Mr. Fahrenheit (25 page)

T
he Dream Machine rocketed into the football field parking lot.

“
The pass by Bedford Falls is ruled incomplete,
” boomed the referee's amplified voice over the stadium speakers, eliciting shouts of disapproval and joy. “
The clock will be reset at seven seconds. Fourth down and twelve for Bedford Falls. Ball is on their forty-yard line.
”

Benji stomped the brakes and skidded to a stop beside the stadium entrance. Security guards weren't stationed here, as they normally would be: They stood on the other side of the turnstiles, faces angled toward the light of the field, hypnotized by the gridiron clash.

“Stay with the car, Ellie, don't let anyone move it.”

She tried to stand, but couldn't quite do it. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

Benji said the honest thing. “I've got no idea.”

He hid the ray gun inside his tuxedo and hurdled the turnstiles into Bedford Falls High School football field.

To him, everything inside the stadium looked like a highly
colored movie dream, a reality drenched in rainbow.

The Jumbotron: a live, video-feed close-up of CR shouting bright steam at the line of scrimmage, about to begin the play, the red numbers displaying the time clock glowing like sticks of fire.

The bleachers: full to bursting with fans, thrashing their pennants like flags of war.

The crowd standing at the fence that ringed the field: ten people deep, swelling against the chain-link for a better view, shouting at Benji as he shoved through them.

And despite all the insanity, as Benji finally reached the chest-high fence, a tiny piece of his heart broke for his best friend. The score was 21–17, and Bedford Falls was losing.

Benji tried to climb the fence. Someone cursed, yanking him back.

CR screamed, “
HIKE!
”

A series of machine-gun pops: The shoulder pads of the offensive and defensive lines collided, powered by all the fury and hope of their two towns. Ball in hand, CR faded back, back, and perhaps it was the snow that did it, but CR suddenly stumbled. For one electrifying instant it seemed that he would fall, fumble, and end the game and his fans' world.

He caught himself and scrambled up again, head whipping left and right, left, right, searching frantically for a receiver.

And so that was why CR didn't see the impossible thing occur: A seam opened in the vaunted Bedford Falls offensive line, and a Newporte defender surged through. CR was looking left, the defender barreling in from the right, and as the game clock hit
0.0
and the stadium's buzzer blared, the Newporte defender dove at CR, going airborne, a lunatic missile aimed directly at CR's knees.

AND CR LEAPED OVER HIM.

But it was not just a leap: It was art, a miracle on Earth. The defender sailed under CR harmlessly and the hometown crowd let loose a shout like a beat of their single collective heart.

Returning to the ground, CR spotted a receiver downfield, cocked back his arm.

And there it went,
zoom
, the long bomb, the Hail Mary, the most important throw of his life. The spiral split the snow like an asteroid ascendent, soaring, ten thousand necks craning to follow the leather rocket, and whether they wanted the quarterback to win or lose, there could be no doubt: This was what destiny looked like.

Amid all the other noise, there came a low quivering shriek of metal being rent apart. At the same moment, the shadows of every football player were thrown in a new direction. Benji looked up and saw with a surge of terror and awe that the great silver poles of the field lights were
bending forward
toward the field, like divining rods pointing to something secret in the earth.

The sky overhead looked as if it had been lit on fire. The blizzard above the field had become something like a hellish vision of the northern lights. But the northern lights, which Benji had watched longingly on YouTube a hundred times, were caused by a wondrous conspiracy of nature. Whatever was up there was not natural.

The announcer's voice came over the speakers: “Oh, Christ almighty, boys, look out, get off the field!”

A black helicopter tumbled out of the clouds, its blinding searchlight whirling. Its blades cut CR's football cleanly in two. The helicopter slammed straight down on the fifty-yard line.

Touchdown.

The field lights, still bowing magnetically, exploded all at once,
throwing glass and sparks, burning an afterimage of the stadium on Benji's eyes. As the crowd and players began to scream, he climbed over the fence and sprinted through the darkness.

Get CR before the Voyager does!

Benji shouted for CR, but the air was a chaos of voices. He was almost knocked off his feet as he collided with another player. He checked that the ray gun was still in his jacket and barreled on.

Now he could just make out the stampeding shapes in the moonlight. He wove through them, calling “
CR!
” again and again. He felt the earth begin to quake underneath him and tried to tell himself it was only because so many people were running from the stadium at once.

