Just Plain Weird

by Tom Upton

  “Yeah.”

  “Of course, I did-- how could I not know? You really weren’t very subtle about it, you know. You climbed into the tree house every afternoon. The telescope you have wasn’t exactly pointed at the stars. I really learned quite a bit about you during those weeks.”

  I had a serious creepy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “But look,” she continued, “none of that is very important now. It’s all water under the bridge. I know everything I need to know about you, so now it’s only fair to tell you what’s going on-- why I had to put you through all this. Come on, let’s sit on the sofa.”

  When I hesitated, she grabbed my hand and playfully tugged me toward the sofa. I sat at the end of the sofa, and tried to get comfortable, which would be impossible because I had no idea what bizarre things she was about to tell me. I knew I was on the brink of learning something, something that I probably shouldn’t know. And once I knew, I would know too much. For a fleeting second, I felt like making a dash at the door to escape, but there was something in her the way she was acting-- as if she really needed to talk about something-- she was so excited. She hopped onto the sofa next to me, and drew up her legs, crossing them in front of her.

  “All right,” she said. “This is the deal….

  2

  “You probably have about a million questions to ask me,” she began, “and sure, I could answer them. But it would probably be better if I started the story from the beginning. So you’ll have to be patient, because it is a pretty long story. It’s plenty weird, too, I’m going to warn you from the beginning.

  “It all really started with my father. He’s not really an inventor. He was a college professor. He used to teach archeology. Well, every time he had the chance, during the summer break, he would arrange an archeological outing. Sometimes he would take students with; sometimes it was just my mom and him and me. He just loved the idea of going places, exploring, digging up old things. Go figure. We went all over-- let me tell you-- we went to Peru and Chile and southern Mexico. We went to Egypt and Israel and Jordon. He really loved it when he found some piece of pottery or something. I mean, I never understood it, really. It was just junk-- old junk, sure, but junk. I’m sure three thousand years from now some archeologist is going to be on a dig in this country, and find--I don’t know-- some broken Sponge Bob action figure or something, and he end up rich and famous. Anyway, the whole thing seemed silly to me, but to him-- it was like his passion.

  “Now the one thing he loved more than finding old things was finding old things where nobody ever thought to look for them. ‘Off the beaten trail’ was what he used to call it. On the last outing he had, seven summers ago, we went to Peru. It was just my mom and dad and me, along with a guide and some men to carry the supplies. There are places to explore in Peru-- I mean known areas of archeological interest-- but my father… well, you know, he’d heard of some ancient village he wanted to locate. There was no historical proof the village ever existed. Nobody else ever went in search of the village, because everybody believed it was nothing more than a myth or legend. Everything he knew about the village was based on rumor. It was just the type of place he would want to discover. So we ended up in what probably was the densest areas of jungle on the whole continent, looking for a place that probably didn’t even exist. For my father this was fun.

  “For my mother and me, it wasn’t so much fun. My mother-- she didn’t complain very much, as long as she didn’t have to do anything-- that’s just the way she was. And me, I was more interested in the insects than anything else; they have mosquitos down there that looked about as big as bats. Every night, when we set up camp, I would lie in the tent and listen to all the animal sounds and wonder whether I would wake up alive in the morning.

  “Anyway, after about a week of hiking through the jungle, we came across a fairly large clearing. It was a good place to make camp for a few days. It was a beautiful place, too, the way the dense jungle surrounded the area-- like the eye of some violent tropical storm. There was a river branch running through the jungle not far away, and a couple of the men who handled the supplies found straight tree branches and whittled down the ends, making them into spears. They went spear fishing in the river, and everybody had fish fried over an open fire every night. It was really a good time, then; even the insects weren’t such a nuisance.

  “My father was fascinated with the clearing itself. It wasn’t enough for him that it was a nice place to stay; it had to make sense to him, as well. He said that there wasn’t any logical explanation for the existence of the clearing. The ground was too level. The surrounding jungle was very dense, and there was no gradual thinning of the jungle leading to the clearing. Though the ground of the clearing was covered with wild grass, there was no evidence of tree growth or that there had ever been trees growing here. Even the lack of insects struck him as odd; the surrounding jungle was alive with insects, but it seemed to him that the insects were actually avoiding the clearing.

  “He staked out a couple areas within the clearing, and started to do some digging. He never thought that this might find the village that he was looking for. An ancient village like that would be swallowed by the jungle; this was all just a little too neat. But he knew the area was unusual, and was worth the time and effort to excavate.

  “So for the next few days, he dug and dug and dug. He sifted the earth that he’d dug up, and all he found was dirt and rocks. At one point the thought, he found a fragment of an ancient tool, but in the end, it turned out to be just a piece of petrified wood. He didn’t get frustrated right away; instead, he staked out new areas, this time closer to the edge of the jungle. He worked on those areas for a couple days, but didn’t find anything.

