The Smashed Man of Dread End Page 9

  Noe didn’t like this woman at all, but she would put up with anything to learn more about the Smashed Man.

  Fern took a deep breath. “We don’t know if we’re alone in the universe, but we know that the universe isn’t alone. There are billions of universes. But they’re not out there.” Fern pointed at the ceiling fan, somehow successfully indicating the starry blackness wrapped around the planet. “They’re here and there and everywhere.” She started pointing randomly around the room with her free hand, somehow successfully indicating the disgusting room around them. “Universes of different sizes overlapping and moving through each other at different speeds, some fast, some slow. You, tall girl, raise your hand.” Crystal did so, slowly. “A universe the size of a baseball just passed through your palm. You, little girl, stand up.” Ruthy jumped up like she was in trouble. “A universe the size of a marble just moved through your stomach. And in about five seconds, a universe the size of a whale will have finished passing through the whole house after starting about ten minutes ago.” She paused while Ruthy sat back down and they all stared around the room, waiting to feel the whale. “And that was three of about seven thousand universes that are moving past us right now in all directions.”

  “You can see all that?” asked Noe doubtfully, still looking around the room.

  “I said no questions, girl.” Fern’s eyes narrowed, like she was trying to shoot lasers at Noe through her lenses. “Especially silly ones. Nobody can see them.” Fern grabbed her teacup by the elephant trunk and took a loud sip.

  “The universe is infinite.” That came from Crystal, and the other girls looked at her in surprise.

  “You girls just won’t listen,” said Fern. “An infinite universe is conventional science. That doesn’t apply here. What would your science teacher say to a two-dimensional monster coming through a crack in your basement wall, huh?” Crystal shook her head slowly. Noe looked over at her in sympathy. As strange as it was for Noe to hear an adult talk about the Smashed Man, it must have been a thousand times stranger for the other Dread Enders, who had waited their whole lives for an adult to acknowledge the monster in their basements. “Conventional science deals with observable phenomena. When you can’t observe things because your eyes go all indigo . . .” Fern shrugged and took another sip of tea.

  “What do all your universes have to do with the monster in our basements?” asked Noe.

  “Everything,” said Fern, her lenses firing up again. “Sometimes a universe or a part of a universe gets caught inside another. It doesn’t flow through. It stops, like one fist inside another.” She held up a fist, but her other was clenching a teacup, so she dropped the fist to her lap. “We call them stuck places. And there’s a stuck place under Totter Court.”

  Had Noe not seen a flat monster sliding out of a crack in her basement and people’s eyes turning purple and an invisible house, she would have called this woman crazy and run back home. She snuck a glance at the other Dread Enders. They were listening with full attention. They wanted answers badly.

  “How long has it been under there?” asked Noe.

  “I don’t know. At least a couple of decades, I think. Not a very relevant question.”

  Noe bristled like when Fern called her “girl.”

  “Is that where the Smashed Man is coming from? This stuck place?”

  Fern emptied the cup of tea and put it back on the tray. She hesitated a moment, throwing a quick glance at the girls, and then picked up another. “That’s a better question. But no.”

  “Where does he come from, then?”

  Fern scratched at her ear. Adjusted her glasses. Ran her finger along the rim of the teacup. She was obviously trying to figure out what she was going to tell them. Finally she said, “This is where what we know gets . . . wiggly. We think that when one place gets stuck in another, there’s still some space between them, a zone of limbo between the two. And that’s where the Smashed Man lives. At least when he’s not trying to get through to our world. That’s why ‘Smashed Man’ is such an interesting phrase to me. He really is smashed between two places.”

  Noe was about to fire off another question when she realized that she had been asking all the questions so far. She looked over at the other girls on the couch. They were all still staring at Fern. And they looked more fragile than usual. Radiah’s eyes were watery. Ruthy was sunk into the cushions. Crystal looked sunk within herself. They wanted the answers so badly but were also afraid of those answers. The answers could make things worse. They couldn’t take worse. Noe asked another question.