After a minute of fruitless searching, Benji seemed to be the only person left on the field. Just as he was about to leave the field, he spotted one of the players standing a few feet from the helicopter wreckage, staring at it. Benji's heart leaped when he saw
NOLAND
on the back of his jersey. Benji reached out for him—

The field gave a roaring seismic lurch, as if the whole planet had been rocked off its axis. Benji was knocked off balance, staggering into CR. They fell together onto the trembling ground, Benji landing on top, CR crying out beneath him.

As Benji rolled off him, a tower of light suddenly erupted upward from the place where the helicopter had been. A hole had opened in the earth and was expanding every moment, threatening to take Benji and CR down to whatever lay buried beneath them.

Benji pulled a strangely wooden CR to his feet and away from the hole, no longer caring about the Voyager mystery, only that he get his friend to safety.

They had gone only a few steps when they had to stop: Without warning, a wall of flames jetted straight up from the ground
before them, as if the awakening of the Voyager's subterranean machine had ignited a long-lost pocket of Bedford Falls's natural gas. As the earthquake grew stronger, so did the inferno: The fire raced around nearly the entire field, a ring of flame encircling them on all sides. The terrible memory of being stranded in the House flashed through Benji's mind.

“We have to get out of here!” he shouted over the flames, spinning toward CR. “The Voyager wants y—”

CR grabbed Benji by the collar of his tuxedo. “You did this!” he screamed. “Look what you did, you sack of selfish shit! Is this what you WANTED?!”

Benji knew he deserved every bit of CR's rage, but the great hole in the ground was still widening as more and more of the earth collapsed. It would reach them in just a few moments.

Benji tried to conjure Papaw's steady, grown-up calmness. “I'm sorry, CR! I'm sorry for everything!
I'm
the stupid one, okay? I know I screwed up, I know I've done nothing but screw everything up since you pulled me and Ellie out of the House, and I'm sor—”

CR released Benji and shoved him away. “Stop lying!”

“I'm not.”

“I didn't pull you out of the House!”

Despite the madness all around them, Benji blinked, stunned, confused. “Yes, you did. I passed out inside and you came in.”

“That is not what happened, and you know it!” CR screamed. “You found Ellie and brought her out, and
then
you passed out, on the porch! All I did was drag you into the damn yard!”

Benji didn't hear whatever CR said next. He couldn't hear anything at all except for a kind of dizzied ringing in his head.

I didn't pass out until I got outside
, he thought, and the idea seemed inconsequential, so why did it hit him like a depth charge?
I didn't pass out by the door to the cellar.
He felt
something enormous hauling itself up and up into the light of his mind, like the bogeyman mounting the stairs.

The dark man in the cellar
.
I saw something in the cellar when the House was burning. It was coming out of that huge hole in the ground where the gas exploded.

He'd assumed it was just a hallucination. After all, he'd thought he was passing out.

But if he
hadn't
been passing out, then . . . then . . .

“Benji, look out!” CR shouted, his face transported with horror by something he saw behind Benji.

The ledge of the pit had reached them at last. Benji had enough time to look down and see a huge metallic saucer rising from the earth. The Voyager stood atop it. Benji reached for the ray gun within his jacket at the same moment the Voyager's claws flew up and clasped his head like a vise.

It felt as if the inferno had breached his skull. As agony consumed him, Benji again flew gravityless down the memory corridor of mirrors, and he understood why both Papaw and Ellie believed the Voyager's mangled mind was shattering: The corridor was now filled with the smoke and the sound of sizzling snow from the football field. It was as if the Voyager could no longer tell the difference between the past it sought and the present by which it was surrounded.

Still, the creature pressed on through the corridor, piercing more deeply into Benji's mind. At the end of the corridor, growing brighter and nearer, Benji could see the image of “the dark man” in the cellar. An overpowering feeling of longing and loss suffused the Voyager:
This
was what It wanted! Where was this place, where was this House? It needed to find out—

But then, through the memory, light erupted: three brilliant ovals, atomically green, crashing through the mirror and shattering it into a thousand pieces. The Voyager's physical and
psychic grips on Benji loosened.

Benji was back on the football field, lying in the snow. CR stood beside him, aiming the ray gun past Benji.

“I don't think I killed It, but I hit It,” CR said. “This gun kicks like a
mother
!”

Benji saw something strange behind CR: A collection of sod, soil, and snow had floated from the ground and formed an odd ghost shape, a shape that resembled Benji-as-a-boy. It was like when the Voyager had telekinetically used snow at the drive-in to reenact the saucer explosion.

