of the car. Marina led the procession to the front gate, and shrank back immediately as the dogs charged, barking and slobbering.
“Mean dogs,” said Alexei.
“Let’s cross the street,” Janet suggested, and as they did, the barking subsided, and they could study the house in the quiet. The light was still on in the room with the Greater Kudu Bull. Alexei whistled softly.
“Is hideous thing to be having in house,” he clucked.
“There’s no accounting for taste,” agreed Janet.
“It’s just a stuffed creature,” Marina shrugged. She’d seen worse. One time she saw a stuffed owl - the entire large bird - in a bathroom hanging over the toilet. She had seen chandeliers made of ossified dragonflies. She once knew a woman who’d had all her pets stuffed. Seventy years of stuffed cats lined the hallways of the old lady’s house. And then there was people’s ideas of art. Once you started to think about that, what was a moose or whatever it was? Mere bad taste.
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“You mean what’s with the moose?” Janet asked.
“Or the house,” Marina said. “Why the house?”
“What about this one?” Alexei asked, and he pointed to the one they were standing in front of, the ghost house, as the boys called it, whose door was wide open and whose lights were all out.
“Phil said the weird stuff started happening only after they went inside there,” Janet said.
“So we should go in?” Marina asked, but the two others were already heading that way. Marina stopped back at her car first and fetched a small flashlight from the glove box, then hurried to catch up with her friends. By the time she had reached them they were already inside and had experienced the effect of leaving the living room for the kitchen, and having the lights turn on behind them. Janet examined the wall for switches, as Marcus and Phil had done.
“It’s pretty much how he described it,” she said, and she went through the motions that Phil had described; walking from room to room, opening the window and seeing the curtain come down in the moose house, closing the window, and the curtain going up. As the three went through these routines, they saw the living room light coming on in the moose house, and the tops of three heads begin to take shape. The originals stood, feeling more and more frozen in their tracks, as the faces emerged, and they saw that the faces were copies of theirs, and the bodies that unfolded below were their own, and a sensation of weight came over their eyes.
Chapter Twelve
“We’ve got to be careful,” Marcus told Phil. “There was a cop at my house. My stepmother called him. She thought I was missing or something. Anyway, he says that he knows you and you might be in trouble.”
“Fat cop?” Phil inquired. “Stupid looking. Kind of greasy?”
“That’s him,” Marcus confirmed.
“Officer Mike,” Phil shrugged. “I don’t care about him. He’s told lies about me before now, I know. The guy’s got it in for me, but he’s going nowhere. Other cops told me. Nobody listens to him.”
“Even so,” Marcus said. “We need to watch out. They’ve got photos.”
“Really? Of us?”
“Not us. Them,” Marcus said.
“What I meant,” Phil replied. “The other us, them. Whereabouts?”
“The Ironworks,” Marcus told him, “And Officer Mike said something about the glass factory too. Said we were seen, or someone was seen, I don’t know.”
“Maybe we should go there,” Phil suggested. They had already decided to avoid the moose house. They didn’t want to get caught in that trap again. Now they were shuffling down the street, in no hurry, having been unable to decide what to do, where to go.
“Who were those people?” Marcus wanted to know. “At your house?”
“Oh, some friends of my mom,” Phil replied. “Or I think so, at least. They seemed to be friends. The old guy is some kind of genius, according to her. Or he used to be back in the day. The other one, I don’t know what she is. My mom seems to think she’s important.”
“So what were they doing there?”
“Trying to figure it all out,” Phil said. “They were saying some crazy stuff, about aliens and wormholes and bending gravity.”
“Bending?”
“A lot of equations,” Phil said. “It’s all math. You can do anything with math, the old guy was saying. Prove anything. Go anywhere. Do anything. You can make the whole universe as small as a pebble, or as big as infinity if that’s what you want. With math you can draw any picture, prove anything and even prove nothing.”
“So what do they think happened to us?”
“We were turned into copies,” Phil said, and Marcus just laughed.
“We already knew that,” he said. “We didn’t need any genius to tell us.”
“And they said that whoever did it was limited to the thing that they copied. Like since they copied a kid, meaning us, they could only do the things we can do, they could only use our bodies and brains in ways that we can, but I don’t know if I really believe it. They said that we were just carriers. They needed us but couldn’t use us for long. The old man had a theory they had limited time, they could only survive in our kind of bodies a few hours, and then they’d run out or whatever. Without bodies they couldn’t do anything. He said they were not really solid in their real forms, at least not on Earth, so they take what they can whenever they can to do what it is they are trying to do, whatever that is.”
