CHAPTER ONE
A While Ago
This all happened a while ago. Not horse and buggies, I mean—the modern day, after the industrial revolution, after radio and TV and color TV and Nintendo—but when you were small, at least. The events and the people and the settings are all turning sepia on the edges. Everybody who was involved remembers where they were, and they remember the first time they realized they would remember where they were—that sort of thing.
None of the people involved are the publicity-seeking types, but it was certainly a big deal—the biggest. It was a fate-of-the-world type deal.
It involved a boy like you, and some other kids like you, for the most part, and it involved the fate of the world. I know it seems implausible, for you to have never heard of it in spite of all that, but sometimes things just go that way. Sometimes saving the world is a little ordinary.
The boy was twelve or thirteen. He liked baseball, he liked his family, and he lived in Podunk, a little suburb of a suburb you’ve never heard of. Altogether ordinary. He, his mother, and his twin sisters, Mimmie and Minnie, had lived there in perfect ordinariness for some time. His father was away on business a lot, but when he was home he would join them and the five of them would all be ordinary together. That seems like enough ramping up for now, so long as you realize that when it comes down to it this boy had done nothing at all to distinguish himself as the kind of boy who gets involved in a fate-of-the-world type deal. He might as well have been you or me.
The day that all changed he’d come back from a disappointingly normal day of school and was sitting in his room, looking over his homework in the way someone might look over their family’s fire safety plan or a life insurance policy, when it began shaking. The room, I mean, not the—he backed his chair away from the table, and he stood up. People tend to do this when things start shaking around them, even though it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
After he was up and moving, shakily, across the carpet, he became aware of a shrieking that was so loud he could barely hear it. His body was trying its best to block it out, but what got through reminded it that the whole effort was futile, made it regret the initial effort, and our normal boy, here, was racked with a pain he’d never felt before. His field of vision blurred, and when it resolved itself it vibrated—he moved toward the door, the doors, in front of him in an unconscious run.
But when he reached the doors, and felt his way to the real one, the noise focused itself into a piercing point behind him, and the vibrating—the thing, the feeling that was vibrating everything—compelled him back into his room. It turned him around, picked him shakily up and deposited him in front of his lamp. By the time his faculties came back to him he saw the vibrating force move into the lamp. That is, he thought he saw it—he was as confused as you would expect, and though ‘saw’ was the verb that came to mind in his internal narrative it was somewhere along the continuum between that and ‘felt.’ But the lamp lunged at him, definitely lunged, and he was momentarily unconcerned with the semantics of the situation.
And he took the lamp by its—by its throat, and he hurled it as far as he could across the room. The force took him with it, and he spun like a strung top until the lamp came to a shattering stop against the far wall. Things were calm for a moment until his dizziness segued into the mind-occupying vibrations and he was stumbling, again, for the door.
Out into the hallway he stumbled into the twins’ room and found the same thing playing itself out—the same lamp, part of a wedding-registered set, making the same lunging move at his kid sisters, who, to this point, had fought about as much as your average kid sister has fought. Minnie and Mimmie were shaking, silently, in the corner, bunched up against a toy-box, but he could hear them screaming for him. He moved toward the lamp, but the vibrations didn’t focus on it again; something was different. He closed his useless eyes and he moved toward the howling. You learn these things fast when you’re thrown into them, like you’d learn Japanese if your parents Home Aloned you in Tokyo, and with his eyes closed he could guide himself with the pain and the intense, stultifying confusion the howling was causing him. And it’s the decision to do this that frees him—that sets him up for all that’s going to come after. He’s there, alone in the room, crawling, maybe, in the direction of this thing, not sure why, and he hears-feels some music. And that music is not only the first peace he’s had since this thing began, it’s the most peace he’s ever felt—it washes over him like everything else has, shows him colors that it’s impossible to see, lifts him up over the twins’ bunk beds. And when it’s just begun, the music—this tinkling little tune—cuts out and drops him back onto the hardwood. He gets up, coughing dust out of his lungs, with an indelible memory of a few notes and an eviscerated doll in his hands. Then things snapped back into focus.
It talked to us, Minnie said.
The doll, Mimmie said. It made that awful noise and its words were all we could hear.
Uh-huh, Minnie said.
Brother, Mimmie said. The house is falling apart!
The boy didn’t know what had happened but he knew that he wanted to hear more of that song—that he needed to. He hugged his sisters, who, realizing with that gesture the gravity of the situation, hugged him back, and he went downstairs. His mom looked at him with the face that we as humans have established as shorthand for this unwieldy idea: I know a little more than you know. And I know it’s not going to be easy. I want you to know that.
Last Chapter: Prologue
A While Ago
Next Chapter: People Don't Know But They Can Tell