The Phantom Limb Read online

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sleator, William.

  The phantom limb / William Sleator, Ann Monticone.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Living in a dreary new home with his father dead, his mother hospitalized, and his grandfather increasingly distant, fourteen-year-old Isaac’s wish for someone to reach out to him comes true in the form of a phantom arm that appears in a mirror box designed to help amputees, warning of danger.

  ISBN 978-0-8109-8428-8

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Moving, Household—Fiction.

  3. Grandfathers—Fiction. 4. Optical illusions—Fiction.

  5. Loneliness—Fiction. 6. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S6313Ph 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2011010396

  Text copyright © 2011 William Sleator and Ann Monticone

  Book design by Maria T. Middleton

  Published in 2011 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  www.abramsbooks.com

  For Supan Hoc Ngun

  —W. S.

  For Vicki Thompson and Donna Mathias

  —A. M.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29: One month later

  About the Authors

  INALLY, FRIDAY AFTERNOON AND THE LAST bell—the moment he lived for. He bolted out of school. Another long week of hell over.

  He didn’t know, of course, that he was going to find the mirror box that day.

  As usual, the Fitzpatrick twins were lurking in the playground. Hadn’t they humiliated him enough by shoving him into his locker yesterday, for everyone at his new school to see? At school there was no way to avoid them. They were black-haired, identical, and hateful, and they wore matching outfits every day. Today it was a trendy Japanese T-shirt over their jeans. “You scream just like a little girl,” one of them said, referring to the locker incident.

  He didn’t know whether it was DCynthia or Destiny. They were equally vicious.

  “What’s that sack you’re wearing, shrimp?”

  “It looks like it belongs to your father,” the other said.

  “Don’t say anything about my father!” Isaac shot back, glaring at them. He was sorry the moment the words slipped out of his mouth, and he hurried to get away.

  But there was something about the Fitzpatrick twins’ taunts that rang true. He really was petrified about being in small spaces, like his locker. And now the whole school knew.

  Nothing was going right in his life.

  Why did his father have to die last year? Why did his mother have to start having seizures? Why did they have to move to the city? And now his weird grandfather was living with them, shuffling around the apartment in a daze and always getting in Isaac’s way.

  He was also lousy at sports, unlike Matt Kravetz, captain of the football team. If he were Matt Kravetz, the Fitzpatrick twins would be worshipping him, instead of taunting him relentlessly. He would be cool. Why did he have to feel like such a freak?

  A mental darkness surrounded Isaac. He was fourteen, and he had no friends. He felt angry and miserable most of the time. He hated where he lived, who he lived with, and, most of all, himself.

  But now it was Friday, and school was over, and he would be away from all of them. He looked forward to being alone, and for a while he could do whatever he wanted. He could read about his favorite subject—zombies—and imagine burying the Fitzpatrick twins alive or performing a ritual to make his grandfather go away. He could look at his collection of optical illusions and search for more on Google. He would have two and a half days of relief from the kids at school. Or one and a half days, anyway. With Monday looming so ominously, the empty feeling in the pit of his stomach would begin on Sunday. Friday was the best.

  His mother, Vera, was a piano teacher. She had studied the piano at Juilliard and had met Isaac’s father, Stan Verdi, at a reception after one of her performances. When his father was alive, they had lived in a nice house. His parents had dinner parties with interesting people—artists like his mother, scientists like his father. Isaac wasn’t much for socializing, but he liked the background noise of their conversations and games.

  But after his father had died unexpectedly in a plane crash in Africa, it turned out they couldn’t keep the house. Vera couldn’t handle the stress, and that’s when she began having seizures. They had to move to a small apartment in the city. Sometimes Isaac felt as though he was suffocating in those tiny rooms. It was harder for him to be alone and lose himself in his collection of optical illusions. It was even harder living with his grandfather, who hadn’t acted like himself in years. His behavior bothered Isaac so much that eventually they had had a major blowup. Now his grandfather was cowed and distant—but still in the way.

  Vera’s seizures had worsened. She couldn’t teach anymore and was ordered to stay home. Then a special unit in a hospital about a hundred miles away was highly recommended as the best place for treating her symptoms, so they had to move again.

  The hospital helped them find inexpensive housing, so they moved just before school started. Even though the new place had two floors, the rooms were small and gloomy. It was a real contrast to the house they had lived in before his father died. But it did have a storage room where Isaac could display his optical illusions. Isaac often escaped to that room, where he could study his collection in peace.

  When he got to the house, he locked his bike in the garage and went straight to the storage room upstairs.

