George Brown and the Protector

by Duane L. Ostler

  This was impossible. How could a rock answer math questions? George’s hand was trembling, even though it was not cold. This was clearly no ordinary rock. What was it? Why had he been drawn to it, and felt such a strange fascination every time he gazed through it? Could it hurt him? Was it his for a reason?

  George heard a noise from the front of the class. Mr. Dalton, the teacher giving the test, was staring at him in an unfriendly way. Quickly George picked up his pencil and went to work on the math questions. At first he set the rock aside and went back to trying to guess the answers. But the rock almost seemed to beckon to him to use it, and soon he was sliding it across the paper over the questions he did not know, rapidly writing down the answers he saw through it.

  Then a sudden thought occurred to George. What if the answers were wrong? After all, how could a rock do math, or know what the right answers were? Flipping back the page, George moved the rock over the easiest question, the only one he felt reasonably certain he had gotten right. He could see the question and his handwritten answer through the rock. He then moved the rock to the next question, one he had guessed at. This time he saw not only the question and his handwritten answer through the rock, but a red line through his answer and the correct answer written next to it!

  George stared at the rock again. It had corrected his answer! This was impossible. But impossible or not, there was the corrected answer in front of him. Slowly, George wrote down the correct answer, then after correcting a few more of his first guesses, flipped back to the page he had been on. He continued to work his way through the test, writing down the answers he saw through the rock.

  This was definitely better than guessing. Suddenly a new thought came into George’s mind. Was this cheating? After all, he was being helped to answer questions he otherwise could not have done. George pondered for a moment, not sure what to think. Finally, he went back to answering the test questions. All he knew was that he had never studied any of this in school last year and he didn’t know any of the answers, or even how to do this type of math. He finished the entire math portion of the test just as it was ending.

  While waiting for the next part of the test to start, he stared at the rock in fascination. Clearly this was no ordinary rock. But where had it come from, and why had it come to him?

  The next section of the test was spelling, one of the few subjects George felt confident about. Once the test began, he immediately moved the rock over the first misspelled word to see what would happen. All he saw through the rock was the same misspelled word. He tried the next one, and the next. The result was the same. There were no answers. George also noticed that the rock was cooling down, and was no longer as hot to touch, although it still caused his fingers to tingle. He wrote down a wrong answer to one question and moved the rock over it. There was no correction this time.

  What could it all mean? Could the rock do math, but not spelling? Or had it just decided to give no more answers for the day—if a rock could decide anything. With a sigh, George pushed the rock aside and began working on the misspelled words. He didn’t have time to try to figure out the secrets of the rock now.

  Spelling was the last portion of the test, so George didn’t have a chance to try it out again. When the test ended, he put it back into his pocket. The rock was once again as cold as ice. George didn’t know what it all meant, but knew that he would try out the rock on everything he could think of when he got home.

  Over the next several days, George tried the rock on everything. He held it over the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, but saw nothing underneath (except the empty crossword puzzle, of course). He held it up to the TV screen during game show questions, but never saw anything different through it. He got out one of his dad’s old college algebra books and held it up to the questions, but there were never any answers underneath. He held it over newspapers and magazines, books and ingredients labels on cans of food. Nothing. He even held it up to Door Jam’s eye and to the back of his sister’s head (when she wasn’t looking) to see if he could see any evidence of intelligent life through it. But other than a twinkle in Door Jam’s eye, he saw nothing out of the ordinary through it either time.

  'What could it be? he asked himself again and again. Why would it show him the answers to his midsummer math exam, but nothing else? Why was it always cold as ice, but had been hot during the math test when it gave him the answers? More than ever, George wanted now to go back to the fallen star where he had found the rock, to see if there were any other rocks like it, or any clues about what it was or where it came from. But his mother had again forbidden him to go there after she read an article in the newspaper that scientists from the university had found it, and were saying that it contained strange trace elements that even they could not identify.

  CHAPTER 4: The Dream

  The third night after the midsummer exams, George had the dream again. It was always the same, and it always left him feeling confused afterward. It had come to him often over the last year, ever since his father had disappeared.

  In the dream, he saw his father climb through the window of his bedroom, come over next to George and sit down on the edge of his bed. He didn’t say a word, and even though George wanted to cry out, to call his name and jump up and grab him, for some reason he couldn’t speak or move. His father then took George’s right hand into his own hands and silently began writing on George’s palm with his finger. George could never tell what he was writing.

  This went on for some time until George’s father abruptly stopped, then walked over and climbed out the window and disappeared, all still without saying a word. After this, George always woke up. He would always jump out of bed and go quickly over to the window, but his father was never in sight.

  George had mixed feelings about the dream. Part of him enjoyed it, because it allowed him to spend a few minutes with his father again. But there was also something eerie about it that made George feel uncomfortable. Maybe it was because his father always looked so sad. Or maybe it was the strange, tingly feeling he always felt while his father was writing in his hand, a tingling that was uncomfortable and almost painful.

