The Suburban Strange

by Nathan Kotecki

  But Celia’s heart rose up in protest. A beautiful possibility pounded in her chest, and she knew its name as surely as she knew her own. Tomasi. She cursed the province of love. No roads ran straight, but it made no difference because she was being driven away, and she couldn’t bear to leave. No bells rang on time, but what did time matter, anyway, now that it was running out? It only made Celia wish she never had found that province at all, yet she knew she didn’t mean it. All she wanted was to see Tomasi again, even if it was for the last time. There were pages and pages of their conversations in the sketchbook, but his face . . . How was it she never had drawn him?

  “I am such a fool,” Celia said, reaching for a pencil. She glanced out her window, where the earth’s shadow continued to creep across the bloodied moon. On a blank page she roughed in Tomasi’s eyes, his nose, lips, and the square set of his jaw. She drew confidently, even though her memory depended on so many shy glances she had stolen, so many moments she literally had dared herself to look at him. She teased out the scruff of hair on his head and set his ears against each side. All the while the luster of blood orange moonlight gradually drained away from the front lawn. It would be another hour before the eclipse was total. She shaded in the planes of Tomasi’s neck, the way it widened to meet his shoulders. It was comforting somehow, even if she never would see him again. Celia’s eyes welled up—what cruel world would put all these beautiful people in front of her, only to snatch them away again?

  By the light of her bedside lamp, Celia thought she saw her drawing stir on the page. She blinked, rubbed the tears out of her eyes, and looked carefully again. In her drawing, the lines of Tomasi’s lips moved. Next to his face, letters appeared, much more ornate than his own handwriting, and forming words much faster than when he had written to her before.

  Looks great. Can I come over?

  Celia stared. Now? she jotted next to his message. Aren’t you at your grandfather’s?

  Immediately a shadow filled the page and then stretched out across her bedspread. A silhouette rose up the wall, and Celia recognized Tomasi’s broad shoulders, forearms beneath sleeves rolled to his elbow, legs slightly apart. The shadow darkened to black and then turned around, and Tomasi was there, standing in front of her, looking as surprised as she was.

  “I’ve never done that before,” he said, looking around curiously.

  “How did you do that?” There in her bedroom it felt as though she had allowed an exotic, possibly mythical creature in from the wild, and now she was about to discover how tame it was after all.

  “I think that’s the power you just gave me.” He gave her a half smile, but it faded when he saw her expression. “I’m so sorry about that phone call, when you were at prom. My parents completely freaked out. They gave me five minutes to pack, and they didn’t even tell me where we were going, but I knew. Grandpa’s asleep at the farm right now,” he said bitterly.

  “Why didn’t you write back before?”

  “He locked up all the books! I looked everywhere, but he knows everything that happened, and he decided not to take any chances, I guess. I just convinced him to give me a freaking Bible tonight! We have to get help—the eclipse has started, and your teacher is going to be after you.”

  “I think it’s too late,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” His voice was harsh, but she knew it was because he was confused.

  “I didn’t want you to do anything that would get you hurt!” Celia cried. “Mariette died! If something happened to you and it was my fault—” She began to sob, and felt Tomasi sit next to her and take her in his arms.

  “It’s okay. But we have to do something now. At least we know who we’re up against.”

  “What can we do?”

  “I don’t know.” Tomasi concentrated, but he stayed silent, and she could tell that ideas were not coming to him.

  “How did you travel through the book?”

  “I don’t know. I had tucked the paper from your sketchbook in the Bible, and I was sitting there reading, hoping you would write to me, and suddenly it was like I was a skydiver looking through the open door of a plane. I could see you out there in the sky, and I just . . . jumped. I don’t know how to explain it. But it was because you drew me. You drew me close.”

  “Like your admonition said,” Celia said. “I didn’t realize . . .”

  “I know! I thought you were right, and you had fulfilled the admonition when you pulled me back to you at the funeral. But apparently it was literal. You had to draw me. And it worked, just in time. You do have power!”

