Lost Boy Lost Girl

by Peter Straub

  “I hope you’re not going to stand out there and watch,” he said. Without his necktie, he looked oddly naked, like a man seen for the first time without his glasses.

  “They’re just going to knock down a wall,” Tim said.

  “I mean after that.” He was obviously in anguish, and just as obviously had no idea of how to cope with it. “Anybody can knock down a wall. I could knock down a wall. Even you could knock down a wall. It’s the part that comes after. You might want to spectate, but not me. I’m serious.”

  “Spectate?” Tim said.

  “Frivolity is par for the course with you, isn’t it?” He charged into his den.

  “I never heard the word before,” Tim said to himself. “Spectate. Philip chooses not to spectate.”

  The living room seemed to retain some of the tension of Philip’s little speech and annoyed departure. Tim felt like moving around, going somewhere, yet he did not want to leave Philip alone, if only because it would be counted against him later. Then he remembered that Mark’s computer—the very computer from which he had e-mailed his Uncle Tim—was still upstairs, waiting to be used. With the help of good old Gotomypc.com and Mark’s laptop, he could spectate his e-mail, see if anyone interesting had written to him, and clean out the spam before it became overwhelming. It would be a way to fill the time: spam as distraction.

  “Philip,” he said to the obdurate door, “I’m going upstairs to look at my e-mail on Mark’s computer. Do you mind?”

  Philip said he could do whatever he liked.

  Upstairs, Tim sat in Mark’s desk chair and clicked open the lid of the laptop. He felt slightly guilty, as if he were trespassing on his nephew’s privacy. Instantly, the computer screen sprang to life. Icons in neat rows arranged themselves across a charcoal-green field. Tim clicked an icon and waded through the inevitable commands and delays before he managed to get connected.

  On a dial-up modem, his program moved with excruciating sluggishness, and the server was having a grouchy, error-ridden day. After three tries, Tim finally succeeded in linking up with his computer at home. Using Mark’s mouse, he moved his cursor to the Outlook Express icon on his screen and clicked once. It was like watching the Mississippi River drift around a wide bend: everything swam along in a brown, sleepy current. The boldface of the new e-mails came to life on his screen. Five and six appeared, then a rapid, ascending column that even at one remove hit the screen with the rapidity of microwave popcorn exploding in a bag. The number at the bottom of Tim’s screen rose from 24 to 30 to 45 to 67. There it stayed, all the popcorn having popped.

  He read wearily down the From list, bypassing Depraved and PC Doctor and vVirtual Deals and the first names of women he did not know because they did not exist, and was then all but levitated out of the chair by the familiar but entirely unexpected name munderhill. munderhill had e-mailed his old adviser and confidante tunderhill a message bearing the subject line 4 u 2 c. There was no date.

  Tim selected this heading with a click and cursed the draggy modem, the draggy server, and the sluggish program.

  At length, the message appeared in the wide lower-left-hand box.

  From: munderhill

  To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

  Sent:

  Subject: 4 u 2 c

  deer :) my unk

  old writer

  try this link

  lostboylostgirl.com

  it is

  4 u 1nce 2 c

  so u know

  u have & hold our luv

  m & lc

  Did he hesitate, did he think about it? He rammed the cursor over the blue underlined text and double-clicked, double-clicked, double-clicked.

  Another brown, blurry Mississippi episode overtook both monitors, his on Grand Street and Mark’s in Millhaven, and while it lasted, Tim Underhill, otherwise known as tunderhill, leaned forward far enough to breathe on the screen were he breathing. Onto his screen, then Mark’s, appeared the ordinary Explorer window bearing the link’s URL.

  Across the top of the larger interior window scrolled the words BROUGHT TO YOU BY lostboylostgirl.com. Beneath that was: 1-Time Only Showing! The Windows Media Player’s rectangle opened beneath the caution, if that was what it was and, without the conventional delay for buffering, filled immediatelty with light and color. So Tim was to see a film clip. The line on the bottom of the rectangle told him that the clip ran for one minute and twenty-two seconds, one of which had already slipped into oblivion. A golden beach ornamented with arching palm trees, a long blue ocean, occupied the little window. A movie, a webcam? A webcam, Tim thought, broadcasting to an audience of one from a world where there were no webcameras. Faintly, he heard the sound of gentle surf and wind rustling the palm fronds. His heart tightened.

