by Matt Carter
She was silent for too long. I tried to fill the void, “So you don’t remember anything?”
She shuddered. “Bits and pieces, but none of it makes sense. I’m not even sure if any of that is real.”
She fought through a sudden wave of tears, covering her face and breathing heavily. She was strong. Stronger than I’d have thought someone could be after going through whatever it was she had gone through. I put my arm around her shoulders. She looked up at me and started laughing.
“Way to make a guy feel special,” I said, trying to laugh it off to cover my bruised pride.
“I’m sorry,” Haley laughed. “It’s just . . . if my mom saw us, she’d be going nuts. After what you did, I think she’s already planning our kids’ names right now.”
I wanted to laugh with her, but a sharp exclamation followed by dead silence from across the street caught my attention. The three men had stopped laughing and were standing as still as mannequins, staring at us as we passed. Two were covered in shadow, one wearing a hoodie, another a postman’s uniform, their faces obscured. The third was unquestionably Alexei Smith. They made no move to follow us as we passed and began laughing again after we got a good distance away. It was creepy.
Haley, thankfully, had not seen them.
“I just don’t think I could handle that,” Haley continued. I realized that she’d been talking the entire time I was watching the men stare at us.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“I just don’t want to be with anyone right now. Before any of this happened, I’d just gotten out of a bad relationship, and the way I am right now, I really don’t want to try for anything. Does that make sense?”
I nodded noncommittally. Haley looked at me nervously, quickly adding, “It’s not that I don’t think you’re a nice guy, it’s just—”
“Relax,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I came up here to go to your funeral. It’s not like I was expecting anything more from you. I’m gonna be stuck here for a while, it looks like, probably in your house, and probably with both of our moms under one roof. Even if we did want to make a go of dating, it would be—”
“—weird,” she finished.
“Yeah, weird,” I agreed, wanting to add, But not as weird as this town.
We could see the lights of the house coming up. Our moms had probably driven back while we walked. This moment of peace would be over soon.
“Are you okay with being friends for now?” she asked, looking up at me hopefully. As if for dramatic impact, she pulled herself out from under my arm and held out her hand (though it was hard to miss the emphasis she had put on “for now”).
For a brief, fleeting moment that I couldn’t understand, I remembered that strange girl, Mina, I’d met at the memorial service. I thought about the words she’d written, “THAT ISN’T HALEY,” on the back of one of those gaudy, giant programs they’d given out to everyone. Thinking of that program, sitting somewhere on the desk of the guest room I was sleeping in, I vowed to throw it away once I settled in for the night.
I took Haley’s hand in mine and gave it a firm shake. “Friends.”
4.
New Approach
Mina
Of all the things I have to do to protect the humans of Prospero, explaining myself to potential new assets is easily the one for which I have the least talent, the one task that makes me more nervous and prone to stalling than any other.
Usually, I prefer to wait until I can get my hands on a fresh Creature Splinter from the woods before making my pitch. People find it harder to brush me off while they’re watching a furry, oversized dragonfly trying to grow itself human arms and legs, but such things are hard to find, harder to catch, and hardest to keep alive long enough for any particular use. The threats against Ben, and the return of the thing I will henceforth refer to as “Haley,” purely for convenience’s sake, had forced me to move up my schedule considerably.
The bug in the program I’d given Ben hadn’t died yet, and he hadn’t thrown it away, or at least, if he had, he hadn’t emptied the guestroom wastebasket since, so at least I had a muffled ear in his room at the Perkins house. Haley had finally left her purse unattended in a locker behind the park amphitheater long enough for me to fit another temp bug in her wallet, download a good teen tracker app to her phone, and get Ben’s number out of it—it still wasn’t nearly enough.
My network is small at the best of times, and some of the members leave town for summer vacation. Fewer ECNSs in Prospero means fewer people to worry about, but it also leaves any work that comes up to Aldo, Billy, and me. Mostly me.
