Mr. Fahrenheit

by T. Michael Martin

  “Dig what?” Ellie said.

  Before he could answer, the Cadillac emerged from the forest and reached the field where the House had been. Benji had not visited this place since the day the House had burned. The forest had grown and shrunk the field, and the witchgrass of summer was smothered underneath the snow. The passage of years had changed everything on this storied plot of land.

  But the sky? The sky was a time machine.

  Benji and Ellie stumbled out of the car, and there it was, aloft above the earth on the borderland of the only town he’d ever known; there it was, a memory beside the mothership in silhouette before the starlight; there it was, the final resting place of a billion ghosts of make-believe and their own mythic childhood.

  There was the House, resurrected and floating in the sky a hundred feet overhead, in all its great and terrible glory.

  “Oh, Ellie,” Benji breathed. Awe and terror of holy intensity flooded him. “Oh, look at it.”

  “I can’t believe . . .” Ellie said. “It’s real, isn’t it?”

  It was, and wasn’t. This new House was the progeny of memory and madness. The detritus of Bedford Falls—stoplights and swing sets, bicycles and gravestones—had fused together in the shape of the House. More shattered tree limbs missiled out of the forest every moment, uniting to form all the porch steps, all the spires and turrets. If this House differed some from Benji’s memory (and it did), it was because this House was not Benji’s memory: It was CR’s.

  Beside and above the House, the saucer’s tractor beam blazed into the pit that once had been the House’s cellar. Endless tons of earth rose in that poison light, and so did shadows in the shapes of pods.

  “What are those things, Benji?”

  “They’re the Voyager’s children,” he said, goose bumps going all the way to his heart. “It left them here to grow, when Papaw was young. He saw the Voyager bury them. Now they’re ready to be born.”

  From somewhere within the floating skeleton of the House came a scream of shock or pain.

  “That’s CR!” Benji said. “We have to get him!”

  “How do we get up there?”

  “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to move. He felt small.

  “I can’t do this,” he said.

  “I can’t, either,” she said.

  And so they found each other’s hands, and ran together.

  With every step, the chaos climbed.

  Whips made of torn tree bark whizzed by them. The earth erupted in all directions, as if struck by invisible cannonballs. Benji and Ellie hurtled onward.

  In the great tower of light ahead, the shapes became clearer: the children of the Voyager clawing free from the pods that had been their hidden wombs. They emerged writhing and glistening, shrieking heart-chilling wails.

  “Ellie, whatever happens,” Benji shouted, tightening his hand just before they leaped into the tractor beam, “hold on to me!”

  But no sooner had they entered the beam than holding on became nearly impossible. It was as if he’d been wrenched upward by a chain wrapped around his waist. His head snapped back. They spiraled upward, the beam a whirlpool teeming with newborn cries and chaotic earth. He felt Ellie’s fingers slipping away, and he held on tighter than he had ever held anything, knowing only that he must not let go of the hand tethering him to this woman he loved.

  They were getting closer to the portal, fifty feet away now. The House, which was outside of the beam and slightly lower than the ship, was just above them. More cocoons split, and creatures soaked in green slime emerged. With his free hand, Benji pulled the ray gun from his waistband.

  Around the rim of the portal, an enormous silhouetted head appeared: the Voyager. Everything inside Benji longed to fire at the creature.

  No, not yet, not yet.

  Now Benji and Ellie were approaching the porch steps of the House. “Get ready, Ellie!” he shouted, her grip tightening.

  They were even with the porch.

  “NOW!” Benji roared, and pulled the trigger.

  But he did not shoot at the Voyager. He fired the ray gun straight past his shoes, so that the blast was parallel with the ground.

  Just as the blast of “the Question” had propelled the Rust-Rocket when it became their unexpected afterburner on Prank Night, the ray gun’s blast now sent Benji and Ellie soaring backward through the tractor beam. Benji heard a shriek of pain from one of the creatures—he’d hit one of the cocoons, which was a wonderful accident—and then he and Ellie broke free of the light. They screamed as gravity reclaimed them, but they did not have far to fall: They crashed together onto the porch and rolled through the doorway of the House.

