Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

Still, I didn’t mention it to Kristine, not till after everything was over. She didn’t know anything about computers then except how to boot up and get WordStar on the Altos. It never occurred to her that there was anything weird about Scotty’s game.

It was two weeks before Christmas when the insects came again. And they shouldn’t have—it was too cold outside for them to be alive. The only thing we could figure was that the crawl space under our house stayed warmer or something. Anyway, we had another exciting night of cricket-bagging. The old sheet was still wadded up in the crack in the closet—they were coming from under the bathroom cabinet this time. And the next day it was daddy longlegs spiders in the bathtub instead of June bugs in the kitchen window.

“Just don’t tell the landlord,” I told Kristine. “I couldn’t stand another day of that pesticide.”

“It’s probably the landlord’s father causing it,” Kristine told me. “Remember he was here painting when it happened the first time? And today he came and put up the Christmas lights.”

We just lay there in bed chuckling over the absurdity of that notion. We had thought it was silly but kind of sweet to have the landlord’s father insist on putting up Christmas lights for us in the first place. Scotty went out and watched him the whole time. It was the first time he’d ever seen lights put up along the edge of the roof—I have enough of a case of acrophobia that you couldn’t get me on a ladder high enough to do the job, so our house always went undecorated except the tree lights you could see through the window. Still, Kristine and I are both suckers for Christmas kitsch. Heck, we even play the Carpenters’ Christmas album. So we thought it was great that the landlord’s father wanted to do that for us. “It was my house for so many years,” he said. “My wife and I always had them. I don’t think this house’d look right without lights.”

He was such a nice old coot anyway. Slow, but still strong, a good steady worker. The lights were up in a couple of hours.

Christmas shopping. Doing Christmas cards. All that stuff. We were busy.

Then one morning, only about a week before Christmas, I guess, Kristine was reading the morning paper and she suddenly got all icy and calm—the way she does when something really bad is happening. “Scott, read this,” she said.

“Just tell me,” I said.

“This is an article about missing children in Greensboro.”

I glanced at the headline: CHILDREN WHO WON’T BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS. “I don’t want to hear about it,” I said. I can’t read stories about child abuse or kidnappings. They make me crazy. I can’t sleep afterward. It’s always been that way.

“You’ve got to,” she said. “Here are the names of the little boys who’ve been reported missing in the last three years. Russell DeVerge, Nicholas Tyler—”

“What are you getting at?”

“Nicky. Rusty. David. Roddy. Peter. Are these names ringing a bell with you?”

I usually don’t remember names very well. “No.”

“Steve, Howard, Van. The only one that doesn’t fit is the last one, Alexander Booth. He disappeared this summer.”

For some reason the way Kristine was telling me this was making me very upset. She was so agitated about it, and she wouldn’t get to the point. “So what?” I demanded.

“Scotty’s imaginary friends,” she said.

“Come on,” I said. But she went over them with me—she had written down all the names of his imaginary friends in our journal, back when the therapist asked us to keep a record of his behavior. The names matched up, or seemed to.

“Scotty must have read an earlier article,” I said. “It must have made an impression on him. He’s always been an empathetic kid. Maybe he started identifying with them because he felt—I don’t know, like maybe he’d been abducted from South Bend and carried off to Greensboro.” It sounded really plausible for a moment there—the same moment of plausibility that psychologists live on.

Kristine wasn’t impressed. “This article says that it’s the first time anybody’s put all the names together in one place.”

“Hype. Yellow journalism.”

“Scott, he got all the names right.”

“Except one.”

“I’m so relieved.”

But I wasn’t. Because right then I remembered how I’d heard him talking during the pirate video game. Come on Sandy. I told Kristine. Alexander, Sandy. It was as good a fit as Russell and Rusty. He hadn’t matched a mere eight out of nine. He’d matched them all.

You can’t put a name to all the fears a parent feels, but I can tell you that I’ve never felt any terror for myself that compares to the feeling you have when you watch your two-year-old run toward the street, or see your baby go into a seizure, or realize that somehow there’s a connection between kidnappings and your child. I’ve never been on a plane seized by terrorists or had a gun pointed to my head or fallen off a cliff, so maybe there are worse fears. But then, I’ve been in a spin on a snowy freeway, and I’ve clung to the handles of my airplane seat while the plane bounced up and down in mid-air, and still those weren’t like what I felt then, reading the whole article. Kids who just disappeared. Nobody saw anybody pick up the kids. Nobody saw anybody lurking around their houses. The kids just didn’t come home from school, or played outside and never came in when they were called. Gone. And Scotty knew all their names. Scotty had played with them in his imagination. How did he know who they were? Why did he fixate on these lost boys?

We watched him, that last week before Christmas. We saw how distant he was. How he shied away, never let us touch him, never stayed with a conversation. He was aware of Christmas, but he never asked for anything, didn’t seem excited, didn’t want to go shopping. He didn’t even seem to sleep. I’d come in when I was heading for bed—at one or two in the morning, long after he’d climbed up into his bunk—and he’d be lying there, all his covers off, his eyes wide open. His insomnia was even worse than Geoffrey’s. And during the day, all Scotty wanted to do was play with the computer or hang around outside in the cold. Kristine and I didn’t know what to do. Had we already lost him somehow?

We tried to involve him with the family. He wouldn’t go Christmas shopping with us. We’d tell him to stay inside while we were gone, and then we’d find him outside anyway. I even unplugged the computer and hid all the disks and cartridges, but it was only Geoffrey and Emily who suffered—I still came into the room and found Scotty playing his impossible game.

He didn’t ask for anything until Christmas Eve.

Kristine came into my office, where I was writing the scene where Ender finds his way out of the Giant’s Drink problem. Maybe I was so fascinated with computer games for children in that book because of what Scotty was going through—maybe I was just trying to pretend that computer games made sense. Anyway, I still know the very sentence that was interrupted when she spoke to me from the door. So very calm. So very frightened.

“Scotty wants us to invite some of his friends in for Christmas Eve,” she said.

“Do we have to set extra places for imaginary friends?” I asked.

“They’re aren’t imaginary,” she said. “They’re in the backyard, waiting.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “It’s cold out there. What kind of parents would let their kids go outside on Christmas Eve?”

She didn’t say anything. I got up and we went to the back door together. I opened the door.

There were nine of them. Ranging in age, it looked like, from six to maybe ten. All boys. Some in shirt sleeves, some in coats, one in a swimsuit. I’ve got no memory for faces, but Kristine does. “They’re the ones,” she said softly, calmly, behind me. “That one’s Van. I remembered him.”