Just North of Nowhere

by Lawrence Santoro

  His monsters were everywhere, more or less. In closets, of course, and, yes, under the bed. Under every bed. Flat things flip-flappered wetly under chairs. Hard scrabbly things whose eye-stalks sometimes poked from air vents, lived in the narrow parts of the old house near the ocean. Things with no legs and other things with too many legs, lurked in drains where sometimes you heard the distant roar of water. Others slipped through the white sand above the seaweed-line at the beach, things with bumps like soft soaked thorns raveled and spun beneath the bushes in the yards. There were things he never quite saw but whose sighs drifted from strangers’ houses. Walking back from the ice cream place evenings with his mother, their shadows moved against shades. He and Mother walked beneath other shadows that dangled from overhead wires. Other things click-clacked lonely teeth down the dark alleys they passed. They were in strange rooms and under the treads of every stairway everywhere. The attic! Loaded. The cellar? Forget it! Eventually, he realized that monsters were one thing, and the outer people were others and they were worse.

  He assumed everyone knew them. Figured everyone paid no mind because monsters and the outer people were just, well, there! They were part of the world. Forget 'em, he thought, everyone knows.

  When he found he was the only one, fear came like an old bad smell that filled the world! People weren't afraid because they didn't know! No one did! Holy Jeeze, no one in the world knew the world was lousy with monsters and others!

  Mother didn’t. Daddy? He was one and wouldn't! His friends? They rolled their eyes and spun their fingers next to their heads.

  He shut up after that. He got good at silence.

  In the beginning, mother didn't worry. She remembered monsters, she said. Who didn't have them? “A phase,” she said. “Just being afraid, is all.”

  When the boy started describing the monsters that were everywhere, she continued to smile.

  “Vivid imagination,” she said. “He'd grow to be a writer, make movies, maybe. Imagination – fear’s raw material!”

  He'd whimper when the night-light burned out. He pointed at empty places. At nothing. Her smile tightened. He'd yell, “Don't step here!” or “be careful there!” She’d reach in the closet, “Don’t!” he’d say. He told her that, well, that maybe something had loosened the third step going down the cellar, or she should watch putting her hand far, far back into the freezer.

  Funny. Sometimes the step would be loose. And things sometimes vanished from here, there and the freezer. She'd find drops of blood frozen where. . .

  Quickly, his father had enough.

  Teachers began calling, evenings, to ask, casually, had they noticed anything strange about their boy? Would they keep their eyes on him? Would they have words with him?

  Dad’s “words” got angrier. He became really mad when the art teacher called to suggest, perhaps they'd like to stop by to take a look at Roy's, uh, work.

  Every drawing, every finger painting, was of mom and Roy, of the house and car and shapes and forms unaccounted for as child-made trees, trucks, cars, pets, friends, clouds, bushes, garages, daddies, or anythings. The lumps of dark color Roy drew always seemed to be under, in waiting, watching stilly, or lurking at the edges.

  The teacher asked what did they suppose these things were? Mother shrugged. Daddy shook his head. Later, daddy shook the boy and made him cry.

  In all that time, he never spoke the words he whispered, now, in Leslie's ear. “I bring the monsters,” Roy had said.

  A few years earlier, he might have said it differently. A few years earlier, he might have said, “I know there are monsters.” Later, he might have said, “Knowing there are monsters, takes their power.” Even later, he might has said, “I destroy monsters.”

  “’Outer people?’” Leslie said.

  Roy nodded.

  They were different. Outer people lived in secret places. Outer people couldn’t be killed with knowing.

  “Well that's something,” Leslie said. “You see any here?” she asked, looking around.

  Roy smiled, raised his eyebrows.

  In the bright kitchen where Esther chopped and cooked, the man without a head, black with blood, covered in worms and engorged flies, bumped over and over into the same spot on the wall between the hot black ovens and the back door. His foot-long fingernails curved away from his bony fingertips and scraped the greasy aluminum wall. His toe claws tapped the tile floor as he padded back and forth in his ever-repeating pattern. He'd been at it since he'd come in. Probably a lot longer. Esther didn't seem to mind. The face on the ceiling? That was probably the staggering man’s.

  Roy nodded.

  “What's it look like?” Leslie whispered in his ear.

