Dread Locks

by Neal Shusterman

  Until that moment, I had never known the meaning of pain. I once broke my leg in two places while snowboarding. I once had a root canal. I once took a softball thrown at full force, in the most tender spot known to man. But none of those things came anywhere close to the pain I felt as the jaw of the scissors came down on that first thick tendril.

  The pain shot through my scalp, zigged through my brain, and clasped my spine like barbed wire. I could no longer feel my arms, my legs, my body It was all the pain I should have felt when I fell from Darwin’s Curve. I was blinded. There was nothing left of me but the pain. Then the pain began to fade.

  I found myself curled up in the fetal position, knees to chest, between the toilet and bathtub, the scissors lying on the floor beside me. But something was wrong with them. They didn’t look right, and as my vision came into focus, I could see that one of the blades had snapped.

  I stood up slowly, balancing against the sink to keep my knees from buckling beneath me. The twisting, snaking curls were still there—all of them—and in the sink was the broken scissor blade.

  After that, I slunk back to my room. The sun was rising now, but I didn’t feel like facing the day I crawled into bed and fell asleep, and although I knew I had vivid and bleak nightmares, I didn’t dare remember any of them.

  Somewhere between 5:30 A.M. and noon, Tara claimed her next victim.

  14

  THE SCULPTOR

  I woke up at noon, still feeling profoundly void in my mind and in the pit of my stomach. It was Saturday; my parents were off at the country club, Dad playing golf, Mom organizing yet another social function. I slithered down the stairs. I couldn’t find Garrett, but Katrina was there, sitting in the living room, brushing Nasdaq. There was something off about the way she did it. Not so much rhythmically as mechanically. My heart missed a beat. I slowly approached her.

  “Hey, Katrina,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “You’re right,” Katrina said.

  “Right about what.”

  “She’s not a vampire. She’s something else.” Katrina continued to brush the cat, and the cat clearly didn’t like it.

  “What did you do?”

  “I went to her house and snuck in.” Katrina shivered.

  “What happened?” I demanded. “Did something happen when you were there?”

  “She caught me snooping. She ...”

  “Her glasses! She didn’t take off her glasses, did she? Please, Katrina, tell me she didn’t take off her glasses!”

  “No,” Katrina said.

  I breathed a deep and thankful sigh of relief.

  “No. She didn’t have to take them off. She wasn’t wearing them.”

  Gooseflesh rose on my arms and legs, and I felt my dangling curls start to squirm, their roots like deep weeds in my brain and spine. “Did you see her eyes?”

  Katrina turned her gaze to me. The cat bolted from her lap. “Those things aren’t eyes,” Katrina said. “There’s forever in there....”

  I stormed to Tara’s mansion. I didn’t know what I would do when I got there, but I couldn’t just sit idly by and watch my brother, then my sister, fall victim to her as so many already had. How long would it take for Katrina? I wondered. It had taken two weeks until Ernest had been carted away to be a textbook case of some strange new disease. About the same amount of time passed before Garrett lost all sense of emotion and chowed down on kitty litter. What kind of future did Katrina have now? No future at all.

  Tara’s door was unlocked. It was always unlocked. What did she have to fear? I swung the door wide and stepped in. “Tara,” I shouted. “I want to talk to you!”

  There was no answer. I took a few more steps into the house.

  “Tara!” I called again, even louder. “Are you here?”

  My voice echoed through the mansion, bouncing off walls faraway rooms, only to return unanswered.

  I walked into the living room and sat down in a chair wi thick, swallowing cushions, prepared to wait until she can back. I didn’t care how long it took. My mind was filled wi fury and confusion, the feelings pulling me deeper into myself don’t know how long I sat there, seething, not moving a muscl It felt like time was no longer moving at the usual speed, as time had become strangely elastic and unpredictable. Was th another effect of my “change”? I thought. Freedom from tl laws of time?

