Lost Boy Lost Girl

by Peter Straub

  “About what?” Jimbo said.

  Mark moved along the wall, opened the door, and leaned in.

  “Anything there?”

  Mark disappeared inside.

  Jimbo moved toward the closet and heard a sound as of something sliding off a shelf. Smiling, Mark reappeared through the door. He was holding a dust-covered object Jimbo needed a moment to recognize as an old photo album.

  Jimbo had no way of knowing, and Mark had no intention of telling him, that the smile on his face had been inspired not by the photo album, but by something else altogether—a door set into the back of the closet. A certain theory about the house he was at last exploring had begun to form in his mind, and the door inside the closet seemed to confirm it.

  “Bingo!”

  “Yeah,” Mark said. “Let’s take a look.” He went to the window and held the album in the light. Dark gray with accumulated dust, it had once been a deep forest green. Quilted plastic rectangles made to resemble cloth surrounded a central plate that read FAVORITE FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS. Mark opened the cover to the first page of photographs.

  A heavy-set young man wearing a long black coat and heavy boots bent sideways on the bumper of an old Ford and shielded his face with a hand. In the second photograph the same young man’s face was a stationary blur as he stood with his arm around a smiling girl whose dead-straight hair fell nearly to her waist.

  “I don’t believe it,” Mark said. “Look at this.”

  Shrouded by his long coat, his back to the camera, the man bent over a table littered with clamps, sanders, and jars of nails.

  Then came a photograph taken directly outside this house. The lawn was barer, the trees looked smaller. Showing only the top of his head, the man held the branchy arms of a small boy of five or six.

  As if having a son had released something in him, the three photographs that followed caught him in the midst of a social gathering seemingly located at a lakeside tavern. Wearing his usual garb, the man had been photographed in conversation with other men of his age or older. Here he was standing on a dock next to the tavern, here he perched on an overturned rowboat with two other men and a woman with plucked eyebrows and a cigarette in her mouth. In every photograph, the man’s stance made his face unavailable to the camera.

  “What’s your name, you asshole?” Mark said. “Don’t want to show your face to the camera, do you?”

  “I’m sorry, this is creeping me out,” Jimbo said. “The guy in your kitchen didn’t show his face, either.”

  “Because this is him, get it? He’s the guy.”

  “This is way too scary for me,” Jimbo said. “Sorry. We should never have come in here. We should have left the whole thing alone right from the start.”

  “Shut up.”

  Mark was scowling down at the photographs. He abruptly bent his neck and lowered his head closer to the page. “I wonder . . .” He raised his hand and pointed at a rangy, cowpoke-like man also seated on the overturned rowboat. “Does that guy look familiar to you?”

  Mark was never going to let him off the hook. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Yes, I heard you, but I can’t do anything about it. Now look at the guy I’m pointing at.”

  Jimbo thought the man looked a little like the Marlboro Man in old advertisements, but he knew better than to say this out loud.

  “Come on, look close. Imagine him with a lot of wrinkles.”

  “This is Old Man Hillyard? I don’t believe it.” He looked more closely at the man sitting on the upturned rowboat and almost succeeded in superimposing his features over Mr. Hillyard’s. “Maybe it is.”

  “Sure, it is. Hillyard knew this guy, see? He’s talking to him, they’re having a few beers together. We have to talk to Old Man Hillyard.”

  “I could do that,” Jimbo said, seeing an excuse for getting out of the house.

  “Yeah, he likes you now, doesn’t he?” After twisting his ankle the week previous, Mr. Hillyard had signaled to Jimbo and asked him to pick up his groceries for him. “Go see him this afternoon. In fact, talk to everyone on the block who looks old enough to have known this guy.”

  Now Jimbo’s gratitude at an honorable reason for escaping the genuinely oppressive atmosphere of the house met the sudden suspicion that Mark seemed to be trying to get rid of him.

  “What about you?”

  “Are you serious? While you’re going around the neighborhood, I’ll be here.”