  He told her.

  “Oh,” she said. “You see its head anywhere?” She asked.

  He looked. “Nope,” he said.

  “Well huh!” she said. “Now, that's probably Olaf. Olaf Tim.”

  Roy looked at Olaf Tim scratching at the wall. Olaf Tim. His monsters didn’t have names, not real names. He liked knowing who this one in the kitchen was. Mr. Tim.

  “Yeah. Tim built this dump back in…” She considered the impossibly long stretch of years between that cool summer evening and the time at the turn of the century when Olaf Tim had built the American House—Eats!

  “He comes here from Sweden or wherever with Mrs. Tim and stakes out this spot by the river. The river was closer then. Figures its going to be the only diner in town. He builds it himself, yada-yada-yada, all that stuff, through the hottest damn summer on record before or since. Every board, beam and shingle. And Mrs. Tim watches him. She sits on her rocker, middle of the street out there. . .” She pointed to the street. Roy looked and saw only gathering dark and a few people – or whatever they were – moving or drifting with the breeze. “She gets fatter and fatter with a baby, never lifts a finger to help.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And the day he finishes the last coat of paint and nails up the sign, Mrs. Tim give birth and Olaf goes inside, gets his shotgun, sits down in the kitchen and blows his head clean off.” She waited for Roy to react. He smiled. “Most of it anyway,” she added.

  Roy peeked again at Olaf Tim, scratching the wall. Feeling what he could of the world. Missing the door, working his way around the room. At least this monster had a name and a past.

  “I think he can't find the door,” the boy said.

  “Maybe.” Leslie said. Then, suddenly, “Or he's looking for his head!” She stretched out the last word. They both laughed and that was good. Leslie grabbed Roy's hand and dragged him through the Dutch door to the kitchen.

  “So, maybe he’s not a monster.”

  “Ghost, you figure?”

  The tall lady with the dark hair now sat on a long table, her legs swung underneath her. She wore black New Balance shoes and her feet were dirty. She’d loosened her hair and it hung below her shoulders in long, mahogany waves. A long white streak started above her right eye.

  “Maybe one of the outer people?”

  “Hi, Leslie,” the tall woman said, “who is your familiar.” They both laughed.

  “I'm Eugene Roy,” he said before Leslie said anything.

  “Eugene?” she said.

  The headless Swede swept toward him as he stood talking. At just that minute, there in this good-smelling kitchen, Leslie next to him, the pretty dark haired woman dangling a shoe from her foot, he felt brave. And as the headless Swede swept through him on his way to the Dutch door, Eugene Roy felt, for just a moment, as though he’d grown, lived, died and come back to life.

  The dark woman shook his hand. “I am Cristobel Chiaravino,” she said. Her voice sounded foreign. A little bit, anyway. Maybe she wanted it to. She looked at Leslie. “I brought Esther the last of the morels.” She hesitated for a moment.

  “And you need more?” Leslie said.

  “For that,” she hesitated again, “that recipe,” she said.

  At her cutting board Esther was slicing a large brown puffy thing.
She looked up in time to have Mr. Tim swipe his claws through the smile.

  “Well, Eugene Roy,” Esther said, “you and your mom decide to stay here in Bluffton, you're going to have to find your own ‘shrooming ground. About everyone's got a morel patch somewhere out there!” She waved her long knife at the back door. The blade passed through the spot where Olaf Tim's head would have been. He couldn’t help smiling. “When you find a good’n, you'll most likely get strange. Be perfect and ordinary most times, then come May 'shrooming, you'll go twitchy and start looking over your shoulder. You'll slip off to the woods by misdirect wanderings just to hide your patch.”

  She dumped the contents of the second shopping bag onto the table. The roiling scented air of the kitchen filled with the smell of earth and age. Dozens of the puffy fungi rolled across the table.

  “These are Leslie’s. The morel’s a weird guy, ain’t it?” Esther laughed, holding one of the puffballs up.

  Roy took it. It was indeed. Looked as though you'd have to hold it down to kill it before cutting it up. He held it to his face. It smelled like time; as though he held forever in his hand. Forever or something else. Life maybe. He laughed.

  Esther joined him. Leslie smiled and Miss Cristobel just watched.

