The Obsidian Blade (11 page)

Each twist in the road came on a little faster. He loved how the tires clung to the pavement. As he headed into a particularly sharp curve, his rear wheel hit a patch of gravel. Tucker fought for control, the rear of the bike slewing back and forth. The rear wheel caught and sent Tucker flying off the bike into a patch of tall weeds. He rolled several yards through a soft mass of vegetation before coming to rest. His first thought was that he was very lucky to be alive. His second thought was that he had been attacked by ten million mosquitoes. The weed patch was solid nettles. His arms, his legs, his face — everything — itched like no itch he had ever experienced. He had landed so hard that the nettles stung him right through his T-shirt. He dragged himself out of the weeds, skin shrieking. After a few seconds of clawing at himself, Tucker realized that he was only making it worse. He forced his arms to stop moving and climbed out of the ditch to the road.

His motorcycle was nowhere in sight. Tucker walked along the side of the road, peering into the dense woods, trying to not think about his prickling skin. Fifty yards away, he found the twisted ruin of the dirt bike wrapped around the trunk of a maple.

Kosh would not be happy.

He walked the three miles back to the barn, trying to come up with a good story. He failed. By the time he reached the driveway he had blisters on his heels, his neck was sunburned, and he still itched everywhere. As he walked up to the barn, something caught his eye just above the peak of the barn near the motorcycle weather vane. A wavering of the air like he had seen over their house in Hopewell. He moved toward the barn, keeping his eyes on the spot, waiting for it to move, or disappear. As he shifted to the side he could make out the shape of a disk.

Could it be heat rising off the barn roof, somehow reflected by the shingles? He didn’t think so. It was something else, something unearthly.

“Where have you been?” Kosh was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed.

Tucker pointed to the top of the barn.

Kosh stepped outside and looked up. “What?”

“Can’t you see . . . ?” Tucker stopped talking. The disk was gone. “I thought I saw something up there. Like a disk.”

Kosh shook his head slowly. “There’s nothing there,” he said.

“I saw —”

“Maybe you saw a cloud of gnats. Now tell me how you got all scratched up.”

“I
SWEAR YOU MUST HAVE A DEATH WISH
,” K
OSH SAID
as he smeared a paste of baking soda and water on Tucker’s arms. “The only reason I don’t hang you up by your toes and beat you is because I used to be twice as dumb.”

“What was the dumbest thing you ever did?”

“Invited you to come live with me.”

“Oh.” Tucker thought his uncle was kidding, but he wasn’t sure enough to press the matter.

“I’m really sorry,” Tucker said.

“Me too, kid. That was a nice little bike.”

“I mean about everything. Coming to live here, and the stove, and . . . everything.”

“How’s that feel?”

“Being sorry?”

“No. The itching. You want some of this goop on your neck?”

“That’s okay. It doesn’t itch so bad anymore.”

Kosh stood up and wiped off his hands. “You don’t have to feel sorry about staying here,” he said. “I don’t mind so much.”

For the next few days, Tucker kept a low profile and managed not to wreck anything. He checked the roof of the barn several times a day, but the disk did not reappear. Kosh’s eyebrows began to grow back — they looked like gray smudges. Every time Tucker looked at him, he had to suppress a laugh.

One morning, as they were eating pancakes for breakfast, Kosh sat back in his chair and regarded Tucker.

“What?” Tucker said.

“You think if I leave you on your own today, you can try not to kill yourself?”

“Where are you going?”

“I got to ride up to Whitehall and pick up a license, then up to Eau Claire for some parts.”

“Can I come?” Tucker asked.

“No. I’ll be gone most of the day. During that time, you will not lay a hand on any tool or any piece of machinery, including my stove and my remaining motorcycles. Do not enter my workshop for any reason. Furthermore, do not run, climb, ride, kick, slide, throw, pry, hammer, or in any other way risk damage to yourself or, especially, any of my property. Do you understand?”

Kosh’s missing eyebrows were no longer quite so amusing.

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Sleep. Read. Contemplate the universe.”

“Just sit here all day and do nothing?”

“That would be ideal,” said Kosh.

A few minutes later, sitting on his bed doing absolutely nothing, Tucker heard Kosh ride off. As the sound of the Harley faded into silence, a sense of loneliness and gloom settled upon him, soon to be replaced by irritation at Kosh, who seemed bent on eliminating his every source of entertainment. Doing nothing was
hard.
Tucker lay back on his bed and tried to read a book, but the words skittered back and forth on the page. If he didn’t get up and
do
something he would go crazy. He threw the book aside and went outside. He could poke around in the woods. He could weed the garden. He could walk to the end of the driveway and check the mailbox. None of those options seemed interesting. He looked up at the weather vane on top of the barn.

He blinked and rubbed his eyes, then looked again.

The disk had returned.

Climbing onto the barn roof certainly qualified for Kosh’s list of forbidden activities . . . but it wouldn’t hurt to take a look. There were ladder rungs nailed to the south wall of the barn. Tucker had never climbed them, but he’d checked them out. The rungs were as old as the building itself: rusted, U-shaped, each one fastened with four nails directly onto the siding. The column of rungs reached all the way to the peak.

Tucker grabbed the lowest rung and tugged on it. A little loose. He stepped on it with one foot and bounced up and down. It wiggled, but felt like it would hold. He climbed a few more steps. The ninth rung was loose — two of the nails had rusted away — but the rungs were close enough together that he was able to climb past it. He looked down. A shame to waste all that climbing. He looked up. It wasn’t that far. Kosh would never know.

