Pull Down the Night (The Suburban Strange)

by Nathan Kotecki

“What do you mean? I find the most amazing people I’ve ever met in my life, and you wonder why I want to be a part of their group?”

  “Part of their group, yes. But a club? With members? You and Regine are the only ones who talk about it that way. Celia and Marco hardly ever mention the Rosary, unless they’re reminiscing about last year.”

  “You wouldn’t understand. This doesn’t mean the same things to you. This isn’t just a fun thing I’m doing to try to impress a girl, the way it is for you.”

  Bruno seethed, but Sylvio was too oblivious to notice.

  “Anyway, on Friday at Diaboliques I finally get to meet them. And then Marco can make me one of those rosary bracelets. It’s gonna be awesome.”

  ON FRIDAY NIGHT THE PROCESSION of black cars traveling to Diaboliques increased from two to three. “I feel like we’re diplomats,” Bruno said to Sylvio as they drove.

  “I always think of a funeral. That’s what Regine says.”

  Sylvio had taken an undue amount of care in dressing, and while his outfit was impressive, his desperation for approval was a little transparent. Regine had begun to hedge about the big Rosary decision, since Ivo hadn’t come home. “We may have to wait until Halloween,” Bruno had heard her tell Sylvio. “But that’s only a couple more weeks.”

  Bruno liked Liz and Brenden on sight. They seemed more relaxed than the half of the Rosary that was still in high school. Liz wore a leather biker jacket. Brenden’s hair rose in the same Morrissey peak Bruno remembered from the photo Marco had shown him, and his charcoal suit bore telltale signs of Marco’s handiwork. He held Marco’s hand and looked at Bruno warmly. “It’s great to meet you!” he was saying as Regine pulled Sylvio into their midst.

  “Brenden, this is Silver. I feel like I’ve told you two so much about each other!” Brenden greeted Sylvio, but with not quite the same level of interest he’d shown in Bruno. Sylvio behaved as though he was on a job interview, shaking hands with Liz and Brenden and taking all his cues from Regine, who looked almost as eager for approval.

  As they walked toward the club, Marco steered Bruno back over to Brenden. “Bruno’s my best model when you’re out of town.”

  “Thanks for keeping Marco company for me,” Brenden said.

  “No problem,” Bruno said. “I’m surprised he wants to spend so much time with me.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Brenden smiled.

  Upstairs Liz chatted with Bruno when they had settled in. “I like your style,” she said.

  “Marco helped me a lot. How’s college?”

  “I love it. I highly recommend it.” She smiled. “You like Suburban?”

  “I do. I feel lucky we moved. The high school I would have gone to wasn’t nearly as big.”

  “How’s Celia doing? Last year was so crazy. Have you seen Mariette’s ghost?”

  Bruno nodded. “It’s still crazy. But Mariette looks kind of nice.”

  “She was. I wonder why she’s causing trouble now.”

  They took their usual spot at the edge of the dance floor. The Rosary had an easy authority in this space. Across the room, the St. Dymphna boys had taken notice of the additional faces.

  “Who are they?” Brenden asked.

  Marco told him what Tomasi had shared. “They seem a little desperate for attention, but I’m not going to lie—they’re kind of hot.”

  “I can see that,” Brenden said, taking Marco’s hand again.

  Bruno hadn’t told anyone about his encounter with Turlington the previous week. Now from across the floor Turlington gave Bruno the odd salute, cupping his hand and touching the tips of his fingers to his forehead, the way the boys did to Tomasi.

  Tomasi arrived, and Bruno was relieved when Celia and Tomasi and he separated from the rest of the group. “Regine really needs to calm down,” Celia complained. “She’s like a door-to-door salesperson over there, and her product is Silver.”

  “What’s that about?” Tomasi asked.

  “I don’t know if she wants Silver to be officially part of the Rosary because she’s in love with him, or if she’s in love with him because he’s such a good fit for the Rosary, but either way she is hell-bent on tying it all up in a nice bow. So it’s the Silver show while Liz and Brenden are in town.”

