by Matt Ruff
It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet when he got off the phone, but his father told him it was time for bed—he needed his rest. Horace got into bed but he didn’t sleep. He lay in the dark with his eyes open until he heard his father go into his own room. Then he got up, quietly, and went to check that both the kitchen door and the front door were locked and bolted. He went to the parlor window and looked down at the street again. He looked for a long time.
Eventually Horace slept, but he dreamed that he didn’t—that he just went on checking doors and windows all night. By the time morning arrived he was exhausted. His father, seeing how tired he was at breakfast, offered to let him stay home from school. But Horace thought it would be more restful to be out among other people than home alone; he told his dad he wanted to go.
“All right, but you take it easy,” George said. “No deliveries today. You come straight home.”
At school he tried to talk to Reggie about the devil doll. But Neville and Curtis must have gotten to Reggie first, because he was in no mood to discuss it. “It wasn’t me, it was Bug!” he said. “Now leave me alone!”
That evening his father had a Freemasons meeting to go to. “I was thinking of skipping it,” George explained, “but your uncle Montrose has something he wants to talk to me about. We might go out, after. I got Ruby coming to stay with you while I’m gone. I don’t want any arguments—I know you think you’re too old for a sitter, but I don’t want you by yourself tonight.”
Horace didn’t make any arguments.
Ruby came over at seven. Horace was glad to see her, and not just because he didn’t want to be alone. He’d always liked Ruby. He felt like she was one of the few adults other than his parents who took his artistic ambitions seriously, neither dismissing them as fantasy nor offering false assurances. Making a living at comic books would be hard, she said, and he might well fail, but if it was what he wanted to do with his life, he shouldn’t let anyone talk him out of trying.
They sat in the kitchen and drank hot chocolate and played Scrabble. Ordinarily this would have been heaven, but Horace couldn’t stay focused. He kept getting up to go check the front door and look out the parlor window, and the third time he was gone long enough that Ruby called out to make sure he was OK.
He came back to the kitchen and managed to sit still for ten whole minutes. But then he thought he heard something out on the fire escape. He got up and opened the door and poked his head out. There was nothing there. Nothing in the alley, either—not that he could see.
When he sat back down at the table, Ruby said, “What’s got into you?”
Horace looked at her. His lungs were fine right now, but he could feel the asthma just waiting to rise up and stifle him the minute he said the wrong thing.
“Horace? Is there something you want to tell me?”
Horace breathed in, and breathed out. He shook his head.
He looked down at his tile rack:
OELCZPI
He shuffled the letters around:
POLICEZ
He breathed in, and breathed out. He looked up and saw that Ruby was still watching him and without pausing to think about it he said, “Ruby can I tell you a secret?” His lungs tightened up at the end of “secret” but the question was already out.
“Sure,” Ruby said. “You can tell me a secret. You can tell me anything you like.”
For the next thirty seconds or so he couldn’t do anything but concentrate on getting air. Then his lungs unclenched, but not all the way, and Horace knew if it happened again it would be much worse.
He kept his tongue still. He removed the Z from the tile rack and turned the rack around so Ruby could see the other letters.
“That’s what your secret’s about?” Ruby said.
Horace breathed in, and breathed out. He nodded.
Ruby lowered her voice and asked: “You worried somebody might be listening?”
Horace shook his head.
“But you don’t want to say it out loud?”
Horace nodded.
“All right . . .” Ruby dumped her own tile rack on the board, and dumped out the tile bag, too. Then she shoved all the letters over to Horace’s side of the table. “Spell it out for me.”
It didn’t take very long. He spelled out DETECTIVES and ASKED ME and MOMS XMAS TRIP and WISCONSIN and a few more words and phrases, but as soon as he got to BRAITHWHITE they switched to a Twenty Questions format, with Ruby, who had always been a good guesser, seeming to know exactly what to ask. Horace nodded fervently, shook his head a few times, did a couple more spell-outs, and then, the bulk of the secret having been spilled, he felt his asthma back off and found that he could speak. He filled in a few more details.
