Darkness Creeping (13 page)

“Yes, yes, we’re scared.”

“Are you
really
scared?”

“Yes!” they yelled. “Please stop, Marybeth!”

“Good!” I bellowed. “That’s what you get for ruining everything for everyone.”

Then they started to cry, and I realized I had gone too far. I took the dumb old mask off. “Oh, stop whimpering,” I said. “It was just a game. You can come out now.”

But they didn’t come out.

“Come on,” I coaxed. “You can’t hide under that blanket all night!”

“We’re not hiding,” said Timmy. “We can’t get out!”

I watched as the two of them struggled to unravel themselves from the blanket.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. But as I watched them struggle, I could see that blanket stretching around them, pulling tighter and tighter—actually straining to keep them from struggling out.

“Help us, Marybeth!” they cried. “The monster—it has us! It’s eating us!”

That’s when I saw the eyes. They were attached to all those faces—hundreds of them—all staring out of the quilt . . . and this time I knew it wasn’t just my imagination.

They were all the faces of children.

“Help us, Marybeth!” the twins kept shrieking.

Panicked, I ran across the room and, in the process, stepped on the thumbtacks that had held the thing to the wall. Wailing in pain, I fell to the ground. That’s when I noticed that the twins’ cries seemed to be getting weaker. I
had
to get them out.

I crawled to the bed, where the quilt had them wrapped up tighter than ever. I could see that, all bundled up, the thing did look like a creature . . . but like no creature I had ever imagined. I bit back my own fear, reached for the terrible quilt, grabbed hold of an edge, and tore it off the bed.

But there was nothing beneath it.

There in my hand was a mere blanket, a limp quilt that was still warm to the touch.

“No!” I cried.

I ran to my room with the horrible quilt clutched in my hand and got a pair of scissors. I was ready to cut the thing into a million pieces. But as I brought the scissors to the fabric I knew that I couldn’t do it—because of something I saw
inside
the quilt.

There, at the very corner of the fabric, was a new patchwork square. Two ovals of tan velvet on a purple cotton background. And, when I looked at it hard enough, those ovals became two faces—
their
faces. I could see my brother’s and my sister’s eyes, just like all the other eyes, silently staring out at me from inside the quilt.

The following Saturday, Mom and Dad had a garage sale.

“Look at this!” said a woman who rummaged through the piles of children’s clothes and children’s toys. “It’s a double stroller!” She was talking to her husband, who held newborn twins in his arms. “Just what we need,” the woman went on, and then she turned to my mother. “I guess your twins have outgrown it,” she said, giving the stroller a friendly pat.

My mother just stared at her, blinking. “No, we don’t have twins,” she said.

The woman glanced around at the piles of clothes. “But you seem to have two of everything, so I thought—”

“The stroller was in the garage,” my mother said with a shrug. “I don’t know how it got there . . . maybe it was from the previous owner.”

And then Mom walked off to help some other customers. I almost said something, but what good would it do? I was the only one who remembered the twins. To everyone else, it was as though they had never existed.

“You’re lucky,” said my friend Corinne, who was rummaging through our stuff as well. “You’re lucky you’re an only child. I have to share everything with my little brother.”

And then Corinne picked up the many-colored quilt, which lay folded across a plastic teeter-totter.

“I should give this to my brother to replace that disgusting old security blanket he carries around the house,” said Corinne. “How much do you want for it?”

I thought about it. I thought about it a long time. And in the end I let her have it.

“Take it,” I told her. “It’s free.”

And why not? Who was I to stop the quilt on its journey through this world? And besides . . . misery loves company.

In a vast universe, toward the edge of a spinning galaxy, on a small blue planet flying around the sun, in a place called Northern California, lives a girl who is quite certain that the entire universe revolves around her. Or at least she acts that way. In fact, if an award were given out for acting superior, Marla Nixbok would win that award.

“I was born a hundred years too early,” she often tells her friends. “I ought to be living in a future time where I wouldn’t be surrounded by such dweebs.”

To prove that she is ahead of her time, Marla always wears next year’s fashions and hairstyles that seem just a bit too weird for today. In a college town known for being on the cutting edge of everything, Marla is quite simply the Queen of Fads at Palo Alto Junior High. Nothing and nobody is good enough for her, and for that reason alone, everyone wants to be her friend.

Except for the new kid, Buford, who couldn’t care less.

Buford and Marla meet on the school bus. It’s his first day. As fate would have it, the seat next to Marla is the only free seat in the bus.

The second he sits down, Marla’s nose tilts up, and she begins her usual grading process of new kids.

“Your hair is way greasy,” she says. “Your clothes look like something out of the fifties, and in general, you look like a Neanderthal.”

Several girls behind them laugh.

