“Dead possum, maybe—under the window, like last year,” said Winston, but the smell didn’t catch him the way it caught Thaddy.
Thaddy clung to this explanation, and climbed into bed. Winston tucked his brother in, making sure to touch only the blanket.
“Thank you, ’Stone,” said Thaddy. “And I’m sorry about what I said before about you being too small and all. I think it’s great that you’re small.”
“Quit talking about that!”
Winston didn’t want anyone talking about it ever. The very first sign of trouble came about three years ago. Not only had it become apparent that he had stopped growing, but something else just as alarming began to happen. It was the way Winston’s touch could make a person tingle. Carpet shocks, his parents called it. Didn’t think much of it. Then they had taken Winston to the doctor for a simple flu shot. The doctor noticed his height was half an inch shorter than a year before. Didn’t think much of it. Must have been a mistake. A few months later, they knew it was no mistake. He was a whole inch shorter. Four doctors later, and they still didn’t know what to make of it—and none of the doctors would acknowledge the strange effect Winston’s touch was beginning to have on people. Vitamin deficiency, they said. Genetic fluke. One doctor named Guthry wanted to called it Guthry’s Syndrome and tried to send him up to the Mayo Clinic where they’d study him like a rat.
So they stopped seeing doctors.
It was the crazy old sisters down the road who called it “Growing Down.” They called Winston a witch child, and it made his dad furious. Mr. Pell had been a man of science—a pharmacist—but more than that—a scholar. He was an educated man with educated friends; he had moved back from the city to set an example and help the small town he grew up in. Those two old sisters were everything he hated about growing up black, poor, and ignorant in the Deep South.
When Winston’s dad died of a heart attack, the sisters spread word that it was Winston who did it, by putting “a stunt” on his daddy’s heart, the way he had put a stunt on their little vegetable garden, where nothing grew larger than the size of a finger. For all Winston knew those toothless old crones were right.
Of course, people didn’t really believe he had killed his father, but the thought was always there—and by then, Winston’s touch could numb people’s arms, making them tingly, like when your foot fell asleep. The family had stopped going to church soon after, because Baptists saw God or the Devil in everything. It wasn’t exactly comfortable being the center of attention on Sunday. Still, Winston often wondered . . . if he could stunt vegetables, numb flesh, and grow backward, was that science or magic? God or the Devil?
Winston finished tucking Thaddy in nice and tight, just the way he liked it.
“The window, ’Stone. Gotta shut out the rotten possum smell.”
Winston went to the window, and remembered Thaddy’s shirt hanging in the branch, just out of his limited reach. Before closing the window, Winston leaned out into the night to get the shirt . . .
. . . and the monster, sitting in the tree limbs beside the window, hissed like a python.
Winston screamed!
The hideous thing was less than a foot from Winston’s face. It was going to kill him. It was going to rip his guts out like Thaddy said. Why, of all times, did Thaddy have to be right about something now!
It leapt deeper into the tree, and the tree limbs clattered like bones as the thing hurried to the ground.
“It’s Tailybone!” screamed Thaddy, half out of his little fool mind. “It’s Tailybone!” And he screamed for their mother.
Winston pushed himself back into the room and fell to the floor. A light came on downstairs.
“Thaddy, are you all right? What’s going on up there?” Winston headed downstairs with the baseball bat, and Thaddy fell in line close behind, still whimpering about Tailybone.
“Shut up!” Winston commanded his brother. “There ain’t no such thing, there never was and there never will be!”
“Then what was that?”
“I don’t know, but it wasn’t no Tailybone. It was a someone, not a something,” Winston was sure of that now, because the face of the beast had something very human about it. Maybe it was something that escaped from someplace. A carnival. An asylum.
“Maybe it’s an alien, maybe,” said Thad. “It was so UGLY!”
“What was so ugly?” shouted Mama. They passed her room downstairs, on the way out the back door. She was already scrambling out of her bed and into her wheelchair.
“Don’t worry, Mama, I’ll check it out.”