  “None of my drawings ever has done that before,” Celia protested. “I think I just gave you your power. What is my power?” In her mind she heard the fortuneteller laughing pleasantly at her.

  “I don’t know,” Tomasi said, taking her hand in his. They looked down at her slender fingers among his. “Nothing has happened with your drawings before?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Well, we have to get help,” Tomasi said. “We have to find my old teacher, the Kind who helped me before. He’ll know what to do.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Maybe I can take you through the book,” Tomasi said.

  “Can you do that? How do you know where we’ll end up?”

  “I don’t, but I can’t think of anything else. At least you won’t be here for him to find you.” Tomasi stood up from the bed and pulled her to her feet, but Celia nearly fell.

  “My feet are asleep,” she said, feeling the needling numbness from both her ankles down.

  “Shake them,” Tomasi said impatiently.

  Celia couldn’t get her feet to move. She tried frantically to get the blood flowing, but the numbness was creeping into her calves instead. “It’s getting worse!” She looked up at Tomasi and screamed when she saw Mr. Sumeletso hovering outside her window behind him.

  Tomasi turned and saw him there, too. He was ten feet away from the house, standing still, as though he were on an invisible platform, with a calm, malevolent look on his face. Behind him, the moon was thinning into a bloody sickle.

  “Who is that? Is he floating?” Tomasi stared.

  “It’s Mr. Sumeletso! What can we do?” Celia gasped. She sank back onto the bed, no longer able to support herself because she barely could feel anything below her knees. Her feet were like lead weights on the end of her legs.

  “I don’t know!” Tomasi balled his fists and pressed them against his temples. “I don’t know!”

  There was a knock on the door. “Celia, are you okay? Was that you?” her mother asked from outside.

  “I’m fine!” Celia called desperately. She looked at Tomasi, who was wide-eyed. You have to go! she mouthed at him, pointing at her sketchbook, which lay open next to her. He silently protested. “Go back! I don’t want him to get you, too!” she whispered to him.

  Outside her door, Celia’s mother said, “Was that you a minute ago? It sounded like you screamed.”

  “I stubbed my toe!” Celia called. She watched Tomasi turn back to the wall and darken into a shadow. He sank down the wall and across her bedspread to her sketchbook, shrinking into the page.

  Her mother opened the door and looked in on Celia, who lay against the pillows on her bed, her thighs cold and numb. “You’re all right?”

  “I’m okay,” Celia said, and she almost laughed at how pointless her lie was. “I’m tired. I’m going to go to sleep.” She felt her vision start to close in. Around the edges her sight was blurry and dark.

  “Okay. Hey, do you want to take another art class this summer? I thought maybe you’d like to try a painting class this time.” Her mother pointed at the Rothko print on the wall.

  “Sure,” Celia said helplessly. She glanced out the window. The Unkind man hadn’t moved. Just beyond the light from the room, his eyes were fixed on her.

  “Maybe Regine would like to take it with you,” her mother suggested.

  “I’ll ask her.” Celia fel
t the coldness creeping up to her hips. She touched her knee, and it felt like it was frozen solid.

  “Okay, well, let me know soon. I think the deadline to register is coming up. Good night, dear.” Her mother smiled at her and pulled the door closed.

  Celia turned to look out again at Mr. Sumeletso, who had floated closer to her window. She was calmer than she had been since the graduation ceremony. Everything had been cleared away. “I will know what to do when the time comes,” she said in a low voice. He raised an eyebrow but didn’t speak. It was as if he knew that no matter what she said, Celia didn’t have a clue.

  She looked helplessly at the sketchbook on her lap. On the open page her drawing of Tomasi’s face was alive. He looked up at her imploringly. She touched his lips with her finger and then flipped through the book, unsure what she was looking for. She couldn’t feel anything below her stomach.

