Authors: James van Pelt
Late that night, a chorus of howling dogs woke Peter. It seemed as if every pet in the neighborhood decided to let loose at the same time. As he had the night before, he stood at his open bedroom window. City lights illuminated the low lying clouds, rolling across the sky. It didn’t feel cold enough for snow, but it wouldn’t take much of a change in the temperature to mark the true shift in seasons.
Broad swaths of light from the streetlight out front, and shadows from the trees, striped Christy’s yard. Something crossed through a lit space only twenty feet from him, then leaped the privet hedge before vanishing into a deep shadow. The light was bad enough that Peter wasn’t even sure he’d seen anything at all. It had been in his peripheral vision, and he didn’t get a good look. He strained, trying to make something out of the shadows. The dog across the street barked continuously.
Finally, a shape emerged from the shadow below Christy’s window, a black on gray outline he recognized. It was the Cyclops dog. It lay down below her window, seemed to sniff the air, then put its head down on its single front leg.
The neighbor across the street yelled, “Shut up, you stupid mutt!” The animal whined as he was shepherded into the house.
Soon, the other dogs quit barking and the night grew quiet. The Cyclops dog didn’t move.
When he texted Christy, she replied, “Let sleeping dogs lie.”
Peter went to bed again, but he could see his window, and he kept imagining the Cyclops dog bursting through it. He looked up the number for animal control. They wouldn’t start answering their phone until 8:00 a.m.
The night should have been over. Too much had happened already, but three hours later, by the red digital numbers on Peter’s clock, screaming outside his house and a horrifying, animal growl jerked Peter from bed. Before he reached the window, a sharp series of gunshots rattled the air. A car roared to life on the street, screeching in acceleration as it peeled away, its lights still off.
Just below his window, bathed in moonlight, the Cyclops dog stood, facing the retreating car. The moon’s milky illumination gleamed off the dog’s bare skull, although in this light, it didn’t appear orange. It was a light gray standing on a darker gray, casting a shadow on the lawn. It looked up at Peter. He couldn’t see its teeth, but the single eye gleamed.
Across the lawn, on the other side of the privet, Christy’s bedroom light flicked on. She stood at the window, a dark eclipse of herself. Peter waved. She waved back. The Cyclops dog did its weird hop-trot across the hedge, and lay down again, as it had before, head on its single front leg.
In the morning, the Cyclops was gone.
*
The first time Peter experienced altered reality was when he was seven. He’d started reading chapter books instead of picture books the year before. Most of them his dad read to him. He didn’t read them on his own. But, for his birthday, his Aunt Janet sent him a three book series by Ruth Stiles Gannet. The first book,
My Father’s Dragon
, drug him to another world where a little boy named Elmer Elevator listens to a cat who tells him that a baby dragon needs to be saved.
Peter opened the package along with his other presents and put it aside, but later that afternoon, when the kids had gone home and the cake was gone, and the ice cream that Dad forgot to put back in the freezer had melted on the kitchen counter, Peter opened up the first book, lay on the footstool with his knees on the floor on one side, and the book on the floor on the other, and began reading. There was this place called Wild Island where a mouse talked, and lions were vain, and crocodiles were cruel. The baby dragon had been tied to a tall pole on one side of the river that split the island and forced to give the creatures rides over the water so the crocodiles wouldn’t get them. Elmer Elevator was clever. It seemed his backpack held the solution to every problem he faced. He could fool the animals and save the baby dragon, but right at that point, Peter’s father came into the room and asked him a question. Peter couldn’t remember the question, but he remembered looking up from the book. His living room looked like a strange and alien place to him. The sounds, the colors, the shapes, even Dad felt unreal. It took several minutes to shake off the feeling that his own home existed only in a dream and that Wild Island was the real place.
Reading often affected him that way since then, as did a well-done movie. He remembered looking up from the TV after
The Wizard of Oz
ended, wondering why he wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
The path to school felt exactly like emerging from a book or movie, except the sense of alienation lingered. He knew his world wasn’t as he’d known it the day before. Everywhere he looked, he imagined the surface peeling like it had at the softball field. He imagined that a hard bump could tear the air aside and he’d see the creature on the hill again who knew he was there. Who wanted him.
