Definitely Not Kansas (Nocturnia Book 1)

by Thomas Monteleone

  She checked the time on her cell phone: 2:30. Then she checked herself. They’d have to bike through town. She was wearing a Life is Good T-shirt and cargo pants that ended halfway down her calves. The pants were okay, but her T-shirt was kind of tight. Made her look fat. She wasn’t really fat, but she’d added a few pounds during eighth grade. Didn’t know how. She hadn’t been eating more, but the idea of getting a little overweight was starting to bother her.

  She remembered when she and Ryan were really little kids, and they used to huddle under the back porch in the cool shadows on the hottest summer days, scarfing down Sour Patch Kids and Kit-Kat bars. Ugh, just the thought made her gag…

  Forget it, she thought. More important things to worry about.

  She couldn’t fight this sense of urgency… or was it more? Like impending doom, maybe?

  She gestured to Ryan. “Let’s go.”

  2

  By bicycle, the trip to the Professor’s place took about fifteen minutes through downtown Skelton Springs. Emma liked her mid-size Kansas town. She’d never known anyplace else. It had a small-town feel because it depended a lot on the surrounding farms. But McKeen, the local private college, lent it something extra.

  The mid-afternoon traffic was pretty light on this muggy Saturday in June. She noticed big, lumpy clouds piling up in the west. She didn’t want to get caught in a storm. Her red hair frizzed up something terrible when it got wet, making her look like Little Orphan Annie. She’d smeared a fresh coat of sunscreen on her face to prevent freckles. She hated freckles even though Terry Harbaugh, the boy who sat next to her in homeroom, was always telling her how cute they were.

  She shook her head as she rode. Ain’t easy being me.

  Once they cleared Central Avenue, they headed north on Main, which became the county road headed out of town. Emma was glad they didn’t have to pedal far on the two-lane blacktop; it had no shoulder and the cars tended to rip past like they were late for something. Off on the right she spotted a small white farmhouse flanked by alfalfa fields to the north and shin-high corn to the south. After checking the address on the mailbox, she led the way up the long driveway, stopping before the big front porch. Ryan braked hard and scritched his tires in the loose gravel to stop right beside her.

  “Stop showing off,” she said.

  He smiled. “You just wish you could do it.”

  “Cool it, okay? We don’t want this professor guy to think we’re fooling around.”

  Ryan‘s eyes widened as he looked past her. “Isn’t that–?”

  She turned and saw what looked like a Jetta bumper poking out past the corner of the house. The faded “I Brake for Space-Time Anomalies” sticker on it left no doubt who owned it.

  “Telly!”

  Elated, she ran around the corner and found his car parked under a rickety carport. Its thick coating of dust and pollen said it hadn’t been driven in a while. She looked inside: empty. She tried the door handle and a wave of heat hit her as the door swung open. An empty Big Gulp container sat in a cup holder, but the rest of the car was clean – a stark contrast to Telly’s garage quarters.

  Her spirits fell.

  “He’s got to be inside,” Ryan said.

  Emma looked at the house and didn’t know about that. The place looked deserted. She led him up onto the front porch.

  The sticker over the intercom-doorbell said: ANTON POLONIUS, Ph.D. All she knew about him was that he was a teacher in a college once and that Telly thought he was the coolest, smartest guy on Earth. “He could be the next Tesla,” Telly would say. Emma had looked up Tesla and learned he’d invented AC current – the electricity powering every home and appliance in America. A man who’d changed the world – just like Telly hoped to do someday.

  Taking a breath, she pushed a button. After a short pause, a slightly high-pitched voice rasped from the speaker. “Yes? Who is it?”

  “Professor? It’s Emma O’Dell…”

  “Who?”

  “Telly’s sister.”

  “Telly? Where is that b-boy?”

  Her heart sank. He wasn’t here? Then where–?

  “That’s what we’d like to know.”

  “‘We’?”

  “My brother’s here. We–”

  “Listen, I hate shouting though this thing. C-come around to the barn out back so we can talk.”