  Roy handed the mushroom back to Esther.

  “Looks like a monster, honey, but it eats good.”

  He nodded.

  Leslie nudged him. ‘Lets get,’ the nudge said.

  “Bye,” he said as Leslie dragged him through the Dutch door.

  Olaf Tim waddled toward the middle of the kitchen then spun toward the stove.

  Roy and Leslie sat on the top step on the Eat’s front porch. Evening oozed through the afternoon. Mother still leaned over the open mouth of the car. Einar ticked off points in his greasy palm. He waved, gestured, did a little dance to translate what was wrong in woman terms.

  Mother's head shook and her tongue added sums on the roof of her mouth. Her eyes had already gone squinty.

  “I know where,” Roy whispered to Leslie. “I found it.”

  “Huh,” Leslie said squinting at him.

  “What'd you find?” Leslie asked.

  “Olaf's head. His face anyway. It's stuck in the ceiling. Looking down. Maybe in the paint. He keeps telling the body to 'look oop. Look oop. Here I yam you bik dumb sumofvitch.'“

  Leslie nodded and sighed.

  “'Look oop here,'“ Roy quoted again. “He doesn't know his body can't hear.”

  “Ears are on the head,” Leslie said.

  He nodded.

  “You figure you'll stay?” she said.

  Roy looked at his mother. She looked at him, smiled, sighed and turned back to Einar.

  “Yes,” Roy said. He looked at his watch. Five-fifty-two. He put that in his head to remember. Five-fifty-two, and he knew where he was. “Now what do you mean, 'you know where things are?’” he asked Leslie.

  Some time later, he’d realize that what she meant was she knew how to HIDE things.

  Chapter 7

  FRESH TRACKS IN LONG-GONE SNOW

  Ruth? Five O'clock and she shuts it down; slams the library door, locks, jiggles it – jiggles it again to make sure – and that’s that.

  Thank the Lord, Ruth thought, that’s one more day I won't have to live through. She yanked the shade, sneezed, then sat to consider dust.

  Sunset streamed in the windows. In its glow, every surface was soft with dust. Move a book, it smoked with dust. Run a finger across a study table, a dark trail remained in the dustscape. Breathing, Ruth inhaled dust, dust, she knew, to be flecks of the past: the ashes of Harald Bluetooth's dragon ship, a molecule of Stegosaurus broasted for eons in Gobi heat, a chip of George Washington's ivory dentures, iron atoms drifted down from the bursting hearts of stars now cold cinder cores, dead beyond the Magellanic Clouds. Particles of every age, place and time swept up her nose and into the alveoli of her lungs. Ruth Potter's lungs, soon to be dust, too. Soon but not soon enough for Ruth.

  They'll have to get someone in, they really will. Twice a month. Once, at the very least! Even part-time, Ruth knew a janitor would be out of the question. The Selectmen had made that clear. As people the board members were fine. Ruth had nothing against them as folks. Alone, they would have had been magnanimous, generous perhaps. Yes?

  With her around? With them as her board! No. Ruth knew where to lay the blame, yes indeed she did! On HER: Hillary Arroyo Burroughs. Naturally!

  “A little more money, Ruth?” A look around the table, “Well maybe we can find. . .”

  Then, at the top of the table, Hillary's dry smile would seep across the polished wood. Suddenly “maybe we can find” turned to “no, no, Ruth. Sorry, no.”

  A few more dollars? Some new non-fiction titles, a couple, three, periodicals?

  The Hillary stare chilled the damn clock.

  “A janitor? Well, maybe you could clean up a little around here Ruthie? Not like you're exactly 'busy' over here, now is it?”

  Not exactly.

  Was he right or was he right?

  Exactly. Yes. Indeed.

  And the antique ivory of Hillary Arroyo Burroughs’s smile would shut like a retreating glacier, to wait. Wait. Wait.

  A time ago – half a career now – Ruth would have done the cleaning. She'd taken pride, was proud of what the place meant, for goodness sake.

  That was when people read, for goodness sake; when children entered, caps in hands, wiped their feet without urging. The children once stood awed by the knowledge on the shelves around them, they breathed in the scent of knowledge.

