The Trap Read online

  He asked if we’d help him. I was a little wary, Carl being a stranger and older than us, and big. But he wasn’t mean then. He seemed happy for the help. Together we blocked out the diamond, and Carl hammered stakes with string running between to define the baselines until he could lime them. Then he let us take a few swings with his beat-up old Louisville Slugger.

  “Kid, I hope you got interests outside baseball,” he said to me, laughing after I missed his second easy pitch.

  Thinking back on that day now, I puzzled over Carl. He’d gotten meaner slowly, at first. I remembered one summer where he never spoke, just glared at things. The following year, Alan said Carl wasn’t doing well in school, and was maybe going to get kicked off the baseball team. Then he started shoving us around. Eventually, I don’t know exactly when, I became afraid of him. I avoided him, and so did other kids. This summer was the worst. Bullying became a mission for Carl, like a new sport that had replaced baseball.

  “Henry,” Carl had said that first day, smiling after I struck out on his slow tosses, “you should meet my younger brother. I think you’re the same age.” Then he’d yelled back toward the house, “Hey, Alan, are you in there? There’s a kid out here you should be friends with.” That distant voice echoed in my mind as I looked at the covers of the Airman Crusader books, with their lightning-bolt titles:

  Airman Crusader Versus the Bat Creatures, Airman Crusader Versus the Rats, Airman Crusader Versus the Venusians, Airman Crusader Versus the Airmen . . .

  Then I reached the last volume in the stack, and paused. The cover didn’t feature lightning bolts, aliens, or laser blasts. It was just black, no illustration at all, only a title like on a textbook: Subtle Travel and the Subtle Self. There were two authors. One was A. Møller, who wrote the Airman Crusader books, and the second was J. Brody.

  It was as dog-eared as the rest of the paperbacks, just as grimy and with cracks along the spine. I turned it over to see what the summary said on the back, but there wasn’t anything. The back was blank too, without even a price listed.

  I opened to the first page.

  CHAPTER ONE

  You think you are one person in one body, but that is a fault of perception. In fact, you are one person in two bodies. Your first body: weight, mass, matter. Your second body: weightless, massless, flow—the subtle form. One body upon the other, within the other, each the shadow of the other. The subtle sleeps and wakes with and within the physical, or so it has been. Now learn: The physical sleeps, the subtle wakes! The physical lies still, the subtle walks! This is the art we teach.

  I barely noticed Helen’s footsteps on the stairs as she came up to the second floor and got ready for bed. It must have been pretty late. She brushed her teeth, and I dimly heard her in the hall. Then she appeared in my open doorway. “G’night, Henry,” she said.

  “G’night,” I answered, not even looking up.

  “Thanks for the chili,” she said.

  “Yup,” I replied, still reading.

  “School tomorrow,” said Helen. “We’re junior high kids now.”

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed.

  Helen realized that she would get nothing out of me. She padded off to her room, and I heard her door click shut.

  I’d never been more absorbed in a book. I was even a little scared. It didn’t seem like a story. It seemed like it was describing something real—that a person could step right out of their body while their body was sleeping. You’d be yourself, but invisible. This was called “subtle travel.” The part of you that did the walking, your second body, was called “the subtle form.”

  Lie atop the covers, one arm up as illustrated in fig. 1, index finger extended. Recite the nine-number series, and repeat: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34. When you continue beyond these digits, you will be awake to the subtle plane. Enter the paralysis. Using your eyes, rock yourself from your sleeping body. Now you are free. Walk without fear.

  I didn’t understand everything. What did it mean to recite beyond the nine digits? What was the paralysis? How do you rock yourself with your eyes? It seemed like half instructions and half poetry.

  I put the book aside, and looked at the clock. It was after midnight—way later than I should have been up.

  As the book had instructed, I lay down and propped my arm with a pillow so my forearm was sticking up, my hand in the air. It wasn’t very comfortable.

