InterWorld (2 page)

I took off my shoe.

Under the inner sole was a folded five dollar bill. My mom makes me keep it there for emergencies. I took out the five bucks, put my shoe back on, got some change and got on a bus for home, rehearsing all the things I could say to Mr. Dimas, to Rowena, even to Ted, and wondering whether I’d get lucky in the next twelve hours and somehow manage to contract a disease so contagious that they’d have to keep
me out of school until the end of the semester….

I knew that my troubles wouldn’t be over once I got home. But at least I wouldn’t be lost anymore.

As it turned out, I didn’t even know the meaning of the word.

I rode the bus home in a daze. A few blocks after getting on, I stopped looking out the window and started looking at the back of the seat in front of me. Because the streets didn’t look right. At first there was nothing specific I could point out that bothered me; everything just seemed a little bit…off. Like the green tartan McDonald’s arches. I wished I’d heard about whatever they were promoting.

And the cars. Dad says that when he was a kid, he and his friends could easily tell a Ford from a Chevy from a Buick. These days they all look the same no matter who makes them, but it was as if someone had decided that all cars needed to be painted in bright colors—all oranges and leaf greens and cheerful yellows. I didn’t see a black car or a silver one all the way.

A cop car went past us, siren on, lights flashing: green and yellow, not red and blue.

After that, I kept my eyes on the gray cracked leather in front of me. About halfway to my street I became obsessed with the idea that my house wouldn’t be there, that there would be just an empty lot or—and this was even more
disturbing—a
different
house. Or that if there were people there, they wouldn’t be my parents and my sister and baby brother. They’d be strangers. I wouldn’t belong there anymore.

I got off the bus and ran the three blocks to my house. It looked the same from the outside—same color, same flower beds and window boxes, same wind chimes hanging from the front porch roof. I nearly cried with relief. All of reality might be falling apart around me, but home was still a haven.

I pushed the front door open and went in.

It smelled like my house, not someone else’s. Finally I was able to relax.

It looked the same inside as well—but then, as I stood in the hallway, I started to notice things. Little things, subtle things. The kind of things you think that you could be imagining. I thought maybe the hall carpet was a slightly different pattern, but who the heck remembers a carpet pattern? On the living room wall, where there had once been a photo of me in kindergarten, was now a picture of a girl around my age. She looked a little like me—but then, my parents had been talking about getting a photograph of Jenny….

And then it hit me. It was like the time I went over the falls last year, when the barrel hit the rocks and smashed, and suddenly the world was all bright and upside down, and I
hurt.
…

There
was
a difference. One you couldn’t see from the
front. The annex we’d had built this spring—the new bedroom for Kevin, my baby brother—wasn’t there.

I looked up the stairs—if I stood on tiptoe and twisted my neck to just short of painful, I could see where the new hallway started. I tried doing that. I even took a couple of steps up the stairs to see better.

It was no use. The new addition still
wasn’t there
.

If this is a joke
, I thought,
it’s being pulled by a multimillionaire with a really sick sense of humor.

I heard a noise behind me. I turned around, and there was Mom.

Only she wasn’t.

Like Rowena, she looked different. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt I’d never seen before. Her hair was cut the same as always, but her glasses were different. Like I said, little things.

Except the artificial arm. That wasn’t a little thing.

It was made of plastic and metal, and it started just below the sleeve of her T-shirt. She noticed me staring at it, and her look of surprise—she didn’t recognize me any more than Rowena had—turned suspicious.

“Who are you? What are you doing in this house?”

By this time I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or start screaming. “Mom,” I said desperately, “don’t you know me? I’m Joey!”

“Joey?” she said. “I’m not your mom, kid. I don’t know
anyone named Joey.”

I couldn’t say anything to that. I just stared at her. Before I could think of what to say or do, I heard another voice behind me. A girl’s voice.

“Mom? Is anything wrong?”

I turned around. I think I was already sort of subconsciously expecting what I would see. Something in the voice told me who would be standing there at the top of the stairs.

It was the girl in the picture.

