Tales From Beyond the Brain Read online

  Mike eyed Jerry’s plane. “What is that supposed to be?”

  “Dunno,” said Jerry. “I learned how to make it from some website.”

  “It looks ridiculous.”

  “Yeah, but bet you I can fly it to the other end of the room,” Jerry said.

  On the count of three, both boys flung their planes along the narrow gap between the desks and the window.

  Mike’s dart plane loop-de-looped and bounced off the window.

  “Aw, crap!” he said.

  Thankfully, everyone else in the room was still paying attention to Mrs. Taylor.

  Jerry’s plane, meanwhile, somersaulted through the air, gaining velocity as it did so. With an impressive burst of speed, the plane collided with Mrs. Taylor’s desk. The paper shattered like glass into pieces.

  “Whoa!” Mike said. “I didn’t know paper could do that.”

  Jerry nodded. “It was a pretty cool website.”

  Mike looked over at Mrs. Taylor. She was still deep in her lesson, and so were the rest of the students. Either she hadn’t noticed the two boys or she was purposely ignoring them. It was one of Taylor’s tricks—she didn’t give into Mike’s or Jerry’s antics until after the bell rang. But then she often grabbed them as they headed out for recess and made them stay in.

  “Let’s quit while we’re ahead,” said Mike.

  Jerry nodded.

  But then he ripped out another sheet of paper. He started folding it madly.

  “What are you doing?” Mike whispered.

  “The website showed how to make another airplane. But it gave some kind of warning too. So, obviously, I have to give it a test flight.”

  “What do you mean, warning?”

  “I don’t know exactly. The website was in some other language.”

  “Then how do you know it was a warning?”

  “Well,” Jerry said, folding as he talked, “there was a big, flashing, red bar with some word written on it. And there were pictures of people folding airplanes, with red lines through them like on those No Smoking signs.”

  “Then why are you making it?”

  “You think I’m going to let some lame internet sign keep us from having fun?”

  Jerry finished folding the paper. The plane almost looked like a blade, something that could really hurt somebody if it was thrown.

  “This is not a good idea,” Mike muttered.

  “I know. Check me out, dude,” Jerry said. He fired off the airplane.

  At first the plane looked like it was going to sail right across the room and onto Mrs. Taylor’s desk. But then the razor-sharp nose of the plane veered and seemed to slice the air in half, like a knife cutting through butter.

  “Wha—?”

  The plane disappeared through the incision. All that was left was the classroom. Only now there was a vertical slit around five feet in length in the space between the desks and the window. It made the world around it flap back and forth as if it were on a flimsy sheet of plastic wrap.

  Through the slit was nothing but darkness.

  It was a shade of darkness darker than any kind of dark Jerry or Mike had ever seen. It was so dark that their eyeballs and brains were not fit to process how dark it was.

  “Uh-oh,” Mike said. “Now you’ve done it.”

  “What is that thing?” Jerry asked. He also wondered why nobody else in the class had noticed the giant tear. But a tear through what, exactly? The classroom? The universe?

  Jerry clutched his head. His brain was in overdrive trying to process what he was seeing. He turned away from the rip in the universe. The other students were staring at the board at the front of the class, copying down whatever it was that Mrs. Taylor was busy writing onto it.

  “It’s a black hole,” Mike suggested, shaking his head at the impossible tear in the universe. “Has to be.”

  Jerry turned back to the hole, making sure not to stare directly into it. “If it was a black hole, it’d probably suck us in.”

  “But it’s so…dark in there.”

  “You know this is all your fault,” Jerry told Mike.

  “My fault? How do you figure that? You threw the plane.”

  “You should have stopped me.”

  Mike rolled his eyes.

  “We’re going to get in so much trouble,” Jerry said. “We’d better fix it.”

  “Fix it? Dude, you’ve created a giant void. Nothingness. Absolute nothingness.”

  Jerry nodded. “That’s why we’d better fix it. I can’t get another phone call home. I’ll be totally grounded.”

  Mike was baffled. “How do we fix it then?”

