The Moonlit Mind (Novella): A Tale of Suspense (6 page)

The quivering flames, sensitive to the slightest movement of the air, produce faint, trembling shadows that wriggle up the walls like ghost lizards.

She must have been bathed here hours earlier. The tub is dry. The wet towels have been removed.

Stuck to the white bathtub, however, are six scarlet rose petals.

On the floor beside the tub gleam two silver bowls with beaded rims. He picks up one and sees words in a foreign language engraved all around the exterior.

In the bottom of the bowl shimmers no more than a tablespoon of clear liquid, which he supposes is
aqua pura
. He dips a finger, raises it to his lips, and licks away the single drop.

The liquid has no taste, although the instant that it wets his tongue, he hears his sister’s whispered yet urgent plea,
“Crispin, help me!”

Startled, he lets the bowl slip from his fingers. He catches it before it can ring off the marble floor.

He turns, but Mirabell is neither in the bath nor in the room beyond. If she spoke the words, she did so at a distance, and he heard them not with his ears but with his heart.

After carefully setting the silver bowl on the floor, he returns to his sister’s bedroom, where for the first time he notices that her teddy bears and other plush toys are gone. Mirabell must have had two dozen of them on the bed, the armchair, and the window seat. Not one remains.

The shelves that once held her collection of picture books are empty.

On her nightstand, where her Mickey Mouse clock once glowed with green numbers, there is nothing to tell the time.

On a hunch, Crispin yanks open the door to her walk-in closet and switches on the light. Nothing hangs on the rods, and the shoe shelves do not contain a single pair.

Early December, three years and four months later …

Since the close call on the recent Halloween night, Crispin and faithful Harley have been less bold, traveling more by greenbelts, alleyways, and storm drains than by the main streets.

Entirely separate from the sewer system, the massive drains are not dangerous in dry weather. They are secret highways, shadowing the avenues and byways above them.

Occasionally he encounters a rat or a pack of them, but they always run from him. City employees can reliably be spotted far in advance because of their work lights, and can be avoided by taking a branch different from the pipe in which they’re doing maintenance.

Initially, the boy and his dog were limited to entering and exiting the storm-drain system by way of open culverts that sloped up from ditches and streambeds to join that subterranean network. Manholes and the perfectly vertical iron-rung ladders that serve them offer a great many more entrances and exits, including a number of discreet options in quiet alleyways and abandoned factory yards, but four-legged Harley can’t use them.

For the past year, however, having grown rapidly stronger in his exile, Crispin has been able to lower the fifty-pound dog through a manhole or carry him up a ladder with the help of a device that he has crafted.

First, there is a sling made of fabric-backed vinyl, customized to the dog’s body, with holes for his four legs to be sure that his weight is evenly distributed and that undue pressure is not put on any of his internal organs. Crispin cut the vinyl and
hand-sewed the sling himself. He is confident that neither will the seams split nor the snaps fail under stress.

When lowering the dog, he employs two lengths of a multistrand nylon rope favored by mountain climbers. He uses carabiners to attach the ropes to a pair of rings on the sling.

When climbing out of a drain, he wears a harness that he has also fashioned himself. With dog loaded, the sling attaches to the harness, and on his back Crispin carries his best friend up the ladder.

Before performing that feat, however, he ascends alone to open the manhole. From a city maintenance crew, he has stolen a tool with which he can hook and lift aside the big iron disk. From below, the reverse end of the tool allows him to tilt the cover up and, using leverage, swing it out of the way.

After poking his head out into the cold night to be sure there are no witnesses, he pushes his backpack through the opening before descending again to get in harness and carry the dog.

In such manner, they now emerge into a dead-end alley a block from Broderick’s, the largest and oldest department store in the city. Over the past year, they have taken shelter from time to time in Broderick’s, which is an especially welcoming place in winter.

This night, the moon is lost behind a lowering sky. The icy air cuts at him so that tears bleed from his eyes.

