When You Were Young

Joey awoke in a cave with Aunt Veronica squatting next to him. When he tried to get to his feet, she shoved him down to the ground. "Don't even think it," she said.

"What are we doing here?" he asked.

"It's time you see what's going on here." She dragged him by the front of his shirt towards a circle of glowing red light. As they neared the light, he saw it was a pool with symbols all around it. These symbols looked familiar to him, but he couldn't remember where he'd seen them before.

At the edge of the pool, he looked down into the glowing red light. Clumps of some kind of plants lay on the surface of blood-red water. Reflected in this water he saw not himself, but the faces of little Samantha, Prudence, and Wendell. They were all screaming for help. Joey reached out towards them, his fingers about to graze the surface when Aunt Veronica jerked him back against the wall. "Don't touch it, idiot," she said. "Unless you want to die like the others."

"They aren't dead," he said. "They're in there."

"They can't be alive in the water. They'd have drowned a long time ago. You're seeing things."

"No I'm not! They really are down there."

"Fine, maybe they are down there. If you want to help them, then you have to figure out how we can get rid of that algae. I know the answer is somewhere in that little brain of yours. Come on."

Aunt Veronica led him out of the cave and back into the forest. As they tromped through the woods, Joey tried to think of what he could do to help Samantha and the others. Aunt Veronica said he knew the answer, but how could he? He was only six years old; he could barely read and write.

He thought again of those symbols, trying to remember where he'd seen them before. A dark place. A cave, but not the same as that one. In the cave he found something. He couldn't remember what, but he knew it held the answer to everything.

They emerged from the forest at the cabin where he, Molly, Samantha, and the twins had stayed for that one night. "Is that where we're going?" he asked.

"No, it's time for you to get to work. We aren't really set up for a laboratory, but I've done what I can." Aunt Veronica dragged him along the path into town. There, in the square where decorations for Samantha's birthday were still up, they found little Molly.

A trio of boys surrounded her, holding the pink hair ribbon over her head. Whenever she tried to grab it, they raised it higher. "Give it back! It's mine," she said.