Mystery

set behind them on the next street. Tall elms arched over this second street, which seemed as quiet as Eastern Shore Road. The houses beneath the elms were one notch less impressive than those on Calle Burleigh. Tom instantly understood that this second street was forbidden territory. This information was not ambiguous. The little street might as well have had a chain-link fence around it and a sign commanding him to KEEP OUT: a spear of lightning would sizzle right down out of the sky and impale him if he entered that street.

The imaginary light that shone on his face became stronger and hotter. He had been right to come all this way. He stepped sideways, and a little two-story wooden house painted a very dark brown on the top story and a bright buttery yellow on the bottom came into view on the forbidden street.

Two days earlier, Tom had been lying on the striped yellow chaise in the living room reading Jules Verne, inside the imaginary but total safety of words on a page organized into sentences and paragraphs—a world both fixed and flowing, always the same and always moving and always open to him. This was escape. It was safety. Then a loud noise, the sound of something striking the side of the house, had pulled him up on the yellow chaise as roughly as a hand shaking him from sleep. A moment later Tom heard a blurry voice shouting obscenities in the street. “Bastard! Shithead!” Another rock crashed against the side of the house. Tom had jumped from the chaise and moved to the front window, unconsciously keeping his place in the book with his index finger. A middle-aged man with a thick waist and short, thinning brown hair was weaving back and forth on the sidewalk beside a slumped canvas bag from which a few large stones had spilled. The man held a baseball-sized rock in each hand. “Do me like this!” he yelled. “Think you can treat Wendell Hasek like he’s some kind of jerk!” He turned all the way around and nearly fell down. Then he rounded his shoulders like an ape and squinted furiously at the two houses—each with great columns, round turrets, and twin parapets—across the street. One of these, the Jacobs house, was empty because Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs had gone to the mainland for the summer; the other was inhabited by Lamont von Heilitz, a fantastic and sour old man who lived in the shadows and echoes of some vague ancient scandal. Mr. von Heilitz always wore gloves, pale grey or lemon yellow, changed clothes five or six times a day, had never worked a single day in his whole life, and darted out on his porch to yell at children who threatened to step on his lawn. The chaos-man hurled one of his rocks toward the von Heilitz house. The rock banged against the rough stone side of the house, missing a large leaded window by only a few inches. Tom had wondered if Mr. von Heilitz would materialize on his front porch shaking a fist in a smooth grey glove. Then the man twitched his head as if to dislodge a fly, staggered back a few steps, and bent down for another rock, either forgetting the spare in his left hand or feeling that one rock was simply not enough. He thrust his hand into the canvas sack and began rooting around, presumably for a rock of the proper dimensions. He wore wash pants and a khaki shirt unbuttoned half of the way down the bulge of his stomach. His suntan ended at an abrupt line just below his neck—the protruding stomach was a stark, unhealthy white. The chaos-man lost his balance as he leaned down deeper into the bag and toppled over on his face. When he got himself up on his knees again, blood covered the lower half of his face. He was squinting now at Tom’s house, and Tom stepped back from the window.

