XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Read online

Janis stood in her bedroom in a long cotton T-shirt. Next door, she could hear Margaret settling into bed. Her father was the only one still up. Janis pictured him in the study down the hallway, his reading glasses perched near the end of his nose.

  Janis had finished what little homework she’d been assigned and already spoken to Samantha on the phone, each recapping her first day of school and making plans to meet for lunch. She had tied up the ends of her day — her normal life, as she’d come to think of it — and now stood contemplating this alternate life that claimed her when she fell to sleep each night.

  There is also the doorway between here and there.

  And that’s what it felt like to Janis. That she was looking down, not at a bed with soft printed sheets and a light summer comforter, but at the doorway Mrs. Fern had spoken of.

  The doorway between this world and another.

  And looking down at it, Janis felt small and afraid. To draw back the covers and step inside was to go to a place she wasn’t sure she wanted to go to anymore. And could she even trust what she saw and experienced there?

  Janis stepped around her bed to her dresser. Trophies lined its top — gold-painted statuettes of girls dribbling soccer balls, wielding bats, and fielding deep flies on marble pedestals. She parted the medals that hung like necklaces around the tallest trophies and pulled open her top-right drawer. From behind a container holding a medley of loose change, team patches, some old Charlie’s Angels trading cards, and movie-ticket stubs, she drew out the plastic Easter egg. Two quarters shifted inside.

  She carried it to her desk, where her books and folders with her finished homework sat in a neat pile. Upon setting it down, she gave the egg a spin. Janis watched it rotate drunkenly, her chin on the back of her hands.

  Yellow instead of purple.

  Not the same color, no. Not in the exact same spot. But it had been there, her guarantor that the experiences were real.

  Or were they?

  Of all the Easter egg hunts they had done over the years, weren’t the chances good that at least one or two eggs had gone undiscovered? It wasn’t like her parents took an annual inventory. And where would the eggs be most likely to turn up? In the places hardest to see, of course. In areas of dense growth.

  Inside the ferns.

  Maybe somewhere in her subconscious mind, she’d already reasoned that out. And maybe that’s all these nocturnal experiences were: voyages into her subconscious mind. Vivid, perhaps, but not happening out there at all. Instead, it was taking place inside her head.

  Janis gave the egg another spin.

  * * *

  Whoosh.

  The force that pulled her through the bushes last night had stretched her, made her feel long and charged. The vibrations tightened, rattling like charged ball bearings inside her head, down her body. She feared for a moment that the energy was going to force her apart, cast her into pieces. Even her mind, in her panic, felt like it was about to be blown like shot pellets.

  Then, in a gasp, she was through.

  She found herself hovering over the cement culvert that ran from the large cylindrical opening beneath Twenty-first Avenue down to the woods where the cement fell to rubble and sand and joined the creek.

  Janis raised her face to the Leonards’ house, which seemed very close, looming above her. A chain-link fence separated her from the steep, unkempt yard. On the deck stood a slender shadow. The cigarette that had earlier illuminated his glasses was gone. Had he sensed something and ground it out? Could he sense her?

  She sank to the slanted wall of the culvert and watched through the tall grass along the fence.

  She felt his vigilance as he stood there. Yes, an energy surrounded him, raw, and perhaps a little conflicted. Was this his desire for her sister, for Margaret? The thought made Janis’s insides crawl.

  She drifted down the culvert to the lower boundary of his property, continuing to monitor him to make sure his gaze wasn’t following her. Then she went for it. The chain-link pattern of the fence offered brief resistance, and she was through. She was in his yard. Above her, Mr. Leonard yawned, his head tilting back. She crouched deeper into the grass. It seemed impossible that he couldn’t hear the energy that whooshed and crackled around her.

  A flare made Janis jump. On the deck, Mr. Leonard’s brow shone pumpkin orange. Then he shook out the match, and only the ember and its reflection against his lenses remained.

