by Peter Straub
“This is such bullshit,” Jimbo said. “But okay, do your thing.”
Mark was already moving down the alley. “You’ve seen it a thousand times before, but this time I want you to think about it, okay?”
“Yo, I can remember when you used to be sort of fun to hang with,” Jimbo said.
“Yo, I can remember when you still had an open mind.”
“Fuck you.”
“No, fuck you.”
Feeling obscurely improved by this exchange, they walked down the alley to the point between Mark’s backyard and the concrete wall.
“Look at that thing. Just look at it.”
“It’s a concrete wall, with barbed wire on top.”
“What else?”
Jimbo shrugged. Mark gestured toward the tangle of vines and leaves erupting from the sides of the wall.
“Plus all that crap,” Jimbo said. “And lots of plants around the sides.”
“Yeah, the sides. What’s on the sides?”
“Like fences, or big hedges.”
“What’s all this stuff for? Why was it put here?”
“Why? To keep other people off his property.”
“Take a look at the other houses on this block. What’s different about this one?”
“You can’t get in there without a hell of a lot of grief.”
“You can’t even see in,” Mark said. “This is the only house in this whole neighborhood that you can’t see from the alley. Does that tell you anything?”
“Not really.”
“The guy who put this up, whoever he was, didn’t want anyone looking at his backyard. That’s what all this stuff is for, to keep people from seeing it.”
“You’ve been thinking about this way too much,” Jimbo said.
“He was hiding something. Look at that humongous wall! Don’t you wonder what his secret was?”
Jimbo stepped backward, his eyes round with disbelief. “You’re like the world champion of bullshit. Unfortunately, to you everything you say makes sense. Can we go to the park now?”
In silence, the boys left the northern end of the alley and turned east on Auer Avenue, not an avenue at all but merely another residential street lined with houses and parked cars. Down Auer they proceeded for a single block that offered for their consideration two interracial couples sitting on their respective porches, a sight that so forcefully brought to the boys’ minds what their fathers would have to say about this spectacle that they themselves maintained their silence throughout their turn onto Sherman Boulevard and the one-block trek past the diner, the liquor stores, and the discount outlets to the corner of West Burleigh. Without waiting for the light, they ran across the busy street and continued on into the little park.
A substantial crowd of people milled aimlessly around the dry twenty-foot basin of the fountain. The competing sounds of Phish and Eminem drifted out of two facing boom boxes. Together, Mark and Jimbo noticed the uniformed officer leaning against the patrol car parked off to the side.
As soon as they saw the cop, their way of walking became more self-conscious and mannered. Indicating their indifference to official observation, they dipped their knees, dropped one shoulder, and tilted their heads.
“Yo, little homeboys,” the policeman called.
They pretended to take in his presence for the first time. Smiling, the cop waved them forward. “Come here, you guys. I want you to look at something.”
The boys lounged toward him. It was like a magic trick: one second the officer’s hands were empty, the next they held up an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of a stoner metalhead. “Do you know this guy?”
“Who is he?” Jimbo asked. “He’s in trouble, right?”
“How about you?” the cop asked Mark.
“I don’t know him,” Mark said.
The cop moved the stoner’s photograph closer to their faces. “Have either of you ever seen him here at night? Does he look familiar to you guys?”
They shook their heads. “Who is he?” Jimbo asked again.
The policeman lowered the photograph. “This kid’s name is Shane Auslander. He’s sixteen years old.”
“Where does he go to school?” Jimbo asked.
“Holy Name,” the cop said.
That explained a lot. For Mark and Jimbo, the boys who went to Holy Name fell into three basic categories: squeaky-clean nerds who were secret lushes; bullies and/or jocks who had a tendency to get in car wrecks from which they emerged pretty much unscathed; and, on the bottom rung, potheads struggling with the question of Mary’s virginity. Members of the third category often failed to complete high school.
“What’d he do, break into a drugstore and steal all the OxyContin?” Jimbo asked.
“He didn’t do anything,” the cop said. “Except four days ago, he went missing.”
