The Acolytes of Crane Updated Edition

by Tew, J. D.

  ‘Can you speak English, please?’

  He ignored my plea. ‘There is one last thing before I go. There is a boy named Travis who has already been visited by the Dacturons. He is the only remaining link to Theodore after Jason’s death. They are using him for something that Theodore has or knows about. We have not figured out what they are after, but I need you to find out what it is, and keep Theodore away from Travis at all costs. I must go!’

  Around him, a whirl of matter, oblivious to me at the time, formed a type of portable jet and in a bluish brilliance, he rocketed into the atmosphere from which he had come crashing down earlier.

  ‘Lincoln, are you okay? Were you talking to someone out here?’ my dad asked from the deck, in his red silk boxers.

  I rubbed my eyes and scratched my head, because the supreme being that stood before me was real. I realized that if I believed this joker, I had a starring role in the future that Zane foretold. I answered my dad by saying, ‘No.’

  “The bus would arrive to deliver me to piano camp, but it would leave without me. I would be bound to that crucial meeting with Theodore by my fear of the world’s end and what a joke it has been. I am done! That is it!”

  No one responds.

  I realize that, once again, I have never hated anyone more than the warden of this prison.

  6 theodore: weird science

  “Open request! Prisoner eight-six-seven-five. Guns are hot, requesting permission to deliver the warden’s message—over,” the guard says.

  The guard has the speaker on his communicator up loud enough for me to hear the response: “Permission granted—over.”

  “Prisoner! Assume the static position!”

  I hear my vault opening. It sounds hydraulic and in need of maintenance.

  “Prisoner, the warden wishes for me to relay this message—”

  The veteran guard from a day ago shouts, “Get on with it rookie. I am tired of holding my gun on this prisoner!”

  “The message from the warden is as follows: prisoner, your efforts have been highly commended. If you continue to provide us with the information we need, at some point we might be able to discuss a transfer. Message end.”

  The rookie’s feet tap the ground quickly, as he hurries out of the cell.

  The veteran guard requests for the closure of my vault, and it closes.

  Finally, I thought they would never leave. Transfer, yeah right! They are gone, and I cannot wait to hold a session with my tablet. I enjoy talking about Lincoln, so I start: “Later in the morning, after I met the paperboy, I woke up to the smell of oatmeal and honey. The aroma was intoxicating, and beams of sun cut shadows across my room; the sunrise invigorated me.”

  I needed the cheering up because I had started developing an achy back, and my overall fatigue was worsening over time. I told my grandparents about the problem a couple of days previously, and they were looking into it.

  My grandma whispered to herself, ‘I think I hear a little monkey stirring.’ She always thought of me as that little boy; one who used to pop over to visit with his parents. That little boy who would play happily for hours in their sandbox, out by the azalea garden, with that awesome toy bulldozer that was a prized hand-me-down from grandpa’s childhood.

  I could hear grandma’s soft whisper thanks to my years of self-training to become a ninja, practicing the art of stealth. That skill enabled me to avoid my dad around the Red Brick apartment. The less noticeable I was, the more I dodged beatings.

  My eyes widened as grandma walked in from the kitchen, winked at me, and handed me a plate with a forbidden item on it: a giant long-john donut. It was definitely a good start to the day.

  There was a rapping upon the door. I approached the door with my long-john in hand and alien slippers on my feet. I saw, on the other side of the narrow vertical window panel adjoining the door, the palm of a teenager’s hand shaded with a familiar tone of ink.

  It must be Lincoln.

  I opened the door. He had his skateboard, and he was ready to shred. I had a plastic banana board that was, ironically, yellow. My board had these giant three-inch wheels that could take on graveled paths, and eat the stones for breakfast too. However, in reality, the only action these funky wheels had seen so far was upon tepid pavement.

  ‘Is it okay if you come over to my house?’ Lincoln asked.

  Before I could answer, Marvin and Laverne stepped up behind me, curious. They then fired away questions at Lincoln out of surprise and curiosity: Who are your parents? Where do you live? Where are you going? My grandparents were extremely protective and old fashioned.

