Jonah Havensby (27 page)

Jonah looked around. An expert in architecture had built him a home in a tree. He looked closely at how well put together it was, and how his belongings were organized, even how the Christmas lights hung. He hadn’t even realized that next to each window was a heavy piece of red velvet fabric that could be pulled to cover the windows. His hand slid across the floor absentmindedly and he registered how smooth it was from the wood stain. It must have taken a month to build this place.

“You are exactly two miles outside of town and one and a half miles inside the tree-line. The nearest ranger station is three and a half miles to the west. To get to the road that leads back to town, you will head East. I have downloaded you a compass on your tablet so you will know where you are.”

“Now that you know the ‘who’,” he continued. “Let’s move on to the ‘how’. From what I have deduced, each time you manifest one of us, you revert to your original form. That is, as Doctor Stapleton described you, a wet ball of sand. Now that you’ve substantially grown, it isn’t so little anymore.”

“I believe that these changes began to happen to you when you started puberty. That is, the human cycle of puberty. As your human side began to produce more hormones, I believe that your alien side began to explore what other forms you could take. I think you have manifested other forms before, but none that you could hold onto for very long, such as myself and the others you have now.”

“When you transform, you physically build us from the ground up, almost as you would build a snowman. When you become you again, and by that I mean Jonah, the process repeats itself. Each and every fiber is broken down and re-constituted for use by the other – even the clothes you wear. You believe I should look like this, and so I am created in these clothes with this appearance.”

The man straightened his lab coat and brushed back the bushy sides of his hair.

“I can also tell you this. The pain you experience when you take back your shape, the same pain is felt by all of us. The last thing to form is your optic nerve in your left eye. That was the last thing to form when you began to adopt human features, so I believe you have simply carried that over to the forms you are creating now. I believe, and this is just hypothesis, but I believe that if you concentrate, you can move this pain to anywhere you choose – your foot, your hand, your little pinky finger.” He said this as he waved his own pinky finger.

“It is something to think about,” The man said with a wave of his hand. “I can tell you that you have stopped the change before, which makes me wonder if you can re-form any of us if you want to. That is an interesting question. It was the Red Devil that tried to emerge at the mall during your confrontation with Logan Oswald.  Somehow, you were able to hold him back. I still have not deduced how you did it unknowingly. I do know that, up to this point, we have only manifested when your subconscious allowed it. Now that you know the full story, you may be able to control it, or deny it entirely. I should have to think about this.”

The man was clearly fascinated by the idea.

“When you manifest into one of the others, that being becomes fully functional. It has its own mind, its own thoughts, its own feelings, but only by way of the parameters you have given it.”

“Do you remember the IQ test your father asked you to do last year?” The man asked. “I’m sure you do. Your IQ was ninety-three. Very good. You always were a smart young man. But the brain you have given me and the components of it, work at a much faster rate. My IQ is two-hundred and thirty. I am almost two geniuses.” He was clearly very impressed with himself.

“The Creature, on the other hand, is not so smart. He has his own thoughts and feelings, but would not be much of a communicator. Although it is clear he understands quite well.”

“You have given the Red Devil incredibly elastic muscles and an increased circulatory system. He uses these to create his great speed.”

“You see, each one is unique based on your design. And each one knows its purpose. We are well aware that we are only parts of you, and that is why I believe you can exhibit far greater control now that you know.”

“Ah, one last thing,” The man said, lifting up the notebook.

Just then, there was a crackle from inside Jonah’s backpack. Then there was another.

Jonah stopped the video from the camera and went over to the pack. He found the walkie-talkie and held down the button to talk.

“Eric? You there?” He asked into it.

What he got back was just above static. Every third or fourth word came through. He was too far away from Eric’s walkie-talkie to get a clear signal.

His need to tell Eric everything he had just learned overtook his need to hear whatever the man on the screen was going to say next. He was already feeling overwhelmed with information. He would go find Eric and bring him back here, have him sit and watch the recording and find out whatever the ‘one last thing’ was then.