It wasn’t Jenny. This girl had red-brown hair, freckles, kind of a goofy expression, like she spent too much time inside her own head. She was as old as me, so she couldn’t be my sister. She looked like—and then I admitted to myself what I already knew—she looked like what I would look like if I were a girl.

We both stared at each other in shock. Faintly, as if from far away, I heard her mother say, “Go back upstairs, Josephine. Hurry.”

Josephine
.

It was then that I understood, somehow. I don’t know how, but it hit me and I knew it was the truth.

I didn’t exist anymore. Somehow I’d been
edited out
of my own life. It hadn’t worked, obviously, since I was still here. But apparently I was the only one who felt I had any right to be here. Somehow reality had changed so that now Mr. and Mrs. Harker’s oldest child was a girl, not a
boy. Josephine, not Joseph.

Mrs. Harker—strange to think of her that way—Mrs. Harker was scrutinizing me. She was wary, but she also seemed curious. Well, sure—she was seeing the family resemblance in my face.

“Do I—know you?” She frowned, trying to place me. In another minute she’d figure out why I looked so familiar—she’d remember that I’d called her “Mom”—and, like me, her world would fall apart.

She wasn’t my mother. No matter how much I wanted her to be, no matter how much I
needed
her to be, this woman wasn’t Mom any more than the woman in the blue coat that day at Macy’s.

I ran.

To this day I don’t know if I ran away because it was all too much to handle or because I wanted to spare her what I knew: that reality can splinter like a hammered mirror. That it can happen to anybody, because it had just happened to her—and to me.

I ran past her, out of the house, down the street, and I kept running. Maybe I was hoping that if I ran fast enough, far enough, I could somehow go back in time, back to before all this insanity happened. I don’t know if it might’ve worked. I never got a chance to find out.

Suddenly the air in front of me
rippled
. It shimmered, like heat waves gone all silvery, and then it
tore
open. It was like
reality itself had split apart. I caught a glimpse of a weird psychedelic background inside, all floating geometric shapes and pulsing colors.

Then through it stepped this—
thing
.

Maybe it was a man—I didn’t know. It was wearing a trench coat and hat. I could see the face under the hat brim as it raised its head to look at me.

It had my face.

The stranger was wearing a full-face mask of some kind, and the surface of it was mirrored, like mercury. It was the strangest thing, staring into that blank, silvery face and seeing my own face staring back at me, all bent and distorted.

My face looked goofy and dumb. A liquid map of freckles, a loose mop of reddish-brown hair, big brown eyes and my mouth twisted into a cartoonish mixture of surprise and, frankly, fear.

The first thing I thought was that the stranger was a robot, one of those liquid metal robots from the movies. Then I thought it was an alien. And then I began to suspect that it was someone I knew wearing some kind of a cool high-tech mask, and it was that thought that grew into a certainty, because when he spoke, it was with a voice I knew. Muffled by the mask enough that I couldn’t place it, but I knew it, all right.

“Joey?”

I tried to say “Yeah?” but all I could manage was some kind of noise in my throat.

He took a step toward me. “Look, this is all happening a
bit fast for you, I imagine, but you have to trust me.”

All happening a bit fast? Understatement of the decade, dude,
I wanted to tell him. My house wasn’t my house, my family wasn’t my family, my girlfriend wasn’t my girlfriend—well, she hadn’t been from the start, but this was no time to get finicky. The point was that everything stable and permanent in my life had turned to Jell-O, and I was about
this
far from losing it completely.

Then the weirdo in the Halloween mask put his hand on my shoulder, and that closed the gap between losing and lost. I didn’t care if he was someone I knew. I jerked my knee up, hard, just as Mr. Dimas had told us all to do—boys
and
girls—if we ever thought we were in physical danger from a male adult. (“Don’t aim
for
the testicles,” said Mr. Dimas that day, just as if he were discussing the weather. “Aim for the center of his stomach, as if you’re planning to get there
through
the testicles. Then don’t stop to see if he’s okay or not. Just run.”)

I practically broke my kneecap. He was wearing some kind of armor under the coat.