  Lincoln wrote down his address, and my grandma reminded me of the appointment they made for me to see a doctor. She said she would pick me up at Lincoln’s house at around three. We diligently answered the rest of their questions, and when we were finished, we opened the door and sprinted down the street.

  My grandparents yelled, but with the door closing behind us, the train had left the station.

  Lincoln was shorter than I was, only by a few inches, but he was well beyond his years in knowledge and maturity.

  He had dark brown hair and his eyes were equally deep in color; there was only a slight difference of hue between pupil and iris. He wore clothes that were stylish and trendy. My guess was that he came from some money.

  He lived within an area of Ferndale that was developed post-pyromaniac-Jason, with some fine three-story single households. His hair was always moussed or pomaded into position, and his glasses were sleek and practical. I was envious.

  Someday I would learn that Lincoln’s best quality was his ability to reason meticulously. I could always tell when he was deep into thought, because his lips moved with the speed that his thoughts were. It was simply an indication of his process. No matter what his thoughts—metaphysical, statistical, or theoretical—he was brilliant.

  With Lincoln by my side, we were unstoppable.

  On our way to Lincoln’s house, we were interrupted by Nick White. Nick was a weird one. I stayed over at his house a couple of years earlier. He drank an entire glass of water with a cup of sugar dissolved in it that night.

  Anyway, he wanted us to go inside the store with him. Lincoln’s house was near Big-Mart, so there was no worry of deviating from the itinerary laid out by my grandparents.

  When we arrived in the store, after a mile of walking in the scorching sun, Nick wanted to check out the baseball card section. He then said something that branded him as conniving and dishonest. He said that I could take as many cards as I wanted, if I stuffed them in my pants.

  Drained by the betraying sun that had relentlessly stalked me during the last one mile, my judgment went out of the window. Glancing left and right quickly, I grabbed some cards. I had foolishly believed Nick. In my corrupted state, I felt invincible. I inched my way toward the bathroom with several of the newest trend in baseball cards stashed into my crotch, between my underwear and my pants. We shot paranoid looks everywhere in the store.

  I even suspected a doll for having a hidden camera behind its ominous-looking eyes. Lincoln grabbed my shirt at the collar and scared me immensely.

  ‘Ted, there is a man from electronics looking at you. The sign there says, Thieves will be prosecuted, a p-word that sounds horrible, and it isn’t like you to steal, right?’ Lincoln asked.

  I realized what I was going to do was wrong, but part of me wanted to savor the danger, so I proceeded under the sign.

  My amulet was warming up, glowing brighter and brighter. Intensely looking at it as I walked, I realized that some incredible physical force was holding me back. It was weird! When I took a step, my upper foot slowed in mid stride. My composure started to crumble; my consciousness screamed at me to feel like ‘normal’ again. Whatever normal meant. It was as if I was moving in water and then mud. My body came to a complete stop. I was halted and frozen like a statue. It was like I was under control from an outside presence. Under the strain, which to me felt more mental than phys
ical, I started to sweat; I felt like I would experience a panic attack.

  Once my mind resolved to back off from the misdeed, my body suddenly became fluid again, almost causing me to lose my balance. I swiveled and turned away from the restroom, and my hand opened, dropping the baseball cards to the ground. The man in electronics shook his head at me and asked me if I was okay.

  I regained full control over my body. Lincoln’s jaw practically hit the floor. He had witnessed the whole thing.

  ‘What was that, Ted?’ Lincoln asked.

  ‘I don’t know! Let’s get out of here! That Nick is nothing but trouble. I will tell you about it later,’ I said, as I boogied out of the mart with Lincoln at my side. We ditched Nick, but he deserved it.

  Once out of the store we rendezvoused at the garbage cans behind the strip mall. Out of breath and frightened, I told Lincoln exactly what happened. It was difficult to explain the details of this incredibly weird sensation. To myself, it was as if I were made of quick-drying plaster of paris. That was what I wanted to tell him. But I couldn’t. Shaken, I merely said, ‘I felt a strong energy.’

