Splinters

2. Change of Plans

2. Change of Plans

Mina

I am probably not crazy.

More importantly, I am almost certainly not wrong.

Strange things happen in my town. Most people at least agree on that. If you haven’t already heard of Prospero, California, you only have to walk down Main Street, take a lap of the glorified gift shop we call a cryptozoology museum, and stop for a Cherry TimewarpTM at the Soda Fountain of Youth to know that it’s that kind of town.

Everyone has heard the stories about the monsters in our woods and about the people who come here with Parkinson’s or cancer and then live to be a hundred. Some even know that they’re true.

Very few know that the two are connected.

I do. I know what happens to people here, what the Splinters do to them. I’ve seen it.

And I am one of the few resistors working to stop it.

Most of the people I’ve lost along the way have not received the last respects due to them. The ones being used by the Splinters are not quite dead, and few realize that they’re missing, but I’ve been to more than my share of funerals as well.

I don’t like them.

All those people sitting so still and quiet, so eager to be offended. It’s even worse than school. Mentally alphabetizing and spelling the periodic table can only keep you occupied for so long.

This funeral had been a necessary evil, an investment I hoped would pay off.

Back in the basement bedroom that served as my office and sanctuary, I could finally think.

My room is as organized as the space allows while keeping everything I need easily accessible. Most of the walls and table space are taken up with amulets of various sorts, a salt lamp, an Eye of Osiris, plenty of different hex marks, a vial of holy water, a few garlands of garlic and bundles of sage. There’s a handmade broom over the door, and the top of the dresser is covered with different crystals and herb sachets.

It all looks silly, it takes up valuable workspace, and it doesn’t smell too pleasant mixed together, but some combination of it seemed to be working, so I’d had to learn to tolerate the rest of it, for as long as it would take to isolate the active ingredients. And if the combination failed, I had plenty of flammable materials for more aggressive defense.

There was room for the things I needed to keep my mind in working order, the electric keyboard and headphones, the ceiling-high shelves of jigsaws, puzzle books, puzzle boxes, and half-finished lanyards. The closet had a chin-up bar over the door and just enough space kept free to hide something the size of a small human when necessary, less comfortably but also less obviously than in the tiny adjoining bathroom. The reference books were under the bed.

At least, the good ones were.

Over the desk was the bulletin board containing the essentials of my life’s work. My map where I marked all the sightings, my schedule of the most important bits of watching and listening to do, my ever-shifting top five leads, and, most importantly, my lists of names.

Effectively Certain Non-Splinters (ECNS for short), Probable Non-Splinters (PNS), No Useful Information (NUI), Probable Splinters (PS), and Effectively Certain Splinters (or ECS).

I’d crossed Haley Perkins off the Probable Non-Splinters list when she’d gone missing, and she hadn’t been anywhere since then. Suddenly, she needed a place again.

I selected a Java Monster from the case of assorted energy drinks in my closet, turned on the computer monitor, selected a playlist, and turned to a fresh Sudoku page to clear my head.

One, four, eight….

“I am the very model of a modern Major-General….”

All the nicely ordered thoughts crowded Haley securely into the part of my brain where I could handle her, like packing peanuts.

Two, three, nine….

Haley had been missing for two months. Like everyone else, I’d thought she was almost certainly dead.

I’d even started to consider the possibility that she was just the ordinary kind of missing person, left in a shallow grave somewhere by some depraved human, and the fact that she’d happened to disappear from Prospero was a wild coincidence.

As unpleasant as that option was, I’d hoped, for her sake, that it was true.

Haley and I had never exactly been close. She had been popular, forever absorbed in some social function or event, surrounded by questionable people.

But she had never been unkind to me, and that was more than I could say for most of the Prospero High student body. I was quite sure she was intelligent, if a little naïve, and a far greater talent than the school’s Theatrical Society knew what to do with.

As the weeks had passed with no sign of her, I had sincerely wished her the dignity of death.

Seven, nine, two, five, six, one, eight, four, three vertical….

I penciled her name onto the Probable Splinters list. It’s one of the longer ones, but I gave hers a double asterisk so it wouldn’t get lost.

“And many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse….”

I didn’t like the idea of my potential new ally living under the same roof with someone on that list, but I wasn’t ready to write him off just for that. Ben was the most promising prospect I’d found in a long time. I’d picked apart every tweet and status update from both his family and the Perkinses for the past five years, every signature in the museum guestbook that every visitor had to sign, every page of the set of Haley’s yearbooks that had been on solemn display in front of the school since her disappearance, until I couldn’t find any reasonable way he could have been exposed to Prospero recently enough for it to be a problem.

His local and school newspapers had never reported any miracles connected with him, or anything remarkable about him at all, unless you counted taking AP World History or announcing his Eagle Scout project a year early, and I hadn’t been able to identify any unexplained contact between him and any of the Effectively Certain or Probable Splinters.

