Darkness Creeping: Twenty Twisted Tales Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  CATCHING COLD

  WHO DO ME APPRECIATE?

  SOUL SURVIVOR

  BLACK BOX

  RESTING DEEP

  SECURITY BLANKET

  SAME TIME NEXT YEAR

  THE RIVER TOUR

  FLUSHIE

  MONKEYS TONIGHT

  SCREAMING AT THE WALL

  GROWING PAINS

  ALEXANDER’S SKULL

  CONNECTING FLIGHT

  RALPHY SHERMAN’S ROOT CANAL

  AN EAR FOR MUSIC

  RIDING THE RAPTOR

  TRASH DAY

  CRYSTALLOID

  SHADOWS OF DOUBT

  From SECURITY BLANKET

  There were faces in the quilt, too, and after a while I began to feel the faces were all looking back at me. Suddenly it seemed there were a hundred people in the twins’ room—all of them staring at me—and I could swear those faces were opening their mouths, trying to tell me something. But there was only silence.

  I backed away from the quilt until I hit a picture on the wall, and it fell down. I picked up the picture, and when I looked back at the quilt, it was just a quilt again. No faces, just colorful fabric filling the many squares.

  I left the twins’ room with a shudder and went into the living room, where the only faces looking at me were those in the smiling family photos on the wall. Then I sat at my piano and played something soothing. It had all been my imagination, I told myself. And I kept telling myself that until I almost believed it.

  OTHER BOOKS BY NEAL SHUSTERMAN

  THE DARK FUSION SERIES:Dread Locks

  Duckling Ugly

  Red Rider’s Hood

  The Schwa Was Here

  The Shadow Club

  The Shadow Club Rising

  The Dark Side of Nowhere

  Dissidents

  Downsiders

  Everlost

  The Eyes of Kid Midas

  Fall Tilt

  Speeding Bullet

  THE STAR SHARD TRILOGY:Scorpion Shards

  Thief of Souls

  Shattered Sky

  What Daddy Did

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  Kid Heroes

  MindBenders

  MindQuakes

  MindStorms

  MindTwisters

  Visit the author at www.storyman.com

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  “Monkeys Tonight,” “Black Box,” “Flushie,” “Screaming at the Wall,” “Alexander’s Skull,” “Same Time Next Year”, “Resting Deep,” and “Shadows of a Doubt” first published in the United States of America by Lowell House Juvenile, 1993.

  “Riding the Raptor,” “Trash Day,” “An Ear for Music,” “Soul Survivor,” “Security Blanket,” “Growing Pains,” “Connecting Flight,” and “Crystalloid” first published in the United States of America by Lowell House Juvenile, 1995.

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2007

  “Monkeys Tonight,” “Black Box,” “Flushie,” “Screaming at the Wall,” “Alexander’s Skull,” “Same Time Next Year”, “Resting Deep,” and “Shadows of a Doubt” copyright © Neal Shusterman, 1993 “Riding the Raptor,” “Trash Day,” “An Ear for Music,” “Soul Survivor,” “Security Blanket,” “Growing Pains,” “Connecting Flight,” and “Crystalloid”

  copyright © Neal Shusterman, 1995

  “The River Tour,” “Who Do We Appreciate?,” “Ralphy Sherman’s Root Canal,” “Catching Cold,” and introductions copyright © Neal Shusterman, 2007 All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17671-9

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  FOREWORD

  Once, when I was doing an author visit, a kid who had read my novel The Dark Side of Nowherestood up and asked me, “Mr. Shusterman? What planet are you from?”

  Thinking quickly, I answered, “It hasn’t been discovered by your puny human telescopes.”

  I suppose people wonder where I get some of the crazy ideas for my stories. Well, I’m here to officially confirm that I am, like all of you (or at least most of you), from the planet Earth. I do get weird ideas, though, and I’m lucky enough to be able to make my living writing those ideas down. Some of them are scary, others are funny. Some are true-to-life, and others are just plain bizarre. I guess that’s why I don’t like sticking to a single genre—I like writing all sorts of things. I think that’s the only way you grow as a writer.

  The stories in this collection are of the creepy/bizarre variety, with some humor thrown in for good measure. They span half my career (I say that because I’m hoping I still have at least another half to go). For those of you who are curious as to how I came up with the stories, I’ve prefaced each one with an explanation of how the story came to be.

  I would like to thank Jennifer Bonnell and Eileen Bishop Kreit at Penguin books for letting me creep through the darkness with this collection, as well as Jack Artenstein, who was the first publisher, way back when, to take a chance and publish collections of my short stories.