Then Tom’s grandfather, Glendenning Upshaw, the most imposing figure in his life, came heavily down the stairs in his black suit, passed his grandson without acknowledging him, and slammed the front door behind him. Tom instinctively knew that the chaos-man had come for his grandfather and no one else, and that only his grandfather could deal with him. Soon his grandfather appeared, making his way down the walkway toward the sidewalk, thumping the tip of his unfurled umbrella against the pavement. The intruder shouted at Tom’s grandfather, but Tom’s grandfather did not shout back. The intruder fired a rock into Gloria Pasmore’s roses. He fell down again as soon as Tom’s grandfather reached the sidewalk. To Tom’s astonishment, his grandfather picked the man up, taking care not to bloody his suit, and shook him like a broken toy. Tom’s mother began yelling incoherently from an upstairs window and then abruptly stopped, as if she had just taken in that the whole neighborhood could hear her. Tom’s father, Victor Pasmore, came down and joined Tom at the window, staring out with a careful neutrality that excluded Tom. Tom slipped out of the living room, index finger still inserted between page 153 and page 154 of Journey to the Center of the Earth, moved through the empty hall, and continued on out through the open door. He feared that his grandfather had killed the chaos-man with the Uncle Henry knife he always carried in his trouser pocket. The heat was the muscular heat of the Caribbean in June, a steady downpouring ninety degrees. Tom went down the path to the sidewalk, and for a moment both the chaos- man and his grandfather stared at him. His grandfather waved him off and turned away, but the other man, Wendell Hasek, hunched his shoulders again and continued to stare fixedly at Tom. His grandfather pushed him backwards, and Hasek jerked away. “You know me,” he said. “Are you gonna pretend you don’t?” His grandfather marched the man to the end of the block and disappeared. Tom looked back at his house and saw his father shaking his head at him. His grandfather came trudging back around the corner of Eastern Shore Road and An Die Blumen, chewing his lip as he walked. The determination in his slow step suggested that he had pitched the chaos-man off the edge of the world. He glanced up and saw Tom, frowned, looked down at the sparkling sidewalk.

When he got back in the house he went wordlessly upstairs with Tom’s father. Tom watched him go, and when both his father and grandfather had closed his mother’s bedroom door behind them, he went into the study and pulled the Mill Walk telephone book onto his lap and turned the pages until he came to Wendell Hasek’s name. Loud voices floated down the stairs. His grandfather said “our” or “hour.”

Tom became aware of a thin sound like the cry of an animal a moment after he had ceased to hear it: then he immediately wondered if he had heard it. The cry lingered in his inner ear, probably the only place it had ever existed. No sound as soft as that had a chance of being heard in the clopping and rattling from Calle Burleigh.

Tom longed to be home, not stranded in a foreign district. The traffic on both sides of the boulevard blocked his passage across Calle Burleigh as effectively as a wall. There were no traffic lights on Mill Walk in those days, and the rows of vehicles extended as far as he could see. He would have to wait for the end of rush hour to cross the street, and by then darkness would be very near.

Then he heard the actual sound, not its sudden absence. It surrounded all the other noises of Calle Burleigh like a membrane. The cry disappeared into itself and vanished by gradations, like an animal that begins by swallowing its tail and ends by devouring itself altogether.

The cry came again, a wavering rose-pink cloud rising up from the block behind Calle Burleigh. The cloud broke into a stuttering series of dots like smoke signals and coalesced into a bright thread that went sailing over the tops of the houses.

Tom began to drift eastward on the pavement, his back to the streaming traffic. He slid his hands into the pockets of his white cotton trousers. His white button-down shirt, streaked with grey here and there by the milk cartons, adhered to his back.

The houses on Calle Burleigh gave him a broken and interrupted view of the forbidden street. Between two massive redbrick houses with wide porches Tom saw the two-story yellow and brown building and a smaller house, of rough white stone joined with thick ropes of mortar, beside it. He found himself before a brown wooden house as ornately ornamented as a cuckoo clock. He kept moving and looked through to the backs of brick houses on the next street. Facing him was a taller, two-story building of dirty cream-colored brick in which a broken first-floor window had been replaced by grease paper. In a sudden cessation of noise as the traffic stopped, he heard chickens clucking in the yard.

The pink cloud rose above the houses and thickened and narrowed, thickened and narrowed.

The traffic started up with clanks and shouts, with heavy hooves striking the ground, with cracking whips and ringing bells.

Tom moved sideways to get to the other side of a gloomy Gothic structure with a turret and a widow’s walk. A curtain shifted, and Tom had an impression of grey hair and a skull-like face peering out. The creature behind the window moved back just enough to become a grey blur.

The thin grey fingers disappeared, and the curtain dropped. Tom moved sideways, thinking in a way that was not quite verbal that he was not in his real life, but in some terrible dreamlike state from which he had to escape before it claimed him forever.

In the next instant the cry went up again, this time clearly from the little street Tom could see between the