After another minute of tugging he stepped to the window, making sure to keep the rope taut. The dog hung directly below him. She was trying to keep her head above the windowsill, but her paws simply couldn’t hold her up as they swung below her. Her claws made a scrambling sound on the siding and Alex thought fondly of chasing her through his house as she skidded through turns, leaving scratches on the hardwood floor.
He doubted he’d ever go back to that house.
“Pull her in, please!” David called, much closer to the window than he had been before.
Alex peered past the dangling, scrambling dog and saw that David had climbed up the ladder directly behind her, pushing her up as he went. The fact that it was difficult to hoist the dog with help now made Alex feel pathetic. He put that aside, however, as he nodded to David and pulled his dog in by the harness.
She shambled through the window and immediately began chewing on the ropes.
David fell through seconds later, huffing and puffing. He pointed at the window as Alex looked at him. “The ladder,” he said between breaths.
“What?” Alex asked, confused.
“The ladder,” David repeated. “Pull the ladder in!”
This didn’t really help with Alex’s confusion. “Why? What if there are—”
“Just pull the damn ladder in!” Nicole shouted from outside the room.
“All right, all right!” he yelled back, as he tugged it up and through the window. He left it in a pile by this “less-than-easy” entrance.
David looked at Alex, then at the messy pile of ladder, sighed, pulled himself up, and carefully rolled the ladder up into a neat bundle. “It’s easier to use this way,” he said. It made Alex remember something else about David—or at least something he guessed from the fact that the boy had been skipped ahead: he was a know-it-all. Alex began to wonder if it would have been so bad if the siblings hadn’t found him at all.
The room they were in was eerily white: white walls, white tiled floor, off-white ceiling. He recognized a lot of the items in the room as belonging to the karate school that sometimes used the building.
There were also a lot of items that did not seem to belong. The most glaring one was a dismantled paper-cutter, the same large, green type that he knew from the teacher’s lounge at his school; the huge blade lying on top of the grid-like base, nuts, bolts and pieces of wood surrounding it.
“That’s for the next defensive machine for outside,” David said. The inventive boy picked up the blade. “This thing will do a lot of damage.” He swung it like a sword, making a whip-like sound through the air. “You know ... with enough force behind it.”
“Yeah,” Alex replied. “Radical.”
NICOLE
Sick of the two boys, but satisfied she had established who was in charge, Nicole headed down the hall to her room. She thought of it as her room, though the three—soon to be four—of them had been sleeping in it. Ryan was probably in his corner of the sleeping room, exactly where she had left him when they heard the dog barking and went to investigate. He might have moved, but she doubted it.
He hadn’t spoken a word since his father turned.
He was getting better, though. The room held two large mats and a few karate uniforms and practice cushions that she had dragged up from the karate school and which they all slept on. The previous morning, Nicole, having become a very light sleeper, woke up when she heard a shuffling. She saw David sleeping—evidently his sleep habits went unchanged.
Then she heard it again. A scrambling, scratching sound.
“David,” she whispered; then louder. “David!”
He didn’t open his eyes, and instead rolled over, tugging on the karate-uniform-turned-blanket, just like he would have done at their house when he was woken before he wanted to be. “What?”
“Do you hear that?”
“What? No.” Then the noise came again. “You mean that?”
“Yes, I mean that!” It took all of Nicole’s will to keep whispering, though it was a loud, angry whisper. She had to stay quiet because it seemed like the sound was coming from the walls around them.
“Um, Nicole?” whispered David, looking around. “Where’s Ryan?”
“What?” Nicole said, surprised. “He’s right—” She turned, pointing to the spot on the other side of her—the place where the near-catatonic Ryan had lain for nearly the whole time they had been there. He wasn’t there.
“Oh crap,” she muttered, forgetting to whisper. “Crap, crap, crap!”
“Um ... Nicole?” David said.
“Shut up, shut up! Crap, crap, crap!” she pawed through the pile of uniforms that Ryan had been using as blankets, as if he had merely shrunk and gotten lost in them and not been stolen or eaten by one of those ... things.
“Nicole!”
“What? What do you want?”
She turned on David, ready to punch him when she saw what he was looking at.
Some of the mats were set up like a box against the far wall. Like a pillow fort. As they looked at it, one of the walls shifted and they heard the scrambling, scratching sound again.
“Ryan?” Nicole called to the mat-fort.
David, feeling oddly brave, walked to the box and knocked on its roof. “Knock, knock,” he said, lifting it up enough to peer inside.
Ryan was inside, curled up, and staring at the crack of light that David had just created. “You okay?” David asked.
Ryan nodded very slightly, which was pretty much the only way he communicated anymore.
“Okay,” David said with a smile. “Just checking.”
Nicole was shocked to see the box. Ryan had barely moved in two days. “Did he build that?”
“I’m guessing,” David replied. “Unless one of us did it in our sleep.”
“It was a rhetorical question, spaz,” she said, shaking her head at her brother. She looked back at the box. “Good to see that he’s doing something, I guess.”
David seemed to be at at a loss for words—for once. “I guess,” he repeated.
Ryan had stayed in the fort almost constantly since then.