  ‘Okay dude, you have been watching far too much TV,’ Lincoln said.

  ‘I don’t think I was in the presence of an alien or something like that. I think it was the Almighty,’ I said assertively.

  There was a long silence and then we both burst into uncontrollable laughter. We put our hats on backward and boarded to Lincoln’s house. After hanging out with Lincoln, my grandparents picked me up for my appointment.

  I knew that day as I drove away from Lincoln’s house that I had bonded with an incredible new pal, and I was excited about getting to know him more. Those heady feelings were mixed in with the bewilderment and confusion—which Lincoln had obviously shared with me—over what had happened in the store.

  The next few weeks afterwards were scientific in nature, at Lincoln’s instigation. Lincoln was a gifted person, and his instinct was to trust in my testimony about the event. He believed that what happened was a phenomenal intervention.

  He wanted ever so badly to uncover the phenomenon with experimentation. After bandying about and getting tired of calling the unknown energy as simply the power, Lincoln proposed a brilliant official term: The Intervention. I liked it.

  We put a week of research and creative visualization into the foundation of our trials.

  The initial trial was also to determine how far we could go before the unknown power intervened. It was his theory that The Intervention was caused by knowingly breaking the law, and not so much the actual act itself. Lincoln wanted me to, just for a moment, be evil in thought, to see whether the intervening power was aware of what I was currently thinking.

  We were ready for trial one. After we had entered the mall, we strolled into a popular skateboarding shop. Lincoln said that he wanted me to stuff something big and blatantly noticeable under my jacket. It was decided by both of us that if the item from the rack was indeed too small, then Lincoln could fail to observe my deft move from rack to jacket.

  I have to admit that all I could think about beforehand was the prospect of failure.

  Lincoln and I proceeded with the skit despite the consequences.

  ‘Dude, you said that you would buy it for me,’ I yelped in an irritated tone, but it wasn’t loud enough to override the music in the background of the store. Lincoln motioned for me to take it up a notch with his thumb.

  I yelled out once more, louder this time, so that everyone could hear me over an epic guitar solo that was playing through the speaker system. I felt the weight of all the eyes and ears in the room fixed on us.

  My mouth was dry. My stomach was full of butterflies, and it was showtime. I initiated the shove, and Lincoln stumbled across the room, knocking over a skateboard rack. When everyone seemed to be looking at Lincoln, I stuck an entire pair of shoes under my jacket, and no one had a clue that I did it. I did it! The Intervention had passively stood by, despite the evil within my mind. The real test would come later—by stepping outside the boundary of the store, possessing stolen goods without paying—the true definition of shoplifting.

  It happened so quickly that I became sick with nerves in reaction to what I did.

  We wanted to rule out all unexplained variables. We agreed, that should I actually complete the abduction of the item while he looked on, he would have to remove the existence of ulterior motive in my mind by grabbing me and pushing me out of the store. Thus, the switch—Lincoln would take on the role of bad guy, and test himself too.

  We didn’t want to fail. We were determined to discover what was causing The Intervention, so we needed draw it out. Lincoln was to take his time grabbing me and shoving me several yards away from the store perimeter, so that his ulterior motive in shoving me could draw in The Intervention long before I reached the exit.

  ‘Dude, I cannot believe you shoved me, dork . . . boy,’ Lincoln shouted as he clutched my shirt and escorted me out in an act of false rage. Again, nothing supernatural happened. The Intervention had ignored the evil in my mind, then it ignored Lincoln’s too. Our eyes locked in fascination as we simultaneously realized the truth, but we had a trial to finish. We were now going to finally show the risky part to the omnipresent force—the exit from the store with stolen goods.

  I backpedaled achingly close to the exit from the store, the stolen goods still on me. Out of improvisation and quick thinking, Lincoln gave one final big shove, propelling himself forward in my direction. Losing my balance due to Lincoln’s onslaught, I set one foot right on the speckled marble floor of the foyer of the mall—the forbidden “no man’s land.” My other foot tenuously remained on the tiled floor of the skateboard store.

  Then it happened.

