by Peter Straub
“You looked funny,” he said.
Nancy wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands, her mouth flickering between mirth and despair. “Get yourself to bed, young man. I won’t say anything to your father, but this is the last time, understand?”
Mark understood. He was not to say anything to his father, either.
7
Mark’s obsession had begun quietly and unobtrusively, as simple curiosity, with no hint of the urgency it would so quickly acquire. He and Jimbo had been out with their skateboards, trying simultaneously to improve their skills, look at least faintly impressive, and irritate a few neighbors. Over and over they had seen it proved that the average adult cannot abide the sight of a teenage boy on a skateboard. Something about the combination of baggy jeans, bent knees, a backward baseball cap, and a fiberglass board rattling along on two sets of wheels made the average adult male hyperventilate. The longer the run, the angrier they got. If you fell down, they yelled, “Hurt yourself, kid?”
Unsurprisingly, the city of Millhaven offered no skateboarding venues with half-pipes, bowls, and purpose-built ramps. What it had instead were parking lots, the steps of municipal buildings, construction sites, and a few hills. The best parking lots tended to be dominated by older kids who had no patience with newbies like Mark and Jimbo and tended either to mock their equipment or to try to steal it from them. They did have amazingly good equipment. Mark had seen a Ledger classified ad placed by a dreadlocked twenty-year-old hippie named Jeffie Matusczak who was giving up the sport to pursue his spiritual life in India and was willing to sell his two boards for fifty dollars apiece. They went on the Internet and spent the last of their money on DC Manteca shoes. Their outfits looked great, but their skills were drastically under par. Because they wished to avoid ridicule and humiliation, they did some of their skateboarding in the playground at Quincy; some on the front steps of the county museum, far downtown; but most of it on the streets around their houses, especially Michigan Street, one block west.
On the day Mark’s obsession began, he had pushed himself past the entrance to the alley, rolled up to Michigan Street, and given the board a good kick so that he could do the corner in style, slightly bent over, his arms extended. Michigan Street had a much steeper pitch than Superior Street, and its blunt curves had donated a number of daredevil bruises to the forearms and calves of both boys. With Jimbo twenty or thirty feet behind him, Mark swung around the corner in exemplary style. Then it took place, the transforming event. Mark saw something he had never really, never quite taken in before, although it had undoubtedly been at its present location through all the years he had been living around the corner. It was a little house, nondescript in every way, except for the lifeless, almost hollowed-out look of a building that had long stood empty.
Knowing that he must have looked at that house a thousand times or more, Mark wondered why he had never truly noticed it. His eyes had passed over its surface without pausing to register it. Until now, the building had receded into the unremarkable background. He found this so extraordinary that he stepped backward off his board, pushed sharply down on its tail, and booted it up off the street. For once, this stunt worked exactly as it was supposed to, and the nose of the skateboard’s deck flew up into his waiting hand. Jimbo rumbled up beside him and braked to a halt by planting one foot on the ground.
“Stellar,” Jimbo said. “So why did you stop, yo?”
Mark said nothing.
“What’re you looking at?”
“That house up there.” Mark pointed.
“What about it?”
“You ever seen that place before? I mean, really seen it?”
“It hasn’t gone anywhere, dude,” Jimbo said. He took a few steps forward, and Mark followed. “Yeah, I’ve seen it. So have you. We run past that stupid place every time we come down this street.”
“I swear to you, I have never, ever seen that house before. In my whole life.”
“Bullshit.” Jimbo stalked about fifteen feet ahead, then turned around and feigned boredom and weariness.
Irritated, Mark flared out at him. “Why would I bullshit you about something like this? Fuck you, Jimbo.”
“Fuck you, too, Marky-Mark.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Then stop bullshitting me. It’s stupid, anyhow. I suppose you never saw that cement wall behind it either, huh?”
“Cement wall?” Mark trudged up beside his friend.
“The one behind your house. On the other side of the alley from your sorry-ass back fence.”
