Read Online The Phantom Limb by William Sleator, Ann Monticone - Free Book Online Page B

wanted to throw that box out.
    Grandpa handed it to Isaac. “You get the spiral aftereffect and do what you need to do with it … I need to take a nap.” He was slipping away again. His periods of alertness were sporadic.
    In his room, Isaac turned his attention to the mirror box. He wanted to try an experiment using itand the spiral aftereffect. He knew that if the spiral aftereffect appeared in the mirror, Joey Haynes would be able to see it.
    Isaac started spinning it inside the box.
    The phantom limb slid into the mirror. After a moment it began to shake, as if the spiral aftereffect was making it dizzy. A phantom arm, dizzy? Was it possible? This spiral aftereffect was so large that it took up all of the mirror. Isaac stopped spinning the disk, put it back into his left hand, outside the box, and carefully laid it on his desk. He had wanted to get Joey’s reaction to it before he did anything else.
    The phantom limb slapped its hand excitedly on the floor of the box, then made a thumbs-up gesture. Isaac knew this meant the phantom limb was very happy now because the trick was something that Isaac had discovered on his own and showed to Joey.
    Isaac withdrew his hand from the box. The phantom limb held up three fingers. It made an OK sign with its thumb and index finger, waved happily, and disappeared.
    Isaac sat on his bed with the spiral aftereffect and began studying it more closely. He had to understandexactly how to spin it at the right speed to make the right effect.
    Looking at the numbers on the disk, he began turning the dial. At one, it spun quite slowly, and there was not much of an effect. At two, he began to see the line slide slowly down inside the disk. He went up to four, and now the line was really spinning down inside it. Isaac dared to turn it all the way up to ten. The effect was so strong that it pulled him right off the bed.
    He quickly looked around the room. Everything in his room was converging toward him. It was as though the whole room was about to crush him. The feeling was very real, all because the spiral aftereffect took up his whole field of vision. The speed at ten would have to be used against the person who was endangering Vera and himself, he decided. The sensation would easily knock someone over.
    When the sensation stopped, Isaac put the spiral aftereffect into its box and went back to the mirror box again. He felt sleepy.
    He knew what was coming.
    But this time he was looking into a different bathroom, not clean and white and perfect like thefirst one or rustic like the second. There was old-fashioned wallpaper and a flowered shower curtain. The linoleum on the floor was worn. And there was nobody in the room.
    Then he heard the door open and, a moment later, the lock click. A young girl appeared in the mirror, holding up a plastic baby doll that was about eight inches long. Its clothes had been removed.
    The little girl was so short that only her head and her arms with the doll appeared in the mirror. Her face was still blurred.
    â€œBad baby! I told you not to do that,” she said so softly that Isaac could barely hear her. She had locked the door and now she was whispering: she didn’t want her parents to know what she was doing in there. “Bad,
bad
baby!” she said again. Then, with her tongue pushed slightly out of her mouth, she began twisting one of the doll’s arms. She twisted the arm around backward and pulled at it, grunting slightly. There was a slight crack, but the arm remained attached. She kept pulling, harder and harder, until the arm was at right angles to the doll’s body. With one final burst of effort, she snapped the arm off.
    The little girl beamed, as happy as if it wereChristmas morning. She dropped the severed arm into the sink. “Oh, my dear little baby,” she suddenly cooed as she lovingly rocked the doll, “Mommy will make everything OK now.”
    Isaac was shocked by the little girl’s cruelty and