by Peter Straub
“Uh-huh.” He could not meet her eyes.
Margo rapped the palm of her hand on the top of her son’s head and turned away. Soon her footsteps were moving up the stairs. Tim looked at the cringing boy on the other side of the table.
“Jimbo, even your mother knows you’re still holding out on me.”
The boy slumped deeper into his chair.
“But she doesn’t know anything about that house, does she?”
Jimbo sighed. He could not trust himself to look up at Tim. “We should have stayed away from that place.”
Tim remembered seeing the two boys walking through Cathedral Square and turning onto Jefferson Street. “You didn’t want to have anything to do with it, did you?”
“He wouldn’t listen to me,” Jimbo said. “Mark went crazy, sort of. Of course, he had a really good reason to go crazy.”
“Tell me,” Tim said.
And Jimbo told him—told him more than he had intended to, certainly.
Mark, he said, had been kind of weird after the Maglite incident, seeming to be both angry and confused. He thought he had been warned away from the house on Michigan Street, and he had developed certain fixed ideas about it. At the same time, his mother had become a source of tremendous worry.
Two nights after Jimbo’s scare and subsequent fainting, Mark had come home half an hour after his curfew, and instead of getting the interrogation he expected, he had come across his mother sitting on the edge of the downstairs bathtub, dazed and blank with what he thought was fear. After that night, she seemed to deteriorate a little more every day.
“And, see, we thought there were two people hiding out in that house,” Jimbo told Tim. “That big guy in the black coat and a girl. We spent hours hanging out on the other side of the street, hoping to see the man leave the building. He had to buy food, didn’t he? Especially if he was keeping the girl prisoner, like we thought he was. Or maybe what Mark thought was a girl was really Shane Auslander, you know? He was a pretty skinny kid, after all. One afternoon, we called the police and told them the Sherman Park guy was hiding out in the house, but nothing happened. I don’t even know if they looked at the place.”
“They never checked it out?”
“We never saw ’em do it.” He lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “They never called us back, either. That’s the last time I ever try to do anything for the cops, yo.
“So there’s that house, and there’s his mother. And his mother knows something about the place, he’s really sure of that. Every day, she gets a little worse. He told me, ‘It’s like she thinks the Black Death is in that place. She’s turning into one of those old peasant ladies back in Eastern Europe, where her ancestors came from. Like the old women in Dracula, all wrapped up in black?’ That’s what he said. And what’s eating at her? Whatever she knows about that house! Which made him get even more cranked about the place.”
Jimbo glanced at Tim, bit the inside of his cheek. “He thought maybe there was something inside there that could explain why his mom was dragging around like she was. Something like pictures, or old papers, or what, bloodstains, even.” The boy looked profoundly uneasy, and a trace of anger flashed in his eyes. “He wanted to get a look at it. That’s how it went down. Since that one day, we never saw anything or anybody in there, and nobody went in or out, either. If the Sherman Park Killer ever used to hide out there, it sure looked like he took off. And you know what?”
The anger flared again in the boy’s face.
Tim said, “I have no idea.”
“He didn’t trust me. That jerk. He was going to go against his precious promise, and he didn’t want me along.”
“Jimbo, for God’s sake, what did he do?” Tim asked, knowing that he was getting somewhere at last.
“He broke in—he smashed a hole in the rear window, and he got inside. He told me about it afterward, but right then he wanted me out of the way. So naturally, the asshole lied to me.”
In a cell-phone conversation after dinner that night, Mark had surprised Jimbo by suggesting that they see what was happening at the fountain. If they went together, they would surely be safe from whatever had befallen the missing boys. The greatest danger they faced was that Sherman Park would wind up being even more boring than hanging out on Michigan Street.
Mark’s proposal delighted Jimbo, who wished to stay as far as possible from the man whose eyes had found him through his father’s binoculars. And although by going to Sherman Park they would undoubtedly be breaking the letter of their vows—they might as well be honest about it—the meaning, the soul, of the vows remained intact, since the presence of half a dozen cops like Officers Rote and Selwidge guaranteed the continued well-being of any adolescent within a hundred-foot radius of the fountain. Actually, their parents should have been begging them to spend their evenings in Sherman Park.