  I hope you enjoy the journey, and if, after reading, you have a hard time getting to sleep, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

  Neal Shusterman

  September, 2006

  CATCHING COLD

  We have a psychotically impatient ice-cream man in our neighborhood. He comes down the street, playing his happy little tune, my daughters come screaming downstairs in a panic asking for a dollar each. By the time they get out the door, however, the ice-cream man is gone, and all the little kids on the street are crying, because not a single kid got ice cream. I had never seen the guy stop. In fact I had never seen him. I just heard his stupid little song.

  One day we decided we were not going to stand for it anymore. We all piled into the car, we chased him down, and we cut him off, blocking traffic. Everyone who saw it applauded. He was forced to sell us ice cream. It was lousy ice cream, but to us, it tasted like victory. So you could say this story was inspired by reality. Sort of.

  CATCHING COLD

  History tells of a man named Pavlov.

  Pavlov was a scientist who did a famous experiment with dogs. Each day he would ring a bell, then feed the dogs, ring a bell, then feed the dogs, over and over, until the dogs knew the bell meant food. Then one day he just rang the bell. The dogs, who were trained to expect the food aft
er the bell, all began to salivate, drooling all over themselves expecting food that didn’t come. They developed a physiological response to the sound of the bell. It’s called classical conditioning.

  The same can often be said of kids when they hear a certain sound wafting over the treetops in their neighborhood. A pleasant sound. A song. The song is different in every neighborhood, and in every town across the nation, but the song always means the same thing.

  Are you listening?

  Can you hear it now?

  The music is out there, stealing through your window, echoing between closely packed rows of homes. It seems to come from the left, then from the right. It grows louder, then fades, louder and fades, until you’re not sure whether the song is coming or going—and, like Pavlov’s dogs, you’re drooling. You’re scrambling for spare change, begging your parents for a dollar—because a dollar is all it costs to pay the ice-cream man. Just one dollar, and you can have sherbet on a stick in the shape of your favorite cartoon character, with a gum-ball nose. Hurry out that door! The ice-cream man is here!

  Like you, Marty Zybeck was a victim of classical conditioning; however, no one had it worse than Marty. He kept his window open, every afternoon when the weather got warm, and kept his sizable ears tuned to that high frequency on which the tune would come.

  His particular ice-cream truck played “Pop Goes the Weasel.” It was one of the more annoying ice-cream truck tunes, but for Marty, it was a call to arms.

  Whenever he heard it, Marty was prepared. He already had a dollar in his pocket, to give to the Creamy-Cold ice-cream man. The moment he heard the song, he would bound down the stairs and burst out the front door. His ears, like radar dishes, would triangulate the direction of the music, and he would take off, his feet pounding heavily, desperately on the pavement . . . but each day the result was exactly the same. First he would hear the music in front of him. Then he would hear it to his right. Then he would hear it passing on another street behind the row of houses to his left.

  He would run until he was out of breath, and practically out of his mind, but the end result was always the same. The music would fade. The Creamy-Cold truck would leave, and he’d be left panting in the street with a dollar and no ice cream.

  If only I were a little faster,he would think—but speed was not one of Marty’s strong points. He came in last in everything. He was, in fact, the very definition of “last.” Not only was his the last name on any school roster, but he was also the last to finish every race, the last to turn in every test, the last to be done with dinner, and the last kid on the school bus. It only seems to follow that no matter how much he tried to get to the Creamy-Cold truck, he would be the last kid in the neighborhood out the door.

  “He’s an impatient one, that ice-cream man,” his mother would say. “Never hangs around long.” And then she’d remind Marty that maybe it was best he didn’t have the ice cream anyway, as he tended toward being a husky child. “Well, it’s not a total loss. All that running will do you good!”

  He would sneer at his mother when she said things like that. His mother was as slender as could be—but Marty took after his father, who was not.

  “I’ll bet his ice cream stinks!” Marty would grumble, but deep down, he didn’t believe it. In his heart of hearts, he believed that Creamy-Cold ice cream was the tastiest, most heavenly frozen treat ever devised by man—and the only way to get it was to buy it from the truck. Marty Zybeck did not have many goals in life—but at the top of that short list was catching the Creamy-Cold man.

  Legend tells of a boy named Jim-Jim Jeffries.

  Jim-Jim, as the neighborhood legend goes, was the fastest kid in little league. He could run faster than any player could throw a ball to a base, and so when he got a hit, he rarely got tagged out. He was a winner, and did not accept defeat easily. One day, long before anyone can remember, Jim-Jim went chasing after the Creamy-Cold ice-cream truck, refusing to accept that it was already leaving the neighborhood. He turned the corner, waving his dollar bill, and was never seen again.