I yelped in pain and clutched my right knee. What made it worse was that I knew that behind mirrored mask, the creep was smiling.

“You okay?” he asked in that half-familiar voice. He sounded more amused than concerned.

“You mean apart from not knowing what’s going on, los
ing my family and breaking my knee?” I would have run, but fleeing for one’s life requires two legs in good operating condition. I took a deep breath, tried to pull it together.

“Two of those things are your own stupid fault. I was hoping to get to you before you started Walking, but I wasn’t fast enough. Now you’ve set off every alarm in this region by crossing from plane to plane like that.”

I had no idea what he was talking about; I hadn’t been on a plane since the family saw Aunt Agatha for Easter. I rubbed my leg.

“Who are you?” I said. “Take off the mask.”

He didn’t. “You can call me Jay,” he said. Or maybe it was, “You can call me J.” He put out his hand again, as if I were meant to shake it.

I wonder if I would have shaken it or not—I never got to find out. A sudden flash of green light left me blinded and blinking, and, a moment later, a loud bang momentarily put my ears out of commission, too.

“Run!” shouted Jay. “No, not that way! Go the way you came. I’ll try to head them off.”

I didn’t run—I just stood there, staring.

There were three flying disks, silver and glittering, hovering in the air about ten feet away. Riding each disk, balancing like a surfer riding a wave, was a man wearing a gray one-piece outfit. Each of the men was holding what looked like a weighted net—like something a fisherman might have,
it occurred to me, or a gladiator.

“Joseph Harker,” called one of the gladiators in a flat, almost expressionless voice. “Opposition is nonproductive. Please remain where you are.” He waved his net to emphasize his point.

The net crackled and sparked tiny blue sparks where the mesh touched. I knew two things when I saw those nets: that they were for me, and that they were going to hurt if they caught me.

Jay shoved me.
“Run!”

This time, I got it. I turned and took off.

One of the men on the disks shouted in pain. I looked back momentarily: He was tumbling down to the ground while the disk hovered in the air above him. I suspected that Jay was responsible.

The other two gladiators were hanging in the air directly above me, keeping pace with me as I ran. I didn’t have to look up. I could see their shadows.

I felt like a wild beast—a lion or a tiger, maybe—on a wildlife documentary, being hunted by men with tranquilizer darts. You know that it’s going to be brought down, if it just keeps running in a straight line. So I didn’t. I dodged to the left, just as a net landed where I had been. It brushed my right hand as it fell: My hand felt numb and I could not feel my fingers.

And I
moved
.

I was not sure how I did it, or even what I had just done. I had a momentary impression of more fog and twinkling lights and the sounds of wind chimes, and then I was alone. The men in the sky were gone—even mysterious Mr. Jay with the mirror face was nowhere to be seen. It was a quiet October afternoon, wet leaves were sticking to the sidewalk and nothing was happening in sleepy Greenville as per usual.

My heart was thumping so hard I thought my chest was going to burst.

I walked down Maple Road, trying to catch my breath, rubbing my numb right hand with my left, trying to get a handle on what had just happened.

My house wasn’t my house any longer. The people who lived there weren’t my family. There were bad guys on flying manhole covers after me, and a guy with an armored crotch and a mirrored face.

What could I do? Go to the police?
Suuure
, I told myself. They hear stories like this one all the time. They send the people who tell them stories like that to the funny farm.

That left one person I could talk to. I came around the curve in the street and saw Greenville High in front of me.

I was going to talk to Mr. Dimas.

Greenville High School was built nearly fifty years ago. The city closed it when I was a kid for a few months to remove the asbestos. There are a couple of temporary trailers out in the back that house the art rooms and the science labs, and will do until they get around to building the new extension. It’s kind of crumbling; it smells like damp and pizza and sweaty sports equipment—and if I don’t sound like I love my school, well, I guess that’s because I don’t. But I had to admit it made me feel pretty good to be there now.

I made it up the steps, keeping a wary eye on the sky for gladiators on flying disks. Nothing.

I walked inside. Nobody gave me a second glance.