Up the alley they went, Jimbo feeling a happy relief at the return of their customary occupations. So much of the past few days had the flavor of dreamlike confinement in someone else’s irrational designs. Now he felt an unexpected lightness of spirit, as if he had been set free in a restored world.
On West Auer Avenue, a man in a gray University of Michigan football T-shirt, gray cotton shorts, and flip-flops was washing a dark blue Toyota Camry in his short double-wheel-track driveway. Heavy-looking muscles stood out on his arms and legs while he scrubbed the Camry’s hood. As the boys approached, he looked toward them and smiled. Helplessly, they fell into their homeboy stroll.
“Ah, youngbloods,” the man said. “How y’all doin’ tonight?”
“Hangin’ in there,” Jimbo said.
The man leaned against his car and smiled at them. “That seems to be working out just fine. Be sure to take care of yourselves, all right?”
The day was still hot, and the shops still stood open. Bored clerks lounged against counters, sneaking looks at their watches. Widely separated cars trolled along the boulevard. The only other people on their side of the street were an old woman bent nearly parallel to the sidewalk and a man who recently had been thrown out of a liquor store. He was aiming punches at a parking meter. The old woman carried a string bag containing a single head of iceberg lettuce.
“I’d really like to get out of this nowhere town,” Mark said. “I should e-mail my uncle Tim and ask if I could come to New York and stay in his place.”
“Would he let you?”
“Sure he would, I think. Why wouldn’t he?”
Jimbo shrugged. A second later, he said, “Maybe I could come with you.”
“Maybe,” Mark agreed. “Or I could just go and send you a postcard.”
“You fathead skell.”
“No, you’re a fathead skell,” Mark said, and for a time the two of them sniggered like children.
“A lot of great-looking women live in New York. They’re all over the place, bro. They’re lining up at every Starbucks in the city.”
“Yo, and what would you do with them?”
“I know what to do,” Jimbo said.
“You know what to do with your right hand.”
“I didn’t hear any complaints from Ginny Capezio,” Jimbo said.
“Ginny Capezio? Give me a break. She’s so hopeless, she’d go down on that guy.” He waved toward the rummy, who had finished punishing the parking meter and seemed now to be looking for a soft place to lie down.
Virginia “Ginny” Capezio had administered brisk oral sex to a number of the boys in Quincy’s ninth grade, among them Jimbo but not Mark. According to Ginny, oral sex did not count as actual sex.
“You’re jealous, that’s all,” said Jimbo.
He was jealous, Mark silently admitted, but of Jackie Monaghan, not his son. Also of everybody who had ever had sex with an attractive, or even a semi-attractive, woman. Ginny Capezio had fat legs and the disconcerting beginnings of a mustache, which her father forbade her to remove. Mark did not suppose that his inventions concerning a gorgeous and brilliant girl named Molly Witt,
who after having been universally desired at Quincy had left the previous year, had ever convinced Jimbo. Mark wasn’t even sure why he had lied about Molly Witt. It had happened in a weak moment, and after that he was stuck with it. Fortunately, they now reached the street corner diagonally across from the park’s entrance, and checking the traffic to make sure they could run across the street without waiting for the light to change gave him an excuse to ignore Jimbo’s remark.
They trotted across the street, and the same thought floated into two heads, that they should have brought their skateboards. The paths and benches, in themselves no less suitable for skateboards than the building site’s ramps, converged at the wide, curved bowl of the fountain, which was large enough for some halfway serious fun.
Knowing nothing of the shadows gathering about them, the boys began walking toward the fountain on the broad, long path, imagining their skateboards bumping and rumbling over the grooved stone flags. Imagined pleasure would be all the pleasure to be enjoyed at Sherman Park that evening: a small group of boys in baggy jeans perched on the lip of the fountain, ignored by two police officers who appeared to be talking to their girlfriends on their cell phones but were probably engaged in official business.
