by Robert Maxxe
There was silence on the line now, a chance for Carrie to respond. But she was speechless. Nick had been boldly lying to her, and she had never suspected—never imagined. For a second she was seized by panic, lurid melodramatic visions of Nick fallen into incorrigible delinquency. Then the inner storm subsided, and from some mental reservoir came a flow of comforting phrases collected out of newspaper advice columns, PTA meetings, guest appearances by child psychologist's on TV talk shows. Nick was going through a stage, acting out some problem. Maybe it had to do with the girl. Or it might go all the way back to Mike's death.
"Well, what do you think, Carrie?" the voice on the phone prodded. "Any hope you could persuade Nick to continue with the band?"
There were a dozen questions she wanted to ask, but every one would give away the shameful secret: she had lost control of her child.
"I really don't know, Joanne," she said.
Her tentative tone was misinterpreted by the other woman. "God knows, Carrie, I'm no big fan myself of the kind of music they make. But I thought it was good to have them wrapped up in a project of their own. It's a damn shame to see that go down the drain. Don't you think so?"
"I agree," Carrie replied stiffly. It was a strain to keep up the pretense that she knew about Nick's decisions. Making a conscious effort at warmth, she added, "I'll see what I can do, Joanne. I'm sorry Doug's been let down."
Joanne Bannerman thanked her and they said good-bye.
After hanging up, Carrie remained standing by the phone. Her hopes for a lovely evening had been blasted apart. Was there a chance in hell she could go off now with Lon Evans and enjoy herself? Her only need was to find Nick, find the truth—and Carrie thought she knew exactly where to look.
She started to reach for the Millport phone directory, then realized that Lon Evans was too new in town to be included. She picked up the phone again and learned from the information operator that, under new listings, there was only an "A. Evans" on Bowridge Road. (Lon—what was that short for?) Carrie took the number and tried it.
A man answered. It was Lon.
She told him only that an emergency had developed, something with one of the children, and she would have to attend to it immediately.
"Anything I can do to help?" he asked.
He sounded so instantly sympathetic, there was a moment that she almost told him the details of the problem. But then she held back. If she told him where she was going to look for Nick, she thought Lon would tell her she was making a mountain out of a molehill and repeat all the things he'd said the night of the meeting.
So she answered that she would manage alone.
"Well, I hope everything works out all right," he said earnestly. "I'm going to miss seeing you tonight, Carrie. Can we plan on another night?"
Her doubt stood in her way, suspicion of his connection to the very thing that had, perhaps, misled Nick.
"I'll call you, Lon," was all she could reply before lowering the receiver slowly into the cradle. For one more second she stared at the phone, her mind buzzing with some confused thought about technology, the miracle that could put a distant voice right next to your ear. Nothing bad about that. . . .
Then she turned from the phone and unwound the bedspread from her body. Without stopping to fetch a bath towel and finish drying off completely, she began rushing into her clothes.
12
She parked the car a block away from the arcade. As soon as she got out, she crossed to the other side of Elm Street before walking toward the pharmacy. She couldn't help turning up the fur collar of her parka, hunching down into it. Not only to shield herself from the night's chill. She felt like a spy.
In a rage when she left home, her first idea had been simply to locate Nick and haul him back to the house, like the police capturing a fugitive. Wrecking her evening was the least of his crimes. He had broken a cardinal law of the family. Detention and short rations were in order; a full confession must be extracted.
But on the short drive she cooled down. Punishing Nick might satisfy her pride, salve the wound of being deceived—treated like an antagonist, the enemy! But it would only harden the positions and make it more difficult to learn Nick's motives. And Carrie wanted knowledge more than retribution. Why had Nick lied so grossly for the first time in his life? Because of the girl, perhaps? If that liaison was leading Nick into overheated explorations of sex, he wouldn't need Holmesian powers of deduction to know his mother would disapprove.
