He turned everything off, even his modem. Especially his modem.
The room went black. Behind his desk, Scott squirmed inside the snake’s nest of cords, yanking every plug from the power strip, already begging his parents’ forgiveness in his mind. His breath came in strangled gasps. He kept hearing — no, feeling — that interval between the final pulses for Wayne’s number and the ring. A matter of milliseconds, probably, but it didn’t matter. It had been milliseconds too long.
When he stood, the room wavered around him. The corner street light came on, illuminating his blinds. At the same moment, something damp touched Scott’s calf. He nearly screamed. J.R. nosed him again and then gave a tentative lick. Scott collapsed to his haunches, the life gone from his legs. He rubbed the stiff curls around J.R.’s vanity collar.
“This is bad, buddy,” Scott mumbled. “Really bad.”
Because those milliseconds too long meant one thing to Scott, and one thing only. His phone line, his calls, his hacks — it was all being monitored.
4
“HOW WELL DO you know Mr. Leonard?” Janis asked.
Her mother’s face appeared over the top of the mustard-colored refrigerator door. Even from across the kitchen table, Janis could see lines forming between her brows. “Mr. Leonard?”
“Yeah,” Janis said. “The neighbor behind us.”
Her mother disappeared inside the refrigerator again. Janis edged her gaze to her father, who had paused mid-chew to listen to the evening news on the TV. Margaret appeared equally absorbed in the anchor, who spoke gravely over their dinner: “NATO is proceeding with plans to deploy six hundred new American missiles in Europe. The comments came following the Soviet Union’s announcement Saturday that it had conducted successful tests of its ground-launched cruise missiles.”
Their father grunted and resumed eating.
“Well, they both seem nice enough,” her mother said, closing the refrigerator door and returning with a fresh bowl of grated orange cheddar. She was wearing tan slacks and a print blouse — modern housewife attire, she called it. “Tend to keep to themselves. Why do you ask?”
Because I think Mr. Leonard has been watching us.
“Just curious,” Janis said, gesturing impatiently for her mother to sit and eat. Everyone else was almost done with their first taco while her mother had yet to even start dressing hers.
“Did he say something to you?”
Janis shook her head and pretended to become interested in the news. Her mother, who made it a habit to stress over everything, remained staring at her, worry lines growing around her pale blue eyes.
Should never have opened my mouth, Janis thought as she crunched into her taco.
The news segment ended, and the ubiquitous commercial for Viper Industries came on: “In these challenging times, the security of the United States and its citizens cannot be underfunded. Call your congressperson and ask them to hasten approval of the V4 missile system, the next generation of—”
Her father muted the television. “What was that about Mr. Leonard?”
Oh, for the love of…
“He was at the beach today,” Margaret answered for her — a not uncommon occurrence, especially when her sister had no idea what was being discussed. “I just hope he covered that chrome dome of his.”
Their father began spooning ground beef into the bottom of his second taco. He was staid-faced, with stiff gray hair receding blade-like above his tanned temples. Their mother was younger, with Dee Wallace blond hair, but paler than their father, more careworn. They had met in college as many couples did — only he had been her political science professor, more than ten years her senior. “Rescued her from the long-haired hippies,” he often joked.
“When does soccer start?” he asked.
“Tryouts in four weeks,” she replied, grateful for the change of topic.
“Are you ready?”
“I will be. Gonna put in an hour of garage practice after dinner and a half-hour of dive and rolls in the side yard. Samantha’s coming over this weekend so we can practice up in the Grove.”
“Atta girl.” he said, winking. He had lettered in three sports in college, and though he never said so, Janis could tell he was pleased one of his daughters had inherited his passion for athletics. And that, in turn, pleased Janis.
The news came back on, and her father unmuted the television.
“…on a campaign stop in Ohio, President Reagan answered questions about a proposed summit with the Soviet Union.”