He didn’t tell her everything. He told her about Captain Lancaster rubbing spittle on his head and some of how that had affected him, but when he came to the part about Cousin Otis, and Black Pete, and especially the devil doll, Horace balked, thinking it would sound too crazy. So instead he just said that in addition to his asthma problems, he’d been “feeling strange” and “having weird dreams.”
“You believe me, right?”
“Yeah, of course I believe you,” Ruby said.
Horace slumped with relief. Then he said: “What am I supposed to do? I want to help Mom, but I don’t even know what this is about.”
“You just sit tight,” Ruby told him. “I know someone who can help.”
“You do? Who?”
But Ruby shook her head. “That’s going to have to stay between me and me, for now. When’s your mom get back from her trip?”
“She hadn’t decided, last I talked to her. Maybe tomorrow night.”
“All right, so you don’t need to worry about her,” Ruby said. “You just keep your own head down. Once your daddy comes home, I’ll get in touch with my . . . friend. I should be able to reach him tonight, but if not, I’ll be talking to him tomorrow for sure.”
“And he’ll know what to do?”
“He’d better,” Ruby said. “You just be careful going to school tomorrow, and after—”
“After, I got work,” Horace said. “I had to skip today, but I promised Rollo I’d be in tomorrow.”
“All right, tell you what,” Ruby said. “You go to Rollo’s, and I’ll meet you there. But you keep your eyes peeled on the street, Horace, and if you see those two detectives coming, or that Captain Lancaster, you run the other way. Don’t worry about getting in trouble, either—just do what you need to to get clear and we’ll sort it out later. OK?”
“OK.” Suddenly Horace was blinking back tears. “Thank you, Ruby. I’ve been so scared about this, and I didn’t know what I was going to—”
This time they both heard it: a thump like a heavy footfall, out on the fire escape. Ruby put a finger to her lips and pointed at the switch on the wall behind Horace. He got up and flipped the lights off. Ruby rose silently and went to the sink, leaning forward to look out between the burglar bars that covered the window.
“What is it?” Horace whispered, but Ruby gestured for silence. She grabbed a knife from the drying rack and stepped to the door, at the same time motioning Horace back into the hall. She opened the door and went out, and Horace covered his face with his hands. But after a moment Ruby came back inside, shaking her head.
“Nobody,” she said. “Nobody there.”
By six thirty the next evening Ruby still hadn’t showed.
Horace had finished his last delivery run twenty minutes ago. Rollo told him he could go home, but he lingered instead, loitering at the front of the store so he wouldn’t have to play stare-down games with Cousin Otis—and so he could keep an eye on the sidewalk. Coming back from this last run, he’d caught a glimpse of a small black creature—something that might have been a cat, or a large rat—darting underneath a parked car half a block behind him. Now, staring out the window, he found himself fixated on a patch of darkness beneath a blown streetlamp across the way.
“You plan to keep f
idgeting like that?” Rollo said, looking up from the Zane Grey novel he was trying to read.
“Sorry,” Horace said. “Can I use the phone, Rollo?”
“Long as it’s local.”
He dialed the number Ruby had given him but it just rang and rang. Then on impulse he called home, but there was no answer there, either. He tried the travel office number and got the after-hours answering service. “No message,” he told the woman.
He hung up and stood gnawing his lower lip. His father had mentioned that he might go run an errand after work. Horace hadn’t thought much of it, because he’d assumed Ruby would be with him, but now his imagination went to work, and he pictured going up the stairs to the dark apartment, alone.
The phone rang, making Horace jump.
Rollo gave him a look and picked up. “Danvers Grocery, Rollo Danvers speaking.” He listened a moment and reached for his order pad. “Yeah, we deliver there,” he said, scribbling down an address. “Is that a house or an apartment? . . . OK . . . And that’s all you want? . . . Sure, no problem . . . And what name is this order for? . . . Hello?” Rollo frowned, then shrugged and hung up.
