Chapter 3: The detectoscope
Sep. 10th, 2003 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaneramosI'm starting to have anxiety about this because I have hardly any idea where it's going after chapter 4. Nevertheless, I have decided to start locking the entries after this one in case something publishable comes out of it. From chapter 4 onward the entries will be "friends only" so if you want to read them and are not on my friend's list, just ask and I will add you.
Oh, and chapter four will introduce a gay character or two.
The detectoscope
The wasps were still swarming around their nest when Lark got back. He stood by the buckthorn bush for several minutes, staring at his other sandal. It lay mere inches from the epicentre of the disturbance. Finally, he found a long stick. Standing far enough from the nest to avoid attracting attention, he used the stick to hook one of the loops of his sandal and lift it out of harm's way.
He went home thinking it would be nice to hang out there with nobody else around. He could use the computer and tell Chrysalis about the strange thing that had happened to him.
Most likely, she wouldn't believe him. He sat staring at the computer screen for a few minutes. The house was so quiet he could hear nothing but the refrigerator humming at the end of the hall.
Lark went to his bedroom. Under a corner of the carpet was a hole in the floor where he kept things he didn't want his parents to know about. Most important was the stash of quarters from his allowance which he was saving for when he ran away from home. These were kept in a purple cloth bag with a silver design embroidered on it. The bag came from some kind of his father's favourite liquor. Lark took out $1.50 and slipped the bag back into its recess.
He wanted some Owl Pellets ice cream, and this time he would make sure Dumpster Trinity didn't get him on the way home. Kornburg was a small community. Lark could get downtown almost as easily by going the other direction.
Instead of walking toward Main Street, which followed Highway Six, Lark walked south through the subdivision and cut through a vacant lot into a neighbourhood of old, Victorian houses. He walked down Oak Street, a quiet avenue lined on either side with giant maples. It was a peaceful place, and the deep shade offered relief from the warm September afternoon.
Half a block ahead of him, a familiar silver Taurus pulled around the corner and proceeded up the street toward him. Lark ducked behind a fat maple, and pressed himself against the splintery bark. It was his father's car. He heard it slow down. Lark edged around to keep out of sight. It pulled up to the curb almost directly across the street from him and stopped. The engine was turned off. He held his breath.
Two doors clunked open. In a moment they slammed again and Lark heard two sets of footsteps. One was his father's. The other went clackity-clack on the sidewalk, a woman in high heels. They were moving quickly, but not urgently, without speaking, up some front steps, moving away from Lark toward the house on the far side.
When he heard them pause on the front porch, and a screen door swing open, Lark dared to peer around the side of the tree. He saw his father wearing his business suit, and Ms. Tendency from the library turning a key in the front door. When it opened, Mr. Denby placed his hand briefly, on the librarian's hip as they moved inside together.
Lark recoiled behind the tree and gasped for breath. He rested there for a minute, then peered around again, but the windows of Ms. Tendency's house were dark or curtained and he could see nothing.
He made a break for the next maple, back towards home, hid there for a moment peering around, then dashed down the remaining length of Oak Street and plunged through the vacant lot.
Arriving home a few minutes later, he was surprised to see his mother's minivan parked in the driveway. Lark slowed down and paced his breathing walking up the street toward the house. He debated trying to sneak through the laundry room or pry open his bedroom window, but decided against either approach. He would have to face his mother sooner or later.
She was peeling carrots in the kitchen.
"Hi Mom," he said cheerily. "I thought you went golfing."
She glanced at him strangely and he realized his mistake at once, but she said, "Oh hello, Lark. You're home."
She didn't accuse him of disappearing on her an hour ago, but that was normal. She never remembered these things. Lark started to walk toward his bedroom, but something stopped him. What was unusual was the benevolence in her voice.
"They had some trouble down at the country club," she explained. "Some damage to the greens. Very odd. Apparently there were strange lights in the sky last night. I went shopping for a little while with Mrs. Castanet and then came home."
Why the golf course story made Lark think of the talking vegetable in Mrs. Apron's garden, he didn't know. But he didn't want to think about that now.
"Lark, I brought you something."
She washed and wiped her hands and went to some bags sitting on the kitchen table. She took out a small parcel which had been nicely wrapped at the store in blue tissue paper with elastic gold string and a gold bow.
"I've been thinking," said Mrs. Denby. "I've been awfully cross lately, not myself really. And I wanted to say I'm sorry. It isn't your fault."
She came over and put the package in Lark's hands.
"Is anything the matter, Mom?"
"No, nothing really."
