He threw back his head and laughed. At least, I think it was a laugh. The actual sound was sort of a cross between a chainsaw and a werewolf gargling. “Now, at last, Flinduvia will rouse from her slumber! Now we wake—and the galaxy trembles!”
I heard a groan, and turned to see Martin push himself to a kneeling position. Melisande started toward him.
“Don’t move!” snapped the Flinduvian.
Martin looked up at the sound of his voice. “Oh, it’s you, Dysrok! It’s about time. I was wondering when you were going to get here.”
“Martin, what are you talking about?” cried Gaspar.
“Be quiet, you fool,” snapped the boy. “Why do you think I let the Wentar bring me back here? Does the word bait mean anything to you?”
Melisande started to cry. Gramma put an arm around her shoulder.
That’s my Ethel, thought Grampa. Always worried about others.
Though he didn’t say anything else, I caught a note of terror running beneath his thoughts. He was right to be terrified. The very moment he sent those words to me, one of the Flinduvians armbands began to beep.
Dysrok smiled, and his tongue flicked out. “Well,” he said happily. “It looks as if we have a ghost near us right now. Might as well collect it while we have the chance. Who knows when it might prove useful?”
The Flinduvian behind him, the one with the beeping armband, turned in a slow circle. When he was facing in my direction, the armband began to beep more loudly. His blue face creased in one of those horrible, tongue-flicking smiles, and he stepped toward me.
The beeping increased.
Dysrok looked puzzled. “Are you harboring one of the dead, boy?”
I shook my head, trying to look both innocent and stupid.
It did no good. The Flinduvian with the armband raised his hand. He was holding something shaped like a big squirt gun—colorful and bulgy, with a wide mouth at one end and a yellow, bottlelike thing at the other. He smiled, his snaky tongue flicking out at me. The big black holes in its tip opened and closed like sniffing nostrils. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he tailed mockingly.
Then he pointed the collecting gun at my head, and pulled the trigger.
19
The Collecting Jar
I HEARD A CRACKLE, and felt a buzz of energy, a little like the feeling we got when we went through the Starry Doors.
Hold on, Grampa! I thought. Hold on!
Someone screamed. (Later, I realized it had been me.)
Then everything went black.
I felt a horrible wrenching, as if I was being pulled apart at the seams. I thought, at first, that it was because Grampa was being ripped from inside me.
It took me a while to realize that the true situation was even worse. It wasn’t Grampa who had been ripped out of my body—it was me! I was the one who got sucked into the collecting jar!
At first I just felt as if I had fainted or something. Then, for a little while, it was as if I were in a dream—the kind where you know you’re dreaming but can’t force yourself to wake up. Finally I began to realize where I was.
I screamed again, which was getting to be sort of a habit. It didn’t make any difference, since no one could hear me. I suppose it was because I didn’t really have a mouth. I didn’t have eyes or ears, either, but somehow I could still hear and see what was going on. Don’t ask me how that worked. I suppose I was hearing and seeing the same way that ghosts do—the same way I had when we left our bodies to go to the Land of the Dead. I hadn’t thought about it as much then, because I was still in a shape that resembled my own body. But being stuffed inside a bottle made you wonder about that sort of thing.
As I began to get a sense of what was going on, I realized that Grampa was putting on a big show.
“How could you just take him like that?” he cried. He was speaking with my voice, through my mouth, and clutching the sides of my head with my hands.
“What’s happening?” cried Gramma. “Anthony, what’s going on?”
Grampa turned my body toward her and said, “It was Grampa. He was inside me, and they pulled him out!”
A cold fear gripped me. What was Grampa doing? Was he planning to keep my body? Was it possible my own grandfather would betray me that way? But why else would he be lying to her like that?
Gramma was furious. “You let my husband out of that bottle!” she cried, lunging at the Flinduvian who held the collecting gun.
“Ethel!” cried Gaspar. He caught her and held her back.
Dysrok laughed. “We’ll let the ghost out when the time is right. Out of the bottle . . . and into the body of a Flinduvian warrior. His life force will animate that body, but control of it will be ours. He will be a perfect slave.”
Gramma didn’t understand any of that, of course, since she hadn’t had a translation spell put on her. But I did, and believe me, it didn’t do anything to make me feel better about my situation.
What made things even worse was when the Flinduvian yanked the bottle off the end of his gun and dropped it into a pack he was carrying. Everything went dark I couldn’t see or hear a thing.
I had just come back from the Land of the Dead.
In my opinion, this was far worse.
The only good thing about being stuffed into the pack was that it gave me a chance to think. In fact, thinking was about the only thing I could do under the circumstances. Actually, that’s not quite true. I could also panic, which was the first thing I did. Not that it did me any good. I mean, usually when you panic you run around and scream, or hyperventilate, or something like that. All I could do was feel like I wanted to do that stuff. That feeling kept growing and growing, until I thought I was going to explode. That might not have been all bad. Maybe the bottle would have exploded, too, which might have been kind of cool—though I don’t know if I would have zapped back into my body, or just been left floating around like a ghost.
