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Jilly
Deborah Wheeler
The summer he was twelve, Evan's baby sister, Jilly, spent a month with Cousin Edith in Chicago and when she came back, she had changed. Evan's first clue came when he went with his dad to meet her at the little country airport. Evan waited behind the outdoor gate, watching how the wire fences broke up the cloudless Kansas sky into rounded diamonds. Dad strode over to the field where the small private aircraft were parked, staring as if he'd never seen them before. When Jilly's plane landed, he followed it with his eyes.
A redheaded flight attendant led Jilly by the hand. Jilly started toward Evan and Dad with a big smile, showing the gap where one of her teeth had fallen out. Otherwise, she looked the same, with her bony knees that were always getting skinned and her flyaway hair the color of pine wood.
Her hair smelled of conditioned air, plastic, and airplane fumes. Evan didn't want to get too close to her.
Dad picked her up and hugged her. A shiver passed through her thin body and her face went pale right down to her freckles. She let her body go floppy until Dad put her down.
Dad said, "We've missed you."
She looked up at him and didn't say anything. Driving back in the pickup, she sat as far away as the seat belts would allow. Evan decided she must still be airsick. Jilly always had something to say about everything. Now, glancing at her round, unblinking eyes and pinched-in mouth, he wondered if this was the same kid.
Dad pulled up in the graveled front yard. A patch of daisies shimmered in the afternoon heat The two dogs lay panting under the apple tree by the picket fence, well away from the house. Mom caught Jilly in her arms, then glanced at Dad
"What's wrong? Is she sick?"
"Must be," he said.
She's just tired, Evan thought, but even then he knew that wasn't it.
Mom said, "Well then, up to bed, young lady, and we'll take your temperature. Evan! Get out here and help Dad with her bags."
__________
Jilly didn't have a fever, but Mom made her go to bed, anyway After Evan finished his chores and had taken care of his 4-H heifer, he went upstairs. One of the dogs, the old spaniel that was Jilly's favorite, lay inside the door. It whimpered as it crept out of Evan's way
Jilly lay in the exact center of her bed, the sheets folded down over the patchwork quilt that Grandma made the last winter before she died. She looked up at Evan and said, "I'm not afraid of you."
"Of course not." Evan sat on the side of the bed. The mattress springs creaked under his weight. "You've had all summer to make someone else's life miserable."
"You're not my real brother," she whispered.
Maybe the thing to do was humor her. Evan went into his own room and rummaged in his toy chest. Among the dog-chewed baseballs, the action figures, mismatched Legos, and his favorite model spaceship that Jilly had broken, he found the old hockey goalie mask he'd used as part of his costume last Halloween. He'd painted green slime around the eye-holes and red nail-polish blood dripping from the mouth. The red had faded to orange, but it still looked great. He put it on and lumbered back to Jilly's room, practicing his Frankenstein walk, arms outstretched, legs stiff.
"I am the monster who has taken Evan's place!" he growled in his deepest voice.
Normally, Jilly would have gone, "Eek!" or thrown a pillow at him or even pretended to be some other monster. She did a truly inspired Lady Dracula imitation. But now she sat there, white-faced.
Evan whipped the mask off. "Come on, I was only kidding."
"I wasn't."
__________
The next morning, Jilly still didn't have a temperature. Mom drove her over to play with her best friend, Doris, whose parents owned the farm five miles down the road. Evan hadn't seen their neighbors all summer. He'd been too busy watching sci-fi movies on television, taking apart the old tractor in the shed, and paging through the encyclopedia. Dad had spent much of the summer at the Air Force base, although Evan didn't know what he did there.
After she brought Jilly back, Doris's mother marched into the kitchen. Mom set Evan to peeling potatoes while she made the meatloaf.
"You've got to do something about that child before she gets out of hand," said Doris's mother. "Spouting nonsense about not belonging. Next thing, she'll claim she was adopted. I saw a case like this on TV. Kid went from bad to worse in no time. The family had to send her to New York City to a special doctor--- can you imagine that?"
Mom ran one hand through her fine--- mousey hair, which she'd grown out that summer until it covered her shoulders. Evan and Dad had both let theirs grow out, too.