  The strange room downstairs, which had never been far from his thoughts, surged fully into Jimbo’s consciousness. The farther he could get from that thing, the better he would feel. It was as if it radiated an unnatural heat, or an unwholesome odor.

  Mark’s eyes were curiously large and bright. “Both of us don’t have to poke around in this place. Anyhow, you don’t want to be here, do you?”

  Jimbo stepped back, his face filled with suspicion. Contradictory impulses battled in him—Mark really did seem to be putting him on the sidelines. Then he thought again of the man in the photographs and the room downstairs they had yet to enter, and supposed he would be more useful outside the house than in.

  “This place doesn’t feel right,” he said. “It’s like it’s all cramped up, or something. It has this terrible feeling.”

  That was the truth. Jimbo felt as though he were wading through some unclean substance that would harden around his ankles if he stood still too long. Mark’s ghostly spider webs had been a version of this same feeling.

  “You should see where I found the pictures,” Mark said.

  No, I shouldn’t, Jimbo thought, but he moved forward and went through the door.

  There was barely room enough for the two of them in the closet, and the darkness made it difficult to see what Mark was doing. He seemed to be pushing on a high shelf above the clothes rail. The shelf slid up. Mark stepped in closer and opened a panel at the back of the closet.

  “Look.”

  Jimbo came forward, and Mark leaned to the side and reached into the darkness.

  “Can you see?”

  “Not really.”

  “Come around and stick your hand in.”

  They jostled around each other, and Jimbo bent forward and pushed his right hand into a half-visible opening.

  “Feel the bottom,” Mark said.

  The wooden surface felt furry and scratchy, and softer than it should have been, like the hide of a long-dead bear.

  “The wood’s a little rotten,” Mark said from behind him.

  Jimbo’s fingers encountered a raised screw, a small hole, a raised edge. “I got something.”

  “Pull up on it.”

  An inner flap detached from the floor of the hidden cabinet. Jimbo probed into the opening and found a sunken compartment about a foot long, two feet wide, and five or six inches deep. “This is where you found the album?”

  “Right in there.”

  Jimbo pulled his hand from the secret compartment, and both boys backed out into the room.

  “How did you find the flap? How did you know it was there?”

  “I guessed.”

  Jimbo squinted at him in frustration.

  “This place is supposed to be identical to my house, isn’t it?”

  “I thought so. But the rooms look a little smaller.”

  “You got it,” Mark said. “That’s why the rooms seem so cramped to you. Almost all of them are smaller than the rooms in my house. On the outside, though, it’s identical. The extra space had to be somewhere.”

  “You mean there are hiding places all over this house?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Mark said, not saying at least half of what he was thinking.

  Without any desire for greater precision, Jimbo immediately understood that hideous possibilities lay in this arrangement.

  “Let’s say you had someone, a girl, locked in this house,” Mark said. “She would think she was safe, but . . .”

  This was the possibility Jimbo least wished to consider. “If you wer
e hidden in one of these secret places, you could come out anytime you liked.” Saying it made him feel ill.

  “This house has to have a really terrible history,” Mark said.

  “Its present isn’t all that wonderful. I mean, Mark, the place really gives me the creeps. It’s almost like there’s someone else in here with us.”

  “I know what you mean,” Mark said. “Let’s go downstairs and get it over with. I’ll do the real searching tomorrow.”

  One floor down, the boys roamed through the living room and the dining room, exploring closets and cabinets and examining the floorboards for secret caches. Mark appeared to be observing architectural eccentricities he was not bothering to describe. He lifted his eyebrows, he pushed his lips in and out, he went through all these little gestures of thought and comprehension. Whatever he was comprehending he kept to himself.

  Too soon for Jimbo’s comfort, they found themselves back in the kitchen. If anything, he felt worse about that extra room than he had earlier. A bad, bad feeling seemed to flow directly from it. As if in response, the door in the wall seemed to have grown larger, taken on increased density.

