The Otherworldlies (5 page)

Once the twins were safely in the office, Sam plopped down in the chair in front of the computer. Fern kneeled next to him, silently.

“Fern, what in the world’s going on with you? What really happened?” Sam said, looking at his sister. He was whispering, but having had no opportunity to really
talk
to his sister since yesterday, he was excited and unable to keep his voice low.

“I don’t know what happened, exactly. One second I was in class and then the next second I was on the beach.”

“You really don’t remember anything?” Sam said. “Like being taken to the beach or something?”

“Nothing.”

“Unbelievable! Do you realize what this means?” He had no idea how to even process the information. He looked at his sister with wide, wild eyes. That’s when he noticed the fear in Fern’s. She had been remarkably composed throughout the whole ordeal up to this point, so it was easy for Sam to forget that she was probably terrified. He calmed himself down.

“What did it feel like?” Sam asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

“You mean disappearing?”

“And the reappearing.”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it scary?”

“You know what it was like?” Fern said, trying to describe something that there were no words for. “The second drop in Splash Mountain. When your stomach feels like it flies out of your body and everything goes dark. You come out of it in a totally new place. Except, there was nothing to hold on to.”

“So you really did just disappear.”

“Yeah.”

“Was it instantaneous?” Sam whispered.

“What do you mean?” Fern whispered back.

“When you disappeared,” Sam said. “Did you go to the beach right away?”

“Yes,” Fern said, anxious to confess to the only person who believed her. “Well, almost. Things went black for a few seconds. There was a strange person waiting there, Sam.”

“On the beach?”

“Yeah. This sunburned man—he was the only other person at Pirate’s Cove and he had this weird voice and a metal detector. He knew that I’d ‘disappeared.’ He said I disappeared because it was a celebration of the end of the Titanomachy. At least I think that’s what he said, but I’ve never heard that word in my life.”

“He sounds like he was talking gibberish.”

“It wasn’t gibberish.”

“He was probably just some crazy guy. There are lots of those people at the beach.”

“No, it was like he was waiting there for me. He seemed crazy but he wasn’t. He knew I’d come from school, and he told me to go into the cave by the stairs. I found initials there that were the same as Mom’s. M. L. M.”

“Those could have been anybody’s initials. The Commander would never deface anything.”

“I know you’re probably right.” Fern said, feeling foolish for bringing it up. She continued, “There was also a second cave behind the cave near the entrance to the beach. The sunburned man was calling it the Den.”

“What?”

“He pointed out this hole to me and after he left, I crawled through.”

“That’s impossible! We’ve been in that cave a million times before.”

“It was there. I swear. There was a strange inscription on the floor, with strange lettering. It looked very old. And there was a drawing on the wall.” Fern looked pleadingly at Sam, who looked confused. “I know all this sounds crazy, Sam, and that nobody is going to believe me, but you know me, I don’t—”

“I believe you,” Sam said. He looked at his sister with an earnest intensity. “I saw you disappear.”

The twins looked at each other for a moment without saying anything.

“You did?”

“I almost talked myself out of it in the last day. Like I couldn’t have seen it, but talking to you now, I know what I saw, Fern. You just vanished. Like a ghost.”

“Maybe that’s what I am.”

“If you were a ghost,” Sam said, “I wouldn’t be able to do this.” He grabbed her wrist and twisted his hands in opposite directions. “Indian burn!”

“Ouch!” Fern said.

“Shhhh,” Sam said. “I just thought of something.” He narrowed his eyes and began to focus on the computer screen in front of him. “There’s a word for it. Like in
Star Trek
when Captain Kirk says, ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’ Only you can do it all by yourself.” Sam began typing.

“Since when did you start watching
Star Trek
?”

“I don’t know; the reruns are always on when I’m flipping through.”

“You’re such a closet nerd.”

“Do you want to figure this out or not?”

“Sorry,” Fern said, half smiling.

Sam clicked the mouse with fervor, scanning the rapidly changing windows. “Yes! Here it is.
Teleport.
I bet you teleported,” Sam said, his whisper growing raspy with excitement.

