by Daniel Pyle
“Yeah, me, too.”
“I never got my popcorn,” Trevor said. He didn’t want to cry about some stupid popcorn, but he could almost feel it happening anyway.
Zach didn’t say anything, just reached up and touched himself on the forehead.
Trevor leaned back a little, thinking, staring up at the ceiling, and suddenly his eyes widened.
Once, at Daddy’s house, there had been a dark spot on the ceiling in his bedroom, a spot his daddy said was from water damage. His daddy said he was going to fix the spot, but one night, before he could, Trevor was sleeping and some of the ceiling fell down on his toy box and got gray powder gunk on his action figures. Daddy had gotten the mess all cleaned up and the ceiling fixed, but first Trevor had touched the gunk in his toy box, and he still remembered how soft it felt, like wet sand or cookies that were old but not real old. There was a similar spot on the ceiling now.
“I have an idea,” Trevor said. He got off the pile of blankets and moved to the closet.
“There’s nothing in there,” said Zach. “We already—”
Trevor flapped a hand at him. “Just wait.” The closet door swung open, and he smelled old clothes, the smell of garage-sale boxes full of other people’s old, used-up shirts and pants. He reached in and tugged on the first thing his hand touched, a plain blue sweater with a torn sleeve that looked almost big enough for a grown-up but not quite. The hanger holding the sweater slipped off the wooden closet rod, and the sweater fluttered to the floor by Trevor’s feet.
“What are you doing?” asked Zach from the blankets.
Trevor said, “Help me,” and pulled down another piece of clothing, this time a pair of denim cutoffs, the fringed bottoms of which Trevor could only just reach. Zach joined him at the closet door, and together they took down the rest of the clothes, making a pile on the closet floor that came up past Trevor’s knees. When the last item was off the closet rod, Trevor asked Zach to push up on it.
“Why?”
“Just see if it’s loose,” Trevor said, head aching. “We might be able to use it.”
Zach did, and the rod popped out of the plates nailed to the wall on either side of the closet. Zach fumbled with the rod for a second and nearly dropped it, which might have made the bad man catch them, but then he got a real good hold of it and took it out of the closet.
“Okay,” said Zach, “so what are we going to use this for? Bash the guy’s brains in? Ram the door?” He held the wooden pole at his side; it was just a little taller than he was.
Trevor shook his head and said, “Come here.” He led the bigger boy to the other side of the room, to an area just beneath the dark spot on the ceiling, which was a couple of ruler lengths across. “See that?” He pointed up.
Zach looked at the water damage but didn’t seem to understand. He eyed Trevor as if he thought this was some kind of joke, then looked up again. “What?” he finally said. “That stain?”
“It’s not a stain,” Trevor said, meaning that it wasn’t just a stain. “Try poking it with the pole.”
Zach raised the closet rod and touched the gray area with the tip. Some of the ceiling in the middle of the spot flecked away and fell down on the two boys’ heads. Trevor smiled. Then the whole section began to crumble, and it came down on them like dirty, heavy snow. Trevor managed to get his arms over his eyes and mouth before the bulk of the mess came down, but Zach kept his hands wrapped around the closet rod, and he ended up with a whole face full of the crud.
Trevor brushed dust out of his hair and looked worriedly at the door. The falling ceiling hadn’t made a loud sound, but it hadn’t exactly been quiet either. Trevor expected the crazy man to come bursting in, maybe with a chainsaw.
But nothing came. No stranger. No chainsaw.
He turned to Zach and asked if he was okay.
“Not—” Zach spit on the floor. “Really.” He let go of the pole with one hand to wipe at his dusty eyes. He looked like a ghost, all covered in gray, but Trevor wouldn’t think about that. Ghosts were dead, after all, and Zach wasn’t. Not one bit.
Trevor looked up at the hole they’d made. It was about the size of those holes in the street the Ninja Turtles used to get to their home in the sewers. Above it were two wood boards and some clumps of yellow stuff. For just a second, Trevor imagined he was seeing the hairy bones of some sort of attic monster, and then he shook his head.
Zach was still trying to get the gray stuff off his face. He finally leaned the closet rod against the wall and went to work wiping at his face with both hands.
