And then there was silence.
After a long moment—when it was finally clear that no one else was going to come through the Gate—the grey man dared to breathe again.
I did my job. Now the Shadows know the truth. They’ll decide how to handle this mess.
It wasn’t a reassuring thought.
1
MANASSAS
VIRGINIA
TOMMY?”
No answer.
I pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped into the house. The interior was gloomy, not at all what you’d expect on a summer afternoon. It took me a few seconds to register that all the curtains had been drawn shut.
I called for my brother again. “Tommy?”
Still no answer.
On a normal day, that wouldn’t have worried me. My little brother generally spent more time in imaginary worlds than in the real one, and I strongly suspected that his “chest cold” earlier that day had more to do with a World of Warcraft game taking place during school hours than anything rooted in biological causes. He was probably hooked up to his computer right now, ear buds blasting game feed straight into his brain, and wasn’t even aware that I had come home.
But.
I locked the door behind me—careful to include the deadbolt—and as I pushed a strand of wet brown hair back from my face (next time check the weather report before biking to school!) all I could think about was the disturbing text message he’d sent me earlier in the day. Doubly disturbing since it had arrived while I was in the middle of a trig test, and I hadn’t been able to read it until nearly an hour later. Precious time to lose if he was in some kind of trouble.
133 WATCHD, he’d texted.
133 was our house number.
A cold feeling was growing in the pit of my stomach, and I wondered if I should call for help before searching the house any further. I’d shown Tommy’s message to two of my friends before leaving school, and they probably would come running if I called, but it would take them time to get here. There was always 911, of course. I fingered the cellphone in my pocket nervously, wondering if the police would take me seriously if I called them. Truant brother—weird text message—yeah, right. Call us when you find a body.
I was going to have to deal with this on my own.
Heart pounding, I crept through the house, trying to move like the cops did on TV, sliding my back along the wall as I approached corners and doorways. It was harder than it looked—walls have things on them—and I almost knocked over a vase as I slid past Mom’s china cabinet.
Finally I reached the door of Tommy’s room. There was no noise coming from inside, which could be a good thing or a bad thing. I wasted a few seconds debating between a stealthy entrance and a sudden one, and decided that without some kind of backup I was best off going with the first option. Slowly I eased the door open, every nerve on high alert. Nothing seemed to be moving inside. I pushed it a little more, to where I could just see my brother’s bed. It was in its usual state of chaos; only in cyberspace did Tommy value order. It took me a minute to parse the various lumps of blankets, discarded clothing, and video game controllers into meaningful patterns. When I finally did, I exhaled noisily in exasperation and stalked over to the bedside.
“Hey.”
The lump that was my brother did not move.
“Hey!” I shoved the bed hard, and when he still didn’t move, jerked the blanket off him. He was wearing his Lord of the Rings pajamas, and the face of Gollum had gotten twisted onto his butt. “Get up and talk to me, jerkwad!”
I knew why he was so tired, and it really pissed me off. If you’re going to stay up all night playing games with people in Australia, so that when morning comes in America you’re so tired you can’t even keep your eyes open, and you have to moan and sneeze and pretend you’re sick in order to stay home from school so you can catch up on sleep, that’s your business. But if you then send your older sister a weird text message about how the house is being watched, and then don’t follow it up with an immediate explanation of what on earth you’re talking about, or even let her know that you’re still alive … well, you’d damn well better be waiting at the door when she gets home!
At last the kid was stirring. He turned his head, and his eyes cracked open a bit. They were bloodshot. “Jesse? You’re home?”
Understatement of the year. “Yeah, I’m home. What the hell was that text about? Who’s watching the house?”
The eyes closed again. “She’s gone now.”
I couldn’t tell from his manner if he was fully awake yet. Maybe he thought he was dreaming this conversation.
“All good,” he said. “I checked.”
