Submitted for your approval: thirteen-year-old Marshall Teller, resident of a small town in Indiana known for some reason as Eerie. Marshall believes that Eerie is the center of all things strange and unusual, and keeps records of everything he finds, from Bigfoot sightings to UFOs to a strange, grey-haired boy who appeared out of nowhere with no memory of who he is or where he came from. Marshall's adventures are about to bring him into that place where Eerie intersects . . . the Twilight Zone.
"Don't Left?"
Simon and I stared up at the sign that had appeared this morning at the corner of Front Street and Main. The odd grammar wasn't the only thing about it that was weird. It was a strange shape as well: slanted on the left, up to a short top and then a sharp point on the right. Road signs didn't look like that.
I shrugged. "It means someone in the Eerie Public Works Department needs to go back to school."
"But you can't even turn left there! It's all woods back to Maple Street!"
"So they put it on the wrong corner, too. Someone'll call City Hall and tell them about it."
"I don't know," Simon said. "It took eight years to get a stop light at Serling and Beaumont."
"If enough people complain, they'll do something about it. C'mon, let's head home. It's time for dinner."
"Someone mention dinner?" Our semi-friend and partner in weirdness investigation, Dash X, popped up from behind a hedge and nearly gave me a heart attack.
"Dash, don't do that!"
"What's on the menu tonight?"
"Who said you're invited?"
"Your mom. She said I was welcome anytime. Don't believe me? You can ask her."
"She only said that cause you rave about her cooking."
"Well, I love her cooking!"
"Only cause it's free." I can't really blame Dash for looking for a free meal, which is the only kind he gets, since he doesn't have any money-or a home, or parents, or anything. He woke up one day in Eerie with no idea how he got here or who he was. I still don't know how we became friends, but he eats at my house whenever he can. Which is pretty much all the time.
"Who put that there?" Dash was looking up at the sign now. "Don't Left? What's that supposed to mean?"
"That's what I said!" Simon exclaimed.
"Just more Eerie weirdness," I said. "We'll come back tomorrow and take some pictures for the Evidence Locker. Let's go."
But the next day, we found the "Don't Left" sign on the opposite corner.
"How did it get there?" Simon demanded. "They moved it overnight?"
I went over and looked at where the sign had been the day before. "There's no hole in the concrete. They couldn't have filled it in that quickly. Could they?"
"Woulda taken a jackhammer," said Dash. "People would have heard it. They'd have called the cops."
"So how did it get over here without anyone knowing?"
"Maybe it was always here. Maybe we just thought it was on the other corner."
"No, I know where it was. I wish I'd had my camera yesterday."
"What's that down there?" Dash was pointing to something at the base of the sign. "Was that there yesterday?"
"I don't think so." It was a black box about a foot high, and it looked like it was made of metal. "Looks a little like a transformer, but why would it be here?"
"Maybe the sign lights up at night," Simon offered. "We should come back and check."
"Yeah, maybe." I stepped down off the curb, and suddenly there was a creak of metal. When I looked back, the sign was still in the same place, but it was facing the other way, its back to us. Like it had turned itself around when we weren't looking.
"I still don't know what 'Don't Left' means," Dash grumbled.
Over the next few weeks, more and more of those signs popped up all over Eerie. Most of them were at major intersections. Nearly all of them had those little black boxes beside them.
After the first one, none of them moved, so we were able to document them pretty thoroughly. Once we knew where they all were, we could then observe their effect on local motorists.
Most people didn't know what the signs meant, so they just ignored them. Some thought the sign meant "turn right," and turned whenever they saw one of the signs, even if it took them out of their way. There were more than a few accidents when someone coming one way and ignoring the sign ran into a right-turner.
Things got so bad that an angry mob stormed City Hall and demanded that all the signs be removed. The mayor promised that the problem would be taken care of, and as far as I can tell, did nothing about it.
The signs went away on their own.
Then they came back.
Not all of them; a few in out-of-the-way places stayed gone. But most returned to exactly where they had been. As far as I could tell, no one had removed them, and no one had put them back.
At least . . . no one human.
"You think it's aliens?" I asked, examining the base of one sign.
Dash gave me a look. "Aliens are messing with our traffic patterns?"
"Why not? Cars and driving are a big part of life on Earth. They're monitoring us to see what we'll do. It's like a big psychological experiment."
"Like rats in a maze?" asked Simon.
"Maybe. Maybe the little black boxes are recording devices. See if you can pry one up or open it or something."
There wasn't a black box beside the sign we were near. We had to go two blocks down to find one. When I bent down to examine it, I couldn't see a place where it attached to the ground.
"There's a hatch back here," said Dash, who was lying on the ground poking at the back of the box. "Like a battery door on a remote."
"Can you open it?"
"I'll try." He reached into his many pockets and finally came up with a screwdriver. Then he went to work trying to pry open the door. It took a long time. There weren't any screws or anything; he had to work the screwdriver into the crack and push and pull until finally something gave way. And when the door opened . . .
We stared at the inside of the box in shock.
"It's empty," I said at last. "There's nothing in there. No wires, no circuits, nothing. I wonder if they're all like this?"
Dash looked up at me wearily. "We're not gonna check every single one, are we? There's hundreds?"
"Seventy-four," Simon corrected him.
"That's still a lot."
"We'll do two or three," I decided, "a representative sample. The one on Willoughby Street . . . and the first one we saw, on Front Street."
We checked those boxes, and they were as empty as the first. At that point, we gave up and went to go get some slushies. On our way home, the sign in front of the laundromat vanished. But the black box was still there.
Things came to a point when the mayor's brand-new Porsche was wrecked by a right-turner at the Front Street sign. Standing there beside the lump of twisted metal that used to be his sports car, Mayor Chisel made a series of furious phone calls, and within an hour, road crews were on the streets with their jackhammers, removing each and every sign. They threw them into the back of a truck and moved on.
The boxes remained behind. The work crews either didn't know they were there, or they weren't sure what they were and decided to leave them just to be safe. It didn't matter; pretty soon the boxes started disappearing as well.
We never did find out what they were for. When we went back to see if the boxes or the signs had reappeared, all we found was a rectangular hole, a void where the box had been, as if someone had ripped it out in a hurry.
"Now we'll never know what 'Don't Left' means," Simon lamented.
Dash was on his hands and knees, examining the hole. "Hey, this dirt's still warm. Whoever took the boxes just did it, not too long ago. Hey!" He jumped back and scrambled to his feet. As we watched, the hole filled itself in, and then covered itself so completely that it looked like there had never been a hole.
"Time-traveling alien robots," I decided. "Covering up every trace of their presence here. Hope they found what they were-whoa!" As I stepped back, my foot struck something and I almost fell. I managed to regain my balance and looked down to see what I had tripped over.
It was the original DON'T LEFT sign, its odd angles rusty around the edges, like it had been lying there for years instead of only a few weeks. It was warm, like the dirt in the hole.
I picked it up and tucked it under my arm, hoping it wouldn't disappear before I could tag it for the Evidence Locker.
Aliens? Robots? Time travelers? Perhaps all of the above. Whoever they were, they left no trace of themselves or their strange devices, and no clue what their strange signs meant. A lesson for all: there are some questions that just have no answers. In Eerie . . . or in the Twilight Zone.