Lost Boy Lost Girl

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.

“This house has to have a really terrible history,” Mark said.

“Its present isn’t all that wonderful. I mean, Mark, the place really gives me the creeps. It’s almost like there’s someone else in here with us.”

“I know what you mean,” Mark said. “Let’s go downstairs and get it over with. I’ll do the real searching tomorrow.”

One floor down, the boys roamed through the living room and the dining room, exploring closets and cabinets and examining the floorboards for secret caches. Mark appeared to be observing architectural eccentricities he was not bothering to describe. He lifted his eyebrows, he pushed his lips in and out, he went through all these little gestures of thought and comprehension. Whatever he was comprehending he kept to himself.

Too soon for Jimbo’s comfort, they found themselves back in the kitchen. If anything, he felt worse about that extra room than he had earlier. A bad, bad feeling seemed to flow directly from it. As if in response, the door in the wall seemed to have grown larger, taken on increased density.

“I’m not sure I want to see what’s in there,” he said.

“Then don’t go in.”

Mark went to the door and pulled it open. He stepped back, making it possible for Jimbo, whose heart felt as though it were in free fall, to move up alongside him. Within, the boys could see only a flat sheet of darkness. Mark made a noise low in his throat and went up to the door, and Jimbo trailed a reluctant half step behind.

“We’re just going to do this,” Mark said. “It’s only an empty room, that’s all.” With a single step, he moved into the dark room. Jimbo hesitated for a moment, swallowed, and went after him into the darkness. Suddenly his face felt hot.

“I should have brought that flashlight,” Mark said.

“Yeah,” Jimbo said, without at all agreeing.

Their eyes began to adjust. Jimbo was reminded of that moment when you walk into a dark theater and pause before moving down the aisle. The featureless darkness faded to a grainy shadowland. Jimbo became aware of a faint but serious odor. Here, something animal and unpleasant had been added to the smell of emptiness and defeat exuded by the rest of the house. He realized that he was looking at a large object with a shape at once familiar and foreign.

“Shit fuck damn. What the hell is that?”

“I think it’s a bed.”

“That thing can’t be a bed, ” Mark said. They moved closer to the object that dominated the room. It extended sideways under the slanting roofline and bore an initial resemblance to a bed—the bed of a cruel giant who nightly collapsed into it drunk. Thick, crude ten-foot timbers defined the sides, and sloppily assembled planks formed the rough platform on which the giant slept. They moved in closer, and without indicating anything in particular, Mark said, “Uh-oh.”

“I wouldn’t want to spend the night on that thing,” Jimbo said.

“No, look.” Mark pointed at what Jimbo had taken for a darkness in the grain of the long planks. In the center of the darkness, a pair of leather cuffs about three feet apart were fastened to the platform with chains. Another pair of restraints, a little farther apart, had been chained to the platform about four feet beneath them.

“The legs are bolted to the floor,” Mark said. His eyes shone in the darkness.

“Who was this for?” Then Jimbo noticed that the series of blotches, which seemed to be black, around and between the restraints were not an element of the grain. “I’m getting out of here. Sorry, man.”

He was already moving toward the door, holding up his hands as if to ward off an attacker. With a last look at the huge bed, Mark joined him. On the other side of the door, they glanced at each other, and Jimbo was afraid that Mark was going to say something, but he looked away and kept his thoughts to himself.