Still, Edgar, being Edgar, often found himself cold. And though he’d been given permission to turn up the thermostat (“Anytime, anytime,” Conrad had said), he was timid. Whenever he did bring himself to adjust it, he only notched it up one or two degrees—and, even then, proceeded with a distinct feeling of stage fright.
Thwok.
Edgar watched the axe come down and the wood crack—after which he looked at his finger. It had pretty much healed. The bandage was gone, and Edgar studied the little Frankensteiny rimple surrounding the tip of his left pointer.
“Battle scar,” the man had called it—and the boy had silently agreed. Because that’s how he remembered it, too. It had been a battle. Conrad may have said some things along this line, about how lucky Edgar was to have gotten away—but Edgar was pretty sure that most of the story had come from his own memory.
First and foremost: the way the butcher had cut off his finger.
Edgar dwelled on the incident. It was like some horrible bedtime story—except no one had told it to him, had they? It had actually happened. Edgar could follow his mind back to the brightly lit kitchen—and, if he was brave, force himself to see the exact moment when the butcher’s hand had come down with a malicious, air-bending whack.
But why would a person do such a thing? And why would his mother have just stood there and let it happen? The Schlips—Henry and Netty, Florence’s friends—had been there, too.
Was it a dream?
No. Edgar clearly remembered how the butcher had put the fingertip in a plastic bag and tried to steal it. But, somehow, Edgar had gotten it back. Maybe the Schlips had interceded on his grandmother’s behalf. Edgar suspected that Conrad might have helped, too.
What stood out, most of all, was the image of the butcher standing beside Florence’s tomato plants, laughing, shining a flashlight onto his oversized face. Edgar could remember his mother laughing, too—and then suddenly there’d been a lot of blood.
Thwok!
Edgar instinctively touched his throat where Florence had once put a crucifix on a chain. It had had to be removed because the metal caused a rash on the boy’s sensitive skin. Now, at the cabin, he wished for something charmed: one of his grandmother’s Saint Christopher trinkets or a little white candle in a blue glass cup; maybe even a dab of Chanel Nº 5—something to protect him from evil, a job that had always been Florence’s. His grandmother had been an expert at discerning what was good from what was bad, whether it concerned towels or artichokes or people. Edgar would now have to figure out such distinctions for himself.
He looked away from the window, toward the bureau. The Virgin’s head rested on top. Edgar had hoped her body might grow back, like a lizard’s tail. But there she lolled, useless, facedown next to the empty bottle of pills.
Luckily, he still had the diamond.
In one corner of the bedroom, where the floorboards were slightly rotted, there was a small splintery hole. He knelt before it now and pulled out his treasure. He slipped Florence’s ring over his Frankenstein finger and kept it there for several minutes. The idea was similar to recharging a battery from a power source—Edgar being the battery, and the diamond being the source. He did this every morning. If it weren’t for the ring, he probably wouldn’t have had the strength to get out of bed.
Cold air sometimes came up from the little hole. It was coming up now, making Edgar shiver. From the bureau he got one of the other boy’s sweaters and pulled it over his head. The waistband fell nearly to his knees. The clothes were all too big, but at least there were lots of warm things, including bulky turtlenecks that made Edgar feel burrowy and safe. The only item he didn’t care for was the reflective orange vest. It looked to Edgar like something worn by garbagemen—or by the prisoners who picked up litter on the sides of roads. But the man had explained that it was for hunting. He’d also said that when it came time to practice for real, Edgar would have to wear the orange vest.
Hunting season started in November, according to the man. Edgar wasn’t sure how soon that was. He’d lost all sense of time. When he’d searched the cabin for a calendar and found nothing, he wondered if he should start making marks on the wall.
