Silver Shard

by Betsy Streeter

  “Let go of my brother! Now!” Helen screams.

  Time slows and Helen’s vision becomes grainy and gray like an old movie. She can see her brother’s face, but just barely. She shakes her head and tries to clear her sight but she can’t.

  “I’m going to give you a choice, now,” a voice says in her ear. It sounds refined, highly-educated, even snooty.

  “Who the hell are you? Leave my brother alone!” Helen yells. Why can’t she see? She blinks her eyes furiously.

  “I need your brother’s assistance,” the voice says. “Let me borrow him for a while, and I won’t kill him.”

  “No!” Helen yells, tightening her grip on Henry’s wrist. “You leave him alone, now!”

  “Now, dear,” the voice says, “I can’t do that. I’ve gone to such trouble to find him. But I can ensure that he lives. Let him go, and I’ll spare his life. But if you don’t, I’m afraid I will let my assistants shoot him full of venom and eat him.”

  Helen strains her eyes, trying hard to see anything. She can hear Henry calling her name, but his voice sounds far away. His left hand pulls free; now she’s only got hold of his right. The pull is so strong his body lifts off the floor.

  “Make your choice, Helen Silverwood,” the voice says. “Let go, or he dies right now.”

  Helen grits her teeth. Her hand is sliding. All she can see is Henry’s face, blurry and gray, mouth open.

  Helen lets go of Henry’s hand.

  “Mom!” Henry screams, sliding backwards out the door. The black creatures converge around him, and he is gone. The door slams shut behind him and silence falls.

  Henry’s eyes snap open, and he sits up. He’s by himself in a metal-framed bed at the center of a square room with high ceilings, a door at one end and a window at the other.

  A single round light bulb hangs high overhead, suspended on a long cord from the center of an ornate medallion on the ceiling. Everything—the walls, the carved wood moldings, the windowsill, the door, the bed frame—appears to have been thickly coated long ago in the same white paint. The room looks worn and decayed.

  Henry has on plain grayish pajamas as drab as the walls, and his feet are bare. The bed sheets are gray, too. It’s as if the entire room has been drained of color, except for the red light blinking on and off above the door, a visual shock in the dull room. A long beep sounds and then stops. The light stops blinking.

  The door creaks open and a tall figure enters, hooded, and wearing a white robe.

  “Hello, Henry Silverwood,” the figure says. “Don’t be afraid; no one is going to hurt you.”

  Henry pulls his knees up under his chin, instinctively retreating from his visitor.

  The figure closes the door with deliberate precision, and Henry thinks he can see a glow coming from under the hood. When the thing finally turns toward him, he sees why; this person is fitted with a digital face on the front of its skull. There’s no skin, just an oval-shaped display made of pixels that it can light up and change at will.

  Henry remains in his defensive posture as the visitor approaches and sits down very slowly at the foot of the bed. The digital display is set to the face of a kindly old woman, smiling as she speaks. Her blue eyes twinkle and crinkly lines move at the corners of her mouth.

  “Who are you?” Henry asks over his knees.

  “I’m here to take care of you and make sure that you get what you need,” the figure says.

  “What I need is to go home now,” Henry says.

  “Soon enough,” the figure says. “But before you can go home, there is much work to do.”

  “What kind of work?” Henry asks.

  “Very important work, Henry Silverwood.” The digital face now seems more serious. “But for the moment, you should rest. Someone will be by shortly with something for you to eat. And then we will go on a little tour, shall we?” The face smiles a fake digital smile.

  “I’m not going to help you,” Henry says as the figure stands and walks toward the door.

  “I think you are,” the figure says. “Because if you do help, you can go home. Now, rest.” The door clicks shut behind the visitor.

  Henry runs to the door and tugs on the knob, but it is locked from outside. He peers through the sizeable keyhole beneath. He can see movement but not much detail. There seem to be more robed figures out there and more light. He can hear voices but he can’t make out any words.