“What is this stuff?” Zach said, pawing furiously. “I hope it’s not asbestos.”
“What’s that?”
“Never mind.” Zach leaned over and brushed at the top of his hair. The ceiling powder came pouring off and piled on the floor below.
“I think,” Trevor said, “I could get through that hole and in between those boards.” He looked at Zach. “If you lifted me.”
Zach spat again and looked at the hole himself. “I’ll try. But it’s awful high.”
If he could get through the hole, maybe he could escape and try Zach’s mommy’s phone outside. Maybe he could get them help.
“Let’s try,” said Trevor. “We have to.”
Zach wiped one last time at his face and moved back beneath the water-damaged section of ceiling. There should have been more of the yellow stuff up there, Trevor knew. His daddy had told him all about houses and how to build them, and he knew that yellow stuff was probably old insulation. He saw right through the yellow stuff to the roof above, but it was so dark up there he couldn’t really see much more than the darkness itself. It looked scary, and he thought about bugs and bats and spiders, but he had to try, had to help himself and Zach. He had to.
“Okay,” Zach said, cupping his hands and holding them low so Trevor could step up into them. “Let’s give it a whirl.”
“Give me your phone first. I’ll try to call for some help.”
Zach straightened, took the phone out of his pocket, and looked at it for a long time. Trevor thought he was probably remembering his mommy and wondering when he would see her again.
“Be careful with it,” Zach said. “Have you ever used one of these before?”
Trevor frowned at him and said, “I’m not a baby. I know how to use a phone.”
Zach said, “Yeah, sorry,” and handed over the cellular. Trevor slid it into his shirt pocket, where he’d stored the five dollars earlier that day when he’d messed his pants. Thinking about that worried Trevor. Could he really expect to get out of this room, out of the house, and call for help if he couldn’t manage to potty in the toilet like a big kid?
Just an accident, he thought. Happens to the best of us. His mommy had said that, and although he knew she was just trying to make him feel better, that she probably never pottied her pants, that Daddy never did either, he did feel better. He could get them help. He would.
Zach cupped his hands together again the way you do when you’re drinking from the faucet, and he hunched over. “Okay,” he said and lowered his hands. Trevor slid one foot into the finger cup, thinking about the poo on his shoes that morning, wondering what Zach would say if he knew he was touching poo shoes. He grabbed the older boy’s shoulder.
“Kay.”
Zach lifted, making a soft groaning sound. Trevor wobbled, and the two of them started to tip over. He grabbed Zach’s other shoulder and tried to balance. He looked up to the ceiling, and it still seemed a very long way away.
“Hold on,” Zach said. He stood up as tall as he could now, raising his arms almost in slow motion. Only Trevor knew he wasn’t going in slow motion, that he was trying his hardest and only just barely making it. Trevor reached for the hole in the ceiling, stretching his fingers until they trembled, wishing he could fly, the way Superman and some of the X-Men did.
Zach groaned again, louder this time. Finally, his shaking arms stopped moving and he said, “You’re going to have to climb o
n my shoulders. But you gotta hurry. I can’t hold you up much longer.”
Trevor looked into the other boy’s scrunched-up face and bit his lip. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll try.”
He stepped up onto Zach’s upper arm. The bigger boy winced, and Trevor whispered an apology, but he didn’t stop moving. With one hand still on Zach’s shoulder and the other on the top of his head, Trevor pulled a knee onto Zach’s collarbone.
“Good,” Zach wheezed, “but hurry, please.” Zach pushed on Trevor’s bottom until Trevor had both knees on Zach’s shoulder, then held him steady while Trevor regained his balance.
Trevor had gotten closer to the hole now, could smell the old, dusty smell coming from the space above, but he still couldn’t reach the boards, what his daddy called joists. He looked down at Zach, who was also staring worriedly at the hole.
