The lights inside the garage flickered twice and then went out completely. The shop radio cut out as well, but not before losing its signal for a moment first, the harsh white noise giving way to a silence broken only by the hysterical wails of poor Mrs. Crandall, who was still on her knees on the sidewalk.
Seeing her out there seemed to trigger something in Uncle Dean’s brain, a hardwired instinct to help. He started toward the door, with Pete following close on his heels.
“Just wait!” I told them both. I was worried that it wasn’t safe yet, that the worst might still be to come, even though the sky was already clearing, the smoky darkness moving off with all the stealth and mystery of a town-sized UFO.
They both ignored me and continued out onto the street, where several others were already gathering, their eyes wary and their movements slow, like they’d just crawled out from a bunker in the midst of a war, the prospect of further bombing hanging over their heads.
I only made it as far as the front door myself before deciding to wait inside, at least for a moment or two, just in case. I tried to tell myself that I was the smart one, that I was only being sensible, but when it came right down to it, I was just scared.
I watched as Pete and Uncle Dean broke away from each other, with Pete heading off for a closer look at the old-man-turned-statue while Uncle Dean went to help Mrs. Crandall back to her feet. Uncle Dean was quickly joined by the large-bottomed Spandex sisters, who owned the hair salon down the street. Their last name wasn’t actually Spandex, but that’s what we called them since that’s what they always wore. Pete usually made a rude joke whenever he saw them, but today his head didn’t even turn in their direction. He was mesmerized.
“It’s not possible,” someone in the growing crowd said. “It can’t be.”
Clearly it was, though. The longtime owner of the general store had turned to glass.
I jumped as the radio behind me crackled back to life. The lights came back on as well, which made me feel a little bit better. Whatever had happened was officially done happening… for the time being at any rate.
I screwed up my courage and joined all the other brave people out on the street, most of whom had formed a circle around Mr. Crandall. I pushed my way into the heart of it to try to find Pete, who of course had moved in closer than everyone else, a slave to his curiosity.
“Nobody touch him!” said a woman to my right, as if Mr. Crandall’s condition might be contagious, which, for all we knew, it was.
Everyone backed off a step. Everyone except Pete. Ignoring both the warning and plain common sense, he stepped right up and reached out his hand to tap Mr. Crandall square on the chin. It made a firm sound, like a fingernail against granite.
“My God,” said a bearded man in a John Deere baseball cap. “What if he’s still in there? Trapped? He’ll suffocate to death!”
“I don’t think it’s like a shell,” Pete said. Mr. Crandall’s mouth was still open, and you could clearly tell that it was black on the inside, too. I wasn’t tall enough to see if the darkness went all the way down, but the bearded man was. He stepped forward for a closer look.
“I think he’s solid through and through,” he told the crowd.
The whole street was buzzing. The few people who had actually witnessed the transformation were now trying to explain what had happened to those who had shown up too late to see it. Many of them were talking over each other, which only resulted in shouting.
I was standing close enough now to see that every small detail was retained in the glass, from the lines on Mr. Crandall’s knuckles to the hair in his ears, which I’d noticed one day in church a few months before and hadn’t been able to stop noticing ever since, mostly because it grossed me out a little. Mr. Crandall wasn’t just a frozen semblance of his former self—he was a flawless replica, as dark as onyx but scarily real.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at his eyes, and instead turned my gaze to the Polaroid photo, which I’d belatedly noticed he was still holding above his head. It seemed important up there, like a small flag or a sign of protest. I decided that I wanted to see it. I didn’t know why, exactly; I just wanted to.
A small jump and the photo was mine. I only had time for a quick look before Uncle Dean appeared to pull me out of the crowd, but I was surprised to see that it hadn’t finished developing yet. There was still a big dark blur right in the middle.
“C’mon,” Uncle Dean said as I slipped the photo into my back pocket. “Let’s get you boys back inside before your dad shows up.” With one hand on my shoulder and the other on Pete’s, he guided us toward his garage.
FOUR
According to Uncle Dean’s shop radio, the skies were going dark all over. From New York to New Mexico, Cairo to Japan, black waves were sweeping the globe, leaving swaths of solid glass victims in their wake. Mr. Crandall wasn’t alone.
If I hadn’t already seen it with my own eyes, I probably wouldn’t have believed what I was hearing. I would have written it off as some sort of silly mistake or misunderstanding, like when people started spreading fake news after Orson Welles read that War of the Worlds book over the radio. But as impossible as it seemed, it was happening. Pete and I really had just finished watching five strong men struggle to tip Mr. Crandall onto a trolley and cart him inside his general store.
It was a scene too strange for words.
“Must be heavy” was Pete’s only comment on the effort, as if the men were moving a deep freeze instead of a person.
I wondered where they would put him. In the back with the stock? Maybe near the front entrance? I imagined him standing there, his hand raised as if to welcome incoming customers, like an obsidian Walmart greeter. Definitely too strange for words.
By the time Dad showed up, Pete and I had left the window for a pair of rickety old stools by the Coke machine. We wanted to be closer to the radio, which continued to spill bad news. A radiographer in Chicago had turned to glass while performing an X-ray; a tailor in Montreal fell victim while taking measurements for a tuxedo. It didn’t seem to matter where you were when the darkness passed; inside or out, there was nowhere to hide.
