Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,212

sun itself. It fused seventy-five acres of this desert sand into glass.”

“How is that going to win the war?” Dewey asked. It was strange to finally be talking about secret stuff out loud.

“It’ll melt all the Japs!” Suze said. “Right, Daddy?”

Mrs. Gordon winced. “Well, if cooler heads prevail,” she said, “we’ll never have to find out, will we, Phillip?” She gave Dr. Gordon a look, then took a few steps away and stared out toward the mountains.

“You girls go on, take a walk around,” he said. “But when I call, you scamper back pronto, okay?”

Dewey and Suze agreed and stepped out onto the green glass sea. The strange twisted surface crunched and crackled beneath their feet as if they were walking on braided ice. They walked in from the edge until all they could see was green: splattered at their feet, merging into solid color at the edges of their vision.

“I didn’t know war stuff could make anything pretty,” Suze said. “It looks like we’re on the planet Oz, doesn’t it?”

Dewey was as amazed by the question as by the landscape. Suze usually acted like she didn’t exist. “I guess so,” she nodded.

“This is probably what they made the Emerald City out of.” Suze reached down and picked up a long flat piece. “I am the Wicked Witch of the West. Bow down before my powerful magic.” She waved her green glass wand in the air, and a piece of it broke off, landing a few feet away. She giggled.

“I’m going to take some pieces of Oz home,” she said. She pulled the bottom of her seersucker blouse out to make a pouch and dropped in the rest of the piece she was holding.

Suze began to fill up her shirt. Dewey walked a few feet away with her head down, looking for one perfect piece to take back with her. The glassy surface was only about half an inch thick, and many of the pieces Dewey picked up were so brittle they crumbled and cracked apart in her hands. She picked up one odd, rounded lump and the thin glass casing on the outside shattered under her fingers like an eggshell, revealing a lump of plain dirt inside. She finally kept one flat piece bigger than her hand, spread out. Suze had her shirttails completely filled.

Dewey was looking carefully at a big piece with streaks of reddish brown when Dr. Gordon whistled. “Come on back. Now,” he called.

She looked at Suze, and the other girl smiled, just a little. They walked slowly back until they could see brown dirt ahead of them again. At the edge, Dewey turned back for a minute, trying to fold the image into her memory. Then she stepped back onto the bare, scorched dirt.

They walked back to the car in silence, holding their new, fragile treasure.

Dr. Gordon opened the trunk and pulled out a black box with a round lens like a camera. He squatted back on his heels. “Okay, now hand me each of the pieces you picked up, one by one,” he said.

Suze pulled a flat piece of pebbled glass out of her shirt pouch. When Dr. Gordon put it in front of the black box, a needle moved over a bit, and the box made a few clicking sounds. He put that piece down by his foot and reached for the next one. It was one of the round eggshell ones, and it made the needle go all the way over. The box clicked like a cicada.

He put it down by his other foot. “That one’s too hot to take home,” he said.

Suze pulled out her next piece. “This one’s not hot,” she said, laying her hand flat on top of it.

Her mother patted Suze’s head. “It’s not temperature, sweetie. It’s radiation. That’s a Geiger counter.”

“Oh. Okay.” Suze handed the piece to her father.

Dewey knew what a Geiger counter was. Most of the older kids on the Hill did. She wasn’t quite sure what it measured, but it was gadget stuff, so it was important.

“Did Papa help make this?” she asked, handing her piece over to Dr. Gordon.

Mrs. Gordon made a soft sound in her throat and put her arm around Dewey’s shoulders. “He certainly did. None of this would have been possible without brave men like Jimmy—, like your papa.”

Dewey leaned into Mrs. Gordon and nodded silently.

Dr. Gordon made Suze leave behind two eggshell pieces. He wrapped the rest in newspaper and put them into a shoebox, padded with some more