Except that every now and then Mom sent me out there with some kind of message. How lame is that? It would cost money to connect the groundline so that never happened and Val wouldn’t have a pocket phone out there. When he went to the shed he left his phone in the house. Even Mom thought this was kind of weird, and kept asking him why. Eventually, one night at dinner the subject came up again, and Mom asked why again, and he got a funny little smile on his face and said, “I don’t like the energy.”
“You—what?” said Mom.
“I do not like the energy,” repeated Val. “I would be without electricity and my ’top also, but that is too difficult, and I am lazy.” He had an old-fashioned fold-up ’top that lived on a shelf in the kitchen with its power cord tucked behind the refrigerator where Mongo couldn’t get at it. It was so old that when you unfolded it not only did you have to tell it to turn on, you had to tell it to plug into the webnet. And almost all the letters on the keyboard had worn off.
There was a creepo silence. Finally Mom said, “Oh, you philosophers,” and changed the subject.
Philosophers. What Val had said sounded like the sort of thing the loopheads who studied the physics of the worlds might say, not that I knew any of them personally. How to Go Crazy in One Easy PhD: get it in physwiz and then get hired by one of the brain bureaus. There was one in Steelgate, called The Intellectual Trust, in a big grey building that was so ugly it looked like squashy purple methane-breathing aliens must have built it. Trust. Not likely. Mom’s mysterious missing sister was supposed to have worked for a brain bureau before she disappeared—or maybe she disappeared because she worked for a brain bureau. There was a rumor that the one in Steelgate had a whole floor sealed off against stuff like electricity and groundlines and the webnet, and you had to work with paper and pencil by oil lamps. Doing what?
If Val had been a friend I’d’ve said shut up. Don’t talk about energy. Maybe someone dropped a ’top on you when you were a baby and it bent a little piece of your brain. There’s nothing wrong with groundlines and electricity. The rumor about those sealed-off brain-bureau areas was that they were trying to discover where science meets magic. Where the boundary is. And how they could cross it. But they got rid of magic because it made people crazy.
If Val was a magic user, instead of some kind of monster, he would make sure he didn’t have shadows, wouldn’t he?
And why didn’t everybody see them? What was my problem?
I had kept my eyes on my plate. All my life Mom had been making us have dinner together at least two or three times a week. This had survived Ran’s throwing-up phase when he was about two years old. It had survived Dad’s job, although there were nights when Mom gave Ran and me most of our supper at the usual time and then we had dessert with Dad, who’d come home, yank his tie off, and sit down at the table immediately, his briefcase leaning against the wall below the quilt.
Dinner together had even—just—survived those months after he died, when Mom was working three jobs. When she was super late I used to put Ran and me to bed on the sofa (heads at either end and feet in the middle. He kicked, of course) and I’d get up and stagger into the kitchen and turn the skillet on for scrambled eggs when I heard the car. She didn’t like this much and tried to tell me I should go to bed (Ran could sleep through the end of the world, and he was still little enough for Mom to carry him upstairs) but I said we eat dinner together in this family and I could see she didn’t know what to do. I didn’t dare tell her I was afraid of the dark when it was just Ran and me: I already knew she couldn’t afford a babysitter and I was ten pretending to be thirty. I’d make scrambled eggs and heat up a roll and get the salad out of the refrigerator and sit at the table with her and drink a glass of milk and listen to Ran snore. It won’t be for long, she’d say. I’ll get a real job soon.
And she did. And we got Mongo. And P&P opened. And we all got older.
And then Val happened.
Dinner together two or three times a week was apparently also going to survive Val. I was careful to be out as many of the other nights as I thought I could get away with. This would be easier as soon as school started again. Val had only been around about half the time when it ended at the beginning of the summer. But the kind of thing you’re out late for when it’s school-related takes less explaining to your mom.
So anyway. If Mom wanted to say anything to Val when he was in his shed she had to go out there. Or send a messenger. Occasionally she managed to send me. Sometimes she just sent me out there with a mug of coffee because she was making coffee (all of us except Ran drank a lot of coffee). Because unfortunately I liked watching TV on the big screen in the living room instead of my weeny ’top up in my room and I’d decided this was something I wasn’t going to let Val totally wreck. So there I was when Mom wanted someone to go. Although I guess this was part of her Make Maggie and Val Friends project.
I can’t remember what message I was supposed to be delivering that day. I’d been out there a few times before and it was always creepo, but that’s all, and I’d learned to say whatever I had to say, or hand him the note or the mug, and run away. That day I’d knocked on the shed door and he’d said “Come” so I had to go in.
When I went in that day it was like . . . I don’t know what it was like, but whatever it was that made Val bigger in the dark was living in there, not just the shadows—suddenly the shadows seemed tame and harmless—this huge awful unimaginable thing—something like a combination of the silverbug checkerboard where all the little black void holes were gaping jaws with glinting silver teeth and a monster out of a fairy tale with too many eyes and too many claws as well as too many mouths with too many teeth. . . . I may have screamed.
Then Val had his hands on my shoulders like he was holding me up and he was saying, “Maggie, Maggie, it’s all right,” when it was anything but all right, and he led or dragged me out of the shed and kicked the door closed, which cut off some of the worst of it. But there was a breeze that day, and it was late in the afternoon and all the ordinary leaf shadows were running around madly anyway, as well as all the stuff following Val, because yes it was still there and dreeping rioting over the garden. I would probably have gone completely doolally in another minute, frothing at the mouth and biting his hands (ewww) but he let go of my shoulder with his right hand and made some weird twisty gesture where his hand seemed to disappear under a great dizzy-sparkling swirl of shadows, and at the same time breathing out some phrase I didn’t understand, in Orzaskan or something I suppose.
It all fell away—whatever it was—like taking a coat off, and I was okay. Shaken—and furious—but okay.
He dropped his other hand and for a moment we stood looking at each other. I would have run away instantly except my knees were rubber. I noticed he looked weirdly shocked. That was my job in the circumstances. I was about an inch taller but I felt like unmown grass next to a bulclass="underline" the grass may be taller, but . . . Val loomed, even if he was shorter than me.