by Tom Upton
When I turned my attention back to the conversation, the man was explaining to Raffles an idea he’d had to better organize the internet.
It was just at this point that she entered the room. She was still breathless from running down the stairs, probably from her bedroom. She had to be this man’s, Laughton’s, daughter. She hurried into the room, but when she spotted strangers sitting there and speaking with her father, she froze just inside the doorway. I’d been right when I first laid eyes on her, when they moved in; she was incredibly cute, with long wavy hair that perfectly blended blonde and light brown. Her eyes looked dark green. The shorts she was wearing were pretty short, the white t-shirt was loose, and all and all she was looking a lot better than all right. Her legs were pale, badly in need of a tan, but that didn’t stop my heart from taking a leap that nearly broken a couple ribs as I watched her standing there frozen in time. When her father glanced over at her, she gave him a look that was like a series of questions-- Who are these people? Why are they here? Why are you talking to them? What are you telling them? When are they leaving?-- the cascade of emotions running through her expressions somehow making her appear adorable. I made no mistake about it, though; it was clear she viewed us as intruders.
“I need to speak to you,” she told her father, petulant, “in the other room.” She said in the other room in a vicious hiss. I couldn’t explain why but I felt as though I was the cause of her tetchy attitude. Sure, she probably saw us as unwelcome visitors, but for some reason I took it all more personally than that.
The man vanished into the other room, and when he returned, he was alone. He appeared to have been scolded for some transgression.
“That was my daughter, Eliza,” he said, and added, in way of an apology for her rude behavior, “She’s funny, sometimes.”
“She needs a suntan,” I said simply; it was as if it were a passing thought going through my mind, but somehow finding its way out my mouth before I could stop it. After I’d said it, I still wasn’t certain I’d actually said it but only thought it-- that kind of thing would happen to me now and then.
The man stared at me for a moment. He seemed to be earnestly dwelling on my statement, and then starting with a soft chuckle, worked his way up to a loud inexplicable guffaw. I must have stuck on something he found extremely funny. Before long, he was holding his side, and his eyes were tearing up. He nodded agreement, unable to speak.
Raffles shot me a side-glance that said, Oh, yeah, he’s gone.
When he was able to speak, he said, “Why don’t you boys finish off your lemonade. It’s getting late. I’m sure your parents will be expecting you home for dinner.” He was still wagging his head at the comment I’d made.
After we finished the lemonade, he walked us to the door, which shut behind us before we had the chance to look round, say good-bye or thanks or anything.
“Well, that was-- interesting,” I said, as we walked back to my house.
Raffles probably didn’t hear me, though; he was so caught up in thought.
We sat out on my front porch, then. Raffles was distance for quite a while, deeply distracted by something. When he next spoke, it was with a level of seriousness I’d never before heard him speak.
“There is something terribly wrong going on in that house,” he said grimly.
Though I had to concede it had been a strange episode, I had the distinct feeling he was talking about something entirely different.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, frowning, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he took a gulp, “It doesn’t add up.” Here I ought to explain that Raffles’ mind didn’t work the way other people’s minds worked; somebody else might notice that the man seemed somewhat childlike, while his daughter seemed somewhat more the adult, or something like that. Raffles, on the other hand, was steadfastly literal: if he said that something didn’t add up, some mathematical problem was troubling him.
Knowing this, and not seeing how anything mathematical could be applied to the episode, I said, “You’re kidding, right?”
“No,” he said, and before he continued, he hedged as though afraid he might sound crazy. “Did you notice how the floor was covered in the living room?”
“Tiled?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I thought that was unusual.”
“I’m not talking about style or taste,” he said. “I’m talking about area.”
“I don’t get you,” I said.
“Look,” he labored to explain, “That house is not much different from your house, right? It is built on a similar lot, with a side driveway that is approximately the same width as your driveway. Well, hard as this will be for you to believe, that living room we were sitting in is-- say-- about three feet wider than it should be.”
I was completely lost, and the expression on my face must have shown I didn’t have a clue what he meant.
“All right,” he said. “These houses are built on identical lots, right? The lots are forty to forty-five feet wide, right? The driveways are about twelve feet wide, which leaves twenty-eight to thirty-three feet for the house and a border around the house. Now, that house is about eighteen feet wide, from outer wall to outer wall, right? That’s my estimate, anyway, but I think it’s pretty close-- close enough to illustrate the problem. Now, the tiles used to finish the living room floor in that house are nine inches by nine inches. By my estimate, the living room can be no more than 21.5 tiles wide-- that’s if you allow six inches for the outer walls. But when we were in that room, I counted that the living room was about 25.5 tiles wide, which is three feet wider than it ought to be.”
By now I must have been looking at him as though he’d gone daffy. Who in their right mind counts the tiles on the floor when they go visiting a neighbor?
“I don’t get what you’re saying,” I admitted. “The living room is too wide?”