Conrad would have noticed them, though. Other than some splintery wood here and there and the faulty fixture in the bathroom, the cabin was in excellent condition. If it had once been the house of a poor person, this was no longer true. The man said the place was over a hundred years old, but that a lot had been done to fix it up. The windows were new and tight, each with two sheets of glass—the double panes keeping out not only drafts, but also sound. The trees beyond the windows tossed silently, appearing less like trees and more like current-swept vegetation at the bottom of the ocean. Edgar would not have been surprised to see one of the fish from the man’s aquarium disappear into the submerged stone tunnel, only to reappear outside among the trees. The silence was so profound at times that Edgar had the uncanny sensation he’d gone deaf.
The fish had miraculously appeared a few days after his arrival. “I got them while you were sleeping,” the man had said. Edgar, it seemed, slept a lot. Only recently had he started to wake up enough to see the cabin as something more than a foggy wooden box; to see it as a house.
The place was a weird mixture of old and new. There was an antique cuckoo clock with little figures that trotted out twice a day; hulking pieces of wooden furniture: towering wardrobes and rough-hewn chests, intricately carved throne-like chairs. But then, interspersed among the heavy old furniture, space-age lamps rose like silver ferns—and in one corner of the living room stood a spotlit sculpture, a delicate floating staircase that seemed to be made from translucent paper. In the kitchen there were chipped cups of blue enamelware, alongside a set of expensive-looking white china. The stove was an old gas top whose oven made a loud tinging sound whenever the man used it, as if he were cooking up a hailstorm instead of a chicken. Across from the seventy-year-old stove, though, lived a new dishwasher, as well as a robotic refrigerator that scolded you if you failed to properly close one of its doors.
The strangest thing in the cabin was a small round window of pink glass, embedded high in the living room wall, above one of the mounted deer heads. In the late afternoon, there was a brief period when a beam of colored light fell nearly to the floor. On several occasions, when the man wasn’t around, Edgar stood directly under the channel of pink light. Unfortunately, it seemed not to function as a teleportation device.
Not that Edgar knew where he would go. Home was complicated. To make going home okay, he’d need more than a teleportation device; he’d need a time machine, as well.
For now, he had to stay where he was. His anxiety was lessened slightly by the fact that the cabin was clean. The man was nearly as fanatical as Florence had been when it came to housecleaning. Even when they’d first arrived, Edgar’s perceptive nose had picked up a lingering scent of bleach, as if the place had been scrubbed down before it was last vacated. Conrad was always washing or polishing something. Several times a week, he scoured the kitchen faucet with an old toothbrush. He kept good care of the outside, too, and had recently started to dig a series of holes. For a fence, he’d said. The man’s constant activity seemed a kind of nervousness—and this made Edgar feel a little less ashamed about his own fears. Sometimes he was even able to approach the man without shaking. He once asked him if he had a job, and Conrad said he didn’t need one, he was busy enough. When the boy then asked him what he used to do, Conrad only smiled. “I’m retired now,” he said. “I’m writing a book.”
Edgar didn’t think the man seemed old enough to be retired—and as for writing a book: when did he find the time to do it? When he wasn’t working around the house or attending to Edgar, he mostly read. Sometimes, at night, you could hear him talking in his bedroom. Possibly, that’s when he was writing. The boy knew, from his own experience of doing compositions for school, that it was sometimes necessary to say one’s words out loud to see if they were good, or true.
> Having a life meant having a story.
Edgar wondered if he should be writing, too. Even though he had a pretty good memory, he worried about forgetting stuff. His grandmother and his mother had forgotten tons of stuff, especially about his father. Maybe it was important to keep notes so you’d have them when you were older. Lately, Edgar had the sense that there was a hole in the middle of his brain; that important thoughts were slipping away.
Clearly, he’d let his head get lazy. It’d started with the little pink pills, but the effects seemed to linger even now, especially at night, when he had the most confusing conversations with Conrad. What did it mean when a stranger said he needed you, or wanted to know if you hated him? Edgar tried to give the right answers. Still, he often felt like he was drowning.