  Jerry slipped out of his seat and dropped to the floor. Nobody really took any notice of him as he scurried across the linoleum tile, crablike, until he was at Mrs. Taylor’s desk. He reached up with his hand and fumbled around until his fingers clasped the stapler.

  Meanwhile, Mike eased over to Makayla’s desk. She was busy watching Mrs. Taylor. She didn’t notice as Mike reached into her desk and fished out the big roll of masking tape she had brought for her science project.

  Mike inched back to his desk and then joined Jerry over by the large slice. The edges were billowing like curtains in the breeze.

  Once he had it between his fingers, Jerry tugged at the edges of the tear. It felt freakishly thin, like some sort of stretchy material. He ran his other hand along it too. Taking a deep breath, he plunged his hand through that deep, dark middle. His hand passed through empty space. Then Jerry craned his neck around the other side of the tear. The rip was still there too, only Jerry couldn’t see his hand poking through the other side like he expected. “This is really cool,” he whispered.

  “Just hurry up,” Mike said nervously. He turned to the front of the class, where Mrs. Taylor had finished writing on the board. The other kids were still staring. Mike turned away and pulled a length of masking tape off the roll. He tried to stick the two sides of the tear together. The tape held, but now the piece of masking tape was hanging in the air. Not good.

  Jerry grabbed the stapler and started to snap the two sides together.

  “This is never going to work,” Mike huffed.

  “Stop complaining. We’ll just pretend we weren’t the ones who did it,” Jerry said. He pulled tightly on one edge, so it stretched past the sliver of jet blackness, and stapled it to the other edge of the tear. “What we really need is a good sewing machine.”

  “What are you two doing?” a voice boomed.

  Suddenly all eyes were on Jerry and Mike.

  “Uh, nothing,” Mike said.

  “It doesn’t look like nothing,” said Mrs. Taylor. She was eyeing the rather noticeable rip in reality. The random pieces of masking tape and bad staple job had left several long flaps of the universe overlapping with one another.

  “Oh, that?” squeaked Jerry as he tried to make his way back to his desk. “That’s…uh…”

  “In the middle of my lesson, you’ve been tampering with the very nature of reality, haven’t you?” The teacher took a few steps forward.

  “We were just making some paper airplanes,” Mike said. He sounded a bit whiny.

  “And now you’ve gone and torn a hole with one,” Mrs. Taylor said with a frown. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “Uh…” Jerry said.

  “Erm…” said Mike. He turned away from Mrs. Taylor. The words on the blackboard behind the teacher’s desk caught his eye. As he began to read, his eyes went wide.

  Jerry pulled a long piece of tape off the roll. “Don’t worry, Mrs. T. We can totally fix this.”

  “Oh yes,” Mrs. Taylor said. “It will most certainly be fixed.”

  Jerry noticed that all the students were now staring at Mike and Jerry with wide, expressionless eyes. “Hey, Mike, what’s up with the rest of the class?” he said.

  But Mike wasn’t looking at the students or at Mrs. Taylor. He was still staring at the board. “My mind is not my own,” he mumbled, reading from
the board. “My mind is not my own.” It had been written on the board at least thirty times.

  “That’s right. Your mind is not your own,” Mrs. Taylor said with a big smile, “because it belongs to me.” She gave the shoddily repaired tear in the fabric of the universe a closer look. “I see you found my website.”

  “Your website?!” Jerry looked shocked.

  “My mind is not my own,” Mike said, unable to take his eyes off the board.

  “Don’t mind him.” Mrs. Taylor’s smile got even bigger. “He’s just being a good student.”

  “What language is that website even in?”

  Mrs. Taylor cocked her head back and opened her mouth. Out spewed a mechanical sound, like a garbage truck compacting an old refrigerator into a small metal cube.

  “Oh,” said Jerry. He was pretty sure they didn’t teach that language in this school.

  “My mind is not my own,” said Mike.

  Mrs. Taylor took Jerry by the hand and pulled him across the linoleum tiles of the floor. She had a firm grip. “I’m a little tired of teaching,” Mrs. Taylor admitted. “I thought I would go home for the weekend.”

