Keeper of Dreams (27 page)

And then it was Friday and he got to go home from school and fix himself some food and stay away from the closet because that would make him crazy, to sit and stare at the thing. Nothing was ever coming out of it, and nobody except the stupid elf was ever going into it again. There was nothing to see.

Except there he was when Dad got home, the closet door open and Jared sitting on the floor just looking at it, remembering Mom’s look of panic as the thing caught hold of her and then how she looked, just her left shoulder and the rest of her body still in the closet, but not her head, not her right shoulder or arm, because they were going, and how Jared lunged and caught her but then she was torn right out of his arms. Like the thing had to get her in two swallows.

In two
bites
.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?” Dad asked. Softly, which meant he didn’t think anything was really funny.

“It didn’t take Mom all at once,” said Jared. “What if it bit her in half? What if she’s dead and Todd can’t ever bring her home?”

Dad took a slow breath. “Then Todd will tell us that when he gets back.”

“And if he never comes back?”

“Then we’ll move away from here.”

“And leave somebody else to find it?”

“Jared, what can we do? Nuke the house? We didn’t make this problem. Especially not you. It was done
to
us. And we’re doing our best to undo it.” He came and sat beside Jared. “Things can get a lot worse. Or they can get a lot better. But at least we’re doing something, and we’re doing the best thing we could think of, and what more can anybody do?”

Jared didn’t answer. There wasn’t an answer.

“Let’s have dinner and watch a DVD tonight,” said Dad. “What about a Harry Potter movie? What about all of them?”

“No magic,” said Jared, shuddering in spite of himself. “No crap about people turning invisible or going back in time or three-headed dogs or vines that choke you or chessmen that try to kill you or teachers with a face on the back of their head.”

“Charlotte’s Web?”

“Dad, that’s for kids.”

So they watched
The Dirty Dozen
and when they threw those grenades down the shafts and the German officers in the bomb shelter were panicking and screaming, Jared felt a moment of breathless panic himself, but then he thought: At least the good guys were
doing
something, even though some of them were going to get killed in the process, even though some of them would never get home.

They were saving the world, maybe. Or helping to. We’re just saving Mom.

But to Jared, that was better than saving the world. He didn’t care about the world.

Saturday morning, Jared was up before the sun. He wanted to wake Dad, but he waited. And not long. Dad usually slept in on Saturday, but today he joined Jared at the breakfast table, pouring out Cheerios and stirring a couple of spoonfuls of brown sugar into the bowl and eating them, all without milk.

“That’s so gross,” said Jared.

“Better than watching the milk turn grey with sugar,” said Dad.

“Do we have to wait till, like, noon or something?” asked Jared.

“There’s a lot of oat bran in this stuff,” said Dad. “I think I’ll need to use the bathroom before I can go anywhere or do anything.”

“Yeah, and you’ll read a whole book in there.”

“Reading, the best laxative.” Dad said it in his Lee Marvin voice, which was a pretty good imitation.

“You might as well stick a plug in it,” said Jared. “When you’re reading, you never let fly.”

“I can’t believe you’re speaking of the bodily functions of your father.” This time Dad was doing Charles Bronson. It was nothing like Charles Bronson, actually, but somehow Jared knew that was who he was doing.

“We’re giving an interstellar worm an enema today, Dad. I got rectums on my mind.”

And Dad went into Groucho Marx. “I don’t let anybody say my kid’s got poop for brains.”

“Poop?” said Jared.

“Got to get used to saying ‘poop,’ now that Mom’s coming back.”

“Is she, Dad?”

Dad’s Groucho Marx grin didn’t fade, but his voice came out like W. C. Fields. “I’ll never lie to you, my boy. Now finish your breakfast, you bother me.”

“That’s all you got? Lee Marvin, a half-assed Charles Bronson, Groucho Marx, and W. C. Fields?”

“I did three others that you didn’t catch,” said Dad. “And besides, I had Cheerios in my mouth.”

“Oh!” said Jared, doing the old family joke associated with Cheerios. “O-o-o-o-oh.”

Which would have been the cue for Dad to launch into singing “We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oh’s,” but instead he reached across the table and covered Jared’s hand with his own. “I can’t really eat much this morning, can you?”

“You see anything in my mouth?” said Jared.

Dad pushed back from the table. “I’ve gotta see a man about a hose.”

Jared followed him out into the back yard. Dad unlocked the back shed and set down the clothes he had brought for Todd and Mom, while Jared unspooled the hose and dragged it across the lawn. Of course it got heavier the farther he pulled it, but it didn’t slow him down. Quite the contrary—by the time he reached the shed, he was running.

“Careful,” said Dad. “Let’s do this methodically and get it right.”

Jared watched as Dad found the gap in the air, following the pictures taped to the wall. Then he pushed it in, and kept pushing, and pushing. “Get me more slack, Jared.”

Jared went back to the hose reel and pulled it until it was stretched tight. He could see Dad back in the shed, pushing more and more of it into the hole in the air, so it looked for all the world as if it were disappearing.

“It’s pushing back,” said Dad. “It wants to get it out.”

“Wouldn’t
you
?” asked Jared.

“Turn the water on. Full blast. Every bit of pressure the city can give us.”

Jared turned the handle, turned and turned until it couldn’t open any more. He could see Dad bracing his back against the shelves, pushing forward against the worm’s efforts to expel the enema.

Jared walked closer to the shed, to ask whether any water was coming back or whether it was all getting through, when he saw the elf walking toward him across the back lawn.

Careful not to speed up, Jared continued toward the shed, but instead of talking or even letting himself look at what Dad was doing, he closed the door, loudly saying as he did so, “Hello, Eggo. Why didn’t you tell me that was your name?” With any luck, Dad would realize that they didn’t exactly want the elf to know what they were doing.