“Don’t you go out there, Winston, if it’s a prowler, we’ll call the sheriff!”
But nothing she could say would stop him now. At first he had been terrified, but the terror was quickly boiling itself into full-blown fury. He had his fighting fury up, and no one messed with ’Stone Pell when he was in a fighting frenzy.
The kids around town knew that you didn’t fight that little freak ’Stone, unless you wanted to be laid out by the count of five—because now Winston’s touch was more than just numbing. Every punch Winston threw was guaranteed to paralyze whatever it hit. First your right arm would go senseless, then your left, then your chin, then your gut, and before long you were lying on the ground, your body limp and useless for hours—maybe even till morning. Maybe longer.
It left Winston with no one to fight, and that was a horrible thing, because lately all Winston wanted to do was fight.
Winston and Thad raced through Mama’s stunted garden, hopped the fence, and followed the thing out into the pasture at the edge of a field ripe with cotton.
The moon was on the rise now, making the cotton shine like snow. There was enough light to see the shape of the thing as it lumbered behind the octopus tree, an ancient live oak with a dozen limbs perfect for climbing. The thing tried to get up into the tree, but Winston swung the bat. He missed, but the creature slipped on some Spanish moss, and fell to the ground. Thaddy pushed at it once, and then ran to hide behind the octopus tree.
“Paralyze it, ’Stone,” yelled Thad. “Paralyze it good!”
Winston threw the bat down and cornered it against a hedge thick with sharp thorns. He moved in for hand-to-hand combat.
The beast wasn’t as big as he had thought—but it was certainly bigger than he was. Winston dove on the thing, fists flying. It struggled, and Winston grabbed onto its arms—but the thing pulled away, and they both fell over the fence into the cotton. He couldn’t paralyze it, no matter how hard he tried. All he could do was fight it, and so Winston and the beast rolled in the cotton, fighting one another, until the beast spoke.
“Stop it,” it screamed in a voice that was wet and raspy, but still not evil enough for a nightmare beast. “Or I’m really gonna have to beat you silly!”
The thing threw Winston off, and he landed hard against a fence post with a thud.
By now Thaddy was scratching his arm—the one that had touched the thing.
“Why aren’t you paralyzed yet?” Winston demanded. “What the hell are you?”
“I’m a freak,” it said. “I’m a freak like you.”
Winston took a good look at its face. It was pocked and cratered, like the face of the moon—full of peeling sores and swelling boils, as if it had been bathing in nuclear waste. It was what Winston imagined leprosy might be like—only worse.
That’s when Thaddy made an amazing observation.
“I think it might be a girl,” he said.
A girl? Winston regarded the grotesque face. It was hard enough for Winston to figure what color its skin was, much less its sex. The straight blond hair gave away that it was white, but the fact that the hair was short and matted didn’t reveal what sex it was, if any.
“Are you a boy or a girl?” demanded Winston.
“A girl,” it said, disgusted.
By now, Thaddy was scratching his arm like crazy.
“What did you do to him?”
The she-thing smiled. “He
shouldn’t have touched me. Guess I gave him cooties.”
Thaddy looked at Winston and the pizza-faced girl in horror, as if to say You mean there really is such a thing as cooties? He turned and ran back to the house, screaming for Mama.
“He’ll get a rash on his arm,” said the girl. “Probably come down with a bad fever for a week or so, but then it’ll go away . . . he shouldn’t have touched me.”
“Winston?” called his mother from the porch. “What’s going on out there?”
“Just some girl, Mama,” said Winston. “Thaddy fell in some poison ivy—better tend to him.” This was far easier than trying to explain to her the truth.
When his mother had rolled back into the house, the girl-thing told Winston her name was Tory, short for Victoria.
“What’s wrong with you?” Winston asked Tory.
“Acne,” she said. “Ain’t you ever seen acne before?”
Winston looked closely. If this was acne, it was acne gone mad. There was a human being down there, but it was hidden far beneath an oily layer of zits built on zits. If you spread all those blemishes across ten faces, each face would still be painful to look at.