“Our governments have had serious differences,” Reagan said from an outdoor lectern, the wind tossing graying strands of hair from his steep side part. “But I stand by what I have said repeatedly: If their government wants peace, there will be peace.” As he gripped the sides of the lectern, his grandfatherly voice began to shake. “Russians, hear this: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to ensure they will never be used.”
“So far,” the anchor concluded, “the Soviet leadership has expressed no willingness to meet.”
“And they’re not going to,” Janis’s father said. “Secretary Chernenko is as rooted in moldy Soviet-think as his predecessor.”
“Oh, we don’t know that,” her mother whispered, the lines around her eyes seeming to grow taut. She looked from her husband to Janis, trying to smile, then down to her plate.
~*~
That night, Janis had the dream again, the experience.
But another dream preceded it, and in this one, she was back on the beach blanket, the soccer ball beneath her head. People were everywhere, the beach even more crowded than it had been that day. Margaret’s friends were talking too close, debating about the hottest member of Duran Duran. “Rio” blared from the boom box, but it sounded warped — one moment chipmunk speed, the next slow and nauseating. Janis got up and pushed her way past Margaret’s friends toward the sound of the surf. Underfoot, the sand firmed and dampened, making a sucking sound each time her foot flexed.
Soon, she found herself alone before the ocean. But the ocean looked larger, more daunting, and she squinted to see the faint line of the horizon. Across all of that water was no change, no point of reference, just endless gunmetal gray — like the sky. Janis hugged her shoulders and began to shiver. The season was no longer summer but pale winter.
She turned, seeking warmth, seeking people. Most of all, she sought Margaret. But Margaret was nowhere; the beach stood empty. Miles of sand rose, coarse and untrammeled, into dunes of wild sea grass.
Something flashed and rumbled. Janis spun back around. Far off over the ocean gathered the same black clouds that had threatened earlier, but these clouds were rising into… an hourglass? Yes, a giant hourglass blooming at the top. But no, not blooming, Janis saw in dawning terror.
Mushrooming.
A low line of clouds the thickness of a blade blasted inland. A blistering wind dashed through her hair. The mushroom grew taller, its cap more corpulent, rivaling the very ocean for size.
“Margaret!” she cried, but it came out a murmur.
The air stung Janis’s nostrils as if something toxic were burning. She fled from the water, knowing only that she needed to get away, needed to escape inland. A fireball smashed into the beach no more than ten feet to her right. Globules of melted sand splashed up. Another fireball landed to her left, and Janis screamed because she knew the next one was going to be the one to strike her. And moments later, as her legs swam against the inexorable pull of the sand, it did.
The sound — a walloping roar inside both ears — jolted Janis awake.
But she was not in her bed.
She stood in her backyard, beside the island of oak trees and azalea bushes where her mother had recently planted a row of caladiums. English ivy crept ink-like from the house, curling into tendrils near her toes. Vibrations coursed the length of her body and thrummed inside her head: WHOOSH-WHOOSH-WHOOSH. It was the same feeling she’
d had in similar dreams that summer.
Similar out-of-body experiences.
Keep it together, she told herself. Just keep it together.
The backyard was dark, the household asleep. No light shone from her father’s study or bathroom. Janis guessed it was after midnight. It dawned on her that she would also be inside, sleeping. And yet here she was, out in the yard, shimmering shapes playing across her vision.
When she first began to experience this state, she couldn’t move or see. The shimmering shapes were as chaotic as the energies that ravaged her senses. Am I dead? she had asked herself the first time. Is this hell? Janis had prayed with everything she had, prayed that she be delivered from her wraithlike state and be restored to life. She started to panic when she remained paralyzed, but soon the vibrations faded, and cool, familiar sheets had enfolded her legs.
Now, with a little concentration, Janis made herself light. She had learned not to concentrate too hard because doing so would disturb the experience and return her to her body, to her bed. The vibrations came more quickly. Janis giggled as her feet lifted from the grass. Free from gravity — or whatever passed for gravity here — Janis hovered above the lawn and began to drift its length, weaving around one plant island and then another.
