Fetch

by Scott Cawthon

  Jake, four years old, loved the picnic, but he wasn’t keen on the huge rubber spider that lurked near the edge of the picnic blanket. He was so agitated that Greg suggested they put the picnic on hold. He got out two spatulas and made a big production of scooping up the spider and putting it in a sealed plastic bag. That wasn’t enough for Jake.

  “Out!” he demanded, pointing a chubby finger toward the door.

  So Greg put on his rain jacket and went out in the rain. While Dare and Jake supervised from under the shelter of the house, Greg dug a hole in the mud and buried the rubber spider.

  Satisfied, Jake ate the rest of his picnic lunch without comment.

  “Good job, boyo,” Dare said.

  Greg enjoyed the praise. He sure never got any from his dad, who, as usual, was working. When Dare was around, though, he didn’t seem to mind his father’s disapproval as much. His uncle made everything seem better.

  A couple days before Christmas, Greg and Hadi were talking on the phone about Trent. “He’s such a jerk,” Greg said. He laid on his bed watching his plants, sending specific thoughts to them like one might send to an REG. Just like in Cleve Backster’s experiments, his plants seemed to be responding well to his latest intentions.

  “I don’t really pay attention to him,” Hadi said, “but I know he freaks out Cyril.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He needs to be pranked,” Hadi said. “I was thinking spiders. I overheard him the other day telling Zach he’s afraid of spiders.”

  Greg laughed. “Seriously? I’ve got a rubber one buried in my backyard. Maybe if the rain stops, I’ll dig it up before I come over.”

  “Yeah, do that. Ho, ho, ho. It’d make a nice surprise in his stocking.”

  Greg waited a few hours, but the rain didn’t let up. It thrummed relentlessly on the roof. If Greg hadn’t promised Hadi he’d go over to wrap presents, he wouldn’t have left the house.

  But he promised, so he geared up for the rain and stepped outside.

  He almost screamed when he looked down and saw a huge spider covering the WEL of WELCOME FRIENDS on his mother’s jute doormat. Jumping back, he stared at the spider, realizing now what it was.

  Greg felt his pulse accelerate.

  This. Was. Not. Possible.

  But there it was. It was the rubber spider he’d buried—still in its now muddy plastic bag.

  No one except Dare and Jake knew where that spider was. Jake and his family had gone to Hawaii for Christmas, and Dare was on a ski trip with friends. “Wish you could be here for our white Christmas, boyo,” Dare had said on the phone the night before.

  Leaning over and picking up the plastic bag by the corner, as if it was a deadly creature in and of itself, Greg held the bag in front of his face.

  Were those teeth marks along the bottom edge?

  He dropped the bag.

  His phone buzzed. He sucked in his breath and fumbled for his phone.

  Merry Xmas.

  Merry Christmas to you, too, Fetch, Greg entered while trying to ignore the fact that his fingers were trembling.

  He didn’t wait for a reply. Ignoring the urge to throw the phone into the shrubs at the edge of his yard, he shoved it back in his pocket. It was time. He had to talk to his friends.

  The day after Christmas, the boys gathered in Greg’s room, on the bed. Greg sat with his back against the navy blue cushioned headboard, his friends sprawled next to each other at the foot. He glanced around the room, taking comfort in his familiar surroundings. Posters of movie musicals alternated with puppy posters on the walls, and two shelving units stuffed with books flanked the window that looked out toward the ocean. The sky outside was matte gray, as if an artist with no sense of depth had just slathered paint across the horizon. On the wall opposite the window, his plants sat in rows on shelving under a low-hanging bank of grow lights. His antique rolltop desk, a gift from Dare, sat next to the door. A plate of gingerbread cookies Greg had baked two days before sat in the middle of the bed.

  Grabbing a cookie, Hadi asked, “What’s this urgent meeting about?”

  “Yeah,” Cyril squeaked. “I was going to go to the day-after Christmas sales with my mom.”