  “Why is he trying to get through to our world?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What will happen if he does?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened to Erica?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It felt like the first time she had visited Rune Rock with the Dread Enders. Nobody knew anything. “What do you know?”

  Fern laughed. A short, loud bark. “More than you, but not much more. We’re bumbling along, really.”

  “Who is we?” asked Radiah.

  “There is a small group of us that are not susceptible to the violet blindness as adults. We don’t know why. We call ourselves the Neighbors. We observe stuck places.”

  When Noe pulled out her phone, she said, “You won’t find anything about us online, girl. Not with a name as common as ours. That’s why we chose it. Just like you won’t find anything about two-dimensional basement monsters.”

  “So you’re not here to . . . fix everything?” That was Ruthy, and the way she said it almost broke Noe’s heart.

  “I’m not a handyman, little girl.”

  “You barely know anything. Why are you even here?” asked Noe, angry at the way she talked to Ruthy.

  “This is what comes from asking too many questions and not listening. As I just said, I’m here to observe. This house is an observation post. We have one everywhere we discover a stuck place. But nobody has been at this post for a long time. No reason to be. Until that girl in the red house did whatever she did. Do you know what she did?”

  “No,” said Radiah. Good idea, thought Noe. No reason to tell this woman anything.

  “So what’s different about you, Noelle Wiley? How come you can see past the Nonatuke?” Fern looked at Noe over the rim of her teacup. Noe decided to pick the last cup up for herself. Not because she wanted tea, but because she felt like she needed a buffer between her and this woman. The tea wasn’t dark brown like she expected. It was almost white. She took a sip. It was thick and tasted sweet and spicy. It was wonderful.

  “It’s chai. And not that sugary milk most people call chai. This is straight from India. Too good for you.”

  Noe took another sip.

  “Do you have autism? Asthma? An oversized birthmark?” Fern asked.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “I didn’t ask if anything was wrong with you. You think this is something wrong with me?” She gently kicked the aluminum shaft lying beside her. “I asked if anything was different about you. Peanut allergy? Heart murmur?”

  “No.” She tried to be as definite with the answer as Radiah had been.

  “There is something, even if you don’t know what it is. It’s what makes you able to see this house. To see past the Nonatuke painted on it.”

  “Nonatuke.” Noe took her time with the word, like it was the first time she had ever come across those syllables. It wasn’t hard to fake. The word was hard to say. “That X on the front of the house? It’s painted with the same sparkly stuff that’s on the Dead End sign and on Rune Rock. What is all that?”

  “Rune Rock?” Fern thought for a bit. “Oh, one of the sigils out in the forest. You girls have a gift with naming. You know what a sigil is? It’s kind of a magic symbol. Not that we believe in magic, but it seems to fit here, because those sigils have some kind of power when painted with darkwash. A power we don’t always understand.”

 
“Darkwash?”

  “It’s a by-product of a place getting stuck within another. One of the Neighbors figured out how to collect it from between the stuck places. The same space where the Smashed Man lives.” Fern reached down and plucked a thin, tall glass vial about the length of her hand from a pile of books and old soda cans and other vials. The glass tube was full of dark liquid with tiny bright specks of light. They seemed to be moving. The star stuff Erica had mentioned in her diary.

  “What does the R sigil do?” asked Noe. “The one on Rune Rock?”

  “It’s not an R. It’s an Amberonk. A very old sigil. The Egyptians used it. They called it the Eye of Horus. Or the Eye of Ra. I forget which is which. It’s the one that looks like a right eye.” Fern placed her left hand over the left lens of her glasses. “I suspect they knew about stuck places.”

  “But what does it do?” asked Noe, who didn’t want a history lesson.

  “It’s for protection,” said Fern. “We use it to mark the border of the stuck place.” She shrugged her shoulders and took a sip of tea.

