Chapter 1: The Dream. The Door. The Fire.
Norbert was drawing a spider. He was also trying to ignore a monotone lecture on President Roosevelt and Garret’s nonstop kicks at the back of his chair. Well, at least the spider looked alright. He worked his pencil, adding hairs to the spider’s abdomen and a little menace to each of the spider’s eyes. He only had forty minutes to finish, and the picture had to be as real as possible since Chelsea sat in his desk next period and was a huge arachnophobe. She was also a total bitch.
Satisfied with what he had thus far, Norbert dug into his backpack, past unfinished homework and incomplete notes, and pulled out his colored pencils. They were the one thing he never forgot to bring to class.
“Fag,” Garret whispered from behind. He gave Norbert’s chair a harsh kick just as brown pencil touched white paper, sending a thick line across the drawing.
Norbert reached into his bag for a kneaded eraser. The picture was still fixable. He went to work, being as careful as possible while Garret continued drumming, and after a few lost minutes, the worst of the line was gone. He could shade and color around the rest. Norbert looked up at the clock, assuming history was still a thousand years from being over, and saw he only had twenty minutes left. He was running out of time!
“Okay class,” the very short, very bald Mr. Yehle said, turning away from his PowerPoint presentation. “Who can tell me which book convinced President Roosevelt to establish the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906? Hint. You are to have it finished next week!”
Norbert froze, eraser in one hand and pencil in the other. If he stood perfectly still, maybe he wouldn’t be seen.
“Uh … Jack. Tell us all about The Jungle, if you would.”
Norbert went back to work, adding lighting and shadows to his fuzzy arachnid. With two minutes to spare, he finished. The spider looked pretty good, not his best work, but respectable. It would have to do. Just as the bell rang, he flipped over the drawing and wrote, “To Chelsea, from your secret admirer” in squiggly letters.
“What’s wrong with you, Nobhead?” Garret asked as he stood. He towered over Norbert, and his breath stank of cigarettes.
“Leave me alone.”
Garret shoved Norbert aside, making sure to use his elbow so it hurt. A few kids snickered. One looked away. No one actually did anything because this was Wild Creek High, the high school that strove for no bullying but made exceptions in all cases all the time. The teachers called it progress. Most of the students did too. But then, they were the ones doing the bullying.
Norbert grabbed his things. It wasn’t personal, he knew, just part of being in high school. Every class had to have a Norbert, that weird loser kid with no friends. The one that was shorter than everyone and still looked like he belonged in middle school, the one with a goofy name and curly, stupid hair. The one who always wore long-sleeve shirts to cover his wrists and took antidepressants when he got home. No, it wasn’t personal.
It felt personal though.
Norbert waited outside and watched Chelsea walk into Mr. Yehle’s history class, laughing her high-pitched laugh and paying no attention to him. She was the one who had coined the nickname, “Nobhead.” That conversation had went something like, “Hey Norbert, do you know what a Nobhead is? It means penis in British.” Short, sweet, and to the point.
It didn’t take long for a blood-curdling scream to come sailing out the open door. Laughter followed alongside Mr. Yehle yelling for everyone to sit down.
Norbert smiled. The rest of his day would suck, but at least he had this.
*
When Norbert got home, he headed to his room, passing his older sister Michelle and her friends. All were seniors, and no one bothered to acknowledge his presence. That wasn’t personal either, Norbert knew, just part of the hierarchy that was high school. Everyone had a role to play. They were just following the rules.
Norbert’s room was a disaster of scattered clothes and art supplies, with a filthy card table wedged into one corner. Streaks of paint covered it from top to bottom, and old newspaper covered the floor around his work area in a hopeful effort to contain spills. The walls were a light blue, the sheets on his bed a cream white. His comforter was somewhere on the floor because making the bed was stupid when he was just going to unmake it the next night.
He dry-swallowed one of his little red pills, today marking a full month on the new prescription, and approached his card table. On a large piece of cardstock was the start a pastel-smeared version of Saturn, pockmarked with fingerprints and messy blending. Oil pastels were harder to work with than colored pencils. Norbert refused to let them win though, so he sat down and worked a quick hour, smudging different shades of brown, white, and yellow into a windblown circle. Progress was slow, and chunks of kneaded eraser cluttered around the drawing and his floor. His fingers looked like a bad drip painting.
