‘Ring the bell?’
‘They rang it.’
‘You’re the one who brought us out here. What were you expecting?’
He glanced back at the bedroom’s bare walls, the rectangular, dustless space in the floor where, until very recently, a bed or rug must have been, the empty light fixture overhead. Struwwelpeter. My friend. ‘Opposition,’ he said, and shuffled off down the hall.
‘Where are you going?’ I called after him.
He turned, and the look on his face stunned me, it had been years since I’d seen it. The last time was in second grade, right after he punched Robert Case, who was twice his size, in the face and ground one of Robert’s eyeglass lenses into his eye. The last time anyone who knew him had dared to fight him. He looked . . . sorry.
‘Coming?’ he said.
I almost followed him. But I felt bad about leaving Jenny. And I wanted to see her and Kelly out on the lawn, pointing through the window at us and laughing. And I didn’t want to be in that house anymore. And it was exhausting being with Peter, trying to read him, dancing clear of him.
‘I’ll be outside,’ I said.
He shrugged and disappeared through the last unopened door at the end of the hall. I listened for a few seconds, heard nothing, turned, and started downstairs. ‘Hey, Jenny?’ I called, got no answer. I was three steps from the bottom before I realized what was wrong.
In the middle of the foyer floor, amidst a swirl of leaves and paper, Kelly Mack’s black baseball cap lay upside down like an empty tortoise shell. ‘Um,’ I said to no one, to myself, took one more uncertain step down, and the front door swung back on its hinges.
I just stared, at first. I couldn’t even breathe, let alone scream, it was like I had an apple core lodged in my throat. I just stared into the white spray-paint on the front door, the triangle-within-a-circle. A wet, wide-open eye. My legs wobbled, and I grabbed for the banister, slipped down to the bottom step, held myself still. I should scream, I thought. I should get Peter down here, and both of us should run. I didn’t even see the hand until it clamped hard around my mouth.
For a second, I couldn’t do anything at all, and that was way too long, because before I could lunge away or bite down, a second hand snaked around my waist, and I was yanked off my feet into the blackness to my left and slammed against the living-room wall.
I wasn’t sure when I’d closed my eyes, but now I couldn’t make them open. My head rang, and my skin felt tingly, tickly, as though it was dissolving into the atoms that made it up, all of them racing in a billion different directions, and soon there’d be nothing left of me, just a scatter of energy and a spot on Mr Paars’s dusty, decaying floor.
‘Did I hurt you?’ whispered a voice I knew, close to my ears. It still took me a long time to open my eyes. ‘Just nod or shake your head.’
Slowly, forcing my eyes open, I nodded.
‘Good. Now sssh,’ said Mr Andersz, and released me.
Behind him, both Mack sisters stood grinning.
‘You like the cap?’ Kelly said. ‘The cap’s a good touch, no?’
‘Sssh,’ Mr Andersz said. ‘Please. I beg you.’
‘You should see you,’ Jenny whispered, sliding up close. ‘You look so damn scared.’
‘What’s—’
‘He followed us to see if we were doing anything horrible. He saw us come in here, and he had this idea to get back at Peter.’
I gaped at Jenny, then at Mr Andersz, who was peering, very carefully, around the corner, up the stairs.
‘Not to get back,’ he said, so serious. It was the same voice he’d used in his own front hallway earlier that evening. He’d never looked more like his son than he did right then. ‘To reach out. Reach him. Someone’s got to do something. He’s a good boy. He could be. Now, please. Don’t spoil this.’
Everything about Mr Andersz at that moment astounded me. But watching him revealed nothing further. He stood at the edge of the living room, shoulders hunched, hair tucked tight under his dockworker’s cap, waiting. Slowly, my gaze swung back to Jenny, who continued to grin in my direction, but not at me, certainly not with me. And I knew I’d lost her.
‘This was about Peter,’ I said. ‘You could have just stuck your head out and waved me down.’
