The Suburb Beyond the Stars (5 page)

S
treet led to street. The day was bright, and the grass shone beneath the sprinklers as if gemmed. Behind the houses there were small stands of white pine marking off individual yards. Brian and Gregory walked along, watching carefully for any detail that might suggest danger. It was almost six, and more parents were getting home from work. Their wheels hushed past on the tarmac.

Everything was peaceful.

Brian didn’t like the peace. Something was coming, he felt instinctively — something that hated the slumber and ease of this community. They had built their suburb over something ancient and dangerous, and whatever lived beyond the rim of the world and peered through into this one would now exact revenge. It didn’t matter that the houses looked firm and complacent on their lawns. There was something in the mountains that wanted it all to blacken and burn at the edges, that wanted to crawl forth, astonish, and destroy.

The adhesive golden numbers on mailboxes were still new, and sparkled in the light.

At the corner of Fisk and Yastrzemski there was a green electrical box surrounded by a moat of red wood chips. Though there was a sticker on the side saying
DANGER
and
PELIGRO,
with a stick figure getting shocked, three ten-year-old girls were sitting on top of the box, staring up at the mountain. One sometimes spun a soccer ball on her finger.

“Excuse me,” said Brian to the ten-year-olds. “Do you know where Heather Lane is?”

Gregory added, “The Carruthers’s.”

The three girls turned their gaze on the boys. One chewed a piece of gum a few times. They didn’t answer. They just stared.

“That’s great. Thanks,” said Gregory. “Your check is in the mail.”

One of them gestured with her shoulder. “Down there,” she said. “Toward the middle.” She had a Southern accent. “That’s where Heather Lane is. I think.”

Another girl said, “We don’t go down there.”

“This is our street.”

“We stay on this street.”

“Do you know any Carruthers?” Gregory asked.

The one with gum chewed it.

“The middle of what?” Brian asked.

“What does he mean, the middle of what?” the girl with the Southern accent asked Gregory.

The fair-haired boy explained, “You said Heather Lane was near the middle. Of what?”

“This,” said the girl. Her friend or sister whirled the ball. It didn’t stay aloft for long.

“What about a river?” Brian asked. “Is there a river around here anywhere?”

“River?” one asked another. “What are they talking about, with a river?”

“There’s a river. Down there.” The girl with the ball pointed. “I guess you think we shouldn’t be sitting on this box.”

“No,” said Brian. “I mean … no, I don’t.”

“In fact, I was hoping you’d crawl inside it,” said Gregory, smiling. “All three of you.”

One of the girls gave a grunt of irritation and flopped on her back. The electrical box gave a tinny thump and dust drifted out its gills.

“Thank you,” said Brian, waving. “Thanks!”

None of the girls moved. The ball spun on one un-moving finger.

Brian and Gregory walked on.

“That was friendly,” said Gregory. He tapped his fingers on mailboxes they passed, as if playing Duck, Duck, Goose. “They were kind of young to be that sarcastic. Don’t you think people should wait for sarcasm? Like learning to eat oysters.”

“Oysters?” said Brian.

“Do you like oysters?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so,” said Gregory, as if that proved something.

They followed the girl’s vague description to get to
the river. It was only a couple of blocks before they found it. What had been the River of Time and Shadow now crossed under the road in an aluminum culvert. The grass in the yards around it looked thin and nude. Almost all of the trees that had once overarched the river had been cut down. A clump of hemlocks still stood on one bank. A few awkward aspens, trembling with exposure, gawked by the river’s shore at new mansions. Behind them rose the mountain, dark and solemn.

“There it is,” said Gregory. “The River of Time and Shadow. Do you recognize where we are? How far along we are?”

Brian shook his head, sucking at his lips.

“Which way do you think Kalgrash’s bridge is?”

Brian walked to the edge of the road and squinted down the meanders of the brook. He shrugged.

Gregory asked, “What do you want to do?”

“I think we should follow it this way,” said Brian. “It looks less built up down there.”

Gregory nodded and they climbed down the bank. They walked along the side of the river.

Brian mused, “Who do you think ‘Bess’ is?”

“Who?”

“Bess. In her e-mail, Prudence said that her old friend Bess would protect her.”

“I’ve never heard her talk about anyone named Bess before,” Gregory considered.

“Yeah. I don’t think it’s a person. I just get this feeling that Bess is an object of some kind.”

“An object?”