  From the back of her sketchbook the loose page with Mr. Sumeletso’s admonition peeked out. She pulled it out to look at it for what felt like the hundredth time. She could see only directly in front of her now. Celia squinted at the admonition. “It has to be here,” she tried to convince herself, and the last stanza floated up to her eyes.

  Only beware a different girl

  With talent hidden like a pearl

  Her hands may render you as dead

  And stop your power in this world

  “What did the principal call my drawing this afternoon? An artist’s rendering?” Celia thought aloud. “My drawing gave Tomasi his power. Maybe it can take yours away.” She kept her eyes away from the window and reached for her pencil again.

  “Your eyes are a little too close together,” she said breathlessly as she drew the teacher’s eyes closed. “And your nose is a little crooked.” The chill was in her chest now, and she was having trouble breathing. She barely could see what her pencil was doing; She was drawing in the dark. “Your lips are thin, but your jaw is square. Your hair is wavy.”

  Celia looked up when she heard a noise at the window. Her vision cleared for a moment and she could see Mr. Sumeletso raising the window from outside. He floated through it, watching her, but his face looked frozen. His expression matched the one she had just drawn. She held the book up to hide the page from him. The man didn’t seem to be able to move his neck. His body floated up to the ceiling and turned prostrate so he could look down at her. His arms stretched out toward her. Celia hurriedly started to draw his upper body.

  “Here are your hands folded on your chest. Are you sleeping? No, no one sleeps with their hands folded like that.” As Celia roughed in the man’s arms, overhead Mr. Sumeletso’s arms flew up and together, sticking to his chest in the position she had drawn. Celia struggled to raise her head to look up. In the tunnel of vision she had left, she saw his legs kicking frantically. Her eyes on the ceiling, Celia drew without looking at her pad. She quickly outlined his body, and when she reached his feet the man became still like a corpse, pinned to the ceiling.

  She fought to recover her sight, but she could see only directly in front of her. “Why are you still here?” she said in desperation to the man who hung lifeless in the air above her. In frustration she tore the page from her sketchbook and crumpled it up. The man’s body jerked as though he were being stung by a swarm of bees. Celia threw the crumpled drawing out the open window and Mr. Sumeletso was sucked after it. She heard him yell in pain, and then he was gone from view. Outside there was a crunching sound as his body hit the ground.

  She still couldn’t move most of her body. Celia worked to fill her lungs with air, and gradually the feeling returned to her chest. Her vision began to fill out again. Celia flipped back to the page where her drawing of Tomasi waited with an anguished expression.

  What’s happening? said the letters next to his face. Celia caught her breath when she saw the graphite tears on his cheeks. She touched the drawing and wiped them away. Come back, she wrote.

  Immediately his shadow filled the page and spread across the wall. In a moment he was kneeling next to the bed, then springing up to look out the window, and then returning to her side. “Where is he?”

  “I think he’s in the rock garden,” Celia said, trying to lift her legs as the blood slowly returned to them.

  Tomasi went back to the window and looked down. “He is! He’s not moving.”

  “In a minute I’m going to have to go get Mom to call the police,” Celia said. “As soon as I can walk again.”

  “What happened? What did you do?” He sat down and helped her massage her feet and calves. “You’re freezing!”

  “I drew him. I rendered him as dead, like his admonition said. I always thought Mariette was the different girl who could stop him. But since my drawing of you gave you your powers, it made me think Mariette was wrong. That maybe I was the one.”

  “That’s amazing!” Tomasi kissed her and wiped his cheeks with his hand. “I didn’t want to leave you. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “It’s okay. I had to do it myself,” Celia said. “I was the only one who could do it.”

  “I know, but I still wish I could have done something. That I could have gotten more powerful people to help you.”

  Celia eased herself up and swung her legs around to put her feet on the floor. “You know what you can do? Just hold me for a minute. I’m still cold.”

  He moved closer and wrapped his arms around her, pressing his chest against her back. “Say something. Are you okay?”

  “I think so.” She felt his warmth around her like an electric blanket. “I’m getting better.”