  Emma said okay. She couldn’t pin down the professor’s strange accent and wondered where he was from.

  Ryan followed her to a big old barn behind the house. Its red paint had faded long ago to a dull russet, but it remained solid-looking, with no lean. Someone had installed new windows and a storm door.

  As they approached, a bad feeling swept over Emma. About what, she wasn’t sure. Telly? Or the man they were about to meet? The foreboding almost made her turn and run. She didn’t dare mention it to Ryan – didn’t want to be other the receiving end of another of his looks – so she pressed on in silence. For Telly.

  The door opened to reveal a man wearing sharply creased dark pants, a black turtleneck, and a pair of reading glasses hanging from a band around his neck. He looked like he was in his forties, but had a leonine mane of silvery hair. Emma’s first impression was a very organized guy with an attention to detail.

  She remembered Telly had said he’d been some sort of theoretical physicist at a university back east, but when he inherited this Kansas farm from his mother, he left his tenured post and came here to continue his “research” in relative solitude. Telly referred to him as “the prof.”

  “Are you sure you are related?” he said with something like a scowl. “You two do not look much like T-Telly at all…”

  Emma couldn’t argue with that. She and Ryan had blue eyes, fair skin, and light hair – his blonde and hers reddish. Telly’s eyes were almost as dark as his black hair, and he’d started shaving when he was around twelve.

  “We can’t help that,” Ryan said.

  The professor gave him a look, then smiled. “No, I guess you cannot. C-come in.”

  Emma wondered about his slight stutter. She’d noticed it on the intercom and in his message on the answering machine too. It certainly contrasted to his formal pronunciation. She watched as Ryan followed him into a large high-ceilinged room – the barn was no longer a farm building, having been converted into something for more unusual pursuits.

  Emma paused, staring in silent wonder at the vast open space that gleamed as if polished. Lots of white laminate and stainless steel. Workstations, rack-mounted electronics, computers and screens, plus an array of instruments and devices she didn’t recognize. A central bench displayed open books, charts, graphs, and diagrams, all aligned in precise stacks, or arranged in geometrically pleasing configurations.

  Emma sensed a subtle familiarity about the place, and knew in an instant that professor Polonius’s laboratory had inspired Telly to create his own over the family garage. But her older brother’s facility lacked such a grand scale of order or organization.

  At the far end of the central workbench, a strange structure demanded Emma’s attention. About seven feet tall, it looked like a doorframe made of polished silver-white steel. Wires and tubing snaked from its vertical posts, connected to an array of unrecognizable devices.

  “So!” he said in that odd accent. “You are Telly’s siblings? I never thought to ask him before, but where does someone get a name like ‘T-Telly?’”

  “It’s really Telford,” Emma replied.

  The professor frowned. “Telford…a f-fascinating name, don’t you think? Quite unusual. I can recall only one other p-person with that name.”

  Emma had never heard or read of anyone with that name. “Really? Who?”

  The professor smiled. “No one you’d know, my dear. Long ago and f-far away.” He seemed to shake off a memory. “So tell me, where did he get a name like T-telford?”

  “From his mother,” Ryan said with obvious sarcasm.

  Filter…she wanted to say.

 
Professor Polonius turned to him. “And your names? If you told me, I c-confess to forgetting already.”

  “Ryan.”

  “Emma.”

  “Nice enough names, I suppose.” The professor sighed. “Where is that boy? When I heard the doorbell I was sure it was him.”

  “You mean ‘he’…not ‘him’,” Ryan blurted, then bit his lip.

  I do not believe it, Emma thought, throwing him her darkest glare.

  The professor stared at him. “D-did… did you just correct me?”

  “Sorry,” Ryan said, reddening.

  “It is very bad manners for a child to c-correct an adult.”

  “He can’t help himself,” Emma said. “He even corrects his teachers.”

  The professor’s frown morphed into a smile. “Do you? Do you r-really? That must make you very popular with your teachers.”