“Hey,” Michelle said, barging in before Norbert could tell her to go away. She gave him a big smile, which meant her friends were gone and he was no longer invisible. “What’cha workin’ on?”
“School project. Can’t get it right.”
Michelle walked over and put her hands on Norbert’s shoulders, leaning over him in an exaggerated fashion. He didn’t like being touched, but since she was his big sister, that gave her the right to annoy him. “Looks fine to me,” she said.
“It sucks.”
“It’s fine. Few finger prints here and there, but you can get rid of those no problem. Just draw the rings over them, and—”
“I can’t get it right! I keep making a mess because these stupid pastels smear everywhere.”
“You could wipe your fingers clean.”
Norbert sighed. “What do you want?”
Michelle grinned. She stood a head taller than Norbert, with long, black hair that went well passed her shoulders when she didn’t have it in a pony tail, which was almost never. Her eyes were brown, her clothing an immaculate level of disheveled-lazy in autumn colors. She wrapped Norbert in a big, overly-tight hug that sent her earrings jingling.
“Well baby brother, I’m glad you asked!” she said. “The senior year book committee is going to host a contest to design this year’s cover. Everyone is sick of our stupid mascot and his stupid grin.”
Norbert shrugged. Rocky the Alligator was an oafish-looking character who wore a backwards baseball cap because he was invented in the early ‘90’s. No one liked him, partly because he failed on every level of looking cool and partly because alligators weren’t known to live in Colorado.
“And you want me to draw a cover for you.”
“Could you? Please, please, please?”
“Why?”
“Because this is the first time the student body has been given a chance to change the look of Rocky. Don’t you want to be part of Wild Creek history?”
“No.”
“Oh come on. High school is supposed to be the best time of our lives!”
“If that’s true, then I should just k—” Norbert cut himself off. He wasn’t supposed to joke about that. “Sorry,” he said. “But seriously, why do you want me to do this?”
“To give you a chance to do something for the school that doesn’t involve moping around and being alone?”
“But I don’t care about our stupid school.”
“You should!” Michelle’s tone turned serious. “We were able to talk dad out of sending us to St. Mary’s, but if you don’t start pretending to give a shit, he’ll reconsider. I overheard him talking to mom last time your grades were emailed out. Do you want to go to that shitty Christian school? It ruined our sister.”
Now it was Norbert’s turn to look panicky. St. Mary’s didn’t have any art classes. None. They also made all their students attend church every day, wear uniforms, and play sports. His older sister Jane was forced to go, and now she was off at a Christian college pursuing a business degree, what Norbert’s father called, “practical.” Norbert Sr. wanted all of his children to get practical degrees, like in business or accounting, not to waste their time drawing and painting.
He also thought little of Norbert’s medical condition, which didn’t help.
“Plus,” and Michelle gave Norbert another big smile, “I think you could do something really cool. I don’t trust anyone in my class to come up with a good cover. All of our pictures are going to be in that book, and I want the cover to scream, ‘Class of 2013!’ Not, ‘Class of 1992.’”
Norbert felt something akin to pride at that. The depressed part of his brain knew Michelle was only manipulating him into doing what she wanted, but he pushed it aside. Normally that was hard; today it wasn’t.
“I’m sorry school is so hard for you,” she said, not looking at him. “I’d … well, you know….”
Norbert did. It all came down to the hands they were dealt, the roles they were forced to play.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll draw up a cover, maybe two if I find some good ideas.”
“Awesome!” Michelle gave Norbert another hug, though this one had nothing to do with annoying him. “Do something mean and scary. Something badass.”
Mean and scary? Norbert could handle that.
*
Norbert spent the rest of the night working on homework, trying his best to catch up on what he’d been ignoring. He read his history assignment and even took a few notes, though when he got to biology, all of his resolve faltered. Even with the threat of St. Mary’s, he just couldn’t make himself memorize the circulatory system. It was too hard, and the more he failed, the more he felt like a failure. He dropped the book on the floor with a loud thump and picked up his English textbook, though that didn’t last long either. Grammar was boring.
Frustrated, he went back to his desk and picked up his oil pastels. He was going to finish something tonight, even if that meant getting no sleep at all.
A few hours later, Norbert crawled into bed, half of the ringed planet done to his liking.