  It was a different kind of tingling than when he held the clear rock he had found by the fallen star. Yet somehow, it was almost the same.

  George lay staring at the ceiling for some time after the dream, unable to go back to sleep. The dream had seemed so real. It always did. Had his father really been there? It would be both frightening and comforting if he had.

  Suddenly, George noticed that there seemed to be a glowing light radiating from somewhere near the foot of his bed. Fearful yet curious, he sat up and looked over the edge of his bed to where the light was coming from. It seemed to be glowing in his pants pocket. Then George remembered that he had left the rock in his pocket when he went to bed.

  Slowly he got out of bed, reached down and pulled the rock from his pocket. It was hot and glowing brightly, but was not too uncomfortable to hold. As soon as he picked it up, George felt strangely drawn to the window of his room. He stood there for several minutes, staring out at the twinkling stars while holding the glowing rock in his palm.

  Suddenly, as he was gazing at a particularly bright star, a very strange thing happened. George’s vision seemed to zoom right out into space, as if he were looking through a high powered telescope that was focusing on a distant object with tremendous speed. The bright star he had been looking at grew rapidly larger until George realized with a shock that it was not a star at all. It seemed to be a spacecraft of some sort that was glowing softly in the blackness of space.

  It was long and silvery, with numerous protruding arms and devices, like so many tentacles. George’s vision seemed to be zeroing in on a rectangular patch of light that George realized was a window. As his view of the window expanded, the rapid telescoping effect of his vision seemed to slow down, until at last it stopped with the window consuming all of his vision, and blotting out everything else.

  Inside the window,
he saw a dog. At least it looked somewhat like a dog—and yet, it didn’t. The thing had a protruding snout and hairy face like that of a dog or wolf, and slobber was dripping from its protruding fangs. Yet there was something very undoglike in its appearance that George could not identify. The creature was looking to the side, as if looking at or listening to someone or something just beyond the frame of the window that George could not see.

  But it was the creature’s eyes that most captivated George as he looked at it. Although they were coal black, they seemed to be lit within by a smoldering fire. There was something frightening and deeply unsettling about those eyes. And as George watched transfixed, the dog creature slowly turned toward him as if it somehow was aware that it was being looked at.

  The instant the eyes of the creature met with those of George, he felt a shock of cold leap out at him like a tongue of living flame. With a cry George stumbled back, raising his hand to shield himself from the cruelty that emanated from the creature’s eyes like a black shadow. And in that instant, George was horrified to see his father just behind the creature, his deep, soul-less eyes radiating an unspeakable sense of sadness.

  Overwhelmed, George dropped the rock he had been holding. The instant he did so, the vision vanished and he found himself staring out at the starry night once more.

  George was shaking and breathing heavily, the horror of what he had just seen still grappling with his mind. Was his father a prisoner of the strange dog-like creature he had seen? Was he in pain? The memory of the soul-less look in his father’s eyes was fixed in George’s mind, torturing him.

  George looked down at the strange rock that he had dropped. Its glow was growing dim, and George knew that if he picked it up, it would already be cool to the touch, and would soon turn icy. What was it? Where had it come from? What power did it hold? He shook his head as if to clear it from a fog. He simply didn’t have the answers.

  After a time, George gingerly picked up the rock and put it on his dresser, then got back into bed. Now at least he could watch it, to see if it started to glow once more.

  It was a long time before George could go to sleep again. When he did, his dreams were troubled with images of slobbering dog-like creatures with eyes of malice, laughing cruelly while controlling his father with puppet strings.

  CHAPTER 5: Pickled Peaches

  The next day, with the sun shining brightly through George's window, the vision of the night before seemed absurd and almost comical. He decided he must have been imagining things. He had learned that his mind could run away from him sometimes in the middle of the night, when the world was dark. How could he see a spaceship way out in space from his bedroom window? And how could some dog-like creatures on a spaceship of some kind be holding his father captive? The idea seemed ludicrous, although it was still somewhat unsettling.

  As the day wore on, George grew fitful and restless. He needed something to take his mind off the vision of the night before. Finally, in a fit of extreme boredom, George agreed to go grocery shopping with his mother. Normally he avoided grocery shopping like the plague, but Jason was still out of town and Alex and Michael had just come down with the measles.

  Once in the store, George’s mother looked at her shopping list and frowned. “I need a can of pickled peaches for your aunt Agnes,” she said to George, as if buying such a bizarre thing was an everyday occurrence. “She called the other day and asked me to bring her some when we go there this weekend. It’s for some new diet she’s trying.”

  “Pickled peaches?” said George in disgust. “How could anybody eat that?”

  His mother looked at him sweetly and smiled. “You know your Aunt Agnes. Anyway, could you go and look for it? I really don’t know where such a thing would be found in this store, and I’ve got other things to get.”

  “I suppose,” replied George unenthusiastically. There was nothing else to do, other than look at cereal boxes.