  “Not exactly,” Ryan said in a low voice.

  Emma said, “You have no idea.”

  The professor shrugged. “Well, some teachers do need correcting, and yes…” He began to nod. “Yes, the verb was a form of ‘to be,’ so you are right: I should have said, ‘he.’ I studied physics instead of English, so I suppose I have an excuse, b-but I will thank you to keep on correcting me.”

  Ryan brightened. “Really?”

  “Yes. But if you get too annoying I will be f-forced to use you in one of my experiments.” He smiled as he said it, as if to reassure Ryan that he was joking, but he wasn’t very convincing.

  Emma was surprised to see Ryan warming up to this professor so quickly. He was almost always stand-offish with people until he had a chance to observe them and try to “suss them out” as he liked to say. But he seemed to be lowering his barriers with Polonius.

  All of Emma’s walls remained up, however. She hated even to think it, but… something about the guy bothered her. She couldn’t say if it was his slight accent, or even that weird thick white hair… but Emma was definitely getting a bad vibe.

  Do people still get vibes?

  Emma smiled. Where’d she even get that expression?

  She watched Polonius, who seemed to be staring intently at her brother. Then the professor’s eyes brightened as he pointed to the corner of the card deck protruding from the pocket of Ryan’s jeans. “A g-gambler?”

  Ryan brightened as he pulled it out and fanned it open. “Not really. Pick a card, any card.”

  “Ryan!” She said it softly, but she wanted to scream.

  “Let him,” the professor said, picking a card and looking at it.

  “Now,” said Ryan, placing the deck on the table, “remember that card and place it on top of the deck.”

  The professor complied.

  “Now cut the deck.”

  Never mind screaming, Emma wanted to throttle him.

  After the professor cut the deck, Ryan began sorting through it, saying, “Keep thinking about that card and I’ll read your mind and pick it out.”

  “I think you’ll find it in front of the four of spades,” the professor said.

  Ryan grimaced and lowered the deck. “You know?”

  “An old t-trick. I learned it long ago when I was about your age. I have performed it many times.” He ruffled Ryan’s hair. “You’re a fascinating little boy.”

  Ryan seemed to like that, but he said, “Not so little.”

  “Fascinating?” Emma said. “You’re kidding.”

  “Not at all. He reminds me of me.”

  Emma couldn’t help rolling her eyes. Oh, brother.

  “Anyway, Telly told me a few interesting things about you two, but he never m-mentioned magic.”

  Please don’t mention Houdini, she thought.

  Ryan could go on and on about his hero, Harry Houdini. And then she realized what the professor had said and was instantly wary.

  “‘Interesting things’ like…?”

  “How both of you d-developed appendicitis at the same time.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly. “We did.”

  Why had he told this weirdo that? Five years ago on a family camping trip – Emma hated camping – they’d both doubled over with pain. A surgeon camping nearby made the diagnosis and rushed them to his clinic where he operated on both of them. Saved their lives… or so they’d been told.

  The professor’s intent gaze shifted back and forth between her and Ryan. “You were lucky. Everything all right?”

  This was kind of creepy. “I guess. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, just scientific curiosity. I can imagine identical twins having appendicitis at the same time, but not simple siblings…” He smiled. “B-but we are way off topic. Where is that brother of yours?”

  “Don’t you know? His car’s parked out front!”

  The professor looked confused, then a bit embarrassed. “Is it? How strange. Although I must confess I have not been out that way since last Thursday. I don’t get out much.”

  “That was the last time anyone saw him,” said Ryan. “I guess you could say he’s missing.”

  “Most unusual that his car is still here.” Professor Polonius wrung his hands as he began pacing. “M-most unusual.”

  “You saw him last Thursday?” said Emma.

  The professor nodded. “Yes, he was helping me set up one of my projects. I had a few errands to run and when I got back, he was gone… I figured he had headed home. And I never thought to see if his car was still here.”

  Ryan looked around. “Did he finish his work?”

  Professor Polonius stopped pacing and stared off into space before finally responding.