“Something.” Brian shrugged. “I think she was joking. Boasting.” He looked around. “Are we going through people’s yards?”

“Yeah,” said Gregory. “See? Grills aren’t naturally occurring.”

Brian stopped.

“What’s wrong?” asked Gregory.

“We shouldn’t go through people’s yards.”

“What’s the problem?”

“It’s private property.”

“We’re saving them from certain death. Or disappearance.”

“What if someone gets angry?”

“We’ll bake them a cherry pie. We’ll kiss them on the nose.” Gregory yanked his friend by the wrist and, when Brian had stumbled past him, kneed him in the butt.

“
Ow
,” said Brian. “It’s weird how hard it is to remember what the woods looked like before these houses were built.”

Gregory squinted along the river. “I know. It’s like the forest was never here. One of the strange things about suburbia. It always seems like it belongs. I can’t hardly even picture the forest anymore.”

“Yeah! That’s what I mean exactly,” said Brian. “But if you …” He didn’t finish his sentence.

They had come upon a soccer field beside the river. There was a game going on. Cars were lined up by the side of the field, and parents were gossiping by the sidelines. Kids bopped a ball back and forth across the halfway line.

Brian had stopped, stock-still.

“What’s up?” said Gregory. “Oh, the beauty of the game. Yup.” He nodded appreciatively. “Whoa. That kid totally should have gotten a yellow card for shin kicking.”

“No,” Brian whispered. “Get down.” He crouched on his knees, surrounded by rushes.

“What’s going on?”

“The guy who followed me in Boston is there. He’s watching the game.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. With the reddish face and the pink polo shirt.”

“And chinos?”

“Yeah.”

“You wouldn’t think that evil from beyond time would wear chinos.” Gregory ducked down next to Brian. “Then again, you wouldn’t think that evil from beyond time would be a big follower of little league soccer.”

“Gregory, what are we going to do?”

“I think it’s just great he shows an interest.”

“Do you think he saw us?”

“He’s pretty much facing the other way.”

“We can’t go back the way we came. He’ll see us for sure when we pass. We have to go this way, but with our faces turned as much to the other side of the river as possible.”

“All right.”

Brian demanded, “Face over there when you stand up. And don’t look back.”

“
Ja
, Herr Kommandant.”

“It’s not funny.”

“I’m not laughing.”

They rose, facing the opposite bank, and walked carefully along the river’s edge, leaving the parents’ shouts behind them. They could practically feel the peering of the eyes in that ripple-skinned face.

All he would see, Brian figured, was two boys walking by the river. Nothing unusual in that. Kicking along, thinking about swimming maybe, picking up old packaging wedged in the dirt.

They couldn’t tell if he ever turned and looked at them directly. They didn’t want to check.

In a couple of minutes, a few willows that had been left to shelter the bank were hanging between them and the game. A few minutes after that, the river was squelching through a construction site, huge tire tracks gouged in the wet earth, rushes growing in mud, the water all brown and red where it had gone stagnant. New houses were going up. Frames already stood amid mounds of dirt and rock. Some walls were sheeted in Tyvek.

“I wonder where this was,” said Brian. “When it was woods. It could have been anywhere. Kalgrash’s cave could have been right here.”

“There was more rock, wasn’t there? Where he was?”

Brian pointed at the huge boulders that had been yanked up and stacked.

They heard footsteps approaching them at a run, splattering through the puddles.

Brian darted for cover. Gregory followed.

They hung close to the mounds. Brian leaned forward
so far that he pressed his fingers into the wall of earth to hold himself. It was unclear where the footsteps were coming from.

Gregory exhaled in surprise. There was a man.

He was jogging through the construction. He wore shorts, and his armpits were ringed with sweat.

“Hey,” he said, and jogged in place.

“Hi there,” said Gregory.

“You kids know to go home before dark, don’t you?” the man said. “You shouldn’t be hanging out here. The curfew.”

“What’s the curfew?” said Gregory.

“It’s not official,” said the jogger.

Brian asked carefully, “When should we be home?”

“Gets dark at, what, eight o’clock or something? You have a half an hour. I’m just saying.”

“Yup,” said Gregory.

“Last week, there was a chariot.”

“Was there?” Gregory asked.

“Don’t you guys ever look out windows? There’s a car, but pulled by horses.” The man kept running in place while he lifted up the belly of his shirt and wiped his face. He said, “It looked weird and dead. Oh, and don’t forget: There’s Gelt the Winnower.”