“It’s a bloody circus out there,” said Dad as he entered the shop. The street was still abuzz over what had happened.
Pete hopped off his stool. “Did you see him? Old man Crandall?”
Dad narrowed his eyes. “George? No, why?”
“Please tell me you’ve been listening to the radio,” said Uncle Dean.
Dad shook his head. “Signal was mostly static outside of town, so I turned it off. What’s going on?” The fact that the sky had cleared had obviously left him with the impression that everything was okay.
Pete immediately launched into a breathless account of what had happened, but it was obvious that Dad was having trouble trying to follow. “Whoa,” he kept saying. “Just wait. What?”
“I think you better see for yourself,” Uncle Dean finally said. “C’mon.”
Pete and I tried to follow, but Uncle Dean told us to wait behind and listen for any updates.
“I bet it’s aliens,” Pete said after they were gone. “Abductions.”
“Why would they turn to glass if they got abducted?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Maybe the aliens can’t move matter without replacing it with something else. It would just be empty space otherwise. I think I saw something like that in a comic book once.”
I knew it had to have come from a comic book because Pete didn’t have the imagination to dream it up on his own. My brother was pretty smart, and way better at sports than I was, but he wasn’t exactly a creative thinker. Still, I couldn’t really argue that it wasn’t aliens.
I started thinking then about all the books that I’d read, too, from ones about demons and monsters to others about interdimensional beings and time-traveling bounty hunters. A thousand fantastical ideas suddenly didn’t seem that fantastic.
It wasn’t long before Dad and Uncle Dean returned, Dad now we
aring an expression unlike any I’d ever seen on his face before—sort of a mix of shock and resolve, like part of him couldn’t quite believe what he had just seen, while another part had already processed it all and moved on, its focus shifting to being a dad.
“I think that’s enough news for now,” he said to me and Pete as we both watched him from our stools. “It’s time we got home. Your mom’s probably worried sick.”
“Do you think the power went out at home, too?” I asked, as if that was the one thing we should be worried about.
“Hard to say” was Dad’s only reply. “C’mon now, let’s go.”
“Is Uncle Dean coming with us?” asked Pete.
“He’ll come by later,” Dad replied for his brother, as if the two of them had already talked it over, which maybe they had. “He’s going to keep an eye on things around here for a little while first.”
What things? I almost asked, but the answer was obvious: Mr. Crandall. Uncle Dean was going to stick around just in case something changed or, perhaps, changed back.
We got in the truck and left for home. As always, Pete had to sit shotgun because the backseat of the truck was “too cramped” and his legs “too long.” It wasn’t true, but I didn’t argue about it.
“Do you think it could be aliens?” I asked Dad. I was still mulling over what Pete had said earlier.
“I sincerely doubt it, Ben,” he answered.
“But you don’t know that,” said Pete. “That black cloud could’ve been a UFO.”
“It could have been a lot of things,” Dad replied.
“Like what?” Pete pressed. When it came to Dad, Pete was always pressing. Mom said they liked to push each other’s buttons.
“Maybe something atmospheric,” I chimed in, hoping to stop them from arguing before they got started. “Like the aurora borealis, only instead of there being light in the darkness, there’s darkness in the light.”
“That’s stupid,” Pete said.
“No it’s not,” I countered. “It’s more scientific than just blaming aliens.”
Pete scoffed. “Scientific? You just made it up!”
“All right,” said Dad, “that’s enough. How about we leave the speculating to the experts?”
I couldn’t see from the backseat, but I’m guessing that Pete rolled his eyes. He definitely shook his head. He reached forward then to turn on the radio, but it still wasn’t coming in very good, probably because the antenna was snapped off halfway up. It had been that way for a while. Pete and I suspected that the Messam twins had done it, but we had no proof.
Mom came charging out of the house before Dad even got the truck into park.
“Hurry up!” she said. “Get inside!”
I almost expected her to say, The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
“Easy now,” said Dad, getting out. “Let’s everybody just stay calm.”
“Calm?” said Mom. “People are turning to glass, Logan! Glass!”
“We don’t know that it’s glass,” said Dad, as if the exact nature of the substance mattered at all. He was just trying to be reasonable, I knew. Trying to take it all in stride. I was glad for it, too—it made me feel less worried.
The TV was already on once we got inside. Normally Mom didn’t watch it much, preferring to watch the birds at the feeders out in the yard, but I guess with circumstances being what they were, she felt the birds could wait. There was a big BREAKING NEWS rectangle covering a third of the screen.
It occurred to me as we all gathered around that it was the first time in a long time that we’d watched TV as a whole family, and it was weird, too, because none of us were sitting down. We watched and listened standing up, as if we might suddenly need to run.
FIVE
The reporters kept on reporting, although it soon became clear that none of them knew anything more than the guy on the radio had back at Uncle Dean’s garage. It was just the same stuff happening in different places, dark skies and strange transformations, and a growing worry that this might only be the beginning.
“I don’t understand,” said Mom. “How can they not know anything yet? Surely there must be something they could measure or evaluate. Something in the air.”