Rollo tore the top sheet from the pad and reached behind him to get a pack of Chesterfields. He slid the paper and the smokes across the counter. “Delivery over on South Park Way,” he said. “You can just go home, after, and bring me the money tomorrow.”
Horace stared at the cigarette pack, his mind on the dead streetlamp outside. “I don’t know, Rollo,” he said.
“You don’t know what?” said Rollo.
Horace raised a hand to his head. Scratched. “Nothing,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later, he stopped beneath a streetlamp to check the address on the order sheet. To his left, across a two-lane avenue, stretched the 370-acre park that gave the Washington Park neighborhood its name. A few sparks of illumination were visible back among the trees, but this section of the park was mostly unlit, and the impression was that of standing by the shore of a vast dark lake.
It wasn’t the park he was concerned about. As he returned the paper to his coat pocket, he looked back along the sidewalk in the direction he had come, paying particular attention to the curbline beside the parked cars.
Like the last dozen times he’d checked, there was nothing to see.
He continued walking south, scanning a row of narrow townhouses. At the end of the row he found the number he was looking for. It was spray-painted on a plywood slab that had been used to board up the house’s front door. Horace stared at the CONDEMNED notice pasted to the wooden slab and thought: Maybe Rollo wrote the number down wrong. But the prickling of his scalp told a different story.
With a glassy pop! like a flashbulb exploding, the streetlamp he’d just been standing under blew out. Horace turned towards the sound, his gaze going automatically to the curb by the foot of the lamppost. Nothing there. But then he lifted his head and raised his hand and scratched, and for a moment his vision blurred; and when it cleared again, he saw a red eye glowing in the darkness.
No, not an eye: a cigar. Captain Lancaster was standing beneath the lamppost, his brutish face wreathed in smoke and illuminated by the glowing coal. There was something unreal about him, a waxwork stiffness that made him seem less a man than a mannequin. But he was no less frightening, for that.
Run the other way, Horace heard Ruby say. He turned around and the streetlamp on the corner to the south went out. As if the light had switched on rather than off, another figure sprang into view: Detective Noble.
Horace.
He jerked his head to the right. Detective Burke had materialized on the front steps of the condemned townhouse, almost close enough to touch. Like Lancaster he seemed posed, stiff as a scarecrow, but there was life in his eyes and he was grinning Cousin Otis’s grin, the expression even more disturbing on a white face.
Horace retreated in the only direction he could. As he backpedaled into the street, headlights washed over him, but his eyes remained fixed on Detective Burke. Then the driver of the car speeding towards him leaned on the horn, and Horace whirled and leapt out of the way, his book bag flying up behind him. The car, which never slowed, clipped the book bag in passing, sending it whipping around to smack Horace in the face. He staggered across the far curb and into the park.
From under the trees he looked back. The captain and the two detectives had been swallowed up by the gloom, and Horace could see nothing moving on the darkened street. But there was definitely something there, making furtive noises in the darkness. Coming closer.
He turned and sprinted deeper into the park, making for a spark of lamplight up ahead beyond the trees. By the time he reached it he was winded and overheating. Horace shrugged off his book bag and leaned against the lamppost, which cast its icy white light over a frozen playground set. He unzipped the front of his coat. He breathed in, and breathed out, hearing nothing now but the sound of his own labored respiration.
With a creak of wood and metal one of the seesaws moved, an invisible weight pushing one end down, a clump of snow sliding off the other end as it rose up. As Horace came off the lamppost, a wind he couldn’t feel set the swings moving.
The roundabout was next. With a groan it started turning on its own, slowly at first, shedding chunks of snow and ice as it picked up speed. Horace stared at it, transfixed by the moving shadows of the metal grab bars.
