“How deep is the sky?”
“I mean ... what would happen if I fell in? Where would I be?”
“It’s a cigar box. You can’t fall in.”
“But if I could?”
“Then I guess you’d be ... lost.”
But I was already lost. I just didn’t know it. I wouldn’t know it for another week, and by that time, it would be too late to do anything about it. That was, of course, if I had wanted to do anything about it. Everything in life is a choice, Bryan. The choices we make are a reflection of who we are and what we want. But it’s the choices we don’t make that tell the true story. The moment I opened the cigar box, I never even thought of turning back.
“How do you do it?” I asked.
“It’s the box,” Jude said. “It’s all the box.”
But that was a lie.
6.
I had gone up to the attic, to the old steamer trunk in the far corner, where Traci kept what she liked to call ... our memories. On the outside of the trunk, blue ink on white construction paper, she had attached a handwritten sign that read: Things Not To Be Forgotten. Inside, the dark corners were filled with things I had spent a good part of my life trying to put behind me. Mostly old newspaper articles about what had happened. But there was also the stack of letters from Rick.
They were sitting on the seat next to me now, as I headed north on I-5. It was a little past two in the morning. The sky was crystal clear, the night air cool and crisp. I had rolled down the passenger window to keep me from drifting off to sleep, but the truth of the matter was I didn’t need it. One by one I was revisiting those letters, hearing every word Rick had written, and trying to understand what had gone wrong inside his head.
Weed was still another six hours away.
7.
From my brother’s letters over the years:
I couldn’t get it out of my head, Bryan. After dinner that night I went to bed early, afraid that if I stayed downstairs and watched television with the family eventually Mom would take a good look at me and she would know. She would know what Jude had shown me. And even worse, she would know that I wasn’t frightened by it.
I thought about Jude all night. I thought about her maybe as a girlfriend, since I’d never had one. But mostly I thought about the magic in that box of hers and what it would be like if that box belonged to me. I suppose that’s a terrible thing to admit, but when you’re twelve, you’re always looking for shortcuts, and Jude ... she seemed like my only chance to finally make people take notice of me.
You know it, Bryan. You know I’ve always been a nobody. A goof. This was the first time in my life I ever had a chance to be someone.
At lunch, I found her sitting in what had already become her regular spot at the back of the cafeteria. She looked lost sitting beneath the huge Halloween banner by herself, and believe me, I knew how she felt. I had felt the same way almost all my life.
“Hey.”
“I knew you’d be back,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s the box, right?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“You want more, don’t you?”
It should have been obvious to me right then, I suppose. She had dropped the first bread crumb and I had picked it up exactly as she had known I would. But shortcuts don’t always lead where you think they do, and in all honestly I should have been paying more attention. I missed the obvious, Bryan. And I’ve paid dearly for it.
“You want to see something really scary?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“That depends. What scares you?”
I remember this so clearly in my head. The first thing I thought was: You, Jude. You scare me. It flashed like lightning across the screen behind my eyes, then I saw the image of an old woman cloaked in a black robe, then that creature from the movie Pumpkinhead, then suddenly I found myself thinking how immune I had grown to the things that scared me when I was a kid. It wasn’t the monsters that scared me now, I thought. It was—
“You’re wrong,” Jude said.
“What?”
“About the monsters. They do scare you.”
I swear, Bryan. I never said a word about what I was thinking. Not a single word. She just ... knew.
“Trust me,” she said. “They scare everyone.”
I watched her dig around in that magical tote bag of hers until she brought out a plain, brown-paper sack. It had been folded in half, then half again, and I sat there, nervous as all get out, as she painstakingly reversed the folds.
“Where’s the cigar box?”
“I didn’t bring it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I brought this instead.” She flattened the bag against the table, and then slid it across the smooth surface at me. “Go on. Open it.”
I took the bag, shook it out, and set it back on the table between us. It was full of air now, standing upright on its own.
“You’ve never really been scared before, have you, Rick?”
“Nope.”
“Bet I can scare you.”
The bag made a rustling noise.
I stared down at it, not frightened, but surprised.
The brown paper walls expanded, then contracted, then expanded again, as if they were alive and breathing.
Jude grinned. “Go on.”
“What?”
“Reach into it.”
“No way.”
“Scared?”
“No.”
“Then do it. I dare you.”
It was only a bag, I told myself. A brown paper bag. Nothing more.
But it was more than that, Bryan.
I raised myself up and stared down at it, all the way to the bottom, where I could see the flaps folded and pressed one over the other in a perfect fit. The bag was empty. I found a tremendous sense of relief in that fact, and sat back again, feeling confident as I finally reached in with one hand.
Now, this is the weird thing, because I can’t explain it, but I felt my fingers brush up against something. I don’t know how to describe it exactly. It felt thick, I suppose. Stringy. Like a ball of yarn. But in my head, there was another flash of lightning and I caught a glimpse of something so ... gruesome, so scary...
I couldn’t pull my hand back fast enough.