“Tests take time,” said Dad.
We’d been home for about an hour, most of which Mom had spent on the phone, trying to get in touch with long-distance relatives (except for Uncle Dean, none of our family lived within a hundred miles). She couldn’t get through, though. The lines were all overloaded.
“This is stupid,” said Pete, abandoning the couch and the TV for the corner nook in the dining room where our family computer was set up. He was obviously hoping to dig some answers up online. I hadn’t told him that when I tried to boot the computer up the day before, the screen had gone blue and stayed that way.
“What the heck is going on?” said Pete as he turned the monitor on and off.
“Something wrong?” I asked, deciding just to play stupid. It wasn’t as if I had done anything to break it, but if I said something now, Pete would blame me.
He ignored me and tried restarting it, but it was no use; the screen remained a solid blue. He swore, and Dad replied, “Hey! Watch your language.”
“It’s not working!” said Pete.
“Yeah, well, cursing’s not going to fix it.”
“Can you look at it?” Pete asked him.
“I don’t see what the point would be,” said Dad. “You know more about that thing than I do.”
Pete gave a frustrated sigh. “What about Uncle Dean?”
“I’ll ask him later,” said Dad. “Let’s not worry about it just this minute.”
Mom tried the phone again but still couldn’t get through. She started pacing. “I feel like I should be doing something,” she finally said. “Like canning food or digging out all our candles.”
Dad shrugged. “Might not be a bad idea. The candles, at least. Can’t be too prepared.”
“Prepared for what?” asked Pete. “Is the power gonna go out again?”
“Hard to say,” Dad replied. “But there’s no harm in taking a few precautions. Speaking of which, why don’t you go out to the garage and get the camping lantern. It should be on a hook near the rafters. Grab the kerosene off the shelf as well.”
Pete started to grumble—Pete hardly did anything without grumbling—but then Mom said, “Hold on. I don’t think we should be going outside. Not yet.”
Our garage faced the alley and was separate from the house. The distance between them was only fifteen feet. Going from one to the other and back again was barely going outside at all.
“It’ll be fine,” Dad told Pete. “Go on.”
Mom gave him a stern look. She hated being overruled.
“People are turning to glass inside their basements, Jane,” Dad reminded her. “I don’t think it matters where they are. Besides, the sky is clear and blue right now. Nothing to fear.”
“I suppose,” she replied with a sigh.
“What should I do?” I asked.
“Why don’t you go fill the feeders?” Dad said. “I’m sure the birds would appreciate it.”
I suspected it wasn’t really the birds he was thinking about. More likely he just wanted to talk to Mom alone for a minute, on account of her anxiety. It could get pretty bad sometimes. Bad enough that she had to take pills for it.
I wasn’t supposed to know about that—the pills, I mean—but I did. I found them in the medicine cabinet one day after falling off my bike and scraping my elbow. I was just looking for a Band-Aid and there it was, a little orange bottle full of capsules. Big capsules. When I asked Dad about them, he told me they were just antibiotics and not to worry about it, which I probably wouldn’t have if he hadn’t hesitated in a weird way before answering me. It was just for a second, but I noticed, so I memorized the name on the bottle (alprazolam), and the next time I was at the library I looked it up. Dad had lied to me.
At first I was mad, but as I read about an
xiety I understood. He just didn’t want me losing sleep over Mom was all. I never told Pete about it, partly because I didn’t want him worrying either, but also because I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut.
“I already topped up the nuts and seeds today,” Mom told me. “But I guess you can refill the suet cages.”
Certain birds preferred different types of food, so we always had a good variety for them to choose from. Blue jays, for instance, were particularly fond of peanuts—shelled or otherwise—while suet blocks were a favorite among downy and hairy woodpeckers.
I grabbed two packages and went outside. As always, the birds scattered at my approach, and then returned as soon as the suet cages were full and my back was to them. Birds fear eye contact. That’s why some butterflies have spots that look like eyes on their wings. The birds would eat them if they didn’t.
I walked over to the bench by the flower bed and sat there. Mom always watched the birds from here, binoculars in her hands and a small notebook beside her, for jotting down “field notes.” The bench was far enough away from the feeders so as not to make the birds nervous.
I watched as a dozen or so of our resident house sparrows flew back and forth from the suet to the short bush that ran alongside the fence. There were two older males with big dark bibs and a bunch of females that were almost identical, the only exception being one that had a pair of pure white wings instead of the usual brown. Mom called this her special bird, her “angel sparrow,” but in truth the bird was just partially leucistic, which meant that it had a pigmentation problem. The bird’s wings weren’t the only thing that set it apart, though; it was also less wary than the other sparrows and would sometimes stay on a branch even after the rest of its flock flew off, its little head tilted in a way that made you wonder if the bird was curious, or maybe even interested in what we were up to.
Pete came out of the garage with not only the lantern and kerosene that Dad had asked for but also an old black radio about the size of a lunch box. I immediately recognized it from a camping trip we’d taken a few years before. Dad had brought it along. I think it was his from when he was younger. I couldn’t remember having seen it since, though.
The Absence of Sparrows Page 2