  Changing the subject, Bruno said, “I think there’s an Unkind at Suburban.” That got their attention, but when Bruno explained what had happened with Van, they weren’t convinced.

  “So you’ve never seen him do anything else that would make you think he has powers?” Tomasi asked.

  “No, just following me on those stairs.”

  “That is strange,” Celia said. “But what does it mean? Last year with Mr. Sumeletso, he was doing horrible things to fulfill an admonition. Are we supposed to just go after Van because we assume that if he’s Unkind, he must be up to something bad?”

  “Well, he must have an admonition, too, right? So he probably has to do something bad to earn more Unkind power.”

  “I don’t think all Unkind admonitions require you to kill someone, or even to hurt them,” Tomasi said.

  “Are you sure about that?” Bruno thought it was a legitimate question, but it seemed to annoy Tomasi.

  “Who knows. I’m going to go dance.” Tomasi stalked onto the dance floor as the ominous percussive notes of “Discotheque Necronomicon” began.

  “I wish we had Van’s admonition,” Celia said. “Without that, we can’t be sure about much.”

  “How do we find it?”

  “I don’t know. Last year Mariette found Mr. Sumeletso’s admonition in some mysterious book she discovered in the public library. But she wasn’t sure whose it was, so we had the opposite problem: We had the admonition but didn’t know who we were trying to stop. Now we suspect we might have to stop Van, but we don’t know what—if anything—he’s doing or how he’s supposed to do it.”

  “You said a mysterious book? I wonder if it’s the same book I found in the library at school, which gave me my admonition. I’d have to go look for it again; it disappeared from Lois’s office.”

  “Mariette said her book had vanished from the library when she went back to find it again. There was no record of it, nothing. All these disappearing things . . .”

  “I’ll look on Monday,” Bruno said. They watched Tomasi dance. “He doesn’t like me.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s true . . .”

  9

  a girl in trouble is a temporary thing

  ON SATURDAY EVENING BRUNO got a call from Celia, summoning him to her house the next afternoon. “I don’t think you and Tomasi got off on the right foot. The three of us have to stick together. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen, when people like us find each other?”

  Bruno thought of Lois. “I thought the Kind usually worked alone.”

  “Mariette said that, too. But doesn’t it just seem obvious that you and Tomasi could do things together that you couldn’t do separately?”

  “You make it sound like we’re superheroes,” Bruno said, and was gratified by her laughter.

  Upstairs in her room on Sunday, Celia said, “I told Mom I’m tutoring you in something or other.” Bruno wasn’t sure what to do. Being in Celia’s bedroom felt privileged and illicit. He wanted to study her room like a map. He wanted to see what his place under the trees looked like from this vantage, but he thought she would find that strange, so he sat down on the chair by her desk.

  The memory of the mystery song he’d heard her play all those weeks ago flared up. “What are you listening to?” He pointed at the CD player on her dresser.

  “Oh, it depends. Brenden’s made us so many great mixes. I listen to them a lot.”

  “Marco’s given me some of them.”

  “Sometimes I’ll latch on to one album and listen to it over and over,” Celia said. “This summer I must have listened to Tanita Tikaram’s Ancient Heart album every day for a month.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “‘Twist in My Sob
riety’ was her biggest hit, but the whole album is brilliant.”

  “Does Patrick play it at Diaboliques?”

  “It’s not really that kind of music,” Celia said, smiling. “I do like some things that aren’t part of that scene.”

  “Can I hear?” Bruno asked.

  “Sure.” Celia found the CD, and while the music was moody and beautiful, it wasn’t the haunting song he remembered.

  Celia looked at her open sketchbook on her bed. “I wonder where Tomasi is.”

  “He’s going to come out of there?” Bruno asked.

  “Yeah. I guess I’m used to it by now, but when you say it like that—it is rather odd, isn’t it?” Celia kept her eyes on the page. “He always writes first, to make sure it’s okay to come through. There he is.”

