Drawn

by James Hankins

  She put the binoculars aside and studied her sketch again. She’d drawn the boy in startlingly vivid detail this time—every curve of the face, every tiny blemish of the skin, every wisp of hair, every striation in the iris of his eyes. And her heart sank. She’d seen this face before, and not just here in the park, or in her subconscious in her apartment. She’d seen this face in real life. She had no idea where or when, but she’d seen it. She was absolutely certain of it.

  Her vision blurred a moment and she blinked away a tear. She felt a sense of great loss. As crazy as it seemed, she had begun to truly believe the little blond boy was her Henry. But he wasn’t Henry, after all. He was someone else entirely.

  But who could he be?

  And more importantly, what did he want from her?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  NATHAN LOOKED AT the wrinkled, creased list in his hands. It was dishearteningly short in the first place, and made more disheartening by the fact that that there were only two names that did not yet have four check marks next to them. Only two chances left. He rang the doorbell. A moment later, footsteps sounded from inside and for an instant, as the thumping grew closer, Nathan felt an irrational urge to flee. In that brief moment, he was certain that the door would open to reveal a huge man with an angry, raw slash torn through his cheek. But the moment passed and when the door opened, Nathan saw a relatively plain face, one he’d last seen a little over a year ago. It looked the same as it had then, like most faces one would see on the street, but for a single distinguishing characteristic: a three-inch scar running almost vertically through his right eyebrow, up toward his hairline.

  “Yes?” the man said.

  “Jeff Simmons?” he said. “You may not remember me. I’m Nathan Zeltner, Jeremy’s father.”

  Recognition dawned in Simmons’s eyes. “Yes, of course, Mr. Zeltner. I’m surprised to see you.” A new look appeared on Simmons’s face. Was it hope? Dread? “Has there…do you have news about—”

  “Jeremy? No, I don’t. That’s why I’m here.”

  Simmons sighed. He hesitated. “I see. It’s been, uh, less than a year this time, hasn’t it?”

  “A little over, actually. Do you think I could come inside for a minute?”

  “Well, I, uh, I was just on my way out the door.”

  Nathan looked down at the man’s bare feet, then at the dishrag hanging over his shoulder.

  “Mr. Zeltner,” Simmons added, “this is the fourth time you’ve come here. If I remembered anything new, I’d have called you, like you asked. I promise. And I’d have called the police, too, like they asked.”

  “But you were friends, Jeff. After you guys came back from over there, you went camping with him sometimes. Are you sure he didn’t call you before his last trip to say where he was going?”

  Simmons shook his head patiently. “He didn’t call me.”

  “Okay, but are you sure you gave me a complete list of the places you and Jeremy used to camp? All of them, not just your favorites?”

  “I did.”

  “All of them? Maybe you missed one. Maybe if you sat down and wrote a new list, one would come to you that you forgot the first time.”

  “Mr. Zeltner, we only went camping three times together. I swear, I gave you a complete list, like I gave the police.”

  “Okay then, did Jeremy ever mention someplace new he wanted to go? Maybe you two never went there, but it was someplace he planned to go one day. Anything like that?”

  Simmons looked pensive for a moment and Nathan felt a flicker of hope that something was coming to him. Finally, he said, “They never even found his car, did they?”

  “Jeremy’s car? No, why?”

  Simmons blew out a big breath. “Mr. Zeltner, do you have any idea how Jeremy’s time in Afghanistan affected him?”

  “I think so.”

  Simmons nodded. “Maybe you do. It’s possible that you do. But maybe you don’t.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that I’m not sure he told you everything.”

  “Of course he did,” Nathan said a bit defensively. “We’ve always been very close.”

  “Well, no offense, but I got the impression from him that he didn’t want you to worry about him, so he downplayed his experiences over there. But maybe I’m wrong. If I am, then you know how tough it was on him. How much that ambush changed him.”

  “He was a hero,” Nathan said.

