasn’t there.
I looked up the stairs—if I stood on tiptoe and twisted my neck to just short of painful, I could see where the new hallway started. I tried doing that. I even took a couple of steps up the stairs to see better.
It was no use. The new addition still wasn’t there.
If this is a joke, I thought, it’s being pulled by a multimillionaire with a really sick sense of humor.
I heard a noise behind me. I turned around, and there was Mom.
Only she wasn’t.
Like Rowena, she looked different. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt I’d never seen before. Her hair was cut the same as always, but her glasses were different. Like I said, little things.
Except the artificial arm. That wasn’t a little thing.
It was made of plastic and metal, and it started just below the sleeve of her T-shirt. She noticed me staring at it, and her look of surprise—she didn’t recognize me any more than Rowena had—turned suspicious.
“Who are you? What are you doing in this house?”
By this time I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or start screaming. “Mom,” I said desperately, “don’t you know me? I’m Joey!”
“Joey?” she said. “I’m not your mom, kid. I don’t know anyone named Joey.”
I couldn’t say anything to that. I just stared at her. Before I could think of what to say or do, I heard another voice behind me. A girl’s voice.
“Mom? Is anything wrong?”
I turned around. I think I was already sort of subconsciously expecting what I would see. Something in the voice told me who would be standing there at the top of the stairs.
It was the girl in the picture.
It wasn’t Jenny. This girl had red-brown hair, freckles, kind of a goofy expression, like she spent too much time inside her own head. She was as old as me, so she couldn’t be my sister. She looked like—and then I admitted to myself what I already knew—she looked like what I would look like if I were a girl.
We both stared at each other in shock. Faintly, as if from far away, I heard her mother say, “Go back upstairs, Josephine. Hurry.”
Josephine.
It was then that I understood, somehow. I don’t know how, but it hit me and I knew it was the truth.
I didn’t exist anymore. Somehow I’d been edited out of my own life. It hadn’t worked, obviously, since I was still here. But apparently I was the only one who felt I had any right to be here. Somehow reality had changed so that now Mr. and Mrs. Harker’s oldest child was a girl, not a boy. Josephine, not Joseph.
Mrs. Harker—strange to think of her that way—Mrs. Harker was scrutinizing me. She was wary, but she also seemed curious. Well, sure—she was seeing the family resemblance in my face.
“Do I—know you?” She frowned, trying to place me. In another minute she’d figure out why I looked so familiar— she’d remember that I’d called her “Mom”—and, like me, her world would fall apart.
She wasn’t my mother. No matter how much I wanted her to be, no matter how much I needed her to be, this woman wasn’t Mom any more than the woman in the blue coat that day at Macy’s.
I ran.
To this day I don’t know if I ran away because it was all too much to handle or because I wanted to spare her what I knew: that reality can splinter like a hammered mirror. That it can happen to anybody, because it had just happened to her—and to me.
I ran past her, out of the house, down the street, and I kept running. Maybe I was hoping that if I ran fast enough, far enough, I could somehow go back in time, back to before all this insanity happened. I don’t know if it might’ve worked. I never got a chance to find out.
Suddenly the air in front of me rippled. It shimmered, like heat waves gone all silvery, and then it tore open. It was like reality itself had split apart. I caught a glimpse of a weird psychedelic background inside, all floating geometric shapes and pulsing colors.
Then through it stepped this—thing.
Maybe it was a man—I didn’t know. It was wearing a trench coat and hat. I could see the face under the hat brim as it raised its head to look at me.
It had my face.
(#ulink_a44083ec-b697-5ff5-beb6-70a47d93d3c5)
THE STRANGER WAS WEARING a full-face mask of some kind, and the surface of it was mirrored, like mercury. It was the strangest thing, staring into that blank, silvery face and seeing my own face staring back at me, all bent and distorted.
My face looked goofy and dumb. A liquid map of freckles, a loose mop of reddish-brown hair, big brown eyes and my mouth twisted into a cartoonish mixture of surprise and, frankly, fear.
The first thing I thought was that the stranger was a robot, one of those liquid metal robots from the movies. Then I thought it was an alien. And then I began to suspect that it was someone I knew wearing some kind of a cool high-tech mask, and it was that thought that grew into a certainty, because when he spoke, it was with a voice I knew. Muffled by the mask enough that I couldn’t place it, but I knew it, all right.
