After polishing off his breakfast and leaving his dishes in the sink, he went down to his bathroom, brushed his teeth, and turned on the shower. He needed one badly, both to clean himself off and to work out the kinks Mr. Woo’s cement stoop had put into his muscles. The hot water felt good and after the shower, he felt refreshed. In the bedroom, he cocked his good eye at his computer and though he couldn’t see well, all seemed normal. As he was dressing, his phone rang. He knew it wasn’t even seven thirty yet. Too early for a call from Kenny. No one else ever called him. He picked up the phone.
“Boone? Is that you?”
“Abby?”
“Didn’t you get my e-mail, Boone?”
“You e-mailed me? When?”
“Last night.”
“Wow, what a coincidence. I almost e-mailed you last night.”
Silence.
Even more silence.
“Abby?”
“Boone…you did e-mail me.”
“Last night?” He realized that he must have sent the e-mail he’d drafted after all.
“You don’t remember?” Abby asked. “Well, I guess that explains things a little.” She chuckled, though it seemed a bit forced.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I figured you were either playing a joke on me or you were drinking. Sounds now like you might have been a bit drunk. Frankly, I’m glad to hear it.”
Thinking about how nutty he must have sounded to her, rambling about a haunted apartment, he said, “Yeah, I know it sounds weird, but there’s some strange stuff going on, Abby, and I didn’t know how else to say it other than to just say it.”
Abby paused. “Boone, do you remember what you wrote to me?”
“Pretty much.”
Another pause. “I think you should reread it and call me back.”
“Uh, okay.”
Boone sat down at his computer and reached for the mouse. One nudge and he’d wake up the computer. He paused, though, afraid that he would be waking up something else, something…bad. Boone shook his head and moved the mouse. He heard the static electricity crackle that told him his screen was on. He gave the verbal command to call up his e-mail. The most recently received message had come in this morning at 5:52 a.m. It was from Abby. Robert read her words in his mechanical male voice, and when Boone first heard it, his heart clenched. It wasn’t long ago that someone, or something, had made terrible threats to him using that voice.
“Boone,” Abby wrote, “is this a joke? If it is, it isn’t funny. If it’s not, then…what the hell?”
That was it. Nothing more. Boone instructed Robert to read his last sent item. It was an e-mail from Boone’s computer to Abby, sent at 4:48 that morning. At that time, Boone had been in the living room, either sleeping or trying very hard to do so. At least he thought he had been. Robert read the e-mail aloud and every word sent another spasm of fear through Boone.
“Boone is going crazy. Hate Boone. Will hurt Boone. Boone going to hell. Boone crazy like hell, going to hurt Boone, crazy, crazy, crazy.”
That was all. Of course, that was more than enough.
Could it be possible? Could he be crazy? Well, he knew he was a little crazy anyway, but could he actually be a complete lunatic? Could he have been imagining all of this, imagining Robert screaming threats at him last night? No, that couldn’t be, because the neighbors had complained and he didn’t think he had imagined Mrs. Lang and her flannel nightie. So perhaps Boone had dictated the threats himself. Perhaps he’d done so and blocked it out. Maybe he’d been the one knocking down his mountain photos. Maybe he himself had defaced his old men. Didn’t seem likely, as he could barely see, but maybe it was possible. Every word in the e-mail he’d actually sent to Abby once again had been contained in the e-mail he’d drafted but hadn’t sent. Perhaps he’d edited it and sent it without remembering having done so.
Boone didn’t like thinking like this. He’d rather be haunted than insane.
But he couldn’t dismiss the possibility out of hand. He was agoraphobic, so it wasn’t like he was the sanest person around to begin with. But was he capable of this level of crazy? Was he sending himself some sort of message? If so, what was he trying to say? Or was he just crying out for help?
