'Josh,' said Hal, 'you shouldn't talk with a frog in your throat.'
Josh suddenly began to gag and cough. Teri opened her mouth to speak, but when Hal turned to look at her, she shut it again, for fear of what he might do.
Frankie Philpot didn't care about the kids in the corner. He anxiously raised the video camera, ready to record the magic of Hal Hornbeck.
'I've had this power for as long as I can remember,' Hal began, once the camera was rolling. 'I was born with it....'
Josh kept trying to clear his throat but couldn't stop gagging. Teri, who was trying desperately to free Kevin from the invisible stranglehold, turned to Josh and gave him the Heimlich maneuver.
'Go on,' said Frankie, 'tell me everything!' This must have been the highlight of Frankie Philpot's life— documented evidence of a supernatural being. 'Where are your people from?' he asked.
'Originally Pittsburgh,' answered Hal.
Teri gave a tug on Josh's gut, and Josh coughed out a good-sized bullfrog, which shot across the room like a bullet, right into Hal's face, knocking the glasses to the floor.
'Great aim, Josh!' said Teri.
Kevin flexed his arms and neck, spun around, and finally broke out of the Nelson. He dove to the ground on top of the glasses, like a football player recovering a fumble.
Frankie Philpot did not waver; he had a job to do. 'Forget about them,' he told Hal, never moving the videocam from his face. 'Tell me more about yourself.'
Kevin and Josh raced out, and Hal was about to follow, when Teri, thinking quickly, took hold of a dental X- ray machine and pulled on the long mechanical arm that connected it to the wall. The thing looked like a huge blue insect head. She aimed it at Hal's chest.
'Make one more move and I'll fry you!' said Teri.
Hal froze in his steps.
At last Frankie lowered his videocam. 'Is something wrong?'
Josh and Teri were on his heels, while, much farther behind, Hal was pursued by Philpot, who refused to let any phenomenon go undocumented. 'Wait!' he cried to Hal. 'I just have a few more questions.'
Kevin turned down a dead-end hallway.
Finally he put on his glasses, and the yellow lettering on the steel doorway ahead of him came into clear focus. It said DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE.
'Kevin, this way!' said Teri as she and Josh turned toward the elevator, at the other end of the hall.
The glasses were already filling Kevin with warmth, taking away his shivers and his headache—but not quickly enough. The electricity was humming behind those doors. Kevin could hear it, and he began to wonder. He pushed the glasses farther up on his face.
All that electricity . . . and only a few feet away . . .
He took a step closer to the steel door of the electrical room, and then another. Josh grabbed his shoulder.
'Don't, Kevin,' said Josh, almost reading his mind. 'You got the glasses, that's enough.... You don't have to do this.'
Kevin shook off Josh's arm. 'I want to do it.' Kevin reached out, pulled open the door, and looked deep into the rat's nest of high-voltage copper coils.
A heavy wave of electricity shot from the transformer and began to course across the surface of the glasses with the random pattern of a tornado funnel. Josh fell to the ground and grabbed firmly onto a steel doorstop, as if he feared being dragged away.
Up above, the lights began to flicker and dim, as if someone in the next room was getting the electric chair.
Teri and Josh had never seen Kevin charge the glasses. It was an awful, private thing they felt they had no business watching, but they couldn't turn their eyes away.
'He'll fry himself!' said Teri. 'We have to do something!'
Frankie Philpot and Hal had just turned the corner, and they stopped dead in their tracks when they saw where Kevin had gone.
For Kevin it was like coming to the surface of a deep, cold ocean and taking his first breath. He felt he could breathe in forever and never exhale. It felt better than anything the glasses had ever done for him.
And then something went wrong.
Something cracked.
It sounded like a million chandeliers falling to the ground at once, and it felt like an explosion inside Kevin's brain. He was blown back and went sliding across the floor. The current between Kevin and the transformer died, and the lights returned to their normal brightness.
Teri and Josh helped Kevin up and looked into his rolling eyes.
'Kevin, are you okay?' asked Teri.
'I don't know, I...'
'The glasses—they're cracked!' said Josh.
It was true. The glasses had overloaded, and a crack in the left lens was shooting tiny sparks.
'Let's get out of here!'
Josh and Teri practically carried Kevin to the elevator. Hal and Frankie were close behind and made it into the elevator just as the doors closed. Frankie raised his camera.
'I have to get this all on tape!' said Frankie. 'Somebody, please tell me what's going on!'
'You stink, Midas, you know that!' Hal grabbed hold of the glasses and tried to pull them off Kevin's face, but they didn't come.
'Somebody, please say something,' begged Frankie. 'Anything!'
'Siberia,' said Kevin, and he disappeared along with Teri and Josh.
Frankie lowered his camera. 'Correct me if I'm wrong,' he said, 'but did I just witness a transcontinental teleportation?'
'Siberia?' said Hal. 'Why would he want to go to Siberia?' Then the elevator bell rang, and the doors opened to the lobby.
Only it wasn't the lobby.
The elevator had opened up to an endless plain of snow, beneath a troubled sky. Before them stood a man with a heavy parka, a funny hat, and a leathery face that peered in at them. Even the yak standing beside him seemed confused.
'Uh-oh,' said Hal.
Kevin, Josh, and Teri picked themselves up off the bottom of an empty elevator shaft. The only light came from the cracked glasses, which still sparked like a bad short circuit. 'Take us home, Kevin,' said Teri.
He reached up to push the glasses farther up the bridge of his nose but realized he didn't need to—they clamped onto his head now, in a perfect fit. Kevin pictured his house, then opened his mouth to wish them home— but they were standing in his living room before he said a single word. He didn't think much of it. Until about a minute later.
13
HAUNTED HOUSE
A black hole, Kevin recalled from his ten-page report on the universe, was a sphere of darkness that swallowed everything that got near it—even light.
His parents often referred to his room as the Black Hole.
A 'singularity,' Kevin recalled from the same report, was that point in space at the very center of a black
