The Collection

I need Kathy.

But Kathy is gone.

And I am here, fighting with ghosts.

 The Baby

It was the late 1980s, and I was driving with some friends through a dilapidated industrial section of Los Angeles on the way to a concert, when I looked out the window and saw three dirty young boys kneeling before a cardboard box in an empty lot. They were clearly looking at something in the box, and I thought: a dead baby. I don't know why that thought occurred to me, but the next day I sat down and wrote this story.

***

'You go in first.'

'No, you.'

'No, you.'

Steve, always the bravest, stuck his head through the open doorway and peered into the dark interior of the aban­doned warehouse. 'Hello-o-o-o!' he called, hoping for an echo. His voice died flatly, as though it had been absorbed by the blackness, by the walls. Someone—Bill or Jimmy or Seun—pushed him from behind, and he almost lost his bal­ance and fell through the door into the building, but he waved his arms to maintain his equilibrium and jumped quickly back out to the safety of the open air. He whirled on them, his face seething with the heat of his anger, ready to beat the hell out of whoever had done it, but all three of them looked at him innocently. He stared back at them for a moment, then laughed. 'Wimps,' he said.

Jimmy turned toward Steve. Nervously flipping the switch of his flashlight off and on, he asked, 'Are we really going in?'

Steve looked at him scornfully. 'Of course,' he said. But he was far from sure himself. Back home, sitting on the ce­ment driveway, surrounded by houses filled with grown­ups, the idea had sounded good. They would bring lights and ropes and Bill's metal detector and explore the old aban­doned warehouse. None of them had the guts to go near the warehouse by themselves—not even in the daytime. But to­gether they would be able to explore the old building to their hearts' content, to plumb its unplumbed depths and bring forth what treasures they could find.

Now, however, standing in front of the multistory struc­ture, looking into the darkened doorway, the idea did not sound nearly so good or nearly so feasible. Theoretically, they should be braver in a group than they were individually. There was safety in numbers. But it turned out that they were just as scared together as apart. Steve looked up toward the top of the building, where the bare concrete wall was blackened by soot, where flames had once leaped up through the night stillness toward the moon, and he silently hoped that one of them would chicken out. Maybe Seun, the youngest of them, would start crying and want to go home.

But all three of them stared silently at him, waiting for him to make the decision.

'Let's go,' he said, turning on his flashlight.

They walked slowly, softly, cautiously, through the open doorway of the warehouse, Steve leading, Jimmy and Bill following, Seun bringing up the rear. Gravel and charred rubble crunched beneath their feet.

'I don't want to be last!' Seun said suddenly. 'I want to be in the middle!'

'Jimmy! Trade!' Steve hissed. He didn't want any of them to talk, but if they did talk he wanted them to whisper. He wasn't quite sure why.

'Why me?' Jimmy hissed back.

' 'Cause I said so!' Steve told him.

Jimmy and Seun switched places, and all of them moved a little closer together.

They walked farther into the darkness. Soon the doorway was little more than a patch of square white light behind them, no longer offering any illumination. The gravel crunched beneath their feet as they walked, and their flash­lights played nervously upon the walls and floor. The thin yellowish beams piercing the blackness made the surround­ing dark seem that much darker.

'I don't think we're supposed to be in here,' Bill whis­pered.

'Of course we're not,' Steve whispered back. 'But no one cares. The place is abandoned.'

'I mean, I think the other half of it's across the border.'

They all stopped. None of them had thought of that. De­spite the way it looked on the maps, the border between Cal­ifornia and Mexico was not a straight line, they all knew. Several stores and homes throughout the city straddled the boundary, and many of them had rooms which were techni­cally in both nations.

Visions of himself falling over some stray chunk of con­crete and breaking his leg in the Mexico side of the ware­house pushed themselves into Steve's consciousness. He didn't know what would happen if that occurred. Would he have to be rushed to a Mexican hospital? By a Mexican am­bulance? Or would he have to crawl back across that invisi­ble border into his own country?

'Don't worry about it,' he said aloud. They started walking again.

Although it was too dark to see the sides of the ware­house, Steve had the feeling that the walls had narrowed, that they were now walking through a room much smaller than that which they had originally entered. He shined his light to the left and right, following the contours of the floor, but his beam was not strong enough to reach a wall. He de­cided to change course, to find a wall and follow it instead of stumbling through this inky blackness in the center of the building. He veered off thirty degrees and the other kids fol­lowed him.

He bumped his head on a beam. Steve screamed, and his right hand shot instantly to his forehead to check for blood. His fingers came back dry. 'Jesus!' he said.

'What is it?' Seun's voice was scared. 'Nothing.' Steve played his light along the wooden beam. But it was not a beam. He had reached a wall. His eyes and his flashlight had been concentrated on the floor, and he had been looking through a large hole in the bottom section of the wall. He shined his light to the left and to the right and saw several similar holes. Holes big enough for a person to crawl through. He bent down on his knees and crept closer to the nearest one, shining his light through to the next room. It looked exactly the same.

'Let's crawl through,' he said, 'see what's on the other

side.'

'No!' Seun said.

Steve knew how Seun felt, but his fear was now sub-servient to his spirit of adventure. They had come here to ex­plore, and they would explore.

He crawled through the hole.

'Steve!' Seun yelled.

'Come on through. There're no monsters.'

There was a quick moment of indistinguishable mum­bling from the other side of the wall, then Jimmy poked his head through. Seun followed, scrambling, and Bill came im­mediately afterward. They stood up and shook themselves off, Jimmy brushing what felt like cobwebs from his hair.

'What do we do now?' Bill asked.

'Search around.' Steve started walking, following the wall, keeping his left hand in constant contact with the smooth concrete.

'Are we going to be able to find our way back?' Seun asked.

'Don't worry about it,' Steve said.

There was not so much rubble on the floor here, and the ground seemed much softer beneath their feet. It felt like dirt. Steve pointed his flashlight up for a second and he could see no ceiling.

They kept walking.

The four boys wandered past a series of doors. Steve turned in one of them and the rest followed. They were in a much smaller room, and the walls on both sides could be made out with their flashlights. They walked out of the room through another door and found themselves in a cavernous space with an endlessly high ceiling. Their footsteps echoed as they walked.

Steve was no longer following any kind of wall, and he swung his beam back and forth across the ground in front of him to make sure he knew what was up ahead. The light touched upon an ancient rotting box in a slimy pool of water, moved across several chunks of wood and plaster, and stopped on something small and smooth and brown.

A baby.