Fire the Depths

by Peter Lerangis

  “I know,” Alex said. “I know.”

  “What happens to her if she—?”

  “Don’t say it. It won’t happen.”

  “I don’t have a mental condition, you know,” Max said. “I make jokes, and I’m funny and smart.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I’m so sorry, Max. I’m the one with the problem. I get really emotional and pigheaded . . .”

  “What happens to me if I’m kicked out on the street?”

  Alex held him tight. For a long time she didn’t say anything. Then she grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him around to face her. “We have to think positive.”

  “Thinking doesn’t do anything,” Max said.

  “We’ll see about that. First, I’ll bandage that cut and get us something to eat,” she went on, touching the side of his face. “Does it hurt?”

  “It’s just a flesh wound,” he said.

  “Ha!” Alex grinned. “Monty Python and the Holy Grail?”

  “Ni,” Max said.

  “So you do have a sense of humor. That’s a start. We’ll both need that while we roll up our sleeves and figure out how to pay these bills.”

  “Do you have money?”

  “No. I’ll get a job.”

  “But you’re a terrible waiter,” Max said.

  “I’ll get better at it,” Alex said. “Or I’ll find a different job. Work at a shop. Mow lawns. Meanwhile I’ll write my novel fast and sell it for a gazillion dollars.”

  “All that will take time,” Max said.

  Alex thought a moment. “I can sell my car right now.”

  “You’ll need that.”

  “True.”

  “We could sell some stuff from the house,” Max suggest. “On eBay. Whatever.”

  Alex grinned. “I like how you think, my brother!”

  “Cousin,” Max said.

  “Cousin,” Alex repeated.

  “There’s a piano in the basement,” Max said. “And lots of stuff in the attic.”

  “I count three TVs. Need them all?”

  “I hate TV,” Max said.

  Alex thrust a fist in the air. “We are in business!”

  “Ni!” Max shouted.

  The cat pee smell was gone. It was the best he’d felt all day.

  Which wasn’t saying much. But it was a start.

  The clock ticked to 9:00 p.m. as Max dropped a toaster oven onto the living room carpet. Along with that, the piano, and the TVs, they’d gathered two small tables, three coffeemakers and one grinder, a waffle iron, four bike tires, three bike pumps, seven old but working laptops, two old-model iPods, Max’s boxed baby crib, an ugly rolled-up carpet with a tag that said Happy Graduation, George!, and stacks of unopened shirts and ties.

  Alex was streaming some punk-rock music through the stereo system, and Max began dancing around the pile. “This is awesome,” he said.

  “You can dance!” Alex cried out.

  “You can notice obvious things!” Max replied.

  “Ooh, I’ll get you for that.” Alex was adding up amounts on a sheet of paper. “A few dollars here, a few dollars there . . . okay, we’re talking maybe in the high hundreds. What about that stuff in the attic?”

  Max stopped dancing. He hated the attic. When he was a kid, he heard ghosts dancing up there. His parents told him it was squirrels, but he didn’t believe it.

  Fish. Deep, stinky fish.

  “I don’t go up there,” Max said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s dark. And spooky.”

  Alex laughed. “It’s an attic!”

  “Anyway, there’s just junk up there,” Max said.

  “What kind of junk?” Alex asked.

  “Old junk,” Max said. “Mom and Dad used to travel a lot, before they had me. They collected things—from other states and countries. Weird stuff. They have weird taste.”

  “Weird collectibles—perfect!” Alex said. “You never know what you can find. They could have picked up, like, an original Pollock at some anonymous garage sale.”

  “Nobody sells fish at garage sales,” Max said.

  “Jackson Pollock,” Alex said. “He was a painter.”

  Alex grabbed a flashlight from the pile of stuff and bounded up the stairs. At the top of the stairs, between Max’s and his parents’ bedrooms, was a small alcove next to a window. A ladder rested against the wall, and overhead was a trapdoor with a string attached. “That’s the attic, isn’t it?” Alex asked. “When was the last time you were up there?”