Janis loved flying dreams, but she wasn’t dreaming. She knew this because of the plastic egg. She had discovered it in the nest of ferns one night, near the old clothesline where her mother aired out their throw rugs each spring. A purple egg, faded and spotted with dirt, half buried — one she and Margaret must have missed during a childhood Easter egg hunt.
A week had gone by before Janis remembered the experience with the plastic egg, sparked by a trip to a McDonald’s during one of her softball camps. A couple of her teammates had gone into the play area and waded into the pit of colored balls. Colored plastic balls. That’s all it had taken. For the rest of the camp, whenever Janis could remember, she repeated to herself, “Plastic egg, clothesline, ferns.” Her friends must have thought she was sun stroking, but it worked.
Back home, Janis didn’t even change out of her cleats. She ran through the house and out the back patio door, straight to where the ferns sprang into their wildest clumps near the clothesline. The egg was not in the exact spot, no. And it was yellow instead of purple. But what did that matter? It was there: half-buried, spotted with dirt — like in the experience. She twisted it open and found two quarters (her dad’s substitute for jelly beans). Now and again, she would retrieve the egg from the top drawer of her dresser and give it a little shake, the rattle of coins erasing her daytime doubts.
But she wasn’t doubting now.
Janis neared the tall bushes that formed the boundary between their yard and the neighbor’s and floated to a stop. In all of her experiences, the bushes were as far as she had gone — as far as she could go, it seemed, as though a force field blocked her way. She extended an arm into the dark leaves and felt it being repulsed. She’d learned about like forces in sixth-grade science, of course, had experimented with the magnets. And that’s how this felt: a charge rebuffing another like charge. The harder Janis pushed, the harder the field shoved back on her.
All right, she conceded. I’m not going to win this one.
She drifted backward and lifted her face to where oak branches dipped and Spanish moss hung like beards. An urge came over her to perch on one of the branches and watch the night hum and crackle around her. The experiences never lasted very long, and on this final night of her summer break she wanted to savor it, even though the out-of-body state still frightened her a little.
Janis rotated as she rose, streams of energy seeming to trail out beneath her. When her gaze reached above the rear line of bushes, she froze.
The back of the Leonards’ house appeared like a dark, dreadful creature emerging from the earth. But it was not the house that chilled her. It was the shadow of a human figure on the high deck and the small light that smoldered red. The same light she had seen the night before and in the same place — at the height of the figure’s head.
The light dimmed and fell. She pictured the threads of smoke snaking over the dark sloping yard, fording the cement culvert between their properties, filtering through the leaves. She did not know if she possessed smell in this state, but she imagined the low scent of the cigarette anyway.
When the point of light rose and smoldered again, it glinted against a pair of glasses.
The previous night, the same sight had driven Janis back to her body, back to her bed. But now she remained hovering. He couldn’t see her after all. She was insubstantial, incorporeal. She drew courage from that vocabulary word — incorporeal. Drifting nearer the shrubbery, she peered past the leafy tops. The red spot of light rose and burned again. The lenses they illuminated were perfectly round.
Forward-facing.
And she could feel it too, somehow, the concentration coming from his shadow, the intent. This was not a person on a casual smoke break. Mr. Leonard was watching just as he had likely been doing at the beach that day, the throngs of beach-goers his shield, as the darkness was now.
But why was he watching?
Janis sifted through what little she knew of him. He had lived in the house as long as she had been aware of him. He had a wife, a pale woman with dust-colored hair, who mostly stayed inside. No kids that Janis knew of. Sometimes he substitute taught. She’d seen him in the halls of her middle school as recently as last year, his dress shirt crumpled, his thinning wreath of hair in mild disarray, as if he were always filling in on short notice. He’d even subbed her history class once, his lecture voice thin and quavering. He never quite looked anyone in the eye, either, always down and to one side. So why was he watching now?
