Unwritten Rules of Impossible Things, Page 4

still being completed, as if being drawn or painted. Hair was settling in, then mouths and ears became more distinct, and the more they grew, the more familiar they looked, the more they looked ...

  "Like us!” Phil gasped, and as he breathed again his counterpart began to breathe on the other side, and as Marcus put his hands to the side of his face, so the other Marcus put his hands up to his own newly formed face and felt it, for the first time, in wonder. The boys were speechless now, and in the few minutes it took for the others to become real, the originals were rooted to their spots. They did not try to move but would have found, if they had tried, that they couldn’t. It was the others who moved, the others who walked to their door and opened it, and as they opened it, the front door of the ghost house slammed shut. Marcus and Phil barely noticed. They stared as their copies walked into the driveway, and then up to the gate, and climbed over it while the dogs remained stationed and silent. Marcus and Phil, the replicas, walked off down the street while Marcus and Phil, the originals, followed them with their gaze, and as the others disappeared from sight, the two boys sank to the floor of the ghost house, and fell into a deep, deep sleep.

  All night they slept, and most of the next day too. They looked so quiet and peaceful lying there on the dusty and deserted floor, breathing calmly and deeply as if dreaming of nothing but good things. Marcus even had a trace of a happy smile on his face, and Phil looked more rested and more at peace than he ever before. Marcus was the first to stir, around sunset, nearly twenty hours after he had first gone unconscious. It was a breeze that awakened him, a breeze coming from the front door which was now open again. If it hadn't been dusk, but later at night, he would have thought he'd been sleeping for only some moments, but the light in the sky informed him at a glance it had been much longer than that. He shook his friend by the shoulders until Phil, too, awakened and sat up.

  "We've got to get out of here,” Marcus told him, and the boys wasted no time scrambling up and running out of the house, not even noticing the lights flashing on and then off one more time as they left, or the door slowly closing behind them. Across the street the moose house was just as they'd seen it the evening before, with the Greater Kudu Bull all lit up in the twilight, the dogs by the gate, and no other signs of life in the place at all.

  "What happened?" Phil said, rubbing his eyes and yawning.

  "I have no idea,” Marcus said, "but it looks like we lost a whole day."

  "At least,” Phil agreed. This thought hadn't occurred to Marcus, who quickly looked down at himself to see if he had perceptibly aged. If they had lost more than a day, it might as well have been weeks, months, or years!

  "We've got to find out,” he said, and the boys took off running as fast as they could down the street, both agreeing without words to head for the corner market where the newspaper box on the sidewalk would tell them the day and the year. Phil got there first, being older and faster, and shouted out loud some words he would never have thought would give him such joy.

  "It's only Wednesday!” he yelled, which meant they had lost just the one single day.

  "Kristen's going to be furious,” Marcus said, panting as he stopped at the corner.

  "I'd better get home right away,” he added, and started to run off, but Phil grabbed his collar and held him.

  "Just a minute,” he said, and Marcus relented and stopped.

  "Did you see what I saw?" Phil asked, and Marcus nodded.

  "Another Marcus and Dark Rider,” he said.

  "They might be still out here,” Phil noted.

  "I don’t know,” Marcus shook his head. "I don't know what to think. Maybe we didn't see what we saw? Maybe there was some chemical in that house?"

  "Like a drug?" Phil pondered. "Hallucination, you mean?"

  "Yeah, and then we passed out,” Marcus said.

  "I didn't feel anything weird,” Phil replied.

  "Me neither,” said Marcus.

  "I didn't smell nothing".

  "Me neither,” said Marcus again.

  "I don't think it was that,” Phil decided.

  "Me neither,” said Marcus, reluctantly, again.

  "Okay,” Phil told him, after a pause. "I guess you can go home now. We'll have to think about this. I wouldn't tell anyone, though."

