Definitely Not Kansas (Nocturnia Book 1)

by Thomas Monteleone

  DEFINITELY NOT KANSAS

  NOCTURNIA: Book One

  by

  F. Paul Wilson & Thomas F. Monteleone

  Definitely Not Kansas – Nocturnia: Book One

  © 2013 by F. Paul Wilson & Thomas F. Monteleone

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  First published in a signed limited first edition by Gauntlet Press & Borderlands Press in 2013

  First trade and ebook editions published 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-880325-04-9

  NOCTURNIA

  This one is for

  Ethan

  Hannah

  Daniel

  Quinn

  Tess

  Leonardo

  Paolo

  CONTENTS

  Part One: A Hole in the Air

  Part Two: Not Kansas

  Part Three: Out of the Frying Pan

  Part Four: Master Simon had a Farm…

  Part Five: Falzon

  Part Six: Escapes

  Part Seven: On the Run

  Afterword

  Bibliographies

  Part One

  A Hole in the Air

  1

  A worried Emma O’Dell shifted her gaze from the overgrown fields spreading out in all directions toward the faraway Kansas horizons and focused on the garage at the rear corner of her backyard.

  No one had seen Telly, her older brother, for nearly a week. Even though he was eighteen and out of high school and technically not a kid anymore, it still seemed weird, even for Telly.

  Scary even.

  Her younger brother, Ryan, stood beside her. He wore worn jeans and a T-shirt with i>u emblazoned across the front. Typical.

  “And the problem is…?” he said, running a hand through his unruly, slightly-too-long blond hair. “I mean, c’mon, Em. Telly goes off for days at a time and never tells anybody.”

  Emma pushed a strand of red hair from her cheek. “I know it isn’t the first time, and I know I sound weird, but this time it feels… different.”

  Ryan, two years younger at age eleven, shrugged with an annoying lack of concern. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s always been sort of like Nightcrawler.”

  “Who?”

  Ryan looked sheepish. “From X-men?”

  “This isn’t a comic book!”

  “I mean, you know, now you see him, now you don’t.”

  “You sound like Dad.”

  Ryan smiled. “And you sound just like Mom!”

  Emma considered this. As much as it bugged her to admit it, Ryan was right. Emma looked up to Telly, a lot more than she let on. Granted, he’d drifted into his own world lately, but he was still the guy who had taught her how to ride a two-wheeler and spent hours helping her with her math homework. He was so smart, one of those independent thinkers who wanted to change the world but had little idea how to actually do it. Telly always said he was inspired by the life of a guy named Tesla.

  Emma wished she could be inspired like that. She didn’t know if she was as smart, but she for sure found school as boring as he had. And with her best friend Jeanie off at soccer camp, she had like nothing to do. Except hang with Ryan. A younger brother was not exactly a cure for boredom. She could see this as the story of her life the summer: boring days with her brother and boring nights with her folks.

  Telly had been bored in high school and didn’t see college as much of a challenge. Maybe boredom ran in the family, even though Telly was only her half-brother. They shared a mom who never talked much about his father. Like, really, never.

  If she looked up to Telly, Ryan practically idolized him. He seemed to envy Telly’s outside-the-box lifestyle, even if it hadn’t made him Mr. Popularity in school. If Ryan dropped mention of being Telly Nadal’s brother, no one was likely to go, “Cooool!” Fact was, the response would tend to be something like, “Yeah? Too bad.” But Ryan wasn’t much into what other people thought. Only eleven, but already he had his own thing.

  And Dad…well, Telly and Dad had never got along too well – the classic oil and water. He’d tried to be a father to Telly when he married Mom, but Telly was hard to know, had his own way of looking at things. Dad didn’t get Telly. But then, hardly anyone did. About the only thing she could remember Telly saying to Dad lately was “Pass the salt.”

  Mom, of course, loved Telly as only a mother could love a son, and she’d somehow gotten used to him going off on his own… so as of now, she wasn’t acting very concerned. At least not yet.

  Why do I always have to be the worrywart where Telly’s concerned?

  But Emma already knew the answer to that question.

  It wasn’t just Telly she was worried about – she tended to worry about things that didn’t bother most people. Because sometimes she’d get these really weird feelings that a situation just wasn’t… right. She couldn’t explain it any better than that.

  Emma looked at Ryan. “Just between you and I, I’m scared.”

  “Me,” he said

  “You’re scared too?” He didn’t look scared in the least.

  “No…me. It’s just between you and me.”

  Emma rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Not your grammar games, again.”

  “It's not a game. I can’t help it.”

  She knew he couldn't. Ryan liked an orderly world, where everything was logical and everyone spoke proper English. That wasn't real life, of course, but he was too outspoken about it. Too outspoken about most things, really. His social filter didn’t work too well and he tended to blurt before thinking.

  Emma grinned in spite of herself. She’d never tell him, but she found his penchant for grammar kind of charming. A sign of his intelligence.