  Off to Janis’s right, a woodshed leaned with the slope of the lawn. A stack of rotten logs huddled against its far side where a shingled roof jutted out. Janis waited for the cigarette to float to Mr. Leonard’s face again, waited for the small ember to swell on his inhalation… She shot behind the shed and hovered, one hand resting against the shed’s back side.

  When she peered around, she found Mr. Leonard in the same place but in profile. A cold tremor ran through her. What in the world was she doing here? What was she hoping to discover? That he was monitoring their house was clear. That he’d followed Margaret to the beach that day was also clear.

  But is he dangerous?

  Yes, that’s what she needed to know — whether he was dangerous, whether he was capable of hurting Margaret, whether he’d hurt someone before. Someone young and vulnerable. Another student, maybe.

  The side of the shed facing the house consisted of a double door held closed by a locked bolt. A bolt? Surely he would keep his expensive tools in the garage, like her father did, not out in some decrepit woodshed. She concentrated in the same manner as when she wanted to float and pressed herself against the plywood siding. She encountered a layer of resistance, like the skin around a soap bubble, before popping inside the black confines of the shed.

  When she concentrated again, the woodshed illuminated for her in little flickers, like a failing bulb determined to hold on. Shelves lined opposite ends of the shed. A heap of kindling rose from the floor, over what looked like some old sacking. Cockroaches glistened chocolate-brown among the sticks and twigs. Janis recoiled. She could handle snakes, spiders, and other creepy crawlies, no problem — she’d even kept some in jars as a kid — but she detested cockroaches.

  She gazed along the shelves, whose contents looked unremarkable: a bow saw with rusted teeth, lengths of frayed rope, a pair of stiff, weathered work gloves — the sorts of things one would expect to find in an old woodshed. Which made the bolt seem even more out of place.

  She pushed out her light along the sides and ceiling of the shed. Solid lengths of timber reinforced the inside, their color still blond. Thick silver bolts secured them. From the outside, the shed looked like it would topple from the breeze of someone walking past, but peering around, Janis wondered whether it wouldn’t stand up to the fury of a category four. Between two pieces of sacking that didn’t quite overlap, or had perhaps moved the last time Mr. Leonard stepped inside, Janis could make out a concrete floor.

  She reached toward it with her hands. She couldn’t pick up anything in this state, she’d discovered, but she did possess a penetrating sense of touch. It was how she’d found the plastic egg in the ferns.

  Her hands encountered a solid slab.

  Janis plied deeper into the cement. The slab went down inches, then feet. It was not meant as a foundation for the shed, she realized, but as a ceiling for whatever lay below. She withdrew her hands and hovered in thought. She’d learned about fallout shelters in school, how some families built them or had them installed in the early years of the Cold War, before it became generally known that an all-out nuclear war would reduce them to ashtrays. Janis had never seen one. She just assumed they weren’t around anymore, not in 1984, or if they were, that they had been converted into things like storage basements, wine cellars…

  (torture chambers).

  If it was a shelter, there would need to be an entrance, and she hadn’t felt one. Unless…

  When Janis moved nearer the kindling pile, roaches skittered into the darkest eaves and burrowed beneath the sacking. Could they see her? She gl
anced toward the door. No gaps around the frame, no space where the double door met in the middle, where whatever light she might be casting would flicker out.

  Calm down, Janis. You’re safe. Incorporeal, remember?

  Squinting, she reached through the sticks and rotten sacking. Cockroaches scurried around her hands. She was about to draw her hands back when they encountered something metallic in the cement. She felt along its edges. It was smooth and shaped like a manhole cover.

  A lid.

  The realization that there was a hidden room underground fell over her like ice water. In her mind’s eye, she saw her bedroom and for a moment she wished herself back there, back to the life of a teenager on the eve of starting high school.

  Back to normalcy.

  Instead, she began to press herself through the kindling and against the metal lid. She had come this far. But like when she’d tried to pass through the bushes bordering her lawn, her progress was barred. The obstruction felt different, though — not like charge repelling like charge but an electrical barrier, fiery and unyielding. She redoubled her concentration.

  The field gave a little.