  “I’m not sure I want to see what’s in there,” he said.

  “Then don’t go in.”

  Mark went to the door and pulled it open. He stepped back, making it possible for Jimbo, whose heart felt as though it were in free fall, to move up alongside him. Within, the boys could see only a flat sheet of darkness. Mark made a noise low in his throat and went up to the door, and Jimbo trailed a reluctant half step behind.

  “We’re just going to do this,” Mark said. “It’s only an empty room, that’s all.” With a single step, he moved into the dark room. Jimbo hesitated for a moment, swallowed, and went after him into the darkness. Suddenly his face felt hot.

  “I should have brought that flashlight,” Mark said.

  “Yeah,” Jimbo said, without at all agreeing.

  Their eyes began to adjust. Jimbo was reminded of that moment when you walk into a dark theater and pause before moving down the aisle. The featureless darkness faded to a grainy shadowland. Jimbo became aware of a faint but serious odor. Here, something animal and unpleasant had been added to the smell of emptiness and defeat exuded by the rest of the house. He realized that he was looking at a large object with a shape at once familiar and foreign.

  “Shit fuck damn. What the hell is that?”

  “I think it’s a bed.”

  “That thing can’t be a bed,” Mark said. They moved closer to the object that dominated the room. It extended sideways under the slanting roofline and bore an initial resemblance to a bed—the bed of a cruel giant who nightly collapsed into it drunk. Thick, crude ten-foot timbers defined the sides, and sloppily assembled planks formed the rough platform on which the giant slept. They moved in closer, and without indicating anything in particular, Mark said, “Uh-oh.”

  “I wouldn’t want to spend the night on that thing,” Jimbo said.

  “No, look.” Mark pointed at what Jimbo had taken for a darkness in the grain of the long planks. In the center of the darkness, a pair of leather cuffs about three feet apart were fastened to the platform with chains. Another pair of restraints, a little farther apart, had been chained to the platform about four feet beneath them.

  “The legs are bolted to the floor,” Mark said. His eyes shone in the darkness.

  “Who was this for?” Then Jimbo noticed that the series of blotches, which seemed to be black, around and between the restraints were not an element of the grain. “I’m getting out of here. Sorry, man.”

  He was already moving toward the door, holding up his hands as if to ward off an attacker. With a last look at the huge bed, Mark joined him. On the other side of the door, they glanced at each other, and Jimbo was afraid that Mark was going to say something, but he looked away and kept his thoughts to himself.

  Feeling as weightless and vague as ghosts, they went out onto the broken little porch. Something had happened to them, Jimbo thought; something had happened to him anyhow, but he could not begin to define what it was. All the breath and most of the life had been driven from his body, as if by a great shock. What was left was just enough to float down the steps into the lush tangle of the backyard.

  Jimbo remained silent until they were walking across the mown grass at the side of the house, and then he found he had to speak. “It was built to hold a kid—that bed-thing.”

  Mark stopped moving and looked back.

  “He strapped a kid, or maybe even a couple of kids, onto that bed-thing, and he tortured them.” He felt as though he were banging on a bass drum. “Because those were bloodstains, weren’t they? They looked black, but it was blood.”

  “I think those stains on the mattress upstairs were blood, too.”

  “Good God, Mark, what kind of place is that?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” Mark said. “Unless you changed your mind about helping me. If so, tell me right now. Are you quitting?”

  “No, I’ll do what you want,” Jimbo said. “But I still say we should never have gotten involved in this stuff.”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Mark said. “You know what? I feel like I was kind of selected. I agree with you, it’s terrible and it’s scary—but it killed my mother!”

  “How? Explain it to me, will you?”

  “I DON’T KNOW HOW!” Mark yelled. “What do you think we’re DOING here, anyhow?”