  George set off down the aisles to begin his search. He quickly found the canned fruit section, but there were no pickled peaches. He tried the diet section, but there was nothing there either. He was just about to go back and tell his mother pickled peaches didn’t exist when he sensed something hot in his pocket. It was the rock from the fallen star, which he now always carried with him.

  George pulled it out and looked at it. He held it up to the light. Nothing looked different through it. Why was it hot now? There were no test questions in a grocery store to solve or spaceships through a dark window to see. With mounting curiosity, George held it up to a maze on the back of a cereal box. He saw nothing different through the rock at all.

  Putting it back in his pocket, George turned to go find his mother. But, unexpectedly, he found himself heading instead to another section of the store, to an aisle he hadn’t been down yet. Halfway down this aisle, on the right, he found the pickled food section. And on the lowest shelf was a can of pickled peaches.

  With mounting excitement, George pulled the rock from his pocket. He held it up to the can of pickled peaches, but saw nothing different through it. The rock was not as hot now. It was cooling down fast. George put it back in his pocket.

  What did it all mean? First it answered math questions and now it somehow helped him find a can of pickled peaches. What would it do next? Wasn’t there any way to control it? And why was it helping him, but only at unexpected times?

  Suddenly George heard his mother’s voice behind him. “I see you found the pickled peaches. I never would have thought of looking here.”

  As George handed her the can, she squinted her eyes at him. “What’s wrong?” she asked suddenly.

  “Nothing,” said George quickly. He knew she had an uncanny ability to sense when things were not quite normal. “I was just surprised to actually find a can of pickled peaches. I thought such a thing couldn’t exist.”

  George’s mother gave him a long, hard look. Then she sighed and looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “It’s just that …”

  George looked at the floor. He knew what she was thinking. She used to sense when strange things happened to his father too.

  “O.k., lets get back to this list,” she said abruptly. “Go and find me a hairnet.”

  When George got home, he went to his room and took the rock from his pocket again. Going over to the window, he held it up to the sunlight. It seemed to magnify the light shining through it, making everything around it brighter. He turned it around. It seemed to glitter inside, as if happy to be in the sunlight. But it was still cold as ice. Finally, George put it back on his dresser.

  Where had the rock come from, and what powers did it have? That it was not an ordinary rock was now obvious. But why had it come to him? Was he supposed to use it somehow? If so, how was he supposed to control it? And how would he find the answers to these questions?

  Suddenly George heard a voice behind him, deep and raspy.

  “George Brown!” it hissed. “I’ve been waiting for you!”

  CHAPTER 6: Searching for the Protector

  George whirled around and found himself looking at one of the strangest creatures he had ever seen. It was about two feet tall with dark brown, leathery skin. It wore only a brown robe wrapped around its middle, tied with a curious red belt, studded with shiny jewels. It had only three toes on each foot, but the feet were very large, while the legs were short, fat and stubby. The creature stared at George with protruding, lamp-like eyes, then raised one of its stubby arms, wagging its two fingers at him.

  Before George could utter a cry or any sound at all, the creature spoke in the same raspy voice as before.

  “The world faces everlasting darkness and fire in just a few days, George Brown. But your sacrifice may be able to stop it. You must seek out the protector to better understand what you must do.”

  Stillness hung in the air while George stared, speechless at the creature. Then, with an unexpected ‘pop!’ the creature disappeared, without even leaving a wrinkle on George’s bedspread to show
its passing.

  George gaped at where the creature had been sitting only a split second before. Then he cautiously approached the bed and ran his hand over the bedspread. It wasn’t even warm. He looked all around the room. The only thing that looked different was the strange rock he had put on his dresser, which seemed to be glowing.

  George walked over and touched it. It was hot—yet only a minute ago it had been as cold as ice! George picked it up. With amazing speed it seemed to cool to his touch, and was icy again within a few seconds. Quietly George put it in his pocket then looked around the room once more. Things were getting weird. George had experienced many strange things, but had never had a visit by a bizarre creature like that before.

  He sat down on the edge of his bed, his mind racing. What did it all mean? Who was that creature, and who was the protector? What had it meant about the world facing fire and ice? What type of sacrifice was it talking about? Nothing made any sense.

  He shook his head as if to clear it from a fog, then stood up and headed for the door. With things going the way they were, it was definitely time for a visit to his secret grove.

  A short distance from George’s house was a city park. It had the usual worn playground with a swing set for little kids at one end, and a scattering of park benches and trees throughout. Almost in the center of the park was a small patch of tangled shrubs, like a little island. If a person knew just which bush to duck under, and just which way to wriggle through the undergrowth, he could worm his way into the center of the little bushy grove where there was a tiny clear space, in the middle of which was a large, knotted tree stump. If a person sat on the stump he could see the whole park and the streets beyond without being seen. This was George’s secret grove, where he often went to ponder and think while watching what was going on in the park. And this is where he now went.