To look upon this scene was depressing; to join it would have been unthinkable. In a single shared gesture, the boys wheeled around and drifted toward the nearest bench. One of the policemen gave the boys a quantifying once-over.
Jimbo jumped to his feet and said, “What are we going to do?”
“I think I’ll go home,” Mark said. “I don’t feel very good.”
They returned the way they had come, past the nearly empty stores and the rows of houses beside driveways leading nowhere. The athletic-looking man washing his Camry waved as they passed him, and they waved back. They turned into the alley and walked the fifty feet to the Monaghans’ backyard.
“Want to come in?” Jimbo asked.
“Not now,” Mark said. “Tomorrow, we’ll hack around on our boards, okay?”
“Okay.” Jimbo pretended to punch Mark’s stomach, grinned, and jogged across the backyard to his kitchen door.
Mark waited until Jimbo had gone inside before continuing down the alley. At its southern end, he turned right onto Townsend, then right again onto Michigan Street, where he walked slowly up the block on the west side of the street, checking the porches for people who might see what he was about to do.
If someone had asked Mark what he intended to do, he would have said, I want to test the air.
Satisfied that no one was watching him, he moved at twice his normal pace up to the property line at 3323, glanced quickly at the other side of the street, spun around and raced over the tilting lawn. When he had run past the side of the house and veered toward the backyard, he stopped short, startled by what he was looking at.
For the first time, Mark realized that the other residents of Michigan Street had been mowing the areas of the lawn visible from the street. Behind the house, the lawn had disappeared beneath a riot of tall weeds and field grass. Queen Anne’s lace and tiger lilies shone within the waist-high growth. Circles of dead leaves and gray mulch surrounded the bases of the giant oak trees. Mark felt as if suddenly he had been transported to another country. Insects buzzed. As soon as he waded into the tangle, a small animal exploded into motion near his right foot and scurried deeper into the tall grass. Startled by what had been done to the rear of the house, he scarcely noticed the ruckus. It had been modified out of all recognition. He realized that he was looking at what the eight-foot concrete wall had been built to conceal.
Alongside the kitchen on the uphill side of the house, someone had added a strikingly eccentric structure. To Mark, the addition only barely suggested the existence of anything that could be considered a room, but a room he supposed it had to be: a room like a space in a steeply pitched attic. The roofline dropped to within three feet of the ground and met a short exterior wall. It looked like the side of a big, big pup tent made of roofing tiles. He could not imagine why anyone would build such a thing—a long, windowless room pinched down into itself by a steeply slanting roof.
In the few moments since he had come around the side of the house, the air had truly darkened. Hasten hasten, night comes on. Mark pushed through the tall field grass, and the tiger lilies bobbed their heads. Another little life shot panicked away from his foot. A dry, jungly odor of rot arose from a clump of bindweed.
Close up, the added room proved to be ill-constructed and in need of repair. Nothing quite lined up or lay flat. Long chips of paint had flaked off the boards alongside the kitchen door. Mark went up three broken steps and peered through a narrow glass panel. A layer of gray dust kept him from seeing any more than the vague shapes of the counters and the arched entrance, identical to that in his house, to the dining room. The arch carved in the wall looked like a trick of perspective. He rattled the doorknob.
The air around him had advanced another stage toward nightfall, though the sky was still almost bright. Mark peeled the topmost shirt off his body and wrapped it around his right fist. He had been seeing himself do this since leaving Jimbo; now it felt as though he were acting mechanically, without volition. Hurry hurry, little boy, do your worst, dark dark night approacheth. He punched the narrow window with his padded hand. Shards of dusty glass flew inward, clattered tinkling to the floor, and burst into fragments. So softly he barely noticed, something odd and as physical as a smell streamed through the broken window and fastened on him. Jagged sections of broken glass clung to the sides of the frame, and these he snapped off with sharp, efficient raps of his hand. He unrolled the T-shirt from his hand, brushed off shards of glass, draped it around his neck, and reached in. His fingers found the doorknob, which felt simultaneously gritty and sticky, almost greasy. He revolved the knob, unlocking the door, and withdrew his arm. Then he opened the door the width of a boy’s slender body and, in accord with the plans he had decided upon hours earlier, slipped into the dark kitchen.