‘Yep,’ said Jenny, and watched Mr Andersz, not me.
Upstairs, a door creaked, and Peter’s voice rang out. ‘Hey, Andrew.’
To Jenny’s surprise and Mr Andersz’s horror, I almost answered. I stepped forward, opened my mouth. I’m sure Jenny thought I was getting back at her, turning the tables again, but mostly I didn’t like what Mr Andersz was doing. I think I sensed the danger in it. I might have been the only one.
But I was twelve. And Peter certainly deserved it. And Mr Andersz was my teacher, and my friend’s father. I closed my mouth, sank back into the shadows, and did not move again until it was over.
‘Andrew, I know you can hear me!’ Peter shouted, stepping onto the landing. He came, clomp clomp clomp, toward the stairs. ‘Annn-drew!’ Then, abruptly, we heard him laugh. Down he came, his shoes clattering over the steps. I thought he might charge past us, but he stopped, right where I did.
Beside the couch, under the draped painting, Kelly Mack pointed at her own hatless head and mouthed, ‘Oh, yeah.’
But it was the eye on the door, I thought, not the cap. Only the eye would have stopped him, because like me - and faster than me - Peter would have realized that neither Mack sister, smart as they were, would have thought of it. Even if they’d had spray paint. Mr Andersz had brought spray paint? Clearly, he’d been planning this - or something like this - for quite some time. If he was the one who’d done it, that is.
‘What the fuck,’ Peter muttered. He came down a step. Another. His feet touched flat floor, and still Mr Andersz held his post.
Then, very quietly, he said, ‘Boo.’
It was as if he’d punched an ejector-seat button. Peter flew through the front door, hands flung up to ward off the eye as he sailed past it. He was fifteen feet from the house, still flying, when he realized what he’d heard. We all saw it hit him. He jerked in mid-air like a hooked marlin reaching the end of a harpoon rope.
For a few seconds, he just stood in the wet grass with his back to us, quivering. Kelly had sauntered past Mr Andersz onto the front porch, laughing. Mr Andersz, I noticed, was smiling, too, weakly. Even Jenny was laughing quietly beside me.
But I was watching Peter’s back, his whole body vibrating like an imploded building after the charge has gone off, right at the moment of collapse. ‘No,’ I said.
When Peter finally turned around, though, his face was his regular face, inscrutable, a little pale. The spikes in his hair looked almost silly in the shadows, and made him look younger. A naughty little boy. Calvin with no Hobbes.
‘So he is dead,’ Peter said.
Mr Andersz stepped outside. Kelly was slapping her leg, but no one paid her any attention.
‘Son,’ said Mr Andersz, and he stretched one hand out, as though to call Peter to him. ‘I’m sorry. It was ... I thought you might laugh.’
‘He’s dead, right?’
The smile was gone from Mr Andersz’s face now, and from Jenny’s, I noted when I glanced her way. ‘Kelly, shut up,’ I heard her say to her sister, and Kelly stopped giggling.
‘Did you know he used to teach at the school?’ Mr Andersz asked, startling me.
‘Mr Paars?’
‘Sixth-grade science. Biology, especially. Years ago. Kids didn’t like him. Yes, Peter, he died a week or so ago. He’d been very sick. We got a notice about it at school.’
‘Then he won’t mind,’ said Peter, too quietly, ‘if I go ahead and ring that bell. Right?’
Mr Andersz didn’t know about the bell, I realized. He didn’t understand. I watched him look at his son, watched the weight he always seemed to be carrying settle back around his shoulders, lock into place like a yoke. He bent forward, a little.
‘My son,
’ he said. Uselessly.
So I shoved past him. I didn’t mean to push him, I just needed him out of the way, and anyway, he gave no resistance, bent back like a plant.
‘Peter, don’t do it,’ I said.
The eyes, black and mesmerizing, swung down on me. ‘Oh. Andrew. Forgot you were here.’