*
Norbert was dreaming—knew he was dreaming—but this didn’t feel like a dream. It was like he was awake. He looked at his hands, legs, and feet and saw that everything was where it should be. He felt his face and was alarmed at the touch. Dreams weren’t always accurate when it came to that particular sense. Smell or taste too. Norbert breathed in deep: dust, stale air, and a faint hint of mildew.
Unease bubbled in the back of his mind. Nightmares came with antidepressants, but this was less like dreaming and more like teleporting, only he wasn’t sure how to teleport back. What if he was stuck?
Norbert looked around. He was standing in a big room filled with black, wooden bookshelves. A dirty-faced oil lamp hung above his head, casting a fragile light that struggled against all the dark. The floor was made out of some kind of grey stone, the bricks large and strangely warm. Wherever he was, the place was spooky. It felt like a breeding ground for monsters, giant spiders, and slimy tentacle creatures. He wanted to leave.
Norbert stood in place, urging himself to wake up. Nothing happened. He closed his eyes and pictured himself laying still, breathing deep, what his therapist told him to do when he felt a spiral coming on. That also didn’t help. Pissed, and now a little scared, he pinched himself as hard as he could, until the pain made him stop. He opened his eyes.
He was trapped.
Fear crawled into him, skittering down his throat and into his chest. He told himself this was just a side effect of his new meds, that it wasn’t real. It was just a dream. That almost helped until Norbert felt a prickle on the back of his neck.
He was being watched.
Norbert ran. Oil lamps and bookshelves watched him go, rows upon rows of them, his surroundings never changing. He glanced back every few steps, but nothing was ever there. Just lamps, dark shelves, and swimming shadows. Eventually his body burned itself out, and he collapsed, light-headed and covered in sweat.
Norbert let himself even out before getting back up. He wondered what time it was. Dreams had a sense of lasting a long time, but they almost never did. This one though, this one had been going on for real hours, and he didn’t like that. It wasn’t natural. Yet it was still just a dream, and even if his mind concocted nightmare creatures to chase him, that didn’t make them real. He was safe, or as safe as he could be while trapped in his own head. Once his alarm rang, he would wake up.
In the meantime, he might as well explore. He was alone, always had been, and wooden shelves couldn’t hurt him.
Norbert marched to the nearest lamp and plucked it off its chain. It was heavy and warm, and the oil had a slight acrid smell to it. He approached another shelf and saw that it too was covered in thick, leather-bound books. This wasn’t a dungeon, it was a library. A gigantic library, perhaps the biggest library in existence. He couldn’t hope to guess how many shelves he passed already, but it had to have been hundreds. If all of them held books, then he was standing in the medieval equivalent of the Internet.
“I am in the most boring place to ever exist,” Norbert whispered. He frowned. Of all the places his mind could create, it went with a giant, spooky library? That seemed like a huge waste of potential, especially when he had the likes of Disney World to visit.
He grabbed a book and flipped to a random page. The text was gibberish, strange squiggles that seemed to read up to down instead of left to right. Norbert continued to flip, hoping to land on a picture or two, but the best he got were large patterns made of overlapping circles. They weren’t even cool patterns, just busy and complicated for the sake of it. He put the book back and grabbed another. It held the same kinds of writing and boring patterns, and he put that one back too.
Norbert walked down a series of aisles, grabbing books at random and glancing through them. The further he went, the stranger the books became, though he couldn’t find any clues as to what they were about. One gave him a deep paper cut, and he dropped it in disgust. Not only was this the most boring place to ever exist, it wasn’t even useful. Just half-assed patterns and repeating shapes.
“The most vivid dream I’ve ever had, and I can’t even give myself See Spot Run.”
Norbert grew bored as he moved from shelf to shelf and row to row. He stopped grabbing books, now only paying attention to their spines. At least one had to contain an Earthly letter. When he found one with nothing on its spine at all, he shrugged. It was different. He opened to the first page and saw Roman Numerals counting downwards like a table of contents, though there were no words to mark the chapters. He sat down to steady the large tome better.
The first few pages were blank, so Norbert skipped ahead until he found a pattern. This one was much simpler than those in the other books, some sort star with a Celtic weave crisscrossing its center. It was cool, and as Norbert followed it with his eyes, he traced it with his finger, trying to memorize it for later. He might be able to do something fun with it. Off to the left, a small, vertical caption read, “Pyre.”