  Neither would she admit that he was smarter. But he was. His vocabulary was astounding. She was starting to realize that girls liked guys who were smart. Her little brother would be all right when he got older. He just needed to patch those holes in his social filter.

  But enough of that. Emma had been trying to distract herself and she knew it. Trying to stop thinking about Telly.

  “Filter-filter-filter,” she reminded him, then looked up at the garage again. “I just have this feeling…”

  “One of your premonitions?”

  He made that face he always made when they got on the subject, as if the word tasted like a brussels sprout. But she was used to it.

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, considering the track record of your premonitions, I’m still not too worried.”

  She couldn’t help it if that sort of stuff – palm readings and tarot-cards and the like – fascinated her. And she had her ace in the hole in that regard.

  “You act like I’m always wrong. What about the quarry?”

  Ryan waved his hands in the air. “The quarry, the quarry! You always bring that up! One time! And that was just because Telly wasn’t answering his phone!”

  Not fair. She’d been only seven back then, and Telly twelve, and she’d just known he’d been hurt. He used to go out to the old limestone quarry south of town and dig for Indian junk. Chippewa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne tribes used to wander through this part of Kansas, and he was always bringing home bits of pottery and arrowheads. Emma had called him on his cell phone, and when he hadn’t answered, she knew he was hurt. She’d raced out there on her bike and found him lying on a ledge below the rim of the water-filled quarry. He’d fallen and his right leg was obviously broken.

  He’d left his phone with his bike, so she used that to call
for help. Then, over his protests, she started to climb down to him. She slipped and fell past him into the quarry. She remembered hitting the water and… and that was it.

  Her next memory was Telly calling her name as he held her above the surface and clung to the side of the quarry. He’d gone in after her, broken leg and all, and pulled her from the bottom. She’d rushed out to save him and he’d wound up saving her.

  He told her that after she’d fallen in, all he’d seen were bubbles. So from then on his nickname for her was “Bubbles.”

  She didn’t care what Ryan said, she’d known Telly was hurt.

  She exhaled. “Let’s drop it, okay?”

  “Drop it? Fine with me.” He smiled and produced a deck of cards. “Hey, want to see a new trick?”

  Emma couldn’t believe it. “Are you kidding? Telly’s missing and you’re doing card tricks?”

  “Telly’s fine.” He held out the deck. “Pick a card, any–”

  “Forget it!”

  He made a face as he put the deck away, then his expression brightened. “Does this mean we’re going to snoop around his room and look for clues?”

  “‘Clues’?” Emma had to smile. He was getting into this. “You’re what – Sherlock Holmes now?”

  “Absolutely, Watson. You get the key?”

  Reaching into the pocket of her jeans, Emma pulled it out, held it up like a prize. “From Mom’s sock drawer…”

  Ryan’s eyes fairly glowed. “Let’s do it.”

  They walked the path between their house and the old cedar-shingled, two-car garage. Their folks had bought this old farm for the room and the privacy. They’d never planned to work it. With Dad’s plumbing business and Mom a librarian at the college, who had time?

  The garage had come with a second-floor apartment. Well, not exactly an apartment. More like a big loft, and Telly had moved in right after high school. Even before graduation he’d been “fixing” things around town, and that was how he earned a living these days. Not much of a living, but he was gaining a reputation as a guy who could fix anything… sometimes things worked better than new after he was through with them.

  He used the space over the garage as his home and his workshop. When he wasn’t fixing something or hanging out with Professor Polonius, he spent his time up there tinkering with his “experiments.” She always knew when Telly was around because of his old beat-up Jetta in the driveway.

  But the Jetta had been gone for days…

  Emma moved to the door on the side of the garage and inserted the key in the old lock. The door squeaked as it swung out to reveal a set of narrow steps.

  Ryan snapped his fingers. “Nothing to it. Let’s go.”

  He led the way up. Despite the afternoon sunlight, the stairs to the top landing lay in shadow. When they reached the final step, another door stood closed before them.

  Emma said, “Aw, no…is it locked?”

  “Only one way to find out.

  She tensed as Ryan reached for the knob. He started to turn it, but stopped.

  “Hey,” he said. “You’re sure Telly’s not in there, right? I mean, we’re not going to find him, you know, like…”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “No feeling about this?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  Ryan looked uncomfortable. “I mean, I was thinking – well, I’ve seen so many movies where–” He shook his head. “Never mind.”

  But Emma knew he was thinking: If Telly was like dead or something, his body could be lying on the other side of that door. But he wasn’t dead. Emma had a very good feeling Telly was nowhere nearby – alive or dead.

  Ryan pushed on the door and it creaked inward to reveal Telly’s private world, his inner sanctum. And, just as she’d known, no dead body – not sprawled on the floor, not hanging from one of the exposed rafters, not anywhere.

  Emma felt a little like an intruder. She and Ryan had been up here before – Ryan more than she – but not often. Telly cherished his privacy. Even her parents had said that Telly needed his own place to live and work.