  I closed my eyes and started reciting the numbers, silently: “1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34.” When I reached the end, I began again. Pretty soon, probably because it was so late, I got sleepy. I started losing track, but whenever I did I just returned to the beginning. “1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 . . . 13 . . .” I started over: “1, 1, 2, 3, 5 . . .” Start over. “1, 1, 2, 3 . . .” I was drifting off quickly, wobbling between a waking state and dreaming. And to my surprise, I found myself in the middle of saying, “55 . . . 89 . . .” Where did those numbers come from? I was really starting to lose my place. I began once again and tried to be careful as I went up, but my brain was going all strange. And this time when I reached 34, I didn’t feel like I needed to start over. It was kind of like I’d hiked to the lip of a hill, and when I got to the top I just walked right up into the air: 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025 . . .

  I kept concentrating, and the numbers showed no sign of stopping: 121393, 196418, 317811, 514229, 832040, 1346269, 2178309, 3524578, 5702887, 9227465, 14930352, 24157817, 39088169 . . .

  I opened my eyes. I guessed I’d awakened. The numbers were gone. The radio had roused me, I thought—“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” was playing. I lay there and listened to it. Lots of people considered it a romantic song, but I thought it was creepy. In the lyrics, Elvis describes this empty house, with an empty parlor and empty chairs, like a ghost story.

  As he sang, I decided to sit up, because it was kind of getting to me, my own house being queer and quiet and dark like the one where he was. But when I tried, I couldn’t. I told myself, “Sit up,” but nothing moved except my eyes, which jerked left and right as I struggled. I felt a sudden rush of fear as the song ended, and I dimly heard on the radio, “This is KRW, signing off for the end of our broadcast day.” A burst of static came over the speakers, then silence, and I finally remembered—the book had described this state. This was “the paralysis.”

  My brain was groggy. What was I supposed to do? After the numbers, I’d wake up and find myself stuck—my subtle form attached to my physical body like a lining zipped into a coat. Then it came to me. “Using your eyes, rock yourself . . .”

  It made sense. I started rocking my eyeballs back and forth, looking left, then right, then left, then right. A momentum began to build. My whole self sloshed like water in a tub, left, right, left, right—

  And I spilled out of myself. That’s the only way I can describe it. My line of sight peeled down the walls in one quick tip, and next thing I knew I was staring at the carpet. I was on the floor.

  I stood, a little dizzy. I turned around and looked down at my bed.

  There I was, sleeping in it.

  LOOKING DOWN AT MYSELF I saw that my arm, which I’d balanced upright, was lying on my chest. When it fell, that’s what broke through the paralysis, I guessed. “Incredible,” I whispered. My voice sounded strange, close, like in a telephone booth. It didn’t bounce off the walls like a normal voice. Because it wasn’t normal. It was . . . a subtle voice.

  My body was sleeping peacefully. I could see the black eye starting up where Carl had punched me. And my ears really did stick out, maybe more now than ever. I did not look like someone’s dance date, but this wasn’t the time to dwell on it.

  Scanning the rest of my room, I realized my sense of sight was altered. I could tell the room was dark—pitch dark—but I could still see. It looked to me like someone had come in and painted everything black and left the lights on. My desk, instead of being brown and green, was black. My walls, instead of being off-white, were black. The top blan
ket of my bed, instead of being blue and red, was black.

  Also, snow. Yes, it appeared to be snowing in here, indoors, in the middle of summer. There were flakes everywhere, lofting around in little gusts. Sometimes they’d stick to one another, or break apart, everything happening slow and graceful. Unlike the rest of the black room, the flakes were different colors—some dark blue, others red or green or brown. Some landed on me as I watched, soaked into my clothes, and disappeared. A few flakes whirled out through my bedroom window and disappeared outside. I wondered if it was snowing there too, and I went to the sill and leaned out to see.

  No sooner had I taken a glance, though, than a voice from below shouted up at me angrily, “I knew it was you, you little thief!”

  I looked down on the front yard and driveway. Someone was there—and not just any someone. This was perhaps the very last person in the whole world I’d want yelling at me in the middle of the night: Carl Dunn. He was standing on the front walk.