Before Benji could fully process this, the shape collapsed and CR yanked him to his feet.

The secret machine, buried so long ago beneath Bedford Falls, had finally risen.

Stumbling backward from the pit, Benji thought,
It's another saucer.
But that wasn't true. It had the same basic shape as the original saucer they'd shot out of the heavens, but this looked like a vehicle from hell. The new saucer was not silver but black, marred by clots of the sediment and stone in which it had hidden. Savage arcs of electricity hissed across its surface, filling the air with a wild ionic charge. Ten times the size of the original saucer, it seemed to take an eternity to escape the ground.

“Shoot it, CR!” Benji shouted. But CR just gaped at the ship like a terrified kid.

Benji grabbed the ray gun from him and aimed at the ship.

Just before he fired, without warning or explanation, the saucer tilted backward, as if reeling from a devastating impact. For an insane moment soaked in adrenaline and hope, Benji thought he had inadvertently dealt the death blow.

The portal on the underside of the ship opened, like a poisonous and omnipotent eye.

The tractor beam blazed into CR like a searchlight. Benji
dove for him, but he wasn't the athlete in the friendship.

CR tumbled upward, screaming, abducted from the only place he'd ever felt at home. He vanished into the portal, which sealed shut as the ship began to rise. Benji raised the ray gun and almost pulled the trigger, but he had to stop himself: Hitting the ship might mean killing CR. He could only stand there on the football field, watching helplessly as the Voyager's unholy ship ascended into the storming sky.

N
o. Please, no. Please let it not have happened.

Benji might have stayed there forever, but slowly he became aware of the world around him mirroring the way he felt: It began to shred and fall into the fathomless sky.

Several long, ragged objects whizzed past his head. Great sections of turf flew from the field, strips of flesh being gashed by invisible claws. They soared into the sky as if drawn by a black hole, and as the saucer climbed out of sight, Benji saw the pieces of debris coming together to form some larger shape as the Voyager's malfunctioning mind explored CR's own brain.

Where was the saucer going?
I don't know—we have to follow it!

He turned, facing the flames, which still burned hot and were as tall as he was. He ripped off his tuxedo jacket, yanking the strings on the shoulders to make the full-length cape unfurl. He smashed snow onto the fabric until every inch of the cloth was soaked. Then he wrapped the cape around himself like a fireproof tarp, sprinted to the firewall, and leaped.
Ladies and gentlemen
, he thought madly,
Mr. Benji Blazes!

Flames licked his exposed ankles and the cloak hissed viciously, but he landed on the other side, unburned. He detached the steaming cape from the jacket and tossed it to the ground, whipping his jacket back on as he sprinted across the field.

The fire illuminated the stadium. Benji was alone, the bleachers and sidelines deserted. The snowstorm and smoke had formed a visually impenetrable seal around the field, and he had to use the distant sounds of chaos from the parking lot to orient himself. The stadium destroyed itself around him as he ran, the light poles and goalposts spearing into the sky. To his relief, the objects were at least flying away from the parking lot; the saucer was retreating in that direction.

The Cadillac was where he had left it, just past the turnstiles, a reflection of the firelight dancing across its hood. All across the parking lot was a roiling, shouting mass of people and cars. From the sound of the sirens wailing across the night, it seemed every last fire truck, ambulance, and police cruiser in town was on its way. But how would they even get into the parking lot? How would Benji leave? The main exit of the lot was blocked by a several-car pileup, all the drivers fighting frantically about who needed to move and where. . . .

Benji slid over the Cadillac's hood. Only when he opened the door did he realize the driver's seat was already occupied.

“Ellie, move over, we've gotta go.”

“Go where?”

“I don't even know. We have to follow the— Listen, you don't have to come, okay? This is my fault—”

“We will leave,” Ellie said firmly, “after you tell me what happened.”

When Benji had left her in the car a few minutes ago, she had been shattered, and so it was a shock to him to hear the dark
steel in her voice. Her jaw was set, her knuckles whitening as she grasped the steering wheel. She was Ellie, undeniably, but she didn't quite look like the girl he loved. Sitting before him was a
woman
, a fierce woman with green eyes ablaze with determination.

“I want that asshat dead as much as you do,” she said. “And you can't kill It by yourself. If you could, you already would have. So tell me. Tell me where we are going to go.”

A dozen different emotions whirled in Benji. It took him a moment to find his voice. “We have to follow the saucer.”

“What saucer?”

“One the Voyager buried under the field. I don't know where It's going, but It has CR.”