  Henry is determined not to panic, even though his impulse is to burst into tears. He returns to the bed at the center of the room, bringing his knees up under his chin again and lying still. He pushes his fear down inside until his chest hurts.

  That’s when he notices the tiny wooden desk, painted the same gray color as everything else, in the corner of the room. It has beat-up corners and chips out of the paint. There’s a high back on it with little square drawers built in. On its surface sits a stack of thick sheets of parchment paper and a long, thin box filled with perfectly sharpened, white pencils.

  Henry swings his feet down and approaches the desk. He puts out a hand to touch one of the pencils. As his hand moves closer, he hears voices, whispering. They sound like the voices of children. They are quiet at first, but the nearer Henry comes to touching the pencils the louder they become until they sound as if they are in the room with him. When he pulls his hand back, the voices recede.

  He sits down on the wooden stool situated before the desk. The stool squeaks a little when he swivels on it. He gives it a spin and around him go the walls, the window, the door, the single bed. He stops spinning and faces the desk again.

  A rattle. Someone is turning the doorknob. Henry jumps back into bed, pulling up his knees again in his defensive posture. But whoever is outside lets go of the knob, and the door creaks open a few inches. Then, silence.

  Henry leans over to try and peer out the door, but the crack is too narrow. He climbs down and approaches, cautiously. There’s no sign of whoever opened the door outside. There’s no sound at all. He pushes the door open wider with one finger.

  Instead of the brightly lit, bustling scene he first saw through the keyhole, now Henry faces a blank hallway similar in drabness to his room. He looks both ways, but he can’t see the end in either direction. There is no discernable source of light—just a dim pallor on the walls that spills onto the dingy linoleum squares that cover the floor.

  Henry steps out into the hall and turns left, figuring there’s no difference. All of the other doors along the walls stand closed, and the plaster looks like it has endured many years of wear.

  He thinks he can see a shape at the far end of the hall. A piece of furniture? A person? He can’t tell. He squints in the dull gray light but the shape remains a dark blur. Then it moves. He hears a giggle, like that of a little girl.

  “Wait!” Henry calls out, and starts running. But the girl, if that’s what it is, disappears around a corner. Henry reaches the end and the hallway turns to the right. It’s just more doors, more beat-up walls, more linoleum floor in front of him. He looks again for the girl, and there she is again in the distance. She seems about his age, with dark, curly hair.

  Henry runs and runs, but no matter how hard he tries, he can get no closer to the girl. She disappears around each corner before he can get there. The hallways seem to grow shorter as Henry runs, turning faster and faster until he’s almost dizzy.

  “Help me!” Henry cries out. “Help—”

  He runs smack into a white robe. A pair of hands grab him by the shoulders and spin him around. “You will return to your room, young man.”

  There’s that digital-face glow again. Is this the same person that visited him earlier? It’s impossible to tell people with digital faces apart—they can look like whomever or whatever they want.

  Henry twists his head around and looks up. It’s the same old woman face from before, but stern this time. It flips a few times like a bad television signal and switches over into a scowl. Either this is the same person from before, or everyon
e in this weird place gets issued the same set of faces to use.

  “You will return to your room and rest. Have something to eat. You’ve work to do.”

  “But I don’t want to…” Henry protests. His back bumps into something that gives and he stumbles backward. It’s a door. His door.

  The robed figure shoves the door the rest of the way open, grabs Henry’s arm, and hurls him inside.

  “Enough exploring. As you have probably noticed, there is nothing to see. And, you will always find yourself back here. So don’t waste your time.”

  “But there was a girl! I saw her,” Henry says.

  “There was no one,” the figure says, and turns to leave.

  “There was!” Henry screams. “You can’t tell me what I see and what I don’t see!”

  The door slams shut. Henry pounds on the pillow and yells at the blank rectangle of the door: “You can’t keep me here! My clan will come get me! You watch! I’m Guild, you know! My sister will kick all of your butts!”

