The Uncanny Adventures of Adam Honey

Chapter 5: Wednesday

Chapter 5: WednesdayAdam Honey woke up and thought, I am six years old. Yesterday I was five. I’ve aged a whole year in one night. The thought scared him. It wasn’t the only thing that scared Adam Honey. One of his constant fears was that he may forget his mother’s face. He hadn’t seen her in a while—was it really just a week?—and already he couldn’t quite remember what her smile looked like, or even her hair. Of his father he had no recollection at all, they would have passed each other by without recognition had they met anywhere outside the house. But somehow the fact that he couldn’t tell his father from a stranger didn’t bother Adam the way not remembering the color of his mother’s eyes bothered him.

Other things scared Adam, like the monsters under his bed, and that he had lost one of his toy soldiers so now there was an uneven number of them lined up on his bookshelf, and that he would die in this house.

It was a beautiful house; big, stately. It towered on a picturesque cliff and overlooked the sea. Adam found a thin-layered solace in the belief that if he didn’t acknowledge that there was a vast, bottomless ocean under his feet, the cliff couldn’t crumble and the house wouldn’t tumble into the water.

Such were the fears of Adam Honey, who turned six on the day his parents died.

He disentangled himself from the bed cover, it was damp from sweat, and pitter-pattered to the toilet. The upstairs bathroom had a window facing east, a stunning view of the North Atlantic Ocean. Adam kept his gaze averted as he sat on the refreshingly cool toilet seat to do his business. If he didn’t acknowledge it, nothing bad could happen. It was a comforting thought.

He flushed, washed his hands, and went downstairs, secure in the knowledge that he was wearing his Super Cop pajama, a clear sign that the day was going to be terrific.

* * * *

From Portland Lighthouse Internet Newspaper, April 24th, 22:12h:

In Too Deep?

Portland, ME, USA: Comment Section

Dear Writers, I appreciate the twenty-paragraph long article on the construction progress on Cemetery Loop in the last online issue. It is comforting to know that both sides, adversaries and advocates, acknowledge that we may be in way over our heads with this. What started out as just another road work quickly spiraled out of control: the hole caving in and revealing the chasm beneath, the strange sightings and the freak accidents. The Cultists of Beelzebub may be the only ones holding up signs, but they say what many of us fear, namely that we are in too deep. I don’t know if it’s true that the chasm keeps growing, but I do know that there have been a lot of strange reports coming in ever since it happened. People seeing things, hearing things; animals acting weird. What’s going on? And, more importantly, who can help if ever we find out that there is something going on? I say we fill up the hole as quickly as possible, feeder road be damned. I dare say I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Sincerely, Sergeant R. of Portland City Police.

* * * *

Hungry for breakfast, Adam ambled into the kitchen. It smelled of pastries and cake. When he walked into the room, the family’s help was decorating a small batch of cupcakes.

“Good morning, Aunt Millicent,” Adam intoned politely. “Those cupcakes sure look delicious.”

The stout woman looked at her little visitor with a sparkle of amusement in her eyes. “Why, those are for you, birthday boy.”

Adam had of course suspected that, no, wished for that, but her words made his eyes widen in humble disbelief nonetheless.

“Thank you, Aunt Millicent!”

She was not his aunt. Neither by blood nor by resemblance—Millicent with a pale face and a bunch of fiery red hair that was tinged with gray in places, and Adam with his auburn framed, olive skinned face; she tall and fat, he small and skinny—but he called her aunt anyway, and from any point of view she was more of a relative to him than his own flesh and blood family.

The cupcakes were chocolate and he bit into one right away. They were just the right mixture of soft, gooey, and sweet. He chewed very diligently, swallowed, and declared how much he liked them. Then he inquired after his parents.

“Off to work already, Adam.”

He hid his disappointment by taking another bite. It didn’t taste as wonderful as the first one, but then again, Adam mused, that was probably just the way it was: The first bite is grand and then you find out your parents aren’t there to spend your birthday with you.

Aunt Millicent gave him a reassuring pat on the head. “But they haven’t forgotten about you. They will be home early today to give you a special present.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it was wishful thinking on her part.

Millicent made sure Adam ate a hearty breakfast after the early morning treat, consisting of fried bacon, eggs, toast, jam, juice, and a cup of hot chocolate. He ate in the dining room, by himself, like every morning. His back was to the big window. The sound his teeth made when they crushed the crunchy bread sounded eerie and hollow in the big room. He bet Super Cop was not afraid of that noise that sounded like he was the last one alive in the house.

Super Cop is never afraid of anything, not even the dark.

But the thought wasn’t as comforting as Adam hoped. All it reminded him of was that he surely wasn’t Super Cop and that Super Cop might laugh about boys who were afraid of the sound a piece of toast makes.

But Super Cop doesn’t live in a creepy house all by himself, his subconscious added.