  This entrance hall was an echo of an echo, differing in small ways from the hall from his memory and dreams. The staircase to upstairs was on his right instead of his left. The deer head mounted on the wall had become a moose. The replica of the once broken grandfather clock was “working,” the tricycle wheel that served as its face rotating slowly to keep time. Most of all, the hall was much shorter than he remembered it.

  It took Benji several moments to see CR, still in his football uniform, lying in a heap at the end of the hall. Benji and Ellie ran to him. Benji grabbed him by the collar. “C’mon, buddy, wake up!”

  CR twitched, his eyes opening groggily. He seemed to nod. Benji and Ellie lifted him to his feet—

  Someone struck Benji from behind, knocking him to the floor, the ray gun flying out of his hands.

  It was Shaun Spinney.

  Or rather, it was the manifested memory of Shaun Spinney, the eighth-grade version of Spinney, remade from stone and earth and recollection. Benji peered up at this echo of his past, thunderstruck as the phantom bully marched down the hall, reenacting CR’s memory of the event.

  Ellie gasped, looking down the hall, for Shaun Spinney wasn’t the only ghost here.

  Near the front door stood four child-size forms: Benji, Ellie, CR, and Zeeko. The reincarnations of Spinney’s buddies, who were blocking the front door, were all blurry-faced; apparently, CR didn’t remember them well.

  But the ghost forms of Benji and his friends were detailed sculptures of snow and dust, their faces achingly familiar as they argued silently with Spinney to let them go. In a few seconds, Benji knew, the ghost form of CR would hurl a stone at Spinney’s phone.

  And yet there was one clear detail where CR’s memory differed from Benji’s.

  In CR’s memory, Benji was much taller than CR.

  That wasn’t the way it really was. I was way shorter, Benji thought, but seeing the event through CR’s eyes only drove home the point Benji had been learning all night: Envisioning the future is an act of imagination, but so is remembering the past.

  “Let’s go,” the real CR said weakly, snapping Benji back to his senses. Benji nodded, looked around for the ray gun. It had landed inside the living room a few feet away. He ran for it—

  Suddenly, the living room wall blasted apart, sending him stumbling backward.

  Holding a ray gun in Its claw, the Voyager floated in the storming air outside the House. It soared into the room and was upon Benji instantly, placing Its claw against his forehead.

  The familiar agony consumed Benji. As their minds fused and the Voyager began to search his memory one final time, Benji saw something he did not think the Voyager intended him to see: a message transmitted psychically to Its children.

  The Voyager removed Its claw from his head. As the creature had done with McKedrick, It began to thrust the barrel of the ray gun into Benji’s chest, plunging it in like a dagger, as if to maximize the pain before death.

  “Hey, asshat,” Ellie said. “You’re in our House.”

  Ellie’s ray gun blast hit the Voyager square in the chest. Like magic, a hole appeared. The Voyager’s claws released Benji and the creature flew backward into the night, for one moment seeming to float out there like the Wicked Witch of the West. Then It fell
out of sight and was gone.

  “Holy crap, Ellie,” Benji said, stupefied and weak with relief, “that was awesome.”

  The House lurched beneath them, dropping closer to the ground and pitching back and forth like a fragile ship ill equipped for the storm. Large holes began to appear in the walls and floor: With the Voyager dead, the House was falling apart.

  “Banjo and Eleanor,” CR said, “let’s get the hell outta here.”

  “I never liked this place anyway,” Benji said shakily.

  At the end of the entry hall, just outside the front door to the porch, Benji saw something that made his heart almost burst: It was the shades of the three children they had been, helping one another to safety. The emotions Benji felt were overwhelming and unnameable, all terror and ache and revelation and hope, but together they formed the shape of a fierce love.

  He ran with his best friend and the love of his life toward the front door, and as they leaped off the crumbling porch together, the three of them physically merged for one fleeting fragment of time with the children they had been. The dust enveloped them, and Benji knew that their childhood had never truly ended. They were still twelve years old, but they were also thirteen and fifteen and thirty and ninety-nine, their selves composed of all the ways they had imagined their past and remembered their future. Then Benji, Ellie, and CR burst free from the bounds of those children of dust, tumbled through space, and landed side by side on the earth.