The wooden fence Philip Underhill had years ago nailed into place around a latched gate at the far end of their little backyard sagged so far over that it nearly touched the ground.
“Oh, yeah,” Mark said. “The wall thing, with the barbed wire on top. What about it?”
“It’s in back of this place, dummy. That’s the house right behind yours.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mark said. “Right you are.” He squinted uphill. “Does that place have numbers on it?”
Rust-brown holes pocked the discolored strip of the frame where the numerals had been.
“Somebody pried ’em off. Doesn’t matter. Check out the numbers on the other side. What are they?”
Mark glanced at the house closest to him. “Thirty-three twenty-one.” He looked at Jimbo, then carried his skateboard up the low hill until he was standing in front of the abandoned building and read off the numbered address of the next house in line. “Thirty-three twenty-five.”
“So what’s the address of this one?”
“Thirty-three twenty-three,” Mark said. “Really, I never saw this place before.” He began to giggle at the sheer absurdity of what he had said.
Jimbo grinned and shook his head. “Now we got that out of the way—”
“They had a fire,” Mark said. “Check out the porch.”
“Huh,” Jimbo said. The wooden floor of the porch and the four feet of brick below the right front window had been scorched black. These signs of an old fire resembled a fading bruise, not a wound. The place had assimilated the dead fire into its being.
“Looks like someone tried to burn it down,” Jimbo said.
Mark could see the flames traveling along the porch, running up the bricks, then subsiding, growing fainter, dying. “Place wouldn’t burn,” he said. “You can see that, can’t you? The fire just went out.” He stepped forward, but not far enough to place a foot on the first rectangular stone of the walkway. There was a bemused, abstracted expression on his face. “It’s empty, right? Nobody lives there.”
“Duh,” said Jimbo.
“You don’t think that’s a little unusual?”
“I think you’re a little unusual.”
“Come on, think about it. Do you see any other empty houses around Sherman Park? Have you ever heard of one?”
“No, but I’ve seen this one. Unlike you.”
“But why is it empty? These houses must be a pretty good deal, if you’re not completely racist, like my dad.”
“Don’t leave Jackie out,” Jimbo said. “He’d be insulted.”
A well-known foe of skateboards, Skip, old Omar Hillyard’s even more ancient, big-nosed dog, pushed itself to its feet and uttered a sonorous bark completely empty of threat.
“I mean,” Jimbo went on, “it’s not one of those places with whaddyacallems, parapets, like the Munster house. It’s just like all the other houses in this neighborhood. Especially yours.”
It was true, Mark saw. Except for the narrowness of the porch and the beetle-browed look of the roofline, the building greatly resembled the Underhill house.
“How long do you think it’s been empty?”
“A long time,” Jimbo said.
Tiles had blown off the roof, and paint was flaking off the window frames. Despite the sunlight, the windows looked dark, even opaque. A hesitation, some delicacy of feeling, kept Mark from going up the walkway, jumping the steps onto the porch, and peering through t
hose blank windows. Whatever lay beyond the unwelcoming windows had earned its peace. He did not want to set his feet upon those stones or to stand on that porch. How strange; it worked both ways. All at once, Mark felt that the house’s very emptiness and abandonment made up a force field that extended to the edge of the sidewalk. The air itself would reject his presence and push him back.
And yet . . .
“I don’t get it. How could I miss seeing this place before today?” He thought the house looked like a clenched fist.
Jimbo and Mark spent the next two hours rolling down Michigan Street, sweeping into curved arcs, leaping from the street onto the sidewalk, jumping off the curb back into the street. They made nearly as much noise as a pair of motorcyclists, but no one stepped outside to complain. Whenever Mark eyed the empty house, he half-expected it to have dissolved again back into its old opacity, but it kept presenting itself with the same surprising clarity it had shown when he’d first rolled around the corner. The house at 3323 North Michigan had declared itself, and now it was here to stay. His obsession, which in the manner of obsessions would change everything in his life, had taken hold.
