by Damien Love
He stopped it then, felt his mind falling to earth from somewhere else, descending through thick, slow time, and watched them hurry away. All except Kenzie, still moaning on the ground. For some reason the effect was strongest with him. Kenzie hadn’t been quite the same since. None of the boys ever mentioned it again. But they left Alex alone.
Until now. Kenzie had been trying to talk to him these past few days, but Alex had worked hard to avoid him. He still felt bad about having used the power on him, even in defense. But ever since that confrontation, Alex hadn’t felt a flicker from inside the tin toy, despite long nights of trying.
His stop drew near. Alex stowed the robot away. As he stepped off the bus, he stood gazing back the way he had come. Just weary traffic trickling homeward through lengthening shadows, just his town’s familiar streets slanting away in the rain. He searched around, not knowing what he expected to find.
For the past week or so, he had been plagued by a dim feeling of being followed, the faint, nagging sense of eyes on him. He had started to suspect that what he sensed was only his own guilty feelings about having kept the robot when he was supposed to have got rid of it forever.
Beyond the rooftops, a white sun was sinking through smoky blue clouds. Alex shivered, zipped his coat at his throat, and hurried for home. Spring was here, but it felt like winter didn’t want to let go.
II.
HOMEWORK
After dinner, Alex went to his bedroom, closed the door, then stood considering the overdue homework stacked on his desk. His eyes drifted to the collection of old toy robots on the shelves above, gathered like a bright, waiting little army. Slightly dusty now.
He sat at the desk, and pulled a sheet from the pile.
Quadratic Sequences
1. Determine the nth term of the sequence 3, 8, 15 . . .
He looked at the numbers without seeing them. He heard his mum laughing at something Carl said downstairs. Rain rapped at his window as wind hit the house with sudden violence.
He flipped open his laptop and looked at the real homework that had been consuming his time, private projects of his own. The folder filled with his research on the golem legend was open. He hadn’t found anything beyond what he already knew. Nothing he could understand, anyway. Beside it, in another folder marked SALT, he’d started to compile every strange old superstition he could find about the stuff, folktales about its power to protect and ward against evil. He’d given up. There had been too many.
He keyed in the same news search he checked every night:
Vltava River Prague Bodies
Nothing.
He returned to his math, then instantly abandoned it. He crossed the room and knelt to reach under his bed, pulling out first the old toy robot, then a piece of plywood that had once been part of a kitchen drawer but now served as a makeshift drawing board. A large sheet of paper taped over it bore sketches for a book cover he was supposed to be designing for art. He removed that, uncovering beneath another project of his own.
At the top of the board, he had pinned a creased photograph of his mother and father, taken years before he was born: a young couple at some dim, happy party, his dad half-turned, blurring into red-black shadows. A vague, tall man, with black hair pushed back from a high forehead. It was the only picture Alex had ever seen of him. He couldn’t see him at all.
His father had died months before his birth. That’s what he had always been told, anyway. He felt certain his mother believed it. He had believed it like a law of nature himself until recently.
The rest of the board was covered in a mess of smudgy charcoal drawings, dozens, all variations on the same subject: a tall man in a long black coat and black hat. Sketches from memory of the figure who had hunted Alex and his grandfather across Europe with his strange gang and their weird machines, trying to steal back the toy robot and its clay tablet.
The tall man, Alex called him—although he had eventually given him another, secret, name, one he could still barely bring himself to utter. In some of Alex’s drawings, the somber figure was depicted in full, turned away. In others, he loomed in brutal close-up: rough portraits of a head completely swathed in ragged bandages beneath the hat, save for one terrible eye.
This mummified visage was the only way Alex had ever seen him clearly, up close, after the man had used the tablet to summon forces he couldn’t control. Alex flinched as he recalled white light falling from the Prague sky, turning poison-black as it struck down. It had burned the man terribly. But it was Alex who had killed him.
