Cold Cereal (The Cold Cereal Saga) (15 page)

“What? Why? What was the dream?”

Emily looked at him, and her face was scared but vague, as though she wasn’t sure of herself.

“I … it was just an empty room. Empty except for a
chair in the middle. As plain a chair as you can think of, in an empty room.”

“Okay.”

“And, I thought, That’s strange, because I knew in some way that I was dreaming and that an empty room with a chair was a strange thing to dream about.”

Her body shook again.

“It was actually boring, you know? I was bored just looking at that chair. But dreams are never boring.”

Erno huffed. “Sure they are. A few nights ago I had a dream I was walking around the school at night. Nothing happened; I just walked around. That’s pretty boring.”

“But it wasn’t boring at the time,” said Emily. “Right? It only seems boring now.”

Erno frowned, trying to remember. “I guess so. That’s weird.”

“It’s not weird. Being bored means whatever you’re doing isn’t holding your interest. Your attention wanders. But when you’re dreaming, the dream is the
only
thing you’re thinking about. Your mind can’t wander ’cause the dream will just wander along with it. That’s what I think, anyway.”

“Go back to your dream,” said Erno.

“Okay. I watched the room for a while, waiting for something to happen, but it didn’t change for the longest time. Then, suddenly, I walked into the room.”

Erno frowned. “Weren’t you already in the room?”

“No. I was just watching it. And then I watched myself walk into the room. It was me, or … someone who looked just like me. And then the girl that looked just like me sat in the chair, facing me, and said … and said, very calmly,

‘Something terrible is going to happen.’

“And then I woke up.”

Erno felt like mentioning that this wasn’t really that scary a dream, but after considering it a moment, he conceded that yes, actually, it was
kind
of scary.

“I think it’s true,” Emily said. “I think something terrible is going to happen.”

“You mean you think this dream was some kind of … fortune-telling? A premonition?”

Emily shook her head and got up to kick off her shoes. As her feet slid into her slippers, she said, “No. No, I don’t believe in that sort of thing.”

“But you said—”

“I don’t think I was telling the future or anything. It sounds crazy, I’m sure, and stupid, but I think the dream was my subconscious mind trying to tell my conscious mind something it already knows. I don’t think it was really a dream at all. I already know what’s going to
happen, and it’s so terrifying, I’m too afraid to even think about it.”

Erno thought he ought to have something comforting to say about this, but, in all honesty, the thought of some great terror barreling down on them sounded about right. It sounded consistent. Every encouraging word that came to mind seemed falsely sweet and ugly, like supermarket birthday cake. It
would
be their birthday, he remembered, in a handful of hours. Happy Birthday to them.

“Please don’t tell Dad I fell,” said Emily. “I don’t want to go see the doctor.”

“Yeah. She’s creepy.”

“I don’t even know her name,” said Emily. “I asked her once, and she said Doctor.”

Erno huffed. “Well, maybe you won’t have to see her for a while. Maybe neither one of us will.”

“I hope so.”

Erno hoped so, too, because he didn’t know that the doctor would be making a house call the next day.

There were two birthday cards stuck to the refrigerator with fruit-shaped magnets. They’d arrived from Goodco a week ago. They were, in fact, identical to the birthday cards Goodco had sent the year before, and the year before that.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO A MEMBER OF THE GOODCO
FAMILY!
read the front, which also featured cartoon art of Clover, Kookie, Agent SuperCar, the Snox Rabbit, and Chip, Sparkle, and Pip. The inside said
MAY YOU ALWAYS STAY CRISPY IN MILK!
, which Erno assumed was some kind of metaphor. That morning the siblings found that the words
Happy Birthday
had been cut out from each card with a knife. Mr. Wilson must have done it during the night, because he hadn’t yet emerged from his bedroom upstairs.

When he still hadn’t appeared for lunch, Erno and Emily set out to pick up their birthday cake alone. And on the way to the supermarket, they saw that
Happy
had been scribbled off a street sign on Happy Valley Avenue. They noticed a bedsheet half covering the billboard for the Happy Hunter Steakhouse. A bald man in a tie and shirtsleeves screamed at his employees outside a mattress store on Logres Avenue, demanding to know “Who would do this,” and “What kind of person thinks this is funny” and “How will people know that Mattress King is having a Birthday Blowout Bash if some joker’s painted a black rectangle over the word
Birthday
.”

The huge neon sign at Happy Jack’s Discount Furniture had a broken
Happy
, a rock still lodged conspicuously between the two
p
’s.

Emily looked at Erno, stunned. “I can’t believe Dad vandalized a sign,” she said.

At the supermarket, the bakery counter lady opened the white box so the twins could inspect their cake, which read
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ERNANDO EMILE
. They said it was fine and paid.

“I’ve decided what I want for my birthday,” said Emily on the way back. “I want you to promise never to hate me.” She was watching him out of the corner of her eye, as if he might disappoint her, as if he might refuse.

He didn’t hate her, of course, and he thought perhaps that could be
his
thing. Emily’s thing could be about being the smartest, and Erno’s thing could be not hating her for it.

“Okay,” he said. “Happy birthday. I promise never to hate you.”

Emily smiled.

After a few seconds Erno added, “I also got you a gift certificate.”

On the way home there were five different pay phones, and each of the first four rang as the twins passed. Erno supposed the phone company must be testing them or something, but still he had to suppress an urge to shout “I’ll get it!” and answer one. He might have, as a joke to cheer Emily, but then he noticed the way she flinched at each and every ring.

