Creatures

Chapter Twenty-Four

I crept through the attic passages with Beth close behind.

“So are we just going to the laboratory?” she asked.

“It’s a place to start.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Whatever Thomas was talking about,” I said. “There was a funny look in his eyes. He really did see something.”

We made our way with only a few bumped heads and scraped knees in the dark, cramped attic to the tiny square door that led into the laboratory. I tried the knob. It clicked and opened.

“It’s not locked,” hissed Beth.

“Urdo has been busy.”

We moved inside. It was very dark and very cold. The metal dome over the telescope was closed, but I could feel the winter seeping in from outside. The wind blew and whistled through the cracks in the dome.

Beth shined her light around inside. It passed over the brass telescope, which gleamed with yellowy brightness. The gears that cranked the scope were dusty and still. I noticed a single tooth had broken off of one of the cogs.

“How did that thing know?” I asked in a hushed voice.

“Know what?”

“That I would become a mouse,” I said. I put out a hand and touched the cold tube of the telescope. When faced with one of the strange devices that my people sometimes come up with, I always feel a sense of wonder.

Beth made a sniffing sound and shook her head. “I’m not totally convinced it did. Maybe it just gives you a general answer that seems to work for everyone. Like a fortune cookie or a newspaper horoscope.”

I shook my head in return. “You don’t know my people yet. We actually do stuff like this. It’s creepy, but real.”

She looked at me and chewed her lip. She had seen us change into animals, so she believed in that. But predicting the future? That was too much for her somehow. I could tell that maybe she didn’t want to believe it. I could tell that maybe, she was scared. I didn’t blame her and so I dropped it.

I frowned at the telescope and the broken metal tooth. “I don’t think that cog had a broken tooth before, you know.” I examined the jagged metal and touched it. The metal was sharp and made a tiny red nick in the pad of my thumb.

“Well,” said Beth. “Maybe it just broke recently, or it was there before and hidden. Maybe we didn’t see it until now because the cog was in a different position.”

I nodded. “Either way, someone has been using the telescope. Let’s look through it.”

She sighed. “I knew you were going to say that.”

I grinned and waved her over to the mechanism that slid open the slot in the dome and let the telescope poke out into the heavens. She worked the lever, and it creaked open with what seemed like a hideous screeching sound.

I was about to look into the eye cup when Beth gasped.

“What?” I asked.

“The plant!” she said, pointing to the potted plant in the roll top desk. I followed the beam from her flashlight. My eyes widened. The plant had flowered.

“It’s some kind of flower,” I said. I touched a leaf to make sure it was real. It had a soft, slightly fuzzy to it, exactly as it should. “It’s not a fake plastic thing.”

“I think it’s an African Violet,” said Beth. “My mother never stops messing about in her garden every spring.”

For some reason, the flower made a chill run through me. What were we messing with? What kind of place was freezing cold in the dead of winter and closed up in darkness and still let a flower bloom?

“There something’s strange about the way time behaves in this place,” I said.

“Time?” asked Beth. She nosed closer to the flower and examined it. She touched a violet petal gingerly, as if it might bite her.

“Maybe time moves differently here. The telescope can see the future, and the flower can grow as if it’s springtime in the sun.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Beth.

“Not without knowing the whole story it doesn’t.”

Beth looked back to me. “Are you going to look into that thing?”

I eyed the telescope and the black rubber eye cup. Did I really want to know whatever it would show me?

“Open the slot where the lenses goes in,” I told Beth.

She blinked, and then nodded. She opened the slot and directed the beam of her flashlight inside. She slid out a disk. It was a greenish-tinged lens. It looked thicker and darker than the rose-colored lens had. It was as thick and dark as a green glass bottle.

We looked at each other. “It has to do something,” said Beth. She was whispering again. She carefully lowered the green lens back into the slot.

I slowly lowered my head to peer into the eye cup.

I almost screamed. As it was, Beth startled at my intake of breath.

“Don’t even tell me,” she said.

I gazed into the night sky, and I saw was there a figure there. It was not an entirely human figure. It was dark with a widespread cloak that reached far out from outspread arms, like the fluttering wings of a kite. I worked the focus knob and breathed hard. I zoomed in on the face. It was a human face, but there were fangs in its mouth. There was a scary look of intelligence in its eyes. The lips curled back over those long teeth and the fanged man looked at me, just as I looked at him. For a moment, the telescope seemed reversed, as if I were the creature being examined and all I could see was the eye of the scientist studying me.

I felt something pulling at me, and finally I fell back away from the telescope and into the chair. I gasped.

“It was holding onto your head like a suction cup!” said Beth. Her hands were on my shoulders. I realized she had pulled me back from the scope. She had ripped me away from it by force.

“Okay, tell me now, I’m ready,” said Beth.

“A man,” I said. “A face in the sky. I think-I think it was Vater.”

She looked at me quizzically.

“And,” I said slowly. “I think he saw me.”