Brian started. “How did you hear about Gelt the Winnower?”

“He patrols the streets sometimes at night. Guy with lots of wires coming out of him.” The man shook his head. “The neighborhood association told us to stay inside.”

Brian and Gregory exchanged a look.

Brian said, “Are you okay with that? Living with … Gelt … and chariots?”

“You got to put up with some stuff,” the man said. “But you should get inside by dark. ’Kay, pal?”

“ ’Kay,” said Gregory.

The man jogged away through the torn landscape.

Brian and Gregory made their way back to the paved road.

“Gelt,” said Brian, uneasily.

“I know. Gelt.”

“Something’s being done by whatever’s invading,” said Brian, “so that people in the suburb don’t know what’s hit them. They’re not afraid enough. Prudence talked about being ‘confused.’ I think this is what she meant.”

“They can’t think straight.”

“Everyone seems a little hypnotized.”

“It
is
surburbia.”

“Eight o’clock,” said Brian. He looked at his watch. “We’ve got to be home by then. Hey, what time do you have?”

“None o’clock. I don’t have a watch.”

Brian took out his phone. It didn’t get reception, but the clock still worked. He insisted, “Gregory, check the time on your phone.”

“Oh, sure.” Gregory looked and said, “Six twenty.”

“My watch says three thirty,” said Brian, “and my phone says it’s almost eight.”

“Let’s believe your watch. Then we can sleep in.”

“It’s strange that …” Brian was looking across the
road at an office and a model home. He picked up speed and started to run.

Gregory squawked, “What? What’s —?” and ran after him.

When Gregory caught up, Brian was standing, looking at a huge sign hung in front of the office. Gregory asked, “What’s up?”

Brian pointed at the sign. It showed an elk poised — with a hoof raised and with the sun glinting on its antlers — on a rock in front of someone’s driveway. In the background, kids played amid the firs.

“What?” said Gregory. “It’s an elk coming home from work.”

“Read it.”

“An elk can take pride in its home, Brian. An elk can enjoy a carpeted rec room as much as the next man.”

“Gregory!” snapped Brian.

Gregory smirked and turned to read the sign. It said:

“So what?” said Gregory. “They sure got to work fast, but still.”

“See who’s in charge of it?”

“Milton Deatley,” Gregory read out. “Inquiries.”

“Milton Deatley,” Brian insisted.

“Uh-huh?”

Brian whispered, voice tight with fear, “Milton Deatley died a year ago of starvation and insanity in Prudence’s basement.”

P
rudence was a terrible housekeeper. As they cooked dinner — pizzas from the freezer, the only unspoiled food in the house — they discovered that everything in the kitchen was covered in gray cat hair. It was stuck to the sides of the counters, mired in grease and scumming up the sink. Brian ran a paper towel around the stove top; after one circuit, it came away shaggy.

“It’s like she cooked the cat,” he said, disgusted. He threw the hairy towel away.

“Look at you, cleaning,” said Gregory. “We should just put you in a calico apron.”

Brian gave him a dark look and kept swiping at the burners.

They felt strangely adult to be cooking their own dinner. It would have been kind of fun — choosing movies to watch, hanging out — if there hadn’t been an undercurrent of unease and terror.

The pizzas took forty-five minutes to cook. The boys were starving by the time the food was ready. They sat
down at the dining room table, the computer in front of them, and got to work.

“I’m sure Milton Deatley is the name of the guy who died,” said Brian. “We’re going to search the newspaper archives for him. There’ll be an obituary or something.”

“There’s even hair on the glass table,” said Gregory. “How can glass be hairy?”

Brian went to the local paper’s web page. He typed in
Milton Deatley
and did a search. “Several hits,” he said.

The first was a real estate listing from a few days before. “‘Rumbling Elk Haven,’” Brian read. “‘Luxury Homes. Why rent when you can own?’” He scrolled down. “‘Call Milton Deatley….’”

“He clearly still thinks he’s alive,” said Gregory.

“There are some more real estate listings here. Going back … only a month.” Brian frowned. “This neighborhood must have been here longer than a month.”

“It’s huge.”

“Yeah. But there aren’t any more hits for a while before that. Back until … okay, in January, he appeared at a town meeting … to get some kind of zoning permission.”

“What’s a zoning permission?”

“To be allowed to build. It says here he was trying to get permission to build on twenty ‘percable lots.’”