A living ghost. What a weird thing to be.
When you panic, you’re supposed to take deep breaths. Since I had no nose, mouth, lungs, or air, I couldn’t do that. Finally I started to pray. That helped. I didn’t get a miracle or anything, but I did settle down—which was sort of a miracle all by itself, if you consider my circumstances.
Once I finally got calmer, I was able to start thinking. The first thing I needed to think about was why Grampa was pretending to be me. I finally decided he was trying to fake out the aliens. Maybe he figured if they thought they had a ghost, but had really gotten the spirit of a living person, there might be some advantage to keeping that fact from them.
At least, I hoped that was what he was thinking. Part of me was afraid that what he was really thinking was, “Yippee! I’m alive again!”
The second thing I needed to think about was why the Flinduvian collecting gun had taken me and left Grampa in my body. I came up with two theories that sort of made sense. The first came from Dysrok’s statement that Earth’s ghosts have an “absurdly strong” connection to life. Maybe Grampa, having already experienced death, was clinging to life more tightly than I did. The second possible reason was our recent trip to the Land of the Dead. Since I had already been out of my body, and not that long ago, maybe I wasn’t as tightly connected to it as I should have been.
Or maybe it was the two things put together. I was in uncharted territory here. And even if one of those theories did explain why I had gotten pulled out of my body, they didn’t tell me what I really needed to know—namely, what should I do next?
Of course, when you’ve been yanked out of your body, stuck inside a bottle, and then crammed into an alien’s backpack, your options for action are pretty limited.
So is your sense of time. I had no idea how long I had been in the bottle panicking, praying, thinking, and fussing before one of the Flinduvians opened the pack and pulled me out again.
Holding up my prison, he said, “Let’s give this one a try. Bring in one of the corpses. We’ll put him inside and see how it wor
ks.”
20
I Become a Flinduvian
THE FLINDUVIANS carried in a box that looked something like a coffin. It was bigger than most coffins—though given how big the Flinduvians were, that made sense. It was also very plain, with no decorations or fancy woodwork or anything. The only marks on it at all were some squiggles across the top, which might have been Flinduvian writing. Suddenly I realized that the squiggles looked like the marks on the box where the Martin-clone had imprisoned Gaspar and the others.
The Flinduvians stood the coffin upright. Dysrok touched a button on its side.
The front swung open.
Inside stood the hulking figure of a dead Flinduvian.
My new home.
Like the other Flinduvians, this guy had muscles on his muscles, tentacles instead of fingers, and feet that looked like long, flexible horse hooves. Even though its eyes were closed, I could tell they were big and bulgy. So was its snout, with its upthrust fangs.
They carried the collecting bottle over and connected it to a pipe on the side of the box.
Then they pumped me inside the Flinduvian.
At first I felt only a horrid clamminess, as if I had been wrapped in a piece of raw liver. Then, slowly, the body began to come back to life. I could feel the alien blood pumping through its alien veins. I would have screamed again, but I couldn’t; the body was not mine to control, merely to inhabit.
My eyes blinked open and I could see again.
Seeing the world as a Flinduvian was very different from seeing it as an Earthling. First, colors did not look the same. It wasn’t as simple as them looking lighter or darker than usual. They looked like nothing I had ever seen before. It’s hard to explain clearly, but I have to tell you, it was pretty freaky.
Second, Flinduvian eyes are much sharper than ours. I could see things I had never seen before: the texture of clothing, the flecks of color in the eyes of someone twenty feet away. I could count the individual hairs on Gaspar’s hand.
But along with that sharpness came something that I can only describe as “interpretation.” Every object I saw seemed like either a potential danger or a potential weapon—sometimes both at once. And every non-Flinduvian being, even my sweet old grandmother, looked like a menace and an enemy. If it hadn’t been for the lucky fact that I had no control over the body I was in, I might have rushed forward to crush her.
I did not like being a Flinduvian. But at least I could see why they were so nasty—though I wondered if they saw things this way because they were so nasty, or they were so nasty because of the way they saw things.
Dysrok took a black box from his pack. He turned a dial, and I felt a jolt of power tingle through me. It was scary, but not totally unpleasant.
“There,” he said. “He’s been activated. Zarax, step forward.”
Must be Zarax was my name, because I had no choice but to step forward.
Dysrok smiled. “See how simple it is? It takes only moments to reactivate the body with one of your ghosts. Once done, that body is completely under our command.”
“What about the ghost itself?” asked Gaspar. “What happens to it?”
Dysroks tongue flicked out. “The ghost is merely a battery—a life force to energize the body. And since the device that prevents more than ten members of a species from passing through a Starry Door on any given day does not apply to corpses, we can bring through a million of these warriors-in-waiting if need be. With a small advance group in place to activate them, we can transport an army large enough to conquer this puny planet in a matter of hours.”
He stretched his chest triumphantly. “Once the planet is ours, the real work begins. We will harvest your ghosts. Then, using them as fuel for our warriors’ bodies, we will take our rightful place as rulers of the galaxy.”
