Paying the Piper

Six: Superfluous Superpowers

Quentin didn't like his room. Or, more specifically, he didn't like the placement of his room in the house. He had a window that looked over the backyard and thus, also to the hill butting up to their yard. And if you looked out at that hill at the wrong time, you saw things you wished that you didn't.

Not often. Quentin didn't risk looking out there often enough to see much. And Otherwordly creatures—truly, he had no better word to use—didn't traipse across the border of his house regularly. But he had seen strange lights when everything had been dark. Lights he couldn't explain and didn't want to try. He had spotted small creatures that looked human, but were too small and too wrinkly and weathered. Possibly they were gremlins. Worst of all were the shadow beings. They were pure darkness, and when they were about, the atmosphere seemed darker, more depressing, more hopeless.

By far, the most normal of the visitors was the grey fox. He hadn't thought it Otherwordly at first. It didn't give him the same chills that some of the other things did. But he had spotted it trotting through their yard several times when it simply disappeared. He thought he must've made a mistake or lost track of it or it had a burrow out there. But when it happened more times in different locations, he was sure: the fox was interdimensional.

What purpose a fox had in traveling between dimensions made little sense to him. But it wasn't his role to decide on the superfluousness of superpowers. It was his role, as Rhia kept reminding him, to write the next argument of their debate on gun control.

He usually left his curtains closed, but that day had been so sunny despite the shortening of daylight hours, so it felt criminal to shut out the last bit of sunlight that was determined to seep into every nook and cranny.

Rhia was frowning at him from the computer, however, because he'd drifted into staring out the window again. She couldn't see what he was looking at because his computer did not face the window. It wasn't next to the window at all: Quentin stayed away from the window beyond the time it took to open or close his drapes.

"What are you looking at?" Her voice sounded slightly tinny, coming through his computer speakers. But it wasn't his computer and hardware causing it—it would be the hardware on her end, where she was Zooming in her room. He thanked the spirit of technology he was sure would become a formal deity any day now that they'd even been able to connect. Rhia's home internet was barely a step above dial-up. Her mom's car was in the shop, so Mrs. Jannowick was borrowing Rhia's SUV, leaving Rhia stranded. Since he couldn't drive, they were stuck working together apart.

"Just a fox. It's gone by three times now." And then disappeared, he finished in his head. It looked like it was on a mission, either searching for something or collecting something and going back for more. But foxes didn't do that. Though, he amended silently, interdimensional foxes might.

"There are probably hundreds of foxes in Gendormi. Actually, there are probably more foxes than people, what with the Potomah Regional Forest being part of our town. Haven't you seen one before?"

"This one's silvery black." And interdimensional.

"Hmm." She leaned back in her chair. He could see her entire top half, and everything in her posture and expression made it clear what her next command would be. "Turn me around so I can see."

"You're not on a laptop," he protested. Which wasn't much of an argument since his monitor was thin screen and spun around, flipped up and down, and boasted about being flexible in all the ads about it.

She tapped her fingers against her bicep since her arms were crossed. "So what are you really looking at? Are you gaming at the same time?"

"Please. I know better than to even think about games in your presence."