  Standing in front of the tear in the universe, she peeled off the masking tape and pulled the two sides apart.

  Jerry stared into the depths of the tear. “You…live in there?”

  “Beyond it,” Mrs. Taylor said. “I admit it’s a bit of a journey.”

  Jerry nodded. He was feeling a mixture of fascination and horror. He’d never been through a portal to another universe before, especially for the weekend. “Can we stop and get a snack first?”

  “All taken care of,” Mrs. Taylor said, turning the corners of her lips into a creepy grin again.

  Sometime later, Mike blinked and looked around the room.

  The rest of the students were also sitting at their desks, blinking. There was writing on the board, but the words had been smudged out. Mike’s head felt a bit like it had been smudged out too.

  Then he noticed something. “Hey, where’s Mrs. Taylor?” he asked Jerry.

  Jerry did not respond.

  Mike turned to Jerry’s desk, but it was empty. He shrugged. Jerry was always wandering off. He’d probably turn up soon enough.

  TWENTY-FOUR FRAMES PER SECOND

  “You’re getting rid of all these movies?”

  Sam stared in disbelief at the trash bin behind the old movie theater. It was overflowing with torn-up movie posters and metal canisters containing reels of film.

  Mr. Lambert, the theater manager, loomed behind Sam’s shoulder. He had led Sam out here and was now pointing to the trash. “Every last one,” the manager said. “Ever since the movie studios started releasing their films digitally, I have been losing business. Now I have to close down because I can’t afford one of those newfangled digital projectors.”

  Sam noticed that Mr. Lambert’s eyes were red, and his wrinkled face was covered in a wispy gray beard, like he hadn’t had time to shave in a few days. His cheeks were hollow, and his skin hung down in loose folds.

  Seeing the manager like this made Sam sad. Sam had visited this movie theater dozens of times, especially on Saturday afternoons when the manager screened old horror movies back to back.

  “But why are you putting them in the trash?”

  “I sold what I could to film collectors. This is all that’s left. Junk. I have to clear out the theater by next week.”

  Sam swallowed. He wasn’t sure how to ask the question, since Mr. Lambert seemed so morose. Nevertheless… “Um… can I have one?”

  Mr. Lambert shrugged. “Unless you’ve got a 35 mm film projector, you won’t be able to watch them, but be my guest.”

  Sam just stood there. The manager’s sad face had vanished. Even the man’s gray beard seemed to have shrunk back into his cheeks. A curious expression had taken over his ancient face. “You don’t know how film works, do you?”

  Sam shrugged.

  Now there was a gleam in the old man’s eyes. “Come in, and I’ll show you. Last chance to learn the old ways before the theater closes down for good.”

  Sam shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was supposed to go straight home after school. “I really shouldn’t.”

  “Aren’t you curious how all those old movies got made?”

  Sam knew you weren’t ever supposed to go anywhere with strangers. But he wasn’t going anywhere weird, like following this guy into his car. It was the Paradise Theater. He’d been there a gazillion times. And if there was some kind of problem, he’d run back out. The theater was open. There were people inside. “Okay,” Sam said.

  Mr. Lambert led Sam around to the front of the theater. The marquee there had probably looked great when all the light bulbs were working, but half of them had burned out. But Sam could still read NOW PLAYING: NATHAN’S STORY. Sam had never heard of that flick before. No wonder this theater was going out of business!

  The manager waved casually to the cashier at the ticket booth, an old lady who looked as ancient as him. Sam got a bit of a thrill as they strolled right into the lobby, without even paying.

  As soon as he passed through the glass doors, the smell of buttered popcorn hit him right in the nostrils. Looking around, Sam could see the place needed some work. The red carpeting stretched across the floor like a dry tongue, the middle worn down to only a few threads. Hunks of wallpaper were pulling off the walls like overripe banana peels. And the framed faded posters of old movies were cracked and chipped. Sam wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the theater in such a sorry state. Sure, it had been a while since he’d been here—he mostly watched movies on his laptop or at the multiplex at the other end of town now—but man, this place looked rough. And like it hadn’t been vacuumed in at least a decade.

