Edsel Grizzler

by James Roy

  ‘Can you put the glass bit down now?’ he asked. ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Sure,’ Edsel replied, and he lowered the dome.

  He watched Hoagy playing in the Egg, shooting some kind of alien, no doubt, or checking out the rings of Saturn as he slipped silently by. As he watched, Edsel slid his hand into his pocket and felt the plug. Even now, he wasn’t entirely sure whether this was the right thing to do.

  Bending down, he made sure that the feet of the Egg were exactly lined up on the little pressed-down patches of grass. Then he straightened up. ‘Hoagy,’ he said, tapping on the plexiglass. ‘Hoagy, I’ve got something here that you might like to look at.’

  Hoagy blinked a couple of times at the plug in Edsel’s hand. ‘What is it?’ he asked, his voice muffled by the dome.

  ‘I’m not sure. I think it’s some kind of module.’

  ‘Cool! A module! I know that spaceships have modules – I saw that in a book.’ Hoagy pushed at the dome, and it rose smoothly. ‘Where does it go?’

  ‘I think it goes in that slot down there,’ Edsel said, pointing.

  ‘What’s it do?’

  Edsel shrugged, trying to appear casual, and mostly succeeding. ‘I don’t really know, Hoagy. Here, try it.’

  Hoagy took the plug, and as he moved it towards the socket, Edsel had to resist the urge to dive onto the ground and cover his head with his arms.

  The plug was a perfect fit.

  ‘It didn’t do anything,’ Hoagy said, looking a little disappointed. He pressed the button and wiggled the stick. ‘See? Nothing!’

  ‘Oh well, I thought it was worth a go.’ Edsel felt a little disappointed himself. Not that he’d wanted anything bad to happen to the little guy. He was just expecting … well, something. Anything.

  ‘Can you put the glass bit back down, Edsel?’ Hoagy asked.

  ‘Sure. Now?’

  Hoagy gave him the thumbs up. ‘Ready.’

  ‘All right, ready to go.’ And reaching up, Edsel took hold of the dome and gently lowered it into place. If anything, the tingling in his fingers felt a little stronger now, and as the edge of the plexiglass reached the rim of the cockpit, he felt the dome lock itself down, as if there was some kind of suction within the cockpit.

  Grinning widely, Hoagy gave Edsel another thumbs up. He was a spaceship pilot, no mistake, and not wishing to cramp the little guy’s style, Edsel stepped back a short distance. He watched as Hoagy took hold of the joystick, waggling it about a bit. Then, as if in slow motion, Hoagy extended his index finger towards the green button.

  And he pressed it.

  From within the canopy came a bright blue flash, not bright enough to blind anyone, not even as bright as headlights. But Edsel knew immediately that it was the same flash he’d seen through his eyelids the night before. Yes, at night it would have been a whole lot brighter, and probably a whole heap bluer. But there was something new, or at least something he hadn’t noticed the previous night. It was a sound, a kind of high-pitched, wailing sound. For a moment Edsel wondered if Hoagy was okay, until he realised that the high-pitched wailing sound was Hoagy, screaming as if his leg was being gnawed off by a crocodile. He thrashed around inside the dome, bashing at the plexiglass and screaming something a little like ‘Aaaaargh!’ and something like ‘Get me out! Get me out! Edsel, please! Get me out!’

  Confused, Edsel pulled at the silver handle at the side of the Egg, and with that same faint psst he’d heard the night before, the lid lifted off the cockpit. Hoagy’s screaming was even louder now, and he almost knocked Edsel over in his rush to get down. He didn’t even stop to pick up his bike. He just ran, as hard and as fast as he could, and didn’t stop until he’d crossed the street without looking, reached his house, dashed up the driveway, through the front doorway, and slammed the door behind him.

  Edsel scratched his head and blinked. Then, once he’d recovered from the shock of what he’d seen, he hurried over to Hoagy’s house and rang the doorbell.

  Hoagy’s mum opened the door. She seemed a bit distracted. ‘Edsel, what happened?’ she asked, glancing over her shoulder towards the wailing sound coming from within the house.

