Teek Page 17

  Allison nodded.

  Macy began ticking off points with her fingers, still holding up the cue ball. “Your mom was a parashrink, right? You think she might have worked for these Fed Flintstones?”

  Allison nodded and hugged herself tighter. She didn’t want to believe it, but it was too obvious to deny it, much as she wanted to.

  “She must have quit.” Must have. “Run and hid from them. A fugitive just like that woman said…” It suddenly struck Allison full force. She stood up shaking her head. “Oh my.” Her voice was barely a whisper as the realization hit her full force.

  “What is it, girl? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  Allison shook her head, and felt tears streaming down her cheeks. Forgive me, Mom. I just didn’t know why. “That’s it, Macy. That’s why she left. To protect me.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “She knew that I might have this talent. It’s in my genes or something. That’s why she left Dad.”

  “Huh?”

  “It wasn’t Dad she was escaping from. It was these ASI people.”

  Macy nodded. “Ok. I’ll buy that. But why didn’t he escape with you.”

  Something drooped inside her. “I don’t know.”

  “Your dad, on the phone, he knew that you might be psychically challenged.” If they know she’s a teek… “Your dad sounds as if he knows as much as your mom about ‘them,’ these ASI geeks.”

  “Yeah.” As she spoke, her skin crawled with the thought of those men watching her. How long, she wondered. How long had dark men in gray vans patiently recorded reel after reel of her life? Somewhere, in little gray rooms, men with little gray souls were editing her life, weighing the pieces, so that they’d only bother their bosses with the good parts.

  Little gray men who found the problems of this naïve little girl terribly amusing.

  The thought didn’t bring tears. Her heart sank a little deeper, but it burned.

  Where was her mother?

  These “Fed Flintstones” might have conned the cops into thinking that Mom had disappeared, leaving Allison to the wolves. Allison knew Mom better than that. Mom wouldn’t abandon her. And she certainly wouldn’t skip town to leave her car in the hands of the ASI.

  No, these men had her.

  But what could she do about it?

  “Can you catch something?”

  “Huh?”

  Macy held a cue ball in one hand and had the yellow note pad in the other. She’d been rummaging in Allison’s paper sack while Allison had been nursing a growing rage.

  “You got some rules here: You can’t teek different objects in different directions, etc. The smaller it is, the harder it is for me— you— to teek it. You can’t teek liquids.” Macy looked up from the pad. “So what if I toss this cue ball at you?”

  It was so completely off the subject that Allison just shrugged.

  “Catch.”

  Macy’s toss caught her off-guard, but Allison tried to snag the cue ball with her teek. In motion, the cue ball slipped out of her mental fingers as if it was made of quicksilver. She had to catch it with her hands. It seemed that she couldn’t get a grip on something in motion.

  Did that make sense? Allison remembered in Physics class how Mr. Franklin made such an issue of the fact that everything is moving. Things can only be at rest relative to each other. It wasn’t the motion that was the problem, Allison thought. It’s the fact that her teek sense was a step behind the real world. She couldn’t shift her attention fast enough to follow a ball moving relative to her.

  Allison tossed the cue ball back. “Try again.”

  Macy tossed it and, instead of trying to wrap her mental web around the cue ball, she thought at a chunk of space near the end of the cue ball’s path. Instead of trying to think this teek around something, she tried to think it into a solid lump. A block of wax, or Jell-O. She had the force wrapped so tightly within her head that she expected the cue ball to bounce off it. Instead, the sensation was like having a ball bearing splash into a blob of molasses.

  Her brain was that molasses, and the impact caused a familiar twinge beneath her temples. She felt her teek blob shake with the impact, and she realized her eyes were closed.

  When she opened her eyes, there was the cue ball, hanging in midair about a foot from her chest.

  “Toss some more.” Allison said.

  Macy obliged. Pool balls splashed into her little teek net to freeze in midair. The feeling inside her skull was the same dizzy vertigo she got when she shook her head side to side too fast.

  Allison was surprised to see that the impact vibration she felt in her mind— what caused the dizzying sensation— reflected in the balls she had already caught. She watched the cue ball, now the center of a frozen solar system, and saw it shake every time she caught a new ball.

  Experimentally, Allison waved her hand between the balls. She felt no resistance. So is this like before, and I can include and exclude matter at will?

  Allison thought of the teek glob also enveloping her hand, and her hand stuck. She tried a few experimental tugs, and the whole complex of frozen balls seemed to vibrate themselves, following the tug of her hand. Like they’re all connected.

  The feeling she got from her hand was oddly numbing, like it had fallen asleep.

  Allison let her hand go, and began dropping the balls out of the matrix, one by one, catching them, and tossing them back to Macy.

  “If I wasn’t standing here—”

  “I hardly believe it myself.”

  “You should do Letterman.”

  Allison sighed, remembering some of Mom’s books. “There’s a guy who says he’ll give a check for some thousands of dollars for someone who can prove they can do something paranormal.”

  “Your chance for the big time.”

  “No. This all is the province of the National Enquirer. No one will believe it.”

