lost boy lost girl (15 page)

16

Mark followed Jimbo through the door with the sudden and unanticipated sense of having found himself at a hinge moment, from which point everything in his life would divide itself into
before
and
after
. It was a watershed he had passed at the very moment of its observation. He had no idea why he should have the sense that nothing would be quite the same again, but to deny that sense would be like lying to himself. The perception of the watershed moment, with himself at its center, was almost instantly surpassed by the next moment, in which a tremendous tectonic shift had already happened, leaving him with his second great impression of the morning, that the kitchen, and by implication the rest of the house, was far emptier than he had imagined.

Side by side, he and Jimbo took in a perfectly ordinary, empty room that had been left to itself for the past three or four decades. On the floor, the flurry of their footprints carved tracks in the thick carpet of dust. Fox-brown stains blotched the flaking yellow walls. The room felt extraordinarily hot. The air smelled musty and lifeless. The only sound Mark could hear was Jimbo’s breathing and his own. So it was true, he thought; in the daytime, they were safe here.

At first glance, the kitchen seemed to be around the same size and shape as the kitchen in Mark’s house. The arch to the dining room seemed to replicate its counterpart across the alley. The rooms might have been a bit smaller. Apart from the absence of a stove and the refrigerator, the great difference between this room and the Underhill kitchen lay in the wall to his left, the one that replaced the exterior wall at home. This wall had no window to look out upon the brief length of grass leading to the next house. It seemed never to have held the spice racks and shelves for cookbooks, little figurines of dogs and cats, and china miniatures of shepherds and shepherdesses that stood in that position in the Underhill household. What it had instead was the door, snugly fitted into the frame, he had noticed the last time.

“Well?” Jimbo nodded at the door in a you-first manner.

“We’ll get to that,” Mark said. “First, let’s look out the front windows and see if anybody noticed us.”

“Yo, whatever,” Jimbo said, acting cooler than he felt.

Mark moved across the room and discovered, just as he was about to pass through the narrower of the two arches, that the house was not as empty as he had supposed. A shrouded, boxlike object that could only be a table beneath a bedsheet occupied the middle of the dining room. Through the wider arch beyond he could see the shapes of other pieces of furniture draped in sheets. When the owners decamped, they had left behind two good-sized chairs and a long sofa. Why would anyone move out and leave good furniture behind?

With Jimbo breathing noisily in his ear, Mark went through to the living room. Remembering what Jimbo had thought he had seen, and his own vision, or half-vision, of the day before that, Mark looked for footprints in the dust. He saw only tracings, loops and swirls like writing in an unknown alphabet inscribed with the lightest possible pressure of a quill pen. Neither Jimbo’s threatening giant, his own monstrous figure of warning, or the girl could have made these faint, delicate patterns. The same hand, that of neglect, had scrawled its ornate but meaningless patterns on the walls. These had faded to the colorlessness of mist—as if you could punch your hands through the unreadable writing and touch nothing more substantial than smoke.

17

Of course nobody saw us,
Jimbo thought,
nobody ever really looks at this house. Even when the neighbors get together to mow the lawn, they pretend they’re somewhere else. And the last thing they ever do is look in the windows. We could dance naked in here, and they wouldn’t see a thing.

While Mark gazed at the walls and saw God knows what, Jimbo moved toward the big front window without, despite what had just gone through his mind, getting so close to it that he could easily be seen from the street. Deep striations in the film over the glass caught the light and stood out like runes.

With the passing of a cloud, the bright streaks and swirls on the window heightened into beaten gold, a color too rich for late morning in the Midwest. Within Jimbo, something, a particle of his being that felt like remembered pain, moved as if it had been touched. A sense of bereft abandonment passed through him like an X ray, and in sudden confusion he turned from the window. The sheets sagging over the furniture in the living room spoke of a thousand lost things.

Jimbo turned back to the window. The golden runes had faded back into the gaps between smears of dust that offered him an oddly unexpected vision of Michigan Street. Directly opposite stood two houses, the Rochenkos’ and Old Man Hillyard’s. Although Jimbo knew exactly what these structures looked like, it was as if he had never quite seen them before. From this vantage point, the Rochenko and Hillyard houses seemed subtly different in nature, remote, more mysterious.

A sound like the rustle of fabric over fabric reached Jimbo from somewhere close at hand, and he jerked his head and looked over his shoulder at . . . what? Some white scrap, briefly visible in the murky air? He was spooked enough to ask, “Did you hear that?”

“You heard something?” Mark took his hand from the wall he had been examining and looked at Jimbo in a manner far too intense for his liking.

“No. Sorry.”

“Let’s start upstairs, or down here—with that.” Mark only barely nodded toward the kitchen and the rear of the house. “Upstairs, what do you say?”

Why ask me?
Jimbo wondered, then realized that he was being told, not asked. “Makes sense to me,” he said. “And what are we looking for, exactly?”

“Whatever we can find. Especially anything with a name on it—like envelopes. We can always Google a name. Pictures would be good. ”

One flight up, the stairs ended at a bleak hallway and the narrow, steeply pitched flight of stairs to the attic. Without a word or a glance, Mark turned to them and went up.