Ellie's eyes may have widened, but their spark never wavered.

“Get in,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Benji Lightman, if we live through tonight, I imagine that we'll have a lot to talk about. And whatever happens, I want you to know that I care about you very, very much, and you have many brave and beautiful qualities, so please don't take offense when I say this: You drive like both an old man and a little girl.
Now get in.
”

The Cadillac exited the parking lot faster than Benji would have thought possible. As the fire crept closer to the lot, someone had taken charge and cleared the pileup that had been blocking the exit. Now the emergency vehicles were arriving, and when the crowd parted, Ellie threaded through oncoming ambulances and fire trucks like a needle. She ignited the high beams and floored the accelerator as they reached the street, the g-force pushing Benji into his seat's soft leather embrace. Snow zoomed into the open-air Cadillac, making it feel as if
they were piloting through a meteor storm.

Soon they had the roads mostly to themselves. Benji was navigator, and he peered upward, trying to spot the ship. The storm seemed to be weakening, but it still obscured the sky. He caught only a glimpse of the saucer, miles to the east.

“Ellie, it's heading out of town!” he shouted over the wind. “Go left!” As they raced in the direction of the saucer, his heart thudded sickeningly. He wondered what was happening up there, and whether the Voyager had finished with CR. . . .

Miles later, the road beneath them transformed: Bedford Falls's streets had their share of potholes, but this route into farm country was wild and unpaved. Ellie sped through switchbacks, passing rows of corn and rusting natural gas mining equipment. Once more the storm momentarily slackened. Benji spotted the silhouetted treeline of a forest about a mile ahead.

That's . . . that's the forest where the House was.

“It's taking us to the House,” Benji said.

“What house?”

“The one I burned down.”

“Why?”

His thoughts returned to what CR had told him.
I wasn't passing out when I opened the cellar door. That Thing in the cellar wasn't a hallucination.

As a teenager, when Papaw had watched the Voyager bury something outside Bedford Falls, the creature had fled, frightened not for Itself, perhaps, but for something far more vulnerable. . . . And when the Voyager had seen Benji's memory of that moment, It had filled with loss and longing. . . .

Papaw had been right: Benji did have a secret the Voyager needed, after all. It just wasn't a secret he'd learned the night he'd shot down the saucer.

The secret came from the sunset of his childhood's last
summer, a moment he'd tried so desperately to forget but could instead only misremember.

“Oh my God, Ellie. I know what It wants. It left Its—
Hey!
”

Ellie nearly drove off the road: Her gaze had been drawn to something to their left. She cursed and jerked the wheel, righting the car.

He saw why she'd been distracted. The Indiana countryside looked like a war zone. The cornfields had been ravaged flat, the roof ripped from a corn silo, the bell tower torn from an old church by the forest. Even as he and Ellie watched, the destruction continued. Headstones from the church's cemetery were wrenched out of the ground and flew toward the forest ahead, stolen telekinetically by the Voyager's malfunctioning mind. A brilliant green light surged from deep within the heart of the woods, making the trees appear to be gaunt, gigantic guardians from a fairy tale.

Now the road thinned, becoming little more than a path snarled with roots that rocked the Cadillac back and forth. As they drove into the forest, tree limbs scratched along the sides of the car like hands begging them to go back. The green light ahead grew brighter and closer. The hair on the back of Benji's neck stiffened, the air humming with that ionic charge.

They heard the thunderous sound of earth being torn apart ahead. “What is that?” Ellie shouted.

“I think the Voyager's using the tractor beam to dig!” Preparing to leave the car, Benji secured the ray gun firmly in his waistband.

“Dig
what
?” Ellie said.

Before he could answer, the Cadillac emerged from the forest and reached the field where the House had been. Benji had not visited this place since the day the House had burned. The forest had grown and shrunk the field, and the witchgrass of
summer was smothered underneath the snow. The passage of years had changed everything on this storied plot of land.

But the sky? The sky was a time machine.

Benji and Ellie stumbled out of the car, and there it was, aloft above the earth on the borderland of the only town he'd ever known; there it was, a memory beside the mothership in silhouette before the starlight; there it was, the final resting place of a billion ghosts of make-believe and their own mythic childhood.

There was the House, resurrected and floating in the sky a hundred feet overhead, in all its great and terrible glory.

“Oh, Ellie,” Benji breathed. Awe and terror of holy intensity flooded him. “Oh, look at it.”

“I can't believe . . .” Ellie said. “It's real, isn't it?”

