Darkness Creeping (21 page)

Cody squirmed and felt his skin begin to crawl. “Maybe what happened to your friend is what happened to Warren,” he suggested. “You see, after I ran out of Warren’s room at the hospital, I sat out there on the porch of that Harmony Home place where they’re keeping him, and I heard other kids screaming, too. I couldn’t tell for sure, but they all seemed to be screaming about something that came in the middle of the night to take them away. Angels . . . monsters . . . aliens . . . whatever.”

Cody’s Dad looked at him for a moment, and then laughed, slapping him on the back. “You sure have some imagination,” he said. “Not bad for a little guy.”

Cody gave him a cold stare. “I’m not so little.”

“Oh, don’t be so sensitive,” said his dad. “You’ll grow soon—I can feel it in my bones.”

They came at three in the morning.

It had been another sleepless night for Cody. He had counted about a thousand sheep and still hadn’t so much as drifted off. He was about to start counting a new, larger flock of sheep . . . when they came. It began as a breeze he felt on the tip of his nose—but he remembered that his window was closed. Cody snapped his eyes open and looked across to the opposite wall.

A line had appeared—a thin black line—and it ran from ceiling to floor, spreading like a fissure or some kind of hole in space. Then, hands started to reach out of the hole—dozens of hands. And then, suddenly, there were people in the room! Cody tried to scream, but one large, heavy hand, cold and antiseptic-smelling, covered his mouth. Then several others grabbed Cody’s arms and legs. He struggled wildly, but the hands were strong, and with little effort, they dragged him toward the hole, drawing him through the cold, dark fissure and into a bright white light.

All at once Cody felt himself being lifted onto something . . . then he was rolling, flat on his back, and suddenly he knew he was in . . . a hospital.

He was strapped down to a gurney and being rolled through clean white hallways. He kept his eyes fixed on a man with a clipboard, running alongside him. The man was clean-cut, clean shaven, and had spotless white teeth.

“I’m Farnsworth, public relations,” said the man with a perfect smile. “It’s good to see you again, Cody. It’s been a while.”

“I’ve never seen you before!” wailed Cody, fighting to get free from the tight bonds around him.

“Of course you have,” said Farnsworth reassuringly. “You just don’t remember.”

“Take me back home!”

“In time, Cody.”

The four hospital workers who had pulled him out of bed and through the hole in space now wheeled him down the impossibly long hallway like pallbearers with a casket. Farnsworth jogged alongside, making sure that everything went smoothly.

“Are you . . . an angel?” asked Cody.

Farnsworth laughed. “Heavens, no,” he said. “None of us are. We’re just the medical staff.”

Farnsworth looked at his clipboard. “Things have been busy around here lately,” he said. “We’re backed up—almost a year behind—and you’re way overdue.”

“F-for what?” Cody stammered.

“A growth spurt, of course,” answered Farnsworth.

They pushed Cody through a set of double doors and into a huge room that seemed to be the size of a stadium.

“Welcome to the Growth Ward!” Farnsworth announced.

In the room were thousands of surgeons, huddled together over patients . . . all of whom were kids.

Cody couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was like his father’s auto shop, but instead of cars it was kids being taken apart and being put back together again—piece by piece. But what was most amazing of all was that these kids, in various stages of repair, were all alive!

And they were also awake.

Some screamed, others just groaned, and the ones who no longer had the strength to even groan just watched in terror as the “medical staff” dismantled them, then rebuilt them before their own horrified eyes.

“What are you doing to them?” shouted Cody. “What’s going on here?”

“Bodywork and scheduled maintenance, of course,” said Farnsworth over the awful wails around him. “How can a person be expected to grow without their maintenance appointments?”

“You’re killing them!” yelled Cody.

“Nonsense, our surgeons are the most skilled in the universe,” said Farnsworth cheerfully. “These kids will be patched up and back to their old selves by morning—and without a single scar from the experience.”

“But I don’t need surgery. I don’t WANT surgery,” Cody insisted.

“Why should you be different from everyone else?” asked Farnsworth. “And besides, you
do
want it.” He smiled. “You do want to grow, don’t you?”

Cody felt weak and sick to his stomach. “You mean . . .
this
happens to everybody?”

“Of course it does,” explained Farnsworth. “Nobody remembers, though, because we erase it from their memory.” Then the smile left Farnsworth’s face, and he shook his head sadly. “Of course, every once in a while the memory erasing doesn’t quite work. It’s a shame, really—those poor kids are ruined for life, and all because they couldn’t forget the Growth Ward.”

Cody was still trying to digest what Farnsworth had just said, when he was rolled into a bright area where a group of surgeons waited. Their faces covered with masks, they anxiously flexed their fingers like pianists preparing for a concert. As Cody stared in horror at them, he noticed that there was something about those surgeons—something not quite right, but what was it? Keeping his eyes glued on them, Cody knew if he looked at them long enough, he’d figure out what it was that made them look . . . different.