  Wham!

  It was as if an invisible wall was placed before us. We plastered ourselves into it at full sprint. We both experienced the full feeling of The Intervention—a frontal body slam.

  It felt just like the time my body smacked the plywood at the bottom end of a skateboard mini-ramp after executing a risky aerial ‘drop-in.’ Back then, I was executing my first ‘drop-in’ on a skateboard.

  Luckily, Lincoln and I were not injured. Two concussed dorks, with stolen goods, would have been difficult to explain to any conservative parents. After the collision, everyone was looking at us. Lincoln turned toward the spectators and screeched.

  He said, “We are working-on-our-drama-for-a-school-play.” He sounded like a chipmunk on a tape player if one held down play and fast-forward at the same time.

  Everyone’s eyes flitted away from our backs. A couple of tattooed punks from behind the counter laughed and joked about us. Meanwhile, we returned the shoes to their rightful home. Lincoln and I left separately, and we met in the food court to hatch out any issues with the first test.

  ‘It is official. You are a freak,’ Lincoln said.

  ‘Okay. Dork . . . man. What in the world were you thinking with that, or was it dork-boy?’ I asked.

  ‘Dork-boy was the best I could do. Never mind that, we need to be careful. If we don’t respect The Intervention, we could,’ he paused to lower his voice, ‘we could get injured or worse…’ he paused yet again to scan the room and ensure no one was listening, ‘…killed.’

  Right there, at the corner of a taco joint and a roast beef stand, it was our grand discovery that what we were dealing with was extremely powerful and real. The first trial was complete. The Intervention could not read minds. The Intervention could only stop us from doing something bad.

  I recalled the baseball card incident of a week ago. Back then, I had attempted to exit the store with an intent to steal. This time, with the shoes, I was pushed out of the store by Lincoln, with no intent to steal. The outcome was exactly the same. The Intervention had intervened both times at the boundary between law and crime—the store exit.

  Lincoln then issued what was to be known as Linc’s Commandments:

  ‘One, we can never, ever-ever-ever speak of this to a
nyone. You and I have been trusted by the power, and we have accepted it. Others will be terrified of this power, and harm us because they are afraid. Two, we can never make a joke of the power. We have to respect it. We felt the pain it dished out today, by being goofballs. We don’t want to put anyone in that pain unless we have a good reason. Three, we must never use the power for bad. We should only use it for good.’

  He paused, with a solemn expression on his face. ‘We have to make a pact. If either one of us speaks of this to anyone, we risk great danger.’

  ‘And if you say anything, Lincoln, I will tell everyone about your crush on Samantha Xiong,’ I said after a few giggles.

  ‘Fine, I will tell them about your life-long crush on Mariah Espinosa,’ Lincoln sang out in a taunting voice.

  We simultaneously agreed with a secret handshake, invented right there in the mall. We glanced over our shoulder: the rent-a-cops of the mall were staying behind a certain distance away, intently watching us.

  Word had gotten around. Our disturbance back at the skateboard store made us a concern for mall staff. To shake them off, we shopped around like the rest of the mall zombies, and we bought some orange drinks. While we sat sipping on our drinks, Lincoln told me that if the security guards gave us a hard time, he would use Aikido on them.

  Lincoln had an orange belt in Aikido. He told me that in Aikido, one was taught to return their enemy’s force against them. Ultimately, a person could manipulate the force of their enemy to advance his own position, or defeat them entirely.

  “After we ditched the teen-monster-building mall guards, we darted to our next target. It was a sporting goods store.”

  “Do you need something, prisoner?” the guard asks.

  I wasn’t sure why he was asking me. Days would usually go by without interactions. Then I realize, I said, mall guards, when speaking to the tablet. He must have overheard what he thought to be “guard.”

  “No, nothing sir,” I responded. After he grunted and walked off, I continued the account: “The second test was to find out whether or not The Intervention could control an object with accuracy. This would be so cool, as perhaps we could use The Intervention as a means of exercising great power at our command. The object needed to be set into motion by me, and I had to want to hurt someone with it...”