The Unspeakable Unknown

by Eliot Sappingfield

  But this time she was too quick, and I could sense her pulling away just before I could get a grip.

  She slapped me hard across the face.

  “You need to learn some manners,” she said, every bit as cheerfully. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to fall for that again.”

  “I was hoping you might,” I said, my cheek stinging.

  She made a frowny face. “Sorry to disappoint you, honey. Things aren’t going to go your way very often from here on out, but that doesn’t mean you have to suffer. Lots of people even come to appreciate us after a while. You must have plenty of questions, and I want to make sure you have all the answers you—I’m sorry, I just have to say—you are so pretty, really. I’d kill for eyes like yours. And that skin! What’s your regimen?”

  “Oh, I just wake up like this! Ha-ha! You’re too kind, Jakki!” I said. Except that only my mouth, vocal cords, and lungs were saying these things. Immediately, I seized control of myself, shouting “STOP IT!” and clawing at her mind again, but once more she was able to slip away.

  “Sorry, force of habit,” she said with a sheepish little shrug, like she’d accidentally spilled something on my carpet. “Still, there’s no need to act out. If you don’t want my help getting your emotions under control, I won’t intervene. Hopefully, I haven’t made you feel uncomfortable.”

  “I am feeling a bit uncomfortable, actually,” I said. “Maybe you could drop us off at the next corner, and we could get together some other time?”

  She pulled a smartphone from her pocket and consulted it briefly. “I don’t think that would be an optimal use of our time, do you? No, no, we’ve too much on our plate and not enough time as it is. I have meetings and calls all this week and next. I have to be in D.C. over the weekend . . . No, I’m just booked solid.”

  She pocketed her smartphone and, almost absentmindedly, crumpled the gravitational disruptor in her hands like it was made of paper, opened her mouth about twice as wide as a human is supposed to be able to, and tossed it down her gullet like an oversized piece of popcorn.

  She swallowed hard and went on. “I feel like . . . we should strike while the iron is hot. Do you understand what a great opportunity for growth this is? You and me getting together after we’ve been playing tag for so long. We may not get another opportunity like this.”

  Without warning, Jakki reached over the seat and patted me on the shoulder with a hand that looked normal but felt icy and gelatinous. She smiled wistfully. “Plus I remember how badly Tabbabitha wanted to reunite you with your father and show you our home. It was her dying wish. Shouldn’t you grant it? You’re the one who killed her, after all. That’s human etiquette, right?”

  She said reunite me with my father. Did that mean he was alive or that she was going to kill me, too? Better not to worry about it. “Not really. Listen, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather—”

  Jakki interrupted me with a raised finger ornamented with a flawlessly manicured nail. “Of course, if you’d prefer, we could skip right to the part where I torture, murder, and consume all three of you, starting with your friends. But make no mistake—it’s your call. I may be in charge here, but good leadership is all about seeking feedback. What do you think?”

  “I’m starting to see things your way,” I said.

  “I had a hunch you would!” she said with a wink and a smile.

  While Jakki went on rambling about plans and synergy and leverage and opportunities and things like that, I took a moment to glance at my friends. Hypatia appeared to be asleep, but Warner could have passed for dead.

  “Warner?” I whispered. Through the gloom, I could see his face had gone pale, and his eyes were bulging open in what looked like shock, but there was nothing behind them. Warner was on vacation from his brain. I reached down and closed his eyes with my fingers so they wouldn’t dry out.

  A quick survey of the inside of the vehicle was all bad news. There wasn’t a handle to open the door from the inside. The black windows were clearly thick enough to be bulletproof, and there were no controls for opening them. For the time being, we weren’t going anywhere, at least not anywhere we wanted to go.

  Then inspiration struck. I could tear a hole in the car with my agar bracelet without any work at all. Why was I always forgetting about it? I glanced at it on my wrist and imagined it becoming wider and stronger, a massively powerful hinged blade ready to spring outward and cut the car in two between the front and back seats. I felt potential energy build up in it like a coiled spring and . . . nothing.