Keeping Ben accounted for every minute of every day without his help was costing me an unsustainable amount of sleep.
For his own safety, he needed to know.
I stood for a while outside one of the windows of the Soda Fountain of Youth, preparing myself.
It was nice, knowing it was a human sitting inside, laughing at Billy’s jokes. It was nice not worrying about whether the way Ben folded his long limbs might include slightly unnatural angles, whether they had the ability to twist into new shapes at a moment’s notice. He had what Aldo had always referred to, not so affectionately, as “heartthrob hair,” exactly the color of wood varnish, cut short up to the middle of his ears and left just long enough on top to fall into his eyes.
I’d never had an opinion on the style one way or another before, but, on him, it gave me the bizarre, persistent urge to brush it behind his ears with my fingers and then staple it there. Or something.
Human.
I wanted him to stay that way, an ECNS, forever. He was my asset. I wanted him for my side. I didn’t want to have to cross him off the list and wonder if it had been my attention that had brought theirs on him, too; and most of all, I very earnestly didn’t want to end up having to kill him.
That made it just a little easier to open the Soda Fountain’s front door, walk up to the booth Ben currently had to himself, and say the most straightforward thing I could think of.
“May I join you?”
Ben froze when he looked up at me, and for a moment I thought he might bolt for the door.
“Um . . . okay.”
I slid onto the bench opposite him and grabbed one of the menus from the clip on the wall, partly to look normal, partly so I could rearrange the letters of the menu items in my head while I gathered together what I’d been planning to say. Somehow it had already gotten muddled on the way from the door to the booth.
Ben still had a menu open in front of him as well, and he showed signs of discomfort with the silence after just a few seconds.
“So . . . uh . . . what do you recommend here?” he asked.
“You come here a lot,” I noted, trying to arrange my argument. “I thought you’d know what you preferred by now.”
In a town as small as Prospero, a person’s movements, particularly those of a recent local hero, aren’t exactly secret, even to those who pay less attention than I do, but judging by the look on Ben’s face, this wasn’t a good start. I picked a recommendation at random to try to fix it.
“Do you like cherries?” I asked.
“I don’t dislike cherries,” Ben responded.
Right on cue, Billy’s hazy voice called out to us.
“Hey, what’s happening?” He wiped his hands on his stained apron as he walked up. Seeing us both at the table, he smiled broadly. “Jailbait and Superman? How’d you two get together?” His eyes were more red-rimmed than usual. It was hard to tell if he was feigning ignorance of my plans better than usual or if he’d really forgotten.
“He calls you Jailbait?” Ben smirked.
“Billy enjoys nicknames,” I explained. “He finds them amusing.”
“And Mina can sometimes use reminding that she’s not a withered old cat lady just yet,” Billy added.
“We’re here on business,” I cut off this counter-productive
thread of conversation. “Get me a Triple Chocolate Malt, Loch-Ness si
zed, double shot of espresso, dark and white chocolate chips, no milk chocolate, extra whipped cream, and a Cherry Timewarp for Ben here.”
“You know him?” Ben asked as soon as Billy retreated to the kitchen.
I nodded and seized the topic. At least this was something we had in common. “Billy Crane. He’s part of my Network. My driver, mainly, but he does a little bit of everything. He owns a van, and he drives it less negligently than you’d think. He’s also good at breaking things, fixing things, he’s a competent drummer, and he’s studying to become a licensed hypnotist.”
“Hypnotist?” Ben asked, poorly suppressing a smile.
“He insists it’s a good way of meeting girls at parties,” I explained.
“Does it work?” he asked.
“If I ever go to one, I’ll tell you. He can also buy alcohol, if that matters to you.”
“No, not really,” Ben laughed.
“Good. This isn’t a place where you’ll want to dull your reaction time.”
Billy returned from the kitchen and, with one of his standard flourishes of ill-conceived humor, arranged two straws in the malt he set in front of me.
