Darkness Creeping (8 page)

We were sent to doctors. Then we were put in hospitals and filled with so much medication that sometimes it seemed like there was a whole platoon of us in here, not just two.

In the end Slam finally broke.

“Peter, I want you to leave,” he told me as we sat alone in the dark, in the big house our baseball contract had bought. Our hair was uncombed and our face had been unshaven for weeks.

“The doctors are right,” Slam announced. “You don’t exist, and I won’t share my mind with someone who does not exist.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

“I order you to leave and never come back,” he said. “Never look for me. Never talk to me. Never come near my thoughts again.” And then he began to cry. “I hate you!” he screamed—not just in our head, but out loud. “I hate you for what you’ve done to me!”

I could have left then. I could have run away to find someone else who wouldn’t mind sharing his life with a poor dispossessed soul like myself. But I realized that I didn’t want to leave.

And I didn’t want to share anymore, either.

“I’m not leaving,” I told him. “
You
are.”

That’s how the battle began.

A tug-of-war between two minds in one brain is not a pretty sight. On the outside our face turned red, and our eyes went wild. Our legs and arms began convulsing as if we were having an epileptic fit.

On the inside we were screaming—battling each other with thoughts and fury. His inner words came swinging at me like baseball bats. But I withstood the blows, sending my own angry thoughts back like an iron fist, pounding down on him. Yes, I smashed that thankless baseball player with my ironfisted thoughts again and again, until I could feel myself gaining control. This was my body now. Not his. Not his ever again.

I pounded and pounded on his mind and filled his brain until there was no room for him anymore. But try as I might, I could not push him out. I could only push him
down
. So I pushed him down until the great baseball player was nothing more than a tremor in my right hand.

I had control of everything else . . . but even that wasn’t good enough. As long as any part of him was still there, he could come back, and I didn’t want that. I had to figure out a way to get rid of him—for good.

That’s when I remembered the dolphins.

In all my travels through air, land, and sea, there was only one place I knew I had to stay away from.

The mind of a dolphin.

I came close to the mind of a dolphin once. I had thought I might slip one on for size—but the place is huge! A dolphin’s brain is larger than a human’s, and its mind is like an endless maze of wordless thought.

When I had first neared a dolphin, I had felt myself being pulled into that mind, as if it were a black hole. I resisted, afraid I would get lost in there—
trapped
in there, wandering forever through a mind too strange to fathom.

And so I had turned away from the creature before I had been caught in its unknowable depths.

But now I had to find a dolphin again.

With the baseball player’s spirit still making my hand quiver, I made a two-hundred-mile trek to Ocean World—a great marine park where they had countless dolphins in captivity. The whole time I didn’t dare sleep, sure that the baseball player would fight his way back in control of my new body.

I arrived at midnight, on a day when a full moon was out and the empty parking lot was like a great black ocean.

With the strong body of the athlete I possessed, I climbed the fence and made my way to the dolphin tanks.

The plan was simple—I had worked it out a dozen times on my way there, and I knew that nothing could go wrong. I was stronger than the baseball player—I had already proven that. All that remained was getting him out of this body forever. Then, and only then, would it truly be mine.

I held on to that thought as I dove into the frigid water of the dolphin tank. Then, as I began to sink, I let Slam climb back into my mind. He was crazed now, screaming in anger and fear. He did not know what I was about to do, because I had kept my thoughts from him.

Suddenly there was a dolphin swimming up to us. It appeared to be just curious as to what was going on in its tank. As it drew nearer, and nearer still, I waited. Then, when it was right up next to us, I blasted the baseball player out of my mind.

Though I’d tried many times to do that, this time it wasn’t hard at all. In fact, it was as easy as blowing a feather out of my hand—because
this
time there was a place for his spirit to go. It went into the dolphin . . . and there it stayed.

But the dolphin clearly did not want that kind of company. It began to swim around the huge tank, bucking and twisting as if it could shed this new spirit that had merged with its own. But the dolphin’s efforts were useless. Slam was now a permanent resident in the dolphin’s mind.

And as for me—I was free! I was the sole owner of this fine body! All I had to do was swim back to the surface to begin my new life.

All I had to do was swim.

All I had to do . . .

That’s when I discovered that this strong athletic body, this body that had hit a hundred fastballs over the right-field wall . . . had never learned to swim.

Slowly panic set in. I moved my hands, I kicked my legs, but the muscles in my body had no memory of how to behave in water. They thrashed uselessly back and forth, and my lungs filled with the icy water. Meanwhile the dolphin swam furiously around the tank, not caring about me or my new body, but trying to rid itself of the foreign spirit that had entered its mind.

I felt death begin to pound in my ears with the heavy beat of my slowing heart, and I knew that if I didn’t leave this body soon, it would be too late.