  I tried again, but it wasn’t doing what I wanted. Instead, it receded and curled back around my wrist, where it took on its old bracelet form.

  I realized Jakki had stopped talking and was looking back at me, watching with placid interest.

  I smiled at her like, Hi, I was just minding my own business back here.

  “Honey,” she said. “Please don’t play with that stuff. I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself. You could put an eye out.”

  I shook my head. “I’m pretty familiar with—”

  “Sorry,” Jakki interrupted with a coo. “I’m not always good with this animal grunting you primates call language. I think what I meant to say is that you should leave it alone, or I will put an eye out.”

  Just in case she hadn’t made her case, a thin white tendril extended from my bracelet, formed itself into a needle almost too fine to see, and slid toward my right eye like a cobra ready to strike. My head recoiled back instinctively against the headrest. The long white needle drew still closer, until I could feel the point faintly touching the center of my eye.

  I tried to concentrate, to move it away, but it didn’t move a micron.

  “Did that come out right?” Jakki said.

  “Yeah, it did,” I said.

  A moment later, the snakelike needle had slid back into the bracelet and was nothing more than a memory.

  “That bracelet is just the cutest!” Jakki exclaimed. “Do me a favor? Leave that lovely thing on your wrist the whole time you’re with me. I like having something I can use to make my point from time to time. Get it? Point?” She smiled without mirth, and I pretended to laugh weakly.

  She patted her driver on the shoulder and said, “Step on it, Gus. I’m sure they’re looking for our new friends.”

  Through the windshield, the city scenery gave way to suburban zones and, finally, empty snowy fields. Before long we were rocketing along highways at speeds that might have made me nervous if I hadn’t been secretly hoping for an accident.

  Jakki seemed to remember something. “I meant to ask you, where did you drop my errant sister off? I can’t tell you how much I’d like to see her again.”

  Jakki didn’t wait for an answer. Again I felt her fingers slipping into my mind, but this time there was no sneaky subtlety. It was like someone breaking the door down with a battering ram or driving a bulldozer through a wall. She was trying to snatch what she wanted before I could stop her.

  It hurt. It felt like something was tearing inside my head—

  But then it didn’t. Suddenly, I was standing on a gravel path, before a cabin I remembered seeing once before. The lights inside glowed warmly. Best of all, I wasn’t alone; my all-time best friend Jakki was by my side. I wanted to win her love any way I could.

  “Is she in there?” Jakki asked.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, not quite understanding what was going on.

  She tried to lead me up to the door, but I stopped, even though I dearly wanted to do whatever she wanted.

  Every instinct I had was screaming at me to stop, to refuse, but why would I do that? It was a nice day, we were already in the woods, and we could go see my friend . . . Where were we again?

  “Where ARE we?” my awesome friend Jakki wanted to know. “Do you remember?”

  I wanted to tell her, but part of me felt like
it would be a bad idea. I could feel the fresh, calming breeze rustling through the forest, but I could also feel my bag just under my hand, like I was in two places at the same time.

  I needed to find where something was.

  “I just love this place,” Jakki said, as stylish and sophisticated as ever. “Wouldn’t you like to visit? Spend an afternoon relaxing in the shade? I just wish I knew where to go!”

  Where was it? There was something I needed to find as soon as possible!

  Jakki, my wonderful pal, patted me on the shoulder and led me to a comfortable bench on the porch, where a steaming mug of hot chocolate waited on a little silver tray. She was sad, which meant I was sad, too. “I wish my sister could come join us. She likes you so much, and I haven’t seen her in so long,” she sighed. “If I only knew where she was.”

  Finally, I knew just what I was trying to find. Inside my bag, I felt the cool surface of my gravitational disruptor, grasped it, and shot my awesome, stylish, sophisticated friend Jakki right in the mouth.