  There was still some stuff in the room that had belonged to the previous owners. The day Isaac saw the place for the first time, he had looked through their things quickly, once, and found some faded black-and-white pictures of an old man and woman with a boy and a girl. The real estate agent told them that the boy had died in the hospital, but he didn’t know of what.

  The boy had been looking straight into the lens when the picture was taken. When Isaac looked at the picture, it was as if the boy was looking at him.

  He quickly refocused on his optical illusions. In the corner of the room was a table with an odd array of objects arranged on it. Isaac’s collection. He studied “The Snake,” a jagged purple and green picture. When you looked at it from the side, it app
eared to be moving menacingly toward you, even though it was really completely stationary. Next to it was “All Is Vanity,” the famous picture of a beautiful woman looking in a mirror. But when you looked at it for a moment longer, the whole thing turned into a skull. He loved his real model of the Necker cube, which was an outline of a cube made out of wire whose front and rear surfaces kept seeming to switch back and forth, so that sometimes the cube appeared to be pointing right and other times left. Before Grandpa had gotten confused, he told Isaac that when the cube did that, it was rotating through the fourth dimension.

  He was most proud of his actual model of the Menger sponge. He had seen drawings of this bizarre object in books about chaos and also online, and when he found out that someone had actually made a three-dimensional model of it, he had insisted on special-ordering it immediately. It was so delicate, it had to be hand-delivered to their door, cushioned and protected in many layers of padding.

  It was a cube, about a foot on each side. A cube-shaped hole was cut out of each face of the cube. Inside the empty cubes, a square hole was cut out of each surface. If you did this an infinite number of times, you ended up with an object that had infinite surface area and zero volume. If somehow you were actually inside something like this, everywhere you went you would be entering a smaller space than the one you had just left. That’s what was so terrifying but also so intriguing about it. To Isaac, it had the fascination of a horror movie.

  Grandpa had once explained how the cube worked. “An iteration is every time you make the next set of smaller holes. Theoretically, by the fiftieth iteration the cubicles are the size of atoms.” Grandpa said that Isaac’s model had only three iterations, or otherwise it wouldn’t hold together at all. “A Menger sponge with four iterations made out of business cards would weigh a ton,” he said.

  Isaac really missed the old Grandpa and the way things used to be.

  When he finally managed to drag his eyes away from the Menger sponge, there was a sudden bright glint. He blinked. Then he looked over by the window to see where the sparkle of light was coming from. But it wasn’t coming from outside. Over in the pile of stuff the previous tenants had left, he saw an object he hadn’t noticed before. It was unlike anything he had ever seen.

  Isaac squatted down to examine the object. It was an open rectangular wooden box, simple and unadorned, with a bottom and four sides but no top. In one of the long sides there were two round holes that were just the right size so that you could stick your hands and forearms into the box. Inside the box—between the two holes and bisecting the box across its width—was a dusty mirror, with a reflecting surface on each side. That’s what had caught his attention.

  Isaac was fascinated. At first, he hesitated. Then, with his left hand on the floor, he stuck his right hand and forearm into the hole on the right side of the box. When he looked down into the box, he could see his right hand and arm, and also the reflection of his right hand and arm in the mirror. So it looked as if both his hands were inside the box. But he could feel his left hand on the floor. It was an extremely peculiar sensation to see his left hand in one place and at the same time feel it in another place. It was as if he had two left hands. He pulled his hand quickly out of the box, and the sensation stopped instantly.

  It was an optical illusion all right! It sure felt weird to see his hand in one place and feel it in another. Isaac had the very strong sensation that the box also had a real function. But what? Had it belonged to the boy in the picture—the boy who seemed to be staring at him? Had the dead boy put his hands into the box a lot? The thought gave Isaac the creeps.

  Did the box have anything to do with the boy’s death?

  SAAC REALLY WANTED TO TELL GRANDPA about this box with a mirror, but how could he? Grandpa lived in his own world. Mostly he stayed in his room. At first, Isaac had felt sorry for him, especially right after Gram died. Before she died, he had been so full of life—a brilliant physiologist who had done important research on the heart muscle. Isaac’s interest in illusions and puzzles was because of Grandpa, who had helped him start his collection. But slowly Grandpa had slipped into another world. He could no longer do anything by himself. He had become a slob. At first, Isaac was just bored and annoyed with him. But after his father died and Grandpa moved in with them, his presence became so unbearable that Isaac tried to avoid him as much as possible. His disdain pushed Grandpa further into his other world.

  Isaac took the box to his room, dusted it off, and carefully put it on his bed. Then he went to the computer and logged on to Google. He typed in “box with a mirror” and read down the list of selections until he came to the one that said “mirror box.” He clicked on it.

