The Suburb Beyond the Stars (12 page)

And suddenly, he knew this was what had happened to Prudence. She had been writing that e-mail, trying to warn them, telling them she’d be fleeing the suburb, coming down to Boston the next day. And as she typed, she had not noticed, in the shadows of her room, the fronds of hair growing. She had not noticed the prickly growths in the corners, the long mane hanging off the goose-necked lamp.

She had not noticed until she looked up and found herself in the midst of the monster, swallowed whole.

The room in which Brian stood, surrounded by army ranks of protective signs, was still stable. It was rectilinear. Outside, everything was soft and yielding and the floor sloped away toward someplace underground.

Kalgrash and Gregory were slipping and stumbling toward the safe room.

Brian seized hold of the doorjamb and extended a hand. “Come on!” he yelled. “Come on!”

The house convulsed.

Gregory screamed, fell over. He grabbed at the fur. Kalgrash gave a fierce yell and buried his ax in the wall. That gave him purchase — he reached out a hand. He tried to grab Gregory’s.

“That’s my burned — ouch!” Gregory yanked his hand away.

Below him now snaked a hairy throat. A straight drop. He looked down — he paled. He held out his other hand.

Kalgrash, closer, reached for the fingers that quivered there. Just a few more inches. A few more.

Kalgrash edged out, trembling, suspended on the slope by the haft of his ax.

He reached out his mailed claw. His fingers were touching Gregory’s.

Almost there.

Almost.

The house convulsed again.

Gregory shrieked and, with his good hand, grabbed at the fur to hold himself up. The other was too badly burned. The fingers couldn’t close. They couldn’t clutch.

“Give me your hand,” rasped Kalgrash. “Come on.”

“I can’t,” said Gregory. “I can’t let go.”

“Your other hand. Your bad hand.”

“It’s burned.”

“I know. Give it —”

A tuft of hair, with the sound of grass pulled up, uprooted.

And Gregory, suspended by those hairs, fell.

He dropped into the hole.

Brian screamed.

Gregory tumbled.

Kalgrash reached his arm after the boy.

But Gregory was gone.

M
rs. Drake turned off the television. It was time for bed. Her husband was already upstairs, reading a magazine. Mrs. Drake got up from the couch and crinkled up the remains of a bag of corn chips. She threw it in the trash and headed for the stairs.

She couldn’t believe she had just wasted an evening. A perfectly beautiful evening. The shows on TV were getting stupider and stupider, she thought to herself. Recently, they had just been rooms full of men with dark-ringed eyes and pointed ears sitting around, staring at the camera. They didn’t speak. They seemed to be waiting for something, which was why, she guessed, she kept watching. You never knew when something might change or arrive.

She stopped on the stairs. She wanted to step outside. It was too beautiful an evening to have spent it inside on the couch. The air through the window screens smelled of summer and green and youth.

She padded down the steps and opened the front
door. She went out into the cool of the night. She wrapped her arms around herself and admired the peace of it all.

There were a few lights on at the ends of driveways. They were embedded in stone pillars or were crafted to look like old-time lanterns.

The first few crickets were starting to sing. In another few weeks, the night would be full of them. The houses all looked slumberous. The kids at the crossroads no longer wheeled on their bikes. They were silent, standing in a circle, their bicycles held upright in their hands. They were all staring at that ticky-tacky 1960s ranch-style house at the end of the street.

She wondered, in passing, why her own children were in the street, perched on a tricycle and a Big Wheel, when they should be in bed. She did not think she had given anyone permission.

Her brow creased; and then, suddenly, she blinked and smiled. She had recalled, in a rush, her childhood in Ohio: learning how to ride her bike with training wheels. Her father taught her, jogging alongside her. He would say, “That’s a girl!” She had pretended to be clumsier than she really was; she had pretended that she couldn’t stop the bike from tipping, just so her father would stay by her side, praising her, teaching her, holding her shoulder, and they wouldn’t have to go in.

And now her own kids were there, outside, in a ring, at midnight, staring.

With shock, Mrs. Drake saw that the windows of the
ranch house were broken and the front door was open. Something had happened there.

There was something awful about that little house. Something hideous in the jagged glass, the singed planks sagging in the window. Mrs. Drake, suddenly, was terrified.

The kids should not be out.

She called their names. “Cassie! Charlton!”

All the kids in the circle turned. They all looked at her. Their faces were pale.

There was no moon. Just stars.

And the children of the neighborhood — Charlton, Cassie, and all their little friends — stared at her, as if to say, “Now we see you. You’re next.”