Jimbo came through the attic door and saw that the roof formed an inverted V with its peak about eight feet above the floor. From this peak, the roof slanted steeply down over a hodgepodge of tables, chairs, and dressers.

Ten minutes later, Jimbo wiped sweat from his forehead and looked across the attic to see his friend methodically searching the drawers of a highboy. How many hours would Mark insist spending on this search?

Sweat seemed to leak from Jimbo’s every pore. When he leaned over a chest or opened a box, sweat dripped into his eyes and plopped softly onto the surface of whatever he was trying to look at.

Just off to the right, Jimbo thought he saw an upright human body wrapped in a sheet, and fear blasted through his system. With a small cry of shock, he straightened up and turned to face the shrouded figure.

“What?”
Mark said.

Jimbo was staring at his own pop-eyed, shiny face looking at him from within a full-length mirror in an oval wooden frame. He had turned himself into a horror movie cliché.

“Nothing. Jesus, it just feels creepy, messing around up here.”

“There has to be something,” Mark said, mostly to himself. He wrenched a tiny drawer out of a flimsy-looking lamp table. “Whoever they were, they left in a hurry. Look at the way this stuff is crammed in here. Even if they were trying to hide shit, probably they got too sloppy to do it right.”

“You know,” Jimbo said, “I’d just like to get out of this attic.”

Twenty minutes later, they were going back down the narrow staircase. The second floor felt ten degrees cooler than the attic. As a result of having kicked the legs of a little wooden table into splinters, Mark limped slightly during the descent.

Thinking of what waited for them on the ground floor, Jimbo almost hoped that they would spend a long time upstairs.

The second floor of 3323 North Michigan Street consisted of two bedrooms and a bathroom linked by a common hallway. In the smaller of the bedrooms, two single beds, one with a deeply stained mattress, had been pushed against opposite walls. The bare wooden floor was scuffed, scratched, and dirty. Mark followed Jimbo into the room, frowned at the stained mattress, and flipped it on its side. Dull brown smears in a pattern like paisley covered the bottom of the mattress.

“Ugh, look at that shit.”

“You think it’s shit? I don’t, I think—”

“You don’t know what it is, and neither do I.” Mark lowered the awful mattress back into place. Then he bent down and looked under the bed. He did the same on the other side of the room.

Mark gave the bathroom a desultory once-over. Dead spider webs hung in tatters from the window, and a living spider only slightly smaller than a mouse fought to scale the inner slope of the bathtub. Gritty white powder lay across the floor tiles.

A double bed butted against the inner wall of the larger bedroom. The same gritty white powder covered the floor, and when Jimbo looked up he saw yellow-brown wounds in the ceiling. A wooden crucifix hung over the headboard.

Mark dipped down and looked under the bed. He uttered a sound that combined surprise and disgust and duckwalked backward, trailing his finger along the dusty join between two planks.

Before Jimbo could ask what he was doing, Mark jumped up. He wandered to the opposite wall.

Jimbo went to the window. Again, the unfamiliar angle distorted a well-known landscape. The buildings tilted forward, diminished by perspective and also by what felt like someone else’s hatred, suspicion, and fear. He shuddered, and the scene before him snapped back into ordinary reality.

“I have this feeling . . .” Mark was leaning against the inner wall. Slowly, he turned his head and regarded the closet.

“About what?” Jimbo said.

Mark moved along the wall, opened the door, and leaned in.

“Anything there?”

Mark disappeared inside.

Jimbo moved toward the closet and heard a sound as of something sliding off a shelf. Smiling, Mark reappeared through the door. He was holding a dust-covered object Jimbo needed a moment to recognize as an old photo album.

Jimbo had no way of knowing, and Mark had no intention of telling him, that the smile on his face had been inspired not by the photo album, but by something else altogether—a door set into the back of the closet. A certain theory about the house he was at last exploring had begun to form in his mind, and the door inside the closet seemed to confirm it.

“Bingo!”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “Let’s take a look.” He went to the window and held the album in the light. Dark gray with accumulated dust, it had once been a deep forest green. Quilted plastic rectangles made to resemble cloth surrounded a central plate that read
FAVORITE FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS
. Mark opened the cover to the first page of photographs.

A heavy-set young man wearing a long black coat and heavy boots bent sideways on the bumper of an old Ford and shielded his face with a hand. In the second photograph the same young man’s face was a stationary blur as he stood with his arm around a smiling girl whose dead-straight hair fell nearly to her waist.

“I don’t believe it,” Mark said. “Look at this.”

Shrouded by his long coat, his back to the camera, the man bent over a table littered with clamps, sanders, and jars of nails.

Then came a photograph taken directly outside this house. The lawn was barer, the trees looked smaller. Showing only the top of his head, the man held the branchy arms of a small boy of five or six.

As if having a son had released something in him, the three photographs that followed caught him in the midst of a social gathering seemingly located at a lakeside tavern. Wearing his usual garb, the man had been photographed in conversation with other men of his age or older. Here he was standing on a dock next to the tavern, here he perched on an overturned rowboat with two other men and a woman with plucked eyebrows and a cigarette in her mouth. In every photograph, the man’s stance made his face unavailable to the camera.

