Lost Boy Lost Girl

No voice, no footfalls responded.

“I know you’re here,” he called in a carrying voice. “Show yourself!”

His heart thudded. While he was in the basement, someone had slipped out of hiding—this house offered a great many hiding places—gone to the master bedroom, picked up the laden bag, and with it moved through the house on either the visible staircase or a hidden one to the ground floor, where this someone worked the catch on the wooden safe, deposited in it the paper bag, closed the box back up, and thereafter disappeared back into the secret parts of the house. Yesterday, the same person had taken the photo album back to the upstairs closet.

It came to him that everything about the house had changed—changed without transition—and he had only just now registered the difference, which was enormous.

The monstrous snout-being that wished to frighten him away was not interested in playing games. That creature wanted to scare him off, so that it could rejoice in the poisoned atmosphere that it had created. Someone else, someone quick and stealthy as a panther, had shifted the bag from one closet to another. During every moment of Mark’s progress through the house’s hidden passages, this being had been aware of his exact location. Mark might as well have been blowing a bugle as he worked his way through the house.

Because most of what he knew about this silent someone else was simply that it was present in the house, he thought of it as “the Presence.” Of course, Mark reminded himself, that the bag and its contents had been moved was all the proof he had of the Presence’s existence. That seemed proof enough. The Presence had shifted Mark’s things, believing that he would find them in their new hiding place, which meant oho o me-o my-o that it wanted him to know he wasn’t alone.

The chill that had moved across his skin receded, and he became aware of the heat of his T-shirt sticking to his skin. Dust swirled in the dim light from the window. The sheets draped over the chairs and the sofa seemed to stir. When he rubbed his eyes and looked again, they hung still as shrouds. A white blur moved across the periphery of his vision. When he turned to look at it, it was gone.

Not long before dusk, the boys sat huddled together on the bench nearest the Sherman Park fountain, conversing intently under the eye of a police officer named Quentin Jester. Patrolman Jester strained to overhear the boys’ conversation. The few words he caught were not helpful, nor did they alleviate his boredom, which had returned to him after banishment by a brief and unsettling incident. Along with four strategically placed policemen, plus a homeless man pushing a grocery cart full of empty bottles down a path, the boys were alone in the park.

What Patrolman Jester failed to mention in his report, or at any other opportunity (except for that presented by his fellow officer and academy classmate Louis Easley at the House of Ko-Reck-Shun), was that shortly before the homeless man entered the scene from the east, and first one boy, the red-haired one, then the other, Mark Underhill, entered from the north, a fourth stranger had excited his professional attention not only by his great size and unusual clothing but for another matter as well, one more difficult to put into words. “He looked like back in the day, he could have played some college ball,” Jester said. “One thing about this dude, he had some serious size on him. But he never played no ball. He never played anything. This guy never played, period, unless it was with a couple of cut-off heads. I got this feeling, like ‘We got trouble here,’ okay?”

Patrolman Jester explained that he had at no point seen the man’s face. And although he had spent the previous hour and a half monitoring the movements of the few people who entered and left his assigned area of Sherman Park, Jester had failed to observe this gigantic man’s appearance until, without any of the usual signals of arrival, the dude had simply come into being in front of him, straight out of nowhere, his back turned to the startled officer. Jester had been following the progress across the grass of a particularly fat and lively squirrel, a squirrel undaunted by the heat that had enervated most of his kind, and upon swinging his gaze back to the broad path and its empty benches, he’d discovered the presence of this massive character, decked out in a long black coat that dropped well past his knees. Huge legs, planted far apart; heavy black boots; massive head held high; and arms folded in front of him. He might have been carved out of half a ton of black marble.

“How could a water buffalo like that sneak up on you?” asked Patrolman Easley.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Jester told his friend. “All I knew was, this man is there, and he is my problem. Because you know he is a problem.”

“You and me, we haven’t been out of the academy long enough to be able to smell the bad guys.”

“You’d know what I’m talking about if you were there. He’s one bad mother, is what I’m saying, and there he is in front of me, and I have to deal with him.”

Louis Easley raised both his eyebrows and his beer glass, but he did not drink. “So this is our man? Mr. Sherman Park himself, in person?”

“That’s what was going through my mind. I move up on him so I can at least get a look at his face. This rumbling noise is coming toward me from the boulevard entrance, and I look that way, and this red-haired kid is pumping along on a skateboard. When I look back, the big dude is gone. Gone, man. Like he fell straight down through a trap door.”

“You, you’re some kind of police officer,” Easley told him.

“You wouldn’t be laughing, you saw him, too,” Jester said.

A few seconds after Jimbo rolled to the bench and jumped off his board, the policeman who’d been standing on the other side of the walkway gave him a funny look and said, “Buddy, while you were coming up this path, did you happen to notice a man standing right over here in this position?”

“I didn’t see anyone but you,” Jimbo said.

“You had a good view of this area.”

“I guess.”

“Where was I standing when you first saw me?”

“Over there.” Jimbo pointed to a spot on the edge of the walkway four feet south of the fountain. It was just about where another officer had shown him and Mark the photograph of Shane Auslander.

“And when I was over there, no one was over here?”

“Not until you got here.”

“Thank you,” said Officer Jester, retreating.

These guys are losing their minds,Jimbo said to himself.

When he first caught sight of Mark moving empty-handed from the bright sun of Sherman Boulevard into the wavering shade cast by tall lindens on the wide flags of the walkway, he felt a twinge of loss. This time, he had brought his skateboard and Mark had not, which was, he found, worse than the recognition that both of them had left their boards at home. It made him for a moment feel as though Mark had set off on a journey that left him waving from the dock. Mark drew closer, and the urgent expression on his face reminded Jimbo that he, too, had something incredible to announce, although he was not so sure he actually wanted to tell Mark what Mr. Hillyard had revealed to him.

Mark suffered from no such scruple. His eyes blazing, he could barely restrain himself from running. Jimbo saw him take in the skateboard and on the spot dismiss it as an irrelevance. The swift, deepening ache this brought Jimbo almost immediately dwindled in the intensity of Mark’s eager slide down onto the bench and the swooping tilt of his shieldlike face toward Jimbo’s. He was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, and his face had a scrubbed, gleaming look. He smelled faintly of soap.

“You just take a shower?”

“You wouldn’t believe how dirty I got,” Mark said. He was exulting. “The bottom of the bathtub was all black.”

“I guess you found something.”

Mark’s grin tightened, and his eyes narrowed. Jimbo could not decipher these signals. It looked to him as though what Mark had found was either unspeakably bad or outrageously good.

“How about you?”

“I’ve got some stuff, yeah, but you go first.”

Mark straightened up on the park bench, placed a hand over his mouth, and looked over his shoulder at Patrolman Jester. Patrolman Jester looked back at him, poker-faced. “Well, that’s a pretty amazing place. Whoever lived there last probably. . . . Are you ready for this?”

“I know something about it already. Whoever lived there probably what?”