If the ship is sinking, better start thinking, Mr. Levinson had always said in science class. Edgar liked Mr. Levinson; he was smart—and he thought Edgar was smart, too. But recalling him now only flurried the boy’s breath. Ever since he’d run out of Percocet, he’d grown more and more anxious about missing school. How would he ever catch up on his homework? One day he’d mustered the courage to ask the man for some paper—but instead of practicing fractions or trying to remember the dates of historic events, he’d only doodled. While he was jig-jagging some lines into the shape of a Christmas tree, the man had walked up behind him and said, “You’re pretty good. Maybe we should collaborate.”
Edgar, who knew the meaning of the word, but not the context, had looked up quizzically.
“I can do the story,” Conrad said. “And you can do the pictures.”
In response, Edgar had only shrugged sufficiently to imply a polite maybe—but, later, he tore up his drawing, promising himself that the next time he asked for paper, he’d use it to write a note to his mother.
Besides, if he ever decided to write a book, he’d do the whole thing himself. Words and pictures.
* * *
A sleepy Edgar ventured out into the living room. He knew he had a little more time alone. After Conrad chopped the wood, he always swept the back patio. And sometimes he cleared branches off the roof or went around collecting the tall bitter greens he used in salads. He didn’t seem to worry anymore about leaving Edgar by himself. Once in a while, Conrad even drove to a store and was gone for more than an hour. Straight out, he’d tell the boy, “I trust you.” And though Edgar wasn’t sure exactly what might make him untrustworthy, he knew it was important to live up to the faith the man had put in him.
He’d already promised not to make any more phone calls or wander off alone down the sugar sand road. Even if he hadn’t promised, he would have given up anyway. A second attempt to call home had led to the same problem as before: the voice of the butcher. Once again, Edgar had hung up without saying a word. He was furious with himself for not knowing his mother’s cell. But the only number he’d ever needed—the one that was always put down for “call in case of emergency”—had been Florence’s landline.
Every time the butcher answered in the old woman’s stead, a peculiar terror seized Edgar’s heart. He wasn’t sure he could bear calling again—and anyway, Conrad didn’t leave his phones lying around anymore.
As for running off into the woods, it was pointless. Whenever he tried it, he only got lost—somehow always ending up back near the cabin, as if the small wooden house were following him or existed in more than one place. Plus, the woods were dangerous—not only because of the feral dogs, but because of the snakes. At first Edgar had thought Conrad was exaggerating, but then he’d seen them: a timber rattler and a puff adder—the latter of which Edgar had nearly stepped on one day, causing the animal’s neck to expand like a pharaoh’s headdress and its mouth to gasp open to enormous size.
It seemed safer to stay inside. Besides, Conrad had assured him again that whenever he was ready to go home, all Edgar had to do was ask. It was obvious, though, that the idea of his leaving made the man sad—a baffling sentiment that Edgar didn’t know how to factor in with his own desires: wild slashes of feeling that went in every direction, but cut no clear path through to his heart.
Sometimes he wondered if he wished to punish his mother. Maybe that’s why he’d run away—if that was even what he’d done. Not once, at this point, did Edgar consider abducted, or imprisoned.
In regard to his mother, he realized that he didn’t have it in him to punish her. Maybe all he wanted was to test her. In some ways of looking at things, she should be the one trying to find him.
If she even realized he was missing.
Possibly she’d become distracted by the black hair curling from the top of the butcher’s shirt. She might even be touching it right now, slipping her fingers inside the slits between the buttons, as Edgar had seen her do. It wasn’t difficult to picture the two of them sitting on the sofa, smoking cigarettes, sipping from the freezer-frosted bottle of vodka—after which the butcher might slide a cold hand between his mother’s legs. Edgar had seen that, too.