Once he’d gone again, Ben eyed the bright red, fizzy, pink whipped cream-adorned Cherry Timewarp skeptically for a moment before taking a sip. The set of his jaw muscles when he swallowed it didn’t suggest that he found it anything less than pleasant.
In any case, he continued to drink from it, watching me warily but expectantly. I had to get to the point.
“Do you believe in UFOs?” I asked.
This caused Ben to inhale some of the Cherry Timewarp and slip into a discouraging coughing fit.
The fact that he’d developed such a fondness for the Soda Fountain of Youth had been one of the few good signs since he’d arrived in Prospero. It’s one of the only places that actually cashes in on the town’s paranormal reputation, with its jukebox full of 50s sci-fi TV soundtracks and collection of framed UFO photographs and stuffed cryptids. Little of it had anything to do with the truth, but I’d thought that maybe if it held any appeal for him, it might be a good place to start.
“What?” he finally choked.
“In aliens? Bigfoot? Angels? Ghosts?” I tried.
When Ben could breathe again, he answered, quite firmly, “No.”
“No to one, or no to all?”
“No to all,” he said. “If any of those things existed, I think you’d probably find one stuffed and mounted in the Smithsonian somewhere.”
So much for that angle. I took a spoonful of my malt and concentrated on crunching the frozen chocolate chips for a moment to keep my head clear.
“Okay,” I said. “I was hoping for a frame of reference you might understand. Instead, I’ll just cut to the chase.”
“I like the chase. I can totally cut to that,” he said, with the nervous kind of smile people wear when they’re trying to calm someone down. It didn’t do much for me.
I took one long draw from the malt, and then I told him.
“For more than a hundred years, Prospero has been ground zero for an invasion from another world of shape-shifting beings who seek to take over our minds, bodies, and lives, and there is every possibility they have designs on the world as well.”
For some reason, the Theremin riff that emanated from the jukebox at that moment seemed to amuse Ben.
“The so-called miracles and monsters of this town are mere side effects of this invasion. When things go according to their plan, it’s almost impossible to notice they exist, but sometimes there are accidents, sometimes they experiment, and sometimes things leak through from the other world that aren’t supposed to. The abnormal activity in Prospero has gotten some attention from the UFO chasers and crypto enthusiasts of the world, as you can see.”
I gestured around the Soda Fountain’s convenient décor.
“But instead of welcoming the publicity and the tourist dollars that come with it, like Roswell, Point Pleasant, and Port Henry, the Prospero Town Council does its best to suppress any information about anything out of the ordinary. It does this because it has been collaborating with the invaders, possibly from the very beginning. In exchange for their silence and their help procuring humans to be copied and replaced, its members are protected and kept in their positions of wealth and power. I have made it my life’s work to combat these creatures and all that they do. Many have come before me. I’m here to invite you to join the fight.”
I sat back and waited for the answer. I could tell a moment before it came that I wasn’t going to like it.
Ben laughed.
“You think this is funny,” I said as agreeably as I could.
“Well, this is some kind of a big joke, right?” he asked, barely suppressing his laughter. “I mean, there are hidden cameras filming this somewhere, right? And at any minute they’re gonna just jump out and say, ‘Hey, you’re on Monsterville: The Reality Series, please sign this release form so we can make you look like a jackass on network TV.’ Right?”
“I don’t have any hidden cameras here,” I told him, calmly, seriously, the only way I’d ever convinced anyone of anything. “And I assure you, this is no joke.”
He stopped smiling. “You . . . you really believe this stuff, don’t you?”
“The way UFO chasers ‘believe’ things on faith alone? No,” I told him. “I’ve seen it.”
“And of all the people in the world you could share it with, you decided to tell me?” he asked.
“You were a logical choice. Almost everyone in town is potentially a Splinter—”
“Splinter?”