I shoved the bed again with my knee. Hard. My heart was finally beginning to settle down to its accustomed rhythm, but I was still pretty pissed. “Who is ‘she’? When was ‘she’ here? Talk to me!”
Finally he seemed to get the message. His eyes opened all the way. They were dark eyes, heavily lashed, just like Dad’s. The resemblance was disconcerting sometimes. “I looked out the window this afternoon and saw some woman there. She was just standing in one place, not doing anything. Staring at our house. Then when I went to get a sandwich later I saw her out the front window again, and it was just … weird. I think she wanted to walk around the house, to get a better look at it, only she realized she couldn’t. That’s when I texted you.” He shrugged stiffly. “Then she got into a black car and drove off. Never came back.”
Walking around our house wasn’t easy. There was a regional park right in back of us whose dense woodland merged into our backyard without visible border. Between that and the placement of neighboring houses, it was hard to find a clear path around the property. “Did you see what kind of car it was?” I pressed. “License plate?”
He shook his head. “She parked behind the bushes. I could see that it was a regular car, not an SUV or anything, but no more than that.”
“What did she look like?”
He scrunched up his face, trying to remember. “Thin woman. Bony face. Black hair, kinda goth. Couldn’t see much else.” When I kept glaring at him he protested, “That’s all I know, honest!”
I couldn’t think of any reason why a strange goth chick would want to spy on our house. Maybe Tommy’s marathon gaming session had warped his adolescent brain, leaving his imagination stuck in high gear. Which still wasn’t going to get him off the hook as far as I was concerned.
“Don’t ever scare me like that again!” I snapped. “Jeez, I nearly called 911 on you! How would Mom feel about that, if they called her at work to tell her you were in some kind of trouble? All because you couldn’t spare the five minutes it would take to let me know what was going on?”
He flushed slightly. “I’m sorry.” It sounded sincere, for whatever that was worth.
I sighed heavily, torn between feeling relieved and angry. With Tommy you never knew which way to go. He was so tied up in his online games that sometimes it carried over into his real life. I wasn’t sure he always knew where World of Warcraft ended and the real world began. It worried me sometimes. It worried Mom, too. And he didn’t have to describe everything that had gone on during the day for me to guess at the bigger picture. When he first caught sight of the strange woman, he’d probably been busy gaming, so of course he wasn’t going to contact me right away. Later on when he took a break and saw her again, he texted me, then went right back to his gaming. Never stopped to think about how much I’d worry when I got that crazy message.
Maybe the woman wasn’t even real. Maybe she was just some fantasy inside his head that had managed to breach the wall between realities and slip into this world. Or maybe she was real enough, but her visit had no significance. A strange woman had gotten out of her car for perfectly mundane reasons, looked around to find some kind of landmark or street sign to tell her where she was, then driven away. Welcome to the DC suburbs.
But even if that was all there’d been to it, he’d scared the hell out of m
e with that text message, and I wasn’t going to let him forget that.
“Mom said I should order pizza for us when I came home.” I kicked the bed one last time as I pushed myself back from it. “I’m going to go do that now. If you’re out of bed when it gets here you can have some; otherwise I’m eating all of it.”
He turned over again and buried his head back in the pillow. Gollum stared up at me. I shook my head as I headed toward the door and added maliciously, “You want anchovies on your half, right?”
The lump stirred. “No anchovies,” a muffled voice protested. “Pepperoni.”
“Double anchovies, all over your half. Got it.” I nodded as I took hold of the doorknob. “And get dressed. You know it’ll upset Mom if you don’t.”
“No anchovies—!”
I shut the door before he could protest further.
• • •
By the time the pizza arrived I had the house looking somewhat normal again. The outer curtains in the living room were open now, but I’d left the sheer inner layer closed. I did have a creepy feeling that something was outside the house, but that wasn’t enough to justify the whole living-in-darkness thing. In our neck of the woods there were always creatures wandering around the property; animals in the park sometimes mistook our yard for their rutting grounds and our garbage cans for their food supply. I’d seen some things wandering by after dark that I couldn’t have named if you’d paid me.