  Then, for no reason Jimbo could see, Mark’s eyes changed. His face went slack and dopey. Mark looked at his empty hands, then at the ground. “Holy shit.” Still looking at the ground, he went four or five feet back the way they had come. “Jimbo, what the hell happened to that photograph album?”

  Jimbo blinked.

  “Did I give it to you?”

  “No. You had it when we came down the stairs.”

  “I must have left it in the kitchen.” Mark was nodding his head. “I didn’t take it in the room, did I?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I must have set it down on a counter so my hands would be free.”

  “No,” Jimbo said, knowing what Mark intended to do. “Leave it. You already saw the pictures.”

  But Mark had already set off back toward the undergrowth, and in another second he was following the path they had beaten.

  “I don’t believe you’re doing this.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be right back.”

  To Jimbo, it was inconceivable that anyone, even Mark, would be willing to expose himself a second time to the interior of 3323. He understood why the neighborhood had silently agreed to forget about the empty house in their midst, to let their eyes go out of focus when they happened accidentally to find themselves looking at it. There were things you shouldn’t look at, things better not seen.

  He sat down and waited. The intense heat amplified the buzzing and clicking of insects hidden in the tall grass. Sweat dripped down the back of his neck and slithered over his ribs, cooling his skin. He kept his eyes on the back door at the top of the broken steps. His shoulders had become uncomfortably hot. He twitched at his T-shirt and rubbed his shoulders, still watching the door.

  Jimbo moved around on the grass, searching for a more comfortable place to sit. He wondered if any dead chipmunks or squirrels might be decomposing in his vicinity.

  Looking at his watch was a useless gesture, since he had no idea what time it had been when Mark went back into the kitchen. He looked at his watch anyway: 12:30 P.M. Amazing. They must have been in the house for two and a half hours. It had felt much shorter than that. It was almost as if the house had hypnotized him. The thought made him glance again at his watch. Its hands had not moved.

  Of course the second hand was in motion, sweeping in its inexorable, clockwise way around the circle of the dial. The little needle darted from 22 to 23, on its way to 30. Jimbo glanced across the top of the grasses at the back door. It looked as though it had never been opened.

&nb
sp; The moving needle rolled across the finish line and without hesitation launched into a brand-new minute. Jimbo’s eyes lifted to the sinister door, and relief washed through him, followed by an intense flash of anger. Through the opening doorway stepped Mark Underhill, carrying the ugly photo album and signaling apology with his every glance and gesture. Jimbo jumped to his feet. “What took you so long?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Mark said.

  “Don’t you know how worried I was? Did you forget I was out here waiting for you?”

  “Yo, Jimbo, I said I was sorry.”

  “Your ass is sorry!”

  Mark stared at him with a fixed glare. Jimbo had no idea what he was thinking. His face was still unnaturally pale. Even Mark’s lips looked white. “Didn’t you ask what took so much time?”

  “Yes. What took so much time?”

  “I couldn’t find the damn thing anywhere. I looked all around the kitchen, I even looked in the, you know.”

  “The room with the bed.”

  Mark nodded. “I went back upstairs. Guess where I found it.”

  Jimbo gave him the only possible answer. “Back in the closet.”

  “That’s right. It was back in the closet.”

  “Well, how did it get there?”

  “I want to think about that,” Mark said. “Don’t say anything, okay? Please. Any opinion you have, keep it to yourself.”

  “Here’s one opinion I’m not keeping to myself—you can’t go back inside that place. And you know it! Look how scared you are. Your face is completely white.”

  “I think I could have left it there, maybe.”

  Around and around they went, Mark now claiming to be unable to remember if he had been holding the album as they went downstairs, Jimbo unable to remember if he had seen him carrying it. They were still arguing about it, though less heatedly, when they reached the bottom of Michigan Street. They turned the corner into the alley, and fell silent as if by mutual agreement. Before they parted, Mark asked to borrow the Monaghans’ Maglite, and Jimbo ran up the block and got it for him. He handed over the heavy flashlight without asking any questions.

  18

  From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 23 June 2003