After freeing the dog, Crispin folds the harness and the sling. He stashes them in a compartment of his backpack, which is larger than the one he carried when he first fled Theron Hall to live wild in the city.

With the pack on his back, with the dog on a leash, he sets out for the wide service alley behind the department store.

His breath plumes from him as if he’s exhaling ghosts. Snow is predicted before morning.

On this first Saturday in December, an hour before closing time, no deliveries are being made to or from the shipping-and-receiving center that occupies the uppermost garage level beneath the huge building.

At the bottom of the two-lane ramp, the automatic bay door is down, and the man-size door beside it is latched. Latched but not deadbolted.

Crispin carries with him an expired credit card that he found years earlier in a trash can. He slips it in the gap between door and jamb, puts pressure on the beveled latch bolt, and forces it out of the striker plate. The door opens inward.

If a guard in the security room happens to be looking at a monitor that provides a view from the camera above the large bay doors, Crispin will find himself in trouble or at least chased out.

But that never happens. A year previously, the Phantom of Broderick’s explained to him that during shopping hours, security guards charged with monitoring the store’s numerous cameras will be focused 99 percent of the time on store interiors, looking for shoplifters.

Once through the door, Crispin relies on the wise dog to guide him.

With the last of the day’s outgoing shipments completed by 5:00
P.M.
and the final store-stock deliveries made by 6:00, the employees in shipping-and-receiving have all gone home, with the
exception of the department’s assistant manager—Denny Plummer—who works from noon until closing time at 9:00.

If a dozen employees were busy in this area, Crispin would have little hope of slipping secretly into Broderick’s to stay the night. But with only Denny Plummer to avoid, he can rely on the dog’s keen sense of smell to locate the assistant manager and evade him.

A third of the huge garage contains a fleet of Broderick’s delivery vans in various sizes. In another third, crates of new merchandise stacked on pallets wait to be opened. The final third is unused.

In better economic times, the fleet of trucks numbered twice what it does now, the new merchandise was piled higher, and every inch of this space was needed. In those golden days, a night shift of stock boys replenished the store’s racks and shelves. In the current doldrums, no night shift is necessary. All restocking occurs during store hours. After closing time, one person remains in Broderick’s: the Phantom.

Harley leads Crispin on a serpentine route among the trucks and crates, to the service stairs, which lead up to a distribution room from which new merchandise is wheeled on carts to far points of the department store. A freight elevator is also available, but for the boy, the stairs are safer.

At this hour, the distribution room on the ground floor is deserted. With the shipping-and-receiving crew gone for the day, this space is dark except for a single light above the wide door that leads to the ground floor of the store.

Among the many carts and unopened cartons are numerous places where a boy and his dog can hunker down and hide. They shelter here until 9:32, when every speaker in the public-address system echoes with the machine voice of the security package, sternly announcing,
“Perimeter control armed.”

This means that the last employee, a guard, has left by the door through which Crispin earlier entered from the alleyway. He has set the alarm for the night. Every exterior door and window is wired, and if any is breached, the police will be summoned.

In better days, Broderick’s maintained a four-man team of guards during the night. They were pink-slipped years previously. Without night watchmen, the store management for a while considered updating their security with motion detectors, but in the end that was another expense they could not justify in this new downsized America.

Until the store reopens on Monday morning, Crispin and Harley can go anywhere in its four sales floors without triggering an alarm. When Broderick’s is closed, the only security cameras that continue to record are those covering doors and operable windows, so no one will know that they were here.

In spite of high electricity costs, aisle lights are left on all night on the ground floor. The police stop by a few times each shift to peer through the display windows, to be certain that the alarm hasn’t been thwarted and that no bad guys are running amok inside.

Crispin unsnaps the leash from Harley’s collar, and they leave the distribution room. They take the public elevator to the fourth floor.