“That’s not quite the point,” he said, rolling his bulgy eyes, and added: “The living room is three feet wider than it can possibly be.”
“It can’t be that wide?” Only Raffles could make me feel this stupid.
“More than that, even,” he stated conclusively. “The point I’m trying to make, here, is that the house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “I notice that these people are acting a little weird. You twist my arm to go over there, just to prove to me that I’m imagining things. And now you’re coming back with there is nothing wrong with the people, but the house-- there’s something wrong with the house they’re living in. Does that about cover it?”
“Oh, no,” Raffles was quick to correct me. “At this point I almost have to concede you were right about the people. There almost has to be something amiss with them, given the fact that their house appears to be violating the laws of physics. They almost have to be aware of this. Look,” he said, “I don’t think you fully understand what it all means.”
“Yeah, I’m stupid,” I said, my annoyance growing by the second.
“I’m not saying you’re stupid--exactly,” he went on. “You’re typical, I’d say, for a jock.”
I had to think about that. I was sure there was a further insult in his statement, but couldn’t pinpoint it.
“Nobody would expect you to know such things,” he added. “I think the best way to get you to understand is by illustration.” He looked around a moment, searching with his eyes, and then said, “Kitchen. We need to go to your kitchen.”
“My mom’s making dinner,” I said-- more like warned, actually.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We won’t bother her.”
We walked round the side of the house, and entered by the back door, which opened directly on the kitchen. My mother was standing at the stove, stirring something in a frying pan. Whatever she was frying was smoking a little too much, and the fan in the hood over the stove couldn’t clear the smoke fast enough. So the kitchen seemed a little
foggy as we entered it.
“Boys,” she said over her shoulder, too occupied to turn round and face us.
“Raffles wanted to illustrate something to me,” I told her, as though she’d really be interested.
She just shrugged and kept frying whatever she was frying.
Raffles went to the refrigerator. He ended up pulling out a gallon of milk and a pound package of butter.
“This should do it,” he said, and I followed him out into the back yard.
We sat at the picnic table on the patio, with the milk and butter between us.
“All right,” he began. “Which container is bigger?”
“The milk,” he said; actually, I sort of growled it, because I was starting to feel pretty dumb. If Raffles had any sense of humor at all-- which he didn’t-- I would have already been expecting some elaborate practical joke at my expense.
“All right, you take the butter,” he said, and handed me the pound of butter. “Now the question is, is there any way this,” he said, holding up the plastic milk gallon, “can possibly fit into that--” he motioned toward the pound of butter-- “package?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because the gallon is way bigger.”
“Is there any way you can make that package big enough so that you can fit the gallon of milk in it.”
“No, it’s impossible.”
“Is it possible to make the gallon of milk small enough to fit into the butter package?”
“Well, if you empty out the milk, and crush down--”
Raffles was already shaking his head.
“No, I mean without changing a thing.”
“No,” I said, certain. “That’s just as impossible.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Let me show you something,” he said, and then stood up. He grabbed the carton of milk, and started walking out into the middle of the back yard. When he was a good forty feet away, he stopped and turned round. He held up the gallon of milk. “What about now?” he called back to me.
I must have looked at him as if he were crazy.
“What about now?” he repeated.
“Well… yeah, but that’s only because it’s farther away-- the farther away it is, the smaller it looks.”
Raffles walked back to the picnic table. He set the gallon of milk on it, and looked down at me.
“And now you’re getting it,” he said.
“Getting it-- getting what?” Actually, the only thing I was getting was a dull throbbing pain between my eyes.
“If the gallon of milk is far enough away, it will be small enough to fit into the butter package.”
“But that’s like-- what do you call it?-- an optical illusion. It’s not really that small; it just looks that small. In that case, you could take an aircraft carrier, if it was far enough away, and put it in your pocket.”
“Exactly-- that’s exactly right,” he piped, very pleased. “Now you have a grip on the concept.”
“But you can’t do it, because when it’s here, it’s too big.”
“Well, that’s what makes it all theoretical,” he said, with a wave of his bony hand. “If you could get the gallon of milk while it’s occupying space over there, and the package of butter while it’s occupying space over here-- well, if you could bring them both together without crossing the space in between, it’s possible.”
I mulled it over for a long moment. I found it impossible not to scratch my head.
“How do you do that?” I asked finally.
Raffles shrugged. “That’s the secret-- apparently the secret your neighbors know.”
I thought about it some more. I discovered the harder I thought about it the more the pain increased in my head. Then I realized something. “Wait a second. Hold on, now. I’m not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer-- I’ll be the first to admit that. I’m not going to Thomas Edison Academy in the fall; I’m going to public high school, where I’ll end up on the wrestling or football team, and I’m going to end up spending a lot of my lifetime scratching myself somewhere or another…. But are you actually saying, when we were drinking lemonade in that guy’s living room, we really weren’t next door?”
