by Kit Reed
Lane went all whites of the eyes at the first shout, and turned to him with her face filling up with things unspoken. She said over her shoulder, “I’ve got this.” She threw her whole weight against the carton and it slid through the front gate, at least a little bit. It took everything Dell had to stay back and let her do it.
Nice that she turned back to him with that desperate, apologetic grin.
Like she was protecting both of us.
He took the warning and faded, leaving her to hump that carton up the long walk alone. Given the givens, he had to, even though he’d come out today thinking to move the last of his cartons out of the shed and into his quarters. He’s been sleeping under the sprawling back porch for long enough to think of it as safe.
More.
At night, he roams the great house overhead. Accidentally or not, sweet old Ivy told him how to come and go because, he supposes, she took to him the morning he helped her turn that scooter. He enters and leaves the body of the house through the long-dead Vincent’s hatch.
Since then he’s prowled the double parlors during the darkest hours, inspected the flaking ancestral portraits and tried his breath on the beveled mirror above the heavy marble-topped pier table that stands like a little altar in the big front room, covered with sacred objects exactly where the first lady of the house had the help put them. It looks like one of those museum model rooms, cordoned off by velvet ropes so strangers can’t trample the carpets or make off with personal treasures. He wonders if they closed the sliding doors between this and the second parlor to keep the children off the rococo chairs and the plum velvet sofa with its mahogany claws and scrolled mahogany trim.
Probably. It’s a shrine to whatever the grand lady of the house thought she was.
Look at her, hanging above the sofa in her golden oval frame: flaking gold leaf, to match the golden chains around her delicate throat. Triangular face, with hair combed high off the white, white forehead to accentuate her widow’s peak. Tight little mouth. Beautiful jewelry. Dead eyes. Planted where visitors could see it from the hall. Romanticized portrait, with plaque:
MANETTE WARE ELLIS
So dainty and so … something. Whatever that something is, it makes him sick. Well, fuck you.
The marble-topped pier table dominates the room. It stands between windows covered by fringed velvet drapes so dense that daylight never touches her precious things. With his Maglite, he’s studied the objects enshrined there. A heavy gold watch in its ornamental case is centered under the gigantic mirror, like a little tabernacle. To its left a glass dome covers a lock of the dead child’s hair; he doesn’t have to read the plaque. It’s Teddy’s hair, flanked by a pair of five-branched candelabra that don’t look right no matter which way they’re turned. Dell points them in different directions every time he goes into the room, trying for symmetry, and he’s done it as freely as Theo would if the old women weren’t around to stop him, the difference being that Dell always waits until everybody has gone silent to come up from his quarters, into the body of the house.
And they are his quarters now.
He’s made the move from his squat at the overpass via the shed next door cautiously, over time, putting down whatever fit in his backpack or under his arm in the far corner of the truck storage shed, stowing his gear behind a rusting semi. Last night he transferred all but the last few items from the shed, rifling each carton as he brought it inside. Face it, Dell. You’re finding that fucking flash drive today.
He searched the last of his cartons before the sun came up rifling them with anxiety running up his heels: the missing USB stick. Guys on his trail, according to Duane. Is it something he did? Walk it off, he told himself. Go out and come back with some Dumpster furniture to make this place a home.
Then he blew it all by helping the girl.
Now he has to stay off the premises until well after midnight. Let the old ladies think he just happened by today, helpful working man on his way to the job. He can’t come back until the last one awake up there, the last old woman shuffling around inside turns out the last light in the Ellis house. Then he’ll have to wait that extra hour before he enters, just to be sure.
Walking, he has the rest of the day to plan.
Use up the day window-shopping for stuff you need that you can get free. Get coffee and browse Dumpsters, wander through box stores looking at things you don’t have the money to buy, and as the day winds down you do what any normal person would do. Go back to the last place and wait until it’s time to come home. Tent one of their abandoned cartons, if you can find one, and if you can’t, grab a couple behind the Publix and drag them into the elbow of the overpass. Hey, it was home for a while. Wrong. What passes for home. You have a real place now, you just can’t go back there until it’s safe.