  There’s something else I should mention. I’m not exactly sure how to put it aside from saying that Carl, well, he wasn’t looking quite his normal self. I mean, he did look like who he was, with his big arms, pimply face, and dark tan from a long summer. I knew him without a doubt. He was even wearing the same clothes as earlier—a white T-shirt and blue jeans. The strange thing wasn’t any of that.

  The thing was . . . his head was on fire.

  And not just a little. It was massively on fire, a giant blaze with bright whitish flames leaping up and a huge column of cottony smoke billowing out.

  I rubbed my eyes, but the problem wasn’t with my sight. The flames jetted from where Carl’s hair should have been, and the smoke chugged like from a train on a mountain ascent.

  Now, I can say with some certainty that if I ever happened to find my own head on fire, I would prioritize putting it out. I mean, no matter what else was going on, I’d do that first. And if I saw someone nearby, I’d say something to them like, “Help me,” or maybe “Please help me” if they looked reluctant. I would not say what Carl said next, which was, “Come down here, you little thief, or I’m coming up.”

  I stared in speechless amazement.

  “Jump,” said Carl, gesturing as if he thought I’d really take a leap from the second floor.

  I hadn’t thought that I could be any more scared of Carl Dunn than I already was, but seeing the flames billowing up from him, and him not caring one way or the other about it, he seemed like some kind of supernatural being. My knees were knocking together, I was so terrified. I took him at his word that he’d come up if I didn’t go down, so I said, my voice quivering, “I’ll be right there.”

  I stepped back from the window and walked into the hall, which was not lit. It should have been pitch dark, but I could still see perfectly, everything colored black.

  I descended the stairs to the entryway. The wall clock read one fifteen. Mom and Dad wouldn’t be home for an hour. “And this is a dream,” I told myself. But it kept seeming not like a dream.

  I reached to open the front door, and to my surprise my hand passed right through the knob. I tried again, same result. As if I was a ghost. Well, if there was one thing I knew about ghosts, it was that they weren’t stopped by doors.

  I stepped forward, flinching a little when I was about to hit. Then my nose just went right through. Have you ever spent time in the middle of a door? It smells of sawdust and sap in there, and the wood grain and layers of glue are thin as pages. Doors are kind of like books.

  Quick as anything I was through, standing outside.

  Carl was right there, by the driveway. Something still billowed from his flaming head, but now that I was closer I saw it wasn’t smoke. It was snowflakes. They weren’t all different colors like the ones in my room, but almost all white, like real snow. They poured out of the flames, flying up in the exact opposite direction of normal snow. “Carl, why are you . . . ?” I said.

  “Shut up,” he replied. He stepped toward me and I cowered back, but he didn’t hit me. “You stole Abe’s books,” he said. “I’m gonna tell him, and you’ll be sorry.”

  I knew he was talking about the books at the campsite, and I didn’t say anything in my own defense. I just stood there shaking.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” said Carl. His voice sounded clipped, and I noticed, which I had not expected, that he seemed nervous.

  “Carl,” I said, “are you okay?” I glanced significantly up at the fire.

  Carl smiled, and gestured at the flames. “See how pure it is?” he said. He seemed pleased about this, bragging as you might about a good grade. I had no idea what he meant, but before I could ask anything, his demeanor changed. He started and spun around, like he’d heard something behind him. He peered across the street into the scrub and trees there, and stammered, “Did you hear that?”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

  “There’s a ghost out there.”

  I was so confused by everything he was saying, all I could do was stand there stupidly.

  “I saw his dead body,” said Carl. “We set traps, but he snuck past them. Now we don’t know where he is.”

  “Carl, Alan’s worried about you,” I said.

  He stepped close to me, his chest level with my eyeballs. I looked away, glancing over toward the front porch. The light there was burned out, leaving a dark area where I could clearly see the white snowflakes drifting. I waited for Carl’s blow, but it didn’t come. He was looking over at the flakes too. “I’m going underground,” he said, quietly.