  “By now, we were running low on supplies. He’d planned only for a three week outing. So he sent the guide and the men back to get supplies for an extra week. If everything went right, they would return in about a week and a half, just as our supplies ran out. Meanwhile he worked from sun up to sunset each day digging and sifting, digging and sifting…. Before long, the clearing was filled with squared areas of dug up earth-- like flower gardens dug but never planted. Still, no matter how deep he dug or how many places, he found not a single thing. Finally, he moved our tents, deciding to excavate the ground under them. He really didn’t have any rational reason to want to excavate under the tents, other than that was the only place within the clearing that he hadn’t touched.

  “So he staked out the area, and after only about three hours of digging he found something.” Here, she jumped to her feet, and raced upstairs, leaving me alone on the sofa. I could hear the distant sound of a short conversation-- actually it sounded more like an argument, a short exchange of fiery comments. A moment later, Eliza was loping down the stairs, carrying a box before her. “Well, what do you think so far?” she asked me. “Nothing too crazy, right? Oh, maybe it’s a little nutty that my father would drag my mother and me all over the world while he searched for-- whatever. But, you know, that kind of thing happens; it’s not abnormal to have one parent who is driven to achieve something.

  “Now, here is where the true weirdness begins,” she said, and set the box she’d retrieved from upstairs down atop the glass coffee table. It was a wooden box, shaped like a perfect cube, with brass-inlaid designs on all sides.

  “Nice box,” I said.

  “It’s what’s inside, Travis, that started my family on the wild and wooly ride to Weirdville.”

  She reached over and slowly opened the box.

  I leaned over and gawked at what was inside the box.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I don’t get it,” I confessed, for all I saw in the box, laid neatly on a nest of velvet, was nothing more than what looked like a metal ball.

  “Take it out and look at it,” she said. “It won’t bite you, you know?”

  I removed the ball from the box. It was the size of a baseball and was bronze in color. What struck me as somewhat odd
was that it felt very light, given its size and that it was obviously metallic, and I immediately suspected that it must be hollow.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Actually, we still don’t know,” she said. “But watch this.”

  She took the sphere from my hand, and set it on the coffee table top. After a couple seconds, to my amazement, the sphere began to move; it didn’t roll as though the table was slightly tilted, but rather it moved as though it had a mind of its own. It rolled to the edge of the tabletop, and then stopped just when it looked about to fall off. It hesitated, and then began to roll along the edge of the tabletop. It continued until it went completely around the tabletop, always hugging the edge, and then rolled back to the exact center of the glass.

  I picked it up and examined it again. Its surface was smooth, without ridges or defects.

  “Weird, huh?” Eliza said, taking the sphere from my hand. She replaced it in the wooden box. “It does the same thing, no matter what you set it on. If you were to place it any where on the floor, it would roll to the baseboards, make one complete circuit of the room, and then roll back and stop at the exact center of the area it just circled.”

  “But why?” I asked, resisting the urge to scratch my head.

  “Who knows?” She leaned back on the sofa, and put her feet on the coffee table. She seemed very relaxed, and it became clear that she was relieved to be sharing the secrets she’d kept to herself. She seemed even to enjoy my bafflement at the nature of the sphere. “When my father was still at the university, he had access to x-ray equipment-- not the type they use on people, but the type they use to x-ray things. So he x-rayed this doodad-- he always calls it ‘the doodad’ or the ‘thingamabob’-- because he was sure it was hollow and there has to be something inside-- some mechanism-- that makes it do what it does. But the x-rays wouldn’t penetrate the metal.

  “Anyway, so my father finds this thing. After that, there was very little digging. He spent most of his time studying it, trying to figure out what it was and where it came from. Even late into the night, sitting out by an open fire, he would puzzle over it; I thought he looked a little like a gorilla trying to figure out a Rubik’s cube, turning the sphere over and over, stopping every so often to frown or scratch his head.

  “We waited for the guide and the men to come back with supplies. One day I did something I was warned never to do; I wandered out of the clearing and into the surrounding jungle. It was very boring for me, after all. You can’t imagine. In the first place, look what we’re doing there-- watching my father digging and looking for old stuff. Then watching him stare at a metal ball for hours on end. Sometimes you can get so bored you forget about anything anybody said about poisonous snakes. So, yeah, I wandered off. I never went too deep into the jungle. That would have been impossible anyway; the jungle was so thick, you needed a machete to hack your way through the vines. What I discovered, though, was that there was a point just outside the clearing, where the ground dropped away sharply into a gully. I probably would have fallen down into the thing, except the sides of the sloping ground were so overgrown with trees and vines, I got snagged on them. The vegetation was so dense I couldn’t even make out how deep the gully dropped. I could hear the babbling of running water from below, where a stream must have been running. Anyway, after I untangled myself, and started to climb back up, I noticed that there was a rock ledge sticking out of the side of the slope, about eight, nine feet from the top. When I reached the ledge, I could walk across quite easily, using the vines and small tree branches to keep my balance. So I walked along the ledge for a while, until I reached a large cleft in the side of the slope. At first glance, it didn’t even look like a cave opening; it seemed like just a small hollow in the slope. But when I continued along the ledge, I found myself in a small cave. At least that was what I thought it was at first. It seemed nothing more than a small cozy cave. The back of the cave was all dark, and it was impossible to see how deep it went. I started to walk back into the darkness. Don’t even ask me what was going through my mind; it never occurred to me what kind of wild animals might be lurking in the darkness. I think I was expecting that I would run into the back wall of the cave. But as I walked deeper and deeper inside, I ran into nothing. Pretty soon I was walking in complete darkness. That was when I started to get the willies. I should have turned round and got myself out of there. You don’t know how many times I wished I’d done just that. My life would be so much simpler now. But no, I had to take a few extra steps. I’ll never be able to say just why-- maybe pure stupid curiosity. Anyway, an amazing thing happened; when I reached a certain point, a light went on up ahead. I could see the cave narrowed into a tunnel that ran another forty or fifty feet. The light was coming from the end of the tunnel. For the second time, I thought seriously about just turning round and getting out of there. It was really pretty spooky. When I took a step back, the light went out. I took a step forward again, and the light went on again. All right, now I just couldn’t leave it alone; the light is reacting to my movement, after all, and that was pretty strange. I was only about eight-years-old, but I did know what a proximity light was-- and this was definitely a proximity light. So I walked to the end of the tunnel. There was a very crude doorway carved in one of the tunnel walls. The light was coming from beyond the doorway. So I went through the doorway, and walked into-- it. My father has come to call it ‘the artifact.’ Me-- I don’t know what to call it. All I knew at the time was that I’d found something that beat the bejesus out of the metal ball he found.