Super Cop did not exist. He didn’t not exist in the way other cartoon heroes don’t exist, he didn’t exist at all save in Adam Honey’s mind. Super Cop was a character the family’s butler, a lanky nineteen-year-old whom Adam called Uncle Jun and who rolled the R in a rather unique fashion, had invented. When Adam was four years old, Jun had taken him outside for the first time. Usually, the boy either played inside or in the manor’s garden, but that day Jun wanted to show him the neighborhood. Jun himself had been raised on the streets of Hiroshima, he was of the opinion that every little boy and girl should know their neighborhood like the back of their hand. They should know where to play and where to find curious, magical things like earthworms, and grubs, and sticks. They should know who was always up for a game of marbles, and how to avoid running into the bully from down the road (there always was one).

Once outside, Adam had refused to leave the premises of the mansion.

“I’m not allowed outside,” he insisted firmly in that calm, grown-up voice of his.

“You’re outside all the time in the garden,” Jun laughed patiently. “We’re just going a bit beyond that today.”

Adam shook his head and put his foot down; a quiet but decisive gesture.

The Honey mansion was the last house before the cliffs. It overlooked Lotus Lane with its beautiful homes on either side of the road. While Jun and Adam stood in the driveway of the mansion, the garage door from two houses down on the right opened and Sergeant Roderick zoomed out on his police bike. Adam gasped in sheer astonishment. To him, the standard police motorcycle looked like a beautiful jewel. A shiny space craft, something so extraordinary it must not be of this world. Never had he seen anything of such beauty and wonder.

“What was that?” he needed to know. Jun told him about Sergeant Roderick and the Portland police department.

“What is a police department?” Adam asked. The second in a long, curious stream of questions.

Jun took the boy by the hand and made a step forward while at the same time explaining. Adam, lost in the subject, didn’t even notice. Chatting animatedly, he walked down Lotus Lane and up again, hand in hand with Jun, without truly realizing what he was doing.

That night, when Jun tucked him in and Adam asked him about the monsters under his bed, Jun sat down on the corner of the small bed and, with grave seriousness said, “Let me tell you about Super Cop.”

Adam’s eyes grew wide with amazement.

“Who is Super Cop?”

“Super Cop fights monsters. He protects children all over the world. He’s not afraid of anything,” Jun told him with a voice that dripped of awe and secrecy. “And you know what? His uniform looks just like your pajamas.”

In front of Adam’s mind’s eye the magical persona of Super Cop took form, and with it the certainty that one day he would be like his hero: brave, strong, and not afraid of anything.

* * * *

From Portland Lighthouse Internet Newspaper, April 9th, 8:21h:

Lights Out

Portland, ME, USA: City-wide blackout wreaks havoc

Day Three after the city council decided to turn Main Street into the biggest highway feeder of the town. Not only did the decision spark a high-profile controversy, the project also seems to be riddled with problems—tech failure, faulty equipment, strange accidents on the construction site, and now a blackout that paralyzed the entire city.

“The main mistake,” so foreman Singer said in a press conference this morning, “was that nobody knew the power lines were running under the road. No blueprint indicates that! So, of course, we never checked.”

Blueprints or not, all the city’s power lines run underneath that part of Main Street. So when Singer and his men began digging, they involuntarily damaged the cables. The repair time would have thrown back the schedule another month, not to mention the costs the city would have had to come up with. And that is not even the bad news. By trying to go around the wires, the workmen came across a pocket of gas in place. The gas ignited, causing an explosion that not only destroyed the power lines but also opened up the ground to reveal a huge cave underneath. The explosion was strong enough to cause a power blackout throughout the city of Portland; but the cave is a much greater issue. Says Timothy Oakley, construction worker, “We were just supposed to widen the street. Now there’s a huge-ass hole in the middle of the damn road and we have no idea how deep this fucker actually is. We can’t do diddly s**t right now.”

A cave of this dimension should have shown up on the blueprints, but didn’t.

“First the power lines, then the hole. Somebody messed up big time,” says Singer.

The blackout lasted for six hours and could only be remedied by bypassing the lines and connecting the undamaged ends via above ground wires. Pedestrians be advised that loose cables are running on the shoulder of the road on both sides of the construction site. Tread carefully.

* * * *

After breakfast, Adam joined Millicent in the kitchen. The woman, who was old by Adam’s standards but merely entering her fifties in actuality, was just clapping shut the purse with the housekeeping allowance. Wednesdays were market days.

“May I come with you, Aunt Millicent?” Adam asked, already bored out of his mind. There was not much to do in the mornings, just biding time until his private lessons began. He was not four years anymore; the thought of leaving the house didn’t scare him these days.

Millicent took a deep breath that made her enormous bosom rise and fall. She bent down to pat him on the head, a gesture he tolerated but didn’t like. She heaved a sigh that explained so much more than any words would have, for example that she knew being by himself every day was not good for a little boy, especially not on his birthday. Then she shook her head.

“You know the farmers market is off Main Street, right down the road from that big construction site. It’s not safe.”

Her fear was not that Adam would wander off and accidentally fall into the hole, or electrocute himself on one of those loose wires the newspapers warned about. Aunt Millicent was not a Cultist of Beelzebub, either. But she thought that when a hole appeared out of nowhere that was too deep to measure, those who held up signs and talked about gateways to other realms were probably not far off. It was not the right place to be around. For nobody.