He’d been living under uncertain circumstances all his life, ever since leaving his childhood home in Wisconsin after his father’s death, and he had remained strong.

I can’t overemphasize the importance of that. What I do isn’t easy.

He already knew the Perkinses and was likely to want answers about what had happened to Haley. He wasn’t going to be in Prospero permanently, so once I’d taught him the basics, I could send him on his way to safety, to research, consult, and preserve the knowledge from afar, without my having to watch him every second to ensure his continuing humanity.

“And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense, ‘Pinafore’….”

It was going to take—

“Sweetie, are you down there?”

My brain jammed up completely, the way it always did, when I heard that voice on the stairs down to my basement bedroom. It makes me feel like I’ve been thinking out loud, and that shuts me up fast.

“Yes,” I called back.

“I just warmed up some pizza bagels! I know it’s not exactly post-funeral food, but since it wasn’t exactly a funeral—”

“No, thank you, Dad.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, thank you, Dad,” I repeated.

I clicked the pause button so I could listen to him backing away into the living room. Once he had gone, and my head churned back into motion, I didn’t start the music back up. I was functional enough. Instead, I checked my daily download of the important times and places. It had almost finished. I selected the clip of my mother’s meeting from the previous morning, adjusted the volume a little so that if anything important had been said, it would catch my ear, and opened Skype.

As usual, Aldo was online.

Aldo’s one of the longest standing names on the Effectively Certain Non-Splinter List and one of the most useful. He’s a tech genius, and his dad runs the one computer repair shop in town.

He also has a sizeable crush on me. I know this because I’ve been informed by multiple sources on separate occasions, all with strong track records of detecting such things and with no likely shared ulterior motives. I’ve asked him repeatedly if this has any significant chance of interfering with our work under any conceivable set of circumstances. He refuses to acknowledge the issue but he assures me that, if it were the case, it wouldn’t be a problem.

“Did you hear the news?” I asked him.

His face appeared onscreen. Every time I saw it, I expected to see his first pimples finally standing out. I don’t know any other fourteen-year-olds who’ve avoided them, at least none who like chili cheese fries so much and showers so little—but, like the promised growth spurt that still had not come and the baby-fine white-blond hair he could never find the time to trim, his skin made him look even younger than he really was.

“About Haley Perkins going Romero on us?”

“Going what?” I waited, as usual, for Aldo to translate, wondering if he’d ever stop making me ask.

“Returning from the dead. And no, I didn’t hear. I decided to spend a nice afternoon in my NASA-grade isolation chamber.”

“It’s not Haley Perkins,” I reminded him. There are few enough people I can talk to about these things. I don’t like not knowing that we’re clear on them.

“Effectively certainly not,” Aldo agreed in the tone he thought I hadn’t identified as mocking yet. “What are you listening to?”

He squinted to listen to the recording playing faintly on my end. It had taken me forever to figure out why he did that, act as if his eyes and ears ran through the same temperamental fuse box. I think his brain doesn’t need as many packing peanuts as mine.

“Council meeting,” I saved him the trouble.

“You’re still listening to the ones at Town Hall?”

Aldo had made so many bugs for me that he tended to forget that I didn’t always lose interest in them as soon as he had moved on to his next project.

“The Council’s involved, even if they don’t talk about it explicitly,” I insisted for the sixty-seventh time. That’s a precise count. “But they’re not the richest source,” I agreed. “I’m going to need some more. Something I can fit in—”

My phone vibrated in my pocket, and I pulled it out.

Restricted.

I’d only seen that a few times before. People in Prospero don’t have restricted numbers. It’s seen as unfriendly. I held up a finger to ask Aldo to wait and answered the call.

“Ben?” I asked.

The voice that answered wasn’t his. It wasn’t even really a voice. It was what Splinters sounded like when they didn’t want to be recognized, a clicking, popping, rasp. I’d only heard it a few times before, on the same occasions when I’d seen a number show up restricted. It made my stomach clench, but this time I was ready enough to hit speaker phone.

“Stay away from Ben Pastor,” it said before I could hold the phone to the computer mic and find the right record button. Luckily, it said it again.

“Stay away from Ben Pastor, or history will repeat itself.”

“Who is this?” I asked. Not that I expected them to answer. They never had before.

“Stay away from Ben Pastor. He belongs to us.”

Then the call ended. Aldo stared at me out of my screen, waiting for me to say something.

“They’re after him,” I said, though that was obvious. “Warning him isn’t going to be enough. I need a link to his GPS.”

“Uh… yeah,” Aldo gave me one of his awkward, sympathetic smiles that I dread. “Did you happen to catch his account number, PIN, last four of his social, and the name of his first pet?”