  Hadi shook his head. “Seriously, dude. Do you listen to yourself? You might as well wear a T-shirt that says, ‘Make fun of me.’ ”

  Greg threw a dirty sock at Hadi. “Leave him alone. If he likes to shop with his mom, he likes to shop with his mom.”

  Hadi gave Greg a mock bow. “You make a point.” He nodded toward Cyril, this time for real. “Sorry.”

  “S’okay.”

  In the silence that followed, Greg weighed how he was going to explain everything. Well, maybe he wasn’t going to explain everything. Maybe just some things. For sure he had to tell them about Fetch.

  He looked over to his nightstand, which held stacks of books, papers, and his phone, still receiving texts from Fetch. His most recent, an hour before Cyril and Hadi showed up, was:

  Do U need food 4 meeting?

  No, thank you, Greg texted back.

  He took a deep breath and wrinkled his nose at the scent of the lavender air freshener his mother had put someplace in his room. (He’d been looking for it but hadn’t found it yet. He preferred the smell of his sweaty clothes, thank you very much.) “Okay, so there’s no way to say this but to say it,” he began.

  Hadi and Cyril looked at him.

  “Fetch has been sending me texts.”

  His friends stared at him. They blinked in unison.

  “Who’s Fetch?” Hadi asked.

  “Wait—you mean that dog thing? That prize fr-from the pizzeria? Is this a joke?” Cyril asked.

  Greg shook his head. He picked up one of the stacks of papers from his nightstand—all the text messages he’d printed out—and held it out to Cyril. “Look.”

  He waited while Cyril and Hadi scooted together so they could read the texts at the same time.

  “This can’t be real,” Cyril said. His voice was even higher than normal.

  Hadi grabbed the stack of printouts and flipped through them. He glanced at Greg then said to Cyril, “He wouldn’t prank us like that.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Greg said. “Want to see my phone? I’m smart, but I’m not smart enough to spoof texts on my phone.”

  Hadi shook his head. He abruptly stood and started pacing in a tiny circle on Greg’s blue-and-maroon braided rug.

  “It must have synced with your phone, dude,” Hadi said finally.

  Greg nodded. “Yeah, except—”

  “Whoa, wait,” Cyril said. “I’m not a techie, but I don’t see how something as old as that animatronic dog could sync up with a modern smartphone. That’s just not possible.”

  “Obviously, it is, though,” Hadi said.

  “It’s not just syncing.” Greg reached for the muddy plastic bag containing the spider and held it up. He felt like he should say, “Exhibit A,” but didn’t.

  “What’s that?” Cyril shifted away so fast he fell off the bed with a thud.

  Greg suppressed a laugh while Cyril jumped up.

  “Sorry,” Greg said. “It’s not real.” He told them the story of the picnic and then the appearance of the unearthed bag on his doorstep.

  Cyril gaped at him, then looked from Hadi to Greg and back to Hadi. “No way.”

  “Let me see that.” Hadi snatched the bag from Greg’s grasp and examined it. “Those are teeth marks!”

  “No way,” Cyril repeated.

  “Way,” Hadi said.

  “It’s like my plants, I think,” Greg began. It was time to share what he was sure was behind all of this.

  Hadi and Cyril stared at him. “What?” Hadi asked.

  “Have you heard of Cleve Backster?” Greg asked, pretty sure they hadn’t.

  They shook their heads.

  “He was a polygraph expert who started doing experiments with plants in the 1960s.”

  “Okay,” Hadi said. “So what?”

  “So,
in the 1960s, Backster had the idea to hook up a plant to a polygraph machine to see if he could measure how long osmosis took. Although he didn’t learn a thing about osmosis, he stumbled upon something else, something super cool.” Greg stopped.

  Cyril and Hadi were still staring at the spider in the bag. They probably weren’t even listening to him, and even if they were, Greg realized there was no way he was ready to tell them his theory.

  “What if someone was in the building with us and now they’re watching you?” Cyril asked, confirming that he and Hadi hadn’t been listening.

  “What? Like a stalker?” Hadi asked.

