‘About what?’ Laurie asked, getting up on one elbow.
‘You said it hadn’t finished growing in your room. What did you mean?’
‘Come on, Trent — you’re not dumb.’
‘No, I’m not,’ he agreed without conceit. ‘Maybe I just want to hear you say it, Sprat.’
‘If you call me that, you never will.’
‘Okay. Laurie, Laurie, Laurie. You satisfied?’
‘Yes. That stuff’s growing all over the house.’ She paused. ‘No, that’s not right. It’s growing under the house.’
‘That’s not right, either.’
Laurie thought about it, then sighed. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘It’s growing in the house. It’s stealing the house. Is that good enough, Mr. Smarty?’
‘Stealing the house . . . ‘ Trent sat quietly beside her on the bed, looking at her poster of Chrissie Hynde and seeming to taste the phrase she had used. At last he nodded and flashed the smile she loved. ‘Yes — that’s good enough.’
‘Whatever you call it, it acts like it’s alive.’
Trent nodded. He had already thought of this. He had no idea how metal could be alive, but he was damned if he saw any way around her conclusion, at least for the present.
‘But that isn’t the worst.’
‘What is?’
‘It’s sneaking.’ Her eyes, fixed solemnly on his, were big and frightened. ‘That’s the part I really don’t like. I don’t know what started it or what it means, and I don’t really care. But it’s sneaking.’
She ran her fingers into her heavy blonde hair and pushed it back from her temples. It was a fretful, unconscious gesture that reminded Trent achingly of his dad, whose hair had been that exact same shade.
‘I feel like something’s going to happen, Trent, only I don’t know what, and it’s like being in a nightmare you can’t get all the way out of. Does it feel like that to you sometimes?’
‘A little, yeah. But I know something’s going to happen. I might even know what.’
She bolted to a sitting position and grabbed his hands. ‘You know? What? What is it?’
‘I can’t be sure,’ Trent said, getting up. ‘I think I know, but I’m not ready to say what I think yet. I have to do some more looking.’
‘If we drill many more holes, the house is apt to fall down!’
‘I didn’t say drilling, I said looking.’
‘Looking for what?’
‘For something that isn’t here yet — that hasn’t grown yet. But when it does, I don’t think it will be able to hide.’
‘Tell me, Trent!’
‘Not yet,’ he said, and planted a small, quick kiss on her cheek. ‘Besides — curiosity killed the Sprat.’
‘I hate you!’ she cried in a low voice, and flopped back down with the sheet over her head. But she felt better for having talked with Trent, and slept better than she had for a week.
Trent found what he was looking for two days before the big party. As the oldest, he perhaps should have noticed that his mother had begun to look alarmingly unhealthy, her skin drawn shiny over her cheekbones, her complexion so pale it had taken on an ugly yellow underlight. He should have noticed how often she was rubbing at her temples, although she denied — almost in a panic — that she had a migraine, or had had one for over a week.
He did not notice these things, however. He was too busy looking.
In the four or five days between his after-bedtime talk with Laurie and the day he found what he was looking for, he went through every closet in the big old house at least three times; through the crawlspace above Lew’s study five or six times; through the big old cellar half a dozen times.
It was in the cellar that he finally found it.
This was not to say he hadn’t found peculiar things in other places; he most certainly had.
There was a knob of stainless steel poking out of the ceiling of a second-floor closet. A curved metal armature of some kind had burst through the side of the luggage-closet on the third floor. It was a dim, polished gray . . . until he touched it. When he did that, it flushed a dusky rose color, and he heard a faint but powerful humming sound deep in the wall. He snatched his hand back as if the armature had been hot (and at first, when it turned a color he associated with the burners on the electric stove, he could have sworn it was). When he did that, the curved metal thing went gray again. The humming stopped at once.
The day before, in the attic, he had observed a cobweb of thin, interlaced cables growing in a low dark corner under the eave. Trent had been crawling around on his hands and knees, not doing anything but getting hot and dirty, when he had suddenly spied this amazing phenomenon.
He froze in place, staring through a tangle of hair as the cables spun themselves out of nothing at all (or so it looked, anyway), met, wrapped around each other so tightly they seemed to merge, and then continued spreading until they reached the floor, where they drilled in and anchored themselves in dreamy little puffs of sawdust. They seemed to be creating some sort of limber bracework, and it looked as if it would be very strong, able to hold the house together through a lot of buffeting and hard knocks.
What buffeting, though?
What hard knocks?
Again, Trent thought he knew. It was hard to believe, but he thought he knew.
There was a little closet at the north end of the cellar, far beyond the workshop area and the furnace. Their real father had called this ‘the wine-cellar,’ and although he’d put up only about two dozen bottles of plonk (this word had always made their mother giggle), they were all carefully stored in crisscrossing racks he had made himself.
Lew came in here even less frequently than he went into the workshop; he didn’t drink wine.
And although their mother had often taken a glass or two with their dad, she no longer drank wine either. Trent remembered how sad her face had looked the one time Bri had asked her why she never had a glass of plonk in front of the fire anymore.
‘Lew doesn’t approve of drinking,’ she had told Brian. ‘He says it’s a crutch.’
There was a padlock on the wine-cellar door, but it was only there to make sure the door didn’t swing open and let in the heat from the furnace. The key hung right next to it, but Trent didn’t need it. He’d left the padlock undone after his first investigation, and no one had come along to press it shut since then. So far as he knew, no one came to this end of the cellar at all anymore.
He was not much surprised by the sour whiff of spilled wine that greeted him as he approached the door; it was just another proof of what he and Laurie already knew — the changes were winding themselves quietly all through the house. He opened the door, and although what he saw frightened him, it didn’t really surprise him.
Metal constructions had burst through two of the wine-cellar’s walls, tearing apart the racks with their diamond-shaped compartments and pushing the bottles of Bollinger and Mondavi and Battiglia onto the floor, where they had broken.
Like the cables in the attic crawlspace, whatever was forming here — growing, to use Laurie’s word — hadn’t finished yet. It spun itself into being in sheens of light that hurt Trent’s eyes and made him feel a little sick to his stomach.
No cables here, however, and no curved struts. What was growing in his real father’s forgotten wine-cellar looked like cabinets and consoles and instrument panels. And, as he looked, vague
shapes humped themselves up in the metal like the heads of excited snakes, gained focus, became dials and levers and read-outs. There were a few blinking lights. Some of these actually began to blink as he looked at them.
A low sighing sound accompanied this act of creation.
Trent took one cautious step farther into the little room; an especially bright red light, or series of them, had caught his eye. He sneezed as he stepped forward — the machines and consoles pushing across the old concrete had stirred up a great deal of dust.
The lights which had snagged his attention were numbers. They were under a glass strip on a metal construct which was spinning its way out of a console. This new thing looked like some sort of chair, although no one sitting in it would have been very comfortable. At least, no one with a human shape, Trent thought with a little shiver.
The glass strip was in one of the arms of this twisted chair — if it was a chair. And the numbers had perhaps caught his eye because they were moving.