Something landed with a thump on the far side of the rotating platform. Horace watched the devil doll come riding around, its little hand clinging to one of the grab bars. As it jumped down, he took a step backwards and tripped over his book bag.
He fell on his back in the snow and for a moment he was eye level with the devil doll now running straight towards him. He rolled and kicked away the book bag and scrambled back up.
A footpath ran beside the playground and on the other side of it was a little cement blockhouse marked RESTROOM. Horace made a dash for it, praying that it wouldn’t be locked. It wasn’t, but when he got inside, he discovered that that was because the lock was broken. He put his back against the door and braced himself, at the same time casting around wildly for a weapon or a way out.
He found neither. The restroom was a windowless concrete cell, just large enough for a sink, a urinal, and a toilet stall. It was lit by a yellow incandescent bulb set above the empty mirror frame over the sink. The bulb flickered as Horace looked at it.
A heavy blow struck the door at Horace’s back. He dug in his heels. More blows fell, making the door jump in its frame, but Horace held firm and it didn’t open. There was a pause.
What came next was a light scratching: A small sound, but like fingernails on a blackboard it sent shivers up his spine and set his scalp crawling. Horace gritted his teeth and shut his eyes. Not getting in! he thought.
The scratching stopped. He opened his eyes.
There was someone in the toilet stall. Beneath the wooden partition Horace could see a pair of men’s shoes and a frayed pair of trouser cuffs. “Hey kid,” a voice said, raspy and low, “you want to make a dollar?”
No way, Horace thought, uh-uh, but the stall door creaked open and there stood the dice man. His five o’clock shadow had become a patchy beard, matted with filth; his hair and clothes were filthy too, and he reeked, as if he’d crawled up a sewer pipe to get in here. His skin was red and cracked and covered in scabs. “Let me rub your head,” he said, holding out a diseased hand. “For luck.”
Horace shrank back. “You’re not real,” he wheezed, but the dice man took a shambling step towards him, and Horace rounded in a panic and tried to push out through the door, forgetting that it opened inward. Then he heard another step behind him, felt scabby fingers brush his scalp, and he yanked the door wide and bolted into the open air.
He was barely through the doorway when his feet tangled and he belly-flopped. He banged his chin on a hard patch of ice, sending sparks shooting up behind his eyes. More ice and snow pressed against his sweat-soaked shirt, instantly sucki
ng the heat from his body. But it wasn’t just the cold ground that froze him: As his vision cleared, he found himself practically nose to nose with the devil doll.
In the stark white lamplight its skin looked pale, and its tribal scars stood out in sharp relief; the bones in its hair gleamed. Its eyes glowed a dull red, and as it caught and held Horace’s gaze it began to sway in a sort of dance, a hypnotic witch-doctor dance.
Get up, Horace told himself. It’s just a stupid doll, you’re a giant compared to it . . . Get up! Get up and stomp on it! But he couldn’t move, not a muscle, and he wondered whether the devil doll would stop his heart now, or just hold him like this until he froze for real.
Then the doll raised its medicine stick, holding it overhand with the bottom end pointed at Horace’s face like the tip of a stabbing spear. Horace felt that twitch start in his eye again. He thought of Pirate Joe, sitting half-blind in a car wreck in the land of Jim Crow, his mother dying beside him and help not coming—not in time, not in that country. A despair colder than the ground on which he lay engulfed him, but he felt a hot spark of anger too, at the unfairness of it, and as rage displaced his fear, the spell holding him weakened. In that same moment he became aware of the chunk of broken brick under his right hand.
The devil doll danced towards him, jabbing at his eyes, and Horace brought his arm around and smashed it with the brick. The doll went flying and the spell was broken. Horace sprang to his feet, clutching the brick and ready to do battle; but the doll, already recovered, looked up at him and hissed. Horace’s anger turned to ash and his courage blew away like smoke.
And then he was running again, racing down the footpath with the devil at his heels. He could feel his lungs puffing up and he knew where this was going, but he couldn’t stop.