  “And he bugged my phone or something?” Greg asked. “That’s just crazy.”

  But was it any crazier than what he thought was going on?

  Greg’s phone buzzed. He picked it up and read the incoming text. He dropped the phone on the bed.

  Hadi and Cyril looked from the phone to Greg.

  He pointed at it. When they leaned over to look at it, he looked, too, and read the text again:

  EL.

  “What’s EL?” Cyril asked.

  Hadi went pale. He met Greg’s wide-eyed gaze.

  “Evil laugh,” they said in unison.

  An animatronic dog that wanted to be helpful was one thing. An animatronic dog that wanted to be helpful and had a sense of humor was okay. But an animatronic dog who had an agenda … that was, well, scary.

  After that, Greg stopped trying to get Hadi and Cyril to understand what he thought was going on with Fetch. So when they finished freaking out about Fetch’s text, he told them he’d keep them posted and decided it was time to conduct more experiments.

  Going to the abandoned restaurant in itself had been a test, and he still wasn’t sure how that had turned out. It had started with him putting an intention out, a desire backed by his will that it unfold. That had led to an impulse to act. The impulse had taken him to the restaurant, where he found Fetch. But how did Fetch play into the grand scheme of things?

  He had to figure it out.

  He decided to start with something small and specific.

  The next day, he got his first experiment’s result. In Advanced Scientific Theory, Mr. Jacoby, looking even more nerdy than usual in a blue checked short-sleeved shirt under a red-and-blue argyle sweater vest, started his lecture with, “So now that we understand the Zero Point Field, let’s see if we can figure out what it means for the real world. To this end, we’re going to talk about REGs.”

  Awesome! Greg thought.

  “A random event generator, usually referred to as an REG,” Mr. Jacoby said, “is a machine that basically flips a coin. Not really, of course. But it’s a machine that’s designed to generate a random output, just the same as you’d get by flipping a coin, assuming you’re not cheating at it.” Mr. Jacoby grinned then continued. “Instead of heads or tails, REGs produce a positive or negative pulse and then turn the pulses into ones and zeros, which as you know is binary code, the language of computers. Once the pulses are in binary code, they can be stored and counted. Researchers built the REGs as a way of studying the impact that focused thought has on events. Make sense?”

  Greg nodded, and he noticed Kimberly did as well.

  “Excellent.” Mr. Jacoby clapped his hands once. “So I was able to get a small REG, and now it’s time to do some intention experiments with it. I’m assigning partners.”

  Greg held his breath. Will it work?

  He only had to wait through two pairings to find out. “Greg and Kimberly,” Mr. Jacoby said, “Pair up.”

  Kimberly turned gracefully in her chair, her hair sweeping through the air like she was in a shampoo commercial. She smiled at Greg, and his bones nearly disintegrated. He had to clutch the lab table to stay in his seat.

  His intention had worked.

  Grinning back at Kimberly and waving at her so exuberantly that her own smile faltered a little, Greg forced himself to stay seated. He had enough wits about him to know that if he did a happy dance, he’d be laughed at for years.

  Mr. Jacoby made everyone move around so partners were seated together. He instructed them to exchange phone numbers because they’d need to stay in contact. Greg had to concentrate to keep his hand steady when he passed his phone to Kimberly and took her phone, tucked into a bright purple case, to enter his number. After they returned each other’s phones and Mr. Jacoby started explaining the experiment’s instructions, Greg’s phone buzzed, and per class rules, he ignored it. It wasn’t until he was out in the hall, after he and Kimberly set a time to meet to do the first step of the experiment, that he checked his phone. Fetch had texted.

  Congrats.

  At the end of the day, Greg couldn’t wait to get home to record the triumph in his journal. Unfortunately, he’d missed the bus that morning, and he’d had to bike to school. That wasn’t a problem, but now the wind was blowing from the southeast, and he couldn’t bike hard enough to overcome the gusts trying to shove him back toward the school. Eventually he gave up and walked his bike the rest of the way to his house. He was so lost in thought he forgot about the tiny terror that lived next door.

