by Donna Tartt
“How are we going to get up there?” said Harriet, eyeing the gutter which ran from first to second story.
“Hang on.” Breathless with his own daring, Hely shot from the shelter of the fig tree and ran pell-mell up the stairs and then—just as rapidly—skimmed down again. He darted across the open yard and dove back under the tree, by Harriet. “Locked,” he said, with a silly, comic-book shrug.
Together, through a tremble of leaves, they regarded the house. The side facing them was dark. On the street side, in the rich light, the windows glowed lavender in the setting sun.
“Up there,” said Harriet, and pointed. “Where the roof is flat, see?”
Above the pitched roof-ledge peaked a small gable. Within it, a tiny, frosted window was cracked an inch or two at the bottom. Hely was about to ask how she planned to get up there—it was a good fifteen feet off the ground—when she said: “If you give me a boost, I’ll climb up the gutter.”
“No way!” Hely said; for the gutter was rusted nearly in two.
It was a very small window—hardly a foot wide. “I’ll bet that’s the bathroom window,” said Harriet. She pointed to a dark window positioned halfway up. “Where’s that one go?”
“To the Mormons. I checked.”
“What’s in there?”
“Stairs. There’s a landing with a bulletin board and some posters.”
“Maybe—Got you,” said Harriet, triumphantly, as she slapped her arm, and then examined the bloody mosquito smeared on her palm.
“Maybe the upstairs and downstairs connect on the inside,” she said to Hely. “You didn’t see anybody in there, did you?”
“Look, Harriet, they’re not home. If they come back and catch us we’ll say it’s a dare but we need to hurry or else let’s forget about it. I’m not sitting out here all night.”
“Okay …” She took a deep breath, and darted into the cleared yard, Hely right behind her. Up the stairs they pattered. Hely watched the street while Harriet, hand to glass, peered inside: deserted stairwell stacked with folding chairs; sad, tan-colored walls brightened by a wavery bar of light from a window facing the street. Beyond was a water cooler, a notice board tacked with posters (DO TALK TO STRANGERS! RX FOR AT-RISK KIDS).
The window was shut, no screen. Side by side, Hely and Harriet curled their fingers under the tongue of the metal sash and tugged at it, uselessly—
“Car,” hissed Hely. They flattened themselves against the side of the house, hearts pounding, as it whooshed past.
As soon as it was gone, they stepped out of the shadows and tried again. “What’s with this?” Hely whispered, craning on tiptoe to peer at the center of the window, where the top pane and the bottom pane met, perfectly flush.
Harriet saw what he meant. There was no lock, and no space for the panes to slide over each other. She ran her fingers over the sash.
“Hey,” whispered Hely, suddenly, and motioned for her to help.
Together, they pushed the top of the pane inward; something caught and squeaked and then, with a groan, the bottom of the window swung out on a horizontal pivot. One last time, Hely checked the darkening street—thumbs up, coast clear—and a moment later they were wriggling in together, side by side.
Hanging head down, fingertips on the floor, Hely saw the gray specks on the linoleum rushing in at him, fast, as if the simulated granite was the surface of an alien planet hurtling at him a million miles an hour—smack, his head hit the floor and he tumbled inside, Harriet collapsing on the floor beside him.
They were in: on the landing of an old-fashioned staircase, only three steps up, with another long landing at the top of the stairs. Bursting with excitement, trying not to breathe too loudly, they picked themselves up and skittered to the top—where, turning the corner, they dashed almost headlong into a heavy door with a fat padlock dangling from the hasp.
There was another window, too—an old-fashioned wooden one, with a sash lock and a screen. Hely stepped over to examine it—and while Harriet stood staring at the padlock with dismay, he began gesturing frenetically all of a sudden, his teeth gritted in a rictus of excitement: for the roof ledge ran beneath this window, too, directly to the window in the gable.
By pulling hard, until their faces were red, they managed to wedge the sash up eight inches or so. Harriet wriggled out first (Hely steering her legs like a plow until unwittingly she kicked him, and he cursed and jumped back). The roofing was hot and sticky, gritty beneath her palms. Gingerly, gingerly, she eased to her feet. Eyes shut tight, holding the window frame with her left hand, she gave her right hand to Hely as he crawled out beside her.