“My little brother saw us,” Marcus remembered. “He said we were running and that I was going faster than you.”
“No way,” Phil said. “I can beat you anytime.”
“I know,” Marcus said, “but it’s like you were saying. If they could only do what our bodies can do, than how could I be going faster?”
“Maybe you’ve got it in you,” Phil shrugged. “But the things that I saw on my computer, there’s no way that I could have written that stuff.”
“Maybe you’ve got it inside you as well,” Marcus said with a smile.
“Where were we running?” Phil asked, and when Marcus told him about the old bridge, Phil suggested they go there, and Marcus agreed. It wasn’t too far and they had nowhere to go anyway. Still, they stuck to the shadows and took some back alleys just in case Officer Mike was out prowling around. As they got closer they also got quieter. Each had a feeling they were getting warmer as they neared the source of their replicas’ destination.
The old bridge had been abandoned for years, like the entire freight railroad business itself. Once upon a time their town had a lively harbor and an active train system, but that was all gone long before even their parents were born. Abandoned buildings remained, some of them turned into warehouses, but mostly left rotting away. Marcus and Phil stepped quietly around broken up streets and discarded rubbish. People used this area as an informal landfill, dumping their junk whenever and wherever they felt like. The yards and the alleys were filled with old cars and appliances, piles of rusting metal and faded plastic. It was hard to go quietly through the place, but Marcus and Phil did their best. Approaching the bridge they moved slower and slower, and as it loomed up before them they even felt chills. Their imagination was getting ahead of their senses. In clear daylight they would have been mocking themselves for these fears, but in the darkness everything seemed ominous and strange.
“I don’t know,” whispered Marcus. “It’s creepy.”
“I know,” Phil agreed, and for a moment the boys were tempted to turn around and flee, run as fast as they could away from that bridge, but then Phil saw something, swaying and glinting, dangling above them, catching the moonlight.
“What is that?” he whispered and pointed it out. As Marcus looked up, he saw more of the same kind of thing; objects swinging slowly between the bridge girders and beams.
“Looks like bottles,” he said.
“And tools,” Phil added. They inched onto the bridge itself, trying to look down to avoid falling between the rails and up at
the same time to try and see what those things were up there.
“Tied onto the bridge,” Marcus said.
“With wire,” Phil said.
“We couldn’t do that,” Marcus shook his head.
“Maybe we didn’t,” said Phil. “Maybe that stuff was already there”.
There were dozens of bottles, tied at various lengths so they wouldn’t knock into each other, swaying in the breeze, and yet there was no breeze. Also there were random pieces of iron, solid bars, fireplace pokers and crowbars, and wrought iron gates. These too were tied up in wires and attached to the bridge. There seemed to be some kind of pattern - a certain number of bottles interspersed with metallics - but not the same number each time.
“Maybe it’s some kind of art,” Phil suggested, and Marcus just shrugged.
“I have no idea,” he admitted. “It’s weird.”
“Must be more than a hundred,” Phil said. The boys were barely standing at the edge of the bridge and were about to go further on, to see just how far this pattern extended, when a light suddenly came sweeping over them, and they heard the sound of a car nearby braking.
“Come on,” Marcus said, tugging at Phil. “It might be the cops. We’ve got to hide”
“Okay,” Phil replied and they hurried off the bridge and quickly found a spot behind a bulky old oven, not far but well out of sight. Crouching down and scrunching together, they heard the sounds of footsteps approaching, and then they heard voices, voices that sounded familiar.
Chapter Thirteen
“It’s all here,” said the voice of Janet Boltch, and the voice of Alexei replied,
“This is good. Now maybe finally go home.”
“It’s been a long time,” said Marina.
“We finally found the right humans,” said Alexei.
“Good work with the trap,” Marina replied.
“Someone will have to look after the dogs,” he answered with a tinge of sadness. “Since we had to dispose of their people.”
“They didn’t have the right stuff,” Marina reminded him.
“Enough talking,” Janet ordered as the three grownups walked right past the place where the two boys were hiding. Marcus and Phil glanced at each other and both shook their heads. They both wanted to talk but knew that they shouldn’t. Marcus would have said the same thing as Phil. That is probably not Alexei, and that is probably not Janet, and that is probably not really Phil’s mom. Marcus and Phil readjusted their positions, inching forward to get a better look. The adults were walking onto the bridge. Janet looked up and pointed, approvingly.