Or was it only so he could spend more time at the arcade? Yet why should Nick feel he had to sneak down there? Far from ruling it off limits, she had been lenient about it—unless he was spending all his free time there. Were the lies Nick had told about band practice only part of the picture? What about soccer practice, his homework?
She stopped outside Osgood's. Beyond the window shelves of hair-driers and a large display card for Grecian Formula, Carrie could see the soda fountain. A handful of teenagers perched on stools along the counter. Nick wasn't among them. She turned and looked across the street. The cottage with its blue neon "eyes" stared back. Beyond the signs, the interior appeared dark as usual. In the darkness, with the games absorbing all the attention of the players, Carrie supposed she'd be able to circulate unnoticed. Making one small concession to disguise, however, she took a scarf from her pocket and tied it over her head, a fashion rare for her. Then she crossed over.
Bicycles were leaning all along the clapboard sides of the cottage. Carrie scanned the profusion of wheels and frames for Nick's red Japanese ten-speed, but the blue glow from the arcade signs washed out the other colors, made one bike indistinguishable from the next. At the entrance she paused, like an actress in the wings preparing to go onstage. If he was there and spotted her right away, she wanted to have her lines ready. So there you are, young man! I thought you might be here. . . . The speech of maternal indignation wrote itself. But she hoped it wouldn't be needed. She could help Nick more by observing, trying to learn the reason behind the lie. It wasn't spying, she assured herself. It was—what did governments say?—"gathering intelligence."
She checked that her long hair was tucked under the scarf and inside her collar, then pulled the door open and slipped through.
It was very dim inside. The ceiling lights over the machines were on, but so faintly that they cast no downward beams. Carrie recalled the system that faded the lights automatically as a player approached a machine. The settings were all low now because every machine was being used. Clusters of shadowy figures stood around each game. Carrie tried, with one darting look around, to find Nick. But it was impossible. The groups around the machines were all facing away, toward the screens, tightly gathered so that the separate shadows blended to form one humped beast.
Standing in the open area by the entrance, Carrie felt too exposed. Keeping her head down, she moved swiftly to attach herself to the group at the nearest machine. Then, cautiously, she lifted her eyes and surveyed the scene in detail.
There were fifty or sixty others in the arcade, a player in front of every console, and several spectators gathered behind each one. Moving patterns of light from the video screens lit their rapt faces—young faces all, as far as Carrie could tell. No one had given her entrance any notice.
Yet she couldn't dispel the sensation of being closely watched, the same sort of spooky uneasiness you got when you entered a silent house, as if eyes were following her every move through a crack in a closet door. Then she realized the cause, no different than it was in the house: the quietness. The arcade was extremely quiet. She had anticipated the ceaseless cacophony of electronic battle, a loud barrage of buzzes and beeps and booms, and noises not so easily categorized. And instead there was this library-like hush. Though not quite silence. Sounds came from the machines, but they were subdued, oddly soothing. Humming, purring, a low, not unmusical whistling—yet none so exactly definable, since they were all electronic, unnatural. The players and spectators made some noises, too, but no more than the whisper
s and murmurs of a congregation in church.
It was this calm, Carrie realized, that induced the uncomfortable feeling of being studied by hostile eyes. It was so unlikely for an amusement parlor filled with kids, it suggested instead the lull caused in a boisterous celebration by the arrival of an unwanted guest at whom everyone stops to glare.
But no one was glaring at her here, no one even looked in her direction. The quiet arose wholly out of the absolute concentration gripping the children standing in front of the games.
Her eyes had adjusted to the dark, and Carrie could begin to distinguish faces. There were six kids in the group she had joined, but Nick was not among them. She edged around the perimeter and crossed a gap of several feet to attach herself to the next group. Nick was not there, either.
She continued along the row of games, inspecting the group around the third, then the fourth.