When Peter walked in with the kids who rode the bus, chattering away with each other, so concerned about their friends or their homework or their video games, he wanted to shout to them, “The world is not what you believe.”
They were the ignorant. He watched two girls laughing at a joke, and he envied them. They lived in a world where jokes mattered. Where the most important question you might face that day was whether to buy the school lunch or run over to the burger joint.
At school, all the students could talk about was the military operation in Melville Park. The army had put up their own perimeter tape, but it stretched halfway into the far practice field, and the two guards, guns on their shoulders, looked serious. P.E. classes rescheduled all planned outdoors activities into the gym.
Peter joined a group waiting outside the school library for it to open. Jenny Pearson, a senior, whose mom was a police officer said, “It’s a total screw-up. The department has been told to take a hike. Plus, the military guys who were here first took the evidence the department had gathered, and that Captain guy from the second group was furious. He made a scene outside the squad room. Everyone heard.”
Tom Tefore said, “My cat’s missing.” Tom wore shorts and sandals no matter what the weather was, and appeared to own only two shirts: a faded Hawaiian print that said, GO BIG OR GO HOME on the back, and a New York Jets Joe Namath football jersey.
Almost everyone ignored him. He was famous for completely unconnected contributions to conversations, but this time Sean Brolan said, “That’s funny. Our cat’s gone too.”
Miss Zanski, his heavy-set 2nd period social studies teacher whose hair was always done in a bun, joined the students at the door. Peter liked her. She’d let him do an extra-credit report on submarines during the Civil War, even though the class had moved on to the Industrial Revolution. “It’ll be nice to get back on schedule,” she said to no one in particular. “I don’t know what to do with myself when school isn’t in session.”
Tom Tefore said, “My cat is missing, and does anyone believe that that noise the other night was a natural phenomenon? It was more like a war. Why couldn’t it happen again? I don’t know why we’re in school. We should be evacuating. And my cat never misses its morning saucer of milk.”
The librarian walked into view, his keys in his hands. His brown hair hung to the middle of his back and he sported a short beard. Some kids called him Jesus. The sea of students parted to let him through.
As the students crowded behind Jesus, Peter looked over his shoulder. T-Man walked by the crowd. He scowled at them. White surgical gauze and tape covered his left arm, and he limped heavily. When he spotted Peter, he flipped him the bird, although it was clear that twisting hurt his leg.
Peter thought, teach you to mess with a Cyclops dog!
A few minutes after 2nd period started, the intercom clicked and Principal Rappe announced, “Sorry for the interruption, but as a part of the investigation of the day before yesterday’s events, the authorities need to touch base with all of our students. This will only take a few minutes. I will call classes to the gym alphabetically. Teachers, if you would bring your roll sheet for today when your class is called, we would appreciate it.”
Ray Bean, a scrawny second-year sophomore, immediately left his desk, heading for the door. The last time Peter had seen him move that fast was when he heard they’d brought in a drug sniffing dog to check the lockers.
“Mr. Bean?” said Miss Zanski.
“Uh, bathroom. It’s kind of an emergency.”
“If you say so,” she said. Ray looked relieved as he sprinted from the room.
Principal Rappe called class after class, alphabetically by teacher. Christy, who had Mr. DeMarco for 2nd period, texted Peter. “One guy from the FBI. He knows about the gun! Anyone with info is to talk to him. Reward. He’s got a carpet at the doorway everyone has to walk over. Don’t know what that is about.”
This would have to be the gun’s owner, thought Peter. Not FBI either. He texted back. “Might he be the Blue-suit guy?”
“Don’t know. Assistant Principal Bovine knows what he looks like, but I don’t see him.”
Peter put up his hand. “Can I use the bathroom, Miss Zanski?”
At the end of the hall, a line of students, the last class called, lined up at the gym. Peter ducked into the bathroom, found the school’s number, and called it. He leaned against the white tile. Next to his head, someone had written in permanent marker: WHERE ARE ALL THE EASY GIRLS? Underneath that, in a different pen, someone else had written, WE’RE NOT TELLING. Underneath that, in a third ink, it said, EASY IS BORING. COMPLICATED IS FUN.
