1- A DISTURBING DRAWING
As he reached to snap the three-ring binder closed, Jake noticed a small crescent of grime under the nail of his left thumb. He closed his eyes again, but when he opened them, the little curve of black dirt was still there. Mrs. Moeller was handing out the test, her mouth moving as she murmured in a low voice, telling students to begin when they got it and work quietly. Jake looked at the clock. He looked at the test page Mrs. Moeller deposited on his desk. He looked back at the line of filth under his thumbnail. He swallowed. He blinked several times. He copied down the first problem on his scratch paper. The little crescent of dirt drew his eyes away again.
It was pointless.
He raised his hand. “May I go to the bathroom?” he asked when Mrs. Moeller came over. He hoped she wouldn’t remind him that this was first period, and he should have taken care of this before school started. She gave him a tight-lipped look but didn’t say anything as she nodded and motioned toward the door.
Now Jake stood in front of the mirror, scrubbing his hands, and his mind strayed to the weird way he had awakened this morning. He’d had a dream. A nightmare. He never remembered his dreams, but this one was burned into his brain. He had been running. But not just running. Running away from something. Being chased. Hiding. Hiding on the ground under some bushes, face-to-face with fragrant earth, the soil so dark it was almost black. He knew, the way you just know in dreams, that whoever was after him was just about to push the bushes aside and grab him, and that was when his alarm went off.
When he’d performed all the regular morning checks and opened his eyes, everything had at first been within normal margins. He was a little sweaty, body temperature elevated by the disturbing dream most likely, and his covers were more rumpled than usual, also explained by the fact that he’d been running in the dream. He had swung his legs over the edge of the bed, curled his toes on the carpet five times, stood, and went into the bathroom.
As he cupped his hands to fill them with water from the sink, he gasped. His fingernails, which he always kept immaculate, were full of dirt. Not just a little, either. Dirt so dark it was almost black, jammed under every single nail. A whistly squeaking sound came from his throat.
He jerked and spilled water all over the front of his pajama shirt and down his pants. Shaking, he turned the water full blast, grabbed his fingernail scrubber, and furiously scrubbed first the nails of one hand, then the other, until all the dirt was gone.
It had taken his heart a full five minutes to return to normal rhythm. And that had messed up his whole morning routine. Weird. Very weird.
Jake shuddered as he scrubbed his hands in the school bathroom. He’d gone over to the next hall, because the one that was right next to his classroom had a funny smell, and a bulb that flickered and made him feel jumpy, like the electricity zapping through the lights was also flying through his body, and he was also flickering.
He turned off the water and bent down to make sure his left thumbnail was completely dirt-free.
It might have come back. What if it came back all by itself?
Shut up!
You did get them all clean, though, so…
Shut up shut up shut up!
He took a deep breath, counted to ten, and dared to look at all his fingernails again.
Clean.
Jake let out the breath, pulled five paper towels out of the dispenser, and dried his hands. He kept the bunch of damp towels between his hand and the handle of the bathroom door, swung it open, and tossed the towels into the trash bin before the door closed. Then he hurried back to his classroom where his math test was waiting. He started solving problems, writing all the steps, showing his answers with meticulous care on his paper.
Mrs. Moeller strolled around the room, observing the students’ progress, resting a reassuring hand on the shoulders of a few nervous-looking kids. Her feet made almost no sound. She stopped near his desk, and he heard her voice a surprised “Hm!” He looked up to find her eyes on him, her brow slightly creased.
“That’s a little disturbing, Jacob,” she said.
Jake felt his face get hot and he knew his ears were already turning red.
“What is, Mrs. Moeller?” he asked.
She gestured at his paper. “I’ve never seen a student draw something so… well, so sinister,” she said. She looked up at the classroom clock. “And we’re almost out of time and you’ve only completed half of the problems.”
Jake looked down at his page and his throat squeezed closed again. His heart slammed against his rib cage like it was trying to break free. Glaring back at him was a terrifying creature. It looked like the cloaked figure of Death, only instead of a scythe, its long, skeletal hand grasped something in its fist – the gnarled knuckles and long fingers clenching it tightly so he couldn’t tell what it was. A fine chain hung down between the bony fingers. The eyes were deep black pits, shrouded in the darkness of a heavy hood that concealed the other facial features. Black robes hung off the body; the cloth spread all the way to the ground, where it lay in folds at the feet of the creature. Jake had captured all these features in detail, with hard, dark pencil strokes.