  Benji rolled onto his back. The last of the pods had ascended, though the tractor beam still burned bright.

  “We have to stop them from leaving,” he said. “We have to stop them all.” When the Voyager had touched him, Benji had seen something: In Its first and final moments with Its newborn children, the Voyager had psychically passed all Its knowledge to Its offspring. It had no past to guide It, and could only give Its children a bleak rage, and the knowledge that humans from Bedford Falls had hurt It. If the creature had originally come to Earth for anything resembling a peaceful purpose, Benji had made that peace impossible. The Voyager’s only legacy would be destruction.

  Benji spotted the ray gun, which Ellie had dropped during their fall, a few feet away. He scooped it up and fired directly at hull of the saucer.

  But when the rays were a few feet from impact, a semitransparent shell of white light appeared around the ship, a force field protecting the ship from the blast. Benji fired at the still-open portal; again his assault was blocked.

  The ship was coming for them now, the tractor beam nearing them and ripping the earth apart, a mere hundred feet away.

  What do I do? What the hell do I do, Papaw?

  “Come on, Benji, we have to get out of here!” Ellie said, pulling him back toward the Dream Machine.

  Benji tried to shake her off. He looked back and saw Papaw’s Cadillac, saw the reflection of the mothership clearly on the mirror-like hood of the car.

  The carnival, he thought. The mirror mansion. The ray gun bounced off a mirror. What if the tractor beam will, too?

  “I’ve got an idea!” Benji said, leading them toward the car. “I need your help! I’m going to drive into the tractor beam!”

  “What?” Ellie said.

  “I’ll jump out right before I reach it! And CR, when I do, I need you to shoot the car.”

  “You want to blow up your grandpa’s car?”

  The tractor beam was gaining on them, seventy-five feet distant now. “Trust me,” Benji said, “this is the only chance we’ve got.”

  “In that case, Benji,” Ellie said, “I better drive.”

  And before he could object, she was in the car, driving straight toward the beam. As Ellie roared toward the beam, the Dream Machine glowed like a comet.

  “Now, Ellie!” Benji shouted. “Jump out!”

  She did, opening the door and barrel-rolling through the snow. The Dream Machine’s momentum carried it forward. Benji raised the ray gun, but right before he pulled the trigger, CR grabbed his wrist and steered his aim.

  “Banjo, I told you, aim for where it’s going to be!”

  And he did.

  The atomic ray gun light hit the Dream Machine just as it entered the beam. The car detonated, bursting into a hundred pieces, the brilliant chrome transforming into a hundred mirrors flying through the air. And those pieces did something that would not have been possible if Papaw’s teenage dream had remained a single intact piece: They reflected the tractor beam in a hundred directions, back at the saucer. The beams tore the ship apart. Its own power, turned in on itself, was the only thing that could have stopped it, because it was the only thing against which it did not know how to defend itself.

  Benji felt someone take his hand.

  It was CR.

  Ellie ran to them and took Benji’s other hand. And the three of them stood together, watching as the ship destroyed itself and crashed to the earth, a constellation they had ripped out of the sky.

  EPILOGUE

  BOY WONDER

  The more he knows, the more he will find to wonder at.

  —Harry Houdini

  From the Bedford Falls Exponent-Telegram:

  AN UNFORGETTABLE HOMECOMING

  BY THE EXPONENT-TELEGRAM STAFF

  It has been five days since the most bizarre homecoming in memory shook Bedford Falls.

  For the crowd gathered at Bedford Falls High football field, the homecoming game was meant to be a battle for the ages, not a battle for their lives. It may be weeks or months before the whole story becomes clear, but here are the facts as we currently know them.

  At 8:49 p.m., moments before the end of the homecoming game, a small aircraft plummeted from the sky and crashed onto the middle of the football field. Initially described by some witnesses as a darkly colored helicopter, it has since been identified by the National Weather Service as an unmanned, “drone”-type craft.

