Lost Boy Lost Girl

by Peter Straub

  “Are you really? I don’t know, you just look kind of . . .”

  Visibly making an effort to imitate her normal self, she straightened her shoulders and gave him a look of mock rebuke. “Kind of what?”

  The only answer he thought he could give was a weak “Tired?”

  “Maybe I am tired. You know what?” Now her smile communicated some actual warmth. She reached out and rubbed the top of his head. “I wouldn’t exactly mind a little help in the kitchen. Your father would only get annoyed if I asked him, but maybe there’s some hope for you.”

  “Sure,” he said, and held out his hands for the rinsed plates. “I was thinking you maybe looked sort of worried, too.”

  “Maybe looked sort of worried.” Nancy spoke the words as if testing her understanding of a foreign language.

  “Yeah,” Mark said. She still had not handed him the plates.

  “Why shouldn’t I be worried? At work today, Mack and Shirley told me that someone’s been abducting teenage boys right in this part of town. From Sherman Park! Mack said, ‘Nance, I hope you’re keeping your boy away from that fountain at night.’”

  With that, she handed him the dripping plates. Mark bent over and began inserting them into the bottom rack of the dishwasher.

  “But you do go there, don’t you? You and Jimbo hang around that fountain almost every night.”

  “Probably not so much anymore.” He straightened up and held out his hands for whatever she would give him next. “Now they have cops all over the place. They ask you all these questions. It’s so stupid.”

  “I don’t think that’s stupid. It’s what the police should be doing.” She handed him two water glasses with a touch of belligerence.

  “Not if they want to catch the guy,” he said. “This way, all they’re doing is guaranteeing that fewer and fewer kids will go there every night, until nobody’s there at all. I don’t think the bad guy, if there is a bad guy, is going to stop what he’s doing, I just think they won’t know where to look for him anymore.” He put the glasses into the machine and held out his hands for two more.

  “So what do you think they should do, Mark?”

  “Go to the park, but stay out of sight. Conceal themselves. Go in disguise. That way, they might have a chance.”

  “And use you kids as decoys? No thanks, Buster Brown.” She shoved another glass into his hand and took his cereal bowl from the sink. “I don’t think I want you going to that park at night anymore. At least not until they catch the man who’s been taking these boys. I don’t care if the Monaghans let Jimbo sashay over there every night. Jimbo isn’t my son. He can go alone, or you and he can either stay home or go somewhere else. You know, you could join a church youth group. Shirley’s daughter, Brittany, has a lot of fun at her youth group. She uses it like a club. They even have dances.”

  “I don’t want to join a church youth group with Shirley’s daughter. Please.”

  “I want you to think about it. Please. You and Brittany could, I don’t know—”

  “Mom, sorry. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about.”

  She closed her mouth on her unfinished sentence and nodded at him, frowning. Uncertain if this was actually a good idea, Mark said, “Is there some kind of story about that empty house right in back of ours?”

  For a second, his mother’s mouth hung open and her eyes lost focus. The cereal bowl dropped from her hands and smashed against the floor, separating into three sections and a scattering of white powder. Nancy stared down at the remains of the bowl without moving her hands.

  “What?” Mark said. “What’s wrong?” he added, this time meaning something different.

  Slowly, Nancy lowered herself. She did not change the position of her hands until she could touch the floor, after which she piled up the three large sections of the bowl and nested them together. “Nothing’s wrong, Mark,” she said. “Get the whisk broom and the dustpan, will you?”

  Feeling blocked and almost rejected, he spun away to fetch the pan and brush from the broom closet. When he knelt beside his mother, she snatched the things away from him. “Go on, I’ll do it. I mean it. I dropped the darned thing, didn’t I?”

  Mark stepped back and watched her brush the fragments into the dustpan, go after the powder, then continue sweeping the whisk broom over the same patch of kitchen tile until she appeared to be attacking invisible fragments. He was determined not to leave her side until she at least looked at him.

