by Peter Straub
Fear made him imagine the thick, somehow misshapen thing sliding across the alley and crawling over his father’s useless fence. Unable to move or look away, Mark peered down. It was there; it wasn’t; it was. Too frightened to close his window against whatever might be invading his backyard, he put his hands on the sill and leaned out. A vague movement in the darkness below showed him the creature sliding down the pitch of the fence and moving closer to the house. Soon it will have come halfway across the yard, and then . . . Two shiny orbs, cold and reflective as steel bearings, looked up at him. Chill with terror, Mark yanked himself back through the window, in the process banging his head painfully against the bottom of the frame.
For a second he had the oddest feeling, that of having awakened a second time. The house, Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, the ghoul policemen with jutting teeth and grimy hands, they had been a dream inside a dream.
But instead of being in bed, he was still standing at the window, and the back of his head hurt like crazy. The bright insistent flare of pain from the tender place at the back of his skull seemed to anchor his feet to the floor, to locate him more firmly in the rational world. On the whole, it was as if he had been yanked out of a dream. Hesitantly, Mark leaned down and looked out the window again. The cold eyes had vanished; had never actually been there. No bloated monstrosity had come creeping toward his house, of course not. Mark half-closed the window and got back into bed. His heart was beating in his chest like a trapped animal.
Too disturbed to close his eyes, Mark lay awake for what seemed to him most of the night. By every measure less subjective and impatient than his, he fell asleep half an hour later. If he had any further dreams, they vanished from his mind the moment his mother, on the way to the bus stop on Sherman Boulevard, slammed shut the front door and woke him up. His father would already be downstairs, reading the newspaper in the morning’s hunt for fresh outrage and eating a characteristically suicidal breakfast of four cups of coffee and a sugar-plated Danish pastry, to every bite of which he conscientiously applied a generous smear of butter. Philip had no real work to do during the summer, Mark supposed, but every morning he got up in time to arrive at Quincy a minute or two before 8:00 A.M. Once there, his father shuffled papers or talked on the telephone until 5:00 P.M., when he could no longer justify staying away from home. To avoid all contact with his father until late in the afternoon, therefore, Mark had only to delay his own arrival in the kitchen for another fifteen minutes.
Before he slipped out of bed and tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom, he went to the window and looked down at the scene of what he now had no doubt had been a secondary and half-wakeful nightmare. The backyard looked as peaceful as he had expected it to be. The fence had not been flattened closer to the ground; no rags or bits of skin clung to the barbed wire. As far as he could see, no footprints, or animal tracks, or anything of the sort had been added to the marks left by Jimbo and himself over the past few weeks.
As soon as he got downstairs, Mark went out through the kitchen door. He saw no more evidence of intrusion than he had from the bedroom window. The packed earth between strips of grass yielded a few sole prints from a pair of DC Mantecas and nothing more—certainly no hoof marks or paw prints or whatever kind of trail would have been left by the creature he had imagined crawling over the fence.
In the alley, the cobbles showed no fresh marks or stains, at least as far as he could see. But of course nothing had dropped from the top of the wall. Nothing, especially not some large animal, could have passed through the barbed wire up there without leaving some traces behind.
With some portion of the relief experienced by a man recovering from an addiction to a bad love or a seductive drug, Mark went back inside to have a glass of milk and a bowl of Chex. As if in imitation of the abandoned house, the morning’s Ledger, rumpled from his father’s hunt for outrage, abruptly lurched into visibility at the center of the breakfast table. This time, however, Mark knew exactly what had caught his notice. A headline on the first page read FEAR FOR FATE OF LOCAL TEENAGER. From immediately below the headline, Shane Auslander looked out at him, not quite meeting his eyes. It was the photograph he and Jimbo had seen in Sherman Park.
The article told him that Shane Auslander, a sophomore at Holy Name Academy and a resident of the city’s North Side, had been missing for five days. He had last been seen leaving his house to join the evening gathering in Sherman Park that had lately been the source of neighbors’ complaints about excessive noise and disorderly behavior. Drug trafficking was suspected at these gatherings, but the police had no evidence that the Auslander boy had been the victim of drug-related violence. They feared, however, that his disappearance could be related to that of fifteen-year-old Trey Wilk, who had ten days earlier left a classmate’s house to walk home late in the evening and failed to arrive. The officer in charge of the two cases, Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus, stated that any connection between the two disappearances would be rigorously investigated and that police were pursuing all available leads. In response to a reporter’s question, Sergeant Pohlhaus said that while he could not comment on the safety of the two missing boys, the chances of a happy ending to such cases tended to diminish over time. Questioned as to the period of time most conducive to a safe return, he said, “We don’t have too much experience of this kind of situation here in Millhaven.”
Another glance at Shane Auslander’s photograph brought with it an unpleasant jab of remembrance. An unwelcome fragment of nightmare flickered in view, and he glimpsed something feral extending a bony hand to yank him out of his life. Goose bumps raised on his arms, and little dark hairs stuck up like quills. Hastily, Mark turned to the arts pages and grazed over the movie advertisements. He had nothing to do until Jimbo Monaghan finally got out of bed, an event that in summertime rarely took place until eleven o’clock had come and gone.