His breath caught as he replayed it again, the most intensely vivid memory of all: this tall, wounded figure leaping from a bridge into a raging river, trying to save his daughter, the unsettlingly strange little girl who had jumped first, diving in when she thought Alex had thrown the tablet into the water. The two of them dragged down under the lethal, boiling current.
Their phantom faces were always in his thoughts, the girl’s—Zia, the tall man had called her—sharp and clear, the man’s always just out of reach. Alex’s attempts to capture his likeness, the features beneath the bandages, had become a nightly ritual. But when he closed his eyes and tried to picture the face he had once glimpsed, it receded into the shadows.
Yet Alex felt it was as close as his own skin. Of all the secrets uncovered during his adventure, this was the one that overwhelmed him most. From vague hints dropped in conversations, from his distant impressions of the tall man, from the resemblance he had eventually noticed hidden in his grandfather’s face—from clues in his own mirror every morning—he was certain.
The tall man was his father.
That his grandfather had been determined to keep their pursuer’s identity hidden from Alex, refusing to answer any questions about who he was, only confirmed it. Just thinking about it set something shivering in Alex’s blood.
He studied the photograph of his dad at the party for the millionth time, trying to penetrate the haze. He felt sure he could match this shadowy picture with the tall shadow leaping through his memories. He taped a fresh sheet to the board, fished out his charcoals, and bent to begin another drawing.
He worked for an hour, hunched in concentration, losing himself, until he realized his arms and neck were aching. He stretched and rubbed his eyes, remembering too late his fingers were filthy with charcoal. His eyes stung. Blinking it away, his gaze caught on the robot lying by his side.
He picked it up and stared at it, long and hard. When he closed his eyes, its ghost hung printed in negative behind his eyelids. He concentrated, straining to send his mind out, detect anything reaching back.
Nothing. He shook the robot in frustration. “Where are you?”
Alex set it aside and looked back at his sketch. He had planned to draw the man’s face, but it had somehow eluded him again. Instead, this latest picture showed the tall figure leaping away through the air, powered by the curious spring mechanisms he wore around his boot heels. His coat billowed like the cape of some eerie superhero. A silver-handled cane caught the light in one hand. In the other, a blade shone.
Alex sighed and reached for a fresh sheet of paper, then snatched his hand back as the edge sliced into the pad of his thumb. Hissing, he lifted the finger to his mouth, then hesitated, struck by a memory of cutting his finger on the old toy’s rough tin in this room once before, his blood leaking inside, a first uncanny sensation creeping over him soon after.
He recalled his grandfather telling him about the other, real robots they had encountered, how the tall man and his followers powered them: . . . they use themselves . . . Pieces of people. . . Bits of their own bodies . . .
Blood glistened, rich red among the grimy black whorls of his thumbprint. He grabbed the robot before he could change his mind, held one hollow eye beneath his thumb, then squeezed until blood welled up.
There came a knocking at his bedroom door.
“J
ust a minute!” Alex scrambled to hide the robot and drawings under the bed. Jumping to the door, he stole a last look around, then pulled it open. Carl stood there, a bundle of fresh laundry under one arm, a mug of tea in each hand. Proffering one, he stopped and laughed.
“Going goth?”
“Huh?”
“Your eyes.” Carl gestured at his own with a mug. “You’ve got, like, panda rings.”
“Oh.” Alex took the tea, rubbed his eyes with his other wrist. He nodded toward the discarded book cover on the floor. “It’s charcoal. Thing I’m doing for art.”
“Can I come in a minute?”
Alex sat at his desk while his mum’s partner perched on the bed, dumping the laundry beside him.
“So—” Carl stopped, frowning. “Hey, are you bleeding?”
“Oh.” Alex sucked at his thumb, wiped it on his jeans. “Paper cut.”
“Oooyah. Well, make sure you wash it, get a Band-Aid on. By the way, what happened here?” From the heap of clean clothes, Carl pulled out Alex’s black hoodie, then waggled two fingers through a rough little rectangular hole on the back.
“I don’t know.” Alex frowned. “I’ve never noticed that.”