“Went missing?” Jimbo asked.
“Vanished,” the cop said. “Disappeared.”
“He ran away, believe me,” Jimbo said. “Just look at this guy! His parents drop-kicked him into Catholic school, and he couldn’t stand the place.”
“Shane Auslander,” Mark said, looking at the boy in the photograph. “What do you think happened to him, Officer?”
“Thank you for your time.” The photograph had already disappeared into the manila envelope in the officer’s right hand.
“Do you think he’s still alive?” Mark asked.
“We appreciate your cooperation, sir,” the cop said.
As they moved away, the officer beckoned to a couple of girls who were whispering to each other a little way down the path. Soon the boys were on the edge of the crowd.
“Look, there’s another cop!” Mark said. “They come in, like, dyads.”
The second police officer, who was tall, slender, and blond, was showing Shane Auslander’s photograph to four seniors from Madison High.
“Shit,” Jimbo said. “That’s Raver, Sparkman, Tillinger, and Beaney Jacobs. Don’t let them see us.”
“Someone ought to snatch one of those assholes, them and their stupid hemp necklaces,” Mark said, moving toward the other side of the fountain. “Hey! I bet that’s what happened!”
“What?” Jimbo was keeping one eye on Raver, Sparkman, Tillinger, and Jacobs. Horrible individually, collectively they were a nightmare.
“Someone grabbed that kid right here. Or they met him here and led him away, you know, to their car, or to their house, whatever.”
“It’s not going to be a whole lot of fun around here tonight,” Jimbo said.
“Well,” said Mark, “if you feel like leaving, I can think of somewhere to go.”
8
For the next two days, Mark felt as though he were balancing two opposed forces, the house on Michigan Street and his mother. Both of these forces demanded great quantities of his time and attention, the house overtly, his mother passively. As if in thrall to some insidious disease, Nancy Underhill crept out of the house in the morning, crept back in at night, and did strikingly little in between. She “rested,” which meant disappearing for hours behind the closed bedroom door. According to Philip Underhill, a highly regarded expert on the mental and physical peculiarities of the contemporary American female, especially as represented by his wife, Mark’s mother was undergoing a long-anticipated and long-delayed spiritual backlash from the abuse she suffered daily on behalf of the gas company, not to mention the symptoms common to women experiencing a certain inevitable physical-hormonal milestone. In other words, she got into bed and, with luck, slept through her hot flashes. To Mark, she looked as though she hardly slept at all, nor did he think she was menopausal. From what he had learned in a compulsory sex-education class, women undergoing menopause could be emotionally overwrought. His mother was nothing like that. He would have preferred it if she were. Better a hot-tempered scold than a dispirited wraith.
Mark’s father seemed almost relieved by the change in his wife. Now that she had at last succumbed to the indignities inflicted upon h
er by the gas company, she needed to rest up before reaching the next stage, that of realizing that she ought to quit her crummy job. He had never liked the idea of her working; he had adjusted to it when they needed her salary to meet the mortgage and car payments, but ever since his move up into the vice principal’s office at Quincy, he had merely tolerated it.
Philip was pleased that Nancy came home from work worn and exhausted; he was pleased by the very things that distressed Mark. Mark thought that his mother was grateful for the distractions provided by indigent or irate consumers, and also for the gossipy company afforded by Florence, Shirley, and Mack. She did not meet her new problem at the office; she carried it around with her, like the consciousness of an illness. The problem frightened her. That frightened Mark. He had never considered his mother a fearful person, and now she looked as though some particular terror had stopped her in her tracks.
