Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

He moved the curtain aside just three-quarters of an inch and looked out, his brow furrowed, at the slight, chubby woman illuminated by his porch light. It was Mrs. Kopinski. She had a plate in one hand covered with some sort of tea towel and her other hand was ringing the bell again and again.

Her face was the most terrifying part.

A completely blank face. That just looked straight ahead without blinking. Like all of Their faces when They don't realize anyone is watching them. Faces that make you think of unplugged machines.

Chuck lifted up one of the shed's back windows very carefully so as not to make any noise. He thanked God he had oiled all the windows less than three months earlier, when he returned to his empty house after they released him from the clinic. He had decided to use those kinds of domestic tasks as an exercise to improve his discipline. He went out through the window and hopped over the fence into the Carringtons' yard. Less than two weeks earlier, before all the animals in the neighborhood disappeared, he wouldn't have been able to do that without his neighbors' two retrievers attacking him.

He crawled along the fence, taking care not to be seen from the porch, although he knew that the porch light was now right between him and Mrs. Kopinski or whatever was now occupying Mrs. Kopinski's body. Then he set off running through the trees and a minute later appeared walking along the sidewalk. His face was covered in sweat and he had two dark, round stains under his arms, besides which his heart was beating like mad from the tension and the Dexedrine, but he trusted that the layer of asbestos in his cap would protect him as much as possible.

“Mrs. Kopinski!” he said in the most cheerful tone he could muster when his steps became audible from the porch and Mrs. Kopinski turned with an alert look on her face. “What brings you here at this time of the day?”

He was even ashamed himself of how artificial that had sounded. Mrs. Kopinski, however, merely traced one of those smiles. Those impossibly enthusiastic and cheerful smiles that now surrounded him every time he went out. Yet, whatever was going on was something different. He tried to gauge how long it had taken him to get out of the shed, go around the Carringtons' property and show up on the corner. Mrs. Kopinski that thing that looked devilishly like Mrs. Kopinski had had her finger on his doorbell for at least fifteen minutes. This wasn't one of Their routine visits. Something was going on. Maybe something in his behavior had tipped them off. Chuck didn't manage to hold back a shiver.

“I brought you a nice piece of Mrs. Kopinski's own meat loaf, Charles,” said that thing in front of his door, with the same impossibly cheerful smile. “That's why I've come. Mr. Kopinski didn't finish his and I have to watch my weight.” She let out a sinister cackle. “And I thought of you, son. Lately you look skinny. And we don't want skinny folks in the neighborhood.” Her expression suddenly changed. Still smiling, something in her gaze turned threatening. “We don't want scruffy folks in the neighborhood.”

In some place in the back of his mind, Chuck couldn't help noticing the irony in that. Before things began to change and everyone around him started acting like characters in a Frank Capra movie, Mrs. Kopinski had always gone out of her way to make her dislike for his family, and for him in particular, quite clear. Whether by telling off Ollie, with that crowing voice of hers, every time he went out into the backyard to play basketball, or by muttering under her breath and shaking her head crabbily when she passed him or Teri in the mall, the old harpy made her feelings for the whole family quite clear. And it goes without saying that she would have cut off both her arms before bringing him a leftover piece of meat loaf.

Chuck went up the porch steps, wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and took the plate with the piece of meat loaf that the woman held out to him.

“You shouldn't have,” said Chuck in an unconvincing tone, growing more and more alarmed by the presence on his porch. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw Mr. Kopinski waving from one of the windows of the house across the street. “But I do appreciate it, of course.”

There was a moment of tense silence, much more tense if one stopped to think what might be going on. Chuck cleared his throat and opened the screen door.

“Well, I guess it's getting late,” he said.

Mrs. Kopinski didn't move. Chuck tried to decide what he could do. He didn't have any weapons on him because he knew that They had ways of knowing such things. And as if that weren't enough, the way that smiling old woman was looking at him now gave him the impression that she knew perfectly everything that was going through his head.

“Would you like to come in and have a cup of tea?” he said, aware that his tone was sounding desperate. He had the vague sensation of being watched from behind every curtain on the street.

Mrs. Kopinski responded to the invitation by widening her smile even further.

The lights inside the house were turned off, which didn't keep the old woman from stopping for a moment in front of the door to the living room to take a good look around in the half-light before entering the kitchen. Chuck felt himself becoming gripped by fear. He knew very well what the woman was looking at. Almost all the living room furniture had been taken down to the basement to leave room for the enormous table where he had been putting together his models of famous buildings. A whole week's work of hiding his thoughts. Something started to change in Mrs. Kopinski's expression. Her features seemed to harden. Was it possible that some of Them had already sounded the alarm after discovering that the models had been stolen from the store? Chuck remembered what the women in the basement had told him about keeping his mind blank when They were nearby. As he filled the kettle and put it on the stove, he went through the multiplication tables in his mind.

The kettle seemed to take forever to start whistling. Chuck was already finishing the nine times table and was about to start again when he noticed Mrs. Kopinski's reflection in the kitchen window. She was standing in front of the garbage can, with that blank expression again. What was she looking at? Chuck turned around. And then he saw it. Mrs. Kopinski was looking at the empty model boxes piled up in the kitchen garbage. And then he understood. It was too late to continue pretending. They had found him out.

Without letting the conscious idea of what he was about to do stay in his mind, Chuck smacked Mrs. Kopinski in the head with the kettle. The woman staggered. He hit her one, two more times, until the woman backed up a couple of tottering steps and finally collapsed on the counter, her face full with blood and some kind of horrible dent in her forehead.

An intense pain in his temples left him instantly stunned. They had been watching. They had been listening. The collective mind was tuned in at that precise moment to the kitchen in Chuck's house. And he could feel it in his head. Like a furious scream.

There was no time to lose. He left the house running and entered the shed through the still open window. Through the corner of his eye he could see people coming out of their houses. He got into the minivan and turned the ignition key. He stepped hard on the accelerator and charged at the large wooden door, which broke open with a tremendous crunch. The minivan made it to the street in the midst of a rain of splintered wood.

As he drove down the street, he had time to see something. Something that was flying over the rooftops of the neighborhood. Something too low and too slow to be a light aircraft. He stepped hard on the accelerator, pushing it all the way to the floor, and turned down Main toward the outskirts of town.