As she turned away, she brushed at her eye, then went back to the counter, picked up the peeler and started in at the carrots again.
"Go ahead, open it," she said.
There was something odd about the parcel. It didn't look unusual. It was just an oblong box the length of a ruler, pleasantly wrapped. It was light, and nothing jiggled inside when Lark shook it. He could tell that it contained something, and that something was what alarmed him.
Not wanting to offend his mother, he pulled off the stretchy string and tore the tissue paper. Inside, there was more tissue paper. Lark pulled it out and was relieved to uncover only a wooden kaleidoscope of the kind he had often seen in gift shops. It had three sides, with a triangular panel of glass in each end. He set the box and wrappings on the corner of the counter and looked through the glass.
It turned out to be no ordinary kaleidoscope. Actually, it was too ordinary to be ordinary. There were no coloured glass shards or mirrors inside. It was just a triangular tube with a glass at the other end. Looking through it he could see through the kitchen window to the side of the neighbour's shed. He turned and looked at his mother's shoulder, which was working rhythmically, chopping carrots now. She was wearing a yellow dress with little red tulips on it and a white lace apron overtop. All he could see was a triangle of his mother's back.
"Thanks mom," Lark said, and then he decided to go to his room.
She hadn't even asked him whether he had done his homework, so he decided to do it. He put the kaleidoscope on the edge of his desk, got his school bag and took out a page of math questions. It didn't take him long to finish that.
Then he flopped on the bed and read another chapter of The Tombs of Atuan.
By then it was 7:00. Mr. Denby usually got home from work at 5:30, but Lark still hadn't heard his car in the driveway.
Lark wanted to go outside, but he felt uncomfortable about seeing his mother again. Sneaking out the bedroom window didn't seem quite right, though. He picked up the new thing. What else should he call it? Kaleidoscope. He went out into the hall.
He could see his mother sitting at the kitchen table. It was all set for dinner. She was sitting there reading a pocket book. She didn't look up or even move a muscle when he came out of his room. Lark stepped quietly down the hall, through the laundry room and into the back yard.
Once outside Lark just wandered around his mother's garden. He didn't know what else to do. He thought for a moment about Mrs. Apron and the strange thing in her garden, but he stopped again. He still didn't want to think about it.
He decided to play with the kaleidoscope. Although it was totally useless, it was very attractive. He didn't know what rosewood looked like, but guessed that's what it must be made of. The reddish wood was nicely polished. The glass had a slightly purplish tinge to it, too. He tried looking through it at some of this mother's flowers. Mrs. Denby had many attractive roses, dahlias and zinnias, which were fun to look at through the thing. It was almost as fun as looking at them with the unaided eye.
Then Lark noticed a strange, glowing line running across the leaf of one of the roses. It was bright green. Neon green in fact. He tried looking at the leaf without the kaleidoscope, but he could see nothing. Putting the tube back to his eye, he saw the line again, clear as before. It was a tiny line, no wider than the head of a pin, but very bright. Then he noticed other lines on other leaves and flowers, some fainter, some brighter. They were all neon green, but different shades of green.
Next, Lark noticed a honeybee roaming on a big head of pink sedum flowers, and it was tracing one of these lines behind it. Removing the tube from his eye, Lark could still see the bee, but no line. The line showed where the bee had been, and he could only see it while looking through the kaleidoscope.
He looked at some of the other lines and found other insects at the ends of them: ants, beetles, flies. Then he looked around the yard, and he could see more lines across the grass, some of them much fatter. Through the next yard strutted the neighbour's black cat. And there behind it stretched another green line.
Lark ran around the yard excitedly, finding different kinds of lines and following them. He used it to find a mouse rustling through some leaves, and to find the place where a squirrel had scampered up a tree. The line ran right up the bark and into the branches.
Some of the lines were fainter. Lark noticed that they faded as they got older.
He ran around to the front of the house to see what was in the street. That's when he noticed his father's silver Taurus in the driveway. A wide green line ran from the driver's door, up the front steps and into the house. He hadn't noticed this before, but his parents were both in the house, yelling at one another. He couldn't hear what they were saying. He didn't want to.
Lark turned around and ran through the back yard. He headed across the next street toward the river. Not far away was the field where he had been stung by wasps earlier that afternoon. That's where he headed. There, and Mrs. Apron's garden.
But suddenly he heard his mother calling him from the back porch. It was not his whole name.
Just, "Lark!"
But it was enough. The magic worked. The magic felt especially strong today, even though she didn't call him Larkwhistle.
"Lark, it's time to come in for dinner!"