It was, and wasn't. This new House was the progeny of memory and madness. The detritus of Bedford Falls—stoplights and swing sets, bicycles and gravestones—had fused together in the shape of the House. More shattered tree limbs missiled out of the forest every moment, uniting to form all the porch steps, all the spires and turrets. If this House differed some from Benji's memory (and it did), it was because this House was not Benji's memory: It was CR's.

Beside and above the House, the saucer's tractor beam blazed into the pit that once had been the House's cellar. Endless tons of earth rose in that poison light, and so did shadows in the shapes of pods.

“What are those things, Benji?”

“They're the Voyager's children,” he said, goose bumps going all the way to his heart. “It left them here to grow, when Papaw was young. He saw the Voyager bury them. Now they're ready to be born.”

From somewhere within the floating skeleton of the House
came a scream of shock or pain.

“That's CR!” Benji said. “We have to get him!”

“How do we get up there?”

“I don't know, I'm making this up as I go.”

He couldn't bring himself to move. He felt small.

“I can't do this,” he said.

“I can't, either,” she said.

And so they found each other's hands, and ran together.

With every step, the chaos climbed.

Whips made of torn tree bark whizzed by them. The earth erupted in all directions, as if struck by invisible cannonballs. Benji and Ellie hurtled onward.

In the great tower of light ahead, the shapes became clearer: the children of the Voyager clawing free from the pods that had been their hidden wombs. They emerged writhing and glistening, shrieking heart-chilling wails.

“Ellie, whatever happens,” Benji shouted, tightening his hand just before they leaped into the tractor beam, “hold on to me!”

But no sooner had they entered the beam than holding on became nearly impossible. It was as if he'd been wrenched upward by a chain wrapped around his waist. His head snapped back. They spiraled upward, the beam a whirlpool teeming with newborn cries and chaotic earth. He felt Ellie's fingers slipping away, and he held on tighter than he had ever held anything, knowing only that he must not let go of the hand tethering him to this woman he loved.

They were getting closer to the portal, fifty feet away now. The House, which was outside of the beam and slightly lower than the ship, was just above them. More cocoons split, and creatures soaked in green slime emerged. With his free hand,
Benji pulled the ray gun from his waistband.

Around the rim of the portal, an enormous silhouetted head appeared: the Voyager. Everything inside Benji longed to fire at the creature.

No, not yet, not yet.

Now Benji and Ellie were approaching the porch steps of the House. “Get ready, Ellie!” he shouted, her grip tightening.

They were even with the porch.

“
NOW!
” Benji roared, and pulled the trigger.

But he did not shoot at the Voyager. He fired the ray gun straight past his shoes, so that the blast was parallel with the ground.

Just as the blast of “the Question” had propelled the Rust-Rocket when it became their unexpected afterburner on Prank Night, the ray gun's blast now sent Benji and Ellie soaring backward through the tractor beam. Benji heard a shriek of pain from one of the creatures—he'd hit one of the cocoons, which was a wonderful accident—and then he and Ellie broke free of the light. They screamed as gravity reclaimed them, but they did not have far to fall: They crashed together onto the porch and rolled through the doorway of the House.

This entrance hall was an echo of an echo, differing in small ways from the hall from his memory and dreams. The staircase to upstairs was on his right instead of his left. The deer head mounted on the wall had become a moose. The replica of the once broken grandfather clock was “working,” the tricycle wheel that served as its face rotating slowly to keep time. Most of all, the hall was much shorter than he remembered it.

It took Benji several moments to see CR, still in his football uniform, lying in a heap at the end of the hall. Benji and Ellie ran to him. Benji grabbed him by the collar. “C'mon, buddy, wake up!”

CR twitched, his eyes opening groggily. He seemed to nod. Benji and Ellie lifted him to his feet—

Someone struck Benji from behind, knocking him to the floor, the ray gun flying out of his hands.

It was Shaun Spinney.

Or rather, it was the manifested memory of Shaun Spinney, the eighth-grade version of Spinney, remade from stone and earth and recollection. Benji peered up at this echo of his past, thunderstruck as the phantom bully marched down the hall, reenacting CR's memory of the event.

Ellie gasped, looking down the hall, for Shaun Spinney wasn't the only ghost here.

Near the front door stood four child-size forms: Benji, Ellie, CR, and Zeeko. The reincarnations of Spinney's buddies, who were blocking the front door, were all blurry-faced; apparently, CR didn't remember them well.