The Eyes Of Kid Midas

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 hole, where all the laws of time, space, and science ceased to exist.

This was a much more accurate description of Kevin's bedroom on the day the glasses fused onto his face.

It was four o'clock. The sun was still high above the horizon, but Kevin was trying his hardest to fall asleep—to be dead to the world in any way he possibly could. He curled into a ball under his blanket and covered every inch of himself so that he could barely breathe. He tried not to think. Not to think of anything at all.

"I found the wire cutters," said Josh, hurrying into the room. Underneath the covers, Kevin burped, the cracked lens of the glasses sparked, and a pepperoni pizza fell from the heavens, splattering at Teri and Josh's feet.

"Just because all that pizza's coming back on you," said Teri, "you don't have to wish it all over us!"

"Leave me alone." Kevin stirred beneath the blankets, trying not to think of food anymore. He began singing in his head, forcing everything out. "A-ram-sam-sam, A-ram-sam-sam." It was the stupidest, most nonsensical song he knew. Words that meant nothing—thoughts that could not possibly take any shape in his mind. "Goolie-goolie-goolie-goolie-goolie Ram-sam-sam."

Still, a thought did squeeze its way in. The lens sparked, and an empty glass on his desk began to foam over with root beer.

Stop thinking! Kevin ordered himself, but his mind wasn't a light bulb he could just turn off.

When they had returned home from their eventful afternoon, it hadn't taken long for them to discover that they had a new and much more serious problem on their hands.

The cracked glasses had fused onto Kevin's face, and if that wasn't bad enough, the crack was making the glasses malfunction in the worst way.

Now the glasses were having little seizures—backfiring like his mom's old car. The fractured lens would send off a random spark every few moments, and that spark would reach deep into Kevin's mind, dragging whatever he happened to be thinking about into the real world.

He didn't have to wish for it—he didn't even have to want it. He just had to think about it. Controlling what he wished for was hard enough, but controlling his thoughts was like trying to herd a swarm of bumblebees with a goldfish net. The best Kevin could do was create a wall of static in his head and try not to think of things like Godzilla.

The glasses sparked again, and some unseen liquid flushed its way through all the walls of the house. Probably more root beer.

Teri snapped the blanket off Kevin, and Josh approached, holding the wire cutters like a surgical instrument.

"C'mon, Kevin," said Teri. "Now or never."

"No!"

Josh leaned in closer, trying to push Kevin's struggling hands out of the way. "This won't hurt a bit!"

But it would hurt, Kevin knew it. The glasses were as much a part of him now as his eyes or his ears, and as Josh began to squeeze the wire cutters on the left arm of the glasses, Kevin felt a searing pain shoot through his skull. Josh might as well have been yanking out his molars.

Kevin screamed, the lens sparked, and the wire cutters turned into a rose. The thorns pricked Josh's fingers.

"Ouch!" Josh hurled the rose down into a pile that contained a sponge, a carrot, and a banana, which had originally been pliers, a hammer, and a monkey wrench. "If you don't stop doing that, we won't have any tools left!" complained Josh.

"Stop torturing me!" yelled Kevin. The glasses sparked, and an iron maiden of the Inquisition variety appeared in the corner and clanged to the ground with a deep bell toll. Kevin grabbed his blanket and covered himself head to toe.

"You should be good at shutting off your brain," said Josh. "You've had enough practice."

A Chinese star flew through the air, the four-pointed steel disc just missing Josh's head, and embedded itself deep in the wall.

Josh looked at the weapon and shuddered. "You're really good at getting rid of people you don't like, aren't you?" said Josh. "First Bertram, then Hal . . . Am I going to be next, Kevin?"

"I'm sorry," said Kevin, "it was an accident." But even so an apology seemed useless. "We're still friends, right, Josh?"

"Yeah," said Josh, "of course we are." But Josh couldn't look him in the face.

"Maybe I could run the glasses down," Kevin whispered, as if the glasses could hear him if he didn't. "Kind of the way you run down a battery."

"Tell us how," said Teri, not afraid to use her full voice.

Kevin looked away. "It has to be cold," he said, "dark..."

"The garage!" said Josh.

Kevin slowly came out from under the blanket. It could work! It might not work for long, but it would buy them time. In the hallway, the extent of Kevin's mental meddling became clearer. It wasn't just the Mona Lisa hanging crooked on the wall, or the roast turkey on the bookshelf, or even the suit of armor by the linen closet that may or may not have contained a medieval knight. Worse were the changes in the house itself. Suddenly angles didn't look right. The floor seemed to slope off, windows weren't quite square, and the walls weren't quite straight. The ceiling seemed farther away, and in the hallway, which somehow seemed longer, there were doors that had never been there before.

It was the type of house Kevin might have passed through in a nightmare.

Teri looked around, troubled. "It's like I'm losing my mind," she said. "I can't remember what's supposed to be here, and what's not."

Kevin knew that as an outsider, Teri could never see things the way he, Josh, and Hal Hornbeck did. If no one told her what was wrong with the picture, it would all seem normal—just as it would to their parents when they got home. Kevin could imagine his mom hanging towels on the armor and his dad carving the turkey for dinner, as if turkeys always appeared on bookshelves for no apparent reason. It was amazing how normal the world could seem to others, when, through Kevin's eyes, it was so incredibly screwed up.

"Trust me," said Kevin, "none of it is supposed to be here."

They climbed down the not-quite-straight stairs, opened the not-quite-rectangular door to the garage, and stepped in.

The garage had taken on the same dreamlike quality as the rest of the house. The ceiling seemed to disappear into darkness; the cinder-block walls were damp and covered with mildew. The air was stagnant, like the inside of a tomb, and in the corner, the boiler had begun to take the shape of a face, with the fiery mouth of an iron monster.

