Interstellar Pig by William Sleator

Author:William Sleator [Sleator, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-06-06T04:46:02+00:00

10

But it couldn't be the real Piggy-

The silver eye stared into mine with keen perception; the lilting mouth seemed to be trying not to laugh. Just in time I heard footsteps and slithered under the sheet with my findings.

The door creaked open. It was only Mom.

"Barney, I thought I heard you .... You're as white as a sheet! What's the matter?"

My face was too burned to be white, but I could feel that the blood had drained from it. "Nothing, I Just came to an exciting place in my book," I said. Luckily, there was a paperback opened on the bed.

"Well, you've had an exhausting day and I don't want you staying up late reading. I’ll be back in ten minutes to make sure your light's out." She started leave, then turned back. "And I think you'd bet-take it easy tomorrow. You've been overtaxing yourself."

"Okay," I agreed, picking up the book.

As soon as she left, I pulled The Piggy out from under the sheet. The interruption had brought me back to the real world; I could look at the face now without feeling crazy. It was the unexpectedness of finding it, so soon after playing the game, that had given me such a jolt.

It was just a missing piece from a board game, that was all. There was nothing sinister about that. A little toy sculpture of The Piggy card. Naturally the neighbors, addicts of the game that they were, would be eager to get it back. The game wouldn't be right without it. You couldn't play Scrabble correctly without all the tiles.

But how often did you search out a missing Scrabble tile by finding it mentioned in a hundred-year-old document? A document that directed you to a place you had never been before? A piece of a futuristic science fiction game, not even on the market yet, "misplaced" where it had not been disturbed for decades.

The intelligent deformed eye knew exactly what I was thinking; the leering mouth mocked me. I covered it with my hand.

My next impulse was to run right over and give it to them. "Here, take it, it's yours, I don't want anything to do with it," I would say, thrusting it at them. And be rid of the pink and foul and mischievous thing, with all its impossible connotations.

Then I could stop worrying about it, because of course they would leave, immediately. This was what they had come here to find. And once they had it, they wouldn't tell me the truth about what it was, or how the whole puzzle fit together. They wanted to keep their true purpose a secret. Otherwise they could have simply asked me if I'd found anything like The Piggy at the very beginning:

But they hadn't. They searched the entire house, cleverly sidestepping all of my questions. They had avoided telling me anything about why they were really here, including me only as a fourth player in a make-believe game. And if I gave them what they wanted now, I would never find out anything else.

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