  Marty Zybeck knew the story of Jim-Jim. Children whispered it in hushed tones, but Marty had a logical, practical view of it. Fact: there was no one in the neighborhood with the last name of Jeffries. Fact: no one seemed to remember where he lived, or what he looked like. Fact: if anyone could confirm the story, it would be Marty’s father, who was a well-respected detective with the local police force, and he flatly denied the existence of Jim-Jim Jeffries. Marty was convinced it was just a made-up story, designed to keep small children from crossing dangerous streets to get ice cream. Well, he wasn’t a small child anymore. He didn’t believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or Jim-Jim Jeffries.

  Still, the rumors went round and round every summer, when the music came in on the wind, and children scraped together their change.

  This was the summer, however, that Marty discovered a great universal truth that every kid in the neighborhood already knew. Marty would have known it, too, had he been just a little more observant.

  It was as he sat playing video games with his friend Tyler CoyoteMoon-O’Callahan that the truth began to emerge. The school year had just ended a few days earlier, and the two boys were filling their time playing interdimensional kickboxer. Five minutes into their third game, Marty heard the faint sounds of “Pop Goes the Weasel” through the open living-room window. Although leaving the game would allow Tyler to completely kick him into a parallel dimension, and thus win the match, he put down the video controller and stood up. He was mature enough to know that some things, like ice cream, were just more important than video games.

  “Don’t bother,” said Tyler calmly. “He won’t stop for you.”

  “He stops for other kids—he’ll stop for me.”

  “Who says he stops for other kids?”

  That gave Marty pause for thought. “Other kids always get ice cream from him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because,” said Marty, “I always see them running for the ice-cream man.”

  “Yeah—but did you ever actually see someone eatinga Creamy-Cold bar?”

  Marty racked his brain, trying to flip through images to find an actual memory of someone walking down the street, eating something they bought from the ice-cream man, but his memory held no such image.

  “Well . . . you’ve eaten Creamy-Cold bars, haven’t you?”

  “Never,” said Tyler. “Not once. Sure, I used to run after him like you do, but I never caught him, so I gave up.”

  They looked at each other, the only sound the music coming from somewhere outside, and Tyler said, “Everyone hears the music, but have you ever actually seen the truck?”

  “Of course I have!” Marty said. But as he thought about it, he realized that the image of the ice-cream truck was only in his head. He had imagined what it would look like if he ever actually got out onto the street in time to catch it—but he never actually saw it.

  “You know what I think?” said Tyler. “I think it’s a ghost truck from the spirit world of our ancestors.” Tyler, being half Navajo and half Irish, had a powerful belief in the ancestral spirit world and leprechauns.

  “I think you’re nuts,” said Marty.

  Tyler responded by turning to their game and kicking Marty into another dimension.

  Fairy tales speak of a Pied Piper.

  As the story goes, the piper’s tune was so entrancing it lured all the rats from the town of Hamlin. Then, when the towns-folk refused to pay his price, the piper used his tune to lure away all the children into a mountain, where, presumably, they either lived happily ever after or died horrible painful deaths. Fairy tales can go either way.

  Such a thing could never happen to large groups of children in modern times, however, because as everyone knows, large groups of modern children are much too smart for that. Between movies, sitcoms, and the colorful language of older siblings, kids know everything, or at least they think they do. Thinking they do, however, is enough to prev
ent an entire mob of them from being lured by the music of a Pied Piper. More than likely they would just laugh at his funny green suit and pointed shoes, then walk the other way. No, when it comes to kids these days, there is safety in numbers, and the only ones who find themselves following the piper are the stragglers.

  Stragglers like Marty.

  Marty was not like Tyler. He was not satisfied to treat the Creamy-Cold man as a mystery best left alone. After all, being a detective was in his genes, and so at dinner that night, Marty tried to learn some technique from the greatest detective he knew.

  “Dad, where do you begin an investigation?”

  “Usually at the scene of the crime.”

  “What if there is no scene?”

  “Then why investigate?”

  “Because it’s important?”

  “Is there a paycheck involved?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s not important.”

  His father was very good at deflecting any and all questions Marty ever asked him with logic that was so circular, it often left Marty forgetting what the question was.

  “Uh . . . I want to investigate the ice-cream man,” Marty said.

  “Why? Did he run someone over?”

  “No, he’s just never there.”

  “You can’t investigate something that isn’t there—just something that is.”

  “What about something that wasthere, but isn’t anymore?”

  “That’s called a cold case. Not my field of expertise.”

  Marty thanked his father and decided he was on his own. He spent the evening pondering the problem, starting with the things he knew for sure. Fact: the music comes from somewhere. Fact: the sound rises and it falls, which suggests that it’s moving. Fact: if it’s moving through their neighborhood, it has to pass by Fillmore Savings Bank around the corner, right?

  That’s when he came up with the big idea. He approached his father again the following morning.