Mom had left us twenty dollars for pizza. That was guilt money. If she’d planned for us to eat without her she would have made us something for dinner and left it the fridge. But she hadn’t, which meant that her boss had called her in to work at the last minute. Again. He liked to do that to her. He knew that Mom couldn’t afford to lose her lousy waitress job or be assigned to crappy shifts. So whenever someone couldn’t make it to work, she was the first one he would call in as a replacement. He figured she couldn’t afford to say no.
Which was, sad to say, accurate.
I once read a Dean Koontz novel in which there were monsters living among normal people, and they looked just like everyone else, but they were really creatures who fed on human misery. So they were constantly working to cause people pain, in a thousand little ways. I figured Mom’s boss was one of them.
When Tommy finally emerged from his inner sanctum he was still barefoot, but he’d pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, all wrinkled but clean. Good enough. I’d never understood why Mom thought that someone who stayed home sick from school needed to get dressed at all, but she did, and I didn’t want her to come home and start fighting with Tommy about it. Life was tough enough without people yelling at each other, and with Mom constantly stressed out from working two jobs—with a Dean Koontz monster for one of her bosses—it took a little extra work to keep the peace.
Yes, that was me: peacekeeper, pizza provider, and surrogate mother for a thirteen-year-old gaming junkie. Truth be told, the last one wasn’t quite as bad as it sounded. On the Sibling Annoyance Scale, wherein a score of one would be “Tommy who?” and ten would be “get him out of my face NOW!”, Tommy ranked somewhere in the five or six range. Some of my friends had to live with sevens and eights, and Jenny Cedric’s brother was a whopping eleven, so actually I was pretty lucky. Tommy rarely caused trouble for anyone. He’d be happy to just sit in front of the computer and play games all day, occasionally posting videos in which he talked about sitting in front of the computer and playing games all day, if Mom and I didn’t force him out into the sunlight now and then.
The pizza was New York Style, made by a vendor from Brooklyn who supposedly knew what New York pizza really tasted like. It had thick orange oil on top, that trickled down your hand no matter how you tried to contain it. Some of it dribbled onto the countertop as I ate, and I found myself swirling it into fractal patterns with my index finger. First a circle to represent our house, then a larger circle surrounding it, to indicate the scrutiny of the strange woman. Then little curlicues leading off from that one, representing all the places she might have gone. I stared at the design for a few minutes, then added a little circle at the end of each curlicue. Other houses the woman might watch? Appointments later in the afternoon? The fate-portrait was interesting, and I wondered if there was some way to press a piece of paper toweling down onto it to preserve it. Maybe I would base my next art project on it. Title: Invader.
Tommy started telling me all about his Australian game, and I did my best to listen attentively because I knew how important it was to him, but as usual, 99.99 percent of it went flying straight over my head. Something about a raiding team with twenty-five people who had to confront a massive “trash mob” (annoying bad guys) on the way to confronting an “epic boss” (big scary bad guy), but the tanks didn’t do their job right, so all the healers got killed, which meant that nobody could get resurrected, which meant that Tommy’s buddy Josh (who was playing a bikini-clad elf with doubleD breasts … now tell me that wasn’t weird) was now going to have to hike back from wherever it was that people went when they died. Death having been reduced by the game to a temporary inconvenience, as opposed to … well, you know, death.
Mom’s sudden arrival cut the recitation short. She looked really tired, and I could feel exhaustion radiating from her skin like heat from a sun-baked sidewalk. The pizza was cold by then, so I jumped up to put a slice in the toaster oven for her. Mom never ate at work, no matter how hungry she got. It was like the story of Persephone, an ancient Greek beauty who swallowed seeds in the Underworld and then had to stay there for six months out of every year. Or changelings who got whisked away to a fairy realm, then foolishly ate food there and couldn’t ever come home. On some deep, visceral level, I suspected that was how Mom felt about eating food at work. Like if she took anything from the Koontz Monster’s world into herself, he’d own her soul forever.