  I can’t say that I finally calmed down exactly, but at son point my eyes focused on my surroundings. It almost felt like was waking up as I remembered where I was. I was sitting Tara’s living room, uninvited and alone.

  As my eyes swept the room, they kept returning to one Tara’s paintings on the wall. It was a huge stone building, an a cient place, with gigantic columns all the way around holding the roof. It stood high on a hill, overlooking a city.

  I stood up and walked closer to the painting. The colum looked like they were made out of marble, turned pink and go by the setting sun. The gigantic roof was made of stone, to with intricate carvings on the sides. Between the columns, could make out a large golden statue of a woman.

  It was beautiful, but I was hardly in the mood for art appr ciation now. Then an uneasy realization began to snake its w inside my head.

  I had seen this building before.

  Tara had told me she had done all of her paintings on her travels around the world. She painted places she had been, things she had seen ... but I had seen this building before, in a photograph. It was famous. Only ...

  I raced out of Tara’s house and headed home. Maybe I was wrong about this; maybe I was imagining things, but I had to find out.

  I ran into my house, then up to my room, grabbed my backpack, and dug through it until I found my world history textbook, a big old thing that weighed my pack down like lead—I guess to remind us how much world history there was. I flipped it open and quickly shuffled through the pages until I came to what I was looking for. Chapter 12, Section 3. Ancient Greece. It was a photograph of the Parthenon, high on a hilltop in Greece, built around 440 B.C. to be the temple of Athena, a Greek goddess. It was the same building as in Tara’s painting, no question about it. Same shape, same columns, same hill. But now the building was an ancient ruin. The roof had caved in, the marble columns were broken and battered, and the carvings on the sides of the roof were gone, along with the golden statue.

  If Tara painted only the things she had seen ... just how old was she?

  I felt my heart freeze as impossible thoughts raced through my mind. Impossible, like surviving a deadly crash. Impossible, like immortality. I felt unsteady on my feet as the reality of her—and now my—immortality finally hit me. My textbook fell from my fingers and began a long, slow fall to the floor. Time was changing again, but I forced my mind to wrestle it back into a steady pace. By the time the book hit the ground, time appeared to be normal once again.

  I wobbled over to the window, and a glint of reflected sunlight caught my eye. I looked down and saw something gleaming in the backyard.

  My statue.

  The replica of me, in bronze.

  It was a work of art, created by an artist. Tara’s painting was also a work of art, and it could be explained just as easily. I probably had misunderstood her. Tara didn’t just paint what she had seen—she must have painted what she imagined it had looked like when it was still intact. Or maybe she had copied it from a book. Sure. That’s all. But ...

  I glanced across the room and saw the stone hand on my dresser, the one Tara had given me as a souvenir of my rampage through her basement. Tara’s painting wasn’t the only unsettling work of art in her house. The statues troubled me just as much.

  As I looked down at the bronze sculpture in the backyard, an idea came to me. I grabbed the stone hand off my dresser and slipped it into my backpack.

  Michael Fisher, Sculptor.

  The next day, while my parents were out, I rifled through their things until I found the receipt in my dad’s filing cabinet. My eyes widened at the price they had paid for my statue, b
ut that’s not what I was interested in. I just needed the address. It turned out that Michael Fisher’s studio wasn’t very far away.

  It was in a part of town I hardly ever visited—the industrial side, just over the bridge and past the cemetery. It was 7:00 P.M. when I got there. The sun was already below the horizon, and the sky was slipping into darkness. The warehouses and factories were so deserted on a Sunday night, you’d think it was a ghost town. I thought I’d come up with a dark studio and a pad-locked door. Lucky for me this artist kept unusual hours. I found Michael Fisher’s studio on a block with a scrap yard, a transmission-repair shop, and a bar called Rocky’s.