Hell, he had majored in psychology. Though not licensed, he used his not insubstantial understanding of human psychology to dispense advice to grateful clients nearly every day. So what would he say if a new client with a history identical to his own brought this story to him? After a moment he realized that he would believe the person was unhappy with his agoraphobia and was using his subconscious mind to turn his home into a frightening, hostile environment in an attempt to drive himself out of his self-imposed exile and back into the world.
Was that what was happening here? He’d never had a client with even one of his symptoms, let alone the smorgasbord of issues he was now facing. He had to admit that he was a little out of his depth here. His specialty was treating people with disabilities or physical deformities and, as such, he tended to deal with depression, self-esteem issues, and problems with acceptance—not hallucinations or whatever he’d been experiencing. He simply wasn’t equipped to deal with someone with a full-blown case of the crazies—especially when that someone was himself.
When the phone rang, Boone nearly fell from his chair.
“Hello?”
“Boone, it’s Abby. Did you read the e-mails?”
“I did.”
“Both of ours?”
“Yup.”
“And?”
“And I think I may be going nuts.”
So he told her everything. He left out nothing. He told her about his accident, and about his face, and about how he went blind and couldn’t breathe if he tried to cross the street. Then he told her about the pictures and the computer. He heard himself talking and felt exposed and embarrassed, and he felt crazier and crazier with every sentence, every word. When he was finished, he sucked in a huge breath and waited for Abby to tell him to hang in there before hanging up and removing him from her e-mail contacts.
“Well,” she finally said. “You’ve been through a lot, Boone. I’m so sorry to hear that. I wish you’d told me everything a long time ago.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I could have helped you somehow. Maybe it would have been good for you to talk to someone.”
“I did. I talked to counselors. They didn’t do me any good.”
“Yeah, well, they didn’t know you like I do. Or at least like I did. We haven’t been in touch for a while, but I used to know you. Anyway, I wish you’d told me. I wish you’d given me a chance to help you then. But maybe it’s not too late to help you now.”
“Really? How?”
“Well, first, I don’t think you’re crazy. I mean, I suppose it’s theoretically possible that you’ve been imagining these things, that you defaced your own pictures, but from what you tell me, you can barely see. Do you think you have the visual acuity to scratch out only the faces of the old men in your pictures?”
Boone thought about it. He really didn’t think so and he admitted that.
“Okay, then. So something else is probably going on. And that’s why you almost e-mailed me in the first place, right? Because of the supernatural angle.”
“Yeah. I remembered you were always interested in that.”
“That’s right. And you also know that I teach a course on the psychology of people who believe they’ve experienced supernatural phenomena firsthand.”
Boone did know that. Instead of trying to debunk claims, like so many psychologists and other so-called experts did, Abby took the “innocent until proven guilty” tack and gave the claimant the benefit of the doubt. She approached each situation with a healthy skepticism without tainting it with actual doubt. She had uncovered fraud before, but had also met with many, many people whose claims seemed genuine. And she tried to help them better deal with their experiences.
“So let’s assume you could be righ
t,” she said to Boone. “Maybe this is something paranormal. You wouldn’t be the first person to have things happen to them that can’t be easily explained.”
He was glad she called. She’d made him feel a bit better. It occurred to him at that moment how strange it was to actually be relieved that you might be haunted.
They talked about poltergeists for a while and Abby echoed some of the things he’d learned from the Internet, and she gave him some new information and insight. He asked numerous questions about the paranormal and she answered as best she could.
“I wish I could fly to see you, Boone, but I have my classes. And Doug would never understand.” She paused. “I could probably tell him that it was research, but I’d hate to lie to my husband. Besides, I really don’t think anyone could cover my classes for me.”
“Don’t worry about it, Abby. Just by telling me that I might not be crazy, you’ve already helped me more than you could know. Just tell me this.”
“Yes?”
“If I’m not a total whackjob and this is something supernatural after all, am I in danger? Could this thing, whatever it is, could it hurt me?”
Abby hesitated for far too long.
“Abby?”