“Twenty? We saw like a million and fifty.” Gregory sawed his pizza into patchwork. “I guess we don’t know whether they were ‘percable,’ though. Did you notice any ‘percing’?”

“Let’s go back further,” said Brian. “Next page.”

The next hit was a longer article. He gaped at it silently. Gregory worked industriously at his pizza, popping cheesy little trapezoids into his mouth and wiping his hands on paper towels.

“Read this,” said Brian, sliding the computer over to Gregory.

“I’m really greasy,” said Gregory. “Can you do the mouse?”

“Just wipe off your hands.”

“There’s nothing that can absorb this much grease. I’d need a yak.”

“Gregory,” Brian said, irritably. “This is big.”

Gregory nodded and read.

“Blah, blah, blah,” said Gregory.

“No,” said Brian. “Then the next one.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” exclaimed Gregory. “What? Huh?”

“Exactly,” said Brian. “Something’s happened to the article. And notice his age. He’s thirty-seven in the first article and forty-three in the second one.”

“The years really fly by.”

“What do you think it means?” Brian asked, tense.

Gregory reread the end of the article.

“This is incredible,” said Gregory. “It’s different already.”

“Let me see,” said Brian, sliding the laptop over toward him.

“Grabby,” said Gregory.

“‘He may have died of natural causes,’” Brian read, “‘but then some animals got to him. He died, hunted and alone. He fled in fear. He hid in madness. He collapsed in need. When he was gone, he —’”

“We can’t even read the real article,” said Gregory. “It’s being blocked somehow. And changed.”

Brian stared, amazed, at the screen. “Somehow,” he said, “no one in town realizes that they’re buying houses from a dead man.”

“He must be pretty charming,” Gregory guessed. “The gift of gab. You know salesmen.”

Brian gaped. “Look at the newspaper’s main page. Look at it. Check out the date.”

Gregory looked at it. “Are you sure this is the main page?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Brian. “And it says it’s a month from now.”

They started examining the page closely. Everywhere they looked, there were small errors and replacements. More and more words were spelled wrong. Then Gregory’s eye was caught by an ad — a line drawing of a man in a blazer and slacks — a sale at some tiny clothing store. The man had three arms.

Other ads were for incomprehensible items — iron heaven, soul brittle, bombast spheres, or lymph.

They could not keep their eyes on the screen. It flickered with change.

“Something’s happening here,” Brian whispered. “Something’s happening to time. And lots of other things. Time is shifting. Or warping.” He looked at his watch, and said, “Twelve thirty.” He scrounged in his pocket and pulled out his phone. He flipped it open and looked at the screen. “Nine twenty. What’s your phone say?”

“Just after eight,” said Gregory.

“Time is all wrong. That’s why no one says the same thing when we ask them when Prudence disappeared. And that’s …”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“Gregory, that’s how all these houses were built so quickly. Time is running differently. Remember the clock that used to be in the forest, telling time for other worlds? That’s what’s happening now. Time here is moving like we’re in another world.”

Gregory swore softly.

Now that Brian had said it, they both could almost feel it, something slipping across their skin, something robbing minutes or slowing them to a crawl — time as breathable as air and thick as smoke.

Brian flipped his phone closed. “No signal,” he said. “Try yours. Call your parents. We need to check the date.”

Gregory dialed. “No signal,” he said.

Brian was pale. Gregory looked panicked. Brian stood up and started to walk toward the living room, then turned back. He didn’t know where to go, what to say.

“Gregory,” he said, “there isn’t an ancient evil invading the neighborhood.”

“Huh?” said Gregory. “What are you suggesting? The Girl Scouts?”

“No, what I mean is, this isn’t a situation where the development was built on top of something magical that’s trying to get out.” Brian sat down. He stared through the glass table at his knees. He couldn’t sit still. He stood up.
He said, “The development itself is the invasion. Somehow, Milton Deatley, this dead developer, is bringing something into this world. The houses, the time jumble, everything. I don’t know why, but he’s bringing it here, and we’re all trapped in it. And tomorrow — tomorrow we’re going to go to his office and find out what he’s planning.”

Outside, at the crossroads, in the dark, the kids rode their bicycles in circles. There were rectangles of light across the lawns and through the bushes and trees. They were lights from kitchens with granite countertops, from dens and marble-floored foyers. The children did not pay attention to their homes. They rode their bikes in circles. Some cried because they were so tired, but still they wheeled and spun as the night drew on and the crickets began to sing of heat and shadow.