  Darleeen’s cabin disappeared with a wicked, blinding flash that caused the SUV to careen almost out of control, as Jakki’s head shot backward and crashed against the windshield, leaving a deep, dome-shaped indentation in the half-shattered glass.

  Jakki’s civilized facade was gone. She lunged, suddenly looming over me as I slid into my seat, snarling with viciously pointed teeth that hung in space below cavernous, empty black eyes.

  When she spoke, her voice sounded more like a lion’s roar than a human voice. “YOU LITTLE SH—darling,” she said, switching almost immediately back into friendly-businesswoman mode. Had her eyes really turned black?

  “There’s no need for violence,” Jakki said, picking a fragment of glass from her now-scrambled hairdo and bouncing it off my forehead. A second later, too quick for me to even see, she’d plucked my disruptor from my hand, returned to her seat, and swallowed it just as she had Warner’s.

  We rode in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes as the road flowed past. I considered my options. Even if I could get away, there was no way I could carry Hypatia and Warner along with me. Just to be sure, I slipped my school tablet from my backpack and took a peek. No signal, of course. The SUV wouldn’t be a very good abduction vehicle if it didn’t block our wireless signals.

  I tried to watch for road signs through what was left of the windshield, thinking maybe I could get a look at where we were going. Unfortunately, even though the road and everything was perfectly visible, all the writing on every sign we passed was complete gibberish, as if the glass were scrambling everything in real time.

  Then I realized I did have one source of information. A chatty Old One who really didn’t seem to understand how interrogation was supposed to work when you couldn’t just extract information from people’s brains without permission.

  “So where are we headed?” I asked, hoping Jakki wasn’t still sore about my trying to blow her head off about ninety seconds before that.

  Jakki perked right up. “Our destination is a surprise, dear. If I killed you, I would have to tell you,” she said. “No, wait. What I mean to say is that if I’m going to kill you, then I’ll tell you after.” She stopped and shook her head. “The idea I’m trying to convey is that you should associate knowing our destination with your personal death. I meant to threaten you—am I communicating effectively?”

  “Yeah. I got it.”

  Maybe another angle would work better. “What are you planning for us?”

  Jakki peeked at her phone and smiled her warm yet wistful smile. “I’m not sure you could understand. Besides, we should be having fun! This is a road trip, you know. I looked it up online, and a road trip is something of a rite of passage for you people. A group of friends pile into the car and head out on the American highway in search of adventure. Sometimes road trippers end up discovering a little something about themselves, too. A while back I saw a movie where two human females detonate a mobile container of your petroleum chemical fuel, then pilot their automobile into a large fissure in the earth’s crust. The movie ends before you get to see them die, but sometimes it’s nice when they leave things to your imagination. Not that I have much of an imagination. No time for creative thinking, when there’s so much to be done.” She sighed as if she were the most put-upon woman on Earth.

  “You can improve your own creativity, you know,” I said. “Have you ever tried picking up painting or gardening instead of kidnapping children?”

  “I did take a needlepoint class last year. That was the whole idea—supposed to help me get in touch with my creative side. I made a cross-stitch of a goose with a little inspirational saying on it. A cross-stitch is where you get a bit of fabric and use needlework to mark it with colors—like making a digital image one pixel at a time. It was from a pattern, but the choice of what color ribbon the goose was wearing was all mine. I chose mauve.”

  “A bold choice,” I said.

  Jakki nodded fervently. “I couldn’t agree more! I gave it a lot of thought because it was going to be the largest block of color, and it’s really what catches the eye. Also the rest of the goose ended up looking a bit deformed, so I wanted to draw attention away from it. I’ll show you later.”

  “So we’re going to your place?” I hazarded.

  She pointed a finger at me. “Cat’s out of the bag now. Really, I should murder you, but I need you for a couple projects, so you’re safe for the time being. Do you know I was this close to blowing you and your friends to bits that night at the library? Tabbabitha swore up and down you were special, but I always figured she was overselling the idea to account for her repeated failures. But the way you fight back . . . you might be one of the few things she was right about.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I said, attempting to come across as enthusiastic. “What kind of projects do you have in mind?”