During dinner that evening, Mark noticed that his mother seemed a bit more distracted than usual. She had prepared meat loaf, which both he and his father considered a gourmet treat. After asking the customary perfunctory questions about how his day had gone and receiving his customary perfunctory evasions, Philip was free to concentrate on impersonal matters. Instead of recounting tales of intrigue and heroism from the front line of the gas company’s customer relations office, his mother seemed to be attending to an offstage conversation only she could hear. Mark’s thoughts returned again and again to the house on Michigan Street.
Now he wished that he had after all walked up to the place, climbed onto the porch, and looked in the window. What he remembered of the feelings he had experienced in front of the house boiled down to a weird kind of politeness, as if his approach would have been a violation. A violation of what? Its privacy? Abandoned buildings had no sense of privacy. Yet . . . he remembered feeling that the building had wanted to keep him away and erected a shield to hold him back. So the building had kept him from going up the stone walkway? That was ridiculous. Mark had kept Mark from leaving the sidewalk. He knew why, too, though he did not want to admit it. The house had spooked him.
“Pretty quiet tonight, Mark,” said his father.
“Don’t pick on him. Mark’s fine,” his mother said in a lifeless voice.
“Am I picking on him? Am I picking on you?”
“I don’t know. Are you?” He watched his mother shaving tiny slices off her meat loaf and sliding them to the side of her plate.
His father was getting ready to call him on his insubordination. Mark rushed through the verbal formula for exiting the dining room and said, “Jimbo’s waiting for me.”
“God forbid you should keep Jimbo waiting. What are you going to do that’s so important?”
“Nothing.”
“When it begins to get dark, I don’t want to hear the sounds of those skateboards. Hear me?”
“Sure, fine,” he said, and carried his plate into the kitchen before his father remembered that his irritation had a cause more specific than its usual source, his son’s adolescence.
After losing the yolky look of the afternoon, the sunlight had muted itself to a dispersed, fleeting shade of yellow that struck Mark Underhill with the force of a strong fragrance or a rich chord from a guitar. Departure, beautiful in itself, spoke from the newly shorn grass and infolding hollyhocks in the Shillingtons’ backyard. He thought he heard the scraping of an insect; then the sound ceased. He rushed toward his destination.
Beyond the defeated fence Jimbo had remarked lay eight feet of dusty alley, and beyond the alley rose the cement-block wall also remarked by Jimbo. If the wall fell over and remained intact, it would blanket fourteen feet of the alley with concrete blocks; and the triple strands of barbed wire running along the top of the wall would nearly touch Philip Underhill’s ruined fence.
Eight feet tall, fourteen feet long, and mounted with coils of barbed wire—Mark had certainly noticed the wall before, but until this moment it had seemed no less ordinary than the Tafts’ empty doghouse and the telephone wires strung overhead, ugly and unremarkable. Now he saw that while it was undoubtedly ugly, the wall was anything but unremarkable. Someone had actually gone to the trouble to build this monstrosity. The only function it could possibly have had was to conceal the rear of the house and to discourage burglars or other invaders from sneaking onto the property from the alley.
Both ends of the wall disappeared into a thick mass of weeds and vines that had engulfed wooden fences six feet high walling in the backyard on both sides like false, drastically overgrown hedges. From the alley, this vegetation looked impenetrably dense. In midsummer, it oozed out a heavy vegetal odor mingling fertility and rot. Mark could catch a hint of that odor now, fermenting itself up at the heart of the weedy thicket. He had never been able to decide if it was one of the best smells he knew, or one of the worst.
That he could not see the house from the alley made him want to look at it again all the more. It was a desire as strong as thirst or hunger—a desire that dug a needle into him.
He ran up the narrow alley until he reached the Monaghans’ backyard, vaulted over their three feet of brick wall, and trotted over the parched, clay-colored earth softened by islands of grass to their back door, which he opened a crack.
“Yo, Jimbo!” he called through the opening. “Can you come out?”
“He’s on his way, Marky,” came the voice of Jimbo’s mother. “Why are you back there?”