“You’re damn ugly,” observed Winston.
“Gee, thanks for noticing, Mighty Mouse. It just so happens that I know who you are. I’ve been watching you ever since my aunt and me moved here last month. Are you really a witch midget? A devil-dwarf?”
“Go to hell!” shouted Winston, and he leapt at her. So what if she was a girl? No one called him things like that.
They rolled and fought, and even though Winston wasn’t really winning, it felt good. It felt wonderful to actually have someone to fight who didn’t fall to the ground the second he touched them.
“You possum-rot pus-head,” shouted Winston.
“You pin-headed voodoo troll!” shouted Tory.
“Slime-drippin’ cesspool explosion!”
“Baby-brained diaper butt!”
“Fusion-face!”
“Shrunken head!’
“Elephant girl!”
Tory delivered a punch to the nose that was right on the mark. It hurt pretty bad, and Winston had to stagger off, collapsing by the fence.
“Why can’t I paralyze you?” he asked weakly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you get sick when I touch you?”
They looked at each other like boxers in separate corners.
“Sorry I hit you so hard,” said Tory. “It’s just that the elephant girl thing is a sore spot. It’s what they used to call me when I lived in Florida.”
“Where’d you live, the Everglades?” jabbed Winston. “Are you a swamp thing?”
Tory didn’t answer. Even in the dim light Winston could see her puffy eyes filling with tears.
“Okay,” said Winston. “Truce?”
“Truce,” echoed Tory, rubbing the tears from her eyes before they had a chance to fall. Tears would probably make her face sting, thought Winston.
“You always go looking in people’s windows at night, scarin’ ’em half to death?” he asked, wiping his bloody nose.
“Sun’s bad for my delicate complexion,” said Tory, “so I do all my exploring at night. People don’t see me that way. Suits me just fine.”
“Does your face . . . hurt?”
“All the time.” She leaned a bit closer to him, whispering. “Is it true you’re growing backward?”
“What do you care?” snapped Winston.
“I came looking for you because I heard what people said about you. I wanted you to touch my face . . . paralyze it so I couldn’t feel it at all, and maybe it would stop hurting.”
Winston shook his head. “But you don’t paralyze like the others . . . . Why?”
Just then their faces were lit by a light in the sky, shining brighter than the crescent moon. The cotton around them glowed green for a moment and then pink. At first Winston took it to be the sheriff’s spotlight, but the color was wrong—and it was too high up.
They stood up to get a better look. It was an uneven ball of light, maybe a fourth the size of the moon. It hurt their eyes to look at it.
Winston backed up to a fence post, leaning on it for balance. The light had triggered something inside of him, and he thought he might pass out. All at once, his brain was firing like crazy, and he was filled with an overpowering sense of wonder and confusion, as if all his life he had been sleeping and was just waking up. But of all the confused feelings and thoughts that rocketed through his head, the most overwhelming feeling of all was the sense that this light in the sky, whatever it was, was meant for him.
“It’s incredible,” said Tory. “I’ve never . . . felt anything like it.”
Winston looked over at Tory and could see in her rapid breathing and wonder-filled eyes that she was hit by the same devastating wave of emotion that he felt. She had the same revelation that this odd light in the sky did not just hit their eyes, it ignited their souls.
It made Winston furious!
Whatever that light was, it was for him and him alone. He didn’t want to have to share such a special thing with this hideous girl beside him. It would mean that they didn’t meet tonight by accident—they were drawn together—somehow bound like soul mates. Winston found the thought unbearable.
“I . . . know you, don’t I? asked Tory. “We’re the same age, you and me!” She said it with such excitement, it made Winston cringe.
“We might both be freaks,” growled Winston, “but I ain’t nothin’ like you! We got nothin’ in common, do you hear me?!”