“It won’t hurt you,” Jude said.
“What is it?”
The bag rustled again.
Hot air rose out of its paper walls, the smell reminding me of the stench that sometimes came up from the garbage disposal at home when Mom made us do the dishes.
“Trust me,” she said.
And I did. I don’t know why, Bryan. I still don’t understand that part of it ... how I could be led so easily to do the things I eventually did ... but this was one more step in the process, I believe. It seems so unreal now, looking back. Blurry around the edges, like a dream. It was almost as if I wanted to see how far I could take it before I woke up and it was over.
I did it all in one quick move. My hand dropped inside the bag ... my fingers wrapped around what felt like a clump of long, coarse hair ... I pulled ... and up came the head of this ... this creature. It had deep-set, bright-golden eyes. Huge nostrils spewing out hot, sour air. A sloped, Neanderthal forehead covered in a thick mat of brownish-black fur. A mouth that seemed almost too big for its head. Incisors that reached halfway down the creature’s chin.
I had never seen anything like it in my life.
I screamed and pulled my hand back, then found myself falling backwards over the bench, head over heels. I landed hard on the floor, my heart pounding like a hammer inside my chest, an ache at the back of my head where my head had struck the linoleum.
Jude laughed. “I told you it wouldn’t hurt you.”
“What ... what was that?”
She took back the bag, folded it neatly into fourths, and then stuffed it into the canvas tote.
“A daydream.”
“What?”
“Your daydream to be more specific.”
“But what about yesterday?”
“That was yours, too.”
“The snow? The stars?”
“All of it. Yours.”
“Impossible.”
“But true.”
“Prove it.”
“Close your eyes,” she said.
I may be a goof, Bryan, but I’m not an idiot. I wasn’t going to trust her again. Not that easily.
“Okay, don’t close your eyes. Just focus on something in your thoughts.”
“Like what?”
“Anything. It doesn’t matter. An apple. A poster. Your favorite movie. A Halloween mask. Anything.”
It should have been easy, but it wasn’t. My head was reeling with the image of that creature. I tried to think about familiar things: my room at home, the desk, the television, the last movie I had watched, the knife I had received from Uncle Chet on my birthday.
And it happened just like that. The knife appeared. It was that tactical knife Uncle Chet called a Generation IV. Remember that one, Bryan? It opened smooth as velvet, nice and easy, like a key locking in place? Remember that? The ported grip? The matte-silver finish?
It was a nice little knife, but it was hovering in the air right in front of my face.
“How do I get rid of it?”
The blade slid out of the handle grip, the tip inches away from my eyes.
“Jude?”
“Think of something else.”
“What?”
“Anything. It doesn’t matter.”
You find yourself staring at a knife and your mind goes into its own little version of panic, Bryan. Let me tell you. I mean, your thoughts really aren’t your own anymore. They pour through your head like alphabet soup, some of the letters forming words, most of them forming gibberish. I don’t know where I got the image of the feather, but suddenly there it was ... floating in place of the knife, the color striations as clear and as real as if I had just plucked it out of the tail of a pheasant.
Jude laughed again. “See, that wasn’t so hard.”
I watched the feather float back and forth on an invisible current until finally it touched down on the table. Then it was gone.
“What happened to it?”
“It lost your attention.”
The cafeteria was nearly empty now. There were some fourth grade girls across the room, dressed in Brownie uniforms and huddled around a tray of beads one of them had brought for making necklaces. The last of the food had already been removed from the serving line, the stainless steel counter cleaned up, most of the kids on kitchen duty let go. It was as alone and as quiet as it ever got at school.
“How come I couldn’t do this stuff before?”
“Before when?”
“Before you.”
“You weren’t ready,” Jude said.
8.
Weed was an odd little town. Just south of the Oregon border. Flat, nestled in a sprawling valley, the elevation somewhere around three or four thousand feet. It looked a little like a forgotten town, a place where people a hundred years from now might stop and visit because over the past century it hadn’t changed much.
I got off I-5, off the beaten tract, and found myself driving through old town, past the Cedar Lanes Bowling Alley, the Palace Theater, The Pizza Factory. Rick had given me directions, but in my haste to get them down my handwriting had been so sloppy that I was having trouble reading it now. Though ... if it turned out that I couldn’t find the place that might not be so terrible when all was said and done. I could probably convince myself that I had at least made the effort. More of an effort than he deserved.
I wondered what he looked like now, how much he had changed. I wasn’t sure I would even recognize him anymore. It had been nearly twenty-five years. A person changes in twenty-five years. I had changed.
I glanced again at the letters on the seat beside me, then pulled to the curb to see if I could figure out where I was and how I was going to get there from here. It was no longer a matter of hours now. Only a matter of minutes.
9.
From my brother’s letters over the years:
What scares you, Bryan?
I mean really scares you.
Sleep does it for me. That’s when I don’t have any control over the pictures in my head. I close my eyes, drift off to sleep, and the movies start rolling. I’m just another member of the audience. What happens happens.