  The bright sky darkened above the water. First a blond head, then a dark, entered the screen from the bottom left-hand corner. “Lucy,” lc, and Mark, moving hand in hand into the frame, leav-ing the prints of their bare feet on the sand beneath them as they went. There was the faintest suggestion of haste. A rattle of palm came from the speakers. From the left, heavy dark clouds swam in above the sea; a branching reddish light irradiated the open sky. Hasten hasten the globe revolves. Wind rustled and stirred their scant garments, little better than rags, though beautiful rags. Moving quickly but without running, they briefly occupied the dead center of the Windows Media rectangle, then moved rightward toward the margin. Boiling darkness occupied the distant reaches of the sky, and a harsh illuminated red forked above, distant but traveling forward. The timer showed one minute and two seconds to go.

  They paused, the lovers, mid-beach and looked toward the turmoil over the darkening water, which rolled toward them. Oh stay; oh hurry.

  b safe my deers :)

  Their beautiful poised slim legs lifted into a sprint; their rags flew.

  Tim could not see the faces turned from him, but he knew them. They were unforgettable. Through the Starbucks window, indelible, that staggering goddess-visage: he did not have to see it again to remember it.

  Now the whole sky grew dark, ripped through with dark, dark red. Thirty-two seconds remained. It seemed an eternity. These luxurious thirty-two, now thirty-one seconds, would last him the rest of his life. But the timer sped up, cruelly, and the lost boy and lost girl sprinted toward the margin of the little frame. Tim Underhill sent himself toward them, as if he could, poor bereft old man, to absorb every particle, mote, and cell of their departing seconds, which numbered fourteen, thirteen, ten, six. Mark’s head turned, and his upper body twisted not even a quarter turn, sufficient for his smile to shine forth and his eyes to meet tunderhill ’swith the force of a soft, underground explosion—four seconds, rain sluiced over their heads, two, they flew into the not-to-be-seen, none, they were gone utterly.

  It was to gasp, it was to tremble.

  The Media Player rectangle with its buttons and keys vanished into the gray beneath Mark’s charcoal-green. Tim clicked the little x on the top right-hand corner of both screens. The linked website should have zipped away and revealed his e-mail window. Instead, it collapsed into itself to leave no more than an impression of broken glass shattering inward. His screen flashed the flat deadly blue of hard-disk crashes and visits from or to the local computer wizard; it hung there for perhaps another second, then faded away to nothing, to disengaged gray, as if a fuse had blown.

  For a while, Tim kept hitting the return key and double-clicking on everything in sight. Then he noticed that the green strip of Gotomypc.com still ran across the top and bottom of Mark’s screen. Trying to control his panic, he managed to back out of the program and get Mark’s computer off-line.

  Through the bedroom’s closed window came the sounds of metal scraping on stone and the whining of gears. He groaned, clutched his head, bent over the keyboard, groaned again. His need for drama satisfied, Tim unfurled from the chair and went to the window. Just beyond the flattened wooden fence, a yellow earth-moving machine nearly the width of the alley was p
ushing its enormous blade into what remained of Joseph Kalendar’s rear wall. The concrete blocks at the edge of the blade shattered into chunks of powder, and the rows above them swooned outward, bulging before they separated, and crashed down into the blade and the alley. Through the dust, a portion of the wide brown strip of exposed earth became visible.

  Tim fished his cell phone from his jacket pocket and dialed a number at 55 Grand Street. Since all there were close friends of his, and everybody spent hours in one another’s lofts, it almost didn’t matter who answered. As it happened, he had dialed Vinh’s number, and Maggie Lah answered. He told her to go upstairs and look at his computer, then call him back on his desk telephone. When Maggie called back, it was to say that his computer appeared to be deceased. Expired. Not a single vital sign. He asked Maggie to call Myron, the wizard next door, and tell him he was having an emergency caused by Gotomypc.com, which Myron had installed on his computer.

  Down in the alley, the bulldozer was collecting broken concrete blocks in its bucket and depositing them into the back of a pickup truck dropping progressively lower on its wheels. Uniformed policemen, four men in yellow space suits, and detectives in sports jackets milled around in Kalendar’s backyard and the alley. Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus was watching the wall removal from just inside Philip’s ruined fence. To Tim’s amazement, Philip stood next to him.

  Myron called to say he was walking up the stairs at 55 Grand.

  “You’re the man,” Tim said.

  “You’re still out of town, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, I’m in your apartment,” Myron said.“Here we are. Are you sure this thing is plugged in? . . . Okay, it’s plugged in. You were using that program I installed?”

  “Yes,” Tim said. “I want to return to the last website I was on. I want to go back to where I was when the computer crashed.”

  “Nothin’s shakin’,” Myron said. “Let me undress this thing, see what I can see.”

  For a minute and a half, Myron wielded his screwdriver and removed the case. “Now, let me get it turned around. . . . Holy shit. Maggie, look at this.”

  Tim heard Maggie giggle.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Your hard disk, man. It like . . . squirted out. I can just about wiggle it free, but it’s, like, misshapen. And it’s hot! What did this? The program didn’t do it.”