Dinner that night was unusually silent. Besides boiled carrots they had roasted chicken pieces and leftover macaroni salad from the night before. His parents normally talked at the table about what books they were reading. But there was none of that tonight. For dessert they had vanilla ice cream with sliced peaches.
"Did you do your homework?" his mother asked as he got up from the table.
"Yes, Mom," he said politely.
After dinner he didn't feel interested in using the new thing again. But he decided to call it a detectoscope and put it safely in his top dresser drawer alongside his socks. He read another chapter of his book, but it was late, and soon his mother told him to brush his teeth and turn out the light and go to bed.
Lark had a hard time getting to sleep that night. As he lay awake, he started to think about what he had seen on Oak Street, and about his mother's strange behaviour. These thoughts made him unhappy. So finally he allowed himself to think about the talking vegetable in Mrs. Apron's garden. This also made Lark uneasy, but he made a couple of decisions while lying there in the dark, with a moonlight glow starting to break in at the window.
One, he would tell Chrysalis about the talking squash and the detectoscope, tomorrow after school.
Two, he would go back and see Mrs. Apron and her garden again.
By the time he had worked this out, a full moon had risen high above the garden outside. Lark retrieved his detectoscope from the drawer and went to his bedroom window. From there he could see down the length of the garden. Putting the scope to his eye, he could see the lawn and garden brightly overwritten with neon green lines. The only thing he couldn't see were the trails of flying things like moths and bats.
Then his eyes strayed down to the end of the garden where his father kept a few vegetables.
Lark made another decision.
He put the detectoscope back in the drawer, carefully opened his bedroom door and tiptoed down the hall, through the laundry room, carefully turning the deadbolt so it didn't make a sound, and sliding silently into the bright moonlight in his pyjamas. He went to the shed and got a hoe, then walked with determination to the end of the garden where the vegetables grew.
He started hacking viciously at his father's tomatoes.
Oh, and chapter four will introduce a gay character or two.
The detectoscope
The wasps were still swarming around their nest when Lark got back. He stood by the buckthorn bush for several minutes, staring at his other sandal. It lay mere inches from the epicentre of the disturbance. Finally, he found a long stick. Standing far enough from the nest to avoid attracting attention, he used the stick to hook one of the loops of his sandal and lift it out of harm's way.
He went home thinking it would be nice to hang out there with nobody else around. He could use the computer and tell Chrysalis about the strange thing that had happened to him.
Most likely, she wouldn't believe him. He sat staring at the computer screen for a few minutes. The house was so quiet he could hear nothing but the refrigerator humming at the end of the hall.
Lark went to his bedroom. Under a corner of the carpet was a hole in the floor where he kept things he didn't want his parents to know about. Most important was the stash of quarters from his allowance which he was saving for when he ran away from home. These were kept in a purple cloth bag with a silver design embroidered on it. The bag came from some kind of his father's favourite liquor. Lark took out $1.50 and slipped the bag back into its recess.
He wanted some Owl Pellets ice cream, and this time he would make sure Dumpster Trinity didn't get him on the way home. Kornburg was a small community. Lark could get downtown almost as easily by going the other direction.
Instead of walking toward Main Street, which followed Highway Six, Lark walked south through the subdivision and cut through a vacant lot into a neighbourhood of old, Victorian houses. He walked down Oak Street, a quiet avenue lined on either side with giant maples. It was a peaceful place, and the deep shade offered relief from the warm September afternoon.
Half a block ahead of him, a familiar silver Taurus pulled around the corner and proceeded up the street toward him. Lark ducked behind a fat maple, and pressed himself against the splintery bark. It was his father's car. He heard it slow down. Lark edged around to keep out of sight. It pulled up to the curb almost directly across the street from him and stopped. The engine was turned off. He held his breath.
Two doors clunked open. In a moment they slammed again and Lark heard two sets of footsteps. One was his father's. The other went clackity-clack on the sidewalk, a woman in high heels. They were moving quickly, but not urgently, without speaking, up some front steps, moving away from Lark toward the house on the far side.
When he heard them pause on the front porch, and a screen door swing open, Lark dared to peer around the side of the tree. He saw his father wearing his business suit, and Ms. Tendency from the library turning a key in the front door. When it opened, Mr. Denby placed his hand briefly, on the librarian's hip as they moved inside together.
Lark recoiled behind the tree and gasped for breath. He rested there for a minute, then peered around again, but the windows of Ms. Tendency's house were dark or curtained and he could see nothing.
He made a break for the next maple, back towards home, hid there for a moment peering around, then dashed down the remaining length of Oak Street and plunged through the vacant lot.