  “He sure was. No doubt about it. Saved the lives of a bunch of his fellow soldiers, including mine.”

  “Nineteen of them,” Nathan said.

  “That’s right. He saved nineteen men. But seven died. I was already unconscious, but Jeremy watched them die, and they died very badly. Two of them were his best friends over there. He saw one burn to death and the other simply disintegrate in a cloud of blood.”

  Nathan nodded, listening and thinking how Jeremy had never told him that.

  “I’m sorry to say it this way, Mr. Zeltner, but Jeremy had a tough time over there. After that day, well, he wasn’t quite the same.”

  “I know he wasn’t. But he was…he was still my boy. We talked. We watched TV. We played cards.”

  Simmons smiled patiently. “I’m sure you did. But I’m not sure he was ever…happy again. Maybe I’m wrong.” Simmons paused. “And they never found his car.”

  Nathan said, “What are you trying to say?”

  “Maybe…I could be wrong here…but just maybe he didn’t really go camping. Maybe he started driving and just kept going.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “Okay.”

  “He wouldn’t do that to me.”

  “Okay, like I said, maybe I’m wrong.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  They fell silent a moment.

  “If Jeremy were alive,” Nathan said, “and able to come home, he’d come home.”

  He turned away. Back in his car, he placed a fourth check mark by Simmons’s name, then folded the list again and put it back in his shirt pocket.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  MIGUEL HAD NEVER been out of Philly before today, yet there he was, cruising along the highway on his way out of town, the wind whipping through his hair, on his way to a house by a real lake with a real boat on it, with twenty thousand dollars in a backpack on his lap. Life had never been better.

  He looked over at Larry, who was steering with his left hand. He held a cell phone to his ear with his right hand and Miguel could see the muscles shifting under his shirt with the slightest movement. Miguel wondered if he’d spent time in prison. He didn’t have tattoos Miguel could see, but that didn’t mean anything. He sure carried himself like a guy who’d been in prison—at least the way Miguel imagined a guy like that would carry himself.

  “Look, Dad,” Larry said into the phone, “the TV will still be there when we hang up, right? You can watch it after…it’s probably a repeat, Dad, you can watch it again in a month, and again a month after that.… So listen, Dad, I know I said I was planning on coming tomorrow but something came up.… Just something I gotta do, okay? Anyway, I was thinking I’d come one day next week.… Dad, you can’t possibly know you’re busy every day next week, right? …Well, let’s try anyway, okay? …Dad, it’s a nursing home, you’re not gonna be out dancing, are you? …Well, we’ll talk about it next week. How are they treating you, anyway? …Look, just tell me if they’re treating you all right.… I told you, you don’t have to do that, Dad, they can’t make you…I can talk to them about that.… Would you forget about the television?”

  He looked over at Miguel and shook his head with a look on his face that said, Fathers, right? What’re you gonna do?

  “Wait, Dad, listen, before you hang up…I’m going to send some more money really soon.… I know you don’t, but your Social Security doesn’t cover that place, you know that.… What do you care how I got it? …Well, you don’t have a choice, I’m sending it. You don’t want it, give
it to your friend there, Rusty, and maybe Rusty will help you find a new place to live when they throw you out because you can’t pay your bill.… Look, Dad, I just wanna help. Why do you have to make it so hard? …Damn it, I’m sending it, now I gotta go.… Bye, Dad.

  He closed his phone.

  “You should thank heaven your parents aren’t around, Miguel. They can drive you nuts. While you’re growing up, they keep saying you don’t appreciate them. Then when you’re old enough to do things for them, they’re the ones who don’t appreciate it.”

  Miguel nodded. Larry seemed like a really tough guy, but if he was good to his father, sent him money, wanted to visit him—even though his father didn’t seem to be nice in return—how bad could he be?

  “Now that you finished your call, can we turn the music back on?” Miguel asked.