  “I know,” Tim said. “I just said that to get you over to my apartment in a hurry.”

  Myron agreed to set up a new hard disk before Tim returned to New York the next day.

  “What was that website you wanted to get back to?”

  “It’s not important. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, all right?”

  Tim hung up and returned to the window. He felt shaken and oddly dispossessed by what had just happened. Mark, Lucy: running barely covered from the storm, like Adam and Eve. Even, it seemed, in that world, safety was fragile and came at a price. Yet their joy had burned through the image on his commandeered monitor, along with their absolute connection. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, Tim remembered, red sky at morning, sailor take warning. The Old Farmer’s Almanac neglected to consider the case of red sky at midafternoon, when ragged beautiful Adam and ragged beautiful Eve made haste, made haste.

  He watched the bulldozer scrape away and decant into the laden pickup the last of Joseph Kalendar’s eight-foot wall. As docile as a probationer, Philip Underhill had not strayed from Franz Pohlhaus’s side.

  Tim let the screen door bang behind him. Philip turned his head to give his brother the glance of a captain to a platoon leader who had arrived late for a briefing. What he had seen must stay with him, Tim realized.

  The fat, red-haired man in the cab of the bulldozer shouted, “Excuse me, Sergeant. Sergeant! Excuse me.”

  “Sorry,” Pohlhaus said. “Yes?”

  “Should I start on the ground now? We got a good clear shot.”

  “Nice and slow,” Pohlhaus said. “Plus I want a DM man. Thompson! Pick up a shovel and work alongside Dozier here, will you?” One of the men in yellow space suits and clumsy boots trotted forward.

  “The rest of you guys, move in as soon as we find something,” Pohlhaus said.

  He gave Tim an unreadable glance. “Little news flash.” He seemed entirely gathered into himself, like a creature enfolded within its own wings. “Lloyd-Jones took himself out.” Anger surrounded him like a red mist. “Out of the game.”

  “Oh, no,” Tim said. In his brother’s grim satisfaction, he saw that Philip already knew.

  “About an hour ago, Lloyd-Jones killed himself in his cell. He ripped his shirt in half, tied one end around his neck and the other around one of his bars, and he rolled off the bed. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it did.”

  “He got off so, so easy,” Philip said. “That sick bastard.”

  “I guess he realized your brother wasn’t going to write a book about him,” Pohlhaus said.

  The bulldozer snorted and jerked to a halt, rocking on its treads. Thompson, who had been treading backward in front of the machine as it delicately sliced away a thin layer of earth, shouted, “Sergeant! We got one!”

  All three men at the bottom of Philip Underhill’s backyard walked over the defeated fence and into the alley. Officer Thompson scraped the blade of his shovel across the strip of earth, then bent down. Using one of his space gloves, he tugged into view a gray-green human hand, then an entire forearm, encased in a white sleeve.

  “That’s not Mark’s arm,” Philip said.

  Pohlhaus waved them back. The brothers retreated to Philip’s lot line and looked on as the first of the adolescent dead began his journey upward into daylight.

  Acknowledgments

  For professional assistance in the writing of this novel, thanks go to Visconti pens (Van Gogh and Kaleido), Boorum & Pease journals (900-3 R), and Kathy Kinsner (eighty words a minute); for moral and emotional support during the writing of this novel, grateful thanks to Lila Kalinich and Susan Straub; for her inspired editing, pro-found thanks to extraordinary Lee Boudreaux.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Straub is the author of sixteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in New York City with his wife, Susan, director of the Read to Me program.

  ALSO BY PETER STRAUB

  NOVELS

  Black House (with Stephen King)

  Mr. X

  The Hellfire Club

  The Throat

  Mrs. God

  Mystery

  Koko

  The Talisman (with Stephen King)

  Floating Dragon

  Shadowland

  Ghost Story

  If You Could See Me Now

  Julia

  Under Venus

  Marriages

  POETRY

  Open Air

  Leeson Park & Belsize Square

  COLLECTIONS

  Wild Animals

  Houses Without Doors

  Magic Terror

  Peter Straub’s Ghosts (editor)

  Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists (editor)

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters, with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures and public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Peter Straub

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
/>   Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Straub, Peter.

  lost boy lost girl : a novel / Peter Straub.

  p. cm.

  1. Suicide victims—Family relationships—Fiction. 2. Abandoned houses—Fiction. 3. Mothers—Death—Fiction. 4. Teenage boys—Fiction. 5. Crime scenes— Fiction. 6. Girls—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T6914L67 2003

  813'.54—dc21 2003046689

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-316-9

  v3.0