  There were two pictures. Near the top was a man looking to his right, with two hands in front of him, each hand a different shade of gray. Near the bottom was a drawing of a mirror box, exactly like the one Isaac had just found. The text explained that a doctor named V. S. Ramachandran had invented the mirror box as a way of helping people who had had a limb amputated.

  Obviously, some past tenant was an amputee. Then Isaac felt a chill. Had the teenage boy who died in the hospital been the amputee?

  Isaac continued reading. The article reported that a very large percentage of amputees have what is called “phantom limb pain,” which means that they feel pain—often excruciating pain—in the limb that has been cut off. Frequently, it feels as if the limb is bent into an uncomfortable position. Often, when an arm has been amputated, for example, the amputee feels that the missing hand is clenched—that the fingers and fingernails are pressing into the palm much harder than could ever happen with a real hand—and the pain of it is unbearable. Medications didn’t help. Hypnosis didn’t help. People had to live for years and years with this phantom pain—phantom, because the limb wasn’t there. But the pain itself was very real.

  Then this neurologist, Dr. Ramachandran, had the idea of making a mirror box. Let’s say the person had a complete right arm and hand but his left arm had been amputated below the elbow. If he put his whole right arm into the right hole of the mirror box and then put his left arm, with the stump, into the left hole, and if he then looked down into the right side of the mirror, the reflection would show a complete arm and hand. Because a mirror image is reversed, the mirror showed a left arm and hand. It looked as if the amputated limb had somehow grown back. The amputee could move his complete arm and hand, and it would look as though his missing arm and hand were doing the same movements. So if he felt that his left hand was painfully clenched, he could unclench it by unclenching his right hand.

  And when he did that, the pain went away.

  It seemed unreal, like magic. But with patient after patient, the mirror box made the pain disappear. It was the only thing that worked.

  Isaac was enthralled. Here was an optical illusion that wasn’t just a game. It had a real function—as he had suspected—and it really helped people. He felt a macabre excitement.

  Isaac clicked on more of the “mirror box” sites. He found an article that talked about bizarre sensations that two people could create with the mirror box. He spent so much time reading about the mirror box that, before he knew it, it was time for dinner—at least for Grandpa, who liked to eat early. Resentfully, Isaac left the box and went down to the kitchen.

  Their old house had had a large dining room. The dinner parties there had been full of stimulating conversation and laughter, which Isaac used to hear from his room. His father was always telling humorous and fascinating stories about his travels, entertaining everybody. He had been a primatologist, and every summer the three of them had gone to Africa and lived in the jungle so his father could study chimpanzees. Isaac wished his father were here now so he could share the mirror box with him.

  His mother had often played the piano at their parties, and the guests had listened intently. The food she cooked was always wonderful.

  Before checking into the hospital, Vera had cooked and frozen some of her best meals, so
that there would be food available that Isaac could prepare quickly and easily for him and his grandfather. He pushed things around in the freezer until he found the chili, his favorite. He needed comfort food tonight, after the bad week at school and his fascination with—and confusion about—the mirror box.

  He thawed the chili in the microwave and found the generic sauce for it in the fridge. He got it all ready and then went upstairs and knocked on Grandpa’s door. He heard Grandpa get up. Isaac waited for him and then followed as he shuffled downstairs.

  There was no dining room in this house. They ate their meals in the little breakfast alcove off the kitchen, called a nook, which had a built-in plastic table like a cheap diner and a small window in the corner. Isaac and Grandpa sat across from each other. Grandpa stared out the window, but it was clear from his blank expression that he wasn’t really seeing anything. As usual, he hadn’t shaved or combed his hair.

  Isaac brought Vera’s steaming chili out on warmed-up plates. Her chili was amazing. It didn’t have ground beef; instead, the meat was in soft cubes, like a stew. There was a lot of garlic in it. Isaac missed the special sauce Vera used to put on it—pico de gallo, which had lots of real chili peppers, red onions, tomatoes, lime juice, cilantro, and fresh avocados. It was wonderfully spicy, but not too spicy. Just exactly right for Isaac’s taste. He could never find anything like it in a restaurant.

  Isaac dug in with gusto. Grandpa, as always, just picked at his food. He never seemed to notice what he was eating; clearly, it didn’t make any difference to him.

  Isaac would have liked to tell the former Grandpa about the mirror box and what it was for and how well it worked. Instead, he kept his discovery to himself and thought back to the young boy who used to live here. He must have had an arm amputated. Isaac wondered why.

  Another of the online articles had mentioned a game of sorts that two people can play with a mirror box. Isaac wished there was someone he could try it with, but there was no one around.

  He was almost finished with his dinner when he heard a loud noise. He looked over at Grandpa and saw that he had spilled his bowl of chili all over his lap.