That night I dreamed about Halloween. I think that’s what she wanted. I think that was what she had in mind from the very beginning. Halloween. Looking back on it now, it was the perfect time, wasn’t it? All Hallow’s Eve. The festival of the dead. A time when the devil and the witches are free to roam the earth and cause their havoc.
In the dream, I was at the school Halloween party, though it was outside, at a beach somewhere, with a huge bonfire and flames reaching ten or fifteen feet into the air. Everyone was dressed in costume. From the Mad Hatter to the Wicked Witch of the West. I was the Grim Reaper. It felt weird, but I liked it. Jude was there, too. Dressed as a ghost. Her white, airy gown flowing like wings on the ocean breeze. I don’t remember much of what went on during the dance, only that at the end when everyone stood in a circle around the fire and removed their masks, my mask wouldn’t come off.
It was a cause for amusement at first. The others gathered around, taking some sort of twisted delight in watching the goof struggling with his mask. I fell to my knees, prying my fingers under the edges, trying to rip it away from my face, nearly suffocating in the process. But it held on. It wouldn’t let go. And gradually, one by one as it dawned on the others that the mask wasn’t going to come off, the laughter began to turn to fear.
You know why, Bryan?
Because suddenly I wasn’t the goof anymore.
Suddenly I was the Grim Reaper!
I woke up with a start.
The bed was soaked; I had been sweating like a damn race horse. I pushed back the covers, sat up, and leaned against the wall, my mouth dry, my breath short. There was a faint hint of sulfur in the air, a thin layer of smoke hovering just above the level of my desk, tendrils of the stuff still rising out of the wastepaper basket.
I didn’t even get out of bed to open the window. I pulled the covers up around me, and sat there for what seemed like hours, rewinding the dream over and over again until I couldn’t find a way around it any longer. A door had been opened, Bryan. It was as if I was standing in the doorway looking in on an ugly part of myself, a part I had always suspected was there, but had managed somehow to keep hidden.
I slept the rest of the night sitting up, my back against the wall. In the morning, the room was still full of that smoky musk. I opened the window to air it out, and then discovered the pile of ashes in the wastepaper basket next to my desk. Left over from the dream, I figured. Because dreams and daydreams were kissing cousins, and if daydreams could get me a feather, it only made sense that the ashes – in all their smoky glory – had made their appearance in the same fashion.
But there was something else, too. I had been only vaguely aware of it last night, but this morning, it seemed remarkably clear in my mind. Someone or something had been in the room with me.
I asked Jude about it at lunch that day.
“Residue,” she said.
“What?”
“Leftovers. From your dreams.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. There was something different about her. I didn’t know what it was exactly, only that something wasn’t quite right. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
“It’s all made of the same stuff, Rick. Your dreams. The snow in the cigar box. The feather from yesterday. They all come from you. From inside your head.”
In all honesty, Bryan, I don’t think I really understood any of it before that moment. Then it came home to me like a light going on and the shadows scurrying back into the recesses of a darkened room with only the stairs illuminated. Th
e magic was in me. Not the cigar box. Not the paper bag. Not even Jude. It was me.
“Residue,” I said, mostly to myself.
“Exactly.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. You’re starting to get it now, aren’t you?”
“I think so,” I said, looking into her blue eyes and finally realizing what it was that was different about her. The cafeteria was awash in fluorescent light, casting a false brightness over everything. Everything except Jude, who looked as if she had just stepped out of a slightly overexposed photograph. The color had begun to fade from her face. That was what was different.
“Are you okay?”
She looked past me at a group of girls exiting the cafeteria. It was almost as if her eyes were both luminous and transparent at the same time. “I didn’t think it would happen so soon.”
“What would happen?”
“Nothing important.”
The cafeteria was nearly empty. Outside, the sun had shown itself for the first time in nearly two weeks and even the Brownies were soaking up the warmth. I could hear the clatter of dishes coming from the kitchen, a teacher’s voice as she scolded some kids for littering, and in the back of my mind I could hear Jude’s voice whispering, It’s just the residue, Rick. Residue.
She didn’t just look different, I realized. She looked ill. She looked like an old tee-shirt with the color washed out. Pale, I suppose you might say. But more than that. If the light had been at her back, I think I might have been able to see right through her.
“No. Something’s wrong with you,” I said. “You don’t look right.”
“I’ll be fine.”
There are different kinds of monsters in the world, Bryan. I know you think I’m the biggest monster of all, but you’re wrong about that. And you’re wrong about what you think happened that night at the Halloween party. Jude knew what was going to happen long before she ever met me. And she knew it would make her well again.
10.
There are different kinds of monsters in the world.
I turned into the parking lot of the Motel Ranchero, and drove slowly around the outer edge, past an old Chevy pickup with a camper shell, past the weeds growing out of the asphalt, past a dimly-lit cubby-hole with a handwritten sign on the door that said Office.
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