“It says here, we’re adding half an inch to your forearms today,” Farnsworth said, glancing at his clipboard again. “And a whole inch to your thighbones. Good for you, Cody! We’ll have you caught up to those other kids in your class in no time!”

Cody turned to see a silver tray next to the operating table. On it were a few small, circular bone fragments, no larger than LEGO pieces.

One of the eager surgeons grabbed a small bone saw from the tray and turned it on. It buzzed and whined, adding to the many unpleasant sounds of the great galactic operating room.

The surgeon said nothing and moved the saw toward Cody’s leg, and the others approached him with their scalpels poised.

“No!” Cody cried. “You can’t operate without anesthesia! I have to have anesthesia!”

Farnsworth chuckled. “Come now, Cody, where do you think you are, at the dentist? I think not! Growing pains are a part of life, and
everyone
has to feel their growing pains.
Everyone
.”

Cody screamed even before the instruments touched his body—then he suddenly realized that it didn’t matter how loud he wailed. For he had finally figured out what was wrong with those surgeons. They couldn’t hear him. They had no ears.

An alarm tore Cody out of the deepest sleep he had ever had. There was a memory of a dream—or something like a dream—but it was quickly fading into darkness. In a moment it was completely gone, and all that was left was the light of day pouring into his room.

“Wake up, lazybones,” said his mother. “You’ll be late for school.”

Cody felt good this morning. No—
better
than good—he felt great, and he couldn’t quite tell why. He stood up out of bed and felt a slight case of vertigo, as if the floor were somehow farther away from him than it had been the day before. His legs and arms ached the slightest bit, but that was okay. It was a
good
feeling.

“My, how you’re growing!” his mother said as he walked into the kitchen for breakfast. “I’ll bet you’ll grow three inches by fall!”

And the thought made Cody smile. It felt good to be a growing boy.

It started with my mom, many years ago.

My mom has a temper, you see, and one of the things that really got her up in a rage was the post office. If something took too long to arrive at our house, she would bawl out the mailman, as if it were his fault. If a card she sent missed somebody’s birthday, she would go to the post office and demand her postage back.

The thing that irritated my mom the most about the post office was misdelivered mail, and she had a good reason for that one: the Mortimer Museum.

It was just dumb luck that the guy who founded that strange little natural history museum had the same last name as we did. We weren’t related, my dad always reminded me. Still, without fail, a few times a year we would end up with a package at our doorstep that was supposed to go to the museum.

For my mom, it was just another postal nuisance—until the birthday incident. Then it became a regular obsession with her.

I was about four or so. It was my mom’s thirtieth birthday, and we had relatives and friends from all over the county show up to surprise her. Everything was going along just fine until she started opening the presents—first the ones from people who were there, then the ones that had come in the mail.

Perhaps if she had looked at the address on the package, it might not have happened, but she didn’t. So, right in front of more than forty guests, in the middle of a birthday party, my mother opened a box, reached in, and pulled out an armful of African centipedes.

The scream could be heard throughout the county. She took her hand, shrieking, and flung the centipedes across the room, where they landed on slices of birthday cake and in people’s hair. The angry centipedes began to bite, and panic erupted. Needless to say, the party was ruined. The centipedes scattered so far across the room that we were still finding them in dark corners weeks later.

The centipedes, of course, were supposed to go to the Mortimer Museum for their exotic insect exhibit, and not to the Mortimer family. The post office, naturally, bent over backward and took full responsibility, offering to give my mother free postage for the rest of her life if she would just never mention it again. But it was too late.

From that day forward, we were at war with the museum and the post office. The poor mailman went to great pains to make sure we didn’t get any of the museum’s mail, but sometimes something slipped through. When it did, whatever it was—what
ever
it was—we kept it. Soon we had quite our own little museum in our basement: fragments of dinosaur bones, a meteorite, petrified wood.

But nothing we ever received was like the package we got one Halloween.

You have to understand, Halloween is a very special holiday for me. Most of the year I get teased for being sort of creepy and spending so much time alone, but on Halloween I can be myself and it’s perfectly normal!

So that night I was in a rush to get out and stalk through the streets like a ghoul, striking terror into the heart of anyone foolish enough to answer their door, when a package arrived on our porch. I took it inside and quickly tore off the brown paper, pulled open the box, and like an idiot, reached inside to find out what it was.

My hand touched something cold, hard, and dirty. I quickly pulled my hand back and saw that it was covered with something black and sooty.

“Mom?” I called, feeling the shivers already climbing up past my elbow to my shoulder.

Mom came downstairs, took one look at the box, and heaved a big sigh. Then she peeled back the paper to reveal what at first looked like a dark rock. But when she reached in to pull it out, she came face-to-face with a human skull.