  Bruno could make out darkening marks that appeared on the page, like small stains seeping up from the underside. Celia took her pencil and jotted a word next to the newly formed letters, and then she went and stood by the closed bedroom door. When Bruno looked back at the book, a deep shadow was flowing out of the pages, across the bedspread, and up the far wall. It formed the silhouette of a tall, broad-shouldered boy. Then it moved, and as it turned around, Bruno saw that it was no longer Tomasi’s shadow but had become Tomasi himself.

  “Whoa,” Bruno said.

  When Tomasi saw Bruno, his expression was quite clear: I am not okay with this. “Hey,” he mumbled, and Bruno heyed him back. Celia came over, and Tomasi accepted a kiss from her.

  “You look serious,” she said, and Bruno wondered how she could tell; Tomasi’s expression was the same as always.

  “It’s weird. I felt like someone was following me,” Tomasi told her.

  “Where?”

  “In there.” Tomasi pointed at the sketchbook. “I see people in there sometimes, headed in another direction. It goes pretty fast, so I never get a good look at them or anything. But this time, I could swear there was somebody behind me. I can’t really turn to look back. I have to stay focused on the exit. Maybe I was imagining it.”

  “Are the other people in there are doing what you’re doing? Traveling in and out of books?” Celia asked.

  “I don’t know. I assume that’s what they’re doing.”

  Celia looked over at Bruno. “Well, I wanted you guys to come over so you could talk some more. It’s hard to talk at Diaboliques, and I thought Bruno might have questions.”

  Tomasi sat down on the edge of the bed, facing Bruno. “Sure, what can I tell you?”

  There were so many things Bruno wanted to ask, but he knew Tomasi really didn’t want to play the role Celia was forcing on him, and Bruno didn’t want to give Tomasi more reasons to resent him. But they couldn’t sit there in silence. Two minutes earlier, this room had charmed him. Suddenly it was all so uncomfortable.

  He had to ask something. “How old were you, when you found out?”

  “Fourteen. If I think back, there were plenty of signs before then, but I didn’t really understand anything until my reading teacher explained it to me.”

  “How many admonitions have you had?”

  Tomasi silently counted up his fingers. “I’m on my seventh now. Some last a long time; others go more quickly. I have no idea how they work or where they come from.”

  “Have you ever missed one? Not finished it in time?”

  “I missed the first five. The one last year was a close call, but Celia made it happen.” Tomasi’s eyes changed when he looked over at her. “For a long time I was only seeing the bad side of being Kind. My parents caught on that something was strange with me because the powers I had were making it harder for me to do some things, rather than easier, so I was doing my best to suppress it. I just ignored my admonitions and hoped it would all go away.”

  There was another moment of silence, and Celia prodded them on. “What else?”

  “So your parents know about you?”

  “Not really. They don’t know the truth. They’re scared of me because they’ve seen just enough to freak them out. If they knew, it would be easier—they could just burn me at the stake and be done with it.” Tomasi looked bitter, resigned.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” His expression said I don’t want pity. “Being Kind makes things harder, more complicated, but it does come with benefits. I see that now. Sometimes you have to look hard to find them, but they’re there.”

  “Like being able to visit me any time of the day or night?” Celia said sweetly. Tomasi smiled just a little.

  He turned back to Bruno. “So your powers are maps and stuff?” Bruno nodded. “You find shortcuts?”

  “Have you ever heard of liminals?”

  “No.”

  “Just wondering. I’m not really sure how I could use them. I mean, if people noticed . . .”

  “Same here. I figure as I develop more, it will become clearer how to use the powers for more useful things. I want to go to college for dead languages or something like that, so I can work on translating ancient manuscripts. I figure I must have some kind of advantage, considering the way I see books.”

  “Maybe you’ll be a city planner,” Celia offered to Bruno. Then it was quiet, and she looked from one to the other. “Well, I really hope you guys can be friends. We are the only ones who know each other’s secrets, and there might come a time when we need each other.”

  “Sure,” Tomasi said coolly, his stare making Bruno uncomfortable.

  “YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE You Are Here book again, have you?” Bruno asked Lois.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t know when it disappeared, but I haven’t seen it since the day you brought it to me. Are you looking for your admonition?”