  The studio was in a corrugated-steel warehouse, with a huge sliding door to get very large things in and out. The sliding door was partly open, and beyond it I could hear the nasty whine of some sort of machine. I peered inside. A big man stood there, hard at work. He wore a thick black apron and heavy work goggles. The whine was coming from a chain saw that he was using to attack a huge block of wood—and when I say attack, I really mean that. He sculpted that wood like he was taking chunks out of an enemy. Sawdust and wood chips flew in every direction.

  I stood there and watched, fascinated, as he hacked away with the chain saw until the block of wood began to resemble a crouching human form. He turned off the saw, put it down, then stepped back to admire his work.

  “Wow,” I couldn’t help saying.

  The sculptor snapped his eyes toward me, lifting up his goggles to get a better look. Then he wiped his forehead on his sleeve. He said nothing. I took a step inside. Still he said nothing. Just watched me. I’d guess he was about sixty. What little gray hair he had left he wore back in a ponytail, and his nose looked like it had been broken twice, once in each direction. He looked more like a trucker than an artist.

  “I can see you’re busy,” I said, “but I was hoping I could ask you a few questions. About art.”

  “Art who?” he said, then laughed at my clueless expression. He reached over to his worktable and picked up a water bottle. As he stretched out his arm, his sleeve hiked up, and I could see that from his wrist up, his skin was covered with tattoos.

  “Hey, I know you,” he said. “Basketball player in bronze. Last name Baer, right?”

  “That’s me.”

  “The new hairstyle threw me, but I never forget a face I sculpt. That was a tough sculpture. Your folks are very particular about what they want.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” I said.

  “Mike Fisher,” he said, stepping forward and shaking my hand. My hand nearly disappeared in his. I also noticed that his hand was strangely misshapen. There were lumps at each of his knuckles. Arthritis. I had seen it before on my grand-mother’s hands, but on these huge hands it was chilling.

  “I’m Parker. Parker Baer,” I said, trying not to look at his hand.

  “So what did you think of my sculpture of you?”

  “I loved it,” I said.

  He shook his head and stared at me, his dark eyes seeming to pierce me. “I hate it when people lie to spare my feelings,” he growled.

  I sighed. “It took me by surprise,” I said. “I didn’t know what to make of it.”

  His eyes softened, slightly. “When your parents commissioned the work, I thought it was about the strangest idea for a birthday present I’d ever heard.”

  I nodded, and he laughed very suddenly and much too loud.

  “Not that I was about to turn them down,” he added. “Money’s money.”

  He grabbed a towel and rubbed it all over his face and neck, wiping off the sweat. I glanced around the studio. The place was dark and untidy. Tools, rags, and work materials were scattered on every surface. Sawdust, stone chips, and metal shavings covered the floor.

  Unfinished works surrounded us. I saw the top half of a perfectly formed woman who seemed to be growing out of a chunk of stone; there were body parts made of clay lying on benches and several abstract iron sculptures as well. It looked like Michael Fisher was a master sculptor in wood, stone, and metal.

  “They’re beautiful,” I said.

  “Beauty isn’t the point,” he grunted, dropping the towel. “Truth is.”

  I brushed past a small tree trunk on the floor. I had assumed it was just another piece of wood that he was going to carve, but when I touched it I realized it was made out of stone.

  “This is amazing,” I said. “This might be your best sculpture of all. It looks exactly like a real piece of wood, down to the tiny cracks in the bark.”

  Mike laughed out loud, then said, “I can’t take credit for that one. It is a real piece of wood. Petrified wood. I’m going to use it in my next piece.”

  I’d read about petrified wood, but I’d never actually seen any. It’s the fossilized remains of prehistoric trees. Millions of years ago it was ordinary wood, but over time, water and minerals seeped into and around the wood’s cells, eventually replacing them, turning it into a perfect stone replica ...

  ... which raised a question in my mind.

  “How long does it take for wood to petrify?” I asked.

  Mike shrugged. “Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years.”

  I knew this line of questioning was about to become a runaway train I didn’t want to be on. I just kept hoping that I was on the wrong track.