“It looks good,” Alexei said as Janet hushed him again. They stood in a line, Janet in the middle with Marina on her left, and Alexei on her right.
“Now for this,” Janet said, “Are you ready?” and she reached out her arms and grabbed the others around their waists. She pulled them close to her sides and then squeezed. The others were scrunched up against her, and still she squeezed tighter. That’s got to hurt, Marcus thought, but neither Marina nor Alexei made any sound as the much larger woman crushed them against her vast body. She gripped harder and tighter and then the two bodies merged with her own. First their waists disappeared into hers, then she adjusted her grasp to pull in their torsos and shoulders. She squeezed in their legs and finally their heads until there was only one person, just Janet. Phil barely kept from crying out, and might have done so had not Marcus put his hand over his friend’s mouth. To see your own mother absorbed just like that, it had to be hard, Marcus thought.
“What are these creatures?” he wondered, “or maybe there is only one?”
It was hard to know what was actually going on. Moments later, the big body that looked like Janet started to peel away in liquid sheets, layer after layer like an onion that was melting, and at the same time - Marcus didn’t know where to look first - the bottles on wires that were tied to the bridge seemed to blaze all at once as if they’d caught fire. They all came swinging together towards the center, towards the spot where the creature was now bubbling and boiling, and the bottles, too, split into sheets, and in a furious blast they shattered but instead of smashing to pieces, they merged and became a sort of a bowl, surrounding the creature and catching the sheets that were formerly flesh.
The thing was all yellow now, and nothing of Janet remained. It was yellow like mustard and lumpy like a poorly made pudding, and collapsing, more liquid than solid. The thing couldn’t stand, couldn’t hold on to its shape, but distilled into something that looked more like butter than anything else that Marcus could think of.
“It can’t even stand up on its own. Our gravity’s not enough,” Phil whispered, but the thing didn’t hear, because the assorted bits of iron began clanging and clasping around the sides of the huge glass bowl as the tools and the rods and the pokers and gates all swung down surrounding it, holding the whole thing together like the grate in a fireplace holds all the logs.
The bowl looked as if it could all melt away. It was shimmering yellow and orange and blue with the flames, and the creature inside it was slishing and sloshing from one side of the bowl to the other. Marcus thought he could hear the thing moaning but that was probably all in his mind.
“It’s shrinking,” Phil said, and as Marcus looked closer he could see that the iron was tightening around the bowl that was becoming a completely closed sphere. It was definitely growing smaller, and tighter and somehow more solid. It was cooling and collapsing in on itself. Now the whole mass, which had been resting on the train tracks, began to lift itself up off the ground, and even as it shrank it rose higher and higher, until it was about six feet up in the air, and had collapsed to the size of a baseball.
Phil started to move from behind the old oven, and Marcus reluctantly joined him. It was getting harder to see the small thing. It was tiny by now, and no longer glowing. They ran onto the bridge and Marcus lost sight of the thing for a moment, and when he saw it again it was smaller than a golf ball, and still diminishing rapidly. The boys ran as fast as they could, reaching the spot where it hovered above, now several feet over their heads, when it suddenly vanished without making a sound. It was gone, and all of the bottles, and all of the pieces of iron were gone, not a trace of them left on the rails or the girders. The night was still dark, and it was all gone.
Chapter Fourteen - Epilogue
“Is that really what happened?” a dubious Ben asked his brother.
“Exactly,” Marcus casually tossed back. He was lying on the upper bunk very late one night. His little brother often had trouble falling asleep, and would keep them both up chatting for hours. It was at least the hundredth time that Ben had insisted on hearing the story again.
“It doesn’t seem too likely,” Ben grumbled.
“Likely? Ha!” Marcus replied. “It’s for sure. That’s the way these things work. There are rules.”
“Rules? What rules?”
“Like what happens when you die,” Marcus went on.
“If you’re bad you go to hell,” Ben promptly responded.
“Right,” Marcus agreed. “And you know hell is hot, and heaven is cloudy. That’s just the way it is. Like with aliens. They have these super-sophisticated technologies that we can barely imagine, and what life is on other planets we can never even dream of. There are some things you just never know.”
“I guess,” Ben shrugged, “but what about the moose? How come that thing disappeared?”
“I don’t know,” Marcus said. “Maybe Mrs. Turtleson told old Mr. Turtleson, ‘look buddy, it’s either me or the moose’.”
Both of the boys cracked up laughing, and then Marcus added,
“That house went up for sale, and the other one too. So it’s gone. No more moose. Well, you never see that every day!”
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