"All right, Terry's turn," a voice said softly just as Carrie moved to the fifth machine, the one that faced rear between the two side rows. The cluster of spectators shifted; a boy stepped away from in front of the console, and a girl took his place. The boy walked around to the back of the group and stood beside Carrie. She recognized him at once, though it took her a second to place the face: he was one of the two sons of the woman who ran a weekly dance-exercise class at her house. Alan—was that his name? He was three or four years older than Nick, and Carrie had never seen him except when he would accidentally barge into his mother's living room during a workout. The boy returned no sign of recognition, however, didn't give Carrie so much as a glance; his attention never shifted from the video screen.
During the changeover in players, the screen had filled with a lively show of computer graphics. Streaks of white on a blue field like shooting stars across a night sky, red and yellow balls like flaming meteors, similar to the display Carrie had seen when she came to the arcade alone. Intermittently, the word also flashed on.
SPACESCAPE
SPACESCAPE
SPACESCAPE
Through the quiet came the metallic clink of a coin being dropped into the machine. The girl at the console was ready to play. A rush of curiosity diverted Carrie from her quest for Nick. The game: what was it?
For an instant the screen went black. At the same time, from the stereo "wings" that jutted out from the sides of the machine, a weird, unearthly voice emerged. Electronically synthesized, it sounded a bit like a rubber band and the lowest note on a piano being simultaneously twanged, the vibrations forming into words.
"Thank you," said the voice.
Suddenly a face occupied the screen, formed out of a mosaic of tiny colored squares in different hues and intensities. It had eyes, a nose, a mouth, but it wasn't a human likeness. This was the computer programmer's cute conception of a space creature. The mosaic shifted, giving animation to the creature as it continued speaking.
"Greetings, earthling. Preceding the flight, will you please identify yourself."
The girl at the console dutifully replied. "Terry."
The picture on the screen remained momentarily frozen, imbuing the computer creature with the comic aspect of being caught off-guard, nonplussed. Then it spoke again.
"Your full name is needed. Thank you."
"Oh, sorry. It's Terry McD—I mean Theresa McDowell."
Ken McDowell ran the fish market in town, Carrie thought, this was probably one of his daughters.
"Thank you, earthling," said the computer animation. "You may begin your flight."
The creature was abruptly replaced by the representation of a landscape in exaggerated three-dimensional perspective, an essentially barren plain but with jagged peaks poking up here and there. Composed entirely of thin white lines laid down on a field of black, it looked to Carrie like the surface of the moon as it might be rendered by an architectural engineer. The only colored area was in the foreground—a small blue-and-yellow shape, like some sort of spacecraft.
"Countdown," a synthesized voice came from the speakers. "Prepare to fly stage one. Four-three-two-one-blast—"
An ear-filling whooshing sound drowned the voice and the floor vibrated as the yellow-and-blue spacecraft rose from the lower edge of the screen into the center and appeared to tilt over. Simultaneously the graphics in the background changed perspective and the pattern of lines etching the landscape reformed again and again in rapid sequence. The effect was to make the spacecraft appear to be flying over the lunar landscape at a tremendous speed.
The girl player threw herself into manipulating the joystick, and the spacecraft dodged between soaring jagged mountain peaks.
Then, near the top of the picture, the outline of a futuristic city pricked the horizon. Very small, at first, in a second it loomed larger, much larger, the spacecraft appearing to bear down on it at supersonic speed. Then the craft was flying through canyons of futuristic buildings.
The sight was dizzying for Carrie. She saw the girl jiggling the control stick frantically to steer the craft away from the buildings. But a moment later it flew straight into one, and the screen exploded with lights while a low boom played from the stereo speakers.
The voice spoke again: "Prepare flight two, stage one."
Another spacecraft appeared in the foreground of the screen and blasted off over the city.
Carrie had seen enough to understand; the game was simply a computerized obstacle course. Two or three tries to steer your spacecraft through it without being brought down, then your turn ended. Nothing new, really, except that it had been fancied up with video gimmicks. That little space creature was probably what gave the kids a special kick. It dramatized the fantasy, made the game appear to be a receiver of signals from some distant galaxy.
