most people when they tried to drag him into a conversation. He found it even harder to figure out what to reply to a TV that seemed to be watching him and saying hello, or whatever it meant by that one word.
“Boy,” it repeated.
Talking back to a TV set seemed a little screwy, like talking to furniture. Putting his book aside, Winny said, “Who are you?” Although the question sounded stupid, he couldn’t think of anything smarter.
The voice was deep but kind of flat, like someone on a public-address system reading a boring announcement: “Boy. Aboveground. Second floor. West wing.”
The TV seemed to be telling Winny where he was in the Pendleton. He already knew where he was. He didn’t need to be told. If there was a guy watching through the TV, he seemed even worse at conversation than was Winny.
But of course there couldn’t be anyone watching. TV worked only one way. A television received. It didn’t broadcast. Something else was going on here, a little mystery that would be solved if he just thought about it long enough. He wasn’t supersmart, but he wasn’t stupid, either, not half as stupid as the boy characters in some of the books he read.
“Boy. Black hair. Blue eyes.”
Winny shot up from the armchair.
“Aboveground. Second floor. West wing.”
Black hair, blue eyes: Someone somewhere could see him through the TV. No doubt about it. The little mystery was suddenly big.
Winny didn’t like the way his voice trembled when he said, “What do you want?”
“Boy. Black hair. Blue eyes. Aboveground. Second floor. West wing. Exterminate. Exterminate.”
Because he was somewhat short for his age and scrawny, still waiting for his biceps to appear, Winny figured that if he ever did the slightest wimpy thing, people would be sure he was a gutless sissy. Once people thought you were a sissy, they would never unthink it except maybe if you saved a hundred little kids from a burning orphanage or disarmed a terrorist and beat him up until he cried for his mommy. Winny wouldn’t be big enough to beat up anyone for at least ten years, if ever. He didn’t know an orphanage anywhere, and even if he did know one, he might wait around the rest of his life for a fire that never happened, unless he started it himself. So he tried never to do or say anything sissyish. He never showed fear in a scary movie. When he accidentally cut himself, he didn’t cry or appear to be alarmed at the sight of blood. Bugs spooked him, all those legs and antennas, so he forced himself to pick up beetles and things that were gross but didn’t sting, to study them in the palm of his hand.
When the TV said “Exterminate,” lots of fourth-grade boys from the Grace Lyman School would have been scared, and at least a few might have run away in panic to hide. Instead, Winny stayed calm and walked—didn’t run—to the kitchen, where the warm air smelled cinnamony. His mom was looking at something through the window in the upper oven door.
Winny said, “You better come see what’s on my TV.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t explain it. You’ve gotta see.”
Indicating a fold-down television mounted under an upper cabinet near the refrigerator, she said, “Show me with that one, honey.”
“I think only my TV has it. Mine switched itself on. This one didn’t. You better come see.”
Winny hurried away—but did not run like he was scared or anything—and he heard his mother close behind him. He figured the TV would be off when he returned to his room. He wouldn’t have any proof, and she wouldn’t believe him—until maybe some death squad showed up, tattooed muscular goons in black uniforms carrying massive guns. To his surprise, the rings of blue light continued to throb on the screen.
“Some kind of test pattern,” his mother said.
“No. It’s 106, a dead channel. And it talks.”
Before Winny could explain further, the deep flat voice spoke from behind the blue light: “Adult female and boy. Aboveground. Second floor. West wing. Exterminate. Exterminate.”
Frowning, his mother said, “What’s the joke?”
“It’s not my joke,” Winny assured her.
“Adult female. Black hair. Dark-brown eyes. Five feet five.”
She plucked the remote off the table beside the armchair, but it didn’t work. She couldn’t turn off the TV or change channels.
“Exterminate. Exterminate.”
Approaching the television, his mom said, “Is this a DVD?”
“No. It’s … I don’t know, something else.”
She checked the DVD player anyway.
Winny said, “It’s happened before except till now it never said anything except ‘boy.’”
“Before when?”
“Yesterday twice.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Wasn’t anything to tell. It just said ‘boy.’”
“Somebody has a sick sense of humor.”
“But how can he see us?” Winny wondered.
“He can’t.”
“Well, but he knows what we look like.”
“That doesn’t mean the creep can see us. It just means he knows who we are, who lives in this apartment. It’s a security issue. We’ll get to the bottom of it quick enough. I’ll call the guard on duty.”
She pulled the plug, and the television went dark.
Just having the set off made Winny feel better, and his mom’s confidence made him feel safer, but not for long.
As she stepped back from the TV, the wall changed. It was covered by low cabinets with bookshelves above—but then it rippled. The transformation started near the ceiling and flowed down, like water washing away one thing and leaving a different thing behind it, as if the cabinets and the bookshelves and all the stuff on the shelves had never been real, had been only a realistic painting that was now dissolving. Above the descending ripples, the new wall didn’t have any cabinets or shelves, and it didn’t look new, either, but stained and greasy, the plaster crumbling, patches of sooty mold reaching this way and that with black tentacles.
His mom made a small startled sound and raised one hand as if to command the change to halt, but the ripples raced all the way down the wall, shivered across the floor, taking with them the polished mahogany, leaving behind scarred and dirty planks, then eating away the area rug, all of it happening so fast that neither Winny nor his mother had time to think maybe they might vanish too, not until the strange tide lapped toward their feet.
She scooted backward, grabbing Winny by one arm to pull him with her, but the ripples broke like surf and feathered around their shoes, dissolving the rug underfoot while leaving the two of them untouched. And just like a wave breaking on a shore, the ripples retreated, leaving in their wake everything as it should have been, the rug intact once more and the mahogany polished. Up the wall the ripples went, reversing the transformation they had made, restoring the cabinets, bookshelves, books, and television, as if a wizard had cast a change spell, had at once regretted it, and had followed it with a cancellation spell to undo his mischief.
The ripples receded into the junction of wall and ceiling. They didn’t return right away. Maybe they would never return. Maybe it was over, whatever it might have been.
Winny’s heart galloped as though he were running for a finish line. He couldn’t breathe. Something seemed to be stuck deep in his throat. For a moment he thought maybe, in the shock of the moment, he swallowed his tongue the way he’d read some people did when having a seizure. He gagged on that thought, though not on his tongue, which turned out to be in his mouth