by Spencer Baum
The disguise was a present from a magic monkey who spoke in sign language. The disguise was a simple basketball uniform, but when Kevin wore it no one could recognize him.
The disguise made him a star. Every jump shot was nothing but net; every lay-up was full of grace. He could steal the ball from anyone on the court at any time, and whenever he did, the crowd went crazy. They adored him.
But they didn’t know who he was. His mom was in the crowd. She said, “I barely recognize you, Kevin.”
“I barely recognize you.”
Her voice was a flute, the sound of it fluttering through the silent darkness. The dream moved to Johnny’s Barber Shop in downtown Turquoise. He was a little kid. Johnny was cutting Kevin’s hair so short that his mother said, “I barely recognize you, Kevin.”
A radio was blaring. Johnny’s radio was always tuned to loud, crass announcers who said frightening things about world governments, surprising things about Texas not really being a state, and strange, passionate things about global conspiracies played out in the world of diet soda.
Today the announcer was going on about some mystery woman.
…the daughter of a poor family in Shuberville, Mississippi, her father was absent and her mother was a criminal. Her home was a den for drug addicts and thieves. She escaped abject poverty, but she never escaped her past. When she was a teenager, she cracked. She went on a killing spree, then fled Mississippi and changed her name.
There was static on the radio, a resonant hum that lay just underneath the announcer’s shrill voice.
The police aren’t looking for her. She was never charged with murder. Everyone who might know of this girl’s awful deeds, from the neighbors to her teachers, her grandparents and friends, the police, the judge, the jury, they all disappeared. Anyone who ever knew her, then anyone who even knew her name, disappeared…
Kevin’s mom paid for the haircut with a ten dollar bill. Johnny gave her five ones as change. He kept the cash register drawer open, waiting for a tip.
My mentor, the late, great, Buzz Tingley, was onto it all, and was prepared to go public with the complete story. Countless people murdered and the truth never discovered! Then Buzz disappeared too.
Kevin’s mom gave two dollars back to Johnny.
So today I bring this story to the world for the first time. This story is a mind-blower, and I must ask for your trust as we cover some strange terrain together. My friends, I present to you the story of The Demon Queen of Shuberville..
The radio lost its signal and went to noisy static. Johnny looked at his radio with disappointment.
“Johnny, why do you listen to this nonsense?” said Kevin’s mom.
“Oh, I don’t think it’s nonsense, Mrs. Browne,” Johnny said as he fiddled with the radio dial, tweaking it to the left and right, trying without success to bring back his program. “That man is a genius. I trust every word he says.”
“Who was that announcer?”
“Why, Mrs. Browne, that’s Lou Sweeney.”
Kevin half woke up, the radio static from his dream still ringing in his ears. He glanced at the clock on the TV. 5:31 am. He drifted back to sleep, hoping to re-visit the dream in Johnny’s Barber Shop. It was so nice to see his mom.
His mind didn’t go back to the memory. Instead, in a half-awake, half-asleep state, he saw disturbing images of bugs. The tree stump in Blackstone Park, the termites – they weren’t going into the holes, they were coming out. More and more of them, flowing out like lava from a volcano. Volcano…. I wonder if all this time, Turquoise Mountain has been a volcano…an explosion, a cave, animal tracks....termites again…Kevin reached into his pocket and pulled out the crystal they found on the mountain….he put the crystal on top of the termite flow, and it sank, slowly. A millimeter at a time, it sank into the termites, into the tree stump, until it was fully submerged and all that was before him was a flowing surface of legs, jaws, antennae, billowing out of the tree stump, funneling in one direction, eventually becoming a single-file line of scurrying bugs.
A Tragic Cycle of Short Lives and Fast Deaths
A single-file line of scurrying bugs. Nothing was more beautiful to eleven-year-old Gretchen Brinkley.
They moved through the alley behind the apartment with precision, an odor trail of pheromones holding the line together, telling each ant exactly where to go.
They moved with grace, the line behaving like a snake, curving around leaves and over twigs in a perfect game of follow the leader.
They moved as a unit. To Gretchen, this was the most beautiful part. The fire ants in this line weren’t choosing to obey the pheromones. They were enslaved. The colony chose this path. Scouts laid the pheromone trail, and hundreds upon hundreds of ants had no choice but to follow the scent.
Precision, grace, and beauty were all linked to that crucial fact, expressed neatly in one sentence of Treasury of Insects by Tristan Nelson III: “The pheromone response is obligatory.” Gretchen had read every other book in the Shuberville Public Library only once, but she had read Treasury of Insects three times.
“This is a book for boys,” Ms. Stephenson had said. “But I’ve held it for you.” She presented the new book to Gretchen with the reverence it deserved. “It’s just been published. It’s the first book in the Shuberville Library with color pictures. You should be the first to read it.”
Gretchen would have read Treasury of Insects twenty times more, but three was all it took. The book was now burned in her memory. She could close her eyes, choose any page, and see every word.
No one knew Gretchen had such a perfect memory, not even her mom.