  Evidently, she had been gathering herself to speak while she rid the tiles of nonexistent particles, and she spoke without looking up. “You were asking me about that empty house on Michigan Street, weren’t you?” Her voice was deliberately uninflected.

  “Come on, Mom. Stop pretending.”

  She glanced up at him. “You think I’m pretending? What do you think I’m pretending about?”

  “I’m pretty sure you know something about that house across the alley from us.”

  “You can think what you like.” She stopped moving the whisk broom over the tiles.

  “Mom, that’s why you dropped that bowl. It’s obvious.”

  Nancy got to her feet without taking her eyes from him. “Let me tell you something, Mark.” She waved him aside so she could dump the fragments of china in the wastebasket. “You have no idea on earth what is obvious. None.”

  “Then tell me,” he said, more alarmed by her present manner than he had been earlier.

  “You’re interested in that house for some reason, that’s clear. Have you done anything about it, Mark?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you been sneaking around that place?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever tried to break in?”

  “Of course not,” he said, stung.

  “All right. Don’t. Stay away from that place. Everybody else does. Did you ever think about that?”

  “I only noticed the place about a day ago.”

  “I’m sorry you did.” Her gaze grew more intense. “Answer me this. Let’s say the reason you never noticed that house before now is because everyone else around here ignores it. Does that make sense to you?”

  He thought about it, then nodded.

  “Now I’m just guessing, okay? I think something terrible happened in there—something really, really bad, and that’s why everybody leaves the place alone.”

  “But what about the people who came here too late to know about it?” Like us, he could have added, but did not.

  “It’s obvious, Mark. Something’s wrong, and they smell it. One of these days, the city will knock the place down. Until then, it’s better to forget about it.”

  “Okay,” Mark said.

  “So that’s what I want you to do.”

  “Well, I can’t really forget about it, Mom.”

  “Yes, you can. At least you can try.” She came a step closer and gripped his arm.

  “Fine,” he said. The wild expression in her eyes frightened him.

  “No, not fine. Promise me you’ll stay away from that house.”

  “Okay.”

  “Say it.”

  “I promise.”

  “Now promise me you’ll never go inside that place.” She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. “For as long as I live.”

  “Yo, Mom, you’re scaring me.”

  “Good. Being scared isn’t going to hurt you. And don’t say yo to me. Now, say it.”

  “I’ll never go inside that house.” Eyes blazing, she nodded at him. “For as long as you live.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise. Mom, let go, okay?”

  She released him, but her fingers seemed still to clamp into his skin. He rubbed his arm.

  “So what are you going to do tonight?”

  “Probably we’ll just walk around, maybe go to a movie.”

  “Be careful,” she said, unerringly placing her fingers on the developing bruises they had just given him.

  Skateboar
d in hand, he fled through the back door. To his surprise, Jimbo was waiting for him, leaning against the concrete wall on the other side of the alley.

  They began drifting back up the alley toward the Monaghan house and West Auer Avenue. “The park is fucked,” Jimbo said. “All those cops around the fountain, nobody’ll be there.”

  “Except for the pedophile child murderers. No more fun for those guys. ‘Dude, where’d they all go? I got two spaces left under my back porch.’”

  “Playgrounds and shopping malls, man. All you need is some Milk Duds and a van.”

  Mark snorted with laughter. Some Milk Duds and a van.

  An earlier subject returned to him, so swiftly its velocity might have pushed him backward. “I asked my mom about that house, and she went completely nuts.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Jimbo appeared to be more interested than Mark had expected him to be.

  “She made me promise never to go inside there. At least not while she’s alive.”

  “That gives you about a fifty-year wait.”

  “Why would she think I wanted to go in there in the first place?”

  “Does she know how screwy you are about it?”

  “No! And I don’t think I’m so screwy, either. There’s something I wasn’t going to tell you, but I think I will. Then you can decide how screwy I am.”

  “Where are we going anyhow? We could take a bus downtown to the mall, see if there are any good new CDs.”

  “Will you shut up and listen to me?”

  Mark stopped moving; after a few paces, Jimbo stopped too. “What?”