It was the middle of fifth period, and there weren’t too many people in the halls. I headed for Dimas’s classroom as fast as I could without running. He’d never been my favorite teacher—those bizarre tests he came up with were hard—but he’d always impressed me as someone who wouldn’t lose his head in an emergency.

If this wasn’t an emergency, I didn’t know what was. And it was his fault, in a way, wasn’t it?

I didn’t quite run down the corridor until I got to his classroom. I looked through the glass of the door. He was sitting at his desk, marking a stack of homework papers. I knocked on the door. He didn’t look up, just said “Come!” and kept on marking.

I opened the door and went over to his desk. He kept his eyes on the papers.

“Mr. Dimas?” I tried to keep my voice from shaking. “Do you have a moment?”

He looked up, looked into my eyes, and he dropped his pen. Just dropped it, like that. I bent down, picked it up and put it back on his desk.

I said, “Is there something wrong?”

He looked pale and—it took me a few moments to recognize this—actually frightened. His jaw dropped. He shook his head in the way my dad always called “shaking out the cobwebs” and looked at me again. He held out his right hand.

Then he said, “Shake my hand.”

“Uh, Mr. Dimas…?” I was suddenly seized by the fear that he was part of all this weirdness, too, and the thought frightened me so that I could barely keep standing. I needed someone to be the adult right now.

He still held his hand out. His fingers were shaking, I noticed. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” I told him.

He looked at me sharply. “That’s not funny, Joey. If you
are
Joey. Shake my hand.”

I put my hand in his. He squeezed it just short of painfully, feeling the flesh and the bones of it, then he let go and looked up at me. “You’re real,” he said. “You aren’t a hallucination. What does this mean?
Are
you Joey Harker? You certainly look like him.”

“Of course I’m Joey,” I said. I’ll admit it—I was ready to start bawling like a baby. This madness, whatever it was, couldn’t be affecting him as well. Mr. Dimas was always so sane. Well, kind of sane. When Mayor Haenkle described him in his column in the
Greenville Courier
as “crazy as a snowblower in June” I pretty much knew what he meant.

But I had to tell someone what was going on, and Mr. Dimas still seemed like the best choice.

“Look,” I said carefully, “today has gone…really weird. You’re the only person I thought could maybe handle it.”

He was still as pale as a pitcher of milk, but he nodded. Then there was a knock on the door and he said, “Come!” He sounded relieved.

It was Ted Russell. He hardly even glanced at me. “Mr. Dimas,” he said. “I got a problem. If I get an F in Social Studies it means I don’t get a car. And I figure you’re going to give me an F.”

Apparently some things even alternate realities couldn’t change; Ted was obviously still grade challenged. Mr. Dimas had looked disappointed when Ted came in; now he was
annoyed. “And why exactly is this my problem, Edward?”

That was the Mr. Dimas I remembered. I felt relieved, and before I could think the better of it, I had already spoken. “He’s right, Ted. Anyway, keeping you off the road is a public service. You’re a five-car pileup waiting to happen.”

He turned on me, and I hoped that he wasn’t going to hit me in front of Mr. Dimas. Ted Russell likes to hit people smaller than him, and that takes in a big chunk of the school population. He raised a hand—then he saw it was me.

He stopped, hand in the air, and said, plain as day, “Mother of God, it’s a judgment on me,” and started to cry. Then he ran out of the room. He ran like I had run earlier.
It’s called running for your life,
I thought.

I looked at Mr. Dimas. He looked back, then hooked one foot around a nearby chair leg and dragged the chair toward me. “Sit,” he told me. “Put your head down. Breathe slow.”

I did. Good thing, too, because the world—or at least his office—had gone kind of wobbly. After a minute things steadied, and I raised my head. Mr. Dimas was watching me.

He walked out of the room, returned a few seconds later with a paper cup. “Drink.”

I drank the water. It helped. A little.

“I thought I was having a weird day before. Now it’s somewhere out beyond bizarre. Can you explain any of this to me?”

He nodded. “I can explain a little of it, certainly. At least,
I can explain Edward’s reaction. And mine. You see, Joey Harker drowned last year in an accident down at Grand River Falls.”

