Lost Boy Lost Girl

The worst was . . . she did not want to say it.

The scene played and replayed in Nancy’s mind and memory as she stared blindly at the television set. Myra sobbing, she herself trembling and lowering her head, thinking, Philip is right, she’s unbalanced. None of this is true, she’s making it up. Nancy knew what she had done; she had backed away. She had said to herself, Myra had a miscarriage, we all knew that. There isn’t any daughter, thank goodness. They’re both crazy. Fear of her dreadful cousin had led her to betray her niece. Eight years later, the headlines had shown the world what her cousin was capable of, but Nancy could not lie to herself: she had already known.

Mark surprised her by coming home early. After giving her one of those looks that had become familiar to her, Mark muttered something about being tired and disappeared into his room. At 10:00 P.M., as if summoned by one of Quincy’s timetable bells, Philip popped into the living room and announced that bedtime had come. Alone, then, she sat in the living room until the next program had chattered to a conclusion. Nancy turned off the television and in the abrupt silence understood that her worst fear had been realized. The world would no longer run along its old, safe tracks. There had been a rip in the fabric, and bleak, terrible miracles would result. That was how it came to her, a tear in the fabric of daily life, through which monstrosities could pour. And enter they had, drawn by Nancy’s old, old crime.

For she knew her son had not obeyed her. In one way or another, Mark had awakened the Kalendars. Now they all had to live with the consequences, which would be unbearable but otherwise impossible to predict. A giant worm was loose, devouring reality in great mouthfuls. Now the worm’s sensors had located Nancy, and its great, humid body oozed ever closer, so close she could feel the earth yield beneath it.

Nancy’s own sensors prickled with dread. Moments before she was able to raise her eyes and look at the arch into the little dining room, she knew her visitor had returned. There she stood, the child, a six-year-old girl in dirty overalls, her bare, filthy feet on the outermost edge of the faded rag rug, her small, slim, baleful back turned to Nancy. Her hair was matted with grease, possibly with blood. Anger boiled from her and hung in the dead air between them. There was a good measure of contempt in all that rage. Lily had come through the rip in the fabric to cast judgment on her weak traitorous aunt, that fearful and despairing wretch. Oh the fury oh the rage in a tortured child, oh the power in that fury. She had come also for Mark, his mother saw. Mark was half hers already, and had been from the moment Joseph Kalendar’s hellhouse had surged out of the mist and knocked him off his stupid skateboard.

13

It amazed Jimbo Monaghan how dumb smart people could be. If he understood the reason for most of what Mark had said and done over the past five days, it could not be all that difficult for anyone to grasp. Especially when the reason was so obvious. Mark had come home in the afternoon, strolled into the little downstairs bathroom to take a leak, and in a tub full of tepid, bloody water, discovered the naked corpse of his mother with a plastic bag over her head. The film of condensation on the inside of the bag kept him from making out her face. Mainly, he could see her nose and the black, open hole of her mouth. A second later, he noticed the paring knife dripping blood onto the tiles beside the tub. At first I thought it was some kind of horrible mistake, he told Jimbo. Then I thought if I went out into the kitchen and came back in, she wouldn’t be there anymore.

All that time, his heart seemed not to beat. He thought he had hung in the doorway for an incredibly long time, looking at his mother and trying to make sense of what he saw. Blood pounded in his ears. He moved a step forward, and the tops of her knees came into view, floating like little pale islands in the red water.

In the next moment, he found himself standing alone in the middle of the kitchen, as if blown backward by a great wind. Through the open bathroom door, he could see one of his mother’s arms propped on the side of the tub. He told Jimbo, “I went over to the wall phone. It felt like I was swimming underwater. I didn’t even know who I was going to call, but I guess I dialed my father’s number at Quincy. He told me to call 911 and wait for him outside.”

Mark did exactly that. He called 911, communicated the essential information, and went outside to wait. About five minutes later, his father and the paramedics arrived more or less simultaneously. While he stood on the porch, he felt a numb, suspended clarity that, he thought, must be similar to what ghosts and dead people experienced, watching the living go through their paces.

In Jimbo’s opinion, that was the last time Mark had been clear about his own emotions. The next day, he had turned up at Jimbo’s back door, his mind focused on an unalterable plan. It was as if he had been considering it for weeks. He wanted to break into the house on Michigan Street, and his friend Jimbo had to come with him. In fact, Jimbo was indispensable. He couldn’t do it without him.

He confessed that he had tried to do it by himself and run into some unexpected trouble. His body had gone bananas on him. He’d felt like he couldn’t breathe and it was hard to see. All those spider webs, yuck! But none of that would happen if Jimbo went with him, Mark said, he knew they would be able to pass untroubled into the house. And once they got inside, they would be able to check out the strangest part of that building, which Mark had not mentioned to his friend until this very moment, the pup-tent room. Wasn’t Jimbo curious about a room like that? Wouldn’t he like to get a look at it?

“Not if that guy is in there,” Jimbo said.

“Think back, Jimbo. Are you really sure you saw him? Or did I maybe put the idea in your head?”

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Mark said. “Because if it’s the two of us, we’ll be all right.”

“I don’t get you.”

“You watch my back, I watch yours,” Mark said. “I think that house doesn’t have anything in it but atmosphere, anyhow.”

“Atmosphere,” Jimbo said. “Now I really don’t get you.”

“Atmosphere makes you see stuff. It made you faint, and it made me feel sick—it felt like spider webs were all over me. But they weren’t real spider webs, they were atmosphere.”

“Okay,” Jimbo said. “Maybe I see that, a little bit. But why do you want to go in there again?”

“I have to go in there,” Mark said. “That house killed my mother.”

Silently, Jimbo uttered, Ooh-kayyy, startled by an understanding that had come to him as if by angelic messenger: Mark felt guilty, and he didn’t know it. Jimbo did not have a detailed grasp of his friend’s psyche, but he was absolutely certain that Mark would not be ranting in this way if, on the day after he broke his promise to his mother, he had not walked into a bathroom and found her lying dead in the tub. Of that, he would not speak. It was unspeakable by definition. Instead, he could not stop himself from talking about this screwy plan. Jimbo resolved not to give in, to fight Mark on this issue for as long as it took.

Over the following days, Mark tested his resolution so often that Jimbo thought that he had been invited to accompany Mark into the house on Michigan Street on the order of something like once an hour. After the first dozen times, he adopted the approach that he would use on every occasion thereafter, to pretend that Mark’s obsessiveness was a joke. Mark might easily have been enraged by this tactic, but he barely noticed it.

One day during that hideous week, Jimbo heard from his father, who had learned of it from an off-duty police officer in a cop bar called the House of Ko-Reck-Shun, that a Los Angeles film crew would be on Jefferson Street early that afternoon, shooting a scene for a gangster movie. He called Mark, and the boys decided to take a bus downtown, an area they did not know as well as they imagined. They knew the number 14 bus would take them past the main library and the county museum, and they assumed that from there they would easily find Jefferson Street in or near the section of downtown located west of the Millhaven River, where theaters, bookstores, specialty shops, and department stores lined Grand Avenue all the way to Lafayette University, west of the library and museum.

They got off the bus too early and wasted twenty minutes wandering north and east before asking directions of a preppy-looking guy who appeared, Jimbo thought, more than a touch too interested in Mark, although as usual Mark failed to notice that he was being admired. Then they walked an extra block up Orson Street and reached the top of Cathedral Square before looking back to the corner and noticing that they had already gone past Jefferson. To cut off some extra distance, they took one of the paths angling through the square. With a pang, Jimbo realized that earlier in the summer they would never have made such a journey without their skateboards; this time, they had