Mark put his dishes in the sink. Hoping to both save his mother some unnecessary worry and preserve his mobility, he folded the newspaper and thrust it into the wastebasket.
Without having made any conscious decisions, he wandered out the back door into the yard. His feet took him to the place on the defeated grass and exposed earth where the monstrous creature had seemed to lift its snout and look up at him. He smiled, thinking that he should send his uncle Tim an e-mail telling him that The Divided Man had given his nephew a grade-A nightmare. Maybe people wrote stuff like that to him all the time. Your book scared the hell out of me. Thanks! Mark did not feel so grateful.
Mark discovered that while conducting a kind of mental dialogue with his uncle, he had stepped over his father’s broken fence and moved into the middle of the alley. This morning, the eight-foot wall still looked ugly and said Keep out, but it did not seem quite so sinister. Lots of people took what other people considered excessive measures to make sure they got the privacy they thought they needed.
And where was he walking now but down to the lower end of the alley to Townsend Street? And at the bottom of the alley which way was Mark turning, east toward Sherman Boulevard, where he could kill a little time mooching around in the shops, or west toward Michigan Street?
It occurred to Mark that he was retracing his path of yesterday afternoon, when he had rounded the corner of Townsend and Michigan on his skateboard. This time, he wanted the reassurance of finding that the front of the house held no more fascination for him than the wall behind it now did. He wanted his normal world back again.
Mark came around the corner, looked for an introductory moment up at the whole of Michigan Street, and felt the breath in his lungs turn to vapor. Even before he had taken in any details, his nerve endings had registered a sense of essential wrongness. For perhaps as long as five or six seconds, familiar Michigan Street struck him as enemy territory. Only then did he notice the profound stillness. Drained of life and dimension, Michigan Street was as flat and dead as a landscape on a billboard. Skip lay curled on his porch as if dead. Mark’s knees weakened and trembled, and his heart st
uttered in his chest.
With an enigmatic, self-conscious authority that suggested he had been there all along, a thick-bodied man facing the other direction stood silhouetted against the dead sky at the top of Michigan Street. He was there now, in any case, and perhaps he had been posed up there from the start, and in his shock, Mark had failed to see him. The sense of wrongness flowed from this man, Mark understood—this figure with his back turned. Mark took in the unkempt black hair curling past his collar, his wide back covered by a black coat that fell like a sheet of iron to the backs of his knees. Willful, powerful wrongness came off of him like steam.
No, Mark thought, this creature had not been standing at the top of the street all along. He had set the scene, then placed himself in it. He had created an effect, and the purpose of the effect was to get Mark’s attention. With the clarity that sometimes follows in the wake of terror, the boy saw that he had been given a warning. A warning against what, the being at the top of the street would let him figure out later. For now, it was enough that he knew he’d been warned.
A recognition bloomed at the center of his terror. Oh, Mark understood, he’s what I saw last night. He climbed over the fence and came into our backyard. He saw the vague snout lift and the empty steel-colored eyes find him at his window.
Then one of those new, funny-looking Chryslers turned left at the top of the street and rolled directly past the place on the sidewalk where that thing had been standing with his back to Mark. On his porch, Skip dragged himself upright and, without much urgency, barked twice. Like Mr. Hillyard’s mutt, Mark forced himself upright. The ground beneath him swayed right—left, then right—before settling down.
Everything inside Mark’s body and most of his appendages seemed to be trembling, hands knees stomach heart viscera. It was almost funny, watching his hands jitter. The way his knees were jumping around, he was amazed that the legs of his jeans were not shaking. All of a sudden he was sweating like crazy.
Let’s pretend we have a clean slate, he thought. Let’s go up and look at that place as though nothing had happened before this moment.
He was going to waste a couple of minutes standing in front of a house that was rotting away from within. After he got tired of standing there, he would walk away.
A sentence from his uncle’s book popped into his mind: “What was at stake here, he thought, was the solidity of the world.” All right, how solid is the world? This time, he told himself, he would look at that house as never before. What could be seen, he would see; if it was nothing but an empty shell, he would go away knowing that his imagination really needed to be held in check.
Set thirty feet before him on its slightly tilting lawn, the house appeared subtly to shift its ground without actually moving in any way. Mark stood stock-still, as immobile as Skip had been a few minutes earlier. The house looked exactly the same, but it had altered itself nonetheless. In some internal fashion he had no hope of identifying, the house had adjusted to his presence. Mark waited. Chill drops of sweat glided down the sides of his chest. Unconsciously, he had balled his hands into fists, and the muscles in his calves and upper arms became unbearably taut. His eyes seemed to grow hot with the concentration of his staring. Mark’s entire body felt as if he were straining against an immovable force.
He dared not blink.
Then he wondered if he had missed it anyhow—a faint change in the texture of an area of darkness beyond the right front window. Too vague to be defined, the difference nearly escaped his notice. Mark could not be certain that he had not invented what he thought he had seen. Now the darkness behind the window presented a uniform charcoal gray. A second later, he thought he saw the slight alteration occur again, bringing with it this time a suggestion of solidity and movement.