He pointed to the screen. Sam had typed ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ into Google and had come up with thousands of websites. He’d navigated through a series of links and had come up with a page explaining the “Art of Teleportation.” A man in the corner kept disappearing, than reappearing.

“‘Although teleportation is not yet possible, it will be,’” Sam said, reading from the screen. “They’ve already done it with photons. It says here that researchers at Cal Tech did it in 1998.”

“Photons?”

“I think they’re like particles. See, it’s exactly like
Star Trek
,” he said, pointing to a sentence on the screen that mentioned Captain Kirk and Spock. “Only that was made up. And you’re real!”

Sam looked at his sister with absolute wonderment.

“What’s all this stuff about entanglement and destroying the object that you’re teleporting?” Fern asked, quickly scanning a paragraph of text under the question “What do people mean when they say
teleport
?”

“Have you tried doing it again?” Sam said.

“Are you kidding? No way!” Fern said, shivering at the very thought of it.

“Why not?”

“What if next time I do it, I get destroyed, like it says in this article?”

“You’re not going to get destroyed.”

“How do you know?”

“Fern, don’t you get it?” Sam said, impassioned. “You can do something nobody in the world has been able to do before. It’s like you’re a superhero.”

“I’m not a superhero. I’m a freak.”

“Superheroes
are
freaks. They’re good freaks.”

“Sam, there’s no such thing as a good freak.”

“Of course there is.
Star Trek
is full of good freaks. Superman’s a good freak. Um,” Sam said, trying to come up with other examples, “and Lance Armstrong—I hear his heart cycles blood twice as fast as a normal person. He’s a good freak. Or Einstein—he was a good smart freak.”

Fern let a halfhearted chuckle escape her mouth.

“Man,” Sam continued, his face animated, “this whole thing is incredible!” He began to focus on the computer screen once more. “Now what was that word that the crazy man used?”

“Titanomachy,” Fern said. “But I don’t know how to spell it.”

“Maybe he made it up, but we might as well check it out.” Sam opened a new window on the computer screen and began typing.

“Here it is,” he said, scanning. “Whoa. It’s a word for the eleven-year war between the Titans and the Olympians.”

“The Titans and the Olympians?”

“It’s from mythology,” Sam said, reading from the page.

Behind them, on the ledge of a window, a large bird with a bright red head and feathers the color of midnight rustled against the window. The twins turned around to look. The large bird turned its head. Fern could’ve sworn it was staring right at them. She began to grow hot under its gaze. It turned away from the window, expanding its wings until they loomed so large, the entire window was blocked with black feathers. The wings could have gathered up both twins with one movement. It stood absolutely still. After what seemed like ten minutes, the bird took off and disappeared into the night sky.

“What
was
that?” Fern said, looking aghast at her brother.

“I don’t know.”

“Feeeern!” Her mother was calling for her from downstairs. Sam instinctively jumped out of the chair and took a step back from his sister. He closed every open window on the computer and backed away from its glow.

“Fern, I’ll be up in a minute to talk to you! I’d better not be hearing chatter up there!” Mrs. McAllister yelled.

“What am I going to tell the Commander?” Fern pleaded with her brother.

“I don’t know if there’s anything you can possibly say that will calm her down.” Sam wore a tired half smile. “Stall her until we figure all this out. We won’t tell anybody about any of it, okay?”

The two snuck out of the office and stood in the doorway.

“Okay,” Fern whispered.

Sam turned toward his room with a slight frown, and waved good night. Fern waved back, retreating to her own room.

When Fern plopped down on her bed, she was sure she was more exhausted in that moment than she had been in her entire life.

A breeze drifted in through her open window. The bedroom walls were lined with maple-wood-framed photographs. All the photographs were of the same place— Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which was Fern’s favorite spot in the whole world. The family had traveled to New Mexico on a summer vacation and stayed there a few days. They’d toured many of the caves, walking downward into the earth. Fern couldn’t quite describe it, but there, enclosed in stone, she’d felt serene and her head had tingled with pleasure. There was something about the still coolness, the masts of limestone, and the hanging prickly stalactites that seemed as if they could crumble at any moment.