I had to leap out of it. I
had
to give it up. If I stayed in this body a few minutes longer, I might not have been able to escape it—I might have been bound to it the way normal people are bound to their bodies. But my will was strong, and my skill at body-jumping well honed.

And so I tore myself from my new body, letting my spirit float to the surface like a buoy . . . while there, at the bottom of the dolphin tank, the soulless body of the great baseball player drowned.

I don’t know what happened after that, because I left and didn’t look back. I have heard tales, though, of a dolphin that leaped out of its tank so often that they had to put a fence over it. But who knows if stories like that are ever true?

And that brings me to you.

You see, I’ve been with you longer than you think. I’ve been sitting on your shoulder watching what you do, what you say, and even how you say it. I know the names of your relatives. I know your friends. We’ve already shared several hot-fudge sundaes together.

And if someday very soon, you wake up only to find yourself walking toward a dolphin pool in the dead of night . . . don’t worry.

Because I know you can swim.

The old man wore a playful smile as he beckoned them closer. Karin and her cousin Randy stepped across the yellowing floor of the immense den, deep within their grandfather’s ancient house. They were paying their respects to the old man, as their parents had insisted.

On a cherrywood table rested a menagerie of colorful origami animals—a folded-paper zoo. Karin wondered whether her grandfather spent all his time making them or if he had folded the animals to impress her and Randy, the way he used to when they were five.

He always spoke to them in Chinese first, as if his speaking the language would magically make them understand it better. Karin understood a little bit, but she knew that Randy didn’t speak a word—he just squirmed and looked annoyed. For his sake she said, “You have to talk English, Grandfather.”

“English!” spat their grandfather, then waved his hand as if swatting the thought away. “Ah! You children lose everything. All the old ways, you lose. How can you call yourselves Chinese?”

“We’re not Chinese,” Randy said defiantly. “We’re American.”

Karin gave Randy a sharp elbow to the ribs.

“Don’t get him mad!” she whispered.

The old man looked at Randy with hardened eyes, and then he laughed. “Yes. American.” He chuckled. “Apple pie!” Then he laughed and Karin elbowed Randy again.

“Don’t you know not to say things like that to him?” she said. Randy never did learn how to deal with Grandfather. Still, her cousin was right. They were both born in America; even their parents had been born in America. How much more American could they get?

Grandfather laughed a little too long, and Karin began to feel uncomfortable.

Finally, he shook his head and wiped the tears from his eyes. “Yes. American.” He sighed. “The old world is gone. My world—gone. Soon nobody will be left to remember.”

“I’ll remember,” offered Karin

Grandfather smiled. “Sweet girl,” he said. “But stupid.”

Randy snickered.

“You should not laugh,” said Grandfather, wagging an arthritic finger at him. “Next to you, she looks like a genius.”

Karin smiled and gave Randy a smarter-than-you look, then she turned back to the old man. He looked very serious for a moment, then he glanced down at the dark cherrywood table and the collection of paper animals. He picked up a paper cat. “This world of new things—you think it is strong like a lion, when in truth it is fragile like paper.”

He crumpled the origami cat in his hand and flicked it with his fingers across the room. “There. Destroyed by a single finger.”

Then Grandfather let loose a hacking cough that rattled the room so much Karin wondered how his lungs could stand it. When his coughing fit was over, the old man turned to a shelf filled with old knickknacks and pulled down a black box about the size of a shoe box. At first Karin thought it held tissues, but there was no opening on it. Anywhere.

“This is very old,” Grandfather said, brushing his finger across the smooth, ebony surface. “Even older than me. Hard to believe anything is older than me, hah?” And he let out a laugh that sent him into another coughing fit.

Karin and Randy looked at the box.

“What is it?” Karin asked as Grandfather handed it to her.

“Puzzle box,” answered the old man.

Randy grabbed it from her and pawed his fingers all over it, leaving dull fingerprints on the shiny lacquered surface. “There’s no way to open it,” he said.

Karin grabbed it back from him and examined it again herself. Randy was right—it was solid all the way around!

Grandfather gently took it back from her. He tapped the top twice, then placed three fingers on one side, two on the other, then pressed inward with his thumbs. A panel slid open. Karin was amazed.

“No way!” said Randy, his eyes wide.

“Way,” Grandfather said simply. He pressed and prodded different pressure points, deftly and skillfully, as if playing an instrument. The box began to open up with dark, textured surfaces. When Grandfather was done it looked more like a black flower than a box, and in the center of that flower was another, smaller box, even blacker than the first one. It was perfectly square, about two inches wide.

Karin and Randy just stared. “Another puzzle?” asked Karin.

“No,” answered Grandfather. “A solution.”

Grandfather held the inner box in his hand and placed his fingertips on it. Instantly, a lid opened, revealing a carved jade panel, and in the center of all that sparkling green jade was a bright gold button. Not the kind of button you wear, but the kind of button you press. Tiny Chinese characters were carved into the jade all around the gold button, but Karin couldn’t read them.