19
I HEARD A CRACKLE, and felt a buzz of energy, a little like the feeling we got when we went through the Starry Doors.
Hold on, Grampa! I thought. Hold on!
Someone screamed. (Later, I realized it had been me.)
Then everything went black.
I felt a horrible wrenching, as if I was being pulled apart at the seams. I thought, at first, that it was because Grampa was being ripped from inside me.
It took me a while to realize that the true situation was even worse. It wasn’t Grampa who had been ripped out of my body—it was me! I was the one who got sucked into the collecting jar!
At first I just felt as if I had fainted or something. Then, for a little while, it was as if I were in a dream—the kind where you know you’re dreaming but can’t force yourself to wake up. Finally I began to realize where I was.
I screamed again, which was getting to be sort of a habit. It didn’t make any difference, since no one could hear me. I suppose it was because I didn’t really have a mouth. I didn’t have eyes or ears, either, but somehow I could still hear and see what was going on. Don’t ask me how that worked. I suppose I was hearing and seeing the same way that ghosts do—the same way I had when we left our bodies to go to the Land of the Dead. I hadn’t thought about it as much then, because I was still in a shape that resembled my own body. But being stuffed inside a bottle made you wonder about that sort of thing.
As I began to get a sense of what was going on, I realized that Grampa was putting on a big show.
“How could you just take him like that?” he cried. He was speaking with my voice, through my mouth, and clutching the sides of my head with my hands.
“What’s happening?” cried Gramma. “Anthony, what’s going on?”
Grampa turned my body toward her and said, “It was Grampa. He was inside me, and they pulled him out!”
A cold fear gripped me. What was Grampa doing? Was he planning to keep my body? Was it possible my own grandfather would betray me that way? But why else would he be lying to her like that?
Gramma was furious. “You let my husband out of that bottle!” she cried, lunging at the Flinduvian who held the collecting gun.
“Ethel!” cried Gaspar. He caught her and held her back.
Dysrok laughed. “We’ll let the ghost out when the time is right. Out of the bottle . . . and into the body of a Flinduvian warrior. His life force will animate that body, but control of it will be ours. He will be a perfect slave.”
Gramma didn’t understand any of that, of course, since she hadn’t had a translation spell put on her. But I did, and believe me, it didn’t do anything to make me feel better about my situation.
What made things even worse was when the Flinduvian yanked the bottle off the end of his gun and dropped it into a pack he was carrying. Everything went dark I couldn’t see or hear a thing.
I had just come back from the Land of the Dead.
In my opinion, this was far worse.
The only good thing about being stuffed into the pack was that it gave me a chance to think. In fact, thinking was about the only thing I could do under the circumstances. Actually, that’s not quite true. I could also panic, which was the first thing I did. Not that it did me any good. I mean, usually when you panic you run around and scream, or hyperventilate, or something like that. All I could do was feel like I wanted to do that stuff. That feeling kept growing and growing, until I thought I was going to explode. That might not have been all bad. Maybe the bottle would have exploded, too, which might have been kind of cool—though I don’t know if I would have zapped back into my body, or just been left floating around like a ghost.
A living ghost. What a weird thing to be.
When you panic, you’re supposed to take deep breaths. Since I had no nose, mouth, lungs, or air, I couldn’t do that. Finally I started to pray. That helped. I didn’t get a miracle or anything, but I did settle down—which was sort of a miracle all by itself, if you consider my circumstances.
Once I finally got calmer, I was able to start thinking. The first thing I needed to think about was why Grampa was pretending to be me. I finally decided he was trying to fake out the aliens. Maybe he figured if they thought they had a ghost, but had really gotten the spirit of a living person, there might be some advantage to keeping that fact from them.
At least, I hoped that was what he was thinking. Part of me was afraid that what he was really thinking was, “Yippee! I’m alive again!”
The second thing I needed to think about was why the Flinduvian collecting gun had taken me and left Grampa in my body. I came up with two theories that sort of made sense. The first came from Dysrok’s statement that Earth’s ghosts have an “absurdly strong” connection to life. Maybe Grampa, having already experienced death, was clinging to life more tightly than I did. The second possible reason was our recent trip to the Land of the Dead. Since I had already been out of my body, and not that long ago, maybe I wasn’t as tightly connected to it as I should have been.
Or maybe it was the two things put together. I was in uncharted territory here. And even if one of those theories did explain why I had gotten pulled out of my body, they didn’t tell me what I really needed to know—namely, what should I do next?
Of course, when you’ve been yanked out of your body, stuck inside a bottle, and then crammed into an alien’s backpack, your options for action are pretty limited.
So is your sense of time. I had no idea how long I had been in the bottle panicking, praying, thinking, and fussing before one of the Flinduvians opened the pack and pulled me out again.
Holding up my prison, he said, “Let’s give this one a try. Bring in one of the corpses. We’ll put him inside and see how it works.”