by Peter Straub
“We have to go in there,” Mark said. “You know it. You’re softening up. Little by little, my logic is wearing away your resistance.”
They reached the bottom of Cathedral Square and turned left on Jefferson. Two blocks ahead, a lot of people were milling around alongside the Pforzheimer Hotel.
Mark jumped ahead and turned around, dancing on the balls of his feet. “Don’t you believe in my stunning logic?” He aimed a fist at Jimbo’s left arm and gave him two light blows.
“All right, let’s think about it, okay? There’s this empty house, except it might not actually be empty.”
“It’s empty,” Mark said.
“Be quiet. There’s this house, okay? For a long time you don’t really see it, but when you finally do, you want to spend most of your time looking at it. Then your mother makes you promise to leave the place alone. You get spooked out, but you decide to break in anyhow and look around. And the next day, you find out she killed herself. And then you lose your mind, you say the house made it happen, and you have to go in and search the place from top to bottom.”
“Sounds logical to me.”
“You know what it sounds like to me?”
“Ah, a great idea?”
“Guilt.”
Mark stared at him, momentarily speechless.
“It is guilt, pure guilt. You can’t stand it. You’re blaming yourself.”
Mark glanced around at the streetlamps, the parked cars, the placards before the buildings on Jefferson Street. He looked almost dazed.
“I swear, no one understands me. Not my father, not even you. My uncle might understand me—he has an imagination. He’s coming here today. Maybe he’s already in town.”
Mark pointed at the Pforzheimer, unaware that I was looking down at him from a fourth-floor window. “That’s where he’s staying, the Pforzheimer. It costs a lot to stay there. For a writer, he makes a lot of money.”
(This was sweet, but not very accurate.)
“Maybe we should go see him right now,” Mark said. “Wanna do it?”
Jimbo declined. An unpredictable adult stranger from New York could only complicate matters. The two boys continued up the street until they were within about twenty feet of the film crew. A burly man with a ZZ Top beard and a name tag on a string around his neck waved them to a halt.
“It’s that dude from Family Ties,” Jimbo said.
“Michael J. Fox? You’re crazy. Michael J. Fox isn’t that old.”
“Not him, the dude who played his father.”
“He must be really old by now. He still looks pretty good, though.”
“No matter how good he looks, that car’s going to mess him up,” Mark said, and both boys laughed.
Mark’s father spoiled everything, that was the problem. They had seen Timothy Underhill’s car pull up in front of the house, and Jimbo could tell that his friend was excited just to see his uncle walk up to the porch. Jimbo thought he looked like an okay kind of guy, kind of big, and comfortable in jeans and a blue blazer. He had a been-around kind of face that made him look easy to get along with.
But when they turned off the boom box and went out of the room, Mark’s dad made a dumb, dismissive remark even before they got to the staircase—something about “the son and heir” and his “el sidekick-o faithful-o,” making them both sound like fools. When they were being introduced, Mark’s dad referred to Jimbo as Mark’s “best buddy-roo” and insisted on treating them as if they were in the second grade, which made it impossible to stay in the house. Then Mark’s dad got all anal about what time they had to be back, and Jimbo could see Mark getting jumpier and jumpier. He looked like a guy who had just put down a ticking suitcase and wanted to get the hell out of there before it blew up.
Once they managed to get out, Jimbo followed Mark reluctantly to the sidewalk in front of 3323, where no shadowy nonfigures had not-appeared in the living room window. Jimbo had to agree: whatever might have been true earlier, now the house was as empty as a blown egg. You could tell just by looking at it. The only movement in that place came from the settling of the dust.
“We are going to do this,” Mark said. “Believe it or not, we are.”
“Do you want me to come along to the thing at the funeral home tonight?”
“If you’re not going, I’m not going, and I have to go, so . . .”
“I guess I am el faithful-o sidekick-o,” Jimbo said.