  Said National Weather Service Regional Director Donald Bray: “These are relatively new aircraft, outfitted with sensitive measuring instruments. They can be inserted directly into extreme weather conditions; they’re more accurate and less expensive than Doppler radar; and unlike most Doppler systems, these crafts are manufactured in America. It’s a win-win-win.” When asked to elaborate on how an aircraft that crashed in a populated stadium could be described as a win, Mr. Bray paused before answering, “Well, as I say, these are relatively new. But we hope to amp up production soon, and our department is currently assessing whether Bedford Falls is a viable location for a manufacturing facility.”

  Mr. Bray declined to comment on whether this proposed facility should be viewed as the government’s mea culpa for the crash.

  Whatever the case, it is clear that the drone had been dispatched earlier that night due to the National Weather Service’s detection of a small tornado in the vicinity of Bedford Falls. It was this tornado that would destroy the county fairgrounds, devastate much of the outlying farmland, and seemingly cause the explosion of an undiscovered natural gas deposit beneath the football field.

  The tornado would also be indirectly responsible for sending one beloved local lawman to Bedford Falls Community Hospital with grave injuries.

  [CONTINUED ON PAGE 2]

  Benji Lightman wore a tuxedo and goose bumps, performing there in the footlights on the celebrated Magic Lantern Theatre stage. His nerves showed only once—he dropped a Ping-Pong ball during a technically difficult sleight—but that was understandable: He’d only been in Chicago a few months, since right after graduating from high school, and he was still growing accustomed to the genuinely unexpected fact that his dreams seemed to be coming true.

  When he finished the act he’d spent several weeks designing, he turned to face the audience, taking a deep bow. Out in the great cavern of the theater, one person—and only one person, for he was the only one there—applauded.

  “That was real nice, Benjamin,” Papaw said. “How ’bout I become your agent? I deserve a cut, don’t ya think, since you got all your talent from me
?”

  [“AN UNFORGETTABLE HOMECOMING” continued]

  From his hospital room, Sheriff Robert Lightman, 73, told the Exponent-Telegram staff his story. “I was sitting on the porch, cleaning my old six-shooter. When I heard that commotion at the field, I sprung right up, and I guess I just fumbled my gun. It fell, it fired, and boy did I get one heck of a bellyache. I just thank the good Lord that Zeeko was there.”

  Zeeko Eustice, a senior at Bedford Falls High School, is the football team’s trainer and a neighbor of Lightman’s. Eustice had contracted a stomach bug that afternoon and was unable to attend the game. Hearing the gunshot, he rushed to Lightman, but was unable to reach 911, as operators were overwhelmed with calls from the football stadium.

  After administering first aid, Eustice drove Lightman to the hospital, where Dr. Elroy Eustice, Zeeko’s father, was able to stabilize Lightman during emergency surgery.

  Lightman said, “What do you call a policeman who never took a bullet except the one he shot himself with? ‘Ready to retire.’ I always planned to slow down someday when the conditions were right. Well, I’m done waitin’. Sometimes you just got to cast the die and then make the best of whatever comes.”

  Given that he has been sheriff for decades, is Lightman concerned about who will be able to fill his shoes, the Exponent-Telegram asked.

  “Not in the least,” Lightman said. “I’ve got some fine deputies. And this generation coming up, they’ll surprise you with how good and smart some of ’em are. Heck, look at what happened with Spinney the other night. . . .”

  [For more information on Shaun Spinney, please see “FORMER BFHS QUARTERBACK BECOMES HOMECOMING HERO ONCE MORE” on page 5.]

  It was the last afternoon of Papaw’s two-day visit, which was why Benji’s manager had let them into the theater. Usually, Benji just spent his day as the grunt-worker-slash-custodian for the Magic Lantern’s front shop, but he didn’t mind the work. Even scrubbing toilets is kind of appealing when you get to the bathroom via a passageway hidden behind a bookshelf. And he knew how absurdly lucky he was to have gotten the apprenticeship. It wouldn’t have been possible without the audition video Ellie had made for him.