It was, of course, the cruelest thing he could have said, the source of his power over me and the reason I was with him - other than the fact that I liked him, I mean. It was the thing I feared most, in general, no matter where I was.
‘That bell. . .’ I said, thinking of the dog’s head-cane, that deep and frozen voice, but thinking more, somehow, about my friend, rocketing away from us now at incomprehensible speed. Because that’s what he seemed to be doing, to me.
‘Wouldn’t it be great?’ said Peter. And then, unexpectedly, he grinned at me. He would never forget I was there, I realized. Couldn’t. I was all he had.
He turned and walked straight across the grass. The Mack sisters and Mr Andersz followed, all of them seeming to float in the long, wet green like seabirds skimming the surface of the ocean. I did not go with them. I had the feel of Jenny’s fingers in mine, and the sounds of flapping paper and whirling leaves in my ears, and Peter’s last, surprising smile floating in front of my eyes, and it was enough, too much, an astonishing Halloween.
‘This thing’s freezing,’ I heard Peter say, while his father and the Macks fanned out around him, facing the house and me. He was facing away, toward the trees. ‘Feel this.’ He held the tongue of the bell toward Kelly Mack, but she’d gone silent, now, watching him, and she shook her head.
‘Ready or not,’ he said. Then he reared back and rammed the bell-tongue home.
Instinctively, I flung my hands up to my ears, but the effect was disappointing, particularly to Peter. It sounded like a dinner bell, high, a little tinny, something that might call kids or a dog out of the water or the woods at bedtime. Peter slammed the tongue against the side of the bell one more time, dropped it, and the peal floated away over the Sound, dissipating into the salt air like seagull-cry.
For a few breaths, barely any time at all, we all stood where we were. Then Jenny Mack said, ‘Oh.’ I saw her hand snake out, grab her sister’s, and her sister looked up, right at me, I thought. The two Macks stared at each other. Then they were gone, hurtling across the yard, straight across that wide-open white eye, flying toward the forest.
Peter whirled, looked at me, and his mouth opened, a little. I couldn’t hear him, but I saw him murmur, ‘Wow,’ and a new smile exploded, one I couldn’t even fathom, and he was gone, too, sprinting for the trees, passing the Macks as they all vanished into the shadows.
‘Uh,’ said Mr Andersz, backing, backing, and his expression confused me most of all. He was almost laughing. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘We didn’t realize . . .’ He turned and chased after his son. And still, somehow, I thought they’d all been looking at me, until I heard the single, sharp thud from the porch behind me. Wood hitting wood. Cane-into-wood.
I didn’t turn around. Not then. What for? I knew what was behind me. Even so, I couldn’t get my legs to move, quite, not until I heard a second thud, closer this time, as though the thing on the porch had stepped fully out of the house, making its slow, steady way toward me. Stumbling, I kicked myself forward, put a hand down in the wet grass and the mud closed over it like a mouth. When I jerked it free, it made a disappointed, sucking sort of sound, and I heard a sort of sigh behind me, another thud, and I ran, all the way to the woods.
Hours later, we were still huddled together in the Andersz kitchen, wolfing down ho-hos and hot chocolate. Jenny and Kelly and Peter kept laughing, erupting into cloudbursts of excited conversation, laughing some more. Mr Andersz laughed, too, as he boiled more water and spooned marshmallows into our mugs and told us.
The man the bell had called forth, he said, was Mr Paars’s brother. He’d been coming for years, taking care of Mr Paars after he got too sick to look after himself, because he refused to move into a rest home or even his brother’s home.
‘The Lincoln,’ Peter said, and Mr Andersz nodded.
‘God, poor man. He must have been inside when you all got there. He must have thought you were coming to rob the place, or vandalize it, and he went out back.’
‘We must have scared the living shit out of him,’ Peter said happily.
‘Almost as much as we did you,’ said Kelly, and everyone was shouting, pointing, laughing again.