  It was like a rabid furry missile was careening toward him at top speed. He nearly jumped to Mars when the dog launched itself from an outdoor table and threw itself over the fence right at him.

  “Crap!” He let go of his bike and dropped his backpack, catching the dog just as it hit his chest and started snapping at his jugular. What was it with this dog? On reflex, he pushed the dog back over the short fence.

  When the dog hit the ground, it came up barking and snarling, and it flung itself against the wooden boards. Greg didn’t wait to see what it would do next. He grabbed his bike and backpack and ran for his house. Once inside, he realized he was hyperventilating. Sinking to the floor in the puddle created by his dripping coat, he texted Hadi, Devil Dog just tried to slash my throat. Scared the hell out of me.

  U OK? Hadi responded.

  Shaken, not stirred.

  Hadi texted back, LOL.

  That night, Greg had nightmares. Not a surprise. He spent the whole night in the abandoned pizzeria being chased alternately by Fetch, a faceless man, and the dog next door while plants grew so fast inside the restaurant that the place turned into a jungle. On the stage, an REG spewed out 0s and 1s almost too fast for the eye to register.

  Greg woke up covered in sweat. Did the dream mean it was working … or not?

  Shaking off the bad night, Greg scowled out the window at the sideways rain. More wind? Apparently Dare was right about this year’s winter storms.

  He threw on some clothes quickly, already late for school. Racing to the door, Greg waved at his mom, who was on the phone. He ignored his dad, who was scowling at a spreadsheet on his laptop while he guzzled coffee.

  Greg threw on his rain jacket, grabbed his backpack, and went out the door and down the steps. That’s where he came to a stop so abrupt, he lost his balance and had to grab the stair railing.

  His eyes widened. His pulse rate flew into overdrive, and his stomach clenched.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  Turning away from what was in front of him, Greg staggered to the nearest bush and threw up. All he had in his stomach was water, which came up, along with yellow bile. Then, even though his stomach was empty, it lurched some more and he endured a couple rounds of dry heaves.

  Finally, he collapsed onto the bottom step of the stairs and wiped his mouth. His fingers were stiff and cold.

  He took several deep breaths, cringing at the sour smell of his vomit and the stench coming from next to his bike. Greg stood. He didn’t want to stand, and his legs felt so weak it was clear they weren’t on board with the idea, either, but he had to do something before his parents came out.

  Looking around wildly, as if someone might appear to help him—which actually was the last thing he wanted—he tried to figure out what to do. Well, he knew what he had to do. He had to move it. Which meant he had to touch it.r />
  No way was he going to touch it.

  He smacked himself on the forehead. “Think, dummy!”

  The admonition worked. He dug his keys out of his pocket and strode to the garden shed tucked against the back of his house. Dropping his keys twice before he could get the right one in the lock, he was drenched by the time he stepped inside the shed and retrieved the black plastic garbage bag he was after.

  Now that he was in action, he moved at hyperspeed. He slammed and locked the shed door, not worrying about the sound because the wind and rain drowned out everything. He raced back to his bike.

  And once again, he had to confront what he didn’t want to look at. This time, he made himself look, really look.

  The neighbor’s dog lay, dead, against the back wheel of Greg’s bike tire. Its throat torn apart, its belly gutted, intestines flopping onto the concrete. It was stiff, and its eyes were wide open, as if staring in fear, maybe for the first … and last … time of its life. Greg forced himself to examine the dog’s fatal wounds. Yeah. It’s just what his subconscious mind told him in his first glance. The dog hadn’t been killed with a knife or some other sharp object. It had been ferociously ripped by teeth and claws. It had been attacked by another animal.

  Greg gagged and swallowed down another dry heave. Breathing through his mouth, he opened the plastic bag and put it down over the dog. Once he had it covered, he slipped the bag under the animal and used the plastic to scoop up the entrails. When he had it all, he carried the bag to the bushes between his and his neighbor’s house and emptied it into the bushes. The dog fell with a sickening splat onto the ground.