Arriving home a few minutes later, he was surprised to see his mother's minivan parked in the driveway. Lark slowed down and paced his breathing walking up the street toward the house. He debated trying to sneak through the laundry room or pry open his bedroom window, but decided against either approach. He would have to face his mother sooner or later.
She was peeling carrots in the kitchen.
"Hi Mom," he said cheerily. "I thought you went golfing."
She glanced at him strangely and he realized his mistake at once, but she said, "Oh hello, Lark. You're home."
She didn't accuse him of disappearing on her an hour ago, but that was normal. She never remembered these things. Lark started to walk toward his bedroom, but something stopped him. What was unusual was the benevolence in her voice.
"They had some trouble down at the country club," she explained. "Some damage to the greens. Very odd. Apparently there were strange lights in the sky last night. I went shopping for a little while with Mrs. Castanet and then came home."
Why the golf course story made Lark think of the talking vegetable in Mrs. Apron's garden, he didn't know. But he didn't want to think about that now.
"Lark, I brought you something."
She washed and wiped her hands and went to some bags sitting on the kitchen table. She took out a small parcel which had been nicely wrapped at the store in blue tissue paper with elastic gold string and a gold bow.
"I've been thinking," said Mrs. Denby. "I've been awfully cross lately, not myself really. And I wanted to say I'm sorry. It isn't your fault."
She came over and put the package in Lark's hands.
"Is anything the matter, Mom?"
"No, nothing really."
As she turned away, she brushed at her eye, then went back to the counter, picked up the peeler and started in at the carrots again.
"Go ahead, open it," she said.
There was something odd about the parcel. It didn't look unusual. It was just an oblong box the length of a ruler, pleasantly wrapped. It was light, and nothing jiggled inside when Lark shook it. He could tell that it contained something, and that something was what alarmed him.
Not wanting to offend his mother, he pulled off the stretchy string and tore the tissue paper. Inside, there was more tissue paper. Lark pulled it out and was relieved to uncover only a wooden kaleidoscope of the kind he had often seen in gift shops. It had three sides, with a triangular panel of glass in each end. He set the box and wrappings on the corner of the counter and looked through the glass.
It turned out to be no ordinary kaleidoscope. Actually, it was too ordinary to be ordinary. There were no coloured glass shards or mirrors inside. It was just a triangular tube with a glass at the other end. Looking through it he could see through the kitchen window to the side of the neighbour's shed. He turned and looked at his mother's shoulder, which was working rhythmically, chopping carrots now. She was wearing a yellow dress with little red tulips on it and a white lace apron overtop. All he could see was a triangle of his mother's back.
"Thanks mom," Lark said, and then he decided to go to his room.
She hadn't even asked him whether he had done his homework, so he decided to do it. He put the kaleidoscope on the edge of his desk, got his school bag and took out a page of math questions. It didn't take him long to finish that.
Then he flopped on the bed and read another chapter of The Tombs of Atuan.
By then it was 7:00. Mr. Denby usually got home from work at 5:30, but Lark still hadn't heard his car in the driveway.
Lark wanted to go outside, but he felt uncomfortable about seeing his mother again. Sneaking out the bedroom window didn't seem quite right, though. He picked up the new thing. What else should he call it? Kaleidoscope. He went out into the hall.
He could see his mother sitting at the kitchen table. It was all set for dinner. She was sitting there reading a pocket book. She didn't look up or even move a muscle when he came out of his room. Lark stepped quietly down the hall, through the laundry room and into the back yard.
Once outside Lark just wandered around his mother's garden. He didn't know what else to do. He thought for a moment about Mrs. Apron and the strange thing in her garden, but he stopped again. He still didn't want to think about it.
He decided to play with the kaleidoscope. Although it was totally useless, it was very attractive. He didn't know what rosewood looked like, but guessed that's what it must be made of. The reddish wood was nicely polished. The glass had a slightly purplish tinge to it, too. He tried looking through it at some of this mother's flowers. Mrs. Denby had many attractive roses, dahlias and zinnias, which were fun to look at through the thing. It was almost as fun as looking at them with the unaided eye.
Then Lark noticed a strange, glowing line running across the leaf of one of the roses. It was bright green. Neon green in fact. He tried looking at the leaf without the kaleidoscope, but he could see nothing. Putting the tube back to his eye, he saw the line again, clear as before. It was a tiny line, no wider than the head of a pin, but very bright. Then he noticed other lines on other leaves and flowers, some fainter, some brighter. They were all neon green, but different shades of green.