  “Are you interested? Are you going to listen?”

  “Well, yeah, but I could listen to this thing you didn’t want to tell me on the bus, too.”

  “I think I saw someone in there today.”

  Jimbo came nearer, his head tilted to one side. So he was interested at last. “What do you mean? Through the window?”

  “Of course through the window, dumbbell. How else could I see someone?”

  “Who was it?”

  “I couldn’t see that clearly. It was like this person was sort of hanging back far enough to hide in the darkness, you know, but close enough to show me she was there.”

  “You think it was a woman?”

  “Maybe. It could have been.”

  Mark tried to remember what he had seen: a shape moving toward him through layers of darkness, then moving back into invisibility. The shape had been without any specific age or gender, yet . . .

  “We should go look,” Jimbo said, firmly.

  “I thought you wanted to go downtown.”

  “I can’t afford to buy any CDs until the weekend, and neither can you.”

  Jimbo set off down the alley in the direction they had come. “I asked my parents if they knew anything about that house, too. They said it was already vacant when we moved here.”

  “My mom loses her mind just thinking about the place. She made me promise—oh, I told you.”

  The high concrete wall rose up along their left side, and Jimbo patted it as they went by. “This thing does look pretty sinister, now that you mention it. I mean, it’s not exactly normal, is it?”

  At the bottom of the alley, the cobblestones gave way to ordinary pavement. They got on their boards and propelled themselves around the corner onto Michigan Street.

  “Next time, I’ll bring my old man’s field glasses,” Jimbo said. “They’re good, yo. With them, you can practically see the footprints on the moon.”

  The house sat on its narrow lot exactly as before. Its windows reflected nothing. The burn marks appeared to ripple across the bricks. The boys’ wheels sent out rolling, unbroken rumbles that boomed in Mark’s ears like shock waves. It sounded as though they were making three times more noise than usual, creating a din that would rattle the dishes on the shelves and shake the windows in their frames.

  Mr. Hillyard’s dog raised its long, big-nosed head and uttered a dispirited woof. Mark thought he saw a curtain on the porch window twitch back into place. They had awakened the dog; what else had they roused into life?

  “We could go back to that place on Burleigh,” Mark said. “It won’t get dark for at least an hour.”

  “Let’s stay here,” Jimbo said. The idea of the unknown girl had provoked a new, heightened interest in him. “If she’s there, she’ll hear us. Maybe she’ll look out the window again.”

  “Why would she?” He sounded doubtful, but his heart stirred.

  “To see you,” Jimbo said. “That’s what she was doing the first time, wasn’t it?”

  “If it was a she. If it was anyone at all.”

  Jimbo shrugged and spun his board around, for once reasonably smoothly. “Maybe she ran away from home.”

  “Maybe,” Mark said. “One thing’s for sure. Nobody’s going to bother her in there.” Then he wondered: was that true? He felt queasier than he wanted Jimbo to notice.

  For another hour, they pushed their skateboards uphill and rode them down, jumping off curbs and doing ollies. A few neighbors stared at them from porches or windows, but no one complained. At least once every couple of minutes, one boy or the other glanced at the front windows of 3323, without seeing any more than an opaque surface, like a film over the glass.

  Just as it began to get dark, Jimbo looked at the house for the thousandth time and said, “We’re such a couple of dopes. We’re acting like we’re afraid of the place. We should just go up and look in the window.”

  “I can’t do that,” Mark said quickly. “I promised my mom.”

  “You promised not to break in, not that you wouldn’t look in the window!”

  “It was more like I promised to stay away from the place,” Mark said, not quite telling the truth. “I just can’t.” He waited a second. “But you didn’t make any promises, did you?”

  “The only place I said I’d stay away from is the fountain.”

  “Then I guess you could take a look,” Mark said.

