The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [76]
“Seb!” Jed put his hand over my mouth with one hand and took back the computer with the other. “Sorry about that, Stan. He’s a little impulsive.” He turned his head away from the computer and winked at me before continuing.
“If all you want is the cure, Stan, then I’ll be glad to tell you. But first you have to promise you’ll leave us alone.”
“What? Son, you know I can’t in good conscience leave you alone! There has to be a controlled research study. I’ll have to examine you folks after this is all over. For heaven’s sake, tell me what you know. My mother is—”
But his sentence got cut off by Ma snatching the phone. “Stan, Jed is not your son. You don’t get to tell him what to do. And you know very well what he means. No more of your secret quarantine business. We’ll be happy to help you with your precious research, but we’ll come and go as we please. And we won’t be selling our land to you, either. Unless of course your little unnatural disaster tonight destroys it. In which case I’ll send you the bill.”
Just then the siren from town grew louder. The Hummer must have made it through the traffic. It was blaring its way up Kettle Ridge!
Jed grabbed the phone back. “Oh, one more thing, Stan—call off your men. Now! We’re not going anywhere with them. Deal or no deal?”
“All right, all right!” Odum cried. “I don’t have time to waste! Deal! What’s the cure?”
“Just go to an adrium vein like the one where we found the twins tonight, apply heat to the adrified area, and the infection will be drawn from the body. Like mag—”
The computer screen went blank. Suddenly the sky filled with flashes of color. Sounds struck the air like an orchestra during the grand finale. I felt vibrations in my bones. We all looked out over the gore with fear and awe.
21
Grum appeared at my side and gripped my arm so hard, I thought it might drop right off like a pruned branch. Over her own glasses she had propped the cracked magic glasses. Ma must have given them to her.
“Dear God, it’s the second coming,” she said. “Everybody repent your sins and get right with the Lord while you still have a chance!”
“You may be right,” said Ma, getting a couple of lawn chairs out of the trunk for her and Grum. They sat, leaned their heads together, and started praying.
I stopped listening. Words didn’t mean anything. I was so awed. The most vivid bursts of every color I’d ever seen were flying up into the sky from all around the Onion. You didn’t even need magic glasses to see them. Colors whirling around in circles, then swooping down into the ground. The air smelled so sweet, I almost couldn’t bear to breathe. The music sounded like all the noises of the woods and the ocean—yet, just wind.
The mined gore dirt started throbbing with those same swirling patterns we’d seen on the cuckoo wall and my tattoo, spreading out and out from where the colors landed, all the way to the fence of boulders that bordered the gore. It seemed that the colors were rushing along like water in rapids, whirling and spinning down into the earth. Down and down. The loose soil was actually sinking deep and hardening into swirls. I sure wished I could tell what was happening at the Hole in the Wall, but it was impossible to see. I felt sad about losing that place.
“Cowabunga,” a deep voice said behind us. It made me jump out of my sadness.
“Dude,” said another.
I turned to stare up at two of the biggest guys I’d ever seen who weren’t on TV wrestling. Odum’s goons had arrived. They looked more like twins than me and Barbie. Both wore gray uniforms and phone earpieces, and they both had on the pearly magic glasses. Those guys looked even more amazed than the rest of us, which gave me an idea.
“Excuse me, Sir, can I borrow your glasses for a second?”
“Sebastian!” said Grum, shaking my elbow. “Say may I.”
“May I?”
Goon One and Goon Two shrugged at each other. “The Chief said be nice to these folks,” Goon One said, and Goon Two replied, “What can it hurt? Let the kids have some