This was beyond weird. It was totally out of routine. There must be a bug in the program. Some file in his brain had gotten corrupted.
The eraser would not be able to completely eradicate the deep black lines he had gouged into his paper. Jake quickly transcribed all his careful work onto a new sheet of paper, then crumpled the old one. Activating the overdrive mode in his brain, he flew through the remaining problems, keeping his handwriting tight and neat.
The bell rang just as he finished the last problem. Jake checked his hands and wiped sweat from his forehead as he turned in his test and carefully gathered up his binder and books. It had been a glitch. Just a glitch. Those happened to people all the time.
Second period was history, which was usually Jake’s favorite class. Today, Jake shuffled in on autopilot, barely registering his surroundings. He slid into his chair and closed his eyes again. He tried to get his brain to run a defragmentation program. Maybe if he could reset, he could just dump the glitch into the recycle bin and start fresh.
He was breathing deeply and counting when an elbow poked into his side He jumped, his eyes flying open. Owen was looking back at him. He raised his eyebrows and cut his eyes toward the front of the room. Jake looked. Their history teacher, Mr. Lindow, was looking at Jake. He wore a strange expression. Jake didn’t have a color for it. He would ask Mr. Clift about that later.
“Well, Jake?” Mr. Lindow said. “Huh?” Jake said.
“I asked if anybody had thoughts about the various superstitions of medieval peoples,” Mr. Lindow said. “I thought you would have been the first one to comment, Jake. You okay?” “Yeah,” Jake said. “Medieval superstitions? I’ve been reading about those.” The brain fog evaporated as he retrieved the right file and double-clicked on it. Jake launched into his current favorite topic. By the time second period ended, things were back on track.
Third period was his meeting with the school counselor, Mr. Clift. Jake took his place in the supposedly comfortable chair, squirming around to get into a good position. He hated the chair. The material that covered the cushion made him itch, and the seat was too deep and the wrong angle. It made Jake feel like he was tilted back in a dentist’s chair that was trying to eat him. He scooted to the edge and leaned forward so his feet could rest flat on the ground. Mr. Clift sat in another chair facing Jake. Between them, on the little coffee table, lay an assortment of colored cards.
Jake re-checked his hands. They were pink, scrubbed clean, the nails trimmed perfectly, with the rough edges filed down, and cuticles dirt-free. He ran his thumbs over the ends of the other four fingers, confirming the nail ends were smooth. When he finally glanced up, Mr. Clift was looking at him like he was waiting, and Jake realized that probably meant he had asked a question that Jake had missed.
“What was that, Mr. Clift?” Jake said.
Mr. Clift never wasted time with the dumb stuff that most people called “small talk.” He jumped right into the real stuff. “I said, your mom is a little worried about you. She says you haven’t been sleeping much, and you’ve been spending a lot of time in your room.”
Jake felt his ears start to heat up. “Well, I’ve been working on my diorama. She knows that. She knows it’s a special interest. She brings me snacks and tells me not to stay up too late.”
“Relax, you’re not in trouble,” said Mr. Clift. “We’re just talking – like we do every day. Tell me about your diorama.”
“Well, it’s for Medieval Day – you know the big thing Mr. Lindow is doing with us where we make a project and then we all set them up in the gym?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Clift. “And I know you’re really into the medieval time period.”
“Yeah!” Jake said. “Did you know, medieval peoples believed in all sorts of magical things because at that time, there was no scientific way to explain them! They thought manatees were mermaids who tricked sailors into going into the ocean where they would drag them under the water and kill them! They thought mice grew spontaneously from grain sacks people left on the ground. They had all kinds of superstitions about monsters and dragons and even people with supernatural abilities. Like that some people, who they would think of as wizards or sorcerers, could possess animals’ minds, and make them do whatever they wanted, and they could even control other people! Did you know—” Jake stopped abruptly when he finally noticed the little purple card Mr. Clift was holding up in front of him.
The counselor and Jake had developed the colored card system to help Jake learn how to read other people. Jake thought it was cool. It was like coding a new program into the computer system that was his brain. Purple was “off topic.”
“Oh… um, sorry, Mr. Clift.” The heat flared back up in Jake’s ears.
“It’s okay, Jake,” Mr. Clift said with a smile. “Actually, why don’t you go ahead and finish? I know that makes it easier for you to talk about the next subject.” He dropped the purple card onto the table, folded his hands, and smiled.
When Jake had finally exhausted his knowledge of the intricacies of medieval science, or at least reached an acceptable stopping point, he took a deep breath and looked at Mr. Clift.