“Well, I hate to say this, Boone, seeing as you can’t leave, but your apartment could be a dangerous place for you.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. I could be wrong, of course. If something’s in your place, it could be all bark and no bite. But there’s also the possibility…”
Boone waited for her to finish. She didn’t.
“What,” he said, “is something going to come out of the walls and eat me alive? Drag me to hell or wherever it came from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will it smother me in my sleep? What?”
“I just don’t know, Boone. I can’t possibly know. Things happen to people, unexplainable things. Sometimes people get hurt or just…disappear. I’m not saying anything will happen to you. I’m just answering your question, okay? You asked if you could be in danger. I’m saying you could be. But I just can’t know for sure and neither can you. So if there’s any way for you to spend as little time in your apartment as possible over the next few months, I’d do so. Maybe whatever is there will get bored and go away.”
“That could happen?”
“As you might know by now, Boone, anything’s possible.”
Many people found that phrase comforting. To some, it meant that nothing was truly beyond a person’s reach. To the most zealously optimistic, it meant that ordinary people could perform miracles in the right circumstances. There was even a time when Boone found comfort in that phrase, though not in recent years. But in this case, it wasn’t comforting. Not at all.
“Boone?” Abby said. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks, Abby.”
He hung up and sat for a moment. He was alone but now, after talking with Abby, he no longer felt alone. He felt…watched.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ALICE HAD SPENT a sleepless night thinking about the blond boy, whether he possibly could be the unborn son she’d lost three years ago. No longer scared of him, she prayed for another encounter with him. She had so many questions. And he seemed like he wanted to give her answers, wanted to communicate with her. What had been the most frightening experiences of her life had turned into the most exciting, fraught with possibility and hope. What if it was indeed Henry trying to reach her from wherever he was? If so, if he could push aside the veil separating them for even a moment, was there a chance he could do it for longer? Could he step from behind that curtain? It seemed crazy, but everything about this was crazy. Even supposing, however, that Henry was merely a spirit unattached to a body that she could hold, perhaps he was just trying to tell her that he existed, that he was waiting for her to become pregnant again, despite the doctor’s gloomy view of her abilities in that regard. Maybe Henry had special knowledge unavailable to her and to her doctors. Maybe he was telling her not to give up. But he also seemed to be telling her to follow him. If so, perhaps she needed to go somewhere specific to make this happen.
Alice hated to get her hopes up again. She remembered all too well the anticipation growing with every day, every hour the clock ticked closer to that part of her cycle that would reveal whether her miracle had taken hold. And she likewise remembered the crushing disappointment she felt every time her pregnancy tests came out negative. Every month it was the same: sex with Daniel, timed to Swiss-watch accuracy to coincide with the most fertile moments of her cycle, followed by weeks of anxious waiting, then several minutes of almost wildly irrational hope while she waited for the results of the home pregnancy tests. After months of failure, they had turned to infertility specialists. Then it was doctor visits and prescriptions and injections and egg harvesting and implantation, and always, between these attempts, the waiting and the hoping and, ultimately, the failure. Then, one glorious month, a miracle did occur. An egg implanted through an in vitro fertilization procedure took hold and, unbelievably, began to grow. Joyful tears were shed, calls were made to every family member and friend, no matter how distant, and a crib was purchased. In the end, though, all these actions were premature. The baby didn’t survive past the fourth month and, finally, Alice’s doctors essentially said, “Enough is enough.” One of them had callously told them, “There’s no point in beating a dead horse.” Daniel had wanted to beat that doctor in response. So after plenty more tears—not the joyful kind this time—she and Daniel turned the third bedroom into an artist’s studio for Alice and she tried to take her mind off the fact that she would never raise a child. Daniel never blamed her, at least he never said he did, but she knew how badly he’d wanted a child, and they both knew that his sperm was healthy. The problem was somewhere inside of her. So while she shared the weight of their disappointment, she shouldered the entire weight of the blame. The combined burden could be very heavy at times. She and Daniel never talked about it anymore, but it was often there between them, just beneath the surface.