Doris's mother nattered on about cults and perverts and the way computer games twisted kids' minds.
"She's only eight," Mom said in an exasperated voice, "and she stayed with Cousin Edith the whole time."
"Never let her out of her sight for an instant, did she?"
After Doris's mother left, Mom phoned Cousin Edith in Chicago. "Did anything happen to Jilly when she was with you? She's been acting a little strange since she got home... I guess you're right, that it was some bug she caught on the plane coming home. You never can tell what kind of spores people carry around these days."
__________
Evan woke suddenly in the middle of the night, startled out of a nightmare of meteor showers and sudden bright colors.
Moonlight streamed through his open window, almost bright enough to read by The house creaked as it settled. But something in the familiar shadows of his room sent a chill down his spine. He held his breath, listening. Them he heard a faint noise.
Breathing.
Without daring to move more than his eyes, he scanned the room. He made out a shape, darker than the rest, standing beside his bed. Watching him as he slept.
"Geez, Jilly..."
Then she was gone, padding down the hall on her bare feet.
__________
Jilly wasn't sick, that much was certain. There was definitely something wrong with her, something majorly creepy. After last night, Evan had the chilling thought that maybe this wasn't Jilly at all, but a robot which looked just like her. That started him thinking, remembering the movies he'd seen, of lights coming from the sky and snatching people off airplanes in flight, or aliens replacing people with pod creatures ....
What had she been doing last night? Studying him, planning a way to take him over or turn him into an alien, too?
Everything started to made sense.
As a test, Evan brought Jilly the new issue of Astonishing Space Ranger Stories. This was something of a sacrifice, since he still hadn't forgiven her for snatching his magazines from the mailbox last winter and reading them before he'd had a chance. He didn't mind sharing them afterward, but he wanted to be the one to rip open the plastic cover and peel apart the glossy, ink-smelling pages.
Jilly's door hung partly open. Evan stood in the doorway, watching her before she saw him. She was sitting up, the tray with its untouched hamburger by her side, cradling something in her hands. He moved closer. It was a harvest-man spider, the kind that sometimes came into the house late in the summer. Jilly had pulled off three of its legs. When she saw him, she brushed the spider off the bed.
"What do you want now?" she said.
He handed her the magazine.
Jilly picked it up, and for a moment nothing happened. She just stared at it, her eyes getting bigger and paler, until they looked like marbles of ice. Then she opened her mouth and screamed--- a high, tight sound. In one swift movement, she threw the magazine across the room.
Evan scooped it up and ran for the door. Standing in the hallway, his heart beating like a hammer, he smoothed the rumpled cover. The painting showed a flying saucer landing on a field at night, just like in the old movie. Evan's stomach went cold and cheesy. Then he took his notepad and pencil from his jeans pocket and began to write.
__________
After dinner, when Jilly had retreated back to her bedroom, the family talked about what was going on with her. At first Dad blamed the flight back. Jilly was much too young to travel so far alone, he said.
Mom thought she was still having trouble readjusting to being home.
Evan saw his chance. He showed them everything he'd written in his notepad, about the spider and the magazine cover and the way her hair smelled wrong at the airport. He hadn't taken any notes about last night when Jilly had watched him sleep. That was just too creepy to talk about.
"There's only one explanation," he said. "Jilly's been taken over by aliens from outer space!"
Mom said that was ridiculous and Evan had been reading too many scary stories. "Give her a little more time, she'll be fine."
"No," said Dad. "If something is bothering Jilly, we need to get it out in the open."
__________
Dinner the next night was fried chicken, Jilly's favorite, corn on the cob, and three-bean salad. Jilly ate it all. Evan wrote everything down on his notepad. Afterward, Dad called everyone together in the living room and told Jilly how much they loved her and there wasn't anything that she had to hide from them. Jilly listened, hugging her bony, scab-covered knees. She wore a backless sundress that made her look thinner than ever.
"Talk to us, baby." Dad leaned forward. "Whatever's bothering you, you can tell us. We're your family"
"No." Jilly stared back at him with eyes like twin lakes of tears. "You're not my family"
"It's no good talking," said Evan. "I told you---"
"Don't tease, Evan," Dad said. "She's having a hard enough time already."