No one knew that Gretchen could solve any math problem in her head in a matter of milliseconds. The hypotenuse of a right triangle with 5-inch and 6-inch sides? Seven point eight one zero two four nine six seven five nine. Three hundred forty eight times one thousand nine hundred twenty? Six hundred sixty eight thousand one hundred sixty.
The amount of time it took her mom to crash into a lamp after Ken Childress struck her in the face? Zero point nine one seconds. Not that she had been counting when it happened. She was sitting in her room in the dark, listening to them fight. Her perfect memory saved it for her. A scream. A slap. Point-nine-one seconds. A crash.
She knew where the ants were going. There were only two expeditions that brought out so much of the fire ant colony: a move to a new location, or an attack. The line of ants ended with an over-sized solider. The queen was still buried deep underground. This day’s expedition was war.
The pheromone response is obligatory.
Hundreds of ant soldiers would die on this day. They knew it, and they didn’t hesitate. It was their purpose. They had grown old. They needed to get out of the way. There were new, young larvae growing to take their place. The war would not only bring back food for these young larvae, but would also remove the oldest, slowest soldiers from the mix of mouths to be fed.
The target was now in sight. A rotten tree stump at the end of the alley, a mountain of treasure about to be looted. The opposition knew an attack was coming. Gretchen could hear the defenders lining up, filling the open corridors, anticipating the paths the invaders would take.
A crack in the side of the stump served as the main gate to this fortress. A giant set of jaws met the first ant soldier and snapped it in two. An information wave flowed down the line of ants, and they moved with new purpose and vigor, their march no longer methodical and precise, but angry and violent.
The first defender exposed his entire head. Five times as large as any ant, this defender was an impressive beast who should have been impassable. But he was far out-numbered, and in seconds, the defender termite was brought to the ground and swarmed, a mighty buffalo felled by a pack of raving jackals.
The ants stormed into the tree stump, and Gretchen closed her eyes. This was the most magical part. She leaned down and pressed her ear to the top of the stump. She listened.
No one knew that Gretchen heard things. With
every soundwave that touched her eardrums, Gretchen heard not only the sound itself, but all the implications of that sound. The implications resonated on the outer edges of the sound, blending into a music that followed Gretchen wherever she went. When she closed her eyes and truly listened, the music told her so much more than her eyes could see.
She heard the music of war inside the tree stump. She heard the collision of two singular organisms, expressed as hundreds of individual units, fighting to the death. It was a dance, purposeful and precise. With every step, termites and ants met their respective ends, a crescendo of death that would reach its climax when the line of ants broke through the outer defenses and stole into the nest itself.
It was beautiful when it happened. The balance of power shifting entirely to one side, and the music of war making a sudden transition to the music of death. Deep in the nest, hundreds of worker termites, smaller and weaker than their soldier brethren, were now exposed to the oncoming horde, and were slaughtered. A tingling flowed from the music through her body, connecting her to the sound at hundreds of tiny points on her arms and legs.
The exodus began. A second line of ants moved opposite the first, one line of traffic going in; one going out. Every ant that lived through this battle would walk out with a dead termite in its jaws. The termite meat would nourish the larvae back at the mound.
And the termite nest would continue. The ants had demolished the soldier class, but stolen only a fraction of the colony’s thousands of workers. The ants did this on purpose. They were farmers, and the termites were their crop. They left enough to ensure the termite nest would re-grow, and be ready for the next raid, the next harvest.
“A tragic cycle of short lives and fast deaths,” is what Tristan Nelson called the ant-termite relationship in Treasury of Insects. He didn’t get it. His color pictures of ants and termites engaged in battle showed the drama of individual insects, but the beauty of the ant mound was its oneness. Thousands of workers, hundreds of soldiers, living for a purpose larger than themselves, dying for the sake of the one colony.
When the last ant went under the earth, Gretchen left the alley and returned to the grim reality of her own life. But the music of war stayed with her.
Chapter 7
Kevin found himself on the living room couch a little after five in the morning, his cell phone buzzing with a call from Jackie.
“Hello.”
“Joseph can fly.”
“What?”
“I know it sounds crazy -- I guess it isn’t any crazier than everything else that’s happened lately, but it’s true. I heard him open his bedroom window in the middle of the night. I went in to see what he was doing and he was gone. I called him on his cell, he said I wouldn’t believe where he was. Ten minutes later he was floating down from the sky and landing on the window ledge.”
Kevin wondered if this was just another vivid dream to top off a night full of them. His brain might be replaying Joseph’s jump over the fence from the day before and concocting a strange scene for him, where he gets a phone call from Jackie before sunrise.
“That’s amazing,” Kevin said.
“There’s more,” said Jackie. “Joseph says he found the tracks again, just north of Turquoise Mountain.”
“The tracks?”
“Yes, the animal tracks we found yesterday on the mountain. Joseph says they go through the forest and stop at a red brick house in the middle of nowhere.”
A red brick house? Kevin sat up. This definitely wasn’t a dream. Despite the jarring, early-morning wake up call, he felt awake and alert.
“Where was this house?” Kevin asked.
“Way up north, hidden in the forest under the mountain. Joseph said there weren’t any real roads around it. Just a path dug out by someone’s tires.”