They walked past the tennis courts and the Wall Street
Taco Exchange, and the fifth pay phone drew near. Emily walked stiffly, increasingly tense, and the phone rang. Here there was a man standing nearby waiting for the bus. He walked over to the pay phone and lifted the receiver.

“Hello?” the man said. “This is a pay phone. You must have dialed the wrong ….what? Yeah, there are some kids here.”

The man looked over at the twins, and Emily began to walk faster.

“Hey,” the man said, the receiver against his chest. “Is one of you named Erno?”

“… Yeah…”

“Phone for you.”

Erno stood there, uncertain. He watched Emily, who had now broken into a run, vanishing over the hill.

“Emily! Wait!”

The man with the phone thrust it forward. “C’mon, kid,” he said. “I’m not your secretary.”

Erno set down his birthday cake on the sidewalk and took the phone, and put the receiver to his ear. “H-hello?”

“Good-bye,” said a familiar voice. Then the line went dead with a click.

Erno ran the rest of the way home, too, the cake forgotten. He ran down three streets and up the concrete steps to their house, crunched through the dead leaves, and crossed the porch and dashed through the front door, which was standing open, and stopped suddenly in the foyer in front of a great piece of butcher paper tacked to the wall, the same thing Emily must have seen when she had first arrived. It read:

ERNO AND EMILY,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

GOOD-BYE.

Erno mouthed the last word and frowned. He had barely the time to take it in before he heard a great deal of creaking floorboards in the living room and a woman’s voice.

“Come in, Erno.”

Then a groaning noise made Erno whirl around, and he was startled to see a six-foot-tall, pink-marshmallow man pushing the door shut behind him. Given a moment, he realized it was only a regular man, dressed from head to toe in the same sort of rubber suit he’d seen Mr. Wilson wear at the Goodco factory. It was the color of stomach medicine. It was the color of ear medicine, come to think of it. The man stared out at Erno through a clear plastic oval and grabbed his arm with a white glove.

“Hey! Leggo. Emily! Where are you?”

“She’s here,” said the woman around the corner, and when Erno was hustled into the living room, he saw that it was their doctor. She was a tall woman in a deep blue outfit with a jacket like origami, and she was surrounded by four more men in identical pink suits.

Erno had always been strangely worried by the doctor’s appearance. Her dark and sloping eyes, her striking, predatory face. Her brow was topped by precision bangs and curtained with straight, waist-length hair of such dissolving blackness that it resembled liquid, like ink. If you watched carefully you would swear her hair did not seem to quite sync with the movements of her body, or the air, but rather shivered at the ends as if caught in the hot vapors of her temper. And you
did
watch the doctor carefully, or else you stared at your feet.

Emily was trembling and staring at her feet in a chair in the center of the room. There was an empty chair beside her.

“Have a seat, Erno,” the doctor said, “and tell us where your father is.”

Erno didn’t move right away, so he was pushed into place by the pink man behind him.

“You’re our doctor,” he said slowly. “From Goodco.”

“Very good, Erno,” she said. “Shows you’ve been paying attention. I
am
your doctor. But I am also your father’s supervisor, and I demand to know where he is.”

Erno just stared, wordlessly, at the strangeness of it all. The doctor changed tactics. She crouched down beside them, and her voice became suddenly soft, lilting, the sort of voice adults think will soothe children. This voice could have narrated a cartoon about ponies.

“See, the thing is, Erno, we need your help! And you and your, ah … sister have already been sooo helpful to us all these years. Yes, you have!”

Emily, who out of fear had not so much as looked at Erno when he arrived, now whispered something she may have never said before.

“I don’t understand.”

The doctor smiled in an unpleasant way. “Oh, I rather doubt that, dear,” she said, and a pink-suit man chuckled.

“You see,” the doctor continued, “for several years we’ve
been testing out a special chemical on you: Milk-7. We’d like to put it in our cereals. It’s a very, very special chemical that makes you smarter! And now we are finishing our tests, and we need your father’s notes. They … seem to have disappeared, like magic! As has your father.”

Erno said, “Um, ma’am…”

“Oh, ‘ma’am’ is so formal,” the woman said. “Call me something else. Vivian is nice. Would you like to call me Vivian?”

“Is that your name?” Erno asked.

“No.”

“Ah. Um, so …. Mr. Wilson …. worked for you?”

“In Research and Development, yes.”

“And he’s been giving Emily and me—”

“Oh no, no,” she said. “Not you. Just Emily. You were in the control group.”

Emily shuddered.

“Okay,” Erno said slowly, “so … Emily’s been given that … Milk—”

“Oh, don’t call it Milk-7,” said the woman who wasn’t named Vivian. “That sounds so clinical, doesn’t it? We call it IntelliJuice™.”

One of the pink men cleared his throat. “Actually, I believe Marketing is now calling it ThinkDrink™.”

Not-Vivian smiled a thin smile.

“ThinkDrink™ then. Fine. Regardless, soon it will be
just one of the tasty chemicals that go into making Agent SuperCar™ Cereal so Naturally Good™.”

Erno fidgeted in his chair and frowned. “I thought
corn
was what made Agent SuperCar™ cereal so ‘Naturally Good.’”

Not-Vivian looked alarmed, as though Erno had said something you clearly could not make a cereal out of. Sofa cushions. Astronauts.