Alone and massive on its little hill, Trott Brothers struck Jimbo as looking like a castle with dungeons and suits of armor. Inside, it was both grand and a little seedy. They were pointed to a small, tired-looking room like a chapel, with four rows of chairs facing an open coffin. To Jimbo, this was terrible, cruel, tasteless: they were forcing Mark to look at his dead mother’s face! It was one thing to respect the dead, but how about respecting the living? Jimbo risked a peek at the pale figure in the coffin. The person lying there did not look like Mark’s mother, exactly; she looked more like a younger sister of Mrs. Underhill’s, someone who’d gone off and known a completely different life. Immediately, the men drifted to the back of the little room, and Jimbo and Mark sat down in the last row.
Mark’s father handed him a card with a Hawaiian sunset on one side. When he turned it over, Jimbo saw the Lord’s Prayer printed beneath Nancy’s name and her dates.
“You okay?” he whispered to Mark, who was turning the card over and over in his hands, examining it as if it were a clue to a murder in a mystery novel.
Mark nodded.
A couple of minutes later, he leaned over and whispered, “Do you think we could sneak out?”
Jimbo shook his head.
Philip ordered his son to get on his feet and pay his respects to his mother. Mark stood up and walked the length of the center aisle until he was in front of the coffin. As Jimbo watched, Philip staged a dramatic moment and put his arm around his son’s shoulders, probably the first time he had done that since Mark’s tenth birthday. He couldn’t help it, Jimbo thought. In fact, he didn’t even know that he was putting on a photo op for a nonexistent photographer. He thought he was being genuine. Jimbo could see Mark squirm beneath his father’s touch.
As soon as Philip relented and walked away, Jimbo got to his feet and moved up to join his friend. He did not want to look at that cosmeticized not-Nancy in the coffin, so he moved slowly, but he could not bear the thought of Mark standing up there by himself. When he reached Mark’s side, he glanced in his direction and saw by a softening in his eyes that Mark was grateful for his presence.
In a voice almost too low to be heard, Mark said, “How long do you think I’m supposed to stand here?”
“You could leave now,” Jimbo said.
Mark stared down at the woman in the coffin. His face had settled into an expressionless mask. A single tear leaked from the corner of his left eye, then his right. Startled, Jimbo glanced again at his friend and saw that the mask of his face had begun to tremble. More tears were brimming in his eyes. All at once, Jimbo felt like crying, too.
From the back of the room, Mark’s father said in a pompous stage whisper, “You have to feel sorry for the poor kid,” and Jimbo’s tears dried before they were shed. If he’d heard it, so had Mark.
The boys’ eyes met. Mark’s face had turned violently red. Timothy Underhill said something too soft to be heard, and this time all but forgetting to keep his voice down, Mark’s father said, “Mark found her that afternoon—came home from God knows where . . .”
Jimbo heard Mark gasp.
“By the time I got home,” Philip was saying, “they were taking her to the ambulance.”
“Oh, no,” said Mark’s uncle.
His face rigid but still flushed, Mark stepped back from the coffin and turned around. A few minutes later, all of them were moving back outside into the roaring heat. The huge sun hung too close to the earth, and the light burned Jimbo’s eyes. Mark’s father buttoned his suit jacket, straightened his tie, and set off down the hill like a sa
lesman off to close a deal. Timothy Underhill gave the boys a look brimming with sympathy, then followed his brother down the descending path. Lines of heat wavered up from the roof of the Volvo.
Mark jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and glared at the neat, suspiciously lush grass that ended in a knife edge at the sides of the path. “I hate my father,” he said in an eerily reasonable voice.
With a brief, electric thrill of panic, Jimbo wondered how Mark was going to get through the funeral.