  The wooden door to the shed began to rattle. She hadn’t heard his footsteps patter down the steps of the deck or cut through the grass, but she could hear the scraping sound of a key inside the lock.

  She fell against the back wall of the shed, her mental commands colliding into one another: Pass though the wall, Janis! Pass through the wall! C’mon, Janis! Concentrate, damn it!

  But the skin of the shed’s wall held this time. There was no pop…

  Other than the bolt’s release.

  A red terror blotted over Janis’s senses like a swarm of cockroaches, flapping their oily wings, spilling down her back, cocooning her arms and legs. It was like those first out-of-body experiences when she couldn’t move. Now the same horrible thoughts assailed her:

  What if I can’t return? What if I’m trapped on the other side of that barrier, trapped inside this shed?

  The door swung open, and Mr. Leonard’s face loomed from the night like an executioner’s.

  WHOOOOSH.

  Janis jerked upright in her bed, heart thundering, cotton T-shirt warm and soaked through. But it wasn’t sweat she felt. It was urine. For the first time since she was five years old, Janis had wet herself.

  * * *

  Janis grimaced as she gazed at the rotating plastic egg. She remembered the fear and shame of stripping her shirt and sheets the night before, tiptoeing the length of the house to the laundry room, starting the Kenmore, taking a quick, furtive shower, spreading a dry cover across her bed, lying there without sleeping, later moving her sheets to the dryer then back to her bedroom, and at last drifting off, where the memory of the experience receded from her conscious mind like a wretched creature down a slippery hole, deep beneath the ground.

  It was the vision of Mr. Leonard’s looming face that had returned to her that afternoon in English, ripped through her amnesia, sent her fleeing from the classroom…

  But that was done. The creature was out of the hole.

  Now, as Janis chewed the inside of her cheek, two competing questions chewed at her mind: What was beneath Mr. Leonard’s wood shed? And had the experience even happened to begin with?

  Janis glanced at her clock radio and sighed. She should have been in bed an hour ago. When she gathered the egg, the back of her hand ached from supporting her chin. She carried the egg to the dresser and returned it to the top drawer.

  Yellow instead of purple.

  She closed the drawer tight. The experience hadn’t happened, she decided, not out there, anyway. Just like with the egg, it had been a product of her subconscious mind, manifesting the very things she’d expected to see and find, scaring herself half to death in the process. The next time she found herself in the backyard, she would will herself back to bed. She would never put herself through another experience like that again.

  With that, Janis climbed beneath her covers and turned out the lamp at her bedside. But she didn’t fall asleep, not right away. A niggling thought came to her as she massaged her hand. She had spun the plastic egg several times in the half hour she’d spent recounting the experience. But how many times had she actually moved her hands from beneath her chin to do so? Every time? Every single time?

  Enough, Janis.

  She turned over and closed her eyes again, and this time she did find sleep.

  11

  Thirteenth Street High

  Friday, August 31, 1984

  Lunchtime

  “You can do this,” Scott said into the rust-speckled mirror. Outside the metal door, he could hear the final calls of students headed to lunch. The bathroom stalls and cracked latrines at his back stood vacant. “It’s just an informational meeting. One informational meeting. You go in, you listen, you size it up. If it feels wrong, you’re done. You don’t have to go back.”

  But it will be a risk, a voice whispered. Being seen will be a risk.

  Scott considered that as he looked back at his pallid face. No one had messed with him all week, or even given him a second look. And now he was threatening that invisibility, threatening to stand out. Informational meeting or not, he might as well be wearing a sandwich board that announced: I want to be like you guys! And on the back side: Please accept me!

  Scott knew something about healthy herds. They didn’t take well to misfits worming into their ranks. As he worked to flatten a few stubborn sprays of hair, he reminded himself of the progress he had made that week…

  After crashing following that first day of school (and sleeping straight through the night), he had rebounded Tuesday afternoon and cleaned the rest of his room. Gone were the relics of his childhood: the Buck Rogers sheets, the plastic models, a View-Master whose lever had jammed years before, a Merlin Phone (“Play it six different ways!”), his old Atari 2600, joysticks, and trays of game cartridges, eight binders of Scratch ’n’ Sniff Stickers, stacks of Encyclopedia Brown, Choose Your Own Adventure, and Mad Libs, as well as a medley of dog-eared magazines he’d stopped reading when he was eleven: 3-2-1 Contact! and Cracked among them. He filled four Glad Bags and dragged them to the garage.

