The Great Interactive Dream Machine

by Richard Peck

  Then it hit me. I come up with a good idea once in a while.

  I strolled into the living room. “Bad scene with Heather, Mom?”

  “The worst yet.”

  “Mom, I’ll cut you a deal.”

  She sighed. “At least I have one child willing to negotiate.”

  “What if I can get Heather to stay home and go to summer school and even be happy about it?”

  “Dream on,” Mom said.

  “Mom, I can do it. But here’s the deal. I’m not grounded anymore, and I don’t have to explain about Hulk’s dress code because I’ll never be able to come up with a good explanation for that. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Mom said. “Let’s hug on it. But I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  I went to my room. I had a letter to write.

  I did a rough draft. The next day I showed it to Aaron. He did some editing and ran a spell check on it. Then he printed it out on a sheet of Huckley School stationery we found in Mrs. Newbery’s desk before homeroom. I told Aaron he’d have to work up a signature and sign it.

  Dear Heather,

  You probably get a lot of letters from guys, but I hope you won’t mind one more. I ran into your brother, Josh, at school today. I enjoy talking soccer with him. He happened to mention you’d be in town this summer.

  I’m a little tired of the same old faces at the Hamptons myself. Like enough already, you know what I mean? Maybe we’ll run into each other.

  Heather, do you believe in fate?

  Sincerely and I mean it,

  We mailed it at lunch.

  10

  The Watcher

  The rest of the school year was pretty routine. As soon as Heather got her letter from Stink Stuyvesant, she was a new woman. There was hope in her heart, and she even started making her bed. I didn’t know how long this could last, but Mom was impressed.

  “Josh,” she said, “I hope I never need to know how you did that.”

  “I hope you don’t either, Mom,” I said. “Really.”

  On the last day we have the All-School Field Day in the park. There’s the traditional faculty-against-upper-school annual softball game, which Aaron and I snuck out of after the first inning. We went over and sat on our rock and really kicked back.

  This was going to be our first real summer in the city. Up till this year, we’d gone away to kid camp. Aaron and I had gone to Camp Big Wampum in the Adirondacks, where it took him years to pass the swim test. Heather had gone to Camp One-a-Bee in the Ramapos.

  But all that was behind us. It wasn’t the same as being seniors, but it was getting there. I thought summer looked like smooth sailing.

  I should have known better.

  That very night I got a jingle from Aaron.

  “Come on up,” he said.

  His telephone voice sounded worried. “My parents have gone to bed, so come up the back way. I’ve left the kitchen door unlocked. We may have a problem.”

  “What we?” I said.

  But I figured I’d better go.

  Even the back stairs seemed more deserted than usual. It was summer in the city, and a lot of people were away. Our building felt big and old around me, like the Dakota. I kept looking over my shoulder. Then I was creeping past Ophelia’s dark sleeping shape on the way to Aaron’s room.

  His head was outlined against the screens. The bluish light turned his red hair purple, and the back of his neck glowed. He never tanned, not even at Camp Big Wampum.

  “Take a squint at this,” he said, never moving. He clicked Read Old Mail on his menu bar. E-mail came up: Hey, A2Z man,

  Fast-forward gamma-force greetings!

  Been anybody lately? Next time you seniorize, factor in compatible dress code. You modem morons looked ridiculous.

  Better yet, try foolproofing your stone-age formula before you polymorph your miserable small bodies again.

  See you in cyberspace, suckers,

  Happy hacking,

  THE WATCHER

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t swallow. The hair on my arms would be standing up if I had hair on my arms. I clutched my forehead. Something evil was on the screen.

  “Aaron,” I whispered, “somebody’s onto us.”

  He sat there slumped in his swivel chair. “I feel violated,” he said.

  “How could anybody—”

  “A thousand ways,” he said. “I could be accessed by any on-line maniac.”

  “But they’re not just accessing your PC. They’re accessing us. That crack about miserable small bodies sounds like Daryl.”

  “It could be anybody in the lunchroom that day,” he said. “When Daryl talks, people listen.”

