He sat down. He checked his watch— the second hand was frozen in place, suspended halfway between the six and the seven.
“Hello Andrew,” Shadow said. “How was school today?”
“Boring,” Andrew said.
They started playing.
“Joshua’s really smart,” Andrew said. Shadow didn’t answer. “He’s figured out a lot of the stuff in the books already, and he’s only been able to see them during lunch.”
“Is that a problem?”
Andrew was surprised— Shadow usually didn’t ask questions like that. “I don’t know,” he said. “He still thinks that I just found all this stuff in my attic. I haven’t told him about Uncle Paul or anything. I mean, I don’t think he really blames me for what happened to his brother anymore, but… I don’t know. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Why don’t you just tell him everything?” Shadow asked.
Andrew shook his head no.
“I can’t do that. I don’t know what would happen. I can’t do it.”
Andrew listened carefully, but if Shadow was worried, she kept it to herself.
#
Walking back from the gazebo, Andrew thought about his life, and how it had changed since his parents had sent him to Wisconsin. Everything was so strange now. Everybody said things like that now, of course, in the newspapers and on T.V. and in the hallways and over the intercom during the morning announcements the principal made. They went on and on about how their lives had changed and how they’d gotten closer to God or their family, how everything looked different, but hearing other people say things like that only made Andrew feel lonelier. For a while he thought that things would be better if he had somebody to talk to other than Shadow. But now he wasn’t so sure.
He got back to the house and climbed the front steps. The triangle on his front door was still there— his grandmother had said she was going to have somebody paint over it, but she hadn’t done that yet. Andrew went inside. The house was quiet. Andrew didn’t know if his grandma was home or not.
“Grandma!” he shouted.
He went upstairs. The door to his grandmother’s bedroom was shut. He knocked once, then again, louder. She opened the door.
“Hello, Andrew,” she whispered. She rubbed her eyes. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to fall asleep. When did you get home?”
“Just now.”
She looked back into her room, at the clock sitting on her bed stand.
“You’re late, Andrew.”
Andrew held his tongue. He nodded his head, turned around, walked down the hall, stepped into his room, threw his backpack onto his bed, then ran back downstairs. He went into the kitchen and started looking for something to eat. His grandmother came down after him and sat down at the kitchen table. She didn’t do anything, just sat there and watched him as he dug through the cupboard. He hardly noticed her— she had a habit of watching him, he’d gotten used to it.
Just when he’d forgotten that she was there, she spoke up.
“It’s important that you be on time.”
It was not her usual tone of voice, but he’d heard it before. Every so often his grandmother got the idea that it was important that she boss him around. It was either that or she always felt that way and only periodically had the energy to follow up on it, Andrew didn’t pretend to know which. Sometimes he could just let it go, but he was already worked up today and he could feel it coming, he knew this wasn’t going to be one of those times. He turned his back on her and marched into the living room. The remote control was sitting on the armrest of the couch. He picked it up, looked at the blank television screen, then put it down and walked back into the kitchen.
“Grandma, I want to call my parents. I want to talk to them.”
“Andrew, you do not get to just march away from me any time you feel like it.”
“I want to call them right now.”
“Andrew…”
“I want to know who Paul is. I want you to tell me.”
The color drained from her face. The doorbell rang. She slowly got up.
“Andrew, go upstairs.”
“Grandma…”
“Now, Andrew.”
Andrew was ready to yell something back until he realized that she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring in the direction of the front door. It was like he wasn’t even in the room.
The doorbell rang again. He ran upstairs and waited at the top, just out of sight. The doorbell rang a third time. The door opened, a man spoke.
“I was hoping we could finally talk face to face.”
Andrew peeked around the corner and saw Joshua’s father standing in the doorway.
“Please just go.”
“My son is dead and my wife hasn’t left the house in two weeks. I need to talk to you. Please let me in.”
There was a long silence. The door closed, and when the two of them starting talking again they were further away, somewhere in the living room.
“I’m very sorry about what happened,” Andrew’s grandmother said. “Andrew hasn’t been the same since. I’m sure you can understand why I didn’t want the police bothering him.”
“I don’t think I do understand. I’m afraid that you’re going to have to explain it to me.”
There was another long pause.
“Everything’s been so horrible… I just thought that the sooner he forgot about all this…”
“Tell me something. Do you seriously think that Tom was attacked by a wild animal?”
More silence. Joshua’s father kept talking.
“Joshua still won’t talk about what happened. Nothing. He won’t talk.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Yeah, you said that already. Listen, there’s a lot of very strange things happening right now. I won’t claim to know what’s going on, but if there’s something you’re afraid of, you need to tell me about it. I have a lot of friends in this town. I know that you and the police…”
“I don’t want to talk about this. I want you to leave right now. I don’t want you talking to Andrew.”