"Look, ever since she came back, she's been different," Evan persisted. "No matter how much we love her, we can't change that. Jilly, the real Jilly, would never... She'd pick a spider up and put it outside so it wouldn't get hurt. And she hates three-bean salad."
"Evan, that's enough," said Dad in his you-better-pay-attention voice.
"Oh, he's so imaginative," Mom said, smiling like a Kmart dummy. "Boys will say anything these days. Now let's forget all about this UFO business, before we make Jilly worse."
Evan felt desperate--- they had to believe him! There was no telling what the alien Jilly would do now that she knew he suspected her. "I showed her a picture of a flying saucer and she threw it at me. She---"
"Stop it!" Jilly cried.
She slid off the chair and walked over to Evan. Her skinny legs shook and her face turned so red her freckles hardly showed at all. "All you know is a bunch of stuff from movies and magazines. You wouldn't know an alien if one was looking out at you from a mirror!"
"That's ridiculous!" Dad said. He looked dark and dangerous, angry in a way that Evan had never seen.
Jilly flinched and dodged behind Evan. "It isn't me that's been taken over by aliens, it's you! All of you!"
Evan felt like someone had played snap-the-whip with his mind. What was going on? He decided to try to handle Jilly himself until Dad could calm down.
"It's okay," he said to Dad. "I can talk sense into her." He drew Jilly away from both parents, out toward the hall. "Let me get this straight," he said. "You think I'm an alien--- and Mom and Dad, too. Doesn't that strike you as a bit strange?"
"I saw the same movies you did, but they had it all wrong. Aliens don't look like pods of fluff or green lights or bug-eyed monsters. They can't walls around on Earth any more than we can on the moon. So they wear some kind of spacesuits. I saw one on your neck that night when you were asleep. Hold still and I'll show you."
Jilly put her arms around Evan's neck. Her fingers burrowed beneath his hair, the hair he'd grown long over the summer. The hair that was hiding--- no, there was nothing there to hide! He was fine, he told himself, fine....
Jilly combed her fingers through Evan's hair so hard her nails scraped his scalp. He started shaking worse than she was.
"Evan, don't let her," came Dad's voice, sounding as if he were calling from the other end of a football field. "We can't lose you. It's just us three, don't you see? We've lost the other scouts and we can't send a signal with only two units."
Make her stop! The words shrieked through Evan's mind, or maybe it was Dad's voice. Hit her, push her down, smash her! Quick now, before it's too late---
But this was Jilly, his baby sister. True, she could be a brat, but he remembered the time she'd given him her double-dip chocolate ice cream cone at the county fair when some older boy had dumped his in the dust, and how she'd listened by the hour to his stories about ghosts and baseball, and no matter what, he couldn't hurt her.
"Do something!" Mom sobbed. "Stop her!"
Out of the corner of one eye, Evan saw Mom start toward them, arms outstretched. Her face looked like a plaster mask, frozen in rage or maybe terror, so that he hardly recognized her.
Before Mom could reach them, Jilly yanked hard on something at the back of Evan's neck. Anchor-barbs came free, stinging where they'd attached to his skull. He felt as if a network of threads were being pulled from his brain and spinal cord, burning like fire.
Mom screamed, "No!" Outside in the yard, the dogs starting howling.
Evan blinked and looked around. Everything seemed so different, the walls, the furniture, the cornfields beyond the windows. No--- it was he who'd been different all summer, as if he'd been seeing the world through colored glasses.
Now it all came back to him in a rush of memories, the night after Jilly left, how he went outside with Mom and Dad to watch the meteor shower, the lights falling all around them, and how everything smelled funny the next morning and the dogs barked and wouldn't let them come near.
All the while he'd been thinking Jilly was the alien.
"Jilly, listen to me." There was something odd about Dad's voice, like an echo effect. "If aliens were to come to Earth--- and I'm not saying they have--- then they might not be bad guys. They might be... curious, do you see? They'd want to find out more about us..."