The breeze was cooling off. Twin jet trails traced a diagonal in the sky, tiny white water-ski tracks in an enormous lake. Harriet—breathing fast, afraid to look down—smelled the wispy fragrance of some night-scented flower, far below: stocks, maybe, or sweet tobacco. She put her head back and looked up at the sky; the clouds were gigantic, glazed on their underbellies with radiant pink, like clouds in a painting of a Bible story. Very, very carefully—backs to the wall, electrified with excitement—they inched around the steep corner and found themselves looking down into the yard with their fig tree.
With their fingertips hooked beneath the aluminum siding—which held the day’s heat, and was a little too hot to touch comfortably—they sidled towards the gable inch by inch. Harriet made it first, and shuffled over to give Hely room. It was very small indeed, not much larger than a shoe-box and cracked open only about two inches at the bottom. Carefully, hand by hand, they transferred their grip from siding to sash and pulled up, together: timidly, at first, in case the thing flew up without warning and knocked them backward. It slid up four or five inches, easily, but then stuck firm, though they tugged until their arms trembled.
Harriet’s palms were wet and her heart slammed like a tennis ball in her chest. Then, down on the street, she heard a car coming.
They froze. The car whooshed past without stopping.
“Dude,” she heard Hely whisper, “don’t look down.” He was several inches away, not touching her, but a palpable corona of damp heat radiated from him head to toe, like a force field.
She turned; gamely, in the spooky lavender twilight, he gave her the thumbs up and then stuck his head and forearms through the window like a swimmer doing the breast-stroke and started through.
It was a tight squeeze. At the waist, he stuck fast. Harriet—clutching the aluminum siding with her left hand, straining up on the sash with her right—shied back as far as she could from his frantically kicking feet. The incline was shallow, and she slipped and nearly fell, catching herself only at the last moment, but before she could swallow or even catch her breath Hely’s front half fell inside the apartment, with a loud thump, so that only his sneakers stuck out. After a moment’s stunned pause, he pulled himself in the rest of the way. “Yes!” Harriet heard him say—his voice distant, jubilant, a familiar ecstasy of attic darkness, when they scrambled on their hands and knees to cardboard forts.
She stuck her head in after him. In the dim, she just made him out: curled in a heap, nursing a hurt kneecap. Clumsily—on his knees—he rose and walked forward and seized Harriet’s forearms and threw his weight backward. Harriet sucked her stomach in and did her best to wriggle through, oof, kicking in mid-air, like Pooh stuck in the rabbit hole.
Still writhing, she fell all in a tumble—partly on Hely, partly on a dank, mildewy carpet that smelled like something from the bottom of a boat. As she rolled away, her head bumped the wall with a hollow sound. They were indeed in a bathroom, a tiny one: sink and toilet, no tub, walls of particle board laminated to look like tile.
Hely, on his feet now, pulled her up. As she stood, she smelled an acerbic, fishy smell—not mildew, though intertwined with mildew, but sharp and distinct and entirely vile. Fighting the bad taste at the back of her throat, Harriet hurled all her rising panic into battling the door (flapping vinyl accordion, printed to look like woodgrain), which was stu
ck firmly in its tracks.
The door snapped and they fell on top of each other through it into a larger room—just as stuffy, but darker. The far wall bellied out in an overstuffed curve which was blackened with smoke damage and buckled with damp. Hely—panting with excitement, heedless as a terrier on the scent—was yanked up suddenly by a fear so sharp it rang on his tongue with a metallic taste. Partly because of Robin, and what had happened to him, Hely’s parents had warned him all his life that not all grown-ups were good; some of them—not many, but a few—stole children from their parents and tortured and even killed them. Never before had the truth of this struck him so forcefully, like a blow to the chest; but the stench and the loathsome swell of the walls made him feel seasick and all the horror stories his parents had told him (kids gagged and bound in abandoned houses, hung from ropes or locked in closets to starve) all at once came to life, turned piercing yellow eyes on him and grinned, with shark’s teeth: chop-chop.