“He’s the only other person who was there. I need to know what happened to my son.”
“I already told you, I’m sorry about that. Leave now.”
Another pause. Andrew didn’t know if they were talking quietly, or if they weren’t talking at all.
Then, suddenly, he could hear his voice again.
“You can’t just pretend I don’t exist. Believe me, I won’t let you.”
The door slammed shut.
#
Josh put the book down on the floor of the attic.
“That’s it.”
On the left-hand page was a diagram, a series of overlapping circles and triangles surrounding a red dot the size of Andrew’s thumb tip.
“What is it?” Andrew asked.
“I’m not sure,” Josh said. “It’s some kind of protection spell.”
Andrew opened his mouth to say something, closed it, and thought for a moment.
“A spell?” he said. “Like a magic spell?”
Josh shrugged. “Well, sure. That’s basically what we’re doing here, right? Magic?”
Andrew thought about that. It was hard to argue with.
He took another look at the diagram, then at the gibberish on the opposite page, but it didn’t make any more sense to him now than it had before.
“So what is this supposed to be protecting?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Josh had his notebook out— it was filled with numbers, letters, the alphabet spelled out backwards and forwards over and over again. He moved between the notebook and the diagram, writing things down in short frantic spurts. Andrew watched.
“I’m sorry I’m still grounded,” Andrew said. “It must be hard to only have a little bit of time every day to try and figure out this stuff.”
“It’s all right, it’s not your fault
. Tell me when you’re not grounded any more, you can come over to my house and we can work on this there.”
“What about your dad?”
“What about him?”
Andrew paused before he kept talking. “He came over to my house and talked to my grandma. He wants to talk to me.”
Josh closed the book and looked up. Andrew kept talking.
“Josh, I’m sorry.”
Josh shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not telling him anything, you’re not telling him anything, and he isn’t going to find out about all of this any other way.”
Andrew glanced up at the window. “Maybe. But why shouldn’t we tell him?”
“No way. I don’t think my dad should find about any of this. He thinks he’s smart because he’s rich but he isn’t. He’d just screw something up.” He took off his glasses and rubbed them on his T-shirt. “Just us, all right?” he said. “Nobody should know except us.”
Andrew was silent for a minute before he answered.
“All right.”
Josh put his glasses back on.
“Great.”
He started reading the book again.
#
Andrew’s grandma made lasagna for dinner that night. She’d made it from scratch, which Andrew hadn’t really known was possible, he’d only ever had it frozen from a box or at a restaurant. She’d also made a fruit salad and some garlic bread. Andrew wasn’t surprised, she always went crazy cooking. He spent the meal shoveling food into his mouth, staring down at the plate. Every so often he looked up and saw his grandmother staring at him with big eyes like a puppy. It made him uncomfortable; he tried not to do it too often.
Andrew tried to figure out what Josh was thinking. He didn’t know. He never fucking knew, and thinking about it he supposed that it was stupid to think that he’d suddenly develop the ability to figure these things out when he’d never had any luck with that before.
He could quit. His whole life people had been telling him that quitting was a bad thing, and he’d never understood why. He could give the books to Josh, wish him luck, and find somewhere else to sit at lunch. You could even say that it was the right thing to do, a way of paying Josh back for what had happened to his brother.
“Did you have a good day at school today, Andrew?” Begging him.
He looked down at his plate and continued to shovel food into his mouth. He didn’t say anything.
#
The next day Andrew thought about leaving the familiar at home but decided to bring it with him to school instead. It wrapped itself around his shoulder, under his shirt. By the time he got to school he didn’t even notice that it was there, he’d gotten used to it.
Josh came up to him between third and fourth period.
“Can you miss math?”
There were people brushing quickly past them on both sides, getting to class. The familiar occasionally reached out towards one of them with a stray tentacle and stroked their arm or face. Sometimes they just kept walking a little faster than they had before, sometimes they looked over their shoulder and gave them a look, scared or freaked out or something else depending on the person.
Andrew just about nodded; the moment Josh got something like an answer, he nodded back and kept walking.
The last period of the day, Andrew waited until the passing period was over, went to the stairwell, looked both ways to make sure the hall was clear, and went up to the attic.
Josh was there waiting, leaning against the wall next to the door. There was a cardboard box the size of a large television on the ground by his feet. Andrew looked down at it and Josh smirked.
“No, really, I need it for the science fair, let me keep it in the office.”
He reached into his binder and pulled out a stapled packet of photocopies. He flipped it open one-handed to the page he was looking for. About half of the writing inside it was highlighted in yellow.
“Come on, open the door up, we’ve got to get started.”