  Immediately, his room felt twice as spacious. It smelled better, too. He proceeded to vacuum and dust in places that no instrument of cleaning had touched in years. But that had been the easy part.

  What about his Star Wars figures, his D&D manuals and modules, not to mention his comic books? He made a deal with himself. He would box them all and place them in his closet, out of sight. If by Christmas, he hadn’t gotten them back out, he would sell them to the last. All except for his John Byrne collection — he could still read those.

  On Wednesday he had tackled his clothing. All of the stained middle school–era shirts and shorts were goners, along with most of the rest of his clothes. He’d been amused to find a mashed-up pair of Spider Man Underoos behind the bottom drawer of his dresser. He held the diminutive red undies to his waist and then tossed them in the discard pile.

  The following evening, Thursday, he had stood in front of his closet mirror, stripped to the waist. His room was clean, his clothes sorted out until he could go shopping for more. It was time for Scott Spruel himself. After deciding he needed his hair trimmed on the sides and grown a little longer in back, he touched his forehead. The red eruptions were fewer than last year, he decided. Even so, he pledged to wash his face twice a day and get back on his Retin-A regimen — something that had fallen to the wayside that summer.

  And the rest of him? He examined his body with the clinical eye of Professor X: his lanky neck, his sallow, sunken chest, stark ribs, arms that hung long and thin at his sides, promising harm to no living thing. He rubbed his right forearm. A slight angle showed where the bones had healed (yes, Jesse had snapped both his ulna and radius), a permanent deformity now. Anger flared from the pit of his stomach, the anger that he had not been able to stop them.

  Do it again, and it’s g
onna be both arms, you little piss stain, Jesse had promised.

  He needed bulk. He needed mass. Scott Summers of the X-Men was no Incredible Hulk, but he was solid. He kept in shape. Scott Spruel of Oakwood, meanwhile, had never touched a barbell, much less lifted one. Back in his room, he broke his promise and fished a handful of non–John Byrne comic books from the closet, plopped in the chair at his desk, and began flipping through them. After a couple of minutes, he found what he was looking for:

  HEY, WIMP! I’M TALKING TO YOU!

  REMAKE YOUR BODY IN 15 MINUTES A DAY!

  It was the full page ad with Bud Body, “The Finest Specimen of Manhood,” standing in what looked like his underwear, fists on his glistening hips, glowering out of the page like he’d just as soon beat you senseless as bestow on you the glories of his strength and conditioning program.

  “Bulk out your back, puff up your pecs, strengthen your arms and legs. My easy-to-follow, SCIENTIFIC method will make you fitter, faster, and MORE DESIRABLE than you ever dreamed possible!”

  Scott made sure it was one of his rattier comics before taking an X-acto knife to the stamp-sized order form for the booklet. It was a start, he had figured, and would only cost him five bucks plus shipping…

  Standing back from the rust-speckled glass of the C-wing bathroom, Scott examined the tuck of his bright-green Izod inside his belted khakis. He turned one way and the other, made a couple of adjustments, and then stooped to rub away a smudge near the cowhide lacing of one of his Docksiders.

  Drawing a long breath, he raised his face back to the mirror and nodded. “You can do this.”

  He folded his thick glasses with a decisive clack and hid them away in his pocket. Squinting, he pushed the door open on the bright blur of mid-day and set a course for D-wing.

  * * *

  The room was a chaos of motion and voices, and for a moment Scott considered feigning surprise with his hands (Oops! Wrong room!) and backing out, resuming his stiff walk down the D-wing corridor and over to the food trucks, where he would eat alone as he had done every day that week. And that was the thought that stopped him: eating alone again.