  “What? Oh, yes…he seemed to have… finished all right.”

  Okay, thought Emma. Definitely something strange about the way Polonius said that…

  Ryan stepped closer and looked at the odd doorframe.

  “What’s this thing do, anyway?”

  “Nothing, unfortunately. It was supposed to be a doorway.”

  “Where to?”

  “Well, now, that is the m-million-dollar question, is it not?”

  Without warning, Ryan stepped through. The professor reached out to grab him, but missed. Ryan turned and regarded him through the opening.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” The professor looked flustered and frustrated. “N-nothing at all.”

  As Ryan stepped back through, a terrible sadness plowed into her like a freight train.

  She blurted, “Oh, jeez, I just have this feeling something terrible has happened to Telly.”

  Ryan looked at Professor Polonius. “She thinks she has… you know, premonitions, and this connection with Telly.”

  Polonius looked confused. “You mean they are close?”

  “More than that,” said Emma. She glared at Ryan, irritated that he would mention something like that to an odd duck like the professor. Now she had to try to explain it. “I don’t think I ever noticed the connection until earlier this week when suddenly it wasn’t there.”

  Ryan wore his Mr. Skeptic expression. “You didn’t notice it when it was there, but missed it when it wasn’t. Now that’s weird.”

  “Maybe not,” said the professor, raking a hand through his silvery hair. “I read that sometime back in the eighteen hundreds Niagara Falls stopped, well… stopped falling when an ice jam blocked the river upstream.”

  Emma put her hands on her hips and looked at him. “What’s that got to do with–?”

  “When the falls stopped, the whole town woke up with a feeling that something was wrong. Then they realized: the roar of the falls had ceased – the silence had awakened them. They had listened to that roar day in and day out for so long that their brains filtered out the sound. B-but when it stopped…”

  Emma felt a lump in her throat. The professor was weird and creepy, but he got it.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Telly…he’s stopped! He’s not here.”

  When she said that, Professor Polonius glanced furtively at the doorframe again, but said nothing. He turned back to th
em, rubbing his jaw.

  “I did find something in the printer… the printer Telly always used.” He shuffled through the papers on the table. “Ah. Here it is.”

  Ryan reached out. “Can I see it?”

  “Be my guest, lad.”

  Emma peered over his shoulder at the line of digits. “Doesn’t make much sense. Is it a code or something?”

  Ryan continued to stare. “Hmm… I have no idea.”

  The professor said, “Well, maybe we can figure this out together. This last one – looks like a time… like the twenty-four-hour clock. See?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Ryan. “I think you’re right.”

  Emma saw 16:22 on the sheet. She subtracted twelve and… “That would be four twenty-two.”

  Polonius nodded. “And look. If that is the time, this line could be a date. I d-do believe that’s today’s date.”

  “What about the rest of the numbers?” Ryan pointed at the last line.

  “Could those other numbers be… m-map coordinates?” the professor said. “I hadn’t really looked all that closely at it till now.”

  Emma studied the odd man. Was he telling the truth?

  “Like latitude and longitude!” Ryan cried. “Do you think they’re from Telly?”

  The professor shrugged. “Who can say? As I said, Telly uses that printer all the time.”

  Excited now, Ryan pointed toward the computer. “We can check them on Google Earth!”

  After a few minutes of tapping on the keyboard, Professor Polonius turned and smiled at Ryan, then addressed Emma: “You have a very smart little brother, Emma!”

  Emma was well aware of the professor’s major contribution, but had to give Ryan some grudging respect.

  “Okay, but what’s it mean?”

  The professor pointed at the image on the monitor. “The numbers represent a point about three miles north of here – looks like an open field from the s-satellite image.”

  “That is too weird,” said Emma.

  “What time is it?” Ryan said.

  Emma checked her phone. “Quarter to four.”

  His eyes widened. “We should go take a look.”

  “Maybe you should,” said Polonius.

  “You mean now?”

  Ryan grinned. “Of course.”