Raffles eyes brighten. “Excellent!” he cried, now highly excited. “You’re brighter than I thought you were, MacDuff…. No, we weren’t. Theoretically, we could have been any place-- a hundred miles away, a thousand miles, a million miles-- who knows?”
“A million miles?” I considered the distance, and what it might imply.
“Yeah, maybe more-- maybe any given point in the universe.” He paused to consider something. “I would imagine it would all depend on how much power was available,” he said, as if to himself.
“So these people next door are-- what?-- aliens?” I asked. “Is that what we’re saying here? It sounds like it.”
Raffles shrugged. “Who can really say? The only thing I can guarantee you is that nobody on this planet has the type of technology required to turn such theoretical ideas into reality.”
“Are you sure? I always hear the government is working on some incredible things.”
“Not this incredible, buddy boy,” he assured me. “Anything the government is working on might be interesting; it might even be worth all the money spent on security to keep their projects secret. But they are in no way even close to touching something this advanced. With this kind of technology, traveling to other star systems would be as easy as walking from one room, through a doorway, and into another room. Whether these people are aliens….” he shrugged his shoulders. “They certainly appeared human. They even acted human-- although somewhat dysfunctional, and even that made them seem more human.”
“You don’t think they could be wearing some kind of disguise-- like rubber masks or something-- do you?” It became a very important question for me at the moment; I was all right with the fact that aliens lived next door to me, only so long as they were really not too different from humans. The second I started to visualize lizard-like creatures hiding in a human shell, I was hit by the heebie-jeebies.
“Ohmigod!” Raffles cried, always two or three steps ahead of me. “I don’t believe it! You’re still interested in the girl, despite the fact that she might be some kind of alien. Does this sickness of yours have any bounds?”
“Whatever she is, she’s still cute,” I admitted. “Besides, what if you counted the tiles wrong, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the house?”
Raffles gasped as though he’d just been slapped across the face. The suggestion that he could ever be wrong while doing something as simple as counting-- it was such an insult.
“Never mind,” I told him.
“No, I can’t believe you said that,” he said, wounded.
“Look, if these people really are aliens,” I said, and even after all the conjecturing, I was having serious doubts, “shouldn’t we report it, then?”
“Absolutely, not,” Raffles said.
“Then what?”
“Keep watching. Make notes,” he suggested. “If you go running around reporting that your next door neighbors are aliens, you’re going to sound like some kind of whacko. But if you have a record, a list of weird things that you’ve witnessed, at least then they would have to take you seriously.”
“What if I never see anything?” I asked.
“Well, I guess you’re stuck with aliens living next door,” he said simply, and rose from the picnic table.
Just about then, my mother started yelling out the kitchen window that she needed the milk.
“I’d better be going,” Raffles said, and started to leave. As he walked away, he glanced over at me, and then turned and looked forward, shaking his head in amusement.
2
That was so very typical of Raffles. Once he’d infinitely complicated one of my problems, he’d just take off and leave me hanging there. All I’d been doing was trying to check out a girl-- a
fairly normal activity for a guy my age, no matter what anybody said. Now I had to worry about aliens living next door to me.
That night I had some truly terrifying dreams. About every two hours, I started from my sleep, and sat bolt upward in bed, bathed in sweat. In one dream, I’d been trapped in a large glass room with a creature that looked like a praying mantis. Outside the room, Raffles, who appeared as a giant, gazed into the room and made notes on a thick pad of paper, as the praying mantis had me cornered and was about to bite off my head. In another dream, high school had begun and I was talking to Eliza Laughton in the cafeteria. It had turned out that she wasn’t an alien at all. Her father was just an odd character who invented something silly-- some electronic gizmo that regulated the traffic of elevators in big high rises. We got along very well, and sometimes we would laugh at how Raffles had convinced me she and her father were aliens. Then, as I was sitting across the table from her, she opened her mouth to say something, and a small hand and arm shot out of her mouth and grabbed me by the throat. When I woke from this dream, I just about had to be peeled off the ceiling. I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time, then, and just lay in bed and stared up into the darkness. I got up and went to the window, and looked at the house next door. It looked utterly harmless, and I was sure that one day I would look back on this time filled with silly notions about aliens, and I would feel foolish. Just then, a dim light went on in the small window downstairs that had to be the kitchen. It was the first time I noticed a single light go on after dark. The light remained lit for a couple minutes, and then went out. A moment later a light upstairs went on, presumably in one of the bedrooms. That light stayed on for quite a long time. I tried to spot shadows or a silhouette that would tell me who it was that was roaming around the house, but saw none. Finally the light went out.
This was the first normal activity I’d seen from the house since I’d be watching it. It was exactly as if someone, unable to sleep, went down to the kitchen, and then returned to the bedroom. I shook my head in the darkness, already feeling silly; if there were such things as aliens, I reasoned, they would hardly suffer from insomnia, right? Only Raffles could make me this crazy, I thought, and then climbed back into bed, finally able to get some nightmare-free sleep.