  ‘I … I don’t really know,’ Edsel said, and in a way this was true. He certainly hadn’t expected anything like this. ‘Hoagy was playing in the spaceship thing in my yard, and the next thing there was a … a blue flash, and—’

  ‘You didn’t electrocute him, did you?’ Mrs Wendl asked sternly. ‘Did you plug something in that you shouldn’t have?’

  ‘What? No! No, I promise it was nothing like that.’

  Hoagy’s voice had lifted a couple of octaves. ‘There was a man!’ he screamed from the next room. ‘A silver man!’

  ‘A what?’ exclaimed his mother, spinning around.

  ‘A what?’ said Edsel. He shook his head at Mrs Wendl. ‘There was no silver man, I promise. There was no man at all. Really, it was just a flash of light, and that’s all!’

  Mrs Wendl frowned at Edsel and began to close the door. ‘You’d better go now,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s been going on up at your house, but I’ll be having a word with your mother.’

  ‘Mrs Wendl, do you like roses … oh,’ Edsel groaned as the door latched shut in front of his face. He could still hear Hoagy bellowing on about a silver man, and his mum begging him to calm down. This was all getting to be rather more confusing and complicated than it was ever meant to be.

  When he got back to his front yard, Edsel saw a bunch of little kids starting to gather around the Egg, waiting for a turn. Luckily no one had climbed in without asking.

  ‘Sorry, kids, the spaceship is closed today. You should go home,’ he announced, and the little kids all groaned and murmured as he turned the sign around. ‘Routine maintenance. Very important for safety.’

  If only they knew the truth, he thought.

  As soon as he’d seen off the last of the disappointed kids, Edsel crouched down to take a closer look at the grass around the feet of the Egg. Just like before, it seemed that the entire machine had moved sideways, but only by a centimetre or two.

  It was just then that Edsel got that very strange and hard-to-describe feeling, the one where you sense that you’re being watched. He glanced across the street, and saw the blinds in one of the upstairs windows of Kenny’s house move, just the tiniest bit, as if someone had been holding them apart, and had then suddenly let them go.

  A car was driving slowly past, but as soon as it had gone, Edsel strode across the street and up to the front door of the Sampsons’ house. He knocked, and waited. Then, after a while, he knocked again.

  ‘What do you want?’ Kenny’s voice asked from inside.

  ‘I want to ask you something.’

  ‘You’re crazy, if you think I’m coming out there,’ said Kenny. ‘You’re out of control! You’re a maniac!’

  ‘I’m not a maniac, Kenny.’

  ‘You are! You’re lucky one of us isn’t dead. I don’t know what that thing is your front yard, but it’ll kill someone.’

  ‘Kenny, can you open the door?’

  ‘No! Get lost!’

  ‘All right, I’ll go, but first let me ask you a question. Did you get into the spaceship last night?’

  There was a brief pause, before Kenny said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You did, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, I kind of … Look, I didn’t mean to break anything, awright? I was just having a go. But I didn’t realise that you were trying to kill me. And then Hoagy.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to kill anyone.’

  ‘No? Then you get in and have a go. Let’s see how you feel when you go there.’

  ‘Go where? Seriously, I don’t think I’m the crazy one here, Kenny.’

  ‘Oh yeah? If I’m the crazy one, why did Hoagy run off screaming like that? Tell me, did he say anything about a man in a silver suit?’

  Edsel frowned at the door. ‘Um …’

  ‘I tho
ught so. Go on, Edsel. If you’re so sure it’s harmless, why don’t you get in and have a turn? Go on. Just get in and press the button.’

  ‘Okay, fine, whatever,’ Edsel said, turning away. ‘Thanks anyway. You are crazy,’ he muttered under his breath.

  He crossed the road and stood in front of the Egg. Maybe Kenny had a point. If he was so sure that it was perfectly safe, why shouldn’t he climb in and have a go as well?

  And that was when Edsel decided. It was his turn. He was going to take his place behind the controls of his machine. It wasn’t Kenny’s machine, and it wasn’t Hoagy’s machine. It was his – Edsel Grizzler’s – and whatever terrors or adventures lurked within were his and his alone to face.

  It made him feel rather brave to think that way, and he felt even braver as he climbed up into the cockpit, sat down, and pulled the canopy into place. But quite suddenly he didn’t feel at all brave any more, as everything went quiet.

