Chapter 3
It’s been almost eleven years since Lisa found Bill half-buried in the snow. In that time, she learned a lot about him. Including that the strange powers he has can’t be used to harm anyone and that he really likes to play with silly straws for some unknown reason. She also learned that he has a really warped sense of humor about things, very specifically about the ‘Screaming Head Incident’ that led to her giving him a very stern talking to about how mean it is to traumatize people. Charles and Bill never really got along well together, mainly because Charles insisted that Bill was like a ‘sleazy used car salesman from hell.’ Which, while it is an accurate description of Bill’s personality, is still a very rude thing to call someone.
One day, while Lisa was washing dishes after dinner, Bill was amusing himself by telekinetically flinging things at her and watching as they bounced off the invisible force that kept the things from getting closer than six inches from her. And that’s when Charles walked in. Charles, who had never seen Bill’s powers. Charles, who couldn’t see the objects bouncing off the invisible force from the angle he watched from. Charles, who saw what looked like Bill trying to hurt Lisa, was furious. So, he waited, and when Bill got bored and left the kitchen, Charles grabbed him and carried him out to the garage.
Lisa didn’t notice any of this. She had gotten used to Bill’s habit of flinging things and knew that they wouldn’t be able to hit her. She only noticed that neither Charles nor Bill were in the kitchen when she heard a loud crash from the garage. Immediately abandoning the dishes, she raced towards the garage to see what had happened. When she got there, she saw Charles lying on the floor, neck bent at an odd angle and clearly seriously wounded. She immediately called an ambulance and sat down on the steps up to the door into the house to wait for it to arrive. She stared straight ahead and didn’t notice anything around her, didn’t notice how Charles stopped moving a few minutes before the ambulance arrived, and didn’t notice that Bill was laying on the workbench, one of his bricks missing and covered with dark red blood. It seemed to take forever for the ambulance to arrive, and when it did it was too late for Charles.
After a while, Lisa moved from where she was sitting in the garage into her bedroom. Shortly after she left, Bill woke up on the workbench still in a great deal of pain from having one of his bricks pulled out. He sat up and very gently started feeling around his front to figure out which brick was missing. To his great surprise, none were. He could have sworn Charles had pulled one of them out before getting flung across the room by an unseen force.
A few weeks later, Bill was sitting out in the backyard getting very annoyed at the mosquitoes. He wasn’t technically allowed to be outside without supervision, a rule that came about after the Screaming Head Incident, but Lisa hadn’t talked to him much at all after he accidentally killed Charles and he was getting bored. Very bored. Bored enough that he had talked to, and somehow befriended, a starling he called Speckles. But Speckles had flown off in search of food, and now he was alone with the mosquitoes. There were a lot of them around that had apparently decided he was a wonderful source of food. Some of the smarter mosquitoes had even started crawling between his bricks where he couldn’t get rid of them. He’d have to come up with some sort of plan to deal with them.
Lisa was walking into the kitchen to get some lunch and was quite surprised and confused to find Bill carrying a potato towards the back door while dragging a knife along with him.
“Do I even want to know what you’re doing?” she asked.
Bill froze like he was hoping she wouldn’t be able to see him when he wasn’t moving. Then he slowly looked between her and the potato a few times before answering.
“I must appease the mosquitoes,” he said in a strangely monotonous voice.
Lisa decided she didn’t really want to know what that meant. She did watch through the window over the sink to make sure he didn’t accidentally stab himself though. After a few seconds, he got the potato where he wanted it and started stabbing it with the knife and yelling.
“L ehj ri wkhh iru phufb, R Pljkwb Prvtxlwr Jrg,” Bill yelled, feeling very happy with himself for finding a solution to the mosquito problem.
A few days later, during dinner, Lisa decided to try asking Bill about his past again. Very specifically, she asked if he remembered where he was originally from. Bill paused and thought for a few seconds after she asked before he was suddenly assaulted by a vision.
I was out exploring with my best friend and twin sister again today. Both of them were hopelessly Irregular by the standards of The Rules. My best friend was a tilted square with a separate eye and mouth. My twin sister was a five-pointed star with five fingers on both hands instead of four. Neither of them were in any doubt that they would die when the time for their Inspection came. I did doubt. We were twelve, and the Inspection wasn’t until they were fifteen. We could change The Rules. They could live. But back to exploring. Today we found this strange circular thing in the woods near Rhombus’ house. It glowed with a light that hurt to look at. None of us had seen anything like it before. My sister joked that maybe it was something that we could wish on, that would make our wishes come true. I didn’t have any better idea about what it was, so I dragged my sister towards it and put my hand against it before thinking my wish.
‘I want the power to change everything, I want to know everything,’ I wished.
Suddenly the thing glowed even brighter and enveloped me in its light. After a few seconds, the glow died down and the thing was gone. But it had made my wish come true, it had given me power and knowledge. It didn’t hurt as much as you might think to be changed from a creature of flesh and blood into a being of pure energy. It felt wonderful, I could change everything. I could make it so that my sister and my friend never had to die. I could give them powers as well. And I wanted to. I wanted them to feel as free as I did. So that’s what I did. Well, tried to do. I tried to give my sister all the powers that the thing had given me. But instead, a great hole was torn in the sky above us and as I tried to give her my powers, she fractured and was sucked into the rift. I hadn’t meant to make our world three-dimensional; I hadn’t meant to tear that hole in the sky, but I did mean it when I burnt it to the ground. The fire burned more than whatever that thing had done to me. My existence was agony. My life was pain. But life is joy, and existence is bliss. So he laughed, for his life was full of pain joy. He laughed and laughed for a thousand years before he came back to myself. And then I searched for my sister through the ashes of our world. For a trillion years to come.
Bill suddenly came back to himself and saw Lisa looking at him with a very concerned expression.
“Bill, are you okay?” Lisa asked.
“Yeah,” Bill replied. “I think that I was remembering something? I don’t know. Don’t really know what it was now.”
“You know,” Lisa said. “You should consider writing down things you think might be memories in a journal to try to keep track of them better. Maybe make some notes about them if you ever remember more.”
“That might be a good idea,” he replied.
In mid-July, something very strange happened. Not ‘sacrificing potatoes to the insect gods’ strange though. This was ‘owl comes up to the window and demands to be let inside in the middle of the day’ strange. Speckles the starling, who had only recently started to be allowed to live inside, was very quick to chirp complaints about the owl’s presence. Another strange thing about the owl was that it seemed to be carrying a letter. After a while of negotiating a price with the owl, who for unknown reasons decided it had to be paid, Bill was able to retrieve the letter and read it. The letter claimed to be from somewhere called ‘Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’ and had very detailed information about the textbooks and supplies required to go there. Bill found it hilarious because, as everyone knows, magic doesn’t exist. Though Lisa did seem to find it very odd that he believed that.