  “When I was three,” Max said.

  “Three? Seriously? You haven’t been up there in ten years?”

  “It’s haunted,” Max said.

  “You mean, you thought it was haunted when you were three,” Alex said.

  Alex pulled on the string. The hatch was stiff, and it took a few tries—until finally it opened with a low, moaning scrawwwwk.

  “Boooo-ah-ah-ah!” Max screamed.

  “Stop it,” Alex replied.

  Max grinned. “Did I scare you?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad.”

  The light from the fixture above the stairway wasn’t bright enough to illuminate anything inside the black square above them. Max squinted but could only see shadows.

  Alex grabbed the ladder and propped the top rung against the opening. “After you.”

  “I want you to face the monsters first,” Max said.

  “Promise to save me if I meet someone with a hockey mask?” Alex asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ll go up and find the light switch. There must be a light switch.” Alex scampered up the ladder and into the darkness. Max expected her flashlight to switch on, but it didn’t. Maybe the batteries were dead. He could hear her footsteps overhead and some muffled mumbling as she bumped into things.

  And then the sound stopped.

  Max waited for a light to go on in the attic, but it remained dark. “Alex?” he called out. “Are you finding the switch?”

  No answer.

  Max began climbing the ladder himself. “Alex?”

  Halfway up, the light at the top of the stairs behind him flickered off. He shuddered, nearly falling off the ladder. Now the alcove was in darkness.

  He turned to look over his shoulder. The entire house was pitch-black. Every light was off.

  “I waaaarned you not to mess with the de-e-e-ead!”

  It was Alex’s voice. Obviously. She wasn’t even trying to disguise it. “Not funny,” Max said. “All the lights are out. Did you do that?”

  His eyes were adjusting now. The moon shining through the alcove window gave the tiniest bit of light, and he could see a vague movement in the attic above. A dark shape began to move into the opening, silhouetted in the blackness.

  “Alex?” Max squeaked.

  The form was human. Max’s mouth opened into a scream that stayed silent.

  Out of the black hole, his arms reaching downward, a man hurtled directly toward him.

  6

  AS Max hit the floor, the body landed on him. It was cold and heavy and smelled of dust and mildew. “Get off me!” he pleaded, struggling against the tangle of legs and arms, pushing hard against the dead weight.

  Finally the body rolled to the side. An arm ripped out of its side, and Max held it aloft. He felt like he was about to pass out.

  “What did you do to Melvin?” Alex cried out from above him.

  She was laughing. Laughing.

  Max forced himself to stare at the arm. That’s when he noticed the sawdust and cotton sticking out of the shoulder joint. He threw it aside, and it landed with a thump next to the rest of the figure. The moonlight cast a dull amber glow on a waxy, expressionless face.

  Of a department store mannequin.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” Max cried out.

  “I—I couldn’t help it!” Alex said, practically hiccuping. “It was a perfect horror film setup. The dark attic, the ladder, the mannequin . . .”

&nb
sp; “You could have killed me!” Max said.

  “I thought you liked pranks,” Alex replied.

  “Not that kind of prank! What if I hit my head when I landed?”

  Alex was climbing down the ladder now. “Why’d you turn the lights off?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then who did? Freddy Krueger?”

  “I thought maybe you did.”

  “From up in the attic? How could I possibly have done that?” Alex glanced around in the darkness as she reached the bottom of the ladder. “Ugh. Just what we need, a power failure . . .”

  “Is that sarcasm?”

  “Yes. Do you know where the circuit breakers are—a box of little switches that shut off if there’s a power surge—”

  “I know what circuit breakers are,” Max said. “I could draw you the electrical plan of the whole house. They’re in the kitchen.”

  She pulled the flashlight from her belt. Together she and Max made their way carefully down the stairs and into the kitchen. Max found the small, square metal panel on the wall at the back of the pantry. He pulled it open, revealing two columns of light switches. At the top was a switch bigger than all the rest. “This is the master,” he said. “Here’s something else I know. The way you get the lights back on is to flick this off and then back on again, like this—”

  He pulled the switch to the left and then back to the right again. Nothing happened, so he tried it again.