  Had he been honest with himself, Edsel might have owned up to feeling guilty. Not so much about Kenny; more about Hoagy. He’d used the little guy like a guinea pig in a lab, like a chimpanzee blasted into space, and he felt pretty awful about that. He couldn’t take that back, but he could put himself in the same position. Which was why he took a deep breath and looked over the simple controls on the dash.

  There was one more reason behind Edsel’s decision to climb into that cockpit, although he did not know it at the time. Something was calling him, something soft and low, like a quiet breeze or a whisper in the night, and it was drawing him in. He wasn’t aware yet, but through the Egg, he was being called to Another Place. And that yearning call, combined with a subtle push from the dreariness of West Malaise, was all it really took to make Edsel reach out his right index finger, just as Hoagy – and probably Kenny – had done, and press the green button, all the way in.

  Inside the dome, the flash was more white than blue, and incredibly bright. It surprised Edsel to note that as the flash happened, there was no sound. If he’d bothered to expect anything, he might have been waiting for a bang, or a high-pitched whine, a bit of a pop at the very least. But there was nothing. In fact, it seemed like less than nothing. It was more like a tiny fraction of a moment where all sound was completely sucked away.

  As he waited for his sight to recover, he ran a quick check over himself. It felt like his arms and legs were okay, he could breathe, he didn’t feel sick, he didn’t feel dizzy or weak or sore. There was just the lingering glare in his eyes and the amazing silence, which continued. Certainly he’d seen nothing so far that could explain Hoagy’s hysterical reaction. Or Kenny’s, for that matter.

  At last his vision was returning, and Edsel looked around. He expected to see the front of his house with the huge blue butterfly on the wall, but he didn’t. He expected to see the garden, and the hedge, and the street, and Kenny Sampson’s house, but he didn’t. All he could see was grey, as if he was staring into a heavy fog. Then he saw a line, like an horizon, before realising that it was the join between a grey floor and a grey wall.

  As his eyes continued to adjust, he finally saw where he was. His Egg was standing in the middle of a round grey room, and the wall that extended all the way around the room came together above him to form a roof. It seemed that beyond his little plexiglass dome was a much larger, room-sized grey dome.

  It surprised Edsel to note how calm he felt. Perhaps I’m in shock, he thought, or maybe I adapt to stressful situations incredibly well. Either way, he didn’t feel at all panicky. It was as if he’d forgotten how to be afraid. Instead he looked coolly all the way around the room, then up at the domed ceiling. There were no lights that he could see, and yet the surfaces around him were perfectly visible. This was indeed a very strange situation in which he’d found himself.

  And there was still that deep, impenetrable silence. Just to make sure that his ears hadn’t stopped working, Edsel spoke. ‘All right, Grizzler, where are you?’ he said. The sound of his voice was loud within the cockpit, and he allowed himself a moment of relief. At least he wasn’t deaf.

  He reached for the latch to open the dome, but his hand paused in midair as an awful thought suddenly came to him. What if there was no air out in that grey room? What if it was a vacuum out there, and opening the lid of his Egg would cause him to be suffocated in an instant? And again he asked himself, in his head this time: Where am I?

  Finally, Edsel Grizzler was beginning to remember how to panic. He was starting to think that as boring as it was, the front yard of his house in that dreary suburb in West Malaise would be a welcome sight right now, even with the big blue butterfly. So he reached out, grabbed the joystick and wiggled, pretty hard. Again he wiggled it. Then he pushed the green button, four, five, six times.

  Nothing happened. Nothing changed. He grabbed the plug and wrenched it out of its socket. Nothing. He jammed it back in, and tried the joystick again. More nothing. The silence, the greyness of the room, everything was exactly the same, and Edsel was really starting to recall what panic was all about.

  ‘So this is great,’ he said aloud. ‘Now what do I do?’

  ‘Await instructions,’ said a man’s voice, slightly stilted and metallic, echoing deep inside Edsel’s ears.

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Should I show myself?’ the voice asked.

  ‘Yeah, that would be good, I … I guess …’ replied Edsel, whose sense of panic was quickly turning into complete confusion. ‘If it’s no trouble.’