14
For Mark, the day of his mother’s funeral revolved around the moment the hard, grayish-brown lump of clay bearing the print of the gravedigger’s shovel fell from his right hand into the maw of her grave and struck the top of her coffin. Before that moment, he had wondered if he could make it through everything the day would demand of him, or if he might succumb to various disasters either internal or external in nature. He could see himself fainting, as Jimbo had fainted on the lawn of the house on Michigan Street; far worse, he could also see himself falling down in a frothing, eye-rolling seizure. These humiliations would occur, he thought, in front of the mourners assembled at Sunnyside Cemetery. The minister would be opening his great Bible; the Monaghans, and the Shillingtons, and the Tafts, plus a couple of the goofy ladies from the gas company and maybe a schoolteacher or two would be standing beside the grave, looking sad and dignified; even Jackie Monaghan, who would surely be in a most grievous condition of hangover and therefore in desperate need of a quick, medicinal jolt; and Mark’s father would be staring straight ahead, with his hands folded on the mound of his belly in a fury of enraged impatience; and then he would embarrass everyone and disgrace himself by jerking and twitching and drooling into the cemetery’s beautifully maintained grass. Or the sky would suddenly darken, abrupt rain would slash down onto the mourners, and a bolt of lightning would slide out of the firmament and fry him where he stood.
The internal catastrophes were far worse, involving as they did a painful death caused by the overheated, untrustworthy physical mechanism that was his body. Because these were worse, they were far more likely. A heart attack, an aneurysm, a brain hemorrhage—common sense told him that he was much likelier to die from a brain hemorrhage than a lightning bolt.
His father’s face suggested that he was counting the minutes until he could leave. Mark regarded the stiff, damped-down expression and realized that he was bound to this man for years and years to come.
Standing a bit apart from the rest of the group and wearing a dark blue suit, horn-rimmed sunglasses of an odd, solarized blue, and a dark blue WBGO cap bearing the image of a man playing a tenor saxophone, Uncle Tim looked as though he was checking everybody out. Maybe Mark’s father would let him stay with Uncle Tim for a week or two.
He listened to the Rent-a-minister’s words, thinking that he seemed like a nice man. He had a slow, pleasant way of speaking, and the sort of rumbling, trustworthy voice that paid off for politicians and voice-over men. Every word the man said seemed to be sensible and carefully chosen. Mark understood each one as it entered his consciousness. The larger verbal units of phrases and sentences, however, made so little sense to Mark that they might as well have been in a foreign language—Basque, maybe, or Atlantean. He was hyperconscious of the breath moving in and out of his throat, the blood traveling through his veins, the sizzle of sunlight on the backs of his hands.
The minister stepped back. A machine like a forklift lowered the coffin into the Astroturf-bedecked grave. The coffin settled on the ground, and two men whisked away the fake grass. Mark’s father walked the few steps to the pyramidal heap of earth scooped from the gravesite. He picked up a baseball-sized lump of dirt, leaned over the open grave, and extended his arm. The lump of dirt fell from his hand and struck the lid of the coffin with a reverberant thunk that made Mark fear he would be struck deaf and blind. For a second, the world before him faded into hundreds of fast-moving red and white specks like infant comets. The dancing specks resolved into the figure of Philip Underhill wiping his hands as he stepped back from the grave. Mark’s head was spinning and the middle of his chest seemed to be filled with effervescent air slightly cooler than the rest of his body. Uncle Tim moved toward the grave. He, too, held a baseball of earth in one hand.
Uncle Tim’s rock hit the coffin with the flat, hollow rap of a hand on a massive wooden door.
Still a little disembodied, Mark moved over to the temporary pyramid of grave dirt and pulled from it a lump with long striations on its widest surface. This piece of clay had been through the mill. It had been stabbed in the gut, bitten, and cut in half. The cool gas filling his chest advanced into the bottom of his throat. His feet moved with surprising confidence alongside the deep trench in the ground. He let the hard-edged clod drop from his hand, and it struck the coffin with a high-pitched pinging sound that reminded Mark uncomfortably of a doorbell. A shiver passed through him.
No matter what Jimbo said, Mark suddenly understood that he had seen the force that had stopped him inside the back door of the house; he had seen the force that had killed his mother. It had been standing at the top of Michigan Street with its back turned to him. Mark remembered the dark, tangled hair, the wide back, the black coat hanging like iron, and the sense of utter wrongness that had flowed out from this figure. That wrongness had seeped into his mother and so poisoned her that she had leaped into her grave.