Nobody knew where they were. Nobody—no neighbor, no passer-by—had seen them climb in; nobody would ever know what had happened to them if they didn’t come home. Following behind Harriet, who was heading confidently into the next room, he tripped over an electrical cord and nearly screamed.
“Harriet?” His voice came out strange. He stood there in the dim, waiting for her answer, staring at the only light visible—three rectangles traced in fire, outlining each of the three tinfoiled windows, floating eerily in the dark—when suddenly the floor plunged beneath him. Maybe it was a trap. How did they know nobody was home?
“Harriet!” he cried. All of a sudden he had to pee worse than he’d ever had to pee in his whole life and—fumbling with his zipper, hardly knowing what he did—he turned from the door and let rip right on the carpet: fast fast fast, mindless of Harriet, practically hopping up and down in his agony; for in warning him so vigorously about sickos, Hely’s parents had unwittingly planted in him some strange ideas, and chief among these was a panicky belief that kidnapped children were not permitted by their captors to use the toilet, but forced to soil themselves wherever they might be: tied to a dirty mattress, locked in a car trunk, buried in a coffin with a breathing tube.…
There, he thought, half-delirious with relief. Even if the rednecks tortured him (with clasp-knives, nail-guns, whatever) at least they wouldn’t have the satisfaction of watching him wet himself. Then, behind him, he heard something, and his heart skidded like a car on an ice slick.
But it was only Harriet—her eyes big and inky, looking very small against the door frame. He was so glad to see her he didn’t even think to wonder if she’d caught him peeing.
“Come see this,” she said, flatly.
At her calmness, his fear evaporated. He followed her into the next room. The instant he stepped in, the rotten musky stink—how could he not have recognized it?—hit him so hard that he could taste it—
“Holy Moses,” he said, clapping a hand over his nose.
“I told you,” she said primly.
The boxes—lots of them, nearly enough to cover the floor—glinted in the faint light; pearly buttons, mirror shards, nailheads and rhinestones and crushed glass all shimmering discreetly in the dimness like a cavern of pirate treasure, rough sea-chests strewn with great careless sprays of diamonds and silver and rubies.
He looked down. In the crate by his sneaker, a timber rattlesnake—inches away—was coiled and switching his tail, tch tch tch. Without thinking, he leapt back when through the screen at the corner of his vision he caught sight of another snake pouring itself quietly toward him in a mottled S-shape. When its snout butted the side of the box it snapped back, with such a hiss and such a powerful lash (impossible movement, like a film run backwards, rope rising from a puddle of spilled milk and flying upwards and back into the pitcher) that Hely jumped again, knocking into another crate, which spat with a perfect ebullition of hisses.
Harriet, he noticed, was shoving an up-ended box away from the mass and towards the latched door. She stopped and brushed the hair from her face. “I want this one,” she said. “Help me.”
Hely was overcome. Though he hadn’t realized it, up until this very instant he hadn’t believed she was telling him the truth; and an icy bubble of excitement surged up through him, tingling, deadly, delicious, like cold green sea rushing through a hole in the bottom of a boat.
Harriet—lips compressed—slid the crate through several feet of clear floor space, then tipped it sideways. “We’ll take him …” she said, and paused to rub her palms together, “we’ll take him down the stairs outside.”
“We can’t walk down the street carrying that box.”
“Just help me, okay?” With a gasp, she wrenched the crate free of the tight spot.
Hely started over. The crates were not nice to wade through; behind the screens—no more than window-screen, he noted, easy to put a foot through—he had a vague consciousness of shadowy motion: circles that broke, and melted, and doubled back on themselves, black diamonds flowing one after the other in vile, silent circuits. His head felt full of air. This isn’t real, he told himself, not real, no it’s just a dream and indeed, for many years to come—well into adulthood—his dreams would drop him back sharply into this malodorous dark, among the hissing treasure-chests of nightmare.