Brian kept screaming Gregory’s name even as the hair in the house receded, even as the floor became solid and the rugs shed their fur.

There were wisps of hair everywhere.

Brian was down on his hands and knees, paddling at the cement. There was no give. No sign that Gregory had ever stood there next to them. Gray fur eddied through the hallway.

Kalgrash was stationed with his back to the wall, battle-ax raised, awaiting some new monstrosity.

“He’s gone,” said Brian. “They’ve taken him.”

Kalgrash nodded vaguely.

“We have to find him!” Brian demanded.

“Some people really benefit from being held prisoner,” Kalgrash said. “They learn a lot of important lessons about friendship.”

Brian scowled.

“And survival,” Kalgrash continued, sighing. “And rescuing.”

“We’ve got to get down there. Down to the castle.”

Kalgrash nodded.

“Let’s go,” said Brian.

Surrounded by shards of glass and kresling, they raided the kitchen for crackers and cheese to eat while they walked. Brian hadn’t eaten for many hours. He went to Prudence’s room and picked up the magical lantern he and Gregory had been using for light in the room. He held it in one hand and hung the blunderbuss on its strap across his shoulder. Then he and Kalgrash sneaked out the back door. They knew the kids were watching the front. If the Thusser could indeed see through the eyes of the children, then they’d have to avoid the gaze of the tricycle circle.

Silently, they eased themselves over the barricade in front of the sliding doors. They made their way across the lawn.

“Toward the mountain,” whispered Kalgrash.

Brian squinted. “Where is it?”

Kalgrash pointed with one mailed hand. His night vision was excellent.

“Not on the roads,” Brian said. “They’ll only lead us in circles. We just have to cut straight across.”

Kalgrash nodded, clinking.

They headed up a rise. The previous year, it had been wooded, Brian thought — very steep — covered in old leaves. Now it was the lawn for a mansion. They carefully crawled up the slope.

They passed through someone’s garden and came out on another street. This one didn’t go very far before it dead-ended in a circle around a huge stone monolith: the Crooked Steeple.

It rose up, uneven and pitted, from shrubs. Brian recalled finding it with Kalgrash the previous fall. It was comforting to see something that reminded Brian of what the wood had been like. He was sure now that there hadn’t been any houses around it, except for Prudence’s. He was absolutely sure.

They slunk past the Steeple, intent on the mountain above the blue trees.

Through yards and along drainage ditches they ran, bent over, trying to stay out of sight.

That night, there was a feeling of youth in the air in Rumbling Elk Haven. The shadows were wet with life and growth; the trees looked young and spindly. The new suburb was silent except for the distant grinding of earthmovers, the chirp of crickets and of trucks in reverse, unseen, at the perimeter of the neighborhood, where work was being done even in darkness: the flattening of the forest, the raising of new homes, the spreading of settlement upon the face of the Earth in all directions, the ceaseless devouring.

Even as they ran, stooped, past pools, the neighborhood grew. The dominion of humankind shrank.

They came to a region of mud, steep and sticky. No one had built above this line. They toiled through it. Kalgrash had a hard time in his armor. The weight of it pulled him down.

“Look!” Kalgrash exclaimed. “Suckers!”

Brian thought he was sneering, but discovered instead that Kalgrash was embracing young trees.

“It’s the forest!” he said. “They haven’t knocked it down yet up here!”

“I think the trees that were originally in the forest were bigger than that,” Brian said. “Weren’t they full size?” He couldn’t really remember.

“But these are darling!” said Kalgrash.

They climbed over boulders and through bracken. They followed old paths through the rocks on the mountain’s side. Brian couldn’t see well. There was hardly any moon. Kalgrash led him, sometimes heaving him up rock walls.

And after an hour, they reached the entrance to the caverns.

It was in a cellar. A rotten door set in the stone. “I remember it being a foundation to a new house,” said Brian.

He looked out over the landscape. Beneath the sliver of the moon and the high clouds, the suburb lay like an organism, glistening with lights, its streets curved and curled. An SUV crawled along one dead end. The lights peppered the wood as far as Brian could see.

That was just like he remembered it from the previous year, he thought. The lawns. The lanterns. The dead ends. Was that right?

He stood, transfixed by the distant, bruising glow of cities on the horizon. The clouds were dingy with their light.

The night was crawling with life.

Kalgrash, below, was heaving the wooden door aside.

“I’ll go a few steps down,” he said. “Then once we can’t be seen, you light the lantern for yourself.”