I thought about the sorrowful spirits we had met in the Land of the Dead, and imagined them being imprisoned in Flinduvian bodies as I now was. I thought about Grampa being stuck here. I thought about old Mr. Zematoski from across the street, who had died last month, and Edon Farrell’s big sister, Gwen, who had been killed in a car accident two years ago. The idea of their spirits being stuffed into these cold Flinduvian corpses was so appalling it made me want to twitch.
To my surprise, one of my new arms did twitch.
What made this surprising was that I was not supposed to have any control of the Flinduvian body at all.
I tried to do it again.
Nothing.
I focused my thoughts, putting all my energy into moving the right hand.
Nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing . . . Twitch!
I stopped immediately. I didn’t want the Flinduvians to know what I was up to. I tried to glance around to see if any of them had noticed, but twitch or not, I didn’t have control of my eyes. All I could do was look straight ahead at the parlor of Morley Manor, which was fairly crowded, despite the fact that all the furniture was gone.
Gramma and Sarah and all the members of the Family Morleskievich were looking at me. Sarah was crying. I wanted to wave, to signal somehow that I was alive and well, but couldn’t manage it. The weirdest thing of all was seeing my own body, from which Grampa was staring at me with horror and fascination.
I had no idea what to do next.
It didn’t make any difference; Dysrok decided for me. Twisting the dial on his control panel, he sent me to stand against the wall.
“Close your eyes and wait for future orders,” he said.
I did as I was told.
The darkness was complete. I couldn’t move. The Flinduvian body, though animated by my spirit, remained the coldest thing I had ever experienced.
I wanted to shiver, but couldn’t. It was, I suppose, a lot like being dead.
No, that’s not really true. If I had been dead, I could have moved on to the Land of the Dead, which, strange as it is, would have been better than this living coffin of cold Flinduvian flesh.
Then I realized that this was what they wanted to do to all of Earths dead, or at least as many as they could harvest.
It made me want to scream.
21
The Haunted Body
MY SIGHT WAS GONE. I had nothing to feel or taste. But I did have two working senses: I could hear, and I could smell. As I began to settle into the body, I realized it was not only Flinduvian eyes that were sharper than ours. My new nose was much sharper as well. It took me longer to get used to that, simply because I wasn’t used to smelling things so clearly. And a lot of what I could smell I couldn’t figure out, because I didn’t know how to interpret it.
Still, by listening carefully and paying attention to the information coming from my snout, I began to associate specific smells with specific people. (Or aliens, or monsters; whatever.) Once I had figured that out, I began to be able to get a sense of where people were standing, and when they moved. After a while I also realized that their odors changed when they were talking. I could actually smell fear, anger, and confidence.
As time went on it became clear that the Flinduvians were waiting for some higher officer who was supposed to take charge of the situation.
“Where is Jivaro?” growled Dysrok, two or three times.
The sound of his heavy footsteps told me he was pacing back and forth across the floor. By tracing his smell, I could tell exactly the route he was taking.
“Who cares?” asked one of the other Flinduvians. “Why don’t we just destroy these fools and get it over with?”
Dysrok walked over to him. Though the soldier made no cry of pain or protest, from the sound of things I got the impression that he was getting smacked upside the head a couple of times.
“Because, you moron,” roared Dysrok, when he was done whacking the other guy, “the only one really worth killing is the Wentar, and we can’t do that without a higher officer present.”
“You’d be wiser not to do it at all,” said the Wentar in peaceful tones.
“Hold your tongue, arrogant nitwit!” sn
arled Dysrok. The anger in his voice was terrifying. Yet he didn’t take a step toward the Wentar, or any of the others. Given how much trouble the Wentar had gotten us into, I was glad to know that he was of some use.
“Oy,” said Albert. “Maybe we should have stayed in the box.”
“Silence!” thundered Dysrok.
While all this was going on, I continued struggling with the body I was in, trying to get control of it. It was hard to tell if I was succeeding, since I didn’t dare make any big movements. I couldn’t even try opening my eyes, since that would alert them to what I was doing.
Mostly I tried clenching my butt muscles.
That may sound stupid, but can you think of anything else you can move when it’s a matter of life and death that no one in front of you notice the slightest twitch?
I was also sort of exploring the body, trying to get used to it—to its size and its power, its weird differences from a human body. Some of those differences were obvious—the tentacles I now possessed in place of regular fingers, the weird, hooflike feet. Some were less obvious—like the incredible strength. (The reason that was less obvious was because I had no way of using it.)
As time went on I began to settle more deeply into the body. I figured this was good, because it would make it more likely I could get control of it at some point. But it also made me nervous. What if by settling in I got so connected to the body that I could never get out again?
That was a terrifying thought. It got even more terrifying when I began to find bits and pieces of the previous owner’s memories clinging to the brain.
Who knows how the connection of mind and body, spirit and flesh, really works? Not me, so don’t ask me to explain this. But it was pretty eerie, let me tell you; as if I wasn’t in the body alone. Well, not quite; the previous owner was clearly gone. Yet his memories lingered on, like the furniture, photos, and knickknacks left behind in an old house after its owner has died.