The Journal of Curious Letters (The 13th Reality #1) (8 page)

No, this was something different, if anything at all.

He crept over to the door with ginger steps, staring at the thin sliver of space between the floor and the bottom of the door. If anything shot out from that crack, Tick knew he’d die of a heart attack on the spot. He stopped a couple of feet away and paused, clenching and unclenching his fists.

Just open it, you sissy.

He reached forward and twisted the handle, knowing his dad had done the exact same thing just over a week ago, remembering that there had been nothing there then.

He pulled the door open and stepped back.

Something very odd rested on top of a pile of dirty clothes.

Something Tick had never seen before in his life.

~

Edgar Higginbottom was a light sleeper, which he hated. Anything and everything woke him up. Cars outside, dogs barking, a child crying. When his kids had been babies, Edgar had woken up the instant any of them fussed. Often he’d lain there, wishing against all hope that Lorena would somehow hear and offer to take a turn checking on them or feeding them. But he always got up after a few seconds, feeling guilty for being so selfish after all his wife had gone through to bring those kids into the world in the first place.

This time, though, it had been a sudden light that snapped him awake, followed by the slight creak of someone walking in the house. He pushed himself up onto one elbow and looked at the door to his room, which stood slightly ajar. Judging from the angle of the shadows caused by the light, and the direction from which the sound had come, he guessed Tick had gotten out of bed for some reason.

What’s he doing up at
—Edgar looked at his clock—
three in the morning?

He flopped back down onto his side, then rolled his big body onto his back, rubbing his eyes and yawning as he stared at the ceiling. Then, with a grunt, he threw off the covers and sat up on the edge of the bed, searching for his slippers with his toes.

He found them, put them on, and stood up.

~

Tick’s mind seemed to split into two factions as he stared at the object. One side wanted him to run because anything that magically appeared in a closet had to be bad. The other side wanted to investigate because the thing looked completely harmless. The latter won the battle, his curiosity once again victorious over common sense.

He stepped closer and dropped to his knees, leaning forward.

It was a strange metal contraption, about a foot long, five or six inches wide, and maybe eight or nine inches tall. Its shiny gray surface had no blemishes, sparkling and clean, with round, gear-looking things attached to the side. A thin handle was attached to the top of the box and a small snout-like nose and a sinuous metallic tail were attached to either end. Along the bottom edges a series of ten evenly spaced rods poked out from the box and curved toward the floor, ending in a flat piece of metal about the size of a quarter. The first thought that popped into Tick’s mind was the thing looked like a stainless steel accordion, ready to march away.

But it didn’t move or make a sound.

Tick noticed some writing on the side of the box, shadowed by the light coming from the room. He shifted his position closer and squinted his eyes. It took a few seconds, but he finally made out what it said:

GNAT RAT

Manufactured by Chu Industries

What in the world . . .

Tick thought of Mr. Chu, his science teacher, but he obviously had nothing to do with this. Tick would know if his favorite instructor had his own company or was affiliated with one. It had to be a coincidence.

But . . .

His mind was blank, churning to come up with an explanation for the weird thing sitting in his closet. It had to be related to the letters from M.G., the Tingle Wraith, and Mothball, but how or why . . . ? No clue.

And what in the world is a
Gnat Rat
?
He reached out a finger and brushed the back of the smooth gray metal box.

The thing jumped.

Tick gasped and fell backward, even though the Gnat Rat had barely moved—an inch at most—before coming to rest again. A slight buzzing came from it like the distant sound of his mom’s oven timer from downstairs. Whatever the thing was, it had just turned on or powered up.

A mechanized clicking sound sprung up and the ten pairs of metal legs started moving back and forth, slowly marching the Gnat Rat off the pile of clothes and out of the closet, toward Tick. His eyes wide and focused on the toy-like thing coming at him, Tick stood up, unsure what to do. It seemed totally harmless, a cheap robot you could buy at any discount store.

But then he remembered it slamming into his door when he’d closed it from the hallway that night. He thought about its name: Gnat Rat. And finally, he thought about how it had somehow
disappeared
and come back, magically. All of these things led to one conclusion.

A Gnat Rat is bad.

Tick was about to bolt away when he heard a loud click like the sound of a gun being cocked. He looked in shock at the ominous toy. A small door slowly swung open on the Rat’s back side.

Then little
things
started flying out of it.

~

Light or no light, a son suffering from insomnia or not, Edgar couldn’t ignore the call of nature. He finished washing his hands in the bathroom, flicked off the light, and stepped back into his bedroom. Trying his best to be quiet so Lorena could sleep—though he probably could’ve danced around the room with cymbals on his knees and blowing on a trumpet and she would’ve remained dead to the world—Edgar walked through the room and into the hallway.

Sure enough, it was Tick’s room with a light on, and an odd mechanical hum echoed out his door and down the hall.
Did he get some new gizmo I don’t know about?

Edgar had taken only one step forward when he heard the boy scream.

~

Tick shrieked as dozens of winged, buzzing little drones flew out of the Gnat Rat in a torrent like a pack of raving mad hornets. Without exception they came directly at him, swarming around his body before he could react, attacking, biting,
stinging.