Margaret.
Her sister’s name sprang over Janis’s thoughts like a cartoon bubble. Had he noticed her at school just as the surfers had noticed her on the beach that day? Had he become interested in her? Infatuated? Mr. Leonard had to be at least twenty years older than Margaret, but Janis’s father had warned them about “sickos” during one of his serious talks. Was Mr. Leonard a sicko?
The tip of the cigarette inflamed the lenses again.
Janis started to withdraw, then stopped. Incorporeal, she repeated. I am incorporeal. As if to confirm the affirmation, the energies that coursed throughout her intensified. Janis dove down and felt her way along the bushes, palpating with ethereal hands, probing for an opening. It seemed crucial that she discover what he was up to… before something happened.
The barrier rebuffed her again and again and—
Her arm plunged through a place in the leaves that appeared just as thick as any other spot but did not feel like-charged. She withdrew her arm and felt the soft pull of a force that seemed reluctant to release her. An opposite charge. Even as Janis leaned away, she found herself reaching forward again, anticipating the fascinating tug on her fingertips.
And if I go through, what then? Will I be able to return?
Or would she become trapped on the outside, barred from her yard, her home, the bedroom where she slept… her own body? Beyond the leaves, the tip of the cigarette smoldered red again. Janis hesitated then let herself be pulled through in a cold and silent whoosh.
5
Spruel household
Monday, August 27, 1984
6:36 a.m.
“WHAT IN THE world were you doing in the garage last night?”
Scott jolted awake. He found himself at the kitchen table, one hand pushing his jaw askew, his other hand barely clinging to the end of a spoon. The spoon teetered over the rim of a bowl of soggy Golden Grahams. Dribbles of honey-colored milk spotted the plastic place mat.
He blinked up at his mom. “Huh?”
“You heard me, mister.”
She clopped across their all-white kitchen to the freezer, pulled out an oat bran muffin, set it on a plate, clopped to the microwave, and jabbed the panel with her thumb. The microwave roared like a vacuum cleaner.
; She leaned against the counter, facing Scott in her orange skirt suit. Arms crossed, she raised her freshly stenciled eyebrows. It was her Don’t Mess with Me look. Scott cleared his throat and tried to sit straighter. His vision swam with sleep or, rather, the severe lack of it — four hours, maybe.
“My computer,” he mumbled.
“What about your computer? And enunciate when you speak.”
“It’s not working.” His cereal dissolved to mush when he stirred it. “Something with the motherboard, I think.”
“Well, no wonder. With you on that thing all the time, it probably overheated.”
“I brought it to the storeroom to fix.”
“What storeroom?”
Yeah, what storeroom, genius? Wasn’t that the whole point of bringing it back there? To hide it?
“In the garage,” he replied, too spent to lie.
His mother gave a sharp laugh. She clopped to the chair at the kitchen table where her white leather briefcase hung and began flicking through the files of houses she’d be showing that day. She yanked a folder halfway out and then slid it, knife-like, back into place.
“I’m surprised you could even get back there. Your father with his… junk piled floor to ceiling. I’ve given him a deadline. Thanksgiving. Everything has to be out of that garage by Thanksgiving, or so help me God, I’ll have it hauled to the fill.” She knifed another folder home. “And don’t think I won’t.”
Scott’s impulse was to defend his father, but he remained silent — as usual. Anyway, what she said was true. For all intents and purposes, his father was a hopeless, and pointless, junk collector. If something caught his eye in the ads section of the newspaper, he bought it. If he saw something on a display case marked down fifty percent, he bought it. If he could dicker low enough at a yard sale, he bought it. Lampshades, lawn chairs, lawn darts, rolls of linoleum, it didn’t matter. If it was a deal, his father bought it. And then promptly stored it in the garage.
Riot Girls: Seven Books With Girls Who Don't Need A Hero Page 69