  Then he stepped back and turned to leave, as if he’d forgotten all about me, which normally I’d take as a stroke of incredible luck. But I remembered how Alan said Carl had done a poor job of hiding his own diary—almost like he wanted it found. And now here he was, accusing me of being a thief and then walking away. “Carl, wait,” I said. “Do you need help?”

  For a second I thought he’d give me a real answer, but then the light in his eyes hardened. “I’m gonna live forever,” he said, and he continued off into the darkness. Within seconds, all that remained of him was a vanishing trail of snowflakes.

  MY ALARM WENT OFF at six a.m. I awakened thinking not about the very strange dream I’d had, but about how much my face hurt. I put one hand up to my cheek. The bulge there felt like a baby bird.

  I went to my closet-door mirror and hesitantly took my hand away. Oh no, I thought. Not on the first day of junior high . . .

  Downstairs, Helen was already up. She was wearing one of her regular school dresses, strange to see after a summer of jeans. She’d cooked eggs for us both, which was a pleasant surprise—but she was more surprised than I was when I walked in. “Henry, what a shiner!” she exclaimed. “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes.” I sat glumly at the table. There was a scrap of paper in the middle, a note left by Mom and Dad when they got in earlier. As I reached for it, Helen said, “I took care of that. The porch light burned out.”

  And I remembered—in my dream, noticing the burned-out light.

  “Also,” Helen added, “we’re in trouble.”

  I didn’t think about the trouble. I was too busy with the porch light. I would not have known that light was burned out, unless maybe I really had walked through the front door, like a ghost, and seen Carl . . .

  Distractedly, I scanned the rest of the note. “Come straight home after school,” it read, in Mom’s hand. “We need to talk about fighting.”

  “Oh boy,” I said.

  “It wasn’t our fault!” said Helen as she slid an egg onto a plate for me.

  We were out the front door soon after, my schoolbooks and hers crammed into my rucksack. We pedaled to Nicki’s house. I wasn’t saying much, and I’m sure Helen assumed it was because I was worried about being in trouble, or about having a black eye on the first day of school. Which I was, both. But I was also remembering Carl’s head, belching snowflakes out of weird flames.

  Nicki’s house looked similar to ours, two storie
s with a low fence around. She was outside on her bike, wearing a blue jacket and a brown corduroy skirt, which was about the cutest outfit ever.

  “Hi, Nicki,” I said.

  She rode past me holding out one hand for a high-five, but I missed it.

  “That is some kind of black eye, Henry,” she said.

  I felt my ears turning red.

  We headed up the highway. A couple of cars passed us and honked—friends getting rides from their parents.

  When we were almost at the school, Alan caught up to us on his rickety bike.

  I rode toward him and held up a high-five, but he didn’t try to hit it. I leered at him comically out of my swollen black eye, and saw he was looking very serious. “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “Carl didn’t come home last night,” he said.

  “Never?” said Helen.

  “You mean, he’s going to miss school?” said Nicki. She was imagining, I think, how her own strict parents would react if she missed the first day, or any day, for that matter. School was very important at her house.

  “Does your dad know?” Helen asked.

  “I doubt it,” said Alan. “He’s sleeping.”

  “You guys,” I said, suddenly intent. “I have . . . something . . .” I paused as we reached the school parking lot. “I’ll tell you in homeroom,” I said.

  Johnson Junior High was big, a real school, not a rinky-dink elementary. At the front was a pair of giant double doors, propped open as kids poured through. The portal transformed us from sixth graders into seventh graders. From grade schoolers into junior high students.

  I’m sure we looked wide-eyed as we surveyed the big halls. Well, one of my eyes was wide-eyed. The other was narrow as a coin slot.

  Everything here was bigger than in elementary school, and more serious. There were no silly pieces of wall art made by kindergartners. The walls had lockers, and flyers were stuck to a few boards with official-looking announcements. I was glad to be with my sister and friends.