When he completed the circuit, the symbol flashed red before returning back to normal. Norbert scowled. That was anticlimactic.
Norbert dropped the book and continued to meander, not even bothering to look at the shelves. He wondered if he should just lie down and go to sleep, try to dream within a dream, when he came across a door. It was huge, made out of the same stone as the floor, and barred shut by a thick piece of black wood. Writing covered it from top to bottom, from squiggles to pictures to somewhat-recognizable letters, making it look like a drunken piece of modern art. Yet there was something off about the door, something that combined dread with curiosity. Norbert needed to know what was behind it, yet he also never wanted to see it again.
He got closer and looked at the patterns. There had to be thousands of messages carved into it, and while he couldn’t read any of them, he got the feeling they all said the same thing. He set his lamp down and started hunting for English, positive that he would find a note written specifically for him. The door promised answers.
It took Norbert an hour before he found a three-word phrase in English, written vertically and in small, tight letters.
NEVER OPEN EVER
Norbert stepped back, almost tripping over himself. The phrase wasn’t a warning but a scream, and he knew with all his heart that something terrible was locked behind the stone portal.
Just as he was turning to run again, his alarm went off and the library was gone.
*
Norbert entered his first-period art class oddly refreshed. Whatever that dream was, it had at least served as seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. He still yawned though. No kid should have to function at 8:00 in the morning. He found his table and unloaded his picture of Saturn, plus a dozen oil pastels. It was time to finish this stupid thing.
Pop music played from a small radio while students filtered in. Most were sophomores and juniors, but a few seniors marched in too, taller than everyone and laughing at jokes only 17 year olds could understand. Two more freshman followed them. Because that was the charm of the art room: It accepted anyone and everyone. The rules were relaxed. Little paintings covered the walls, all done by graduated seniors eager for whatever came next, and even the ceiling tiles had paintings on them. Norbert looked up and found his replica of Salvadore Dali’s Burning Giraffes from his advanced art class. That had netted him an A.
But while the rules were relaxed, they only slackened a little. The sophomores kept to themselves, the juniors found their own table, and the seniors all crowded to the desk closest to the radio. The two freshman, meanwhile, retreated to the back of the room, away from Norbert.
He was alone.
Twenty minutes passed in a frustrated blur as he worked the rings around the ringed planet. The picture was due at the end of the period, but Norbert was finding it hard to concentrate. It was like writer’s block, but for his fingers.
He yanked out a fresh sheet of notebook paper to doodle. Sometimes that helped. Mostly it was an excuse to not pay attention in class, but sometimes a short stick figure or two kept him focused. He had dozens of ideas swimming around in his head too, all the spooky things he had dreamed last night. There was the door, and that feeling of being hunted. Or those old books, oozing dust and God knew what else.
There was that symbol, the one shaped like a star with strange crisscrossing patterns.
Norbert looked at his paper. He had already drawn it.
“What?” he whispered. Anxiety tickled the pit of his stomach. The drawing was perfect too, like a photocopy of what he had seen last night. He had even scribbled out the word.
“Pyre,” he said.
The symbol erupted into flame.
“What the fuck?” someone shouted.
Norbert sat transfixed, watching the flame dance. First it was yellow, then red, then yellow again. When it found his picture of Saturn, it flashed white and began to char it to pieces. The pastels stank as they melted.
It wasn’t until Mrs. Shaw was dragging him away that Norbert snapped out of his daze. He yelped, jerked out of her hand, and ran towards the growing flame. He had to fix this! Someone yelled to get a fire extinguisher. A senior tried to give him a high five. Norbert yanked his sweatshirt off and threw it over the fire, beating at it with both hands, but the fire beat back, stinging his fingers. His sweatshirt coughed up a small cloud of black smoke.
“Fuck!” Norbert hissed. He stared at his mess, waiting for it to erupt again.
“Norbert,” Mrs. Shaw called. “Norbert are you okay?” She approached him and knelt. Her face was narrow, her hair long and grey. She liked to wear long strings of beads in place of more normal necklaces, because every day should be as fun as Mardi Gras, whatever that meant. “Are you hurt?”
“What?”
“Are you hurt?”
Norbert looked at his hand. It throbbed an angry shade of red. His index finger also had the aftermath of a paper cut. The wound had closed, but the skin was still uneven where it had ripped last night. In his dream.