  “So that narrows it down to—”

  “A lot of people,” Aaron said.

  “But who could know about that day when we seniorized? Nobody was around.”

  “The Watcher was,” Aaron said in his creepiest voice.

  11

  Now or Never

  We only had a weekend between the end of school and the start of summer school. I don’t remember much about the days, but the nights were killers.

  You know that kind of dream when you’re in bed so you don’t know you’re dreaming? I mean you’re not falling or anything, so you think you haven’t gone to sleep yet, but you have? I had that dream for two nights straight.

  I’m in bed, covers pulled up, looking down past my feet. There’s Aaron—purple hair and the back of his neck glowing against bluish screens. He’s busy interfacing with his technopolis. So how did he happen to move all his equipment and his swivel chair down to my bedroom? In dreams you don’t ask. And it’s very real—you know what I mean.

  He’s keyboarding like crazy, and it’s just like the daytime Aaron. And I’m there in bed, right? Then out of the corner of my eye I see we’re not alone. I’m sensing that over in the darkest corner of my room, the closet door is beginning to open. We’ve all had that dream, but I haven’t had it since third grade.

  So I think I better mention this to Aaron. That we’ve got company—that somebody’s violating our privacy—that somebody’s onto us. I want to be casual. I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, so I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I’m screaming down my throat, but there’s no sound. Needless to say, I can’t move.

  All this time the closet door keeps opening. This dream is so real, I can hear the bottom of the door brushing across the rug. I can hear a hinge. Now my whole throat is a Carlsbad Cavern, and I’m screaming down it silently.

  Also, I know that if I turn my head to see who’s easing the closet door open, something really horrible will happen. I’ll turn to stone or something. So I figure if I don’t turn my head—or breathe—we’re still okay. But I know the closet door is yawning wide. And with this third eye I seem to have in my ear, I see this shape standing there, filling up the whole closet door. I see this figure with my dress code hanging up behind him. I actually hear hangers jingle.

  I know who it is, of course. I can just about hear his voice, a real metallic voice, saying, Fast-forward gamma-force greetings, because it’s The Watcher. It’s The Watcher, and he’s hacked into my bedroom, and he’s the worst thing in the world. He’s Mister Death.

  And now my neck’s in a vise, and some superior force is cranking my head around so I have to look at him and see who he is, though I know that if I can identify him, I’m doomed. Doomed, do you hear?

  But I look anyway. It’s that kind of dream.

  At first I think it’s Mr. Thaw from History class. He’s that skinny and corpselike. But it’s not him. Then I think it’s the headmaster. He’s that tall, but I don’t know if he’s bald because he’s wearing a big hat, black as a bat, along with a big black shroud. So it’s not the headmaster either. And then I don’t want to do this, but I’m looking into his face for a positive I.D.

  And he doesn’t have a face. It’s just smooth, shiny skin, glowing bluish from Aaron’s screens. But he can see us, and he can seal our fate, an
d there’s no escape.

  Then finally I can scream, but Aaron still doesn’t hear because it’s morning, and I’m awake, sitting straight up. My bed looks like a battlefield, and I’m sweating buckets, and it’s daylight. The closet door is closed, but still I’m not sure.

  Two nights of this.

  The third was the night before summer school started. I was doing sit-ups on my bedroom floor, fully dressed, putting off getting into bed and trying to wear myself out completely so I wouldn’t dream anything. Mom’s light was already out, and Heather was in her room in full eyeliner, waiting for Stink to call.

  I couldn’t take the pressure anymore. I punched Aaron’s number. He answered the first ring, and I told him I was coming up. I’d had it with everything, and it was time to tell him we had to go completely out of business, computerwise.

  In ten minutes I was up in his room. I didn’t tell him about the dream because it wouldn’t cut any ice with him, but I was really trying to talk sense to him.