He continued climbing. The top rung was about two feet below the eave, which jutted out from the siding. Two iron rails curved down around the overhang from the top, providing handholds. Grabbing one of the rails, Tucker gave it a hard yank. It felt secure. To get onto the roof, he would have to grab both rails and pull himself up. Tucker looked down.

Whoa.
He squeezed his eyes closed and willed all of his strength into his hands. It was a
long
way down — he hadn’t been this high since he’d tied the rope swing to the cottonwood. He waited for his heart to slow down, then moved his other hand to the rail, lifted one foot to the top rung, and pulled himself high enough to see the top of the roof.

The two rails, he was relieved to see, were fastened securely to the roof with shiny new bolts. Kosh must have been up there doing some maintenance. If it was safe for Kosh, who weighed well over two hundred pounds, it had to be safe for Tucker. Getting a new grip on the rails, Tucker pulled himself up onto the roof. He crawled on his belly along the ridge for a few feet to get away from the edge, then stood up.

About halfway along the ridge, between him and the weather vane, a shimmering, perfectly round distortion hovered four feet above the ridge. At close range, it looked like a pane of foggy, pulsing glass. Tucker edged forward, keeping one foot on either side of the ridge. He stopped ten feet short of the disk, wishing he had brought a stick or something to poke at it. He dug in his pockets and came out with his pocketknife. He moved closer, then tossed the knife at the disk.

The disk flashed orange; the knife disappeared.

Tucker got down on his hands and knees and looked at the roof on the other side of the disk. No knife. He crawled forward until his head was directly beneath the disk and looked up. Edge on, it became invisible, as if it had no third dimension. Keeping his head down, he crawled past the disk and stood up, gripping the weather vane for support. It looked exactly the same on the other side.

He was standing only three feet from the surface of the disk, close enough to feel it tugging at him, just like the one in Hopewell. His heart rate jumped from nervous and excited to flat-out scared. A voice inside his head was yelling at him to get away from the disk and off the roof, but before he could will his body to act, a prickling at the back of his ears made him turn to look behind him.

Three ghosts were floating around the weather vane, two men and a woman, all staring at him with colorless, translucent eyes. Tucker gasped and backed away from them. As he neared the surface of the disk something grabbed him and squeezed — for an instant, he felt as if he’d been compressed to the size of a pea — then, with a sound like the final slurp of a milk shake through a straw, he was falling.

T
UCKER LANDED HARD, FLAT ON HIS BACK
. A
IR EXPLODED
from his lungs — for a moment, he thought he was back at Hardy Lake, slamming into the tree. He tried to breathe, but his chest was frozen and a sharp pain stabbed at his ears. Bubbles of black crowded the edges of his vision. Just as he felt himself slipping away, his chest suddenly expanded. Air flooded his lungs and his ears popped — the relief was exquisite, but short-lived, as the need for oxygen was replaced by a sharp pain in the small of his back.

I fell off the barn,
he thought.
I’ve broken my back.

He moved his right leg, then his left. Except for the knot of pain in his lower back he seemed to be okay. How far had he fallen? Forty, fifty feet? Turning his head, looking for the barn, he found only clear blue sky. He sat up. He was sitting on a flat, pebbly metal surface, painted blue-gray, bordered by a metal railing. Beyond the railing was the horizon: faint and distant, a blur of water touching the sky.

This was not Kosh’s farm.

Tucker looked straight up. The wavering, not-quite-real shape of the disk hung eight feet above him, just out of reach. He climbed to his feet and noticed his folded pocketknife on the metal surface. That was what had been poking him in the back. He must have landed right on it.

He was on top of a building. He walked a few steps to the railing and looked out upon thousands of other buildings, most of them less than half as tall as the one he was standing upon. They looked like something Godzilla could crush with his great lizard feet. He looked down. His stomach lurched. Tiny cars crowded the city streets. Little dark specks — people — moved, antlike, along the sidewalks.

Turning to his left, he saw another incredibly tall building, maybe a hundred yards away, topped by the white spike of a giant antenna. The antenna alone was taller than any building in Hopewell.

To his right, beyond the sea of buildings, was a large body of water, its gray surface slashed by the white wakes of dozens of boats. He noticed an island with an oddly shaped, pointed structure jutting up from one end.

Every few yards along the railing, binocular telescopes were mounted on steel posts. Tucker tried to look through one, but saw nothing. He noticed a coin slot in the front of the telescope. He felt in his pockets, found two quarters, fed them in, heard a reassuring click, put his eyes to the scope, and aimed it at the island.

The pointy structure was a green metal statue. He had seen it before in pictures, and in movies.

The Statue of Liberty.

But the Statue of Liberty was in New York City.

How could he be in New York? He followed the railing. The city — uncountable buildings — spread out to the horizon. He noticed one building topped by a tall, graceful spire, not as tall as the building he was standing on, but taller than the rest. The Empire State Building? But there weren’t any buildings taller than the Empire State Building in New York City, so how could he be looking
down
at it? He moved back from the railing and sat down on a green metal bench on the other side of the platform. He closed his eyes and hugged himself. This had to be a dream. When he opened his eyes the nightmare would be over. He would be back on Kosh’s barn — unless that was part of the dream, too.