  “Not mine, Van’s.”

  Bruno headed off to the stacks to see if he could find the elusive book again. He easily found The Social History of Art, but he couldn’t find You Are Here anywhere. He gave up and went to the next aisle, where the second volume had been. There was nothing there, either.

  Why am I even going farther? he asked himself as he headed to aisle 4. It’s not going to be there. When he turned into aisle 4, though, Bruno found a boy sitting on the floor, crying softly with his chin on his knees. Bruno had a few classes with this guy, but they had never spoken.

  “Hey, David, what’s wrong?”

  David looked fearfully up at him, his glasses blurred by tears. “I think she got me. I just don’t understand—I’ve never even seen the ghost.”

  “You’re depressed?”

  “I guess. Is this what being depressed feels like? It actually hurts—like something’s pressing down on my heart.”

  On the floor, the David’s notebook was covered with scribbled homework assignments, and Bruno wondered how he kept track of everything. “You’ll feel better. It’ll go away.”

  “It has to. I can’t do this much longer.”

  Bruno sat down next to him. “What do you mean?”

  “It hurts too much.” Tears returned to his eyes.

  “Did something happen?”

  “Nothing happened. I was fine two days ago. Then I started feeling bad, and it just keeps getting worse and worse.” David wrapped his arms around his knees.

  “Where were you when you started feeling bad?”

  “I don’t know. In class, I think?”

  “And you never saw Mariette . . . Can you remember anything that was strange, or unusual?”

  “No. I just want it to stop. I’m scared if it doesn’t stop soon, I’ll do something to make it stop.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been thinking about ways I could do it . . . My mom has sleeping pills. That wouldn’t hurt, would it?” David kept his eyes on his knees.

  “You can’t do that,” Bruno said. “You have to promise me you won’t do that. Why don’t you go talk to the counselor?” He put his hand on David’s shoulder.

  David caught his breath. “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?�
�

  “With your hand. How did you do that?”

  “I didn’t do anything. I don’t know.” Bruno took his hand away.

  “Wait! Do it again.”

  Bruno put his hand back on David’s shoulder and watched his back unhunch and his fists unclench. “That’s amazing.” David wiped his eyes. “It’s like you took the weight off.”

  “I’m not sure what I did. Maybe you just needed someone to listen to you.”

  “Well, thanks,” David said.

  “You’re not going to hurt yourself?” Bruno asked.

  “No. I promise. I feel a lot better.”

  “I still think you should talk to someone. If you feel bad again, you have to tell me, or tell someone, okay?”

  “Sure.” They stood up. “Is it just me, or is this library kind of creepy?” David asked.

  “It’s a strange place. But I like it.”

  BRUNO WAS LOST IN THOUGHT on his way to class when Van grabbed his arm. He hauled Bruno back into the stairwell and down the stairs, stopping by the mechanical room. “Don’t you go running anywhere,” Van grunted at him.

  “What do you want?”

  “We have something to discuss.” Van pointed behind him at the light from the second staircase behind the stairs they had just used. “What’s that all about? How’d you do that?” Bruno tried to leave, but the senior blocked his way.

  “I didn’t do it. I just found it.”

  “Cut the crap. I told you I’d damage you whenever I felt like it, and if you don’t tell me what’s going on I’ll do it. I don’t care who you are.”

  “What about you? Who are you?”

  “I’m the one asking questions here,” Van snapped.

  They stared at each other. Van loomed over him, and Bruno wondered if there was any way to make a break for it.

  “So, now we have two problems. First, you don’t know how to act around seniors, and I still don’t think you’ve learned your lesson.”

  “I’m sorry, okay? Can’t you just forget about it?”

  “I would, but my friends keep reminding me that I got tackled by a shrimp, so it’s a little hard.” Van advanced and Bruno braced himself for another punch. He put his finger square in Bruno’s sternum and pressed hard. “But that’s not all anymore. There’s a freaky thing in the bottom of this stairwell, and clearly you knew it was here. How do you do it?”