He put the walkie-talkie back in the backpack. It was exceptionally light and deflated. He looked around for anything else he would put in it, but found that now that he had a place to leave his clothes and the other items, there really was nothing to pack.

He picked up the tablet from near the over-turned hammock. It had been plugged into the generator and was fully charged. He dropped that in the pack and then righted the hammock. Out of habit, he unplugged the electric blanket.

He looked around again and, finding nothing else to do, grabbed his coat and walked out the door.

He went to the bike and looked at the pulley system it was attached to. The pulley was attached to the roof of the tree-house and a long coil of black rope started at his feet and went through the pulley to the bike. It looked like he could lift the bike over the railing and lower it down.

It was impossible to hold onto both the bike and the rope at the same time, so he decided he was going to push the bike over and hope he could catch the rope before the bike crashed. He readied himself and pushed the bike over the railing.

He was surprised to find that the bike hovered there in midair, locked into the pulley system. He grabbed the rope and tried to maneuver it, but the bike stayed just where it was. When he pulled on the rope, the bike moved up, but then he finally felt the weight of it. The pulley system worked like the pulls on a vertical blind, you had to pull up to get the rope to release and if you pulled to either the left or the right, the rope would lock in place again.

He tested the theory over and over again as he lowered the bike to the leaf-covered dirt far below. Once it was down, he pulled the rope to his left and it locked into place. Then he began to look for a way to get himself down.

He saw a glint of metal just to the left of the door. When he looked closer, he found that it was a rope ladder, but this ladder was made of the same black rope he had lowered the biked down and it had metal rungs. It began at the roof-top and the rest of it seemed to be bunched up just at the patio floor next to another pulley system. When he pulled that rope and let it out, the rest of the rope ladder dropped all the way to the ground below.

He stepped on the first rung and it seemed to be secure. He went down the next one and it seemed secure. He didn’t start to lose his nerve until his eyes were parallel to the patio floor. He stopped, just for a moment, but then told himself that he was going to have to do this. He let out a deep breath and continued down through a hole cut through a thicket of branches.

Almost halfway down the ladder, he had a sudden flashback of being lowered from his second-floor bedroom window. He was filling in the blanks of that evening. Knowing the ‘dangerous men’ were military men who had come to reclaim the alien, and that they killed his father in the process, suddenly made Jonah freeze up tight on the ladder. He couldn’t move. His feet wouldn’t find the next rung, his hands wouldn’t slide down. He was suddenly so angry with his father it brought tears to his eyes.

Why hadn’t his father told him anything? Would it have been better knowing? Could he have been prepared for any of this? Would he have felt the same way he was feeling right now? 

He had to fight to push it all away, but he did. He told himself there would be plenty of nights he could pace the floor of his new home until the wood ran all the way through while he asked himself question after question. Now was not the time.

He took two deep breathes and pushed it all away.

When he reached the ground, he looked up. He guessed that the tree-house was at least two-stories up. The floor of the tree-house was covered by a thick brush of branches and he wondered why he could hardly see underneath it. He circled the tree looking up. The tree had heavy vines hanging from all over it. He moved them out of the way as he looked up searching for the floorboards. Then he came across the reason. The floorboards had been painted black and green in a camouflage pattern. Even if you were walking through this part of the forest you’d really have to be looking for the tree-house to even spot it. If someone happened by on even a casual hike and looked up for a moment, there would be no spotting it. And he doubted hikers ever came this way. There was no clear path.

What he did find was a clear and bubbling stream not five feet away from the tree. This must be where his indoor plumbing came from. He walked over to the stream and looked along the inside of it. After a few minutes, his eyes narrowed on a black piece of tube inside it. Sure enough, there was a small mound of dirt leading all the way to the tree. When he knelt down and moved the dirt, he found that it was more of the tube. He replaced the dirt over it and tracked the mound to the tree. He had to move a few vines out of his way, but finally saw where it met the tree and went up all the way to the floor. It was black, so you couldn’t necessarily see it and if you didn’t look closely at it, you might mistake it for a vine anyway.

