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  “Some freaky storm, huh? The thunder woke me up. Scared the crap outta me.” She gave me an embarrassed smile.

  “Uh, yeah, me too.” I thought about telling her how my sleep had been ruined by my crazy dream, but something held my tongue, something more than just the gradual drifting apart we’d been experiencing ever since she’d begun dating Jim Thome, a senior on the football team.

  I’ll admit to feeling more than a little jealousy when Melissa and Jim had taken up, but truth be told, she’d been changing even before that. First her body had developed, somewhere after her fifteenth birthday. At the same time, her freckles had faded away, leaving behind an acne-free complexion that always seemed to be tan.

  As her looks and body blossomed, she’d become more interested in clothes and being popular than in catching frogs or reading comic books. Of course, I’d changed as well, delving more and more into the mysteries of biology and mathematics and spending less time riding my bike or tossing a Frisbee. Melissa continued to keep up her grades, but we no longer shared as many advanced classes in school. And after-school study sessions had gone from every day to only those times when she needed help for an upcoming test.

  As children, we’d both had dreams of becoming famous explorers, trekking the globe in search of unknown civilizations. Now, I wanted to follow the footsteps of eminent scientists like E. O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould, while Melissa seemed more interested in being arm candy than pursuing a life of substance.

  Nevertheless, she remained the only popular person in school who’d deign to talk to me. And I still embraced a secret fantasy that one day she’d see the light, realize it was better to be with an intellectual equal rather than a physical one.

  I knew I suffered from a heavy case of teen angst, the unpopular kid forced to watch his onetime friend and unrequited love move on to a different social circle. I was the living embodiment of every teenage movie ever made—the ones where the dorky kid has to sit back while the girl he loves goes out with the star athlete, where the girl has to stick up for him when her popular friends make fun of him. Yet in spite of everything, I harbored hope. After all, we’d been each other’s first kiss, sitting on my porch one summer night.

  Bonds like that don’t break easily.

  Besides, in the movies the girl always comes around in the end. A slim prospect to pin my chances to, but it was all I had.

  Yet, despite our shared history, despite the fact that I’d trust Melissa with my life, I found I couldn’t trust her with my nightmare. As I stood with her under the fearsome eye of that unnatural storm, something kept me silent on the subject of my dream, almost as if I had harbored a secret of great value, a secret that had to remain hidden or it would be taken from me.

  “Sean? Is everything okay? You look weird.”

  I realized I’d gotten too wrapped up in my thoughts. “Yeah. I’m just tired. I was up late studying for my SATs.”

  It wasn’t a total lie; I had been studying earlier in the night. I just hadn’t been up late.

  “Still planning on starting college early?” She took my hand and drew me away from the adults. Owen started to follow us, a devilish grin on his face. I waved him away with a frantic hand. He flipped his middle finger at me but left us alone. Sometimes he did show a little common sense.

  Melissa led me to the far end of the porch, out of the circle of light cast by the bulb over the door. Even after we stopped, she kept her hand lightly on my arm, unaware of how the soft, simple touch of her fingers affected me.

  “Yep. I want to get out of high school as fast as possible, get started on college. That’s where the real fun is.” I tried to make it sound like a joke; however, she wasn’t buying it.

  “Teenagers can be real assholes, Sean.” She had to raise her voice over the continuing thunder. “We both know that. But don’t kid yourself that college will be so different, especially as an under-age freshman.”

  I wanted to shout at her, “What do you know?” but I kept my cool. I had no desire to alienate the one person still willing to spend time with me outside of a library. Besides, it wasn’t so long ago she’d been teased in school for being smart and dorky. Maybe she really did still remember the way it felt.

  “I know. But at least in college there’ll be other people with the same interests as me, students and teachers. And I’ll be able to escape to the science labs when I want to.”

  She shook her head, her soft, straight hair waving back and forth, pale white in the ongoing fireworks display illuminating the town.

  “All work and no play. That’s not the way to do it.” Somehow she managed to make her statement sound more like an order than friendly advice.

  “Fine. Find someone to play with me, then.” The bitter words escaped me before I could stop them.

  “What?” Her eyes opened wide.

  I pulled away from her hand and leaned against the railing, which vibrated under my palms with each new thunderclap. “Sorry. Just feeling sorry for myself.”

  She nodded. I had to give her credit. She didn’t try to tell me I had no reason to be depressed. We both knew that aside from her, I got along better with my teachers than my peers. And sometimes even they didn’t understand me.

  “Before we came over here, my dad heard on the radio that this storm has everyone confused.” Melissa had a knack for knowing when to change topics. She also knew my biggest weakness: curiosity.

  “Why?” Despite my blue mood, I couldn’t help asking.

  “The way it’s just sitting over us, not moving. And all this lightning with no rain. The storm’s been dumping rain the whole time it moved up the coast, but now, nothing? It’s almost…unnatural.”

  Images of vacant plains under siege from red lightning attacks flashed through my head. I wanted to say I’d had my fill of unnatural for the night. Instead, I bit my lip and stayed quiet.

  Melissa either didn’t notice my silence or chose to ignore it. Most likely the latter.