Andrew took a step closer to the door, looked down briefly at the packet and tried to pretend like he knew what it was, and unlocked the door. They both went inside. Josh put the box down in the middle of the open space between the bookshelves and opened it. He put his books on the floor— Andrew picked the copied packet up off the top and tried to figure out what Josh had highlighted. It was some kind of a ritual, but most of it was in code and Josh’s handwriting in the margins was hard to read.
“What is this supposed to do?”
Josh took a foot-long steel pipe out of the box.
“I’m not sure,” Josh said. “That’s why we’re doing it.”
Andrew nodded. Made perfect sense to him.
Inside the box were six more pipes, the same length as the first one, a circular bathroom mirror that was two feet in diameter, a box of salt, and a plastic sandwich container filled with some kind of shiny liquid. Andrew kneeled down to get a closer look. It was mercury.
Josh was still smiling. “I stole a bunch of thermometers out of the chemistry lab. It took forever to empty them; I was up until midnight last night.”
He put the mirror down on the ground and arranged the pipes in a circle around it so that the ends faced outward, like the petals of a flower. He left the container full of mercury. He then poured salt on the floor in a much larger circle that spanned most of the room.
He carried the empty box outside the circle and put it on a bookshelf.
“All you’ve got to do is step across the salt line and sit down.”
He stepped across the salt line, sat down next to the container of mercury, and waited.
Andrew knew it wasn’t something he could stop and think about. He either had to do it or leave, right now.
He decided to do it. He felt the familiar slide down off of his body as he crossed the salt line. He sat down on the opposite side of the mirror, facing Josh.
Josh opened the container and poured the mercury down onto the mirror.
They each wondered why nothing was happening. Then their eyes snapped shut.
CHAPTER 9
#
Josh and Andrew stayed where they were in the attic, frozen in place like statues.
#
Josh saw two men wrestling in the dirt next to a bonfire, hitting and grabbing each other, one of them brightly colored, the other one washed out like a hole in the air leading to nothing. Just as he was making sense of it he saw something else: a boxing ring, a series of boxing rings. Again there were two men, one in color, the other shrouded in darkness. Josh recognized the man he could see, the boxing gloves and the shorts. He’d seen them; his dad had them in a box in the basement with his old trophies. He watched his father as a young man, knocking them down one after the other.
#
Andrew saw two people, a young man hitting a young woman. He didn’t recognize either of them. He saw them again, older this time. Again, he hit her, smacked her across the face with his palm.
He saw them again, in his grandmother’s kitchen, and knew who she was now, even though she was much younger. He hit her six times. Five times he slapped her, in the face or the back of the head. Once he punched her in the stomach.
He saw his grandfather in a police uniform, standing next to his car, holding his gun in front of him with both hands and firing. He saw the same thing again, on a different road on another night.
He felt something sharp cut into his face. He didn’t think that this was important. It was all a dream anyway.
He was struck by another image, stronger than the others, a boy with blond hair, younger than he was, with his hands in fists. He saw the school again; he threw the door open and entered the building. His eyes snapped shut. He saw his Uncle Paul’s face, washed in blue light, staring at something, refusing to look away. He saw Paul again, in another place, firing a gun.
#
Josh saw his brother playing football, charging the defensive line over and over
again. It was strange to see him again, not a face in a picture frame but him, alive, moving. He could smell the grass, hear the crowd.
He saw his sister with her hand around his throat. Seeing himself, he denied it. Like hearing your voice on an answering machine. That’s not me.
#
He pulled away, away from the pictures. He didn’t want to watch any more. He forced himself back to the real world, back to the attic.
There was a monster wrapped around Andrew’s face like a prawn.
#
There was a long gap, and for a moment Andrew thought that it might be over. He saw his grandmother, older now, standing on the front porch of the house and holding a baby wrapped in blue cloth. Andrew’s grandfather was standing in the doorway, in uniform like before. He carefully took the baby from her and punched her in the face.
She stumbled backwards, tripping and falling off the porch. By the time she got up he was already in the car. Blood was pouring from her nose, and she was crying, screaming, but Andrew couldn’t hear what she was trying to say.
Andrew saw the patrol car, on the side of the road, a highway far from town. It was raining hard and his grandfather’s face was concealed by the falling water.
He went over to the side of the road. There was a ditch dividing the gravel from the beginning of the forest, partially but not entirely sheltered from the rain by the branches overhead. He removed the baby’s clothes and stuffed them into his pocket.
He lifted the infant up over his head. There was the sound of tires plowing through deep puddles. He dropped the child back down and held it to his chest as the headlights fell across his body.
The car drove on past and disappeared. Andrew’s grandfather touched his hair— it was soaking wet. He looked down at the ground. The water was hitting the pavement and washing off the side of the road.
He put the baby down inside the ditch and drove away.
#
White Rabbit Society Part One Page 8