“All else considered, I give you an F as a human being.”

He just smiles, not caring about Marla’s grade. “Hi, I’m Buford,” he says, ignoring how the girls start laughing again. “But you can call me Ford. Ford Planet.”

Ford
, thinks Marla. She actually likes the name, against her best instincts. “Okay, F-plus—but just because you got rid of the ‘Bu’ and called yourself ‘Ford.’”

“Didn’t you move into the old Wilmington place?” asks a kid in front of them.

“Yeah,” says Buford.

The kid snickers. “Sucker!”

“Why? What’s wrong with the place?” asks Ford innocently.

“Nothing,” says Marla, “except for the fact that it used to belong to old Dr. Wilmington, the creepiest professor Stanford University ever had.”

Ford leans in closer to listen.

“One day,” says Marla, “about seven years ago, Wilmington went into the house . . . and never came out.”

Ford nods, not showing a bit of fear.

“Personally,” says Marla, trying to get a rise out of him, “I think he was killed by an ax murderer or something, and he’s buried in the basement.”

But Ford only smiles. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he says. “There’s a whole lot of weird things down in our basement.”

Marla perks up. “Oh yeah? I wonder what sort of research was this Professor Wilmington doing when he disappeared.”

Ford smiles, and then stares straight at Marla. “By the way,” he says, pointing to her purple-tinted hair and neon eye shadow, “you’ve got to be the weirdest-looking human being I’ve ever seen.”

Marla softens just a bit. “Why, thank you, Ford!”

Marla peers out of her window that night. Through the dense oak trees she can see the old Wilmington house farther down the street. A light is on in an upstairs window. She wonders if it’s Ford’s room.

Like Marla, Ford is trapped out of his time, only
he
belongs in the past, and she belongs in the future. It’s not as if she likes him or anything. How could she like him—he is a full geek-o-rama nausea-fest. But she can use him. She can use him to get a look at all those dark, mysterious machines in his basement.

Marla smiles at the thought. Using people is a way of life for her.

And so the very next afternoon, Marla fights a blustery wind to get to Ford’s house. By the time she arrives, her punked-out hair looks even worse, for the wind has stood every strand on end. She likes it even better now.

“Thanks for coming over to help me study,” says Ford as he lets her in. “I mean, moving in the middle of the school year sure makes it hard to catch up.”

“Well, that’s just the kind of person I am,” says Marla. “Anything I can do to help a friend.”

Marla looks around. The furniture is so tacky, it makes her want to gag. The living-room sofa is encased in a plastic slip-cover. Ford’s mother vacuums the carpet wearing a polka-dot dress, like in
I Love Lucy
. For Marla, it’s worse than being in a room filled with snakes.

“It’s noisy here,” says Ford. “Let’s go study in my room.”

Marla shudders. Who knows what terrors she’ll find there?

“How about the basement?” she asks.

“It’s creepy down there,” says Ford.

“You’re not scared, are you?”

“Who, me? Naw.”

Marla gently takes his hand. “C’mon, Ford . . . we need a nice quiet place to study.”

Ford, who has taken great pains not to be affected by the things Marla says or does, finally loses the battle. He takes one look at her hand holding his and begins to blush through his freckles. “Oh, all right.”

While the rest of the house has been repainted and renovated, the basement has not changed since the day Wilmington disappeared. All of the old man’s bizarre stuff is down there. Maybe Wilmington himself is down there somewhere, just a dried-out skeleton lurking behind a heavy machine. What if they were to find him? How cool would that be?

As they descend the rickety stairs, Marla grips Ford’s hand tightly, not even realizing she is doing so. Ford’s blush deepens.

“Gosh, I thought you didn’t even like me,” says Ford.

Marla ignores him, blocking out the thought, and looks around. “What is all this stuff?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out,” says Ford.

Everything is shrouded in sheets and plastic tarps. Strange shapes bulge out. They look like ghosts, lit by the flickering fluorescent light. There is a warped wooden table in the middle of it all. Ford drops his schoolbooks down on the table and a cloud of dust rises. It smells like death down there—all damp and moldy. The walls are covered with peeling moss, and they ooze with moisture.

“We can study here,” says Ford, patting the table. But Marla is already pulling the sheets off the machines.

Whoosh!
A sheet flutters off with an explosion of dust, revealing a dark, metallic, multiarmed thing that looks like some ancient torture device.

“I wouldn’t touch that,” says Ford.

Marla crooks her finger, beckoning him closer. Her nails are painted neon pink and blue with tiny rhinestones in the center of each one. She leans over and whispers in Ford’s ear, “If you really want to be my friend, you’ll help me uncover all these machines.”

Ford, his blush turning even deeper, begins to rip off the sheets.