  Jimbo handed him his skateboard and ran across the street, bent over like a parody of Groucho Marx. He vaulted across the sidewalk, sped over the ground, and took the stairs in two jumps. On the porch, he crab-walked along the fire-scorched wall to the window. Only his head was visible. Mark watched him cup his hands over his eyes and peer inside. Jimbo moved half a foot to his right without taking his hands from his eyes. Half a minute later, he dropped his hands, half-stood, and, shrugging, looked across the street at Mark. He shook his head and made a palms-up sign for confusion before jumping down from the porch and running back across the street.

  “Did you see something or didn’t you?” Mark asked.

  “There might be something in there—some person, I mean.” Jimbo drew his entire face into a squint. “I don’t really know what I saw. It was like something was hiding from me.”

  “A guy? Because I really do think I saw a girl in that room.”

  “Yeah?”

  Mark nodded. Over the past half hour, the impression had been growing in him: a girl, a young woman, had permitted herself to be glimpsed. It was like an announcement, or an invitation.

  “I have an idea,” Jimbo said. “It’s getting dark in about half an hour. Let’s go back to my house and pick up some stuff.”

  “What?”

  “Stuff.”

  Jimbo flipped his board into position, grabbed it with his feet, and sailed down the street, pumping his body for speed. Mark rolled downhill after him. Six feet ahead, Jimbo swung through the corner, popped himself onto the sidewalk, and kept sailing until he reached the alley, where he jumped off his board, scooped it up, and ran toward his house. Mark trotted along in his wake, thinking that whatever Jimbo wanted to take from his house, he was pretty dedicated about it.

  Then he remembered: the fancy binoculars.

  “Wait here,” Jimbo called over his shoulder, sprinting across his backyard to the kitchen door. The light over the sink burned yellow in the window; behind it, light from the living room washed a
long rectangle across the floor. Mark heard Jimbo’s voice raised in argument, then his father’s voice, louder and more aggrieved. He settled down to wait.

  By slow degrees, the air thickened and gathered itself. At his feet, the separations between the cobblestones filled with shadows. A familiar alto voice drifted from the kitchen window, calm and soft as a summer cloud. His mother at his shoulder, Jimbo reappeared in the door. For an instant, Mark wished he could let Jimbo go his way while he slipped into the kitchen to spend an hour with Margo Monaghan. The door closed, and his ideal woman disappeared. Jimbo came bouncing toward him, carrying a leather case in one hand and in the other, something black that looked like a club. He held his skateboard clamped against his side. When Jimbo reached the end of his backyard, Mark saw that the club was a Maglite.

  “That isn’t going to work, you idiot,” he said. “When you shine a flashlight on a window at night, you just see the reflection.”

  “If you’re holding the flashlight, yeah. But what if I hold the field glasses, and you hold the flashlight?”

  “It won’t work,” Mark said.

  “You don’t want it to work. You don’t want me to see your girlfriend.”

  “My girlfriend, sure.” At the center of his being, Mark knew that his friend was right; he wanted this experiment to fail.

  Up on Michigan Street, streetlamps cast shining pools of light. Unnoticed, night had come upon them. The sky seemed one shade lighter than the inky blue of the earth. A single star pierced the great bowl above.

  “I still don’t see how this can work,” Mark said.

  Jimbo switched on the big flashlight and shone it directly into Mark’s face, dazzling him. “You look scared.”

  “I’m not scared, you blinded me!” Mark raised his hands in front of his eyes.

  “Move over there and stand still.” Jimbo lowered the flashlight and swept the beam in a long, erratic arc onto the pavement in front of the Rochenko house. “Get over there. I’ll keep marking the spot.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “Never mind, just get to your spot.” Even more irritated than he had been earlier, Mark moved into the street and walked toward the yellow ellipse cast on the sidewalk by the Maglite. Bright windows showed television screens. A middle-aged black man in a Cubs T-shirt sat in his living room reading a hardback book the size of a dictionary. In the next living room uphill, an obese white man of no determinate age in a mesh T-shirt propped a can of beer on his gut. The streetlamps hung silhouetted against the oddly light sky, soon to darken. Except for the warmth of the evening, the look of the street reminded him of wandering in costume down this street on Halloween night and imagining, half in pleasure, half in terror, that occult presences shared the evening.