And while she either could not or refused to talk about the particularities of that terror, his mother expressed it in another way, by focusing on her son. She acted as though she were worried solely on his behalf; he could not return home at night without facing interrogation. Most of the scant conversation she directed his way had to do with his schedule. Where was he going, who was he going there with, what time would he get home? Because the truth would have sounded so bizarre, Mark found himself inventing tasks and errands that the Nancy of old would have seen through in an eye blink. Checking out the new puppies at the dog-breeding business run by a classmate’s parents, going to the county museum to wander through the exhibits, taking the nature trail alongside the Kinninnick River were things he’d enjoyed doing in grade school. At fifteen, he was no longer friends with the boy whose parents bred border collies, and the dioramas of alert-looking Indians and Mr. and Mrs. Neanderthal in the Millhaven County Museum retained nothing of their old ramshackle appeal. And his almost magically clueless parents would never find out in a million years, but the nature trail had disappeared when a budget cut had let the banks of the Kinninnick revert to a secretive brushy wasteland lately popular, according to the teenage bush telegraph, as a pickup bazaar for gay men.
Mark did not enjoy lying to his mother, but he was sure that telling her the truth would give rise to a hundred new questions, none of which he could answer. He could not explain why he should have become so fascinated by the house on Michigan Street, but fascinated he was. He would no longer have argued with the word “obsessed.” In fact, Mark liked being obsessed. Being obsessed absorbed into itself a good deal of his concern about his mother. When his attention was focused on the house, his mother might as well have been on the other side of the world.
Or on the moon. The house seemed to vacuum his ordinary concerns out of his mind and replace them with itself. Although Mark knew that his idea was absurd, 3323 North Michigan Street felt as much an active partner in his obsession as himself. Present from the first moment the place revealed itself to him, the sense that it possessed a will, even the capacity for desire, had taken hold in him while he and Jimbo had stood before it with their skateboards in their hands. When they returned to Michigan Street, Mark could feel in himself very little of the afternoon’s hesitancy. Half of him wanted to go up the flagged walk and prowl around the house; the other half was content to do no more than stand on the sidewalk and let his eyes roam over the roofline, the porch, the front windows. Dark to the point of opacity that afternoon, the windows were now, a couple of days later, a dead, flat black. To see anything through them, he would have to hold a flashlight up to the glass.
What would the flashlight reveal? An empty room. There was no point in even thinking about going in there. Mark had no interest in seeing a handful of dusty, long-neglected rooms.
Yet something kept him rooted to the sidewalk, resisting Jimbo’s irritated suggestions that they go back to his house and watch some TV.
After twenty minutes, Jimbo persuaded him to leave. The two of them went to his house and spent hours switching back and forth between music videos and foul-mouthed cartoons on the elderly fifteen-inch Motorola in Jimbo’s room. At ten-fifteen, he went downstairs; did his utmost not to ogle Margo Monaghan while bidding good night to her and a red-faced Jackie, tilting a nice slug of Powers Whiskey into his glass; proceeded homeward past vacant porches and lighted windows, in his mind seeing only the dull, remembered face of Shane Auslander and hoping that he had run away to Chicago, or New Orleans, or somewhere else where weed was plentiful; turned up his own path to his own porch and let himself in through his own unlocked front door; and for some reason experienced a burst of apprehension instantly rationalized by his father’s growl of unwelcome.
Philip looked at his watch. “Break out the champagne, he’s a whole five minutes ahead of his curfew.”
“I was watching TV at Jimbo’s,” he said.
Supine on the davenport, his mother pulled herself from the depths to ask, “You were there all night?”
“Pretty much,” he said. “We went over to the fountain for a little bit.”
“I don’t like that crowd at the fountain,” Philip said. “Trouble just waiting to happen.”
Upstairs, Mark switched on the radio. An old Prince tune filled the air with a toxic perfume. He unlaced his sneakers and tossed them toward the closet. Mark peeled off his shirts and let them drop to the floor. Ditto his socks. Soon afterward, his teeth brushed and various previously unwashed parts of his body more or less washed, he was back in his room picking up his jeans and putting clothes into the wicker hamper. While engaged in these humble duties, Mark remembered that his window looked directly down at the alley, and also, therefore, onto the rear of the house across the alley. He dropped his clothes, scrambled across the room to the window, and thrust his head and shoulders into the humid night.