  "Okay,” Marcus sighed with relief. He didn't want anyone to know, not yet. There was something that made him want to keep it a secret. It seemed important, and as he headed home, half walking, half trotting, he tried to think of what he would say, what he could possibly say. That he'd spent the day at a friend's house? Lost track of time? But for nearly twenty four hours? It was hard to believe. Maybe not as hard to believe as the truth, or what seemed to be that, but still, Kristen was not going to buy it, and what about Ben? How could he ever keep anything from him? Ben would know right away if he were telling the truth or a story. Ben knew all about Marcus and his stories. He’d spent his whole life listening to them

  Chapter Six

  Marcus approached the houseboat cautiously, trying to determine the best course of action. Should he try and creep up the gangplank and sneak through the porthole into his bedroom? Should he boldly stride through the front door as if nothing unusual had happened? Should he slouch in, hands in pockets, apology all over his face? It didn’t matter. He guessed he was going to be in trouble no matter what, so he resolved to face it up front, be as honest as he could and take the hit. Kristen might be really, really mad, but he could deal with it. Hadn’t he braved the worst before? Well, to admit the truth to himself, there had never been a situation like this, and he didn’t know what to expect. He certainly didn’t expect what he found.

  Having settled on the slouching approach, he slinked into the houseboat and there, at the table, sat Kristen and Ben and a giant. Huge and sweatier than Marcus thought humanly possible, young Officer Mike Gramm loomed over the table. The others seemed like mere ants compared to his bulk. His thin, wet hair was nearly the same navy blue as his uniform, and his small dark eyes pounced on Marcus even before he’d taken two steps.

  “Here’s the boy now, I presume,” Officer Mike grunted, heaving the rest of his bulk around the rickety aluminum card-table chair. Kristen jumped out of her seat and ran to Marcus, stopping just short of her instinctive hug, and pointed an index finger instead at his nose.

  “Marcus,” she nearly shouted. “Where on earth? What on earth? Are you all right? Do you know what we’ve? Why didn’t you call? Where the heck?”

  “Let the boy speak,” Officer Mike interrupted, waving his burly arms in the air. “Over here, boy. Come on, take a seat.”

  “His name is Marcus, not Boy,” Kristen corrected him, but the officer paid no attention. Marcus dutifully went where he was told, sat where instructed, and looked straight into the officer’s face. The man was sneering at him. He felt it. This cop was bad news.

  “Out with it, boy,” He spat. “What have you and your friend been up to? Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ve been seen. Yes, you have,” and he pulled out a sheet of paper containing a grainy brown photo and waved it around. Marcus couldn’t make anything of it. Kristen, who had returned to her chair, strained her neck to see, but it was Ben who spoke up.

  “That’s the Dark Rider,” he yelped, then became quiet at once, as if realizing he had done something wrong. The officer stared closely at the little one, whom he’d been ignoring completely up to that time. He sized him up quickly, then returned his attention to Marcus.

  “Philip Galvez. You know him, right? Don’t deny it. Don’t bother. You know him.”

  “I know him,” Marcus admitted.

  “You were with him last night, weren’t you, boy?”

  “Yes,” Marcus gulped.

  “And what did you do with this Philip Galvez?” Mike was leaning over the table now, his fat greasy face only inches from Marcus.

  “Nothing.”

  “Right. Nothing. Don’t fool with me, boy,” the officer warned. “You were see
n, like I told you. This photo right here? It was taken last night. Late last night by the watchman over at the old Hedgely Ironworks. You’re telling me you don’t know anything about it?”

  “That’s right,” Marcus said after a pause. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “And the glass factory too, round about dawn. I suppose you can’t fill me in on that either?”

  “Right,” Marcus said.

  “Wrong,” said the cop. “You were seen, you two boys, running away. What were you doing down there? Why were you out in the middle of the night, down in the warehouse district anyway? What’s two young fellows got to be doing down there at that time? That’s what I keep asking myself. Up to no good, is the only thing I come up with. Up to no good, am I right?”

  “I don’t know,” Marcus swallowed. This was not going well.

  “So you tell me your story now,” Officer Mike said, and sat back with a grin like he already knew what the answer would be.

  “We were just hanging out,” Marcus said. “We lost track of time, fell asleep. I never slept so much or so long in my whole life, really. We just woke up, just a short time ago. I swear it’s the truth. We were sleeping.”

  “Sleeping, eh?” Officer Mike shook his head. “And where was it you boys were ‘sleeping’ as you say.”

  “Not far from here. Pretty close. Somewhere safe. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “That would be a first for your friend,” Mike