She decided not to look into his eyes after she denied Adam his polite request. Not too long ago, she had confided in Jun that Adam was a wonderful boy, beautiful, polite, and delightful to have around, but that his eyes were something else entirely.

“Like the eyes of my grandfather,” she said, because it was the only accurate comparison she could make at that time. It was her way of trying to explain that Adam’s eyes were kind and relentless at the same time.

“When my grandfather cried, I got chills all over,” she added in a hushed voice. “It felt like he was weeping for the sake of the whole world; that’s how Adam cries. Not like a child at all, but like an old man.”

Jun patted her on the back, dear old Millicent who put beans out to keep ghosts away and who was probably the driving force behind many of Adam’s fears. He said, “He’s just a kid, Milli.”

And Millicent had stifled a laugh and replied that, yes, she knew, and she had never thought about it again until that day when she told Adam he couldn’t accompany her to the farmers’ market. She knew he was looking at her with inquisitive, sad eyes, so she busied herself looking anywhere but at him.

* * * *

From Portland Lighthouse Internet Newspaper, April 2nd, 23:13h:

Strange Sleeping Sickness

Portland, ME, USA: Cases of somnambulism occurring more frequently

Two more sleepwalkers have been found in the last three weeks. In each case, passers-by noted someone lying on the ground by the Cemetery Loop and notified the hospital. In each case, the sleepers have not regained consciousness. Apparently, people sleepwalked to a random spot outside, then lay down and slipped into a comatose condition. All of them lived in the same area, which is probably the reason why each of them ended up on Main Street. All of them are now in a separate ward at Back Cove Medical Center. Causes for these erratic behaviors have yet to be determined.

Please scroll down to the bottom of the page to find related medical articles and interviews with doctors on somnambulism, parasomnia, and other sleep disorders.

* * * *

Mr. Learie, the private tutor, didn’t know it was Adam’s birthday, and Adam didn’t tell him. Not because he was that humble but simply because by the time lessons started, Adam had forgotten himself. Had forgotten the chocolate cupcake, the sound the toast had made in the empty dining room, had forgotten that Aunt Millicent had refused to take him out to the farmers’ market. Before Mr. Learie had arrived, Adam had played with his toys, quietly and earnestly. His action figure search party never found the missing toy soldier, but it filled the gap between breakfast and lesson.

Mr. Learie was bald, young, and exceptionally knowledgeable. He was also exceptionally bad at teaching, except Adam didn’t know that. He adored his teacher, because he knew about things, and not only that—he understood them. Mr. Learie, the dry academic who seemed eighty but who was in fact twenty-five, who didn’t have a friend because he didn’t know how to talk to people, and who thought that children were a nuisance until they learned to behave like adults, was a hero to young Adam.

Today, Mr. Learie brought a thick book. He stood awkwardly behind his desk, looking down on Adam over the rim of his spectacles, and announced, “Today, I will teach you about logic.” He said it as if he were about to explain the world’s innermost secrets. Adam, excited beyond measure, had to hold on to the edges of his own little desk to contain his excitement.

“Logic will help you understand everything.” Mr. Learie began quite a long monologue of which Adam understood very little. “It gets you from A to B to C, like an alphabet of cause and effect. It rained during the night. The morning paper is late. Therefore the paperboy must have slipped and fallen off his bicycle on the way. A to B to C.”

Adam thought that maybe the paperboy’s grandmother had dropped in for a visit because the paperboy couldn’t sleep all night due to the rain, so she made him pancakes for breakfast that tasted so good that he had a second and third helping, and then he had to pause a bit before he went on his route because he had a bellyache. Or perhaps he had been chased by big, scary monsters that come out of holes in the ground. But if Mr. Learie said he had fallen off the bicycle, then that was surely what had happened.

* * * *

For all the thoughts of monsters and feeling eerie in the big house, Adam was chipper as ever at bedtime. No fears, no worries troubled his mind. His parents hadn’t come home in time, which disappointed him for a few minutes, until Jun told him the newest—and the last—Super Cop story, and all troubles were forgotten. He dreamed of superheroes and holes in the ground that went on into infinity, and of sand that was falling endlessly in a giant hourglass. He awoke because he was being shaken out of his dreamscape. It was still dark in his bedroom. He turned away from the hand that kept tugging at him, turned away to the other side of the bed to go back to sleep.

“Wake up, Adam Honey. We have to go.”

It was Uncle Jun’s voice. It sounded far away in Adam’s head. Far away and different. After a little struggle, Adam opened his eyes. Uncle Jun’s expression chased the sleepiness out of the boy’s body. Something terrible had happened, he knew. Grown-ups only looked like that when something terrible had happened—he knew that from Aunt Millicent; she looked like it often, except what she thought of as terrible usually didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Adam.

“Something has happened,” Jun told him calmly. “We’re going to the hospital. Get up now, my boy.”