They trotted down the spiral staircase. Brian shrugged the sagging door closed over his head. Now in complete darkness, he held on to the lantern, concentrated, and spoke the Cantrip of Activation.

The lantern glowed and picked out Brian’s round cheeks and Kalgrash’s spiky teeth.

They continued downward, toward the city — and the prison where Gregory, Prudence, and Sniggleping were trapped, far beneath the earth.

W
hen Gregory tumbled out of the hirsute throat of wizardry, he dropped on a floor of stone. The fall was rough. For a while, he lay on the ground, writhing, grabbing at his own arms, flexing his burned hand, rocking back and forth, convulsed in pain.

A Norumbegan lantern lit the dungeon, but not well. The room was too large, the shadows tremendous. Dark bars were cast across his scalded palm.

As he stopped rolling and began to take notice of what was around him, terror struck. He was surrounded by kreslings.

They stood without moving. He propped himself up. “What do you want?” he asked them.

Two came forward roughly, jammed their claws under his arms, and pulled him to his feet. Their flesh smelled of burning tires. They dragged him to the wall.

Then he was truly terrified.

Because there, in front of him, was Prudence.

He had wanted to find her so badly.

But not like this.

Nothing like this.

His cousin was already slumped on the floor, hands behind her. She could not see him. She had on some kind of helmet. On its crest was a small, old-timey movie projector. In front of her eyes were long tracks leading to some kind of screen, which caught the image from the projector above. The projector rattled and ratcheted. Gregory could not see the movie Prudence watched, but it obviously blared colors, which shrank and grew and dissolved across her forehead and eyes. As they changed, she twitched and grimaced. Her mouth was pulled into ugly shapes. She did not seem like a sentient human anymore, but like something that was broken.

Wee Sniggleping was next to her. He also wore a helmet with a projector and a screen a few inches in front of his eyes. He no longer moved. He stared, vainly, at the screen, his mouth open, his hands unclasped on the stone beside him.

“What have you — what is this?” Gregory asked.

The kreslings did not answer.

He called out Prudence’s name. She did not respond. He called it out again.

She turned jerkily, trying to see him. But she could not see past the movie. She raised a hand to try to feel him. Her body jolted with the darts of color that assaulted her.

He was horrified this could happen to her — his clever, sly cousin — but now, there were no Rules to stop the wrong from winning — and here she lay, hardly human.

Gregory reached out to her with both his hands. One was red, one pale. He called her name again.

The kreslings forced him down to the ground. They tried to shove a helmet on his head. He fought them. He brought his elbows up to shield his skull. They batted his arms away. He clenched a fist and ducked.

They got the helmet on him regardless.

He shrieked Prudence’s name again, but he couldn’t see her anymore. There was only a white screen in front of him.

He did not have to ask. He knew what this was. Brainwashing. Somehow, they’d try to get him to soften up for colonization. There was no way, he vowed — no way that they’d break him.

He felt a
click
resound through his jaw. Someone had turned on the helmet’s movie projector, and it wouldn’t, he had a feeling, go off soon.

The colors started. Bold. Flying at him. He ducked. It was like they were three-dimensional. He knew they weren’t real. He closed his eyes.

The machine purred on his head. He saw the colors through his lids — just a blush.

It seemed like more trouble to keep his eyes closed than to open them. He peeked.

The colors came at him in a barrage. Some subtle. Most glaring. Swimming up at him. He tried to wipe them away, but his hands were restrained by claws. He could not reach his own face. The colors were always there. The colors always would be there. For hours, for days, he would watch the colors. They crowded out every thought.
He screamed, but he couldn’t hear his own voice above the nattering of the projector.

He tried to fix his thoughts on the things he knew — on home — on his mother, his father, his house. He saw the house, the kitchen, with an arrangement of dried grasses in a vase on the counter. A calendar of Vermont landscapes covered by fog — covered bridges, pony teams, valleys. The dishwasher … (everything turned purple before his eyes) … the dishwasher had a different compartment for powdered soap than for liquid. His father was there, putting away plates. Gregory thought as hard as possible about that room — the place he knew so well — with the cabinets and the arrangement of dried grass and the men with the dark rings around their eyes, the pointed ears, sitting on the tabletop. There was never a hope for brownies in that house. The Thusser ate them all. The walls were orange — no, yellow, or … with a green stripe … the walls … weren’t the walls …?

Gregory’s head rocked back and forth as the colors assaulted him.

He lay on the floor, deep in that vault, and forgot everything he knew.