For a second or two, he was able to register a sense of emptiness and neglect that suggested absolute abandonment. On the wall to his left, he took in a closed door that must have opened into the pup-tent room. Then whatever had settled on him after he broke the window clamped down like a vise. His eyes failed, and he found that he could not draw breath. Hopelessness and misery thickened around him like a reeking cloud. His stomach and his bowels churned. What had invaded him? Frantic with disgust, Mark cried out. He could barely hear his own voice. When one of his hands struck the back door, he whirled toward it. As if the door had come violently to life, it rapped his chest and his elbow. Layer upon layer of stinking gauze seemed to drift like spider webs down upon him. His right hand blessedly found the doorknob. He thrust himself through the frame and slammed the door behind him. Invisible webs and filaments seemed to float out in pursuit. When he wiped his eyes, the sight of his hands—trembling, so pale!—informed him that his vision had returned.
11
“Oh, you heard me talking to Jackie Monaghan about that ‘heroism’ business?” Philip asked. “Believe me, there’s no point in talking about that subject.”
“Humor me,” Tim said. “Tom Pasmore mentioned it the other day, but he didn’t know the whole story.”
The brothers were driving east on Burleigh in Tim’s swan boat, to which Philip had agreed both for the sake of comfort and on the grounds that riding in the passenger seat allowed him to scan the sidewalks more effectively. Three hours earlier, the radio announcement about Dewey Dell had given him leave to swap the agony of hope suspended for the comfort of despair, but believing that his son was dead did not release him from the obligation to act as though Mark might still be at large. After Tim had driven twice around Sherman Park, expanding his circle outward, Philip overruled his plan of making a third, wider circuit by telling him to drive toward the lake.
He pretended to scrutinize a group of teenagers hanging out in front of a drugstore. At last he looked back at Tim. �
�Heroism! That’s a laugh. Really. Nancy’s family was a lot of things, but heroic was never part of the deal.” He took his eyes from Tim and seemed to look at the windshield instead of through it. “You ought to do background checks on everybody related to the person you think you want to marry, that’s all I can say.”
“You have to admit,” Tim said, “it’s an odd twist in the Joseph Kalendar story.”
“Everything about Joseph Kalendar’s story is twisted. I can’t believe you didn’t know about this. I guess it all came up while you were still frisking around in the Far East. The guy was a good carpenter, but everything else about him was crazy. Kalendar raped and murdered a bunch of women, and he killed his own son. He probably killed his wife, too, so he could have a nice, empty house to play in.”
“What year are we talking about?”
“Kalendar was arrested in 1979, 1980, I can’t remember which. Turn south on Humboldt and get on Locust. We’ll drive past that little park over there.”
“You want me to drive to the East Side?”
“You never know,” Philip said, meaning that it was impossible to predict where a teenage boy might go when he ran away from home.
“Did you and Nancy ever get together with the Kalendars? He was her first cousin, after all.”
Philip shook his head. “I hardly knew the guy existed until one day Nancy told me that his wife had come over to see her. This was when we were living in Carrollton Gardens. Way west. What a mistake. I hated it out there. Bunch of snobs talking about golf and money.”
“Kalendar’s wife went to see Nancy? When was that?”
“Around ’72, something like that. It was winter—a miserable winter. We’d only been married about two years. When I got home from work, Nancy was very upset. She refused to talk about it. Then she finally ’fessed up, said her cousin’s wife had been out to see her. I don’t remember the woman’s name, something like Dora, Flora, who knows? She probably wanted money. Of course Nancy knew better than to give her any. We were thinking about starting a family, and I would have hit the ceiling if Nancy had given my hard-earned money away to her fruitcake cousin.”
