Dreams of Shadows, Patrick Sean Lee [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

once in a while, too, instead of shooting that silly gun of yours outside every morning, Munster Gardella.”

“Hah! What do I look like? Some dumb girl?” he said, reaching in for a red, white, and garish green-colored box, Portland Chainsaw printed on the outside.

I should have hit him for that. Instead I reached around him and kissed his cheek. “You’re going to learn the finer arts of domestic duties, Munster. There are no sexes here any longer. Only dumb people—in your case.”

Charles smiled. “We’ll change that soon enough.”

Lashawna handed her brother one of the smaller boxes, asking him whether he could carry it if she stayed close with her bundle.

“Yes, yes. Don’t worry about me. I have the grounds and the house memorized.”

 

We unloaded the last of the bounty gathered that day, and then after refilling the generator and checking the leaky water lines outside, Charles summoned us into the living room.

“We have everything we need. Everything that’s available at least. More than we could have dreamed of in the old consumer world. A world, by the way, that was decaying. It’s time to take stock of who we are, now, and what will be critically important in the months and years ahead.

“Munster, you have a two hundred-thousand dollar sports car, but forgive me for saying, you have no knowledge or social skills, and further, you'll likely kill yourself in that car. I mean to change the knowledge part of that, at least, before your demise. The rest of you,” he said turning his attention to us, “your educations stopped the moment the catastrophe struck—much sooner than it should have. I think you’ll all agree with that.”

“Yeah, but…”

Charles raised a hand to cut Munster off. “You will not remain ignorant for the rest of your lives. You will not descend into mindless and meaningless existences. All of you will create, and to create, you’ll need to be educated. I can assist you there. Starting tomorrow, we’ll devote half the coming days to reading and writing and…arithmetic. Schoolwork.”

“I got better things to do.”

“Shut up already, Munster,” Peter said. “You’ll do as Mr. Baxter says, and like it, or else I’ll take that chainsaw you snatched and cut your bloody legs off.”

“Oh yeah?”

They were off and at it again. But Charles was right. What was missing, truly missing, in our lives was direction. Something more than flashy new cars, scads of mostly useless gadgets, and beautiful clothes that we could wear to…what occasion? The opera in Marysville Playhouse?

I liked school, and I know Jerrick had, too. Whether Jack and Mari and Lashawna and Cynthia, and eventually Ash, felt likewise was unimportant. The older of us at least, saw the importance of what Charles said.

“I think tomorrow at daybreak, after breakfast, we should make another trip into town—to the first school we come across—and find enough desks to accommodate all of you in our new university.” He smiled. “And more books.”

Munster groaned.

For the remainder of the afternoon, and long into the evening, everyone except me fawned over Mari. Maybe I should have. Maybe I’d been way wrong in my suspicions that Mari was just not Mari. Even Munster, recuperating from the shock of learning he’d be attending school the next day—and every day thereafter, until he became a Rhodes scholar, or died in a fiery crash ditching school—even Munster kidded and joked with the little girl.

After dinner he helped with the dishes. Loaded the dishwasher, anyway. Charles had gathered CDs that day from the Target store where Munster found the chainsaw. All of them were Classical and Broadway albums, and the ancient stereo now filled the house with Bach and Beethoven and Mozart until poor Munster could take no more. When the counters in the kitchen had been at last cleaned spotlessly, he bolted out the rear door. A few moments later I heard his Porsche roar to life.

Wherever he was going, no doubt listening to something a lot more current and exciting, and at a bone-jarring, shrieking volume, I hoped he’d return alive.

 

As promised, they left the house the next morning. I stayed behind to tend to Ash and Mari. She had reverted to her old self at first, playing what I thought were odd variations of old schoolyard games like dodgeball and hide and seek. From my place on the top step of the porch beside Jack, I noticed that she dominated each easily, well beyond what she should have for a girl her age. Her reactions were instantaneous. She never tripped or hesitated, and several times Ash became angry, fuming that she was cheating when, without effort, she caught the ball he threw with all his might at her, or simply sidestepped it. She laughed, and cajoled him to try harder. Abandoning that game, he sulked, and stomped off to take a seat beneath the black cylinder. Mari peered over at him for a few seconds, bouncing the ball slowly up and down on the gravel, and then tossed it aside. Another few seconds elapsed until she padded past him around the cylinder, and disappeared like a ghost.

“She cheats. She’s no fun. Can we go for a walk, Amelia?” he said with a forlorn look on his face when he finally approached me at the bottom of the steps.

“When she returns.”

“NO, you and me! I’m tired of Mari.”

“Maybe we can go look for her. I think she’s hiding in the orchard, down near the road. She’s waiting for you to find her.”

“No she isn’t. She’s no fun anymore.”