  “You like music, huh? Yeah, sure. I’ll even let you pick the station. Just no country crap, okay?”

  Larry turned the radio on and Miguel kept changing stations until he found one playing hard, head-banging rock. He looked up at Larry, who was making a pained face.

  “Seriously?” Larry said.

  Miguel smiled. After a moment, Larry chuckled and shrugged, then reached over and turned the volume up high.

  Miguel laughed and Larry looked over at him. Miguel smiled and Larry kept looking at him. He looked so long that Miguel started to think he should turn his eyes back to the road. They were flying along close to eighty miles per hour and Miguel started to get nervous. Miguel looked out through the windshield, hoping Larry would follow his lead. But he could feel Larry still looking at him. Miguel looked back at him, his smile gone. Larry smiled himself then and, finally, focused on the highway stretching out before them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  AFTER HIS CONVERSATION with Abby, Boone sat at his computer for over half an hour, just thinking. Then he searched the Internet for a while, Googling anything remotely related to what he was going through, no matter how tangential it might have seemed. He did research on the supernatural. He read extensively about every psychosis and delusion that sounded even marginally pertinent. After he had exhausted his creativity with strings of search terms, he simply didn’t know what to believe. Could Abby be right? Could his apartment be inhabited by a spirit, perhaps a mischievous—even angry or violent—poltergeist? Or worse yet, could the entity be attached to Boone himself? Alternatively, what if Abby was wrong and Boone’s other suspicions were founded? Could he be imagining all of this? Could he have been the unwitting source of all the mystery, defacing his own pictures, knocking them from the walls, putting words in his computer’s mouth to spew back at him, sending that strange and troubling e-mail to Abby? If that was the case, if indeed Boone was subconsciously behind all of this, then his mind was far more disturbed than he could ever have imagined.

  Boone left his bedroom and, as he crossed the living room, stumbled over something and fell to the floor. He cocked his head and felt with his hands and wasn’t the least bit surprised to find stacks of his photographs on the living room floor. Just two days ago, before all this started, he would have been surprised. Today, not at all. But how had the pictures gotten there? He hadn’t left them there. Or had he? He truly didn’t know anymore.

  He got to his knees and discovered that there were three stacks of his framed photographs, taken down from the walls and lined up on the floor in the middle of the room. Each stack consisted of just two photographs. Though his limited vision made the task difficult, he was able to determine that the top picture in each stack was one of the photos of the old men from various parts of the world, each with their faces scratched out. Beneath those were the three pictures of mountains that kept going crooked on the walls.

  What the hell did this mean? If a ghost was trying to communicate with him, it was being cryptic as hell. And if Boone was now riding the crazy train and trying to tell himself something, he wasn’t being any clearer.

  Maybe there wasn’t even a message behind all this. Some people believed that poltergeists were little more than otherworldly pranksters. Maybe something from the spirit world merely liked watching Boone’s frustrations. Or, assuming there was indeed a spirit behind all this, maybe it was deadly serious and Boone had better get the hell out of his apartment. Or else.

  He didn’t know what to think. He thought for the hundredth time since this all started that, if he were a normal person, he’d get the hell out of his apartment. He’d be doing just what the spirit wanted, so it should shut up and leave him alone. Or, if Boone himself was the one seeking his own departure, he’d be granting his own wish and, presumably, his subconscious would stop tormenting him. Once it succeeded in forcing him out of his comfort zone, once he crossed the street, the haunting might cease.

  He should leave the apartment.

  But it wasn’t that easy. If he tried, he’d go blind. If he tried, he wouldn’t be able to breathe. He wouldn’t be able to move. He’d be paralyzed with fear, blind and paralyzed and helpless.

  He was trapped.

  He lay back, right where he was on the floor, and closed his eyes. He didn’t know what to do. Call an exorcist to scrub his apartment clean of nasty ghosties? Call a psychiatrist who made house calls to scrub his mind clean of crazy thoughts? He didn’t want to be haunted, and he certainly didn’t want to be crazy, thinking he was being haunted. What he wanted was to—

  He sat up and listened.