‘Mr Paars had been dead for days when they found him,’ Mr Andersz told us. ‘The brother had to go away, and he left a nurse in charge, but the nurse got sick, I guess, or Mr Paars wouldn’t let her in, or something. Anyway, it was pretty awful when the brother came back. That’s why the windows were all open. It’ll take weeks, I bet, to air that place out.’
I sat, and I sipped my cocoa, and I watched my friends chatter and eat and laugh and wave their arms around, and it dawned on me, slowly, that none of them had seen. None of them had heard. Not really. I almost said something five different times, but I never quite did, I think because of the way we all were, just for that hour, that last, magic night: triumphant, and windswept, and defiant, and together. Like real friends. Almost.
That was the last time, of course. The next summer, the Macks moved to Vancouver, although they’d slowly slipped away from Peter and me anyway by then. Mr Andersz lost his job - there was an incident, apparently, he just stopped teaching and sat down on the floor in the front of his classroom and swallowed an entire box of chalk, stick by stick - and wound up working in the little caged-in accounting office at the used-car lot in the wasteland down by the Ballard Bridge. And slowly, over a long period of time, it became more exciting, even for me, to talk about Peter than it was to be with him.
* * * *
Soon, I think, my mother is going to get sick of staring at the images repeating over and over on our tv screen, the live reports from the rubble of my school and the yearbook photo of Peter and the video of him being stuffed into a police car and the names streaming across the bottom of the screen like a tornado warning, except too late. For the fifteenth time, at least, I see Steve Rourke’s name go by. I should have told him, I thought, should have warned him. But he should have known. I wonder why my name isn’t up there, why Peter didn’t come after me. The answer, though, is obvious. He forgot I was there. Or he wants me to think he did.
It doesn’t matter. Any minute, my mother’s going to get up and go to bed, and she’s going to tell me I should, too, and that we’ll leave here, we’ll get away and never come back.
‘Yes,’ I’ll say. ‘Soon.’
‘All those children,’ she’ll say. Again. ‘Sweet Jesus, I can’t believe it. Andrew.’ She’ll drop her head on my shoulder and throw her arms around me and cry.
But by then, I won’t be thinking about the streaming names, the people I knew who are people no longer, or what Peter might have been thinking tonight. I’ll be thinking, just as I am now, about Peter in the grass outside the Paars house, at the moment he realized what we’d done to him. The way he stood there, vibrating. We didn’t make him what he was. Not the Macks, not his dad, not me - none of us. But it’s like he said: God puts something shaped like that in the world, and then He expects us not to ring it.
And now there’s only one thing left to do. As soon as my mom finally lets go, stops sobbing, and stumbles off to sleep, I’m going to sneak outside, and I’m going to go straight down the hill to the Paars house. I haven’t been there since that night. I have no idea if the sheds or the house or the bell even exist anymore.
But if they do, and if that eye in the grass, or any of its power, is still there. . . well, then. I’ll give a little ring. And then we’ll know, once and for all, whether I really did see two old men, with matching canes, on the porch of the Paars house when I glanced back right as I fled into the woods. Whether I really did hear rustling from all those sideways sheds as I flew past, as though, i
n each, something was sliding out of the ground. I wonder if the bell works only on the Paars family, or if it affects any recently deceased in the vicinity. Maybe the dead really can be called back, for a while, like kids from recess. And if they do come back - and if they’re angry, and they go looking for Peter, and they find him -well. Let the poor, brilliant, fucked-up bastard get what he deserves.
<
* * * *
ELIZABETH HAND
Cleopatra Brimstone
Elizabeth hand grew up in New York and lived in Washington, D.C., for a number of years before moving to the coast of Maine, where she now lives. She is the author of six novels, including Black Light, Glimmering and Waking the Moon, as well as a short-story collection,Last Summer at Mars Hill. Her work has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, Tiptree and Mythopeic Society awards, and ‘Cleopatra Brimstone’ won the International Horror Guild Award in 2002. She recently completed a novel calledMortal Love.
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