And now, she was starting to believe, the one child she had conceived but lost was trying to make his way back to her. But he needed her help. He needed her to follow him somewhere. And she desperately wanted to know where that was. She didn’t care where it was, how far it was, because she would go anywhere, do anything, to find Henry. When she did, he’d tell her what she had to do to bring him to her. For the first time in three years, Alice believed she might be a mother after all—somehow, some way, through some miracle, she might be a mother after all.
The problem was that she didn’t know where to go. She needed Henry to show her. So she’d spent the night surrounded by her drawings of him, waiting for him to come to her again, to show her the way. But he didn’t come.
With the first light of dawn Alice rose and showered and, by the time most people were on their way to work that morning, she was already sitting on a bench in the park, in a warm, oversized University of Vermont sweater, a big cup of hot coffee beside her to keep the chilly morning at bay, the small pair of binoculars that Daniel sometimes took to Yankees games hanging around her neck, and a sketch pad and drawing pencil in her lap. Last night’s rain had washed the city clean, leaving it fresh and shining in the sun. It was a gorgeous day to be sitting in the park full of hope for the first time in a long time.
Except for three restroom breaks that made Alice regret the coffee, she sat on that bench until noon. She made a few half-hearted sketches of pigeons and a mounted policeman, hoping Henry would magically appear in them, but he didn’t, and she spent most of the time simply watching. Sometimes she’d see a boy in the distance and check him out with the binoculars, but it was never the little blond boy. It was never Henry.
At one o’clock she grabbed herself a hot pretzel that might have been fresh three days ago, slathered it with far too much mustard in an unsuccessful attempt to hide that fact, then took up watch again on her bench. For the next hour sh
e simply watched the people in the park. Couples strolled arm in arm. A father yelled at his two kids. A couple of teenagers skateboarded past. A worker raked a few leaves, the first that had begun to drop this season. An old man threw bread to the ducks at the edge of a pond. A homeless man slept on a bench. But the boy Alice was waiting for didn’t appear.
Mostly out of boredom, Alice opened her sketchpad again and focused on a heavyset man, probably in his early thirties, sitting on a park bench by a lamppost. He sat alone, doing nothing she could see. He was merely enjoying the day. She took out her binoculars and focused on him. As an artist, she often studied people’s faces. When she saw one that interested her for some reason, she sketched it. The man’s face was round and jowly—he was quite a bit overweight—but the face was strangely handsome nonetheless. His eyes were pleasant and gave her the impression that he was a kind man. He wasn’t smiling, but she knew that if he did, his smile would be pleasant, possibly even dazzling. She’d never drawn a face quite like this one, so she studied it a moment longer before putting down the binoculars and beginning to sketch the face from memory. Every few moments she would raise the binoculars again, memorize another feature, and sketch some more. She looked down at the sketch in progress. It was pretty good. She’d drawn the man up close, from the neck up. In her opinion, she’d totally captured the twinkle in his eyes and the smile lines at the corner of his presently unsmiling mouth. She was pleased with the sketch so far and thought she might even consider rendering it in paint when she got home.
After a few minutes she was nearly finished. She picked up the binoculars again, scanned his features for something she might have missed, and looked back down at her sketch.
She dropped the binoculars, which bounced off her knee and fell to the ground.
The handsome, chubby face was gone. In its place was a close-up drawing of the blond boy. She was frozen for a moment, then she looked up, expecting the subject of her drawing to be gone. But there he was, the chubby man, sitting right where he’d been. He opened a knapsack on the bench beside him and took out a book. He opened it, found his place, and began reading. Alice bent down and retrieved the binoculars. She raised them and focused on the man, half expecting to see the blond boy looking back at her. But it was the familiar rotund face she’d been looking at for the past twenty minutes.
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