A lot had changed at 21 Cressida Drive. It was no longer the kind of place that Edgar could imagine his grandmother living. Not that that really mattered, considering the fact that she was dead. Still, ghosts sometimes wished to return to the places where they’d once lived. Edgar had seen the evidence (actual video footage) on Ghost Patrol, as well as on Haunted Habitat (shows, incidentally, that he’d sometimes watched with Florence).
Clearly, though, his grandmother would be upset if she somehow managed to swoop into her old house and see what was going on. But then it dawned on Edgar that, were Florence to come back, she’d probably come to the woods, where he was. In fact, he was pretty sure he’d seen her once—but then she’d disappeared behind a tree. Sometimes, when the man was sleeping, Edgar stood outside and waited for her.
* * *
Conrad, too, believed in ghosts. Edgar had heard him mumble some things about dead people. When he’d said, one night, that nothing really died, he’d looked at Edgar so steadily that it had made the boy blush. Sometimes, though, the man’s stares brought forth the sickening ooze of octopus ink inside Edgar’s belly. He often felt strangely paralyzed. He rarely spoke, especially about Florence or about his mother and the butcher, but sometimes the man drew out little things. Speaking, though, often caused Edgar to become upset—and, even through his tears, he could see that he was upsetting Conrad. Lately, Edgar had been trying to do most of his crying while the man was out of the house.
Sometimes he rolled himself into a little ball and hid behind a leaning bookshelf shaped like a ladder. It wasn’t as good as the spot at home, behind the trunk in his closet; it wasn’t as tight. Still, it helped—the self-imposed constriction somehow allowing his breath to slow and his mind to blur into whiteness. Claustrophobic conditions had the opposite effect on Edgar from what they had on most people: rather than causing panic, they cured it. Pressure in general, whether from tight sheets or a dictionary put on his chest, felt nice. Another good technique from his old life had been to lie on his stomach, and then to ask Florence to put her foot between his shoulder blades. “Silly boy,” she’d always say, but she would do it—until her foot got numb or she claimed she was getting dizzy. Sometimes Edgar thought he wouldn’t mind spending the whole day like that, under the warm pressure of his grandmother’s foot. It was something he wouldn’t dare ask Lucy to do—and, of course, he’d never ask Conrad. For now, the narrow spot behind the bookshelf ladder was the best comfort he could manage.
Whenever Edgar hid there, it didn’t seem to bother Conrad. He seemed to understand the boy’s need to withdraw; to limit his tiny body even further: tucking his white head down and his legs up, expertly making an egg of himself. He could stay like that for several hours, perfectly still.
At home, Lucy had never liked it if she found Edgar in his closet, behind the trunk. Even Florence, who didn’t mind lending her foot now and then to apply a little pressure, had absolutely no tolerance when it came to the closet. “Out, out,” she’d say. “There’s no
air back there—you’ll suffocate. Out!”
In his new habitat, the only one who occasionally rustled him from his hiding place was Jack. Which was interesting, Edgar thought—because in the old days it was Jack who’d first brought him into little hiding spots, and now it was Jack trying to get him out of one. Of course, they weren’t the same Jack. The old one had been imaginary, and the new one was real. Also, one was human, and the other a dog.
Sometimes, when Edgar was behind the bookshelf, he could feel the animal panting above him. Occasionally the dog used its paws to gently prod the boy’s side. More often than not, the egg would open—exposing its pale green eyes to the animal.
“Hello, Jack.”
The boy’s words, the sweet tone, were always perfectly understood by the dog: Permission to lick, granted.
35
Jack
The boy tasted wonderful, like fresh snow—his white face smooth as a bone. He was different, less like the man and the other slow-movers. He was more like the little ones that had been taken away—her own babies.
Jack was a girl—Jackie—though everyone seemed to have forgotten this.
Jackie had been fond of licking the other boy, too. Even at the end she’d tasted him—one last lick, after his face had become as white as the boy in front of her now. She’d tasted the red, as well, until the man had pulled her away. When she’d howled, the man had muzzled her with his hand. If he’d not been howling, too, she would have bitten him.
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