  As she entered the big, high-ceilinged room, she stopped and stared in renewed wonder at the cluttered weirdness of the place.

  Old thrift-shop shelves lined the walls, jammed with books and magazines and oddments – animal skulls, plaster casts of claws and footprints, the arrowheads he’d collected, stacks of photographs, fossils still trapped in their mineral prisons. An array of tools and instruments littered every horizontal surface. A huge workbench dominated the center of the room like an aircraft carrier, overhung with high-intensity lamps, one with a donut-shaped bulb encircling a thick magnifying lens. Rack-mounted electronics battled for space with what was obviously a hand-cobbled computer and LCD display. Several half-assembled and totally unrecognizable contraptions hunkered across the bench. Open manuals, charts, and faded blueprints sprawled all over the workspace. In a nearby corner, a human skeleton wearing the red coat of a circus ringmaster sat in a frayed wingback chair. Beside it, a large plastic model of H. R. Giger’s “Alien” posed in mid-attack mode. Exotic plants lined the sill of the room’s only window, looking surprisingly vital despite the arid, dusty atmosphere. In the far corner, almost buried beneath the endless scatter of strange stuff, an army surplus cot.

  Emma stared sadly at the makeshift bed. Spartan and meager, but all Telly needed. He’d never been very interested in normal things. Her father had always said Telly walked around with his “head in the clouds.”

  You got that right, Dad…

  Ryan laughed. “Man, I love this place! It’s like those chainsaw movies where the house in the woods is full of all kinds of creepy stuff – only this is even cooler.”

  Emma shook her head slowly as she approached the workbench and started shuffling through the huge stack of photos.

  “Where’d he ever get all this stuff?” She adjusted her glasses on her freckled nose. “I knew Telly was… eccentric, but I had no idea he was getting this–”

  “C’mon, you know he’s been collecting it all his life.”

  “Well, yeah, but I didn’t know he was so involved in this kind of stuff.”

  “Telly’s cool.” He eyed the books hungrily. “He’s like some kind of… well, you know, a real scientist. And you know I love science.”

  “Yeah, sure, that’s why you always make jokes about flying saucers and the frog-boy from Brazil…”

  Emma remembered how Ryan would stand outside Telly’s bedroom door at night when they were all getting ready for bed and he would whisper things like Earth to Telly, come in… Earth to Telly…

  Ryan smiled. “He knew I was just kidding around.”

  “Maybe…”

  “Hey, look at this!” Ryan’s eyes were wide as he held up a photo. “I haven’t seen this before.”

  Emma stepped in for a closer look. A hazy circular orange object hovered a few feet above a prairie. It appeared both three-dimensional and yet concave, an effect enhanced by what looked like something crawling out of it. As if it were a porthole into… the air.

  “What is that?” she said.

  “No clue, but looks pretty neat, doesn’t it?”

  Emma sighed, gestured across the surface of the workbench. “Well, I guess we should get started…

  “I thought we already did…but what’re we looking for?” Ryan still held the stack of strange photographs.

  “Anything. Anything that might tell us where he went.”

  They spent the next half-hour poking around without knowing what they were looking for – always a hard way to be a good detective. Other than a few notes on a stationary store desktop calendar, Emma didn’t learn much.

  The nagging fear she’d felt for days increased in intensity. She couldn’t escape this feeling that something truly awful had happened to Telly. The only thing missing that would really convince her would be one of her night-visions – as she called them. Basically just dreams, but while they were happening, Emma would have this o
verriding sense of something special, of the dream being a kind of psychic message or a view of something beyond her regular senses. Real ESP stuff. Of course, she tried not to talk about it all that much – even to Ryan – because she didn’t want people to confuse psych-ic with psych-o.

  She wished she could talk to Ryan about it but he’d only give her that look he got whenever she mentioned her premonitions. He always wanted proof. Mom and Dad called him “Doubting Ryan.” His two favorite words were “Prove it.” When Gram had called him the world’s worst skeptic he’d said, “I doubt that.”

  Then, on the floor in a corner, she found a crumpled piece of paper from a small notepad – a reminder from Thursday to do some work for the professor – the last day anybody’d seen or heard from Telly.

  Emma jumped at the sound of a telephone ring. She looked around and saw an old black dial phone squatting on the bench. An equally antique answering machine sat next to it. After the second ring she heard Telly’s voice.

  “Hi, I’m not in. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you Ay-sap.”

  It beeped and then a man’s voice spoke. “Ah, hello, Telly. This is – as you m-must have already deduced – Professor P-polonius. You were supposed to be here at t-two and you are late. I must assume you are on the way.”

  Then a click.

  Ryan looked up from the guts of a laptop computer Telly had field-stripped. Her little brother also loved gadgets and instruments and probably had the makings of a true scientist himself. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  She nodded. “Telly might be headed for the professor’s place.”

  “Maybe we should too.”

  The obvious course of action. Emma had never met the professor but felt she knew him – Telly had talked about him enough. And she knew where he lived.