“Joey?”
I tried to say “Yeah?” but all I could manage was some kind of noise in my throat.
He took a step toward me. “Look, this is all happening a bit fast for you, I imagine, but you have to trust me.”
All happening a bit fast? Understatement of the decade, dude, I wanted to tell him. My house wasn’t my house, my family wasn’t my family, my girlfriend wasn’t my girlfriend—well, she hadn’t been from the start, but this was no time to get finicky. The point was that everything stable and permanent in my life had turned to Jell-O, and I was about this far from losing it completely.
Then the weirdo in the Halloween mask put his hand on my shoulder, and that closed the gap between losing and lost. I didn’t care if he was someone I knew. I jerked my knee up, hard, just as Mr. Dimas had told us all to do—boys and girls—if we ever thought we were in physical danger from a male adult. (“Don’t aim for the testicles,” said Mr. Dimas that day, just as if he were discussing the weather. “Aim for the center of his stomach, as if you’re planning to get there through the testicles. Then don’t stop to see if he’s okay or not. Just run.”)
I practically broke my kneecap. He was wearing some kind of armor under the coat.
I yelped in pain and clutched my right knee. What made it worse was that I knew that behind the mirrored mask, the creep was smiling.
“You okay?” he asked in that half-familiar voice. He sounded more amused than concerned.
“You mean apart from not knowing what’s going on, losing my family and breaking my knee?” I would have run, but fleeing for one’s life requires two legs in good operating condition. I took a deep breath, tried to pull it together.
“Two of those things are your own stupid fault. I was hoping to get to you before you started Walking, but I wasn’t fast enough. Now you’ve set off every alarm in this region by crossing from plane to plane like that.”
I had no idea what he was talking about; I hadn’t been on a plane since the family saw Aunt Agatha for Easter. I rubbed my leg.
“Who are you?” I said. “Take off the mask.”
He didn’t. “You can call me Jay,” he said. Or maybe it was, “You can call me J.” He put out his hand again, as if I were meant to shake it.
I wonder if I would have shaken it or not—I never got to find out. A sudden flash of green light left me blinded and blinking, and, a moment later, a loud bang momentarily put my ears out of commission, too.
“Run!” shouted Jay. “No, not that way! Go the way you came. I’ll try to head them off.”
I didn’t run—I just stood there, staring.
There were three flying disks, silver and glittering, hovering in the air about ten feet away. Riding each disk, balancing like a surfer riding a wave, was a man wearing a gray one-piece outfit. Each of the men was holding what looked like a weighted net—like something a fisherman might have, it occurred to me, or a gladiator.
“Joseph Harker,” called one of the gladiators in a flat, almost expressionless voice. “Opposition is nonproductive. Please remain where you are.” He waved his net to emphasize his point.
The net crackled and sparked tiny blue sparks where the mesh touched. I knew two things when I saw those nets: that they were for me, and that they were going to hurt if they caught me.
Jay shoved me. “Run!”
This time, I got it. I turned and took off.
One of the men on the disks shouted in pain. I looked back momentarily: He was tumbling down to the ground while the disk hovered in the air above him. I suspected that Jay was responsible.
The other two gladiators were hanging in the air directly above me, keeping pace with me as I ran. I didn’t have to look up. I could see their shadows.
I felt like a wild beast—a lion or a tiger, maybe— on a wildlife documentary, being hunted by men with tranquilizer darts. You know that it’s going to be brought down, if it just keeps running in a straight line. So I didn’t. I dodged to the left, just as a net landed where I had been. It brushed my right hand as it fell: My hand felt numb and I could not feel my fingers.
And I moved.
I was not sure how I did it, or even what I had just done. I had a momentary impression of more fog and twinkling lights and the sounds of wind chimes, and then I was alone. The men in the sky were gone—even mysterious Mr. Jay with the mirror face was nowhere to be seen. It was a quiet October afternoon, wet leaves were sticking to the sidewalk and nothing was happening in sleepy Greenville as per usual.
My heart was thumping so hard I thought my chest was going to burst.
