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Part 1-19: Keys
“Keeping you. Not easy. Go fast,” said Eden.
“Where we going, then?” I could not stop shooting stares up at the new skyscraper. The second hand moved normally, silent and smooth.
“Show you… keys.”
Eden paused, then loped off towards the ballpark. Its head did the snapping, reptilian thing as it moved. Hunting, I thought, and had to do a quick cycle of long breathing to fight back the insanity of it all.
I followed at a distance, glancing back every now and then at the blanket crew, who watched Deluxe do something on her tablet. The people under the blanket were nice and still.
“Here.” Eden stopped. We were on a dirt path that cut north-south, providing a bit of a border between the field and the ballpark area. There was no one around save for a group of pigeons bobbing around a bench, likely scouring for leftover feedings. They too all had a faint tinge of blue around them; one followed behind each like little cartoon stench clouds.
“This. Too small. For key. But see.”
“What am I seeing…” I trailed off as a stone near the pigeons began to glow blue hot. It was maybe the size of a pack of cigarettes. The birds didn’t seem to mind, or notice.
“Not… easy…”
For the first time, I sensed an affliction in Eden’s otherwise flat, toneless voice. A moment too late, I caught on.
There was a flash and a flutter, and I heard a few dings and a hundred little patters. The pigeons had fled, except for three of them. Two lay still, and one writhed on the ground. The blue tinges were gone from the dead birds, but the dying one’s got brighter. Before I could properly digest the horror of it (my mind kept seeing our various avian Lobsters dead on the kitchen floor), one of those opaque, pearly lumps glided over to the poor creature. A disjointed tube emerged from it and began to probe at the blue cloud. Then it sucked it up. The bird twitched one final, violent time before collapsing.
The pearl sunk into the ground and was gone.
“Lock. And key,” said Eden. “But small. Need big.” It waved an arm up towards the tower, which did nothing special.
Then it began to walk again. I went over to the bodies, an incredible wave of sadness billowing around me. They were dirty ol’ scavengers, but these three had died and one had suffered for demonstration. For me. It was sickening.
I knelt down and went to touch the one that had its cloud eaten by the pearl, and was startled but not entirely confounded when my hand went right through it. I pressed my palm onto the ground, and went through that too. My sadness was interrupted by a weird sense of vertigo, and I decided to stand up and follow after Eden before I thought too hard about how I was walking on the ground if my hand could go right through it. I did not want to start sinking and find out what the pearls called home.
When I caught up to Eden, it was standing near the ball field’s left grandstand. The boys had told me that Henderson Field was the town’s biggest diamond, where all the main league games happened. As such, it was equipped with some decent seating. The structures were about twenty five feet at their highest, held up with a bunch of pipes and poles.
There were a few people on the stands now, watching uniformed kids warm up on the field. Their blue clouds were much smokier and heavier than the pigeons’.
“Hard to…” It made a gesture, flinging its arms apart.
“Uh huh,” I said.
“More hard to…” It looked around, then pointed. I saw a discarded pop can begin to glow like the stone did. I took a step back, but instead of flashing and exploding, it glowed past blue to white, then turned jet black, then collapsed like a sad little sand castle. I remembered the lamppost. I swallowed, and nodded at Eden.
“Takes… all… of me.”
It was fading, the blue man-outline bled into the wind, making the form appear shorter and fatter.
“Need big key.” It indicated the grandstand. I saw all the piping below it flicker blue for a brief moment.
“You’re going to… oh, oh holy hell.”
“You. Help for wifi. Help, no wifi. Wifi, is hard.” It reached out to me.
I backed away. “When?”
“Rest. Quick. Then soon.”
“How much time?”
“Time…”
It glowed brighter, and I heard a whirring, cranking noise from behind and up high. I turned and saw that the hour hand had moved. It was pointing at two.
I turned back in time to see Eden disappear into a wispy grey cloud.
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