Light from his window and from the kitchen beneath made pale, oblong rectangles on the patchy yard. Beyond the rectangles of light could be seen only shapes and the vague suggestions of shapes. A faint gleam on the boards of the ruined fence led toward the hazy darkness of the alley, its dimensions sketched by faint moonlight. Beyond the outline of the eight-foot wall loomed the bushy crowns of trees. Mark had the faint memory, more like that of something glimpsed in passing than actually seen, of the great trees rising behind the cement wall. For a moment, disappointment like a red-hot awareness of loss burned at the center of his body. He would never be able to see the back of that house from his window, at least not until October, when the leaves fell.
How many Octobers had he—
—without once bothering to look—
Mark switched on his bedside lamp, punched off the main bedroom light, and padded back to bed to continue reading the book he had taken a few days earlier from a shelf in the kitchen, a previously unopened copy of one of his uncle’s novels that had been inscribed to his parents. For Philip and Nancy/Something for the wee hours/With Love,/Tim. A sporadic reader at best, Mark had been reluctant to sample his uncle’s work, but he had soon found himself enjoying The Divided Man. It had a built-in dread that made him want to keep reading, and to judge by the street names, a big part of the book seemed to be set in Millhaven. Twenty minutes later, the lines of print began to melt into dream-sentences. He turned off his light, rolled over, and fell effortlessly into unconsciousness.
As a cabbie dreams of driving, a baker of his loaves, Mark dreamed of standing on the pavement in front of the abandoned house, now abandoned no longer. Men and women, some of them with children, congregated on the narrow porch and passed in and out of the front door. Whenever Mark looked at the front windows, he saw the partygoers, the visitors, the celebrants moving around in the crowded living room. Among those arriving were policemen, ax-carrying firefighters in yellow-striped coats, and sailors in dress whites, a UPS driver, his father’s boss, a man in a diving suit and scuba gear . . . and some small children, four-year-olds he had known in nursery school but had not seen since. Whenever the front door opened, cheerful music came to him. Mark felt an overwhel
ming desire to go up onto the porch and join the party, but some mysterious reluctance held him back. He felt shy, awkward, out of place: apart from Mr. Battley, who didn’t count, the only people he knew were the nursery school children.
From the porch, a famous blue eye winked at him, and a famous smile stopped his heart: Gwyneth Paltrow! And who stood beside her but Matt Damon, grinning like crazy and winding his hand in the air, saying Come on, Mark, get up here! And there, beside Matt Damon, was Vince Vaughn, surely; and peeking out from behind Vince, wasn’t that Steven Spielberg, with his arm around Jennifer Lopez? You know you belong here with us, Gwyneth’s smile said. I can’t believe how stupid you’re being!
Resist Gwyneth Paltrow? Hold out against Gwynnie? He stepped off the sidewalk onto the walkway and began to move toward the party. As he approached, the people on the porch began to slip into the house, first Steven Spielberg and J.Lo, then Ben Affleck—whom he hadn’t even seen before!—and Matt Damon, then even Gwynnie, and by the time he reached the steps only two skeletally thin policemen remained on the porch, gazing down at him with their hats pushed back on their heads and their collar buttons undone. Their teeth jutted from their shrunken gums like the teeth of the dead. No more than skin adhering to bone, the policemen leaned toward him. From the house came an odor of rot, floating atop a sour wave of hurdy-gurdy music. One of the cops reached out to take his hand, and Mark understood that this jackal-like figure, no more alive than an image on an Egyptian tomb, wanted him to meet Shane Auslander. He jolted back, his heart accelerating in shock and fear, and saw that he had not been quick enough. The jackal’s dirt-encrusted hand had already closed on the fabric of his sleeve. Mark screamed in panic and without transition found himself sitting up in bed, panting as though he had run a marathon.
Gradually his panic left him, and he got out of bed and went to his window. Out in the night, something happened: a bloated, dark shape melted through the barbed wire at the top of the wall and—he thought—dropped into the alley. It might have been a cat; it might have fallen inside the wall, not into the alley. Mark’s reawakened terror, cold as dry ice, brushed his stomach and his lungs. That had not been a cat, unless cats grew to the size of pigs. And he was almost certain that it had jumped down into the alley.