“What’s your name, you asshole?” Mark said. “Don’t want to show your face to the camera, do you?”

“I’m sorry, this is creeping me out,” Jimbo said. “The guy in your kitchen didn’t show his face, either.”

“Because this is him, get it? He’s
the guy
.”

“This is way too scary for me,” Jimbo said. “Sorry. We should never have come in here. We should have left the whole thing alone right from the start.”

“Shut up.”

Mark was scowling down at the photographs. He abruptly bent his neck and lowered his head closer to the page. “I wonder . . .” He raised his hand and pointed at a rangy, cowpoke-like man also seated on the overturned rowboat. “Does that guy look familiar to you?”

Mark was never going to let him off the hook. “Didn’t you hear me?”

“Yes, I heard you, but I can’t do anything about it. Now look at the guy I’m pointing at.”

Jimbo thought the man looked a little like the Marlboro Man in old advertisements, but he knew better than to say this out loud.

“Come on, look close. Imagine him with a lot of wrinkles.”

“
This
is Old Man Hillyard? I don’t believe it.” He looked more closely at the man sitting on the upturned rowboat and almost succeeded in superimposing his features over Mr. Hillyard’s. “Maybe it is.”

“Sure, it is. Hillyard knew this guy, see? He’s talking to him, they’re having a few beers together. We have to talk to Old Man Hillyard.”

“I could do that,” Jimbo said, seeing an excuse for getting out of the house.

“Yeah, he likes you now, doesn’t he?” After twisting his ankle the week previous, Mr. Hillyard had signaled to Jimbo and asked him to pick up his groceries for him. “Go see him this afternoon. In fact, talk to everyone on the block who looks old enough to have known this guy.”

Now Jimbo’s gratitude at an honorable reason for escaping the genuinely oppressive atmosphere of the house met the sudden suspicion that Mark seemed to be trying to get rid of him.

“What about you?”

“Are you serious? While you’re going around the neighborhood, I’ll be here.”

The strange room downstairs, which had never been far from his thoughts, surged fully into Jimbo’s consciousness. The farther he could get from that thing, the better he would feel. It was as if it radiated an unnatural heat, or an unwholesome odor.

Mark’s eyes were curiously large and bright. “Both of us don’t have to poke around in this place. Anyhow, you don’t want to be here, do you?”

Jimbo stepped back, his face filled with suspicion. Contradictory impulses battled in him—Mark really did seem to be putting him on the sidelines. Then he thought again of the man in the photographs and the room downstairs they had yet to enter, and supposed he would be more useful outside the house than in.

“This place doesn’t feel right,” he said. “It’s like it’s all cramped up, or something. It has this terrible feeling.”

That was the truth. Jimbo felt as though he were wading through some unclean substance that would harden around his ankles if he stood still too long. Mark’s ghostly spider webs had been a version of this same feeling.

“You should see where I found the pictures,” Mark said.

No, I shouldn’t,
Jimbo thought, but he moved forward and went through the door.

There was barely room enough for the two of them in the closet, and the darkness made it difficult to see what Mark was doing. He seemed to be pushing on a high shelf above the clothes rail. The shelf slid up. Mark stepped in closer and opened a panel at the back of the closet.

“Look.”

Jimbo came forward, and Mark leaned to the side and reached into the darkness.

“Can you see?”

“Not really.”

“Come around and stick your hand in.”

They jostled around each other, and Jimbo bent forward and pushed his right hand into a half-visible opening.

“Feel the bottom,” Mark said.

The wooden surface felt furry and scratchy, and softer than it should have been, like the hide of a long-dead bear.

“The wood’s a little rotten,” Mark said from behind him.

Jimbo’s fingers encountered a raised screw, a small hole, a raised edge. “I got something.”

“Pull up on it.”

An inner flap detached from the floor of the hidden cabinet. Jimbo probed into the opening and found a sunken compartment about a foot long, two feet wide, and five or six inches deep. “This is where you found the album?”

“Right in there.”

Jimbo pulled his hand from the secret compartment, and both boys backed out into the room.

“How did you find the flap? How did you know it was there?”

“I guessed.”

Jimbo squinted at him in frustration.

“This place is supposed to be identical to my house, isn’t it?”

“I thought so. But the rooms look a little smaller.”

“You got it,” Mark said. “That’s why the rooms seem so cramped to you. Almost all of them are smaller than the rooms in my house. On the outside, though, it’s identical. The extra space had to be somewhere.”

“You mean there are hiding places all over this house?”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Mark said, not saying at least half of what he was thinking.

Without any desire for greater precision, Jimbo immediately understood that hideous possibilities lay in this arrangement.

“Let’s say you had someone, a girl, locked in this house,” Mark said. “She would think she was safe, but . . .”

This was the possibility Jimbo least wished to consider. “If you were hidden in one of these secret places, you could come out anytime you liked.” Saying it made him feel ill.