The day swung around on a pivot, and his fear transformed itself into clarity. Two tasks lay before him. He had to learn whatever he could about the history of 3323 North Michigan Street and those who had lived in it, so that he could put a name to that evil being. And he had, more than ever, to discover its secrets. He could avenge his mother’s death in no other way. Images of himself ransacking the closets and ripping up floorboards raced through his mind. According to Jimbo, guilt lay behind these desires, but Jimbo was wrong. What he was feeling was rage.
Like a set of orders, his new clarity accompanied him on the journey back to Superior Street and sent him into the house with the white noise of his purpose humming in his head. The funeral was over, it was time to arrange the next step, hurry hurry the minutes slip away.
Men and women filtered in through the front door, but Jimbo was not among them. Mark’s father and Uncle Tim set out the soft drinks and the casseroles and coffee cake brought by the Shillingtons and the Tafts, and soon a crowd as numerous as flies around a bloody corpse had fastened on the dining room table, fracturing and coalescing again as they wandered in and out of the living room holding paper plates and paper cups. The Rochenkos came in hand in hand because they felt shy and ill at ease. A few beats later, Old Man Hillyard eased through the door, not holding hands with anyone, in fact gripping a cane with one hand while the other was deep in a trouser pocket. Annoyingly, Mr. Hillyard caught Mark’s eye and came limping toward him. On a ninety-degree day, he was wearing a thick plaid shirt, ancient corduroy trousers held up by suspenders, and an incongruous pair of cowboy boots.
“I was very sorry to hear about your mother,” he said. “You have my condolences, son. If there’s anything I can ever do for you, just ask.”
Like that’s gonna happen, Mark thought, and thanked the old man.
“See you and the Monaghan boy out on your skateboards almost every day,” Hillyard said. “Those wheels of yours sure make a hellacious racket.” His face drew itself up into a network of deep corrugations, and Mark realized that he was smiling. “Looks like you might be improving some. Wish I could get around like the two of you.” He lifted the cane and shook it. “I was doing all right until my ankle folded right under me when I stepped off my porch the other day. Went down like a sack of potatoes. The way I feel now, I can barely make it to the grocery store.” He leaned forward and whispered, “Tell you the truth, son, I can barely make it to the can when I have to go wee-wee in the middle of the night.”
“I can’t help you with that one,” Mark said, wanting desperately to get away from the old man.
<
br /> “You and Red spend a heck of a lot of time staring at that empty house across from me,” Old Man Hillyard said, horrifying him. “The two of you thinking of moving in?”
“Sorry, my dad needs me to do something,” Mark blurted, then backpedaled on an angle that gave him a better view of the front door. His father’s boss, Mr. Battley, had just appeared at the head of a phalanx of people from the school, all of whom he knew far too well. In their professional costumes of gray suits and white shirts, they resembled FBI agents, but poorly paid ones.
Never before had the house contained so many people. The crowd spilled from the living room into the dining room, where the Quincy people were now single-mindedly headed, and from there into the kitchen. Although most people were speaking quietly, their voices created a noisy Babel in which it was difficult to make out individual words. Ordinarily, this would have resulted in furious eruptions from his father, but Philip seemed more relaxed and at ease than at any time earlier in the day. He looked like a host who had decided to let the party take care of itself. Now his father was following Mr. Battley toward the food, and Mark suspected that he would stay by his boss’s side until the principal had scarfed down enough free grub and made his good-byes.
When Mark glanced again at the front of the living room, Mr. Hillyard was boring the pants off the Rochenkos. The Monaghan family was beginning to come through the door. First Margo, as ever suggesting that some movie star had happened to walk in by mistake; then Jackie, grinning and red-faced, as ever suggesting that he wouldn’t at all object were you to offer him a wee dram of popskull; and finally Jimbo, who gave him a not-unfriendly glance of inspection.
Before he could signal Jimbo to meet him in the kitchen, his uncle Tim appeared beside him with an unexpected offer. “I think you should come to New York and stay with me for a week or so. Maybe in August?”