The strangeness of the cobra—regal, upright, solitary, swaying irritably with the jolting of his crate—did not occur to Hely; he was aware of nothing except the odd unpleasant slide of its weight from side to side, and of the need to keep his hand well back from the screen. Grimly, they pushed it up to the back door, which Harriet unlocked and opened wide. Then, together, they picked up the box and carried it lengthwise between them down the outside staircase (the cobra knocked off balance, thrashing and lashing with a dry, enraged violence) and set it on the ground.
It was dark now. The streetlamps were on and porch lights shone from across the street. Light-headed, too afraid even to look at the box, such was the hateful delirium of thumps from within, they kicked it up beneath the house.
The night breeze was chilly. Harriet’s arms prickled with sharp little goose bumps. Upstairs—around the corner, out of sight—the screen door blew open against the railing and then banged shut. “Hang on,” Hely said. He rose from his half-squatting posture and darted up the stairs again. With trembling, slack-fingered hands, he fumbled with the knob, groping for the lock. His hands were sticky with perspiration; a strange, dreamlike lightness had overtaken him and the dark, shoreless world billowed all around him, as if he were perched high in the rigging of some nightmare pirate ship, tossing and swaying, the night wind sweeping across the high seas.…
Hurry, he said to himself, hurry up and let’s get out of here but his hands weren’t working right, they slipped and slid uselessly on the doorknob like they weren’t even his.…
From below, a strangled cry from Harriet, so astonished with fright and despair that it choked off partway through.
“Harriet?” he called, into the uncertain silence that followed. His voice sounded flat and oddly casual. Then, the next instant, he heard car tires on gravel. Headlights swept grandly into the back yard. Whenever Hely thought about this night in the years to come, the picture that came to him most vividly was for some reason always this: the stiff, yellowed grass flooded in the sudden glare of car lights; scattered weed-spires—Johnson grass, beggar’s-lice—trembling and illumined harshly.…
Before he had time to think, or even breathe, high beams cut to low: pop. Pop again: and the grass went dark. Then a car door opened and what sounded like half a dozen heavy pairs of boots were tramping up the staircase.
Hely panicked. Later, he would wonder that he hadn’t thrown himself off the landing in his fright, and broken a leg or possibly his neck, but in the terror of those heavy footfalls he could think of nothing except the preacher, that scarred face coming toward him in the dark, and the only place to run was back into the apartment.
He darted inside; and in the dim, his
heart sank. Card table, folding chairs, ice chest: where to hide? He ran into the back room, stubbing his toe against a dynamite crate (which responded with an angry whack and a tch tch tch of rattles), and instantly realized his terrible mistake but it was too late. The front door creaked. Did I even shut it? he thought, with a sickening crawl of fear.
Silence, the longest of Hely’s life. After what seemed like forever there was the slight click of a key turning in a lock, then twice again, rapidly.
“What’s the matter,” said a cracked male voice, “didn’t it catch?”
The light snapped on in the next room. In the flag of light from the doorway, Hely saw that he was trapped: no cover, no escape. Apart from the snakes, the room was virtually empty: newspapers, tool chest, a hand-painted signboard propped against one wall (With the Good Lord’s Help: Upholding the Protestant Religion and All Civil Laws …) and, in the far corner, a vinyl beanbag chair. In an agony of haste (they could see him just by glancing through the open door) he slipped through the dynamite crates towards the beanbag.
Another click: “Yep, there it goes,” said the cracked voice, indistinctly, as Hely dropped to his knees and squirmed under the beanbag, as best as he could, pulling the bulk of it on top of him.
More talking, which he could not now hear. The bean-bag was heavy; he was facing away from the door, his legs curled tight beneath him. The carpet smashed against his right cheek smelled like sweaty socks. Then—to his horror—the overhead light came on.
What were they saying? He tried to make himself as small as he could. As he couldn’t move, he had no choice—unless he closed his eyes—except to stare at five or six snakes moving inside a gaudy, side-screened box two feet from his nose. As Hely stared at them, half-hypnotized, his muscles locked with terror, one little snake trickled away from the others and crawled halfway up the screen. The hollow of his throat was white, and his belly-scales ran in long, horizontal plates, the chalky tan of calamine lotion.