“That’s Cassandra’s house,” Kevin said.
“That’s what Joseph thought”
“How did he know?” Kevin asked.
“He said it would take a truck like hers to get over all the mud up there. I told him he was jumping to conclusions too quickly, but I guess he was right. I suppose she could have ridden horseback to the top of the mountain, but those didn’t look like horseprints. Maybe she uses unusual horse shoes.”
“Jackie, you don’t want to spend today following more tracks, do you?” Kevin was amused. Jackie had the power to move objects with her mind, her brother apparently now had the ability to fly, and she wanted to spend the day looking at animal tracks.
“We need somewhere to start, Kevin. We need to figure out what happened at the mountain yesterday before the police link us to the explosion. This Cassandra woman is involved somehow. This is our best lead.”
“I don’t--” He wanted to say he didn’t see why the police were such a big deal. They hadn’t done anything wrong. But he didn’t want to argue. He was interested in where this was going. “Are you suggesting I ditch school today to hang out with you again?”
“Of course I am! If you go to school today, the police will want to interview you. If we figure out what happened first, and we get proof, we’re off the hook.”
Kevin thought about Ruben, about a rematch. How sweet it would be to set that right.
But would it be sweet enough? The day before had been unlike anything he had ever experienced. One amazing adventure after another. What might they find today?
“You’ve got to admit, Kevin – she smelled like those fumes on the mountain. Now there are these unusual tracks from her house to the explosion site. Something weird is going on with your dad’s friend. We should check it out.”
“Okay,” said Kevin. “Where are we meeting?”
* * * * *
A month after Kevin’s mom died, his dad bought a Tingley 2000 espresso machine from a downtown coffee hangout named The Global Mug.
“Everyone’s buying these,” his dad said. “Espresso is such a classy drink. It’s like coffee, but more sophisticated. We need a little sophistication in this house now that it’s just us guys. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t care. I’ve never had espresso before.”
“You’re gonna love it. Let’s whip up a batch.”
Kevin most certainly did not love it. He found the drink to be pungent and bitter. Still, grinding coffee beans, burping steampuffs, and random, coffee-nerd messages like “How Have You Bean?” on the unit’s comically large digital display screen became part of the morning routine at Kevin’s house.
On this morning, the Tingley’s display screen read, “Take a Break From Your Daily Grind.”
“If you say so,” Kevin said, patting the Tingley 2000 like a dog and thinking about the day ahead.
He left the house at a quarter past seven, like he would on any normal school day. But when he should have turned on Jefferson, instead he ducked into the alley and began a sprint through the back roads of town, ending behind Mission Church, where he found Joseph and Jackie waiting. Over the back wall, into the open field, and they were on the same route they had taken the day before. When they were far enough into the open to be certain no one was listening, Kevin asked about Joseph’s night.
“After we got home last night I went into the backyard, just to screw around – see what I could do with these new powers,” Joseph said.
“I cleaned my room last night without ever touching a thing,” Jackie interjected.
“Me first,” Joseph said.
“Sorry,” Jackie whispered, hiding a smile with her hand.
“I was thinking about how when we followed that butterfly, it was so easy to jump that tall fence,” Joseph said. “I decided to really test my jumping ability. I jumped from the lawn to the roof of our neighbor’s garage without any trouble. It was so crazy – I hope no one saw me. I jumped down and did it again. And every time I did it, I felt like I could jump even higher if I wanted to. So, from the middle of the lawn, I thought about jumping up as high as I could go, bent my knees, and did it. And I didn’t just jump high, I jumped really high! Ove
r a tree, over my house -- I thought I was going to zoom into space and fly away. So I tried to make myself stop, and it worked! I just stopped there, hanging over my own house like a helicopter. Then I thought about going down, and that worked too. It’s like a new way to move.”
Joseph stopped walking and looked around to make sure no one could see them.
“I try to go up, and I go up,” Joseph said, floating off the ground as he spoke. He stopped a few feet in the air, like a balloon on an invisible tether. Kevin and Jackie laughed with giddy excitement. The ability to fly – Kevin couldn’t imagine anything better.
“I try to go down, and I go down,” said Joseph, coasting back to the earth and landing on his tiptoes.
“Later, after everyone went to bed, I opened my window and jumped out,” Joseph continued. He floated a few inches off the ground again. “And then I …flew!” As he shouted the word, he took off like a rocket, going twenty feet into the air, bringing a shriek of excitement from his sister.
Joseph came back down for another gentle landing. “Then I flew over the neighborhood,” he said. “I landed on Mr. Altamira’s roof, I jumped from there to the Young’s house and landed on their roof. I flew back to my house and came back in through the window. No one had even noticed I was gone.”
They started walking again, Joseph leading them, walking backwards, waving his hands as he spoke.
“Of course I couldn’t go to sleep, so a little later I got up and flew out the window again. This time I flew all the way to the library and landed on that roof. I flew from the library to a tall tree across the street. I landed on a high branch and looked at everything. I could see the moon and the stars, it was quiet.”
Joseph didn’t mention a sound filling his ears even when it was quiet outside. Surely he or Jackie would have noticed by now if they were hearing it too.