  “Not telling just yet, but you should be excited. You may even get to meet my father, if he’s awake. He hasn’t even been seen by a human in generations. I myself haven’t spoken to him in about six hundred years or so.”

  “He must like you almost as much as I do,” I said.

  She sneered at me. “You have a sense of humor. Never cared for that in animals. My driver here used to have one. I had it removed.”

  “Has he been with you long?” I asked as the driver twitched and grimaced at just being mentioned.

  “Gus, here,” she said, gazing adoringly at the terrified man, “he’s my driver, general henchman, and husband. We just had our five-year anniversary!”

  “You’re . . . married? How the . . . I mean, how did you meet?”

  Jakki leaned back in her seat. “We met at this beautiful little coffee shop in San Francisco. It overlooks the Golden Gate Bridge, and there’s a patio so you can just sit for hours. People jump off sometimes if you’re lucky.”

  She patted Gus on the shoulder. He whimpered and flinched as if she had laid a cobra on his arm. “Oh, it was so romantic. All was quiet, and nobody in San Francisco was feeling suicidal that day, so I was making conversation with people. Gus didn’t vomit or pass out like most guys do. I could tell right away we had a special connection. He said he was an English professor and that he wanted me to leave him alone because he was trying to write poems about fog or some nonsense like that. Well, nobody tells me no, so right then I made him fall in love with me. We were married that weekend, and we’ve been inseparable ever since. Plus he’s not bad to look at, either.” She winked at Gus.

  Gus smiled and shuddered. He nodded and then shook his head no violently while grimacing as if in intense emotional distress.

  Jakki sighed dreamily. “We had the greatest times at first. He’d start talking about going back home, calling me a perversion of nature, signaling to strangers that he was being kidnapped—all your normal newlywed stuff. He always knew how to make me smile. Sometimes he’d cry for hours a
nd hours, and I’d just hold him in my arms until he stopped. We bonded, and I showed him the real me.

  “That’s nice?” I said, feeling sorry for Gus.

  “A lot of that romance has faded, though,” Jakki said, a bit wistfully. “After too much handling, you humans get a bit mushy around the cerebellum. But you know what they say, ‘You should always hurt the ones you love.’”

  “I don’t think that’s how the—”

  “I’ll show you what I mean,” she said. “Gus! What would you like to do today?”

  Gus furrowed his brow and seemed to give the question some serious thought. “A stick . . . with a pointy hat . . . for Alonya.”

  “See what I mean? Mushy brain,” Jakki said, tapping the side of his head. “He’s terrible with names, too. Gus! My name is Jakki. Can you say that?”

  “Anne?”

  “No, like this, JAH—”

  “Jah . . .”

  “KEE.”

  “Kee . . .”

  “JAKKI!”

  “Mmm . . . Margaret.”

  She prodded him playfully in the ribs with her elbow, and he smashed his head against the bulletproof window like he was trying to dive through it. “You’re cute when you try to think, you know that?” she said.

  “That’s one heck of a love story,” I said, wondering what else I could ask.

  “You try it. Ask him something. It’s fun.”

  I felt terrible for Gus. I happened to like my mind and hated the idea of losing it. “I’m not in the mood to have fun at someone else’s expense—”

  Jakki’s smile was gone in an instant. “ASK HIM A QUESTION OR I WILL SEPARATE THE PARTS OF YOUR BODY WITH A TIRE IRON AND FEED THEM TO ANIMALS THAT DO NOT EAT MEAT AND ARE NOT EVEN HUNGRY.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “Hey, Gus, do you think you’ve experienced any adverse side effects from working so closely with your special lady friend here?”

  Gus craned his neck to look at me. His expression was blank. Well, mostly blank.