Tick swatted at them, slapping and hitting his own body, dancing and kicking, yelling for help. Pinpricks of pain stabbed every inch of his skin, under his clothes, in his
hair; the mechanical gnats were hungry and Tick must’ve looked awfully delicious. Panic shot through him in a rush of adrenaline, his mind shutting down, offering no ideas on what he should do.

He heard his bedroom door slam against the wall.

“Atticus!” his dad yelled.

But Tick couldn’t look at him. He’d squeezed his eyes closed, scared the gnats would blind him. They were relentless, attacking him over and over again, their sharp stingers finding fresh spots to hurt him with a frightening ease. Overwhelmed by pain and fear, he fell to the ground.

He felt his dad gripping his arms, dragging him across the floor and out of his room. Down the hall, into the bathroom. He heard the rush of water in the bathtub.

Dad,
he thought, wanting to warn him, but afraid to open his mouth.
They’ll eat you alive, too.

It hurt too much to cry. Tick felt like he’d been taken to an acupuncture school and the overanxious students had given up on the little needles and decided to use knives instead. His whole world had turned into one big ouch. He’d never felt so hopeless.

His dad heaved Tick off the floor and plopped him into the tub, splashing the cold water all over his pajamas, his skin, his hair. Though his whole body felt racked with pain, Tick sensed the gnats leaving him in hordes even before he’d landed in the shallow pool of water.

They’re machines,
he thought distantly.
They run on electricity. The water would kill them.

An angry buzz filled the bathroom, but Tick couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes. He heard a towel whipping through the air. His dad must be trying to chase the gnats away and out of the room. Horror filled Tick’s stomach as he realized the vicious gnats might be going for his sisters, his mom.

“Dad!” he yelled with a slur, his mouth swollen. “Kayla! Lisa! Mom!”

And then he passed out.

~

“What were they?” the doctor asked. “Where did they come from?”

Edgar didn’t feel like talking. Even if he did, he had no answer for the man.

They stood in a curtained-off section of the emergency room, surrounded by the sounds of medical machines beeping, the murmur of voices, the squeak of gurneys rolling along the hallway; a child cried in the distance. Everything smelled of ammonia and disinfectant. It was all extremely depressing.

Edgar stared down at his son lying on the bed, eyes closed. Every inch of the boy’s body looked red and puffy, pockmarked with hundreds of black dots. Lorena and Lisa cried in the corner, clutching little Kayla in a three-way hug. Edgar felt certain his heart had broken into two pieces and was slowly sinking to his stomach.

Tick had always been a lucky kid. Edgar liked to joke that Tick had been born clutching a rabbit’s foot. When Tick had been only five years old, the family had taken a shopping trip to Spokane and Tick had darted for the middle of a busy road, already two steps past the curb before Edgar even noticed. Even as Edgar had sprinted to save his boy, he watched in utter horror as a huge truck, blaring its horn and screeching its brakes, seemingly ran right over Tick. Edgar would never forget the scream that erupted from his own throat at that moment, an alien sound that still haunted his dreams sometimes.

But when the truck passed, Tick stood there in the street, untouched, his hair not so much as ruffled. It had been nothing short of a miracle.

Then, a few years later, the family had gone to the coast for a summer trip, enjoying a rare hot and sunny day on the Washington beach. Tick, showing off his newly discovered body-surfing talent, had been swept away by a sudden and enormous wave, sucking him out to sea. The current pulled the poor boy from the soft sands directly into an area of jagged, vicious rocks nearby. Edgar and Lorena barely had time to register the shock and terror of what was happening before they saw Tick standing on a jutting shoulder of stone, waving with a huge smile on his face.

Or the time he fell off the big waterslide tower at Water World Park, only to land on a pile of slip ’n slide tubes left there by a family eating lunch.

The stories went on and on. They never talked about it; Edgar was afraid to jinx the whole thing, and he had no idea if Tick even realized anything out of the ordinary was happening. Kids rarely do—life is life, and they know nothing different until much later.

But despite all that he’d seen of Tick’s narrow escapes, Edgar couldn’t help but feel the panic rising in his chest. Had the boy’s streak of luck finally run out? Would he survive this—

“What
happened?
” the doctor repeated.

“I don’t know,” Edgar mumbled. “A bunch of bugs, or bees, or gnats, or something attacked him. I threw him in the bathtub, shooed the things away with a towel. They stayed in a tight pack, and when I opened a window, they flew right out.”

The doctor looked at Edgar, his expression full of doubt and concern, eyebrows raised. “
You
shooed them away?”

“Yes, I did.” Edgar knew the man’s concern before he
said it.

“But you—”

“I know, Doctor, I know.” He paused. “I didn’t get stung. Not once.”

~

Tick could think of a million things he’d rather do than get stung all over his body by mechanical gnats that popped out of a demon lunch box with legs. It was a long list and included being dropped in a boiling vat of vinegar and having his toenails removed with hot pincers. Two days after the attack, he’d returned home from the hospital feeling and looking much better, but the experience remained vivid in his mind, playing itself out over and over again. Without any doubt, he knew the Gnat Rat and its stinging bugs had been the single worst thing that had ever happened to him. And that included the time Billy “The Goat” Cooper had almost broken Tick’s arm in front of the girls’ locker room.