It was then that Winston noticed the noise. It had been growing all around both of them since the light had appeared in the sky, and now its volume grew and multiplied until it buzzed in the brush like an air-raid siren. Winston knew right then that the sound was aimed at the two of them, and no one else in all of Alabama—and he knew that it was a sign he could not deny. The sound was nature itself, screaming out to tell him that this torturously ugly girl was more his sister than anyone born to his family. More like him than anyone he had known.
“What is it?” asked Tory, holding her ears. Winston tried to squeeze out the sound as well, but couldn’t.
“Crickets,” answered Winston. “Millions of ’em.”
3. A PLANETOID, THE FULL MOON, AND THE SCORPION STAR
* * *
EARLIER THAT SAME DAY, AND A THOUSAND MILES NORTHEAST, the south fork of eastern Long Island was set upon by an unseasonably warm fog. It brooded dense and round on the weather maps like a gray cataract—an unseeing eye surrounded by cold, clear skies. Shrouded in the center of the fog stood Hampton Bays High School, where things had been normal until third period. That’s when the chase began for Lourdes Hidalgo.
It started in the science lab, and the chase spread through the school as Lourdes tried to escape from the teachers who chased her. She had lost them by ducking into a broom closet, and now she descended the south stairwell, hoping that everyone would be thrown off track just long enough for her to burst out into the foggy October and freedom.
As Lourdes lumbered down the worn metal stairs of the old school, the stairs rang out in dull, heavy tolls, like an ancient mission bell. The bolts creaked, and the steel steps themselves seemed like cardboard, ready to give way under her immense weight.
Lourdes, however, had grown used to that. She was used to chairs buckling beneath her when she sat. She was used to the way her hips would brush past both sides of a door frame when she entered a room, as if the entire room was a tight pair of pants she was trying to squeeze her way into. But she would never get used to the cruel teasing.
Now Lourdes was bounding down the metal stairs, two steps at a time, running from teachers, the guidance counselor, and the principal. Ralphy Sherman had deserved what Lourdes had done to him, and so she fought back her tears, and fought the remorse that was trying to take hold of her.
Ralphy had been whispering lies about Lourdes in science lab, as if he himself believed
they were true. Did you hear that Lourdes was offered ten grand to join the circus? Did you hear that Lourdes donates fat to the Southampton Candle Factory? Did you hear they found some loose change and a TV remote in Lourdes’s belly button? Lourdes tried to control herself. She bit her tongue and gritted her teeth, but there’s only so much abuse a person can take. She wanted to hurt him as much as he hurt her—as much as they all hurt her, and so she pushed Ralphy up against the wall, held her hand firmly on his chest, and felt his chest begin to crush inward. Ralphy tried to scream, but couldn’t. His face turned red, purple, then blue. By then the teacher had taken notice and come running, so Lourdes stepped away from the limp blue kid, and he fell to the floor. Lourdes ran.
Now, as she lumbered down the stairs, she cursed the steps and the way they rang out every time her bursting orthopedic shoes hit them.
It was at the first floor landing that Lourdes encountered Mrs. Conroy, the principal of Hampton Bays High.
“Hold it right there, Lourdes.” She stood ten steps beneath Lourdes, and her voice was well trained to wield power—power enough to stop the grossly obese girl in her tracks. Lourdes swayed just a bit, and the steps creaked like the hinges of a rusty door. There wasn’t any sympathy from anyone in school this year—not even the principal. It was as if sympathy and understanding were limited to a certain waist size, and if a person grew beyond that limit, they were fair game for all forms of cruelty.
“You are coming to the office,” said Mrs. Conroy, “and we’re calling your parents. What you’ve done is very serious, do you understand?”
“Of course I understand,” said Lourdes. “I’m fat, not stupid.” Her voice was thick and seemed to be wrapped within heavy, wet layers of cotton. When Lourdes spoke, it sounded as if she was shouting from inside the belly of a whale.
“I didn’t kill him, did I?” asked Lourdes.
“No,” said Mrs. Conroy, “but you could have.”
Lourdes was relieved and disappointed at the same time.
“This school has had about enough of you,” growled Conroy.
“Does that mean I’m expelled?”