  There’s no response. A plate of food and a glass have appeared on the desk in the corner. Henry sits down and crunches his teeth into an apple, picking up a pencil with the other hand. The whispering voices resume.

  Gabriel has transformed what was a bare apartment made of bricks, wood, and glass into an explosion of information. Every available surface in the room including the windows, floors, and support posts, has been plastered with printouts, photographs, drawings, diagrams, and handwritten notes. He has added lines, circles, arrows, and scribbled notations to many of the papers with marker pens. Light sheets, some blank, some displaying text or photographs, lay scattered over the floor.

  Helen would describe what Gabriel is doing as an extreme bout of Super Logic Mode. It is helping (but not very much) to deaden the pain of his son’s abduction and the humiliation that Henry could have been taken so easily.

  At different spots on the brick wall Gabriel has chalked a single word, like “FRAGMENT,” “GUILD,” or “HENRY.” There are papers labeled, “COUNCIL,” to denote the Council of Portals, the organization that is supposed to be in possession of the other fragment. There are, of course, labels throughout the room that say, “MONDER.” Lengths of yarn and string pinned to the walls radiate out from these words, designating possible connections. The effect is that of a room-sized collage inhabited by stringy and disorganized spiders.

  First there were the photographs and notes, and the troubling conversation with the Tromindox in the desert. These were strange, but not dangerous. But at the moment Henry was taken, what had been a confusing puzzle suddenly grew into an emergency.

  Most of Gabriel’s scribbling has to do with connecting Monder to his son. Gabriel has pulled out and taped up Henry’s recent drawings, showing scenes that look like the inside of an old house or depictions of Monder himself. There are dozens of intricate designs made of circles and lines, but no way yet to decipher their language or how they might depict time or space characteristics. To Gabriel, they might as well be drawings of crop circles.

  Gabriel paces back and forth, one hand on his chin and the other clutching a piece of chalk. His brother Christopher sits cross-legged at the center of the floor, punching characters into a makeshift terminal and rubbing his hand back and forth through his hair, which responds by taking on various shapes.

  Gabriel pauses by the window. He stops moving. Christopher knows that look; he has a pretty good idea what might happen next.

  Gabriel rams his fist, still holding the chalk, through the windowpane. Glass rains onto the floor and flies out the window. A few sheets of paper come loose and flutter down to land around Gabriel’s feet.

  Christopher waits for glass to stop falling from the window before speaking. He can see Gabriel’s chest moving with quick, desperate breaths.

  “We’re gonna get him back, man, I promise,” he says. “And quick. No doubt, big brother.”

  “And when we do, I’m going to tear out some throats,” Gabriel says through his teeth. “He’s a ten-year-old boy. Nobody has any business taking a ten-year-old boy.”

  “He’s a stupendously gifted ten-year-old boy,” Christopher reminds him. “And somebody—maybe Monder—has figured that out. The good news is, he’ll be treated well. He’s no good to anyone if he can’t draw.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re gifted, too,” Gabriel says, turning to look at Christopher. “We are gifted at kicking ass. And destroying squids.”

  “Indeed we are,” Christopher says. “I don’t doubt us.”

  “So,” Gabriel says, resuming pacing over the shattered glass, “if Monder does turn out to have one of the fragments, which by the way remains to be proven, we’ve got to figure out how he got it. To do that, we trace back to whoever had that fragment last.”

  “The other fragment is supposed to be the Council’s problem,” Christopher says. “The mind reels at what stupid thing they might have done to lose it.”

  “Right,” Gabriel says. “Let’s suppose the Council has one fragment and the Silverwood clan has the other. That was the arrangement. Kate is the Silverwood bearer now, Anna had it before her, and so on.”

  “It stands to reason,” Christopher adds, “that if Monder did get the Council’s fragment away from them, which we haven’t proven, as you said…but if he did, chances are he’s going to try a similar strategy to get his tentacles on this one. If it worked once, he will try it again.”