  Still dark.

  “It’s supposed to work,” Max said.

  Alex sighed. “Not if there’s no electricity coming into the house.”

  Max knew exactly what she meant. “The letter from the power company . . .” he said. “It said they were going to shut off the electricity yesterday.”

  “They lied,” Alex said. “It was today.”

  The kitchen was dimly lit only by the reflection of the neighbor’s rear floodlight, and Max sank into a chair by the fridge. Usually it hummed, but not now. “So, no lights, no fridge, no TV, no computers, no Wi-Fi . . .”

  He stared at the fading photos of him and his parents, near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, at the Purple People Bridge in Cincinnati, in front of the Statue of Liberty. In two of the photos, his dad was wearing his favorite T-shirt that said LIVE LARGE. Everyone looked so happy in all those places. And that just made him want to cry.

  “Positive—remember, positive thinking!” Alex said, pacing back and forth.

  Max nodded numbly. “Live large. That’s what my dad always says.”

  “Hm,” Alex said. “Well, we’ll work on living medium. I can call the electric company on my cell tomorrow and explain everything. Maybe they’ll cut us a break.”

  “And if they don’t?” Max asked.

  “We’ll do what the pioneers did—work hard during the day and go to bed at night! We’ll charge our phones at a diner.”

  Max nodded. “Or at Smriti’s.”

  “Exactly! One way or another, we’ll survive until the money starts coming in from the stuff we sell.”

  “So . . . we’ll go to sleep now and look in the attic tomorrow?” Max asked hopefully.

  “Why wait? I’m wide awake now,” Alex said. “And the attic will be just as dark during the daytime as it is at night.”

  Before Max could protest, Alex was heading for the stairs. With the flashlight.

  He had no choice but to follow her. In minutes he was climbing the steps to the attic.

  “Fish fish fish fish . . .” he murmured.

  “Seriously, if you’re going to do that, you might as well wait downstairs,” Alex said, raising her eyebrows. “All alo-o-o-one . . .”

  “Don’t scare me.”

  “Wooooooooo . . . ah-ha-ha-ha . . .”

  Max took a deep breath and imagined the fish swimming away, downstream. As he stepped into the attic, Alex shone her flashlight beam at a battery-operated lantern that hung from the ceiling. “Bingo.”

  “Why do you say ‘Bingo’?” Max asked.

  Alex shrugged. “My dad says it. It’s like voilà.”

  “I like voilà better.”

  “That’s because you have French blood.” Alex flicked the switch on the lantern, and the attic was awash in a dull orange light.

  The space was directly beneath the back part of the house, and the roof was slanted sharply downward. Max could walk upright to the left and right, but going deeper into the attic required ducking low.

  Not that they could travel far anyway—the place was jammed full. The flashlight beam passed over at least two old typewriters, a sewing machine, two more mannequins dressed in seventies-era clothes, two steamer trunks plastered with stickers from foreign countries, and piles of old books and vinyl records. Resting on the back wall were framed paintings, shrouded by white sheets. One of the sheets had fallen off, revealing a scowling white-haired man in a black suit.

  The man’s dark eyes peered out over a bulbous nose. They seemed surprised and angry, as if Max and Alex had interrupted a very important business meeting.

  Max let out a gasp. He stepped backward, tripping over an open toolbox. A hammer, a screwdriver, and a small crowbar fell out onto the floor.

  “Clumsy,” Alex called over her shoulder. She was crouched down before a collection of small stuffed rodents sitting on a pile of boxes. “Awesome! I love these. Your parents are cool.”

  Max looked away from the painting. “What? Those things aren’t cool. They’re disgusting. They’re rats.”