She came around the island to hug me hello, then went to hug Tommy. He wasn’t really comfortable with such overt physical affection, and I could see him stiffen up a bit, though he didn’t actually pull away from her. Mom could sense the resistance, but as usual she gave no overt sign that it bothered her. Doubtless she hoped that if she just kept acting like everything was okay, someday it really would be.
She had once told me that Tommy was a highly affectionate toddler, always trying to climb into her lap, begging to snuggle while she read him bedtime stories, even hanging onto her leg while she cooked. At moments like this you could see how much she wanted to have that closeness back again. But when Tommy was three Dad had walked out on us (or was thrown out, depending on which version of the story you believed), and that changed everything. Tommy never talked about that time—even to me—and a counselor last year had assured Mom that he probably didn’t remember the details of Dad’s departure. People don’t remember things clearly from when they were three years old, she said. But she was wrong. A kid never forgets the day his father walked out on him. It changes the world in subtle ways that a three-year-old might not have words for, but the fact that he can’t talk about his scars doesn’t mean they’re not there.
I suspected that’s what all the gaming was really about. It gave Tommy a world that he could control, a universe with clearly defined rules that stayed the same no matter what he did. Turn the machine on when you want to play, log off when you want to stop. Simple. Always works. He could make himself look like anything he wanted to, spend hours with friends who didn’t care about how insecure he really was, and create fantastic tales that ended the way he wanted them to. Hell, even death had been reduced to a minor story variant in that universe. It was the perfect escape for a little kid.
I had an escape world too, but it wasn’t anything that Mom knew about. There were echoes of it in my artwork, but they were pretty well disguised, and thus far no one had caught on. Some of my paintings were on display at the school right now, and people could look at them on their way to the main office. Sometimes I saw visitors staring at my interlocking fractal patterns and me
taphorical spiderweb designs, and once I overheard comments about how unique my paintings were, and how incredibly innovative I was. But none of those people had a clue about what those patterns really meant. Or the dreams they came from. Tommy was the only one I ever told about those. I knew he sometimes used ideas from my dreams in his gaming universe, but he’d promised me once, on a stack of D&D rulebooks, that if anyone ever asked about them he’d say he dreamed them himself, so no one would bother me about them. He also promised me that if he ever made a million dollars turning one of my dream stories into a game he’d split it with me fifty/fifty, which was a nice fantasy for both of us, so I said okay.
A short while after Mom came home, Tommy went off to bed. Of course he never said a word to her about the strange woman he’d seen that afternoon. Tommy wasn’t forward about that kind of stuff with anyone but me. I found myself staring down at my pizza oil drawing as Mom asked about my school day, knowing in my gut that I really should tell her about the incident myself. But then what would happen? She’d just get all stressed out—like I had earlier in the day—but she couldn’t actually do anything about it, could she? She couldn’t call the police and tell them, Hey, a strange woman was standing outside my house five hours ago, and no, she didn’t do anything wrong, but my thirteen-year-old son just thought it was kinda weird, y’know? So could you maybe come by and take a look? They’d just laugh in her face. Meanwhile you could see from the deep lines in her face and the exhausted glaze in her eyes how much working two long shifts had already drained her of energy today, and I couldn’t bring myself to add an imaginary crisis to her load.
So I told her about my math test instead, and how bummed I was that I hadn’t been invited to a party that some girls in my class were throwing, and about the piece of American History homework I’d stupidly lost in study hall that morning, which might or might not wind up screwing my grade for the whole quarter. It was our nightly ritual. She tried her best to pay attention, and she nodded and “hm-hmmed” in all the right places, but I knew that she just didn’t have the kind of energy it took to connect with me on any meaningful level. I gave her credit for trying, though.