“Well let’s go find her anyway.”

“Oh, all right, but I don’t want to play with her anymore.”

“That’s fine, Ash,” I said, standing, and then stepping down to where he stood.

Jack bounded to Ash’s side. “Come on, Ash, we’ll look for her together.”

“I hate this place! I wish I could go home,” he pouted.

“I know,” she said, “but we’ll find Mari, and then things will be better. This is our home, now.”

“Ha!”

They left ahead of me, calling Mari’s name.

Look...But Don't Touch

We found Mari deep in the orchard sitting beneath a tree. Ash had called out to her over and over once he stuffed his anger, but she hadn’t responded. Seeing her there with her knees tucked to her chest, held tightly with her arms, he left Jack's side and ran to her. Why didn’t it surprise me that when he arrived and addressed her she didn’t respond? It wasn’t until he shook her that she looked up at him with a reaction of surprise.

I lingered back within earshot, but partially hidden in the rows of trees, curious to see what would transpire in the forthcoming seconds. That was pointless. The minute she turned her head I saw her eyes whisk past Ash and Jack, and come to rest on me. She smiled—not that devilish smile I’d witnessed the day before, but a genuine little girl smile of recognition and invitation. I left the futile cover of the branches and walked to their side.

“You weren’t hiding,” Ash was saying to her, “why weren’t you hiding? We found you, though. What were you doing?”

“I think she was just resting, Ash.”

“Oh no. I was talking…” And then she stopped. I searched her face, doubly sure now that something of colossal importance had happened during those days Mari had been comatose. She blinked, but didn’t abandon the innocent smile, and she ignored Ash and Jack all the while. Where had she been?

I determined in that second that I would discover what had happened to her, and further, exactly what this new and seemingly amicable relationship that had developed between them was. I would return to the cylinder and touch it. The frightening thought surfaced, however, that whatever mysterious metamorphosis had overcome a child among us would not happen to me for any number of reasons. My age, perhaps. The beings’ disinclination to rescue me—if that is what they’d done with her. It was true that no one except me saw in Mari a change other than a slow sweeping away of the cobwebs that had descended over her in her unconscious state. Maybe placing a hand on it would kill me.

“We are not to touch it,” Charles had warned us.

“I think we should go back,” I said to them. “I didn’t bring the walkie-talkie. If someone tries to call, we need to be near the phone.”

Mari shot a peculiar glance at me, followed quickly by the stunted smile. “I think they’re okay,” she answered with conviction. She rose from her spot beneath the branches, brushed the dead leaves and brush from her dress and leggings, and set off toward the drive without another word. Ash picked up a dried out orange, cocked his arm, and then threw it at a cluster of oranges hanging from the branch of a tree farther down the narrow path. After it hit, he turned and followed his playmate, and Jack and I followed him.

Nearing the ditch and Munster’s abandoned Flamecar, I caught up to her, Jack close at my side. Ash had stopped several feet behind us and had begun pitching more fruit at the car. Each time they landed with a splat on the metal, he laughed, and then bent down to pick up another missile.

“Mari, look at me,” I said, standing at her shoulder. “What happened? What did they do to you. Why are you so different now?”

She looked up at me surprised. “Nothing, Amelia.” She hesitated for a second. “I’m me, that’s all! I don’t understand…”

“Mari! You aren’t you. You know that, or you should. You must remember how you used to think, and it’s different now. Isn’t it? Think back. Back there you started to say that you were talking to them. How? What did they say to you?”

She began to stammer like a child caught with her fingers in the cookie jar, fidgeting for the little white lie that would satisfy me.

“Tell me, please. I won’t breathe a word of it to anyone else. I promise.”

A moment passed. She gazed intently into my eyes as Ash continued to pummel the car, and Jack stood listening in silence.

“They told me not to.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. They aren’t scary, Amelia! They aren’t! They’re nice to me, and they tell me…things. Good things.”

“Like what, Mari?”

She was struggling for the right words now. “That I’ll grow up. That everything will be fine if I listen to them. That we’ll all be fine…that there are others. Like Charles! Like those men who you said tried to hurt you.”

“Is Charles one of them?”

“I don’t think so. But I don’t know for sure. They don’t tell me everything, you know! Just that I have to be careful. They’ll help me, and someday I’ll get to go inside the tower, and I’ll understand everything.”

The tower? Babel? The University of the Universe?

“Come on, Mari. I’m going back to the cylinder…tower…and I’m going to touch it. Just like you did. I have to know what it is they’ve done to you for myself.”

Jack finally broke her silence. “No! It will kill you!”

“It didn’t kill you.”

I left them at the car and walked up the long drive, stepping off onto the grass border, thirty feet away from the porch. The tower stood shining in the late morning sunlight, down the low rise in the