  Ruth drew in a lungfull of library. Even under the dust, the scent remained. That wonderful library aroma, like...well, all Ruth could say was: It smelled like power, like time itself, the past informing the future!

  People's awe was enhanced, she knew, by that aroma: books and sunlight, mixed essence of paper, leather, ink and glue, mingled in thick steam heat, stirred by generations of cold Bluffton winters, percolated in the locust buzz of summers.

  She'd never admit it, but the smell of a library was a good part of why she'd chosen the life, became a guardian of the past. Coming forth from her studies to her first job – this one – setting a gentle foot for the first time into her library, she breathed it in and knew: Yes, civilization was in her hands and safe here in Bluffton.

  Before she knew she was going to, Ruth screamed. She let out a long dry yowp. It wasn't a loud cry but louder than most sounds she made these days.

  The motes swimming the air froze for a moment like a school of tropical fish then swarmed off on another course through the sunbeams.

  Her life had become silent. No! In fact it always had been! Oh, she’d never hissed people quiet as librarians were to have done. She hated clichés and would not be one. No, she adored scholarship. In her mind, learning was thunderous, a rush of questions posed, debated, concluded; the thunderbolt of understanding crashed down from on high through these disputations. And all of it, attended by the passionate whisk of flicked pages, the fevered scratch of steel nibs on rough paper, perhaps a distant strain of Mozart drifting from the music room, above.

  But! Ah, but. The sounds of scholarly pursuit, the shouted Eurekas, alas, were for others. She was just the keeper of the power.

  But she did like the scritch of pen on paper.

  “Flapdoodle,” Ruth said. No one used inkwells and nibs, had not, not in her working life. She wanted them to, but they hadn't. No one played Mozart on that old Victrola upstairs, either. When they signed to use the music room, the children giggled and groped one another in the shadows while their white earphones thumped their separate rock and rolls.

  Inkwells and Mozart!

  If she'd gone a little deeper into herself, if she'd had a friend with whom to share such romantic nonsense, she would have whispered that such things, pen nibs and Mozart, made her damp between the legs! At lest “The Abduction from the Seraglio” did.

  “Enough,” Ruth said, slamming the cov
er on that little tickle! “Cancel it and move on!”

  She sneezed again.

  Maybe she'd been wrong. Maybe the trappings she'd loved – sunbeams and ranks of books, scholarship’s murmurs and the scent of age – never had awed others. Maybe that library aroma was just mildew, mold, and rot. Maybe (oh unthinkable) all the years, maybe the children who came so silently and with such seeming awe, maybe they simply were afraid, afraid of catching something. An illness? From her! Maybe even the elderly, maybe scholars and tourists, selectmen and mayors, maybe all these years they looked at her – as had Hillary Arroyo Burroughs from the start – and seen only a moldering crank. Someone you didn't like to be near because you might laugh aloud at her, her, someone who might shatter with a thing you might say, some look you might give. Cranks do weird things, you know. What might a dusty old woman do, Roofless Potter, going bald on top, a five o’clock shadow on her chins and cheeks?

  Consarn it, Ruth, she thought, like a bad tooth, it can't be left alone.

  But that was it! Yes, they were frightened of her, the Bluffton Oddity, the bulging eyes and tissue skin, the ever-thinning ring of gray hair and spreading blush of liver spots, the shadow kept at bay with a secret razor once a week.

  Fear? Ha! Disgust, more like. Do not worry children! It’s not catching. This cannot happen to you. Stay out of books, don't breathe the molds and you'll be fine.

  “Ruth Potter!” She had had it! She was not going to tell herself again! “That is enough! Now hush, damn it!” She said it aloud and clamped her mind silent!

  Afternoon sun knifed down from the upper windows. The dust rose in widening gyres... (Now, what was that from? Oh for goodness! Of course!)

  Maybe she would leave tonight; lock the door, never come again. That'd show 'em, like the kids used to say.

  Today, since 9 a.m., three people – only three – had opened that door. One used the lady's room. Another, just a hand, dropped an overdue bestseller in the entry and vanished before Ruth could catch her. She couldn't remember the third, but was sure there'd been one. Three. If she vanished? It would be days before Vinnie Erickson would get a call to come investigate the still-locked door at the old library. Nancy Drew would have had a time with that, but Vinnie Erickson?