She turned away and started searching the darkness again for Nick. Doubling back toward the entrance along the other row of machines, she saw him in the second group she joined. He was near the front, right behind the player at the console. There were four other spectators between him and Carrie, enabling her to observe him inconspicuously. As she watched, she saw Nick put one hand up and rub the back of the person at the controls as if for encouragement. Carrie realized then that the player was the girl, Dana. Lit by the colored patterns on the screen, the girl's face shone in the dark, and Carrie was transfixed again by her beauty. Then the play of light drew Carrie's attention back to the screen and she noticed that the images were completely different from the ones she had seen on the other game. This was not the rendering of a landscape. In fact, it wasn't a picture of anything so much as a design, concentric rings of different hues shrinking down to a pinpoint. Alternate rings were rotating in opposite directions, creating a mesmerizing vortex of color. Only after staring at it for a minute did Carrie perceive the illusion of depth. The spinning rings seemed to form a tunnel, a whirling three-dimensional maze. Carrie scanned the picture for some tiny object that stood out, distinct from the rest of the pattern —the symbol a player was supposed to manipulate through the maze. But she had difficulty keeping her eyes on the screen. The tunnel of colors made her dizzy, so disoriented that she began to feel as if she were slipping from a precipice, in danger of falling away into an abyss. . . . She blinked and pulled her gaze away from the image—to Nick. He was leaning tensely forward, close to the girl's shoulder. Carrie saw a slight movement of his lips, as if he had whispered some advice. The circles on the screen started to whirl faster, and Nick's face grew more taut. His mouth moved again, and this time Carrie caught the words urgently muttered.
"Timejump, Dana. Hurry. Timejump!"
In the next second, a high-pitched whistle erupted from the speakers, and the rings of color suddenly contracted, folded in on each other as the surrounding screen went dark. The tunnel of color was seemingly being swallowed up in a black hole.
The girl tossed a quick glance at Nick. "Oh God," she said, "I meant to . . ."
Carrie was amazed at how distressed the girl sounded. It was only a game. She felt in sympathy with Nick as she watched him rub th
e girl's shoulder in consolation.
"Don't worry about it," Nick said. "You'll make it next time."
The rings of color abruptly blazed onto the screen again.
"Reenter stage three," a voice commanded from the machine.
The girl spun back to face the screen. Her shoulders hunched forward tensely as she placed her hands over buttons on the control board.
Carrie was beginning to feel anxious. If she continued to watch, how long before Nick discovered her? When Dana's turn ended, if she came around to the back of the group, certainly she would recognize Nick's mother from the other night. . . . So how, Carrie wondered, should she deal with Nick? Confront him now . . . or exercise patience and restraint? What would the parents' handbook recommend?
The tunnel of colors spun faster.
Nick was biting his lip as he watched. Then he smiled and patted Dana's back. "That's it," he murmured. "Way to go. . . ."
There was no handbook to guide her, Carrie realized, only her instincts. Jump in now and she'd scare Nick away from her. She'd have to take her time, try to understand what was happening to him.
Carrie turned and headed rapidly toward the street door. Walking between the rows of machines, she gathered only a quick impression that the moving image on each screen was distinctly different.
Not a single pair of eyes turned from the games to watch her go.
Driving home, she rationalized. The shock of Nick's lie had set off an avalanche of emotions, anger and hurt and—the one that cut deepest—self-recrimination. She must have let him down terribly somehow if he could discard the trust between them as worthless.
But after watching Nick in the arcade she felt a little better. He was not, after all, mixed up with a bunch of delinquents. He wasn't taking drugs or stealing cars and taking them for joyrides, not even loitering on street corners. He was hanging out in the arcade with other decent kids. And was it such a bad place? Clean, quiet, seemingly well run. Carrie couldn't easily condemn the games, either. They obviously demanded a degree of skill, sharp reflexes and good eye-hand coordination. All those buttons had to be brought into play. Would she object if Nick spent all his spare time at a chess club? Granted, these video games couldn't offer the revered intellectual challenge that chess did, but from what she had seen, Carrie had to admit she'd be hard put to master one herself.