Lost Boy Lost Girl

“I’ve done enough for him,” I said. “I’ve done all I have to do.”

“There’s no domain name,” Tom said. “Where did he send it from?”

“From wherever they are.”

“This is astonishing—two days after . . .”

“Back in New York,” I said, “before I knew that Mark’s mother had killed herself and I would have to come here, I saw lost boy lost girl stenciled on the sidewalk. In black paint. The next time I looked, it was gone.”

“They do that to advertise things.”

“I know, Tom. I’m just telling you what I saw. I never even mentioned it to Mark.”

“I think you liked the phrase,” Tom said. “I think you saw it on the sidewalk, and it stuck in your head. Somehow or other, you told Mark about it. That’s the way you work. It’s the way all writers work.”

“You don’t know everything,” I said.

Tom put his hands in his jacket pockets and bent his neck. He frowned at his shoes. “Tim,” he said. His voice was as relaxed and soft as an old glove. “Is this thing real?”

“As real as it can be,” I said.

On a humid, sunny afternoon in June, Mark Underhill sat at the bottom of the stairs in an empty house he knew not to be empty. It never had been, he thought. A presence had inhabited it from the first. The presence was female, and she had come for him. Her arrival in the house, which once had been a stage for the enactment of unspeakable and sacred horrors, had tumbled him off his skateboard and rooted him to the middle of Michigan Street. In what now seemed the last days of his childhood, she had stopped him cold. She had whispered to his mind, to his heart, and without hearing he had heard.

A light footstep sounded from somewhere above him. Successive footsteps proceeded softly overhead, he thought either in the bedroom or the corridor hidden behind it.

Above, a door opened or closed. Mark’s body tightened, then relaxed. He thought he heard faraway laughter.

When he thought of the giant’s bed two rooms away, the entire house filled with heat and light. The ugly added room that contained the bed rang and vibrated with a deep, resonant note that only a second before had melted into the material of the floor and walls. A great tuning fork had been struck. This was what he had been called to witness, Mark thought—this enormous thing that had already passed from view. The great feathers of its mighty wings beat the air, and in the tumult of its wake rode endless loss. His heart filled.

Mark listened to the small, light footsteps descending a staircase parallel to his, but narrower, steeper, and enclosed. When she at last showed herself, if this time she did, she would emerge through the closet door ten feet to his left. The footsteps chimed like brush strokes. It was like hearing someone stepping down a passage within his own head.

As though it shared his substance, 3323 North Michigan contracted, and he felt himself contract around his excitement. The little brush strokes descended another few steps and drew level.

That sound of wing beats; blood rushing through his ears. No, he thought, actual wing beats, those of birds that were not there and, to begin with, were not even birds.

He had no idea what was going to happen to him. He had put himself here, and now he would have to accept what occurred. If there was any comfort in the sudden chill awareness that everything was about to be immeasurably different, it was that he had not been placed in this moment randomly, by luck or chance. It had been waiting for him ever since the house had risen up before him like a castle rising from a plain.

Trembling, he shifted, drew up his knees, and fixed his eyes on the closet door. There came the pad of a soft footfall, the first faint click of a doorknob gripped and revolved. In the quarter second before the door began to swing open, time stopped for Mark Underhill.

Dust motes hung unmoving in the still air.

There came a sound, quiet at first, not to be identified. As it grew, he thought it was the overtone of a note from an upright bass, hanging in the air after the note itself had faded—

Then he thought he heard the hot buzzing metallic hum of a thousand cicadas. A mindless drone, greedy, intrusive . . . were there cicadas in Millhaven?

Cicadas?he thought. I don’t even know what a cicada looks like!

Ten feet to his left, the door opened on its hinges, and unlocked from some old chamber in his memory, the smell of chocolate-chip cookies drifted toward him—his mother had been baking cookies, and now they were swelling swelling swelling on the baking pan, melting beyond their boundaries, pushing up and forward and out. A slight figure slipped into the room.

That day, she told him her name.

The next, she threw off the simple things she had been wearing, then undressed him, and led him to the sheet-covered sofa. After that, Mark felt as if branded. She brought him hand in hand to the giant’s terrible bed and taught him to arrange his limbs in its grooves and hollows, which received her as well as him, so that they seemed almost to remake the giant’s bed beneath them as they moved.

He could not say to Jimbo: I wore her body like a second skin.

Is this real?he asked.

As real as it can be,she said. As real as I can make it.

Time changed its old, old nature and gave them its first, primal face. A single hour rocketed by in a lazy month. There was no time.

Go now and think,she said. Do you leave your world with me or in some lesser way? For all in your world must in their own time leave it.

She said, Make haste make haste the sun swims round the Dark Man cometh. But you may come with me.

Mark met his dearest friend and knew he would do so no more. He walked into the park on a summer evening and sat on a familiar bench. The first faint coolness of the coming night touched his cheek. The breeze said, Make haste make haste. Soon he rose and walked.

23

“Apparently he wants to talk to you,” Philip said. “You know that. I already told you.”

“It would be nice to know why.”

Philip pulled into a parking lot a block away from police headquarters, where some nineteen hours earlier Ronald Lloyd-Jones had been fingerprinted, photographed, stripped of his valuables and personal items, and formally charged with multiple homicides. The attending officers considered that he had endured these humiliations with an unsettling degree of good humor. He had refused to make a statement until his lawyer was present, but guess what? His lawyer was on a golfing vacation in St. Croix and would not be returning for another two or three days. Under the circumstances, he requested the dignity of a private cell, regular meals, and the use of legal pads and writing implements with which he could, as he said, “begin to organize my defense.” And, oh, by the way—did his arrest have any connection to the two gentlemen who had driven up to his house that afternoon, asking directions to Loblolly Road? The first half dozen officers he encountered knew nothing and, repulsed by their big, smiling captive, would have remained silent even if they had been able to answer his question. The seventh officer Lloyd- Jones met in the course of his busy afternoon was Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus. Pohlhaus informed Lloyd-Jones that he could not go into that matter.

—Then tell me, Lloyd-Jones said, since you must feel you have grounds for my arrest, were you acting on the basis of an identification made from a sketch?

Franz Pohlhaus allowed that a police sketch had played a role in the events of the afternoon.

—Was your witness the strange old lady who approached me in Sherman Park while I was engaged in an