Free Orgonomicon by Boris D. Schleinkofer

all stood.
    But wait—another moment, and Jaime noticed
that it was only the kids and the lolly-gaggers who were standing
on the metal—the men in suits and the aquarium staff were all
pushed off to the sides of the room, watching from a safe distance.
Jaime wanted to move over by them, to separate himself from the
crowd; a disaster certainly was about to happen. He had images of
the glass wall of the tank breaking, drowning them all beneath a
freezing tidal wave full of predators, of the floor beneath them
opening like a giant mouth and dumping him into a tank full of
sharks, and of a jellyfish that attached itself over his head.
    He didn't think he could be the only one made
so uncomfortable by the looming tank full of danger; looking
around, he saw one kid that he thought he recognized―but how could
he? How could he have felt the stab of recognition, that he'd seen
and done things, important things, with this kid he'd probably
never actually met before in real life? He could have been anybody
or nobody, except that he was somehow so familiar. It was
impossible; this kid hadn't come with his class, was at least a
couple years younger than him, but he felt like an older brother,
if that wasn't too weird to believe. He was short, with light sandy
brown hair and brown eyes that pressed into his brain, dressed in
hand-me-downs like him...but he really just looked like any other
kid in the world.
    And then the dreadful imposition began again,
and Jaime forgot all about the other boy.
    The nightmarish visions were intense,
impossible to ignore, and Jaime found that he wasn't the only one
not at peace with his thoughts—the rest of his classmates, to a
one, squirmed uncomfortably in their places, were staring blankly
straight ahead with expressions of dread openly displayed on their
faces. The animals swam past the glass in front of them, but no one
gasped and no one sighed, the room gone dull and spiritless.
Something hummed.
    He watched while two of the worst kids in his
class (a couple of jerks, they were always mean to him for reasons
he couldn't figure) changed in front of him, their eyes becoming
like steel BB's and their limbs locked in rigid positions, and a
terrible daydream of marionette-puppets flickered behind his
eyelids. He blinked and looked again, but whatever transformation
had taken them over was gone again just as quickly and now they
looked tired more than anything.
    The bottoms of his feet itched, and whenever
the horrible daydreams were at their strongest, the itching was
impossible to ignore. Jaime couldn't take it any more; the pain in
his neck and the general discomfort, the noxious stink of fish and
hundreds of young children and their spectacle, the generalized
feeling of missing out, someone's face that he'd already forgotten.
It was all just too much. Eleven years old was too young to feel
like this, wasn't it? He didn't want to be here anymore.
     
    William didn't know why the other kid seemed
so familiar to him, or why the boy was supposed to forget about
him, or how he'd done it; he'd made eye-contact and felt the same
shock of recognition, but then looked away to a spot above the
boy's shoulder and the spell had been broken. The electricity had
built and then faded away. It was not to be.
    And anyway, he had his parents to ditch. He
managed to slip away while several of the dolphin handlers
orchestrated an elaborately-choreographed trick, the audience
applauding and all attention focused on the performance. They were
too busy fighting, anyway; why should they notice his absence? He
wouldn't be gone long, just long enough..
    William ducked behind a velvet rope when no
one was looking and disappeared down a long, dark hallway. He
didn't know where he was going, nor did he really care—he just
wanted to find out what was around the next corner. Stairs went
down somewhere deep below; he followed them and left his parents
very much behind.
    The stairway ended at a T-junction and there
were voices