  “Aaron, we were getting into enough trouble even before The Watcher—”

  “Watcher, smatcher,” he said, cool as a cucumber. “There are a lot of electronic outlaws and owlhoots out there in cyberspace these days. We’re talking wire fraud. We’re talking an expanding menu of electronic snooping.” He squared his bony shoulders. “I’m already working on a more sophisticated encryption program. Nothing is future-proof, but—”

  “Aaron, the cat’s already out of the bag. The Watcher—”

  He waved a small hand. “Try to keep calm.” His mind had already switched to one of its other compartments. “Let me give you a little update on my recent progress on the formula.”

  “Aaron—”

  “It’s nothing personal. I’m just downloading some imagery. I’m probably not pulling in enough power to interactivate a tenth of our body weight. Believe it.”

  I didn’t even understand it. But now Aaron was back in business, playing his keyboards like a pipe organ and doing all the stuff he does. I edged back on his bed. The whole room hummed. His screens displayed something in a flash too fast to see. A curl of smoke rose from his set-top box. It was Frankenstein stuff.

  But we were still there and in our regular bodies, so it was okay, right?

  Then we heard a small scream.

  Aaron’s sneakers shot up. His arms flew out, and he was looking in his lap.

  “Aaron. What?”

  A weird and unexplained moment passed. Then he began to swivel slowly around in his chair. At first I didn’t see anything but his face. He had that half-electrocuted look.

  Then I saw something in his lap, something strange. A mound of matted fur. Two shiny marbles for eyes. A small bow on her topknot. A mop with paws. She looked around and screamed again.

  Aaron’s face fell into his hands. “No,” he said, “no, no, no, no.”

  “Aaron, is that Nanky-Poo?”

  “How many shih tzus do you know?” he moaned.

  “Maybe she got in by herself.”

  “Are you kidding me? Like she pole-vaulted up and unlocked Miss Mather’s front door? Then she got on the elevator and pressed Penthouse? And how do you think she got past Ophelia? Ophelia would have had her for dinner. To Ophelia, she’d be a Tender Vittle. Then what? She turned herself into a letter and slid herself under my door?”

  We looked. Aaron’s door was closed. Nobody our age leaves his bedroom door open. “And how did she get on my lap? She didn’t jump up. She materialized. Her need lined up with my numbers. It’s Ophelia and Heather all over again. All Nanky-Poo wants is to go out.”

  Her pink tongue poked through her mustache. Panting lightly, she sank a small claw into Aaron’s knee.

  “It’s my formula. I’m not getting anywhere with it. The Watcher is right. It’s stone age. I’ll have every dog in the building up here. They all want out. I’ll have to open a kennel.”

  “Aaron, we’ve got to take her back. You know Miss Mather. She’s probably dialed 911 already. She’ll have us in juvenile court for dognapping. She’ll have us in family court. Nanky-Poo is family to her. She’ll alert her lawyers, and I just stopped being grounded.”

  Aaron and Nanky-Poo sat there. “We’d get caught,” he said. “The woman sees through doors. It’d be a prank, our second offense. Why don’t we just wait? This is only a minor glitch, probably—an electronic hiccup. As soon as Nanky-Poo’s Emotional Component runs out, she’ll probably cellular-reorganize back home on her own. She probably doesn’t have much of an attention span anyway.”

  “Aaron, by then Miss Mather will have a dragnet thrown around the city. She’ll be slapping up road-blocks at the bridges and tunnels with her bare hands. She’ll be going door-to-door. Nanky-Poo is her whole life. They even look alike.”

  Aaron thought about it. He wasn’t that happy about sitting around all night with a lap full of shih tzu. He handed Nanky-Poo to me. She peered at both of us. We were vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t quite place us. Aaron dug around in his clutter and came up with a shopping bag from The Sharper Image. “Put her in this. She’s used to a carrier bag.”

  We crept out through the dark penthouse and past dozing Ophelia. Then we were ringing for the elevator.

  “Here’s the plan,” I said. “We push eleven. When we get there, you keep the elevator door open. I run out, drop the dog, ring Miss Mather’s bell, and beat it back to the elevator, and you push Penthouse.”

  Aaron nodded.

  Then the elevator door opened. And somebody was inside.

  We blinked.