Up here are three departments—kitchenware, home furnishings, and bedding—plus Eleanor’s, which is a restaurant named after the wife of the store’s founder. Eleanor’s is more than a coffee shop, less than a fine-dining establishment. Open six days a week, it is popular with the ladies’-luncheon crowd and with those who enjoy tea and pastries in the late afternoon. Dinner is not served—at least not with the knowledge of management.

The restaurant is to the left of the public elevators. The pair of beveled-glass French doors, which should be closed and locked, stand open.

Past the hostess station, the dining room is dimly lit by the ambient glow of the great city, which enters by tall, west-facing windows. Beyond the tables, in one of the booths, a few candles in red-glass vessels flicker pleasantly.

Crispin is expected. With his disposable cell phone, he has called ahead to ask if he might be welcome for two nights. The phone comes with a limited number of minutes, but that is of no concern to him; the only number he ever calls is hers.

This
side of the hostess station, in the open doorway, stands the Phantom of Broderick’s.

July 26, memorial day for Saints Anne and Joachim, memorial
night
, three years and four months earlier …

Nine-year-old Crispin in his sister’s empty closet is pierced by a sharp fear, not fear for himself—not yet—but for Mirabell.

Crispin, help me!

He doesn’t hear the voice again, but he remembers it clearly.

Something is terribly wrong, and it can’t be put right by one of Mr. Mordred’s jokes or by a kiss from Nanny Sayo.

At the thought of Nanny, the intense flavor of lemon candy fills his mouth. An impossible flood of saliva forces him to swallow once, twice, three times, and still a string of spittle escapes, drools down his chin. He wipes it away with a sleeve of his pajamas.

They have lived in Theron Hall for six weeks, and suddenly those days seem to have passed mostly in a haze. Looking back, he has only a vague sense of what happened on which day, as if time has no fixed meaning in this house.

They have gone to bed and risen according to their desires. They have eaten only what they wish. Every toy they’ve wanted—and many they never requested—have been provided for them. They have been entertained rather than schooled, and their tutor with the horsefly birthmark has indulged them at every turn, always excusing and even encouraging their laziness. They have never left the house. In their three separate rooms, they are gradually being isolated, one from the other, as they already have been isolated from the outside world.

None of that is how things ought to be. Crispin sees now that the past six weeks have been like a dream through which they have
been drawn as though responding to invisible strings attached to all their limbs.

Crispin, help me!

The sense of being in a dream only intensifies as Crispin finds himself at the door to Clarette and Giles’s bedroom suite without realizing that he has left Mirabell’s room.

His mother and his new father have made it clear that they value their privacy and that their quarters are strictly off-limits. Until now, Crispin has never tried their door. He assumes that it must be locked, but it is not.

Stained-glass and blown-glass lamps pour out honeyed light so rich that he can almost taste it, and the velvet shadows remind him of a place he cannot name or quite remember, a place that somehow came before everything he’s ever known.

Of all the grand spaces in Theron Hall, this is the grandest of them all. The dazzling and intricate pattern in the colorful Persian carpet seems to pull gently at his bare feet with every step that he takes, as though it might draw him down into it, into not just the threads that constitute it, but into it and also
through
it, as if it might be a secret gate to another world more real than this one. The draperies are so soft and hang in such elegant folds, the colors are so appealing, the fringe and tassels are so plush, that no vista he might see through the windows behind them could compete. Here is the furniture of some greater royalty than mere kings, and an ornate mirror of such compelling depth that when Crispin stares past his reflection, the room appears too vast to be contained within Theron Hall, dwindling to infinity.

He is overwhelmed by opulence, on the verge of vertigo, when once more he focuses on the velvet shadows in the corners, which
remind him of some place he can’t remember, a place that came before everything he’s ever known. But this time some alien voice inside his head, with words he’s never heard before yet understands, reveals to him that the perfection of these shadows are the darkness of his mother’s womb, from which he was born. If he wishes to step into a corner and allow these shadows to fold around him, if he will wait here for his mother, upon her return she will take him back into herself, and he will know again the peace of being part of her and eventually of being uncreated.