“You’ll have to stand on my shoulders,” Zach said.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
Zach shook his head. “Just do it. All that matters is you getting out. I’ll be okay. But do it now.” Without waiting, he grabbed Trevor’s legs and started forcing him higher. Trevor got both hands in Zach’s hair and boosted himself up, feeling wobbly, like he was trying to stand one-footed on the top of an extra-tall pole. He knew he would fall over any second and break every bone in his body. He straightened up slowly, letting go of Zach’s head and coming so close to falling that he imagined he felt his face bashing against the floor.
He touched the ceiling. The edges of the gray spot crumbled. He couldn’t pull himself up on that stuff, but if he could just get a hold of the boards above…
“Can you boost me a little more?” he asked, knowing Zach was probably only seconds from dropping him.
“Step on my hands,” the other boy said, and Trevor did. Zach thrust him the extra few inches, and Trevor clamped his hands onto the wood like a mountain climber on the edge of a really tall cliff. Except, Trevor thought, dangling from the joist, mountain climbers have rope and helmets and pads and things. Trevor had only Zach below to break his fall if he happened to slip.
“Now just pull yourself up,” Zach said.
Trevor didn’t look at him, didn’t want to look down. The hole wasn’t huge, but neither was Trevor, and he thought he had enough room to pull up one of his legs and wrap it around the board. That was how he climbed trees. First grab onto the branch, get your leg around it, then swing yourself up.
He tried.
He failed. His leg bumped against the edge of the hole in the ceiling and never made it to the wood.
He tried again, but this time he managed to get the very tip of his knee onto the joist. He quickly dragged the rest of his leg and his foot over the board, careful not to kick through the ceiling on the other side. Yellow fuzzy stuff tickled his nose and got into his mouth. He didn’t think that stuff was very good for you, but he guessed just a little bit wouldn’t kill him. Trevor pulled himself up into the dark space and heard Zach cheering quietly below.
Something tugged at the front of his shirt. For a second, he thought it must be a spider or a bat or some other kind of attic creature, but then he remembered the phone and reached for the pocket just in time to keep the cell from slipping out and falling to the floor.
“—kay,” Zach was saying below. “Get out of here.”
Trevor waited.
“Oh, and if the phone won’t work right outside, get to higher ground. Sometimes that helps.”
“Okay,” Trevor said. He made sure to push the phone deep into his pocket before moving. He couldn’t lose the phone. He’d watched the way they’d come and knew they were in the middle of nowhere. An escape would be worthless without the phone. He’d have been better off escaping a spaceship without an oxygen suit.
He crawled along two of the wooden boards, a hand on each, his knees following right along behind them. The first few crawling steps into the darkness were scary and the next were scarier than the first, but it didn’t matter. He would get out of the house, and he would save them. It was his responsibility. He wouldn’t fail.
THIRTY-ONE
DAVE/HANK ABBOTT, WHO still hadn’t entirely accepted his success, who considered himself some sort of combination of the boy he had been and the man he had become, sat on the edge of the bloody bed and looked down at the mess. He held the severed leg by the ankle and thumped it occasionally against the caked gore. In the corner of the room, Manny cowered and whined, his snout buried in his forepaws.
“Shut up,” Dave/Hank said and thumped the leg again. On the bed beside the body was the sword, which jumped a little with every whack of the dead leg. Dried blood had dirtied the blade, but parts of it still glimmered. Dave/Hank smacked the bed again, trying to build up some momentum, and the sword flashed light at him.
His eyes drooped. His muscles were half stiff as rock and half wobbly as jelly. The claw marks on his face, the bruise on his shin, and the stab wound in his chest all throbbed. If the bed hadn’t been covered with Mr. Boots’s remains, the soft mattress and the puffy pillows would have tempted him, made him unable to resist the urge to lie down for a short nap. Part of him was tempted anyway. Except he couldn’t take a nap. He had to take care of the body, had to put it where it belonged while he still had the time.
He thumped the leg one last time and placed it on the bed beside the rest of the corpse. Before rolling up the body in the bedding, he plucked the sword from the mattress and leaned it against the bedroom wall. Then he untucked the fitted sheet from the bed’s corners and went to work.