The glasses sparked once, and whack! a door that had never been there before appeared against the far wall.

"What's on the other side of the door?" asked Josh.

"Disneyland," said Kevin with a sigh.

No one felt like checking.

"Drain the glasses, Kevin," said Teri. "Do it now."

With the simplest thought, Kevin snuffed out the gas fire beneath the boiler, and blew out the single light bulb against the wall. Weeds sprouted up, blocking out the light pouring in around the big garage door. They sat down in a tight circle in the middle of the room.

"Mom will be home soon," said Teri.

"Shh," said Kevin. "This won't take very long." The temperature in the room was already dropping. The glasses still sparked every few seconds, like a slow strobe light, and in the darkness around them objects splat and clanged and fluttered by with each spark. No one moved. No one wanted to know what miscreations—animal, mineral, or vegetable—haunted the house around them.

"Know any good ghost stories?" said Teri.

"Don't even..." warned Kevin.

Fifteen minutes later the room was in a deep freeze. Kevin could hear Josh and Teri's teeth chattering along with his own—but it was working. Now the glasses sparked only once or twice a minute.

Kevin's arms and legs felt lifeless, as if they were nothing more than bones with a faint memory of muscle. His joints ached, his head throbbed, and he wondered if he'd have to feel this way forever just to keep the world safe and sane. How long would he last? He wished he could see a future for himself, in a time long after he had escaped from this trap, but he couldn't see any future for himself at all.

A spark lit Josh's face. His skin seemed almost purple in that unearthly light, and Kevin began to wonder if he had, in fact, turned Josh purple. He felt fairly certain that he hadn't.

Josh spoke and when he did, his voice surprised everyone. It seemed hollow and airy, as if they were in an immense cavern, rather than a two-car garage.

"You know how we sometimes sit and talk about time travel and spaceships and the universe and stuff?" said Josh.

Kevin remembered those talks well. Every once in a while, when the mood was right, they would sit in Kevin's darkened room and freak each other out with really Big thoughts—all those wild, impossibilities that came teasingly close to making sense.

"You mean you two actually talk about something other than girls and baseball cards?" said Teri.

"Sometimes," said Kevin, his voice weak and wispy.

Josh explained. "Like, what if the whole universe is actually a single atom in someone's fingernail, in another really gigantic universe? And, when you beam up to the Starship Enterprise, what happens to your soul and stuff? And, what if, when you die, you live your life all over again, only backward?"

"Wow, really deep," said Teri. "I think you guys are retarded."

"Remember this one, Kev?" said Josh. "What if the whole universe is like just a single thought in God's mind?"

"Yeah, so?"

"Well," said Josh, "I think maybe you stole his thought . . . maybe now we're all inside your head instead."

The glasses had stopped sparking now. Kevin's strength was completely gone.

"I'm not God," croaked Kevin.

"No," said Josh, "you're not."

The glasses never did run down enough to stop working entirely. Perhaps they drew on radio waves and microwaves and who knew what other forms of energy that zipped invisibly through the air. The glasses were, however, too weak to spark those orphaned thoughts out of Kevin's mind.

With what little energy remained in the glasses, Kevin imagined a barge out in the middle of the ocean; then he imagined all the things he had created onto the barge. Finally, he imagined the barge torpedoed and sinking to the bottom of the sea. When the waves in his mind were clear of debris, he knew it had been done. All of the objects he had dreamt up were gone from the house—but he couldn't change everything. The mysterious doors were still there. The listing walls and crooked ceilings had not returned to normal.

In his bedroom, feeling like death's poorer cousin, Kevin curled up tight beneath his blanket. Josh kept him company. "You know, Josh, the worst part is that I don't even get into trouble for it," he croaked. "At least I could get grounded, or suspended or anything . . . but no one knows what awful things I've done."

"I know," whispered Josh.

Downstairs, the garage door ground into action as Kevin's mom returned home from work. His father would be home soon, too, but Kevin would be in a deep sleep that would, if he were lucky, take him to the far ends of the universe and let him stay there a long while.

Teri would cover for him, making up some completely reasonable story to explain why her brother was sleeping at five in the afternoon. His parents would believe it, or at least accept it—in any case, they wouldn't challenge it. His mom would feel his forehead and worry about the flu season. His father would promise to talk to Kevin about his strange sleeping habits, but by the morning, assuming Kevin acted halfway normal, his father would forget.

They don't ask because they're afraid of the answer.

Kevin felt the icy talons of sleep drag him down into a numb, dreamless slumber.

Josh got barely a moment's rest that night. He had no way of knowing whether Kevin's glasses would begin to spark again. If they did, not even Josh's bedroom would be safe from Kevin's creations. The rules had changed; the only limit to what could happen was the limit of Kevin Midas's overactive imagination. Anyone could be a victim now.

Before they had climbed the mountain, Josh had always prided himself on never giving in to fear—but now it seemed he was afraid of everything; shadows, noises—and worst of all, he was afraid of that awful feeling he would have when he woke up, of not really waking up at all—of waking up in what Mr. Kirkpatrick called "The Dream Time."

He had, once more, the urge to smash his fist against the wall, just so that he could feel real, normal pain in his knuckles. But now he was terrified to do even that . . . because what if he hit the wall and it turned out to be made of green cheese instead of plaster? Anything was possible as long as Kevin was stuck to those glasses, anything—from Santa Claus coming down the chimney to a child-eating monster hiding in his bedroom closet. How could he sleep? How could he ever close his eyes again?

"You're losing it, Bro," Josh told himself. "This must be what it feels like to go completely psycho."

Josh kept his vigil until the first rays of dawn, when he finally gave in to sleep.