“A mystery.” Carl nodded. “Probably the same thing puts holes in my socks. Gremlins come when they’re on the clothesline.” He smiled at Alex. “So, uh, how you doing?”
Alex sipped tea, nodded, and shrugged. “Yeah, fine.” He waited for whatever was coming.
“Getting on okay at school, I mean?”
“Mmm-hm.”
“No trouble or anything.”
“Nope.” Alex shook his head. “Everything’s fine.”
“Good. Great. It’s just, well, your mum. You know: your mum. She worries. She’s worried you’ve been keeping to yourself a bit, and, y’know, we got that letter about you falling behind with homework. . . .”
“I’ve just been a bit tired.”
“Ha. Yeah. Tell me about it. God, when I was your age, I was sleeping all the time. Should’ve heard my dad. But, I mean, Alex, you know, if there ever was anything— I mean . . .”
Alex swigged more tea and sat staring at his bloody thumb while Carl went through all the things he thought might be troubling him. He could just see the old toy robot lying in the shadows under the bed, behind Carl’s feet.
“. . . remember what it was like,” Carl was saying now. “I’m not that old. Alex, what I’m saying is: sometimes there might be things you might not want to talk to your mum about. But I’m here, you know. You can talk to me. About anything. I mean, I know I’m not your dad, but I—”
“That’s right.”
“What?”
“You’re not my dad,” Alex muttered, without looking up. As soon as the words were out, he wished he could call them back.
Carl opened his mouth, reconsidered. He smiled, stood, and took Alex’s empty mug. At the door, he paused. “I mean it, though, Alex. Anytime. Anything.” He closed the door softly. Alex sat feeling shabby, listening to footsteps descending stairs, rain at the window.
He looked at the toy lurking beneath his bed. His desk lamp flickered and went out. He pushed absently on the wire at the base, bending it to the angle he knew would work. The lamp glimmered to life. Loose connection. He leaned his head back and sighed, then took out his phone.
“Hey,” he said when David answered. “I will come over tomorrow. I mean, if it’s still all right.”
III.
DON’T LOOK BACK
The visit to David’s was good, until it went bad.
For a few hours, they slumped on beanbags in David’s room, carving their way through some paramilitary massacre of a video game, all digital slaughter and laughter over the headsets. After a while, Alex was surprised to realize he had stopped thinking about the robot, the tablet, the tall man, the girl, his grandfather, all of it. For the first time in months, the tension chewing his skull had eased. He concentrated on the game again, before it came back.
Finally, David’s dad appeared in the doorway with a regretful grin. “Time to face the sisterhood.”
Downstairs, crammed around the kitchen table, sat David’s two older sisters, his mother and her two sisters, his grandmother and her sister, and, regally installed at the head of the feast, his great-grandmother.
David had been right: this was her ninety-first birthday. She sat swaddled in layers of wool bright against papery gray-brown skin, sound asleep amid the chatter of her family and the muted thump from a well-used turntable.
With a few nods and a sternly raised eyebrow at David’s elaborately mimed protests, David’s mother ordered David and Alex to sit on either side of the dozing old lady. As Alex squeaked his chair into place, she gave one short, snorting snore, causing David to dissolve in giggles, until his mother’s eyebrow shut him up.
“Thanks, Mrs. Anderson,” Alex said, as she handed him a steaming plate.
“It’s good to see you, Alex.” She shoved his shoulder gently. “You’ve not been over in too long.” She turned to her mother. “Should we wake Granmé to eat?”
“Let her sleep. She’s happy. If she wakes, she wakes.”
They dug in. Outside, the night was dark and the rain never stopped, but the kitchen was warm and the lights glowed. The windows steamed as the talk, laughter, and music grew louder. The old woman slept, snoring occasionally. David made a face; his sisters smiled. Alex sank into the comfortable atmosphere, soaked it up.