Her brothers had left wishing they had come across a skeleton or two they could tell their friends about. Fern had left wishing she could live there.

Tonight Fern stared at the picture hanging over her bed. It was of the Crystal Spring Dome. The Crystal Spring Dome was remarkable because it was wet, which meant it was one of the only stalagmites still growing. She wondered if she were still changing or if she were like the famous and permanent stalactite, the Sword of Damocles. That particular formation had been named by park rangers in 1928 and had remained exactly as it was back then. Would she be like she was now forever? Or was she still capable of growth?

Knock, knock.

“Still awake?” Her mother’s voice was unexpectedly soft and soothing. The truth was, Mrs. McAllister felt she might have been too harsh with Fern in the St. Gregory’s parking lot.

Fern lay still. She could feel the bed sink from her mother’s weight as she sat next to Fern. Her mother had changed into silk pajamas. In them, with her hair wild around her shoulders, she looked much too young to be a mother of a sixteen-year-old son. Mrs. McAllister grabbed
Lord of the Flies.

“
Ah,
Lord of the Flies
. The second best ‘Lord of’ book in all the land,” Mrs. McAllister said, looking at her daughter sprawled out on the bed.

“What’s the first best?” Fern said, raising her head up on one elbow.

“
The
Lord of the Rings
, hands down.”

“That’s three books, isn’t it?”

“Tolkien wrote it as one.”

“I haven’t read it yet,” Fern said.

“You will.”

Mrs. McAllister took Fern’s copy of
Lord of the Flies
and flipped through it. “Why does this look like it’s been through a hurricane?”

Fern had to admit that there was some significant water damage to the book. It kind of looked like a paper accordion.

“I’ve been taking it into the shower with me,” she said simply.

“To read?”

“Yeah.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Mrs. McAllister was shocked.

“It’s dead time in the shower. I always want to find out what happens and I always have to go do something else, so it seemed like a shame to waste the time.”

“Maybe you should have put it in a Ziploc first.”

“Then I could only read the two pages on top,” Fern said.

Mrs. McAllister paused to think for a moment. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to start allowing more shelf space for all our books. This is twice the size it used to be.” She waved the book in the air and the stiff pages crinkled.

“It’ll look like we have more books that way.” The two smiled at each other.

Mrs. McAllister inhaled. “Fern, sit up.” She folded her hands in her lap, looked down at them, and continued. “I need you to tell me exactly what happened yesterday. I won’t get upset, but I need to know.”

“I told you what happened.”

“Don’t you know that what you say happened couldn’t possibly have happened?” Mrs. McAllister looked at her daughter not with anger, but with sympathy.

“I don’t remember. I felt the world spinning and I woke up on the beach.”

“Why are you lying to me, Fern?”

Fern recognized the emotion that filled her mother’s voice. It wasn’t anger. It was disappointment.

“I don’t understand this, Fern! This is unacceptable. What are you hiding?” Mrs. McAllister was growing frustrated. She couldn’t seem to get through to Fern.

“I’m not hiding anything.”

“You’ve never lied to me before, Fern. I can’t understand why you’re doing it now.” Her voice was hard. If Fern didn’t give in, would there be an end to her mother’s resentment?

“I’m sorry,” Fern said, beginning to speak as her mind worked on overdrive. She thought of the sunburned man’s advice.

The first lie came rather easily. “I took the bus,” Fern blurted out, louder than necessary. “I walked out of St. Gregory’s and took the bus to the beach and I shouldn’t have done it!” Fern was talking fast now, trying to get through it, so it would be over. Mrs. McAllister interpreted this eagerness as Fern unburdening her guilty conscience

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Fern said, visibly upset. “I was sick of being teased. I guess . . . I guess I wanted a break, even for the day.”

The Commander grabbed her daughter’s arms and pulled Fern toward her, hugging her with reckless force. Fern felt like she might be squeezed into two equal halves. The hug was so fierce, it felt like an unspoken reproach.

“I shouldn’t have left school,” Fern said. Fern’s words took the Commander back to her disciplinary stance. She pulled away from her daughter and delivered Fern a harsh look.