  “And what’s with the sky? It’s like God puked up those clouds after a night of bad Mexican food.”

  She chuckled at her own joke while an otherworldly voice whispered alien words in my head.

  Avalla nophilm gjosar r’jim! Shub-Niggurath! R’lyeh!

  Namarasi Annunaki io mlgo ramog!

  Enki anu Nyarlathotep!

  Melissa’s body jerked as if she’d touched a live wire. “What?”

  “Huh?” I felt caught between worlds; an image of that other place lay superimposed over her, over the whole porch, and I had trouble focusing on her.

  “You said something weird just now.” She gave a funny look. “What’s up with you tonight?”

  Had I really spoken those words aloud? I rubbed my eyes and felt a measure of relief when I opened them again and everything had returned to normal. “Nothing. Like I said, just tired.”

  “Tired? More like stoned. Have you—”

  The pop-hiss of beer cans opening interrupted her. We glanced at our parents. Dad had finally recovered his usual good cheer and retrieved four Narragansetts from the fridge.

  “Looks like everything’s returning to normal,” I said, grasping at the chance to change the subject.

  “Yeah. That means they’ll be out here for a while.” Melissa’s mouth pulled to one side. “Which is my cue to go home. I, for one, need my beauty sleep.”

  “I think you can afford to miss a few hours.” I raised one eyebrow in an exaggerated leer.

  She laughed and punched my shoulder. “Save the lines for when you’ve got a hot chick you’re trying to impress.”

  I looked away. “Maybe that’s what I’m doing.” I cringed even as I said it. It really was my night for blurting things out.

  “You don’t need to impress me, Sean.”

  I turned around, but she was already walking across the porch. With her back to me, I couldn’t s
ee her expression, so I had no idea how to take her words.

  “Going home, Melissa?” I heard Mr. Meriweather ask.

  “Yeah, time for bed,” she said to her father. “’Night, Mom, ’night Dad. Goodnight, Mr. and Mrs. Black.”

  “Goodnight, Melissa.”

  “We’ll see you at home, dear.”

  I watched her go down the steps and into the night. Lightning flashes alternately illuminated and hid her, turning her into a ghostly presence gliding away from me. For one brief moment, I thought she turned and raised a hand, but then it was dark again. When the next burst lit up the sky, she was gone.

  “What’s the matter, Sean? No smoochy-smoochy tonight?” Owen made wet kissing noises at me.

  I raised my hand, intending to scare the bratty smirk off his face. “I’ll grind the flesh from your bones, insolent one! Phallosium! Achi nir vermis!”

  Owen’s face went slack and his eyes wide. He backed up three steps, then turned and ran into the house.

  I stood there, my hand in the air, wondering if I was still dreaming. I should have been frightened for my sanity.

  Instead, something inside me laughed, and I felt a dark pleasure at the reaction my words had produced.

  Chapter Four

  I remained on the porch until the storm ended, long after Melissa’s parents went home and my parents went to bed.

  The storm’s finale had been as spectacular and weird as the storm itself. There’d been no fading away, no dissipation of the clouds. Instead, I stood lone witness to an implosion of gaseous matter, the roiling, fungal masses compressing into a smaller and smaller ball, the center of which was a depthless black sphere, as if a wormhole had opened up over the island. Lightning flashed in increasingly rapid bursts while the atmospheric blight swirled around faster and faster, turning the sky into a cosmic toilet.

  Then, with a final crescendo of light and sound that shook the entire house and lit the heavens like an atomic bomb, the storm vanished, leaving behind only a normal-looking night sky, complete with twinkling stars and half-moon. Other than a few car alarms squawking in the distance, the night was silent, the echo of the thunderous climax gradually fading from my ears.

  Once the atmospheric oddity disappeared, a tremendous weariness overtook me. It took all my fading strength to stagger up the stairs to my room, clutching the banister with both hands the entire way.

  I fell into bed at three fifteen, not bothering to remove my clothes.

  My sleep was instant and dreamless.

  Chapter Five

  I awoke to bright June sunshine. A quick glance at my alarm clock showed I’d slept for almost nine hours, something of a miracle for me. I was a habitual early riser, unlike many of my so-called peers. I’ve always felt time spent lounging in bed was time wasted. And since I rarely stayed up late, I had no problem getting enough sleep and still being up before eight on the weekends.

  I rolled out from under the covers and uttered a gasp that would have turned into a scream if I’d had the breath for it.

  Staring at me from my second-floor window was a writhing mass of scabrous, sewage-green tentacles. A gaping maw, lined with row upon row of thin, needlelike teeth, occupied the center of this degenerate monstrosity. Each gray denticle dripped a thick, syrupy, amber-colored liquid, which I instinctively knew to be poisonous.

  I blinked and the alien visage was gone.

  Without thinking, I crossed the room and threw open the window, torn between a dreadful desire to see the creature again—and prove I hadn’t been hallucinating—and a desperate fear that it hadn’t been there at all.

  I needed to assure myself it had been real, for to have imagined such a thing as the creature I’d seen surely meant I was suffering some sort of breakdown.