  Robert was talking again.

  Damn it, Robert was talking again. Again, the cadence was off. Even for his computer, even for that Robby the Robot voice, this didn’t sound like normal speech. But it wasn’t loud and it wasn’t threatening this time. Boone couldn’t hear it clearly, but it sounded rhythmic, repetitive, and unlike speech.

  Boone stood and eased down the hall toward his bedroom. The voice grew louder. Boone was starting to be able to make it out. It sounded like, “Hey, Jen” over and over.

  Hey Jen, Hey Jen, Hey Jen, Hey Jen, Hey Jen…

  Boone walked cautiously to his computer. He was sorely tempted to press the mute button. But Robert wasn’t threatening to hurt Boone or drive him crazy; he wasn’t telling him he was going to hell. He just kept saying “Hey Jen, Hey Jen, Hey Jen” again and again, over and over, without stopping, without pausing, over and over and over.

  The monitor was asleep, of course, so Boone gave the mouse a gentle push and cocked his head to try to see what was on it. He couldn’t tell. He thought he saw a glow now and then, a sort of tiny flicker, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Hey Jen, Hey Jen, Hey Jen, Hey Jen, Hey Jen, Hey Jen, Hey Jen…

  Damn his eyes. He couldn’t see what was happening on the monitor and he couldn’t ask Robert to tell him because Robert was busy saying “Hey Jen, Hey Jen, Hey Jen…”

  Boone backed up, sat down on his bed, and took the phone from his nightstand. He dialed Kenny’s bar. It rang five times before Kenny’s recorded voice said, “You’ve reached Kenny’s Keg, where it’s never too early or too late for a drink…well, almost never, because we’re closed at the moment. We open at eleven a.m. and close at one a.m. and we expect to see you here sometime in between.” Boone thought about leaving a message after the beep, but hung up instead.

  A minute later he knocked on Mrs. Lang’s door across the hall.

  She opened the door and Boone got a strong whiff of cigarettes, eggs, and whiskey.

  “It’s you,” she said. She coughed and the air around Boone’s head filled with cigarette smoke.

  Boone coughed, too, then said with a forced smile, “Hi, Mrs. Lang. I was hoping you could help me out for a moment.”

  “With what?”

  “It won’t take long, I promise.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m having trouble seeing something on my computer and I need your help.”

  “I thought you could see a little with one eye.”

  “I can, but not well. And I have a lot of trouble with words on a computer screen.”


  “Why do you have a computer at all then?”

  “Please, it will only take a second.”

  She seemed to be thinking about it. She might have been wondering whether it would be smart to go into a virtual stranger’s apartment without anyone knowing where she was. She might have been thinking she’d seen a couple of dozen cop shows on TV about situations just like this one. He could have guaranteed that she’d never seen one quite like this, but he wasn’t going to say so.

  “Can you help me out?” he asked. “I just need to know what’s on my monitor.”

  “Okay, but we leave your apartment door open.”

  “Fair enough. Thanks so much.”

  As they walked through Boone’s living room she said, “There are pictures all over the floor.”

  “I know. Thank you.”

  She stopped walking. He heard her take a puff on her cigarette. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “My bedroom. It’s right down the hall there.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Why?”

  “Your bedroom?” she asked, then either chuffed indignantly or let out a little smoker’s cough—Boone wasn’t sure which. “You expect me to just waltz into your bedroom?”

  “Well, that’s where my computer is.”

  “I bet it is.”

  Boone took a breath. “Mrs. Lang, I really need to see what’s on my computer. Maybe I could wait here while you just walk back there and check. Then you can come back and tell me.”

  She considered it. When she spoke, the edge was gone from her voice. “Look,” she said, “I’d like to help you, but I don’t really know you. I don’t want to be stupid. This is an ugly world.”