“I promise. Mom, let go, okay?”
She released him, but her fingers seemed still to clamp into his skin. He rubbed his arm.
“So what are you going to do tonight?”
“Probably we’ll just walk around, maybe go to a movie.”
“Be careful,” she said, unerringly placing her fingers on the developing bruises they had just given him.
Skateboard in hand, he fled through the back door. To his surprise, Jimbo was waiting for him, leaning against the concrete wall on the other side of the alley.
They began drifting back up the alley toward the Monaghan house and West Auer Avenue. “The park is fucked,” Jimbo said. “All those cops around the fountain, nobody’ll be there.”
“Except for the pedophile child murderers. No more fun for those guys. ‘Dude, where’d they all go? I got two spaces left under my back porch.’”
“Playgrounds and shopping malls, man. All you need is some Milk Duds and a van.”
Mark snorted with laughter.
An earlier subject returned to him, so swiftly its velocity might have pushed him backward. “I asked my mom about that house, and she went completely nuts.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jimbo appeared to be more interested than Mark had expected him to be.
“She made me promise never to go inside there. At least not while she’s alive.”
“That gives you about a fifty-year wait.”
“Why would she think I wanted to go in there in the first place?”
“Does she know how screwy you are about it?”
“No! And I don’t think I’m so screwy, either. There’s something I wasn’t going to tell you, but I think I will. Then you can decide how screwy I am.”
“Where are we going anyhow? We could take a bus downtown to the mall, see if there are any good new CDs.”
“Will you shut up and listen to me?”
Mark stopped moving; after a few paces, Jimbo stopped too. “What?”
“Are you interested? Are you going to listen?”
“Well, yeah, but I could listen to this thing you didn’t want to tell me on the bus, too.”
“I think I saw someone in there today.”
Jimbo came nearer, his head tilted to one side. So he was interested at last. “What do you mean? Through the window?”
“Of course through the window, dumbbell. How else could I see someone?”
“Who was it?”
“I couldn’t see that clearly. It was like this person was sort of hanging back far enough to hide in the darkness, you know, but close enough to show me she was there.”
“You think it was a woman?”
“Maybe. It could have been.”
Mark tried to remember what he had seen: a shape moving toward him through layers of darkness, then moving back into invisibility. The shape had been without any specific age or gender, yet . . .
“We should go look,” Jimbo said, firmly.
“I thought you wanted to go downtown.”
“I can’t afford to buy any CDs until the weekend, and neither can you.”
Jimbo set off down the alley in the direction they had come. “I asked my parents if they knew anything about that house, too. They said it was already vacant when we moved here.”
“My mom loses her mind just thinking about the place. She made me promise—oh, I told you.”
The high concrete wall rose up along their left side, and Jimbo patted it as they went by. “This thing does look pretty sinister, now that you mention it. I mean, it’s not exactly normal, is it?”
At the bottom of the alley, the cobblestones gave way to ordinary pavement. They got on their boards and propelled themselves around the corner onto Michigan Street.
“Next time, I’ll bring my old man’s field glasses,” Jimbo said. “They’re good, yo. With them, you can practically see the footprints on the moon.”
The house sat on its narrow lot exactly as before. Its windows reflected nothing. The burn marks appeared to ripple across the bricks. The boys’ wheels sent out rolling, unbroken rumbles that boomed in Mark’s ears like shock waves. It sounded as though they were making three times more noise than usual, creating a din that would rattle the dishes on the shelves and shake the windows in their frames.
Mr. Hillyard’s dog raised its long, big-nosed head and uttered a dispirited woof. Mark thought he saw a curtain on the porch window twitch back into place. They had awakened the dog; what else had they roused into life?
“We could go back to that place on Burleigh,” Mark said. “It won’t get dark for at least an hour.”
“Let’s stay here,” Jimbo said. The idea of the unknown girl had provoked a new, heightened interest in him. “If she’s there, she’ll hear us. Maybe she’ll look out the window again.”
“Why would she?” He sounded doubtful, but his heart stirred.
“To see you,” Jimbo said. “That’s what she was doing the first time, wasn’t it?”
“If it was a she. If it was anyone at all.”
Jimbo shrugged and spun his board around, for once reasonably smoothly. “Maybe she ran away from home.”
“Maybe,” Mark said. “One thing’s for sure. Nobody’s going to bother her in there.” Then he wondered: was that true? He felt queasier than he wanted Jimbo to notice.
For another hour, they pushed their skateboards uphill and rode them down, jumping off curbs and doing ollies. A few neighbors stared at them from porches or windows, but no one complained. At least once every couple of minutes, one boy or the other glanced at the front windows of 3323, without seeing any more than an opaque surface, like a film over the glass.
Just as it began to get dark, Jimbo looked at the house for the thousandth time and said, “We’re such a couple of dopes. We’re acting like we’re afraid of the place. We should just go up and look in the window.”
“I can’t do that,” Mark said quickly. “I promised my mom.”
“You promised not to break in, not that you wouldn’t look in the window!”
“It was more like I promised to stay away from the place,” Mark said, not quite telling the truth. “I just
“The only place I said I’d stay away from is the fountain.”
“Then I guess you could take a look,” Mark said.
Jimbo handed him his skateboard and ran across the street, bent over like a parody of Groucho Marx. He vaulted across the sidewalk, sped over the ground, and took the stairs in two jumps. On the porch, he crab-walked along the fire-scorched wall to the window. Only his head was visible. Mark watched him cup his hands over his eyes and peer inside. Jimbo moved half a foot to his right without taking his hands from his eyes. Half a minute later, he dropped his hands, half-stood, and, shrugging, looked across the street at Mark. He shook his head and made a palms-up sign for confusion before jumping down from the porch and running back across the street.
“Did you see something or didn’t you?” Mark asked.
“There might be something in there—some person, I mean.” Jimbo drew his entire face into a squint. “I don’t really know what I saw. It was like something was hiding from me.”
“A guy? Because I really do think I saw a girl in that room.”
“Yeah?”
Mark nodded. Over the past half hour, the impression had been growing in him: a girl, a young woman, had permitted herself to be glimpsed. It was like an announcement, or an invitation.
“I have an idea,” Jimbo said. “It’s getting dark in about half an hour. Let’s go back to my house and pick up some stuff.”
“What?”
Jimbo flipped his board into position, grabbed it with his feet, and sailed down the street, pumping his body