  “What do you and the Neighbors plan to do here?” asked Crystal, stumbling over “Neighbors,” like she felt wrong using the word that way.

  “Nothing,”

  “Nothing?” said Ruthy.

  “That’s right. Nothing. Same as you girls should do. Leave me alone. Leave the Smashed Man alone. Let me finish my observations so I can go back to Gulf Shores and have a decent sweat.”

  Noe jumped up, angry, “Well, if you’re not going to be any help, then we should just go. . . .” As Noe said it, she dropped her half-full elephant teacup too hard on the tray, stumbling into it at the same time. The whole set clashed wetly to the ground, with Noe following it.

  “Careful, girl!” Fern bent down and started picking up the cups and mopping up chai with a navy-blue T-shirt that was lying on the floor. “That tea set survived all the way from India to Gulf Shores to here, but it’s no match for a bunch of clumsy New England girls.”

  Noe picked herself off the floor. “Let’s go,” she said to the Dread Enders.

  “But . . . ,” started Radiah, but she didn’t finish because Noe was already opening the door to leave. Radiah took one more look at the woman, who was holding the elephant teapot up to her red glasses, scouring it for any cracks or dents, and then followed Noe, the other girls right behind her.

  “Don’t come back,” Fern yelled after them.

  Noe shut the door. Outside, she watched the other girls pause like they’d been dropped there from the sky, dazed and uncertain. They stared at where the house was. Their irises were purple.

  Noe whispered, “Let’s go to Rune Rock.”

  “Why?” asked Radiah, slowly coming out of her daze.

  “Because I have a plan to get rid of the Smashed Man.” Noe lifted up the front of her shirt about an inch, revealing the tip of a vial of darkwash sticking out from her waistband.

  Fifteen

  The arrangement of the Dread Enders at Rune Rock didn’t feel like a courtroom to Noe this time. That was because she was the one atop the rock with the sparkly R on it . . . the darkwash Amberonk. Everyone else sat below her on the logs and leaves and moss. The scene might have been pleasant, like a picnic, were the other girls not looking up at her in horror.

  Noe had just laid out her plan to rid Totter Court of the Smashed Man.

  “No. No. No. No, Noe,” said Radiah, breaking a thin pine branch in her hands. “We do what we always do. We do what that woman said. We get through it. We stay out of our basements at night. We grow up. We move away. We forget about the Smashed Man forever.”

  “It’s worked for us so far,” said Crystal.

  “I can’t do that,” said Noe. “I can’t do that at all.”

  “You sound like Erica,” said Ruthy.

  “Yeah, she went at the Smashed Man instead of avoiding him,” said Radiah. “And look where she is now.”

  Noe stared down at the shimmering sigil of protection on the smooth hunk of moss-covered granite. They had barely talked about Fern. Nobody knew whether to believe her or not, and even if they did, it didn’t change anything. They hadn’t learned anything that would help them. There was still a monster in their basements. One that had gotten Erica. Next would be Noe. Or Len.

  Noe’s shoulders slumped, and she said, “I’m not trying to be brave. Or make drama. Or pretend to know better than anybody else here.” She swallowed. Her throat felt thick, like she was about to vomit. “If I don’t destroy the Smashed Man, he’ll get me. And my little sister. And probably the rest of you after that.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Crystal.

  Noe swallowed again. She stared down at the vial of darkwash in her hand. The bright specks swam through the darkness like glowing fish in an ocean. She had never had to tell anybody about her parasomnia before. The only people who knew were her family and her doctors. Abby’s family knew too, but she didn’t have to tell them. They’d found out the hard way.

  Abby was the last person she wanted to think about right at this moment. Parasomnia had ended their friendship, even though it wasn’t Noe’s fault. Even though she couldn’t help herself. Could these new girls trust her? They’d spent their entire lives being so careful to avoid the Smashed Man, and here she moves in and could free him on any night without even realizing it. She took a deep breath and looked from one girl to the other. “I have a medical condition.”