“You never asked,” said Eggo. He headed toward the sideyard fence beyond where the worm’s anus used to be and started stripping off his clothes in order to stow them back in the box. Only when he was down to his pants did he turn around and look at Jared, who was now leaning against the corner of the house, looking as nonchalant as he could.

“What are you watching?” he asked.

“All these years I see you, you never tell me anything. One time you talk to Todd, and suddenly you’re full of information.”

“You were a baby.”

“I was, but I’m not now.”

“So . . . what do you want to know?” Eggo returned to stripping off his pants. He was buck naked now, stuffing everything into a plastic bag before putting it into the box.

“When are you going to get Mom back to us?”

“I didn’t take your mommy away from you,” said Eggo. “It’s none of my business.”

“You’re like half a worm,” said Jared. “All asshole, no heart.”

Eggo reburied the box and stood back up. By Jared’s rough guess, it had been about five minutes since he started the water running. That was three hundred seconds. So in the other place, it wouldn’t even have been running for two full seconds yet.

Eggo was looking at him. “What are you doing?”

“Math in my head,” said Jared.

“I mean with the hose. The water’s on, I can hear it, but you’ve got it flowing into the shed.”

“Through the shed and out the back window,” said Jared. “It’s the only way to reach the very back of the yard without buying a longer hose.”

But Eggo wasn’t buying it. He was striding toward the shed now.

“It’s none of your business!” cried Jared. “Haven’t you done enough? Why don’t you leave us alone!”

Eggo turned back to face Jared. “Everything’s my business if I decide it is,” he said. “What are you hiding in there?”

The elf glanced toward the place where there had once been a shimmering slit in the air. He walked toward it, searching. He waved his hand. “What have you done?” he said. He whirled and faced Jared. “You moved it, you little moron! Do you know what you’ve done? I’ll never find it! It’ll take months!”

“Good!” shouted Jared. “I hope it takes you
years
, because that’ll be
centuries
here, and I won’t ever have to see your ugly face and your ugly butt again!”

The elf’s face was turning red as he strode toward Jared. His hand rose up as if to smack at him—to swat him into oblivion, as if he were a fly. But then the elf looked at the hose again and then at the shed and then he took off running straight toward it.

“Dad!” shouted Jared. “Don’t try to fight him! He’ll kill you!”

Eggo flung the door of the shed open—flung it so hard that it ripped from the hinges and sailed like a frisbee halfway across the lawn. Jared saw that Dad must have understood what was happening, because instead of
holding on to the hose, he was gripping the chain saw and pulling the cord. It roared to life just as Eggo reached for the hose.

“Just how dense do you think you are!” shouted Dad.

Eggo backed off a little, but he was holding the hose now, pulling it out. “You moved it! You can’t move it!”

“We already did,” yelled Jared, “and you’ll never get it back exactly where it was!”

“You’re drowning my city!” shouted the elf.

“You kept my mother there when you could have brought her home!”

By now Dad had stepped out of the shed and was approaching Eggo. “Drop the hose!” he yelled. “I don’t want to see how much damage this can do!”

Eggo roared and smacked at the chain saw with his left hand. It flew out of Dad’s grasp, staggering him; but the elf came away from the encounter with his hand bleeding. No, spurting blood.

The deadman switch on the chain saw shut it down, now that nobody was gripping the handle. The sudden silence was deafening.

“What have you done to me!” wailed Eggo.

“You want me to call 911?” asked Jared.

“Drop the hose,” said Dad.

“I’ll bleed to death!”

“Drop the hose.” Dad was picking up the chain saw again.

Eggo stamped his left foot repeatedly, spinning him in a circle as he howled and gripped his bleeding hand. It was as if he was screwing his right foot into the ground, and indeed it was already in the lawn up to the knee.

“You
are
Rumpelstiltskin, you little jerk,” Jared said. “You told Todd that you weren’t!”

“We’re going to get them home, and you’re not going to stop us,” said Dad. The chain saw roared to life.

With a final howl, Eggo pulled his right foot out of the ground and ran into the house. Not through any of the doors—he leapt for the wall and his body hurtled through, leaving torn vinyl siding and broken studs and peeled-back drywall behind him. Jared ran to the gap in the wall in time to see Eggo dive through the worm’s mouth.

He turned around to see Dad already back at the shed, pushing the hose back up into the worm’s anus.

“What if he hurts them?” asked Jared. “He’s gone back and he’ll find them.”

“We can only hope they’re already on their way.”

“The water only started a couple of seconds ago, in that world.”

“Then I hope they aren’t wasting any time,” said Dad. “What else can we do?”

Once Mom understood what Todd was talking about, he began to ask her questions. She didn’t know any answers. “If I try to go anywhere, either the wind starts lifting me or people see me and start throwing rocks or . . . screaming, or calling for other people to come and look and . . . I’m naked.”

Todd knew perfectly well she was naked. But to his surprise, it didn’t
feel
like she was naked. She was so misty that it was as if she were wearing the leaves behind her—he saw them better than he saw her.

“But you have to know where he comes from.”

“He comes from the same hole in the air that we came through,” said Mom.

“Then where does he
go
?”

“How can I tell, from here in the leaves?”

“I mean where does he
head
? Which way? Uphill? Downhill?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Downhill. I just didn’t—I can’t think. It’s like my mind is fading along with my body. I think bits of me have been blowing away. I’m being shredded. I’m leaving pieces of me in the tree. Todd, I don’t even know if I
can
go home. Maybe if I get back there I’ll die.”