“Not my term,” I explained, “but it fits. From what I’ve studied of the resistors who came before me, that’s been the word for these things for at least fifty years. But as I was saying, anyone, and I mean anyone in town, or who has even visited, is potentially a Splinter and cannot be trusted completely.”
“Well then,” he said, “I hate to break it to you, but I have been to this town, many times before. How do you know I’m not one of them?”
This part would require some finesse. I hoped I had enough to spare.
“Because the last time you were here, you were eleven years old, and unless you were an early bloomer, they couldn’t have replaced you then,” I said.
Ben’s fingers went whiter than they already were against the cold glass of the Cherry Timewarp. Again, it looked very much like he might run, and again he didn’t.
“How do you know when I was last here?”
I was honest. To a point. “Status Update: July 9th, 3:46 p.m. Ben Pastor is going to be attending a funeral up in Monsterville, USA. First time we’ve been up there in five years. Hopefully the last. If you don’t want the world knowing your life story, you really shouldn’t be posting it on—”
“Thanks for the tip,” he stopped me, looking as annoyed as he did relieved, but he still made no move to get up. “So you looked me up because you didn’t know me, and because of that you thought you could trust me?”
“Yes.”
“Has anyone ever told you you should get your head examined?”
“Many times,” I said. They had, and the conversations had never been productive. “Are you prepared to discuss anything with me other than my mental health?”
Ben needed a few seconds to consider this. “Yes. Fine. I’m listening. You want me to help you fight shape-shifting aliens, and—”
“I never said—”
“Okay, okay, you never called them aliens,” he backtracked. “Suppose I believe you. What exactly do you want to do?”
A helpful question. “First of all, I want you to be on your guard,” I said. “The Splinters have taken a particular interest in you, and with you living in the same house as one of them—”
“You mean Haley.” Ben set his now empty glass down with a clink, all helpful inquisitiveness instantly closed off. “You’re saying that while Haley was gone, she was actually being transformed into some kind of . . . pod person out
in those woods?”
“She’s a Probable Splinter, yes,” I said. “A very, very Probable Splinter, actually, and the process does seem to be executed in the woods, although I haven’t been able to pinpoint the location.”
Ben glanced around for eavesdroppers. A good instinct, one that could be channeled into usefulness, if he’d allow it.
“I can’t believe that,” he said.
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“Does it matter? I’ve known Haley for my entire life. I can’t say we’re close, but she is my friend. I can believe that something terrible, something nobody wants to talk about, happened to her. Maybe it’s even something involving someone in this town, someone connected, someone who could afford to keep this covered up, I don’t know. I believe that whatever it was caused enough stress to make Haley want to forget it as some kind of defense mechanism. But the idea that she’s been replaced by some kind of body-snatching monster is . . . impossible.”
“Impossible?” I repeated. “Maybe on a global scale it’s improbable, but you’ve been willing enough to believe more improbable things than that recently. How many people can you name, real people, not characters on TV or in movies, who’ve disappeared, only to reappear two months later with no ill effects other than some scratches and a convenient dose of amnesia?”
I could hardly believe it. I thought I’d lost him after the reaction Haley’s name had gotten, but something in what he’d seen of Prospero so far must have already brought him closer to my line of thinking than he was letting on because this actually made him look thoughtful. I drank from the malt to keep my focus while he processed it. Finally he asked the question I’d been hoping to hear most of all.
“Maybe . . . maybe if you just had some proof of something paranormal, something more than this . . .” He waved his arms at the pictures and the stuffed Jackalope in the case behind him. “Maybe—”
“I do! Not about Haley personally, but I do!”
It wasn’t the proof I liked to have, the living, breathing kind that I could put in front of someone at almost any level of denial and have them consider it, but when people ask, it’s different. When people ask, sometimes videos will do the trick. I’d loaded my best one, the one I’d captured of Alexei glitching up when a stage light fell on him a couple years earlier, onto my best phone for just this purpose. I hurried to queue it up and passed it across to Ben.