There was another crackle from the walkie-talkie inside his backpack. He would have to admire the construction later.

He went to the bike and unfastened the rope from it. He wasn’t sure what to do with the rope, until he remembered how well-camouflaged the tubing was. He moved through a couple of vines and tied the rope to a vine behind those.

Then he went to the rope ladder. He found another rope that hung just beside it. He tried to look up to see where it led to, but it was impossible to tell. When he pulled on it, the ladder began to ascend into the tree. He tested his theory again and found that the ladder worked on the same pulley system. If you pulled left or right, the rope locked into place.

Once the ladder seemed to be far out of sight, he had a rather long coil of rope to deal with. He thought about simply winding the entire thing around the tree trunk, but debated on what a pain that would be to deal with when he came back. What he settled on was to tie a portion of the rope to an interior vine and then cover the rest with leaves and twigs.

He opened his backpack and took out the tablet. When he powered it on, he found that there was a new compass app there. He matched it up to point East and found that the direction he wanted to go seemed to follow the stream, which would be convenient since there was seemingly nothing else on the ground to follow.

He looked around to find a landmark. He might be able to find his way out by following the stream, but he had no way of identifying his own tree from the hundreds of others. There was no clear pattern to the trees around him, and no bend in the stream he would be able to identify from any other bend. There were three large boulders off to his left, but he didn’t know that he would be able to identify those from any others.

He got off the bike and went over to the center boulder. He looked around and found another small rock. With that rock, he scraped a large J onto the boulder. He dropped the rock and went over to the bike. As long as it didn’t get too dark, he’d be able to see that.

A while later, he emerged from the woods. The stream had led straight to the road and continued underneath it. Jonah looked up the road and then down. He had a feeling he was almost halfway between his father’s house and the town. He clearly remembered this stretch of two-lane highway.

He turned his bike toward town and peddled faster. Almost fifteen minutes later, there was another crackle from inside the backpack, but this time he clearly heard Eric’s voice.

He stopped and took out the walkie-talkie. “Eric?”

“Dude, where have you been!?” Eric practically yelled through the walkie-talkie.

“Sorry. I think I over-slept,” Jonah said, looking at the tablet in his pack and seeing that it was after three o’clock.

“Overslept!? I haven’t heard from you for two days! Where’s my bike!?”

XVII

Two days!? Could it have been a full two days since he ran from Athena Stapleton in Clapton? Jonah didn’t remember how he got to the tree-house. He just remembered running and then waking up.  Could ‘the others’ that were inside him have that much control that they could keep him down for two days?

“I’m sorry,” Jonah said into the walkie-talkie. Then he paused and looked around.  “I didn’t know.”

“Dude, how could you not know?” Eric’s voice boomed through the walkie-talkie.

“I found out some stuff,” Jonah replied, but then stopped again. How would anyone believe it? He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t know what to do or to say. “Are you at the mall or your house?”

“I just came back to the house,” Eric said. “I didn’t know where you’d show up.”

“Can you get on your mom’s bike and meet me at Taylor and Main?” Jonah asked. Main Street became this two-lane highway as it left town. Taylor was the last cross-street, or, from Jonah’s perspective, the first cross-street he came to the night he decided to go into town.

“I can, but it’s going to take me a while to get there,” Eric responded. “Just come back here.”

Jonah considered it, but there was no way Eric would believe him if he just told him. He had to show him the tree-house. And show him the recording.

“Um, there’s something I have to show you, Danger Man,” Jonah’s voice quaked for a minute. It was pretty unconsciously established that night Jonah came clean with his story that if they were going to use their code names, that meant it was business between best friends.