  “Some museum of natural history might want these critters—wild guess, two hundred dollars.” Alex moved toward the typewriters and record player. “Antiques! People love this stuff—movie companies too. You know, props for old-timey films. Maybe one hundred bucks. The old mannequins? Say another two hundred . . . just a ballpark estimate.”

  Max followed close behind her. He hated being there. What made it worse was that the old man’s eyes seemed to be following him, growing angrier. Quickly Max reached down and tossed the white sheet back over the painting. A cloud of dust puffed upward, and Max began to cough.

  “What did you just do?” Alex asked.

  “Sorry,” Max replied. “But that guy . . .”

  Alex turned, shining the flashlight on the painting. The sheet slid off again, setting off more dust, as if the guy had steam coming from his ears.

  “Relative of yours?” Alex asked.

  “Can we turn him around?” Max said.

  She shone the light on a plaque bolted into the frame. “Whoa. Max, do you know who that is?”

  Max leaned closer and read the inscription:

  JULES VERNE

  1828–1905

  “He doesn’t look like either of us,” Max said.

  Alex shrugged. “Well, wait till you grow a beard.”

  “He definitely seems . . . smart,” Max remarked.

  “To write like he did—I think so,” Alex said. “You’ve read his stuff, right?”

  “I’m thirteen.”

  “The perfect age! Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? Three guys captured by a madman in a submarine. A kick-butt underwater adventure from Antarctica practically to the North Pole. You feel like you’re there. Only when he wrote it, the submarine hadn’t been invented yet!”

  “Cool,” Max said.

  “Around the World in 80 Days? A chase around the entire world for a cash prize, in a race against time by this guy who never breaks a sweat, pursued by a cop who can’t wait to throw him in jail for stealing. I could go on. Smart isn’t the word. Genius, maybe. I’ve read each book about five times.”

  “So how much could we get for the painting?” Max said.

  Alex shone the light in his face. “You, Max Tilt, are directly descended from a god. Wouldn’t you want to keep this as a reminder?”

  “His eyes are creeping me out,” Max said.

  With a weary sigh, Alex yanked open a drawer in a chest near the far-right side of the attic, revealing a stack of yellowing newspapers. The top one
read: “Astronaut Neil Armstrong Is First Man to Walk on Moon!” “Ten bucks,” she said.

  Max pulled a funky-looking veiled women’s hat out of a drawer. He lifted it over Alex’s head. “This would look nice on you.”

  “Don’t put that thing anywhere near my face!” Alex jerked away.

  Max wasn’t sure if she was joking or not. It was hard to tell with her. And it really was a beautiful hat.

  So he moved closer.

  As she backed away again, her foot clipped the fallen crowbar, and she lost her balance. Max dropped the hat and clutched her left arm. Her momentum pulled Max with her. Flailing, his fingers clasped a large brass hook bolted into the wall at the far-left side. As they both crashed to the floor, Max heard a hollow clonk.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  But Alex wasn’t looking at him. She was sitting up and reaching for her flashlight. “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “The wall. Where you grabbed.” Alex rolled to a sitting position and shone her flashlight toward the hook. A big rectangular section of wall had swung out toward them. A hidden door.

  She crept closer. “You’ve never seen this before?”

  Swim away, fish. Go. Away.

  “N-N-No!” Max exclaimed. “Like I said, I don’t come up here. Ever.”

  “Do your parents know about it?”

  “How should I know?”

  Alex wrapped her fingers around the hook. “Should we open it?”

  “No!” he said.

  Alex pulled. With a deep, loud croak, the rusty hinges swung open wide enough to let a person through. A musty, sweetish smell wafted out of the opening. It tickled Max’s nose, and he began coughing. So did Alex. Covering her mouth, she trained the flashlight into the space and then stepped inside.

  Max tried to protest, but his vocal cords were frozen. He stepped back and turned to go, only to come face-to-painted-face with Jules Verne.

  Follow her, my lad.

  Max stood there, stunned.

  Did Verne say that? No. He couldn’t have, because he was French. Max had to have imagined it. Paintings couldn’t speak. It was not possible!