“I felt like coming up the alley.”
She appeared in the arch to the kitchen, coming toward him with an unsettling smile. Margo Monaghan’s smile was not her only unsettling feature. She was easily the most beautiful woman Mark had ever seen, in movies or out of them. Her watercolor red hair fell softly to just above her neck, and she combed it with her fingers. In summer, she usually wore T-shirts and shorts or blue jeans, and the body in these yielding, informal clothes sometimes made him feel like swooning. The woman smiling at Mark now as she walked to the screen door seemed not only to have no idea of how stunning she was, but to have no personal vanity at all. She was friendly in a half-maternal way, slopping around in her old clothes. Apart from her amazing looks, she fit into the neighborhood perfectly. His mother was the only person Mark had ever heard speak of Mrs. Monaghan’s beauty. She opened the door and leaned against the frame. Instantly, Mark’s penis began to thicken and grow. He shoved his hands into his pockets, grateful for the roominess of his jeans. She made the situation infinitely worse by reaching out and stroking the top of his head with the palm of her hand.
“I wish Jimbo would get one of those haircuts,” she said. “He looks like a silly hippie. Yours is so much cooler.”
Mark needed a moment to realize that she was talking about body temperature.
“What adventures are the homeboys getting into tonight?”
“Nothing much.”
“I keep asking Jimbo to show me what he can do on that skateboard, but he never does!”
“We have a way to go before we’re ready for the public,” Mark said.
She had the whitest, purest skin he had ever seen, more translucent than a young girl’s; it seemed that he could look down through layers, getting closer and closer to her inner light. The blue of her irises leaked out in a perfect circle into the whites, another suggestion of gauzy filminess contradicted by the luxuriance of the shape beneath the black T-shirt, which bore the slogan: 69 LOVE SONGS. It was one of his, borrowed weeks ago by Jimbo. His shirt, hugging Margo Monaghan’s shoulders, Margo Monaghan’s chest. Oh God oh God.
“You’re a handsome kid,” she said. “Wait till those high school vixens get their mitts on you.”
His face had become as hot as a glowing electrical coil.
“Oh, honey, I�
��m sorry I embarrassed you,” she said, rendering his embarrassment complete. “I’m such a klutz, honest—”
“Mo-om,” Jimbo bellowed, sidling past and nearly pushing her aside. “I told you, stop picking on my friends!”
“I wasn’t picking on Mark, sweetie, I—”
If you wanted to drive yourself crazy you could remind yourself that fifteen years ago, Jimbo had crawled out from between Margo Monaghan’s columnar legs.
Jimbo said, “All right, Mom,” and jumped down the steps to the backyard. Mark pressed a hand to a burning cheek and glanced at his friend’s mother.
“Go,” she said.
He jumped off the steps and caught up to Jimbo on the other side of the low brick wall.
“I hate it when she does that,” Jimbo said.
“Does what?”
“Talks to my friends. It’s creepy. It’s like she’s trying to get information.”
“I don’t mind, honest.”
“Well, I do. So what do you want to do?”
“Check out that house some more.”
“Yeah, let’s go to the dump and shoot rats.”
This was an allusion to a Woody Allen movie they had seen a couple of years before in which, faced with any amount of empty time, a brilliant guitarist played by Sean Penn could think to fill it only by shooting rats at the local dump. For Mark and Jimbo, the phrase had come to stand for any dumb, repeated activity.
Jimbo smiled and cast him a sideways look. “Only I was thinking we could go over to the park, see what’s happening over there, you know?”
On summer nights, high school students and hangers-on from all parts of town congregated around the fountain in Sherman Park. Depending on who was there, it could be fun or a little scary, but it was never boring. Ordinarily, the two boys would have walked to the park almost without discussion, understanding that they would see what was going on and take it from there.
“Humor me, all right?” Mark said, startled by the bright pain raised in his heart by the thought of not immediately going back down the alley. “Come on, look at something with me.”