To spy on us, Evan thought. To use us to spy for them. He thought of all the days Dad had spent down at the Air Force Base, watching the military planes and how he'd wasted his summer on old sci-fi movies and paging through the encyclopedia, passing on all that knowledge.
"I don't care!" Jilly stamped one foot. "I want my Daddy back! I want him back now!"
On the table, something stirred. It looked for all the world like a metallic spider. Each leg ended in dark threads that smoked slightly. Jilly had taken it from the back of Evan's head. He reached up with one hand, half expecting to feel his neck slick with blood, but his fingers met only tender, swollen skin--- no worse than a bad sunburn.
"What have you done?" Mom shrieked. "It's useless now! The whole mission is ruined! We can't call the ship with only two. We'll be stranded on this desolate planet forever!"
"No, it's not too late," Dad said. "The unit is damaged, but it can be implanted in a new host. The girl is not as good for our purposes as the boy--- she's younger and weaker--- but we can't use him again. She'll have to do.
"You want to get your family back?" Dad smiled at Jilly, not at all a nice smile. "In just a minute, you will join them."
Dad put his hands on Jilly's shoulders, pushing her toward the table. She whimpered, "No," and tried to twist free, but she wasn't strong enough. He kept talking in that same voice, as if he were trying to hypnotize her.
"It isn't so bad," he repeated. "You'll see."
On the table, the spider-thing--- the alien probe or whatever it was--- moved, first one long, jointed leg and then another. It had ten of them, the two longest ending in hooks that glistened as if they were wet with slime. It lifted itself and crept toward the edge of the table... toward Jilly's bare back.
"You'll see..." Dad repeated, like a tape loop. "You'll see..."
Jilly choked out the words, "Please, Daddy, don't."
The two longer legs caught in the skirt of her dress, barely creasing the cloth. It hauled itself up as if it weighed nothing.
All Evan had to do was to reach up and grab the thing. Pull it apart like Jilly had the harvestman spiders or stamp it into the floor.
The aliens hadn't hurt any of them, had they? Maybe Dad was right--- they were just curious. But maybe they'd come back to conquer Earth if they found it an easy target. Then he remembered how dark Dad had looked, how he'd shouted at Jilly, scaring her half to death. He remembered the expression on Mom's face.
Evan wished he could think straight. He didn't know who he could trust. Was it Dad talking or the alien speaking through him? What about the magazine stories about green scaly monsters and brains in jars? Were they just some crazy writer's imagination or were they a warning?
"I want my family back," Jilly had said.
My family, too, he thought.
Evan couldn't remember Jilly ever backing off when she said something in that tone of voice. She wouldn't whine or plead--- she just wouldn't give up. He remembered the way she fought over eating three-bean salad and how she stopped snatching his magazines from the mailbox when she was good and ready, not before.
The aliens might have all kinds of mind-control devices, fancy meteor spaceships, and cosmic weapons. Evan decided that once Jilly got an idea in her head, the aliens didn't stand a chance.
He got to his feet and closed his fingers around the spidery shape. The legs crumpled like eggshells in his hand, leaving little stinging scratches. A high, thin whining gradually faded.
"Come on, Dad," Evan said as gently as he dared.
Dad hung his head, his shoulders quivering as if he were sobbing silently. He didn't pull away when Evan reached up to the back of his neck. It was as if whatever drove him had given up.
Evan felt beneath Dad's springy hair and touched skin sticky with sweat. Ridges ran alongside Dad's spine, with a lump near the base of his skull. In the center of the lump, Evan's fingers touched hard, smooth metal. It came free when he dug beneath it, the anchoring legs snapping as they came loose. Getting the thing off Dad was easier than he'd thought. He put it on the table. Mom stood quietly as Jilly removed hers, too.
Already Evan's thoughts were clearing. In a few minutes, Mom and Dad would start to become themselves, too. Maybe in time they'd all forget what had happened to them. Maybe they wouldn't. One thing he knew for certain; the aliens wouldn't be coming back. Their probe had failed and they'd have to find another system, another planet.
Jilly yanked the spider-thing from Mom and turned toward Evan with a grin. He supposed there were worse things than having Earth's secret weapon for a baby sister, and grinned back at her.