  “I thought it was over,” he said, pressing his forehead into her shoulder.

  “Me too,” she said. Celia reached up to stroke the nape of his neck.

  “What did it feel like?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Killing him?”

  Celia started. “I didn’t kill him!”

  “You didn’t?” Tomasi got up, and this time she was able to stand and walk to the window with him. Down below, Mr. Sumeletso sprawled on the rocks, his legs and arms askew. His eyes were open. When his mouth heaved like a fish out of water, Celia jumped. She closed the window and ran for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have to go down there. He can’t hurt me now.” She stopped Tomasi with an outstretched arm. “You can’t come—what if my mother catches you?”

  “At least get her to go with you, then,” Tomasi pleaded. “Please be careful.”

  She called to her mother as she ran downstairs. When she stepped out the back door the electric charge in the air that had haunted her on the way home was gone. Celia looked up and found a sliver of bone white moon emerging from the eclipse like a bleached sand dollar.

  Mr. Sumeletso lay still. When she stood over him his fearful expression looked like a child’s. “I . . . can’t . . . feel my body,” he gasped.

  “I felt that way a few minutes ago,” Celia said. “But you knew that.”

  She heard her mother come out the door, calling her name and then shrieking when she saw the body. “What happened? Who is that?”

  “I saw him in the tree outside my window, and then he fell,” Celia told her, wondering if her voice was too calm, if she was supposed to be hysterical in this situation. “I think he’s hurt pretty badly.”

  “I’ll call an ambulance!” Her mother dashed back to the door.

  “And the police!” Celia called after her. In her bedroom window Tomasi was visible, watching her. She waved him away from the glass, and he obeyed. Then Celia turned back to Mr. Sumeletso on the ground. She studied him curiously, trying to find the connection between the Unkind predator and the helpless, cowardly man.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered up at her.

  “You should be. You thought you were going to float away from here and be long gone before anyone found me. But now I’m going to tell everyone you drowned Mariette, and I have a feeling they might believe me. You might wish you were dead aft
er all.”

  “You could do it,” he said. “Right here, before the ambulance comes.”

  “No. I’m not like you. I can be happy knowing you will suffer, but I am not a murderer. I will never hurt someone else for my own gain.”

  Celia heard a siren in the distance, then a rustle in the trees at the back edge of the yard. She looked up and saw a figure rise from the bushes and pass up through the branches. It stopped just as it emerged from the leaves at the top of a tree, its torso visible, legs still obscured. In the light from the house Celia couldn’t tell if the figure was a man or a woman. Some kind of wrap or shawl draped over what might have been a suit, and long wisps of hair rose from the face like tendrils of smoke. For a moment Celia was sure the figure was looking down at her, and she felt its gaze like a cobweb across her face. Then it shot up into the sky like a rocket, disappearing into the night, black on black. “Who was that?”

  “Someone terrible,” the man on the ground said softly. “Someone far more powerful than you and I.”

  Celia stared down at him. “Tell me!”

  “You don’t terrify me nearly as much as—” Mr. Sumeletso gasped as veins of lightning spread across the sky, washing out everything around them for a split second, like a flashbulb at close range. His mouth snapped shut as if it were spring-loaded. When Celia realized he was not going to speak again, she said, “I’m new to all this, and there’s a lot I don’t understand. But I promise you I will use everything I learn to keep you, and whoever that was, from ever harming anyone else.”

  She turned when she heard her mother approaching behind her. “What were you saying to him?” she asked.

  “That he got what he deserved,” Celia answered. “Creep.”

  26. THE MOON AND THE MELODIES

  ONLY NINE MONTHS AGO, she had entered the upstairs room at Diaboliques as a nervous guest, sure the beautiful people who had bothered to look at her could tell immediately she didn’t belong. The dark, stylized play had gone on around her, and she had watched, feeling hope rise up in her like a flood. That first night could have been a lifetime ago.