  “Come on, I’m looking here with my own eyes—”

  “And how come no one’s picked up Amazing Whoever’s check? David Copperfield can make the Statue of Liberty disappear. Cue balls aren’t very impressive.”

  Macy shrugged.

  “Besides, I’ve been on TV enough for my whole lifetime. No TV, no news.” Allison thought of the local news, more little gray men recording her life and editing for the juicy parts. And that brought her thinking back to Fred and Barney.

  And Mom.

  Where are you Mom? What happened?

  “What am I going to do, Macy?”

  “No news and no cops. Who’s left?”

  Allison lowered her head. “There’s Dad. Like you said, he sounded as if he knows something about these guys.”

  “How do we get a hold of him? The last time you saw him was a decade ago—”

  “Can I use your phone?”

  Macy got up and fished around the pile of electronic waste by the Commodore 64. She came out with a black rotary telephone. She picked it up and listened. “I’m amazed. Chardine isn’t using it.”

  Macy handed the phone over. The cord knocked over a stack of old Atari cartridges. Allison took it and dialed information.

  “What city please?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  Within moments Allison had Macy writing down a number for John Charvat in LA.

  “Charvat?” Macy said when Allison hung up. “I thought your dad’s name was Boyle.”

  “So did I. But Boyle’s my mother’s maiden name.”

  “Where’d ‘Charvat’ come from?”

  “The return address on that express envelope I told you about.” Allison sucked in a breath and began dialing.

  “LA?” Macy said. “My dad’s going to kill me for this month’s phone bill.”

  After too many rings, the phone was answered by a familiar voice. “Hello—”

  “Dad?” Allison gasped. It was the same voice she’d heard Mom talking to.

  “—Charvat. I can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave name and numbe
r—”

  “An answering machine.” Allison could hear the disappointment ringing in her own voice.

  The machine beeped.

  Allison was prepared to leave a message, giving Dad Macy’s number and pleading for him to return the call. But an ugly foreboding stopped her.

  She slowly hung up, without leaving a message.

  “What’s the matter?” Macy asked.

  “I don’t—” Allison realized that she knew what was wrong. If these ASI people were in her house, they had the envelope with those tickets, and they had John Charvat’s address. “I think they have my Dad too.”

  Macy shook her head. “This is too weird. Are you sure?”

  “I’m not sure of anything. I should have thought. That UPS envelope is still sitting on my coffee table. All they have to do is look at the return address. They got Mom. Of course they got Dad—”

  Macy shook her head. “Too bad about the tickets. If Fred and Barney had just waited another day, you’d be on your way to St. Louis by now.”

  “Yeah.” Allison’s heart sank a little deeper. There was really nothing left she could do but turn herself over to someone. The police, the ASI, the news. They had taken her father before she even had a chance to meet him.

  “Hold the phone.” Allison said.

  Macy looked down at the black rotary phone in her hand and said, “I am.”

  Allison said, “Dad was a lot more paranoid about these ASI people than Mom was.”

  “So? Do him any good?”

  “That’s just it. How much you want to bet he was on route to meet us before he ever sent that letter?”

  “Then they don’t have him?”

  Allison shrugged. “I don’t know. But I don’t think he’d sit around at home, waiting for them to show up.”

  “That doesn’t mean we know where he is.”

  “Yeah.” Allison said. Then, very deliberately, she said, “We need to find out what happened to Mom…”

  “What are you thinking, girl?”

  7:30 PM

  The sky had gone dark by the time they’d reached Allison’s block. They stood on the street behind Allison’s duplex. On this side of the block, rows of four-story apartment buildings faced them. Macy followed Allison’s lead, but she hesitated when Allison began walking down one of the driveways.

  “I don’t like this,” Macy said, “It’s crazy, especially when I don’t have the car.”

  Allison turned to face her. “You didn’t have to come.”

  “Like hell I didn’t. My best friend is going to get herself shot or something— can I sit by and—”

  “Okay.”

  “I still don’t like this.”

  Allison shrugged and continued down the driveway. The parking area in back of these apartments bordered against the backyards of the houses on Allison’s street. Allison stopped in front of a vine-choked chain-link fence. Between the vines and the bushes on the other side, she could see the peak of her garage sticking up above the fence.

  She had just been here, only six hours ago. It already felt like six days.

  Macy walked up next to her. “You spent all afternoon scaring me with these people.”

  “I should let them keep hold of Mom?”

  “How do you know she’s there? Just because you escaped from the cops don’t mean—”

  “I have to do something.”

  Macy shook her head. Their conversation had evolved into whispers now that they were at the fence. “They’ll be watching for you.”

  “Hey,” Allison whispered back. “I’m the amazing Allison, remember?”

  Allison took hold of the fence and hauled herself upwards. The entire fence shook with her weight, waving foliage. The rusty fence cut into her hand and the vines made purchase for her feet vague and slippery. She’d barely gotten her feet off the ground when Macy whispered up at her, “Hey, amazing Allison, why don’t you do it the easy way?”

  Huh?

  Then it hit her. She could levitate Babs, cue balls, and Jeeps. Why couldn’t she levitate herself?