  “At first sight, it looked like a bomb shelter. It was a huge chamber with an arching ceiling as high as a cavern. When I walked inside, my footsteps actually echoed throughout the place. The chamber had to be about as big as a football field. The walls, floor, and ceiling were made out of some dull gray metal. I went to the center of the chamber and looked all around, gazing up at the towering ceilings that arched high above me. I must have triggered something then-- another sensor maybe-- and suddenly a console rose from the floor in front of me. It seemed to erupt out of the same metal that made up the floor. The console stopped rising when it reached a point that was perfect for a person of my height, which at the time wasn’t very tall at all. I stepped up to the console, and looked it over. A bunch of shapes and colors covered it. There were triangles, circles, and octagons. Some were blue, some red, others yellow. Some appeared alone next to strange symbols. Others were grouped together is configurations, especially the octagons. Anyway, I realized they were all buttons, but I wasn’t about to start pushing them-- it wasn’t exactly like a TV or a DVD player. If I started pressing buttons, who knows what would have happened? So I just stepped away from the console, which dropped back down into the floor. There was nothing to do, really, but go back and tell my father about it.

  “Naturally, it took me about three hours to convince him I hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. All he wanted to do was harp at me for having ventured out into the jungle-- you know, typical: here I am telling him about this great thing I found, and there he is, checking to see if I’d been bit by a poisonous snake, whose venom was making me delirious.

  “Anyway, I finally convinced him to follow me. When I led him inside the thing, his jaw nearly dropped to the floor. You think he was mesmerized by the metal ball he’d dug up! He wandered around the chamber, and all he could say was, ‘Eliza, what have you found?’ over and over, as if I knew the answer.

  “He sent me back to the camp to get my mother and his camera. My mother-- she was never the outdoorsy type, you know? I remember a lot of yelling, and complaining about having to climb down the slope, and how this was positively the last time she was going out on one of these outings. Like I said before, my mother never complained as long as she didn’t have to participate in my father’s work.

  “By the time we returned, my father was standing at the console in the middle of the chamber. He was studying the shapes and the symbols, trying to make sense of them. While h
e was doing that, my mom, who was just plain flabbergasted, walked around the chamber, snapping off pictures with the camera.

  “After a while, my father started to press a few of the buttons. Now, I was just a kid at the time, but I still knew that this was not a great idea; my father, though very intelligent when it comes to some things, still had a hard time programming a VCR. What happened next was sheer luck-- that I know. He triggered something, and a large section of one of the chamber walls suddenly lit up; it looked like an enormous viewing screen. The screen showed a detail representation of the entire South American continent. There was a small symbol on the screen marking the spot where we were; it looked like the symbol for twins-- you know, two lines with a line running across the top of both lines. When he pressed a couple other buttons, he found that he could zoom in on the location. When he pressed a couple other buttons, a ghost image of the symbol separated from the symbol, and he found that he could move the ghost image anywhere on the screen. You could see he was pretty pleased with himself that he was figuring it out, you know. Then it was like he had a brilliant idea. He moved the ghost image to the top edge of the screen, and the screen switched over to a representation of Central American, and then to North American. He placed the ghost image on the spot where we lived at the time, which was Chicago, and then he zoomed in…. it was amazing-- like a spy satellite-- he actually zoomed into the city, into the neighborhood we lived in, and suddenly the screen showed our house and back yard from above. There, right on the patio was my bicycle, which I’d forgot to put away in the garage. By now my mother and I were gawking up at this huge screen. What my father said next I always considered famous last words: ‘I wonder what’ll happen if I press this button.’ Of course, by this time, nobody could have stopped him; he was on a roll, right? So he pressed the button. Absolutely nothing happened-- not that we noticed. On the screen the ghost image became solid-- that was all. My father looked disappointed, shrugged and said that there would be plenty of time to figure it all out.