“I think … I think I need to go to the nurse,” Norbert said. His voice sounded far away, and someone had turned his legs to jelly.
Mrs. Shaw said something else, but the words were lost as everyone tiptoed back into the classroom. Norbert heard his name said over and over, the topic of ridicule, confusion, and perhaps wonder. He had started a fire. He was crazy. He was stupid. He was going to go to jail. He should do it again. The voices became a meaningless cloud, and all Norbert could do was stare at his ruined sweatshirt.
“Okay,” Mrs. Shaw said to the class. “Show is over. Everyone back to work.”
She grabbed Norbert by the shoulder and gently led him outside. Her face was pale, but she gave him a smile that said everything would be okay. He almost believed it.
“Norbert,” she said when they were in the hallway. Empty lockers covered the walls, and cheap fluorescent lights flickered in the ceiling. The school had gone quiet. “Did you … were you playing with ….” Mrs. Shaw shook her head. “Did you start that fire?”
“No,” Norbert said. He couldn’t have. It wasn’t possible.
“Okay.”
She made him walk, and he followed because he didn’t know what else to do. Nothing made sense, only that his hand hurt and he wanted to cry.
They almost made it to the nurse’s office when Wild Creek High’s principal and security officer met them in the hallway. Mr. Walters, or Principal Walters depending on who was talking to him, was a stout man with jet-black hair and a thick, oily beard. He looked ready to kill someone. Office Drey was a tall, skinny man with thin glasses and an expression that somehow balanced itself between bored and stern. He looked ready to go home.
He barely spared Norbert a glance when he asked: “Alright. What happened?”
Mrs. Shaw wrinkled her nose. “You could at least ask us if we’re alright first.”
“Know you aren’t,” Mr. Walters barked at Norbert. The two were well acquainted. “If what I’ve heard is true, you’re in a lot of trouble. A lot.”
“Nurse’s office first,” Mrs. Shaw said. “And a call to his parents.”
“I think Norbert should empty his pockets first,” Officer Drey said. “And then he can go to the nurse’s office.”
“I….” Norbert stammered, stopped. Fear coursed through his veins, and tears blurred the three teachers into jagged spires.
“Do it,” Mr. Walters said.
With hands that shook, Norbert did as he was told, overturning his pockets and piling a pen, pencil, and his phone into a sad little tower. He tried to pretend he wasn’t crying, and the adults pretended to ignore him.
Office Drey shrugged. “Nothing that would start a fire.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Mr. Walters said.
“I told you!” Mrs. Shaw shouted, her voice shrill, her hands fists. “I cannot believe you two!”
“What happened?” Officer Drey demanded, ignoring the art teacher. He even carried a little notebook and pencil. “Tell me what you did.”
Norbert looked to Mrs. Shaw, hoping she’d save him, but she only nodded. Her face was as white as his. It occurred to him then that she didn’t believe him. No one did. Because he was Norbert, and this was high school. This was his role to play.
“I was drawing,” he mumbled. “A picture of Saturn, and then the paper just lit on fire. I don’t know what happened.”
“You could at least tell a believable lie.” Mr. Walters gestured not to the nurse’s office but in the direction of his own. “You got from here until my office to come up with something better.”
“It’s not a lie!” Norbert clenched his fists. His burned hand hissed with pain, as did the little paper-cut scar on his finger. “You just think it is because you’re supposed to.”
Mr. Walters snorted.
“Listen,” Officer Drey said. He got down on one knee so he was eye-level with Norbert. “This is serious. Someone could have gotten hurt, okay? So tell us the truth, and we’ll do everything we can to help you out of this.”
“I—” Norbert began.
Now it was Mrs. Shaw’s turn to snort. “Wow Jack. So much for believable lies.”
“You’re not helping.”
But Mrs. Shaw was already steering Norbert back to the nurse’s office. “You can continue your good cop, bad cop game later,” she barked. “When Norbert’s parents are here.”
Norbert heard a sigh, and when he looked over his shoulder, he saw Officer Drey and Mr. Walters heading towards the art room. Mrs. Shaw moved to block his view.
“Don’t worry about them.” She said. “Sometimes the biggest bullies aren’t the kids but the adults.”
“Yeah,” Norbert whispered. That realization hurt worse than the fire.
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Nonsense 