  ‘Very well, Armandine, comma, Robert,’ the voice said. ‘Please wait while I assume a less alarming form.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Edsel, whose emotions had just done a U-turn and were heading back towards panic. But before he had a chance to even wonder who Armandine, comma, Robert might be, there was a brief whining sound directly in front of him, high and piercing like a dentist’s drill. And suddenly, without a flicker or a flash or anything else, a slim figure stood before the Egg. It was wearing a tight-fitting shiny silver suit that covered every inch, including its head and flat, featureless face.

  ‘So Hoagy didn’t make up the silver man,’ Edsel murmured.

  ‘If by Hoagy you mean Wendl, comma, Hogarth, you are correct. He didn’t “make up” any silver man, as you put it.’

  Edsel blinked, hard.

  ‘You seem to be having difficulty believing your eyes, Armandine, comma, Robert,’ said the voice.

  ‘Uh … hi,’ Edsel said. ‘But I’m not whoever … that is. I’m Edsel Grizzler.’

  ‘Very good,’ the voice said. Then the figure held out one hand and pointed at the Egg, and with its usual hiss, the plexiglass dome began to lift, all by itself.

  With horror, Edsel realised that he’d forgotten to take a deep breath. If there was a vacuum out there beyond the Egg, he was pretty much done for. He imagined his eyes being sucked from their sockets, his mouth gowping for air …

  He held his breath as the dome opened fully and clicked into its vertical position above him. He wondered if he could somehow get the dome to come back down, preferably before he ran out of breath.

  ‘What you’re doing won’t make any difference,’ the voice said. ‘You’ll have to breathe eventually.’

  His lungs were beginning to ache, and he closed his eyes, concentrating on not taking a breath. But finally he accepted that he couldn’t hold it any longer, and let it out, before sucking in two more huge lungfuls of whatever was out there.

  To his enormous relief, he found that he could breathe normally.

  ‘It’s air!’ he said.

  ‘Yes, we have what you call “air”, although we’ve added a fraction less of some of the inert gases,’ the voice replied. ‘Would you like to get down?’

  Edsel climbed down, and stood rather nervously beside the Egg, quite close, as if it could protect him in some way.

  ‘There’s no need to be anxious,’ the voice said. ‘I’m your friend.’

  ‘Yes, whatever,’ said Edsel, whose original shock and confu
sion had changed yet again, and had now evolved into deep suspicion. ‘Can you prove that you’re my friend? I mean, I’ve never met you before – I think – so how can you be my friend?’

  ‘In time you’ll see that I don’t mean you any harm, Armandine, comma, Robert.’

  ‘I told you before, I’m not Armandine, comma, Robert,’ Edsel protested. ‘I’m Edsel Grizzler. Or Grizzler, comma, Edsel.’

  There was a slight pause. Then the voice said, ‘Our tests confirm that you are last name Armandine, first name Robert.’

  ‘Tests? What tests?’

  The voice went on. ‘Perhaps you’re wrong when you call yourself Edsel Grizzler. The previous two certainly weren’t.’

  ‘No, they were Kenny Sampson and Hoagy Wendl. Or Sampson, comma, Kenny and Wendl, comma, Hoagy. I guess,’ Edsel added.

  ‘Yes, it appears they came here by mistake. Their reactions were regrettable,’ said the figure. ‘They weren’t meant to be here.’

  ‘But I am?’

  ‘Of course. You’re perfect. And the confusion over your name is completely understandable.’

  ‘I’m glad someone understands it,’ Edsel muttered.

  ‘My tonal detectors show that you’re using sarcasm,’ said the figure. ‘Please don’t. It simply serves to confuse matters.’

  ‘No kidding,’ Edsel replied. ‘Hey, am I dreaming?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Unconscious?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘You’re not dead.’

  ‘In that case, can you tell me where I am, why I’m here, and how I can get back to where I came from? Please?’

  ‘You want to return?’

  ‘Well yes, of course I want to return! I want to go home! I’m supposed to be grounded. My parents will kill me if they know I’ve … come here.’

  ‘Allow me to answer your questions in the order that you asked them,’ said the silver figure. ‘First, you’re in Verdada.’