It wasn’t easy. The sheets were torn and stiff, the body rigid though he thought he had practically liquified it, but he finally got the thing rolled up in the sheet and rolled up again in the blanket. He looked around for something to tie the bundle but found nothing. He supposed he could have gone into Mr. Boots’s dresser, gotten some belts or suspenders that would do the job, but he decided it probably didn’t matter. He could hoist the body without ties.
When he first got the roll over his shoulder, the weight of it almost knocked him off balance. Mr. Boots had been a large man, even in his old age, and his corpse seemed almost heavier than his live body must have been, despite a good deal of it being sprayed across the room and not rolled into the package in Dave/Hank’s hands. Dave/Hank shifted a little and managed to stay standing, but the weight became nearly too much to bear. He wished he’d taken care of the task that morning, when he’d still had some energy, but he’d been eager to get to the boys and he’d had a lot of other things to take care of first. Just cleaning himself up had taken several hours. Blood didn’t exactly wipe off like rainwater—you had to scrub.
In the corner, Manny got to his feet, growling and baring his teeth.
“I know,” said Dave/Hank. “He was a bad man. You stay here.”
Manny didn’t stop growling, but he stayed in his place.
Dave/Hank carried the body out of the bedroom and closed the door behind him. He stopped in the hall for a few seconds and listened for movement in the second bedroom, but the boys were quiet in there. Maybe sleeping already, although if the rest of the day was any indication, they were probably planning an escape. They would have to have a serious family meeting after tonight, lay down some ground rules, re-familiarize themselves with the group dynamics. It would all take time.
He hefted the bundle and wished he had a toothpick. His pocketful probably still lay spread out across the little girl’s back yard—wet, dirty, ruined. Dave/Hank lugged Mr. Boots down the hallway, through the living room, and into the small dining area, where he deposited him onto the wobbly table. There was a fresh box of picks in the kitchen cabinet. Two or three would get him through the night.
At the kitchen counter, he pushed aside expired spices and half a bag of flour, found the toothpicks, shook half a dozen out of the box and slipped all but one of them into his pants pocket. Better to be safe. He poked the last pick into his mouth and chomped down.
He shouldn’t have bothered with
the things. They wore at his teeth, sometimes left sores on his gums when he accidentally poked himself, but he loved the woodsy taste. Like autumn in your mouth.
The body on the table looked like a giant cocoon, except the thing inside was not exactly a worm and would never be a butterfly. Shifting his pick from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue, Dave/Hank moved back to the table and recollected his former tormentor. He immediately wished he’d never put him down. Lifting the body the second time was harder than it had been the first, almost impossible. He strained. A streamlet of sweat dribbled down from his hairline across his temple. He knew the house was cool, even felt a bit of a draft on his skin, chilling the sweat before it dripped to his jaw line, but the sweat kept coming. He thought of broken faucets, specifically of the broken faucet in Georgie’s old kitchen, and then of Georgie. Continuing to struggle with his load, he wondered what the boys were up to, whether they would cause much more trouble. He sucked the toothpick another couple of centimeters into his mouth and bit down. The bundle folded over his shoulder, and he eased himself around to face the back door.
Above him, the ceiling creaked. He stopped, listened. Wind probably, or maybe a bird or a rat. No more sounds followed, and he let himself forget about it. He had to get this body off his shoulder before he strained something or simply collapsed. He twisted the knob, and the door swung open. As he moved, he heard dripping behind him. He didn’t look back. Although he’d thought the body was mostly dried up, he supposed some pockets of wet stuff could still be hidden beneath and that the body might drip more now. He flipped off the light with an elbow and hurried out of the house.
Outside, a light breeze blew and refreshed him a little. He moved around the parked truck and the scarred stump holding the ax, shuffled to the rusty wheelbarrow, which had been a fixture of the yard ever since he’d arrived here. He dropped Mr. Boots’s body inside without ceremony and took a deep breath. His muscles tingled. His arms twitched and threatened to cramp. He waited to see if his body would betray him and then looked down at the wheelbarrow’s new front wheel. He’d replaced the old, flat wheel that afternoon, a chore that had taken almost an hour and involved much scraping away of rust and more than a little cursing. He’d known he’d need the thing for Boots’s body at least, if for nothing else, and was glad he’d planned ahead.