  “Exactly,” Gabriel says. “We have to assume that taking Henry is part of the plan to get hold of the Silverwood fragment, or with what Monder plans to do once he puts the fragments back together…” he falls silent and stares out the window between two sheets of paper, information connecting and reconnecting in his mind. He considers it, but decides not to smash another window.

  Christopher stops tinkering and looks up at his big brother. “Let’s get Henry. Kid first, fragment second. Priorities.”

  “I wish it were that simple,” Gabriel says, “but this stuff is all tangled up together in a giant web. If we pull one string we get the whole thing. When we go in to get him, we’ve got to know what we are dealing with so we don’t all end up stuck somewhere being eaten by a bunch of nasty flying scorpion critters.”

  “Agreed,” Christopher says. “However, I will consider our efforts a success as soon as we see the kid’s face again.”

  “You’re right, little brother,” Gabriel says. He claps his hands together. “We’re going to need a vehicle.”

  The thick white letters painted on the heavy, gray metal door at the top of the stairs spell out: ROOF ACCESS. NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY. Kate shoves on the door with her shoulder and it scrapes open.

  Biting air hits Kate’s face and she squints in the sunlight. Everything up here appears more pronounced, the colors brighter. The wind carries up bits of traffic noise, voices, and doors slamming.

  Helen is easy to spot, sitting at the edge of the roof not far from where she and her brother were practicing, less than a day ago. Her black hair stands out in the bright light like ink on a piece of paper.

  Kate has a seat next to her daughter. Helen’s hair hangs down in front of her face, but Kate can see that she has been crying.

  Helen’s holding the guts of a transistor radio in her hands. She pulls the radio apart and puts it back together again and again, her hands moving almost too quickly to see. She pulls her utility knife from her pocket and twists a few screws. She pops open a bit of casing, makes a change, turns the radio on and off, repeats the process. Over and over, her fingers fly and the components move according to her will.

  “It’s not your fault,” Kate says softly, rubbing Helen’s back.

  “It is my fault,” Helen blurts, looking up at her mom. Her eyes are red. “I had him. I had him by the wrist. I let go. It is, in fact, my fault, directly, that Henry is gone.”

  “You were presented with a choice,” Kate says. “You did the best you could with what you had. It’s very possible that if you had not let go of Henry,
he would have been eaten right there and then. And being eaten by a swarm, Helen, that’s not something you can heal with your antivenom blood. You can’t retrieve a person from a hundred creatures at the same time.

  Kate lets her daughter consider this for a moment before she goes on, “But here’s the deal, Helen: As it stands, Henry is alive, and we have a chance to go get him.”

  “A chance,” Helen says. “We can still lose him, Mom. What if we can’t ever figure out where he went? What if we never see him again?”

  “We will see him again,” Kate says. She’s trying to be firm but her voice shakes a little. “We will see him. You have to have faith. I know that we will get him back.”

  “Okay, I’m glad you have faith,” Helen says. “Because if I were you I would not have any faith at all in me right now.” She opens up and reworks the guts of the radio again.

  “I told you, you had a choice, and you made the choice that you thought would keep your brother alive,” Kate says. “Now, tell me again what you heard and what you saw?”

  “It was weird,” Helen says, looking up to visualize her memory while her hands never stop moving. “Everything went all grainy, like there was something wrong with my eyes. And then I heard this voice, like an old man. Or not old, just, very snooty and condescending. And he said,’ let go, or we kill him right here and now’.”

  Helen looks down again. “And that’s when I let go of Henry.”

  The two of them sit silently. The only sound other than the traffic below is Helen’s hands pulling the radio apart, putting it back together, over and over.

  “What exactly happens if the fragments get put back together?” Helen asks. “What kind of portal are they? Are they still connected to each other?”

  “Yes, they are still connected,” Kate says. “The fragments remain entangled. What each one does affects the other. They are the two halves of one portal and nothing can change that. And this is a unique portal; there’s only one like it. It was the portal that was used to send Monder away, to contain him at a time when he threatened to destroy the Silverwood clan from inside.”