  “Is there any way something can turn to stone ... faster?” I asked.

  Mike thought about it. “Not that I can think of,” he said finally. Then he added, “Outside of myth and legend, that is.”

  A runaway train. I tensed for the crash.

  “What myths and legends?”

  “There are plenty of them. There’s the legend of the cockatrice, a monster with the head of a rooster and the tail of a dragon whose glance could turn anyone to stone. Then there’s the story of King Midas—a greedy king who was granted his wish that anything he touched turn to gold. He was delighted, until he got hungry. Then anything he tried to eat or drink turned to gold before he could swallow it.”

  He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “And of course, there’s the most famous one of all ... Medusa. You know the myth of Medusa, don’t you?”

  I shook my head. Ancient myths of dead civilizations had never seemed especially relevant. Not until recently.

  “Medusa was one of three Gorgon sisters. She took the form of a hideously ugly woman, with monstrous teeth and sharp claws. But even worse was her hair. Her head was covered with hissing snakes. She was so terrible to look at, that anyone who caught her gaze was turned into stone. She lived by herself in a dark cave surrounded by statues of men, women, and animals—only they weren’t statues at all, of course. They had been her victims. In the end, she got her head cut off by a hero, name of Perseus.”

  “But none of that is real,” I said, wondering if the sudden tightness in my voice sounded as strange to his ears as it did to mine. “I mean, it’s only a myth, right?”

  “Well,” said Mike thoughtfully, “that’s the question, isn’t it? Personally, I believe that every myth has some nugget of truth at its core. Over the centuries, the story may have changed and become distorted, but somewhere back in the distant past, who knows?”

  I reached into my backpack and took out the broken stone hand. My own hand was shaking so much I almost dropped it.

  “Can you tell me who made this?” I asked. “Or tell me where it came from, when it was made ... or at least what kind of stone it is?”

  Mike reached forward and took the stone hand from me. His face didn’t change, but I could see his eyes registering the quality of the work.

  “Very nice,” he said. “Very lifelike. Where did you get it?”

  “From a friend.”

  “Where did they get it?”

  “That’s what I want to find out.”

  He hefted it in his hand, rubbing his thumb along the broken wrist and the curve of the fingers. “Strange. I’ve been carving stone for nearly four decades. I can usually tell just by looking what kind
of stone it is—and sometimes even which quarry it came from—but this one I don’t recognize at all.”

  He walked over to another workbench against the far side of his studio. I followed. He had more tools on this bench, smaller ones—picks and files, forceps, clamps. And a large magnifying glass.

  Mike held the hand under a bright work light and peered at it through the magnifying glass for a full minute, closely studying the rough surface of the break at the wrist.

  “Okay,” he said at last, “okay.” Then he nodded at me and said, “Time to get out the big guns.”

  He walked over to a deep, cluttered closet, rummaged through it, and finally pulled out an old, rusty microscope. He blew off some dust and wiped the lens with his shirt. “Live long enough and you have one of everything,” he said. “I haven’t had to use this baby since some rich kook hired me to engrave Shakespearean sonnets on grains of sand during the seventies. What you might call microsculpture.”

  Mike picked up a tiny steel pick and pointed it at the broken edge of the wrist, scraping off a small sample. He picked up one of the crumbs with a pair of tweezers and put it on a glass slide, then slipped the slide under the microscope. Peering through the eyepiece, he quickly twirled a knob to focus it.

  “Hmm ...” he said. I could see his forehead crinkling with thought. “Hmm,” he said again. He straightened up and turned to me. “I’m no geologist, but I know this is something you don’t see every day. Take a look.”

  I bent over the microscope. I squinted and could clearly see the tiny little flake of stone, now magnified to the size of a boulder. Light glinted off the nearly translucent edges, creating a little rainbow effect.

  “It almost doesn’t look like stone,” Mike said. “The structure is very unusual—it doesn’t look like a mineral matrix; it looks more like a cellular structure.”