  Allison summoned her mental sense, this time she could feel it pound behind her eyes, and the motion seemed sluggish. She was getting tired. She slipped her mental fingers around herself.

  A bizarre sensation gripped her, a double-layered feedback that felt like the tactile equivalent of the sound fingernails made scraping across a blackboard. She pulled herself up, and nearly passed out with vertigo as her normal and telekinetic senses tried to resolve their respective input and tied her brain in a throbbing knot.

  She flew, but with a sense of shivering dizziness that made her want to throw up. All sense of gravity had left, making her feel like she was falling an immense distance even though she was moving upwards. Her horizon flipped over a few times, causing her to panic. She headed toward what she thought was the ground, and hit, hard.

  The entire surface of her skin had fallen asleep.

  She held herself there, shaking, head pounding, for a long time before she realized that she was hugging the rear wall of her garage, and she was rotated ninety degrees from the ground. She slowly let the teek go, and she rolled gently onto the pile of dead leaves that, earlier, had held the twelve-year-old kid whose leg she’d riddled with nails.

  After a half minute or so, Macy jumped down from the top of the fence. “Are you ok?” Macy whispered.

  Allison groaned. Her whole head felt like a blood blister on the verge of busting open. “Now I know why only gurus do that.” She sat up, rubbing her head. “You’d need to meditate six hours a day just to be able to handle it.”

  “Good news is you didn’t wake up the Flintstones. Still up to this?”

  “I have to.” Allison got unsteadily to her feet. Her inner ear still seemed unsure what direction the ground was in. “But let’s hold on for a little while.”

  They stood there for ten minutes or so while Allison took deep breaths and tried to recover. The fatigue caused by her teeking everything around was deceptive. It wasn’t related to physical exertion. It was more like the sense of brain-deadening mental exhaustion she got after spending all night studying for a trigonometry test.

  It would be very easy right now for her to trigger a very bad migraine.

  That’s it, she thought, after I get Mom out of here, I don’t teek a thing until I get a good night’s sleep.

  After a few minutes, Allison felt decent enough to go on.

  Sneaking up on her own house was an alien sensation. It exacerbated the surreal feeling that had been growing since the weekend. It fed the paranoid thought that the things she sensed peeking at her out from the shadows weren’t simply residents of her mind, but were really there, snickering and meaning her harm.

  The weather conspired with the feeling. Black clouds roiled across the sky like an avalanche of soiled cotton. Every few seconds a biting wind would whip dead leaves into a whirlwind around her feet.

  The house remained quiet, shades drawn against advancing night.

  Allison felt a sense of dread when she saw that there were no lights on in Mr. Luvov’s half of the building.

  Mom’s Taurus was still parked in the driveway, about ten feet away from the rear of the house. Allison paused next to it and looked at Macy.

  “Wait here,” Allison whispered.

  “Wait a sec—”

  “Keep watch, ok?”

  Macy sighed and said, “Ok. Watch yourself.”

  Allison nodded and crept along the driveway. From the street, Allison’s half of the house was on the right, the side with the driveway. She passed under the dining room windows and risked a peek.

  The shades were drawn here too.

  To get a peek inside, she chinned herself up to the window, her foot lodged in the cracks of the brick foundation. The sound of talking came from inside. From the living room, Allison could tell. The only place she could see in was through a small gap in the dining room drapes, and that was half obscured by a potted plant. It provided a great view
of someone’s back.

  She eased herself down and tried to think.

  This will be tougher than I thought.

  She needed to see these people, where they were in the house, before she would have any idea where they were keeping Mom.

  There were two other views she could get on the living room. There was a half window high on the driveway wall that didn’t have shades or drapes on it. However, there was no way for her to reach it without a ladder, or trying to teek herself by her own bootstraps.

  Then there were the porch windows.

  She didn’t want to go on the porch. She would feel much too exposed out there. She also suspected that someone would be sitting in the van parked out front.

  Allison sighed. It was either the dining room windows or give up. She supposed that she might teek some of the drapes out of the way. If she did it slowly, maybe no one would notice.

  When she was ready to chin herself up again, she heard the loudest and most horrendous yowl she had ever heard in her life.

  7:35 PM

  Tension gripped the Boyle house. Barney and Fred talked to each other in low tones in the dining room. Fred spent half the time talking to Barney, and the other half talking on his folding non-phone to the two cars he had combing the suburb for Allison Boyle.

  Occasionally he would curse the fiasco at the Euclid Heights City Hall. Everyone present knew him well enough not to mention anything about it.

  Jane and George were out of earshot, in the living room, tending to a now comatose Elroy. “What’s wrong with him?” George whispered.

  “You keep asking that. I don’t know.”

  “You’re the one who has the doctorate in this. You’re the one who went to med school. I’m a bloody physicist. I’m out of my depth here.”

  Jane looked back at the pair in the dining room. “I think everyone here is. This was supposed to be a milk run.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “If it makes you feel better, I’m sure Elroy’s problem isn’t physical.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  Fred walked into the living room, trailing Barney. “Well?” He said.

  “No change,” Jane said.

  “Damn. We’re crippled without our spotter, and it will take hours to fly one in from Dallas.”