  Even the people working at the food concessions were as withered as raisins. They almost appeared to be coated in cobwebs. Sam had to narrow his eyes and stare to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. Mr. Lambert took Sam by the arm and pulled him forward. “You don’t want to stick around here, do you, kid? I thought you wanted to see how the movies worked.”

  Sam nodded. He sure did. He hadn’t come all this way just to look at the snack stand. Even if the snacks looked kind of old. And when he gave the popcorn in the big glass popping machine a second glance, he could have sworn it looked more like a pile of wriggling maggots than something he’d want to eat.

  The manager was really pulling on him now. Sam glanced back. The people at the snack stand were all staring at him intently.

  A blur of movement caught Sam’s eye. The door to the theater swung open, and a frail man—almost skeleton thin—stuck his head out. He stared at Sam like the snack-stand workers had.

  Sam squinted and strained to see past Skeleton Man to the screen in the background. It wasn’t a new movie that was playing, but some old black-and-white feature. The light from the screen was bright enough that Sam could make out most of the audience. They were all old. Very old and paper thin. Sam wondered if they were on a field trip from the old folks’ home. Who else would want to watch this ancient film?

  Sam didn’t have time to really think about it. Someone called out, presumably addressing the skinny man by the door. “Hurry back. He’s seen you!”

  Sam saw a fearful look on the skeletal man’s face—like he’d been caught in the act of something. The man abruptly turned away, letting the theater door flap shut. Sam wondered what the big deal was.

  He thought about doubling back to the theater, but the manager took Sam by the hand and led him up a flight of stairs to the projection booth. He dug in his pocket, fished out a set of old, clanking keys and opened the door.

  The booth was cramped. Canisters of film lined the walls. Long strips of film were stuck to pegs along another wall, beside a strange-looking machine built into a rectangular table. On its surface were spools and dials and a pair of reels connected to a small screen. In the middle of the room, a large projector clicked and hummed as two reels of film whirl
ed and jiggled around like the back wheels on a Mack truck.

  The manager beamed. “It’s quite something, isn’t it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Twenty-four frames per second. Each frame of the film is a still image, but string it through the projector and the images come to life.” He pointed through a window in the booth that overlooked the theater.

  Sam studied the projector. The reels were connected, so the film ran in a continuous loop. That didn’t make any sense, did it? Would the movie ever stop? “The movie just keeps playing over and over again,” Sam said curiously.

  The manager pursed his lips. “I was wondering when you’d notice,” he said.

  Sam stared past the glass separating the projection booth from the theater. The old black-and-white flick looked pretty boring. On the screen right now was some kid, maybe Sam’s age, standing there looking sad. The print was old and scratchy, like it had been run through the projector two million times. The image was all faded, too, so it was hard to make out much of anything other than the sad kid.

  Sam looked down at the wrinkly audience. “Why do they keep watching it?” he asked. He couldn’t understand why anyone would pay to watch a movie like this. It was obviously an old movie, but no classic that Sam could recall. Still, there was something about that sad-looking boy that held Sam’s attention. Maybe it was just that there were no cutaways to anything else. It was only the image of that boy.

  “Don’t pay any attention to them,” the manager said. “Let me show you the editing table.”

  He motioned to the machine against the far wall. It was one of the few pieces of equipment in the room, aside from the projector, that wasn’t coated with an inch or two of dust. “We call this a flatbed,” the manager said. “It’s used to edit the film together, especially when it breaks.”

  Sam turned away from the bizarre image being projected below. He stepped toward the flatbed table and turned one of the reels. A light flickered on the screen. “What’s it for?”

  “When the film breaks, I have to repair it.”

  Some of the strips of film tacked to the wall beside the table were cleanly cut, others torn right in the middle of an image. Sam removed one of the torn strips and held it up to the light coming from the projector bulb. He could tell it was an image of the same kid being projected on the screen right now. But it wasn’t in black and white. It was in full color and looked brand-new. That was weird.