  It was a little guy, not that much older than we are, not that much bigger. He was in some kind of costume: a short jacket with rows of brass buttons. On his head was a little round hat held on by a strap under his chin. He blinked back at us. He wore a glove on one hand.

  We were in the elevator before we could think. But here’s the really weird part. It wasn’t our elevator. It was like a big birdcage. You could see out to the walls of the elevator shaft. There was a bench you could sit on.

  Now the little guy in the costume was pushing a gate across the door with his gloved hand. “What floor, sports?”

  We stood there stunned. Finally Aaron said, “Eleven,” in a crackling voice.

  We began creaking down. It was a ghost elevator from the days before automation. The guy was a—what do you call it? An elevator operator. We dropped to eleven, real slow, kind of clanky.

  “Have a nice night,” Aaron said in a wobbly voice as we walked out past him in a dream. The door clanged shut behind us.

  “Aaron. What?” Nanky-Poo was still swinging from my hand in her Sharper Image bag. She whimpered.

  “This is going to be a tad trickier than we thought,” Aaron muttered. We were standing in front of Miss Mather’s door. But making a dog drop, ringing her bell, and making a break for the elevator wasn’t an option anymore. We were on different turf now.

  Aaron turned the knob, and the door opened. “Her door’s unlocked?” I said. “She’d never leave it unlocked.”

  “They wouldn’t bother to lock their doors in the olden days,” he said. “Back then, the doorman and the elevator operator were protection enough. Besides, there’d still be cops on the beat.”

  “Aaron, what are you saying? Are you saying that—”

  “We’re going inside,” he said. “We don’t know who’s in there. We don’t know when it is. We don’t know anything. We don’t speak.”

  We teetered on the threshold. There was a front hall, dark, and past it the living room, lighted. We crept in. Nanky-Poo whimpered again and scrabbled around in the bag. We stood at the edge of the living room. Aaron stuck his head around the doorway. He went on. I followed.

  We’d never been in Miss Mather’s living room before, believe me. It was fairly nice: a big crowd of antique-type furniture and pictures in silver frames. Eerie, but what we were doing was practically breaking and entering.

  I wasn’t thinking a nanosecond ahead, but Aaron just stood there, s
coping out the room. He pointed to one corner. There was a big vintage combination radio and stone-age record player. On the front it said STROMBERG CARLSON. The radio dial was glowing, and from inside, a tinny voice was singing,“There’ll be bluebirds over

  The white cliffs of Dover...”

  There was a table by the sofa with a picture of an old man in a frame and a couple of magazines. Aaron’s finger fell on The Ladies’ Home Journal and moved to the date on it: February 1942. The cover on the Life magazine was about the fall of Singapore.

  Nanky-Poo whimpered again. She didn’t want to be here. Neither did I.

  Aaron peered up at me. Then we heard the front door open. We jumped a foot, and the next thing I knew, we were huddled behind the sofa with Nanky-Poo in her shopping bag between us.

  There was murmuring in the front hall. Then somebody said, “Hush. Papa will hear.”

  “Only a moment, dearest,” a deep voice said. For a second I thought I knew that voice. But how could I?

  If they come in the living room, we’re dead ducks, I thought. Nanky-Poo was this close to one of her screams.

  Their voices came nearer. But then she said, “No, Teddy, you’d better go. It’s hopeless. Truly it is. I’ll write as soon as you are overseas. Tell me where to write, and I will. I’ll—knit you a sweater.”

  “Margaret, for once in your life,” he said, “you must think of what you want.”

  They seemed to be as near as the doorway.

  “Darling, marry me now,” he said, “tonight.”

  “Oh, Teddy, you know I can’t. Papa—”

  “Let me talk to him, Margaret. Go and wake him.”

  “No, Teddy,” she said, panicky. “You know how Papa is. There would be a dreadful scene. I can’t send you away like that. After the war when you come back—”

  Aaron’s eyes came up over the back of the sofa. So did mine. It was like we had to see them. They were standing in the doorway. She was a young girl, not very tall. Pretty. Her hair flowed down over her shoulders, and there was a flower in it. The skirt of her 1942 dress was short.