Gorman's Back

Gorman called me at six that morning and if he'd been in the room I would knocked his block off. He was freaking out and told me I had to come over right away. I said, "Sure." and went back to bed. I woke up again at nine and decided to head over there after I ate some Shreddies and watched some cartoons.
I miss the old time Saturday cartoons. I just can't follow these new ones. I didn't really like Bugs Bunny or the Roadrunner, both of whom were a little too smug for me, so I cheered for Yosemite Sam and Wile E. Coyote, completely inept but full of wonder and creative pride. Transformers be damned, these were the classics.
By the time I got to Gorman's it was about ten-thirty. His mom said he was in his room but hadn't heard anything for a while. I went down and knocked on his door but there was no answer.

His room was a complete disaster. As much as I hated it when my mom bitched and complained until I cleaned my room, I had to admit that I liked it that way. This was chaos and it smelled bad. Gorman had a cool room, though. It took up almost half the basement in his house. And it had real walls, and not just blankets nailed into the ceiling joists. His dad wasn't the kind of guy to do things halfway, so when Gorman moved his room downstairs, they fixed it up right.
I called out his name and when no answer came I figured he'd probably gone somewhere. Maybe he was in the can or went to the store for a coke. I decided to wait him out and sat down at the desk.

Gorman always had projects on the go, and his desk was always crowded with drawings of machines that didn't exist and math that didn't work. He was the guy who took things apart to find out how they worked and then couldn't put them back together. He was really smart but really confused at the same time.
I sat looking through the sheets on the top of the pile but couldn't make any sense out of them, until I began to hear a strange whining. It was like the sound of two sheets of metal being ground against one another and it was getting louder. I looked out the window, half expecting to see some big tractor pushing around Mrs. Gorman's garden but there was nothing there. I cocked my head from side to side trying to figure out what direction it was coming from but couldn't find it. The noise seemed to be coming from everywhere.

I turned around, looking for the sound, and that was when I noticed a strange glow in the centre of the room. It was the size of a quarter but was growing quickly and the noise was coming out of the centre of it. I remember backing up against the wall, I remember being terrified. It was like something out of the Twilight Zone. I was just stuck there watching this thing get bigger and bigger until I decided that I'd better get out of there. I gauged the distance to the door and figured I could get there without touching the growing ball of light because, while it was pretty, I had no intention of staying to find out what it was.

I edged my way down the wall and toward the door and just before I went through it I thought I heard a voice, a grinding kind of screech, and it might have been coming from the hole in the universe that was opening in Gorman's bedroom and it might have been a voice, maybe Gorman's, screaming in excruciating pain, screaming the words, "Help me.", screaming something I couldn't make out, just screaming, but then the noise began to diminish and the ball of light began to shrink and then, almost as quickly as it appeared, it popped out of existence and was gone.
I stood there for what might have been ten minutes just looking at the space where it had appeared and then I bolted.

You don't believe me, I know. I wouldn't believe me either if I hadn't been there, and in fact I eventually started to believe what his parents and the cops and everyone else believed and that was that he was either kidnapped by some crazy or he fell down a well somewhere or that he ran away. When I was eleven it seemed likely that he'd opened a door to another universe and had been trapped, possibly by some malevolent force, but as I grew up I let go of those ideas. The world went on without him and eventually I even forgot about him.

The reason I'm telling you this is that he's here. He's back. I woke up last night and could hear a strange noise coming from somewhere downstairs. By the time I got down there was that ball of light, just like the one I'd seen in Gorman's room all those years ago, and the same grinding metal sound was coming from the centre of it. I was terrified and frozen halfway down the stairs as I watched the thing expand until in one short burst of energy something flew out of the hole and it slammed shut with a bang and was gone. And on the floor was Gorman.

He looks exactly the same as he did the last time I saw him. I mean he hasn't aged at all, but it's him. He's still eleven years old. He was unconscious when I got to him and has been sleeping for close to two days now in the spare bedroom and I don't know what to do with him. What do I do? I can't tell anyone that an eleven year old kid popped out of thin air in my basement and I certainly can't tell his family that he's back from wherever he's been, completely unchanged and still a kid. It was nearly twenty five years ago.

I'll have to wait until he wakes up, I guess, and ask him what I should do, what happened to him and where he's been, but until then I'm just going to sit here and listen. That sound is something I'll never forget. I can still hear it. And it just keeps getting louder and louder.