Once, from the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a shadow move at the window. But when he looked around there were only raindrops running on misted glass. Just ordinary life. He’d forgotten how easy it could be. He made a decision: He would put the old robot away for good. When he got home, he would say sorry to Carl and make things up with his mum. Since he’d returned from Prague, he had been increasingly avoiding talking to her, because he simply didn’t know what he might be in danger of saying. Dad. I saw him. Alive. All that time. But now.
He turned his mind from that. So. He would take the old toy away, somewhere remote, bury it deep where no one would ever find it. Just give it all up and forget. Get back to reality. A life that didn’t involve his grandfather’s world of ancient strangeness and sleeping monsters and salt and sinister machines and secrets and power. His father’s world.
It was just as David’s dad began serving dessert that Alex became aware of a change in the old woman. She hadn’t snored for a while. Looking up, he caught a glint beneath one eyelid. It closed quickly. But she was awake. The eye opened a sliver again. Watching him.
He did his best to ignore it and turned to accept the bowl David’s mum was passing. “Thanks, Mrs. Anderson.”
“Alex. How many times,” she said. “It’s Laetitia. Here. I made extra sweet potato bread.” She slid another slice alongside his ice cream. “I remembered how much you like it.”
The stuff was delicious, but Alex barely tasted it. The old woman had both eyes open now, fixing him with an angry stare. No one else seemed to have noticed. He chewed uncomfortably, forced down another mouthful, then almost choked as the old woman slammed both hands hard on the table.
The music bounced happily on as the gathering fell silent. David’s great-grandmother was hauling herself to her feet.
“Granmé?” David’s mother started out of her chair to help her. Before she could, the old lady straightened, extended one arm, and pointed an accusing finger in Alex’s face: “Bokor!”
They all looked at each other. A voice from the stereo was singing about a girl in a hat. The old woman drew a shuddering breath, then shouted the word again, still pointing at Alex.
“What?” Alex managed.
“Granmé? Granmé, it’s all right. . . .” David’s mother and grandmother rushed to her side. She struggled to fight them off. Alex stared at the melting ice cream on his plate. He felt conspicuous, u
nder attack. Then, with alarm, he felt something else: the stirring beyond the borders of his mind he had been searching after for weeks.
Something was reaching out from the old toy robot he carried in his pocket. He felt it moving along the edge of his thoughts. He tried to turn away, but it came flooding fast, eerie, then familiar, wonderful. He wanted to surrender to it. He tried not to.
The sounds around him faded, replaced by a hissing on the air. The room was flickering. Things slowed. The glimmering light was vast now, golden white tinged blue, moving through him. Him moving through it. His mind cleared, expanded.
A tiny noise annoyed him from far below. He turned his head and saw himself sitting down there beyond the vibrating light, beside the shouting woman, and began to piece together the command to shut her up. A distant part of his mind was pleading to stop, not now, not here, not them, but it was very weak. He looked at the old woman and formed the words.
But there was something else . . . A hand on his arm.
He could stop that, too. He could remember the words that would make them all stop, send them into the corners. But there was still something else. . . .
Lost inside his own skull, battered by thoughts from elsewhere, Alex fought to focus on the hand on his arm. He struggled against the tide of light, using the touch on his arm as an anchor, dragging himself toward it. It was David’s father. He was saying something. What was he saying? A word. A name . . .
“Alex,” David’s dad repeated. He made a wincing nod toward the commotion at the head of the table. “You all right? Think maybe we should make ourselves scarce.”
The terrible sensation was gone as instantly as slamming a door. Alex felt his mind rushing back into the here and now. It was as if he had been holding his breath under raging water and had forgotten until almost too late, then come bursting up. His legs felt weak as he stood.
Alex, David, and David’s dad huddled in the hallway, listening to the impassioned cries from the kitchen. David shuffled his feet, a little embarrassed. He caught Alex’s eye and mouthed a slow, silent Wow. Alex hoped his own trembling wasn’t obvious. The force had ripped through him from nowhere, unbidden. He’d barely managed to control it. A memory of the sensation still fizzed in his limbs.