“Ready for the next question?” Mr. Clift said. “Okay.”
“Jake,” Mr. Clift said. “Your mom also told me you’ve been having nightmares…” Mr. Clift trailed off and looked at Jake. Jake understood that this meant he was supposed to give a response. But what Mr. Clift had said didn’t make any sense. He went into his head and consulted his mental directories, but everything came up blank.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “At least, none that I remember.”
Except the one you had THIS MORNING…
I said shut up!
The voice that sometimes spoke up in Jake’s head was just himself. He knew that now. It was one of the ways his brain thought through things. But sometimes it was creepy. Jake’s dad had showed him this old movie once, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Jake’s other voice, the one that gave him his negatives, sounded exactly like the insane computer in that movie – HAL-9000.
Mr. Clift was looking at him with that laser-eye stare that made Jake feel like he was standing under a spaceship and a tractor beam was about to suck him in.
He resisted looking at his hands again and clenched his fists into his sweatpants. Finally, Mr. Clift spoke again. “She said she’s even heard you scream in your sleep. You don’t remember that?”
“No,” Jake said, louder than he meant to. He didn’t remember any other dreams. His mom hadn’t heard him this morning. Had she? He searched through his files, feeling the blue circle spin. And there was something. A memory that was just out of his reach. Buried deep in his mind, underneath all the clean and orderly stuff. He couldn’t pull it up. But there was a reason. This file didn’t want to be opened. It was definitely scary. Maybe even terrifying. A picture came into his mind unbidden. Muddy, smudgy dirt. The black kind that got into everything. The track of the sliding glass door. The treads of your shoes. Fingernails. Jake squirmed and resisted looking at his hands. If there was dirt under his fingernails, he…
Well, he didn’t want to think about what he would do. But his negative voice, the HAL-9000 one, was trying to talk. Trying to give him those thoughts in his monotone, inexorable voice.
Suddenly, he needed to get out of the small office. Like immediately. “I… I think I have to get to my next class,” he said. But it was too late. His body had already frozen. His circuits were overloaded. He needed to slow things down and find a focus point before he locked up completely. Jake pulled his knees to his chest, rocking lightly back and forth. He focused on the colored cards. There was a feeling word for each color. Mr. Clift was teaching him – programming him – that if you could put words to what you were feeling, you would gain some control over those feelings. If Jake could find the right word for what he felt, if he could name it, he would have power over it, and his body would unlock. All these things were strategies Mr. Clift had taught him, and sometimes they worked.
But sometimes they didn’t, and Jake would just ride it out until his muscles loosened up.
“Hey, no worries, kid,” said Mr. Clift, looking at his watch. “Our time is just about up, anyway.” His voice was higher than normal with false cheeriness, that same kind of weird tone Mom used which meant, even though they said there were no worries, there definitely were worries. Mr. Clift stood up. “So, Medieval Day tomorrow, right?”
Jake croaked an affirmative from behind his knees.
“Well,” said Mr. Clift with a sigh, “Maybe things will calm down when you don’t have that project taking up all your attention.”
Jake’s throat was dry. But Mr. Clift had given him one thing to focus on. The diorama.
He thought about the amazing model he had made, examining it in his mind. After a couple more seconds, all his muscles started to unlock. “Yeah, my diorama… Wait – I never told you about it!” Jake said.
“No time now, but don’t worry, I’ll see it tomorrow,” said Mr. Clift, standing. “I’m coming to Medieval Day!”
Jake tried to smile and it worked. He released his knees and put his feet back on the floor.
“Get some rest tonight,” Mr. Clift said. “You need to chill out a little. Leave the diorama alone – I’m sure it’s already perfect – and spend some time with Owen. He probably misses you.”
Owen was the only kid Jake’s own age who didn’t look at him in a way that made him want to lock himself in his room and only come out for hygiene and nutrition-related needs. Jake could stand hanging out with Owen and even told him some of the thoughts in his head. Owen knew about HAL-9000.
Since the Medieval Day project had started, Jake had hardly seen him.
“All right, young sir, be off! And may your day go well!” Mr. Clift sent him out of his office the same way each time they visited. It was the portion of their routine that usually made Jake crack a smile and sometimes even laugh a little. Today, he got out of there as fast as he dared without running, which wasn’t allowed.
Jake didn’t talk to Owen. And he didn’t catch up on his sleep. That night, he stayed up extra late putting finishing touches on his diorama.