  Leaning out the window as far as I dared, until almost half my body stuck out into space, I turned this way and that, looking for the beast. Nothing in my field of vision seemed out of the ordinary. Mrs. Johnson next door was weeding her flowerbed, her heavyset body clad in its usual housecoat. To my right, the Bronson twins were drawing on the sidewalk in colored chalk and squealing with innocent laughter. Far to my left, the choppy waters of the Atlantic cast thousands of sparkling reflections in all directions.

  No one screamed in terror or ran for their lives.

  “There you are, sleepyhead.”

  My mother’s voice gave me such a start that I had to clutch at the windowsill to avoid tumbling to the lawn below.

  “Late night,” I replied, withdrawing to the safety of the room, my heart hammering against my ribs.

  “For all of us.” She glanced around at the piles of clothing, books and adolescent detritus that hid most of the floor around my bed. “Go fix yourself something to eat and then clean up this pigsty you call a room.”

  I’d been fixing my own breakfast for several years by then, something my mother had insisted on since it allowed her to “do other things in the morning”. Normally, I was fine with it. Cereal, toast, eggs—all the basics—were well within my limited culinary skill set. If I happened to be in a good mood, I might even fix something for my brother, too. However, I had the sudden desire to let someone else take care of my gustatory needs, an unusual yearning to have someone wait on me.

  “Could you fix me something? I’ll have bacon and eggs. And toast. With orange juice.”

  “Bacon and eggs? I don’t have time…”

  Her words trailed off as she stared at me. At the same moment, I felt a tickle inside my nose and caught a glimpse of movement in the lower periphery of my vision, a blurred object that appeared and disappeared again.

  For one brief second, my mother’s eyes grew wide. Then the look of alarm left her face, so quickly I couldn’t be sure if I’d actually seen it.

  “Sure, Sean. I’ll fix that right away. You go wash up.” She turned and left, leaving me with a host of unanswered questions and a strong desire to see myself in a mirror.

  I hurried to the bathroom. The face that stared back looked…normal.

  It was me.

  Sandy hair, the same color as all the men in my family. Light brown eyes, decent looking enough when not distorted behind the thick glasses I had to resort to when my contacts bothered me. Ordinary nose and mouth. Same old ears, which I’d always thought were a little too large for my head, so I kept my hair long enough to hide that particular flaw.

  I reached a hand up to smooth down my sleep-disheveled hair and froze.

  A faint spiderweb of blue veins covered my palm. In the mirror, the back of my hand appeared to have a dead-flesh gray hue. I turned the offending appendage back and forth, blinking several times to see if this vision would follow the tentacled monster back into oblivion.

  Nothing had changed.

  I touched a finger from my other hand to the corpse-like skin. Nausea rolled in my stomach when I saw that both hands were affected by the same condition. The abnormal coloring extended from my fingertips to just above the wrist. I pushed, prodded, and scratched at different areas. Everything felt the same. I held both hands in front of me, turning them over. The nails were an even darker shade of bluish-gray, as if starved of oxygen. I spread my fingers and discovered that a flap of extra flesh, so thin I could see through it, now filled about a quarter inch at the base of every gap between the digits. Tiny blue and green capillaries pulsed in the membranes.

  It was all too much for me.

  “Mom!”

  I pounded down the stairs, not waiting for her to come to my rescue. She was in the kitchen, melting butter in a frying pan.

  “Mom!” My voice had risen to a whiny, preteen octave, but I didn’t care.

  “What’s the matter?” She put the pan down.

  “Look!” I held my frighteningly deformed hands out to her.

  “Look at what?” She stared first at them, then at me, a blank expression on her
face.

  “Don’t you see?” I shook them at her. I could hear the hysterical tone in my voice, but I couldn’t control it.

  “I see dirty hands. I thought I told you to wash up.”

  Her calm tones and complete obliviousness to my physical abnormality made me pause. My mother was a lot of things, but underprotective wasn’t one of them. All Owen or I had to do was sneeze near her and she’d be passing out vitamin C tablets and telling us to dress warmer.

  There was no way she wouldn’t notice something as drastic as my hands suddenly turning into something more at home on a salamander or frog. And if she had noticed it, she’d have already packed me into the car for a trip to the emergency room.

  Was it just my imagination acting up again, like the flying squid-thing? Was I seeing things that weren’t there?

  “Never mind.” I went to the kitchen sink and washed my hands. They stayed fish-belly gray. I forced myself ignore them, even though I could feel the webbing bending and stretching as I rubbed the soap across them.

  I sat down at the table. My appetite was gone, but I poked at my eggs and toast until my mother left to go run errands. I did my best not to look down at my amphibious appendages, fearful I might vomit right there in the kitchen.

  After she left, I held my hands up again. They hadn’t changed back to normal, at least not that I could see. Assuming, of course, that they’d actually transformed at all.

  “Maybe I’m really just imagining it,” I whispered to the empty kitchen.

  There was one way to find out. I decided to go outside. If I’d really mutated into something abnormal, surely someone would notice. All I had to do was make sure people saw me; if they screamed and ran away, I was becoming a monster. If they ignored me, I was crazy.