Нил Шустерман: Scorpion Shards

“There’s a monster outside, ’Stone,” cried Thaddy. “I seen him! He was at my window gonna rip my guts out, I know it.” Thaddy wiped his eyes. “I think it was Taily-bone.”

Thaddy made a move to jump into bed with Winston, but thought better of it. Instead he just grabbed Winston’s blanket off of him and curled up with it on the floor.

“You had best give that back, or you’ll be sleepin’ with no front teeth.” But Thaddy didn’t move.

“It’s out there, ’Stone, I saw it. It was drooling on my window. I swear it was. We gotta get the rifle.”

“We ain’t got a rifle, you idiot!”

Winston slipped out of bed and touched his feet to the floor. In the silence, the floorboards creaked.

“Where are the crickets?” asked Thaddy.

“Hush yo’ ass, or I’m gonna paralyze your lips till morning.”

“No! I’ll be good. I promise. No more talking,” which was like a wind-chime promising to be quiet through a hurricane.

Winston glanced out of his window. In normal moon­light, he could see the yard and beyond, all the way through the neighbor’s field. Tonight, he could barely see the fence—and just beyond the fence, the cotton seemed to roll like beasts in the shadows. Tigers and big fat alliga­tors.

“I can smell it out there,” mumbled Thaddy. “It’s got a dead smell, like somethin’ back from the grave.”

“Quit trying to scare yourself,” said Winston. He didn’t smell it the way Thaddy did, but Winston knew that Thaddy was right—something was out there—he could sense it.

Winston grabbed his baseball bat from beneath the bed and headed toward Thaddy’s room with Thaddy close behind. No reason to wake their mother up until they knew for sure.

“It’s Tailybone, I know it!” whined Thaddy.

“There’s no such thing, that’s just a dumb old story,” Winston said, for himself as much as he did for Thaddy.

Then Thaddy made an observation. It probably wasn’t true, but it bothered Winston just the same. “You’re shorter today, ’Stone, " he said. “Reckon now you’ve got so short you can’t whoop a grave-monster.”

Winston threw Thaddy an evil look and put his forefinger up, just inch away from Thaddy’s mouth as a warning. Even in the dark Thaddy could see the silhouette of the finger about to touch his lips.

“No! No! ’Stone, I’ll shut up. I promise.”

Little Thaddy was ten years old—a full five years younger than Winston—but Winston was two inches shorter. Winston was, in every way, the size and shape of an eight-year-old.

It hadn’t always been that way. He had grown like a weed until the time he was twelve or so. Then, when his friends started sprouting legs and knobby knees, Winston stopped growing up . . .

. . . and started growing down.

The way he figured, he’d have the body of kindergartner again when he was eighteen.

“I wish I could grow backward,” Thaddy had once said, when he outgrew his favorite bike. But as he watched his big brother become his little brother, Thaddy’s thoughts on the subject changed. Thaddy made no such wishes anymore.

The door to Thad’s room was ajar, and Winston pushed it all the way open. Its hinges complained with a high-pitched creak as the door swung open to reveal . . . an open window. If there was a thing out there—it could be in the house now! It could be anywhere!

“Thaddy, was your window open before?”

Thaddy stuttered a bit.

“Think! Was your window open or closed?”

Thaddy couldn’t remember.

A gnarled branch hung just outside the window, coiled as if fixing to reach in and grab something. In the tree, a rag fluttered in the breeze.

“It’s my shirt,” said Thaddy. “I threw it at the thing. Maybe I scared it away, maybe.”

Winston stood at the threshold of the room for the longest time, not daring to go in. He squinted his eyes and looked at the tree. The light was so very dim that he could barely see the tree at all, and the more he looked the more he thought he saw a face in it. A big old twisted face. A goblin with a head the size of a pumpkin leering into the window.

“It’s just the tree,” explained Winston, breathing a si­lent sigh of intense relief. “Your fool head is playing tricks on you again.”

“But what about the smell, ’Stone?”

“Dead possum, maybe—under the window, like last year,” said Winston, but the smell didn’t catch him the way it caught Thaddy.

Thaddy clung to this explanation, and climbed into bed. Winston tucked his brother in, making sure to touch only the blanket.

“Thank you, ’Stone,” said Thaddy. “And I’m sorry about what I said before about you being too small and all. I think it’s great that you’re small.”

“Quit talking about that!”

Winston didn’t want anyone talking about it ever. The very first sign of trouble came about three years ago. Not only had it become apparent that he had stopped grow­ing, but something else just as alarming began to happen. It was the way Winston’s touch could make a person tin­gle. Carpet shocks, his parents called it. Didn’t think much of it. Then they had taken Winston to the doctor for a simple flu shot. The doctor noticed his height was half .an inch shorter than a year before. Didn’t think much of it. Must have been a mistake. A few months later, they knew it was no mistake he was a whole inch shorter. Four doctors later, and they still didn’t know what to make of it—and none of the doctors would acknowledge the strange effect Winston’s touch was beginning to have on people. Vitamin deficiency, they said. Genetic fluke. One doctor named Guthry wanted to call it Guthry’s Syn­drome and tried to send him up to the Mayo Clinic where they’d study him like a rat.

So they stopped seeing doctors.

It was the crazy old sisters down the road who called it “Growing Down.” They called Winston a witch child, and it made his dad furious. Mr. Pell had been a man of science—a pharmacist—but more than that—a scholar. He was an educated man with educated friends; he had moved back from the city to set an example and help the small town he grew up in. Those two old sisters were ev­erything he hated about growing up black, poor and igno­rant in the Deep South.

When Winston’s dad died of a heart attack, the sisters spread word that it was Winston did it, by putting “a stunt” on his daddy’s heart, the way he had put a stunt on their little vegetable garden, where nothing grew larger than the size of a finger. For all Winston knew those toothless old crones were right.

Of course, people didn’t really believe he had killed his father, but the thought was always there—and by then, Winston’s touch could numb people’s arms, making them tingly, like when your foot fell asleep. The family had stopped going to church soon after, because Baptists saw God or the Devil in everything. It wasn’t exactly comfort­able being the center of attention on Sunday. Still, Win­ston often wondered . . . if he could stunt vegetables, numb flesh, and grow backwards, was that science or magic? God or the Devil?

Winston finished tucking Thaddy in nice and tight, just the way he liked it.

“The window, ’Stone. Gotta shut out that rotten pos­sum smell.”

Winston went to the window, and remembered Thaddy’s shirt hanging in the branch, just out of his lim­ited reach. Before closing the window, Winston leaned out into the night to get the shirt. . .

. . . and the monster, sitting in the tree limbs beside the window, hissed like a python.

Winston screamed.

The hideous thing was less than a foot from Winston’s face. It was going to kill him. It was going to rip his guts out like Thaddy said. Why, of all times, did Thaddy have to be right about something now!