Next, Lark noticed a honeybee roaming on a big head of pink sedum flowers, and it was tracing one of these lines behind it. Removing the tube from his eye, Lark could still see the bee, but no line. The line showed where the bee had been, and he could only see it while looking through the kaleidoscope.
He looked at some of the other lines and found other insects at the ends of them: ants, beetles, flies. Then he looked around the yard, and he could see more lines across the grass, some of them much fatter. Through the next yard strutted the neighbour's black cat. And there behind it stretched another green line.
Lark ran around the yard excitedly, finding different kinds of lines and following them. He used it to find a mouse rustling through some leaves, and to find the place where a squirrel had scampered up a tree. The line ran right up the bark and into the branches.
Some of the lines were fainter. Lark noticed that they faded as they got older.
He ran around to the front of the house to see what was in the street. That's when he noticed his father's silver Taurus in the driveway. A wide green line ran from the driver's door, up the front steps and into the house. He hadn't noticed this before, but his parents were both in the house, yelling at one another. He couldn't hear what they were saying. He didn't want to.
Lark turned around and ran through the back yard. He headed across the next street toward the river. Not far away was the field where he had been stung by wasps earlier that afternoon. That's where he headed. There, and Mrs. Apron's garden.
But suddenly he heard his mother calling him from the back porch. It was not his whole name.
Just, "Lark!"
But it was enough. The magic worked. The magic felt especially strong today, even though she didn't call him Larkwhistle.
"Lark, it's time to come in for dinner!"
Dinner that night was unusually silent. Besides boiled carrots they had roasted chicken pieces and leftover macaroni salad from the night before. His parents normally talked at the table about what books they were reading. But there was none of that tonight. For dessert they had vanilla ice cream with sliced peaches.
"Did you do your homework?" his mother asked as he got up from the table.
"Yes, Mom," he said politely.
After dinner he didn't feel interested in using the new thing again. But he decided to call it a detectoscope and put it safely in his top dresser drawer alongside his socks. He read another chapter of his book, but it was late, and soon his mother told him to brush his teeth and turn out the light and go to bed.
Lark had a hard time getting to sleep that night. As he lay awake, he started to think about what he had seen on Oak Street, and about his mother's strange behaviour. These thoughts made him unhappy. So finally he allowed himself to think about the talking vegetable in Mrs. Apron's garden. This also made Lark uneasy, but he made a couple of decisions while lying there in the dark, with a moonlight glow starting to break in at the window.
One, he would tell Chrysalis about the talking squash and the detectoscope, tomorrow after school.
Two, he would go back and see Mrs. Apron and her garden again.
By the time he had worked this out, a full moon had risen high above the garden outside. Lark retrieved his detectoscope from the drawer and went to his bedroom window. From there he could see down the length of the garden. Putting the scope to his eye, he could see the lawn and garden brightly overwritten with neon green lines. The only thing he couldn't see were the trails of flying things like moths and bats.
Then his eyes strayed down to the end of the garden where his father kept a few vegetables.
Lark made another decision.
He put the detectoscope back in the drawer, carefully opened his bedroom door and tiptoed down the hall, through the laundry room, carefully turning the deadbolt so it didn't make a sound, and sliding silently into the bright moonlight in his pyjamas. He went to the shed and got a hoe, then walked with determination to the end of the garden where the vegetables grew.
He started hacking viciously at his father's tomatoes.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 12:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 12:54 pm (UTC)He writes: Back to the fall of 1944, when a stepfather sits in his West Eleventh Street apartment and resumes the abondoned draft of his first children's book, tentatively called "Stuart Little". (It is his step father).
no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 01:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 01:40 pm (UTC)I know it's easier said than done, but don't worry about it. It sounds like you've got some fairly developed characters (or at least you're faking it well, if you don't), and you might have just enough figured out in your mind to where they tell you what happens next. Almost like dictation. If you need some help getting going, then you can look (briefly) over what you've written, and think about the elements you've introduced so far, and start trying to answer some of the questions you've raised. I've found that to be helpful.
Keep at it. This is really good.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-11 08:50 am (UTC)I also think it's cool that Lark is reading LeGuin.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-11 11:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-11 11:49 am (UTC)I'm not especially surprised to learn this. She's one of mine, too.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-12 03:25 pm (UTC)This is a really helpful idea.
I seem to have hit a snag. It's not that I don't know what to write for chapter 4, it's just that I have had trouble getting myself to sit down and write for the past two days. This procrastination would be the worst obstacle in doing NaNoWriMo. Don't worry, chapter 4 is forthcoming.
Thanks for your encouragement.