I grabbed my sanity and held on with both hands. “I didn’t drown,” I told him. “I got pretty shaken up, and I had to have four stitches in my leg, and Dad said that would teach me a lesson I’d never forget, and that trying to go over the falls in a barrel was the single stupidest thing I’d ever tried, and I told him I wouldn’t have done it if Ted hadn’t said I was chicken….”

“You drowned,” said Mr. Dimas flatly. “I helped pull your body out of the river. I spoke at your memorial service.”

“Oh…” We both were quiet then for a moment, until the quiet got to be too much and I had to say something. So I said, “What did you say?” Well, wouldn’t you have asked the same thing, if you were me?

“Nice things,” he said. “I told them you were a good-hearted kid, and I told them how you got lost all the time in your first semester here. How we’d have to send out search parties to get you safely to Phys. Ed. or the science trailers.”

My cheeks were burning. “Great,” I said with all the sarcasm I could muster. “That’s just how I’d want to be remembered.”

“Joey,” he asked gently, “what are you doing here?”

“Having a weird day—I told you.” And I was going to explain it all to him—and I bet he would have figured out
some of it—but before I could say anything else, the room began to go dark. Not dark as in, the sun went behind a cloud dark, or dark as in, hey, that’s a mighty scary thunderstorm dark, or even dark as in, I’ll bet this is what a total eclipse of the sun looks like. This was dark like something you could
touch
, something solid and tangible and cold.

And there were eyes in the middle of the darkness.

The darkness formed itself into a shape. It was a woman. Her hair was long and black. She had big lips, like it had been fashionable for movie stars to have back when I was a kid; she was small and kind of thin, and her eyes were so green she had to have been wearing contacts, except she wasn’t.

They looked like a cat’s eyes. I don’t mean they were shaped like cat’s eyes. I mean they looked at me the way a cat looks at a bird.

“Joseph Harker,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. Which was probably not the smartest thing I could’ve said, because then she laid a spell on me.

That’s the best way I can explain it. She moved her finger in the air so that it traced a figure—a symbol that looked a little bit Chinese and a little bit Egyptian—that hung glowing in the air after her finger finished moving, and she said something at the same time; and the word she said hung and vibrated and swam through the room; and the whole of it, word and gesture, filled my head; and I knew I had to follow
her for all my life, wherever she went. I would follow her or die in the attempt.

The door opened. Two men came in. One was wearing just a rag, like a diaper around his middle. He was bald—in fact, as near as I could tell, he was completely hairless, and that, with the diaper, made him look like a bad dream even without the tattoos. The tats just made it worse: They covered every inch of his skin from hairline to toenails; he was all faded blues and greens and reds and blacks, picture after picture. I couldn’t see what they were, even though he wasn’t more than five feet away.

The other man was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The T-shirt was a size too small, which was really too bad, because it left a big stretch of stomach exposed. And his stomach…well, it
glistened
. Like a jellyfish. I could see bones and nerves and things through his jelly skin. I looked at his face, and it was the same way. His skin was like an oil slick over his bones, muscles and tendons; you could see them, wavery and distorted, beneath it.

The woman looked at them as if she’d been expecting them. She gestured casually at me. “Got him,” she said. “Like taking ambrosia from an elemental. Easy. He’ll follow us anywhere now.”

Mr. Dimas stood up and said, “Now, listen here, young lady. You people can’t—” and then she made another gesture and he froze. Or kind of. I could see his muscles trembling,
as if he were trying to move, trying with every cell of his being, and still failing.

“Where’s the pickup?” she asked. She had a kind of Valley Girl accent, which I found irritating, particularly since I knew I was going to have to spend the rest of my life following her around.

“Outside. There’s a blasted oak,” said the jellyfish man in a voice like belching mud. “They’ll take us from there.”

“Good,” she said. Then she looked at me. “Come along,” she told me in a voice that sounded like she was talking to a dog she didn’t particularly like. She turned and walked away.

Blindly, obediently, I followed her, hating myself with every step.