The thought of that bulky figure from the top of Michigan Street hanging back in the darkness while looking out at him caused a sudden pressure in his bladder. Behind the window, an indistinct portion of the general shadow drifted forward and acquired an unmistakable solidity. Another step brought into greater visibility what could almost be identified as a human head atop a human body perhaps smaller and slimmer than that of the creature who had so alarmed him. With another gliding step, the dark figure emerged into sharper, though still uncertain, focus.
To Mark, the figure seemed too small and slight to be anything but a girl. The person inside the house had come forward to see him, as well as to be seen by him. She hung unmoving in the obscurity beyond the window, declaring her presence, exactly as the house had declared itself. Look at me, take me in, I am here. The house and its inhabitant had chosen him. That he had been chosen implied an invitation, a summons, a pact of some kind. Something had been decided, he knew not what, except that it had been decided in his favor.
Mark stepped forward, and the being inside the house filtered backward into darkness and invisibility. If he wished to hold on to its approval, he could go no farther.
Behind him, a voice said, “Yo, don’t you ever do anything else?”
Startled, Mark jumped. Jimbo stepped up beside him and laughed. He jabbed the nose of his skateboard into Mark’s back. “You jumped a mile!”
“You surprised me,” Mark said. “What are you doing up so early anyway?”
“My mom freaked when she saw the paper this morning. Remember the cop showing us that picture of the missing kid?”
“Shane Auslander,” Mark said. “Yeah, I saw that story, too. I bet she wants you never to go back to the fountain.”
“I had to promise her,” Jimbo said. “You look like shit. Honest to God. Didn’t you get any sleep last night?”
Mark could not tell Jimbo about anything that had happened to him since they had last seen each other. It felt completely private, like a secret only he could know. “I slept fine. Like a baby. Like a log. Like the dead. Now tell me something, bro. Do you think that house is really empty? Completely empty?”
“Here we go again,” Jimbo said. “Wanna go to the dump and shoot rats?”
“No, do you? I mean it.”
Jimbo cast an irritated glance at the house, then looked back at Mark. “Isn’t that what got you started in the first place? That it was empty?”
“That was part of it, yeah. That the place was empty. In a neighborhood like this, you’d think an empty house would stick out.”
“More like it fades out,” Jimbo said. “Honest, I don’t get what the big deal is here.”
“Maybe I ought to get inside there one of these days. Find out for sure.”
Jimbo raised his hands and stepped back. “Are you nuts? You want to see inside? Take a look in the window.”
Mark knew he could not do that. The force field kept him at the distance of the sidewalk. It would be easier for him to break in than to walk up the path, mount the steps, and stare into the window through which he had seen that shadowy figure.
“Let’s go to my house, so I can get my board,” he said.
For the rest of the day, they rolled down the handicapped ramps and wide concrete steps of an abandoned construction site located on Burleigh, a short bus ride away. Mark forced himself not to speak about 3323 North Michigan Street, and Jimbo was so grateful that he took pains to veer around the subject whenever it threatened to draw near. They had the place to themselves. No older kids showed up to make fun of their technique or to try to bully them out of their equipment. No aloof, silent loner appeared, as sometimes happened, to shame them with the chasm between their skills and his. Both Mark and Jimbo made three failed attempts to jump across a three-foot gap in a concrete railing; they scraped their wrists and acquired bruises on their shins, but did no serious damage to themselves. Around noon, they rolled down the block to a BK for bacon double cheeseburgers, fries, and chocolate shakes, and while they feasted they agreed that Eminem had changed hip-hop forever, yo, and that Stephin Merritt was the best singer of Stephin Merritt songs. After their lunch, they trundled back on their handsome boards to the construction site and rubbed the
ir sore spots and decided to take another shot at that gap in the concrete railing. Both of them made it across on their first after-lunch attempt, and in the words of Eminem, they asked the world if they could have its attention, please? For the rest of the afternoon, leaving aside a few minor falls, it was as if they could not make a mistake, either of them, and they rode the bus back to Sherman Boulevard in happy and proud exhaustion, fondling their scrapes and bruises like medals. They would never again share a day of such uncomplicated pleasures; it was the last time they were ever able to enjoy themselves in this way, together, like the boys they were.
9
By speaking when he knew he should remain silent, Mark brought some of the coming difficulties down upon himself. After dinner, his father escaped into his “den,” he claimed to read an article in the latest Journal of Secondary Education, but just as likely in order to leaf through the old issues of People and Entertainment Weekly piled in his magazine rack. Coasting along on autopilot, Nancy had put together a mushroom soup–tuna casserole with a crust of crumbled potato chips identical to those that would feed her husband’s guests on the afternoon of her funeral. When Philip scuttled off, she stacked their three plates and carried them into the kitchen. She seemed so distracted that Mark wondered if she would remember how to work the dishwasher.
He followed her into the kitchen, where she was dreamily running water over the plates. Her face, which had been concentrated into a brooding network of lines, twitched into an unconvincing smile at the sight of him.
“Are you all right, Mom?” he asked.
She responded with a phrase she would repeat two nights later, when Mark would find her seated on the edge of the downstairs bathtub. “I’m fine.”