“Can I talk to Assistant Principal Bovine?” he said, deepening his voice. He hoped he sounded older.
“He’s out of the building today,” said the secretary. “Would you like his voice mail?”
“No, that’s fine.” Peter disconnected. How convenient, he thought. He wondered if Bovine was tied up to a chair in his house, or something worse.
He texted Christy, “What happened in the gym?”
“Walked in. Sat in the bleachers. He showed a picture of the gun on the wall with a digital projector. Asked us to come forward with info if we had it. Said it was our patriotic duty to help find it. Dismissed us.”
“What about the carpet?”
“Black, shiny plastic. Stretched across the door and five feet across. Black box the size of a cigarette pack on one corner.”
A student Peter didn’t know came into the bathroom. He smirked when he saw Peter texting. “You got to figure out how to do that under your desk. I get and send more texts in a class than I do at home.”
“Yeah, thanks,” said Peter. He texted, “I should have had you take a picture of the guy.”
She sent back a frowny face.
He tried to remember what class Dante had this period. How low in the alphabet was he? “Don’t go to the gym” he texted to him. “It’s a trap.”
“Already been,” Dante texted back. “They seemed to have missed me.”
“What shoes are you wearing?” Peter held his breath. The far sink in the bathroom dripped. A drop of water plinked against the porcelain every couple of seconds.
“My old tennies.”
“What were you wearing at the dump?”
“New Nikes. I haven’t cleaned the mud off them.”
Peter let out a breath of relief. He looked at his own shoes. He’d cleaned them up the afternoon after they’d messed with the gun the first time. The only thing they had left in the clearing in Melville Park were their footprints. The “carpet” everyone walked on that Christy saw had to be a footprint reader. Peter had never heard of such a thing, but that would be a brilliant way to find whoever had the gun.
For a second, he wondered if he was just being paranoid again. Was it a crime to ditch out on an FBI mandated trip to the gym? It might be, but no way was that an FBI agent.
When Zanski’s class was called, Peter made sure he was one of the last students to leave. He followed the line of students, keeping his eye on Zanski. She turned away from them to lock her room. Peter ducked into the janitor’s closet, pulling the door shut quietly behind him. An upturned bucket made for a good seat. In the dark, among the detergent smells and old mops, Peter played a deer hunting game on his phone until the bell rang, dismissing class. He slipped out to join the other students and headed for 3rd period.
Phoning the police department is like signing a confession, thought Peter—at least if you use your own phone. Caller ID alone would trace a call straight back. Anyone who believed in “anonymous” tips was a fool, at least if he didn’t take steps to preserve anonymity. Most of his schoolmates were idiots about information. Half the baseball team was suspended for six games last year because they’d taken pictures of themselves at a beer blast before posting them on Facebook. The third baseman also uploaded a particularly damning video of the rest of the infield and the manager doing keg-stands. The hysterical part of the incident were the cries from the athletes (and many of their friends) that the administration has violated their privacy by viewing the pages. The keg-stand video racked up 250,000 views in ten days.
Peter left the school at lunch and walked to the Walmart a few blocks down Melville Ave. He needed a floppy hat, preferably a cheap one since his wallet was nearly empty, and he didn’t want to use a credit card. Swiping a credit card for a purchase was another sure way that someone could find you, if he really wanted.
Fortunately, the gardening department had marked down hats on a rack. He couldn’t buy trays of saliva anymore—the season was too late—but the hats remained.
The gas station next door had one of the few public pay phones left in the city. Everyone had switched to cells. Peter put on the hat and pulled it low over his eyes before walking onto the parking lot. The high-mounted security cameras would only be able to see the hat, not his face. He covered the speaker with a napkin to muffle his voice, then dialed the police. “I’d like to report a possible assault. You need to check on Assistant Principal Bovine’s house. He might be in trouble.”
He hung up before the dispatcher could ask a question and ditched the hat in a dumpster on the way back to the school.