  The other girls looked at her expectantly, with concern and not a little bit of fear.

  “Sometimes my sleep cycle is interrupted. During the non-REM stage, I . . .” She trailed off. Why was she using doctor words? She dropped her head and looked at the forest floor. “I sleepwalk.”

  When she didn’t hear a response, she looked up. The girls were staring at her, confusion on their faces. Crystal was the one who broke the awkwardness.

  “I grind my teeth in my sleep. Sometimes I wake up with awful headaches from it. My dentist wants me to wear a mouth guard every night, but it makes me feel like I’m suffocating.”

  Noe was confused by Crystal’s admission at first, but then realized that she was trying to make her feel better about her own medical condition. “Thanks, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that any night I can end up in the basement. Without realizing it. I can get up, walk down there, and stand until the Smashed Man comes out. All while asleep. It’s already gotten close to happening.”

  Ruthy gasped. Radiah dropped the two pieces of pine branch that she had been rubbing together as if she was trying to start a fire. Crystal stared at Noe like she was seeing her for the first time.

  “It gets worse. Since we moved to this new house, Len has started sleepwalking. I found her the other night inches away from the Smashed Man. He was almost out. I grabbed Len and somehow touched him.” She held up her hands to show the red welt on her palm. “We were both thrown across the basement. It felt like . . . I don’t know what it felt like. But it hurt.” She took a shaky breath. “I’m sorry. Sorry that you all have had to live with the Smashed Man. Sorry about what happened to Erica. Sorry that Len and I moved here and now everybody’s in danger. I’m sorry.” Tears welled in her eyes and dropped to the stone. It felt like Abby all over again.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  Noe’s head shot up, not because of what was said, but because of who had said it. Radiah continued. “I told you before, you’re one of us, whether you like it or not. You’re a Dread Ender.” She stood up from where she had been sitting on the forest floor. “And now we know what’s different about you.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Noe.

  “What Fern said. What’s different about you, that you can see past the Nonatuke.” Noe didn’t know what to say to that, so she just stayed silent and let Radiah keep talking. “How do you know that this plan will work?”

  Noe slid down the rock and stood with the other Dread Enders. She knew what to say to that. “Erica was confident she finally had a plan that could be
at him. I don’t know why she was so confident, but I believe her.”

  “But she was wrong,” said Radiah.

  “And how can you even know her plan? Most of her diary is just splotches of . . . darkwash,” said Crystal, looking at the vial in Noe’s hand.

  “Enough of it is there. And I also think that she didn’t have all the information she needed for her plan.”

  “You know something she didn’t?” asked Radiah.

  “I do. Or at least I think I do. Remember the first time you took me here to Rune Rock? I told you about going down into the basement on the night I moved in.”

  “You didn’t see the Smashed Man,” said Ruthy.

  “I thought you were being a jerk,” said Radiah.

  Noe laughed. “I was probably being a little bit of a jerk, but that’s exactly what happened. I went down there, and the Smashed Man didn’t come out. It was the only time that happened. Erica said in her diary that she was going to wait until the Smashed Man came almost all the way out, because she thought that would weaken him. I think she was right. I think that it must take a lot of energy for the Smashed Man to come into our basements, especially now that we know he’s slipping into our world from outside it. I also think Erica might have weakened him further doing whatever she did. That’s maybe why she’s still alive. That’s maybe why he wasn’t in the basement the first night I went down there. He was too weak to come through.

  “By the time I went down there again a week later—which would have been more than a month after Erica’s incident—he had recovered. If we work together, we can weaken the Smashed Man even more. And once he’s at his weakest, I can put Erica’s plan into action. I can paint the Elberex on his head with this darkwash.” She held out the vial in the palm of her hand. It shimmered strangely. Noe had to admit to herself that it seemed too small in that giant forest to be the answer they were looking for.

  “And we’ll never have to worry about the Smashed Man again,” said Ruthy, as if she couldn’t believe it either.