Sleep if you can. Treat yourself to a MacSomething-or-other before you even think about going back to 553. Coffee, for sure, he tells himself, walking until he forgets that he’s still walking. You need to be sharp to divine next steps.
Divine. Like I’m good enough to have foreknowledge delivered in a flash.
As though whatever this is, this is fated.
As if he’s expected here. Does he not have the index card that brought him all this way? In ways he doesn’t understand, he is expected. Expected to what? He is expected to do something big with this life or something terrible, and Dell has spent more than one night under that back porch in lotus position, reflecting, in hopes of finding out which.
As though the mystery that hounds him will reveal itself if he can do the right things in the right order. Sit without moving for long enough. Think hard enough and it will come to him in a flash. Yeah, flash, and this is what keeps him walking.
He’s up against it now. When the USB stick slithered out of his shoe at the hospital, he recoiled. He buried it every time he moved because he can’t bear the sight of it. He should have pitched it into Narragansett Bay back then, or thrown it into a sewer after the thaw. Now he shores up his anxiety with reasons:
One. It could be loaded with information that incriminates him, or worse.
Two. There are guys out looking for him. Or it. Either way, it’s bad.
Three. He needs to search and destroy. It’s not like the thing holds the secrets of life in the universe.
Four. Unless it does.
He has to know.
Never mind that your last run on the defunct colony was a wash. Go back and search while the sun is high. If they see you, bring it. Stupid or dangerous or not, he steps off the street and slides down into the hollow.
Hell with it. Maybe I want to get caught.
Nick of time, so there’s that. Stakes and string mark the area where road crews will pour cement over the footprint of the lost colony, burying the leftovers of their lives.
At the foot of the hill he drops to his knees and advances on all fours, sifting the sandy gray Florida dirt with his hands. He’ll do it until his fingers are raw, working his way through the arch. If that’s what it takes.
But, shit! Planted on a flat rock centered in the space that belonged to Dell real-last-name-still-pending, the missing flash drive sits like a tribal offering.
Or a warning.
Forget what you thought you were going to do with the rest of this wasted day, idiot. Either you open the thing, back up the contents and act accordingly or pitch it into the St. Johns River after all, but which? Find out. Forget the public library. Nobody plugs a flash drive that they don’t know what’s on it into a networked computer, hell, into anything that’s connected. That’s spilling your guts to the world. Get your own machine and disable wifi before you boot up.
Score a laptop and get this over with. There’s enough furniture in Dumpsters to furnish half of Jacksonville, but with electronics, you have to know a guy. Given the few bucks you have in hand, it’s either do crap jobs off the books for as long as it takes to scrape together the cash or, shit. You’re not stupid.
You know what to do.
CHAPTER 15
Theo
So my mom is tied up most days and every night, all pointing and tapping on her cheap little— one step up from a PlayStation, although she gets pissed off when I call it that. She says it was expensive, and she passworded it so the screen dares me to guess what new string she entered before she left the house, and you know what? I’ve tried everything and I still can’t crack it, I hate my life.
It’s not like I want to troll porn sites, unless porn is running and rerunning your one video of that one day back when you used to be happy. See, my ex-Dad posted last year’s Christmas video, which includes me shooting him striking funny poses on every ride we took so I could see how much fun we had together the day he took me to Disney World. We even stayed for the parade and the fireworks. He was making memories for us he said, and I thought there would be plenty.
He took his damn computer and Mom’s laptop with him the night he left.
You bet I’m pissed at him, but I need to check that link, in case he posted something new. Like, a message to me. He could be thinking I had access and there’s something big he wants to tell me. Like, he loves me but he had to go in a hurry because, and he wants me to know he loves me and that he’s OK. Like, he’s figuring out how to get us all back together, and he hopes it will be soon. Unless he’s posted a new video signifying his whereabouts, you know, a secret message to me because he really did leave Mom forever, but he wants me to come with.
No way I can tell Mom what I want, so when she goes downstairs for more coffee, I go, “Let me see your PlayStation for a minute? I need to check out the movies.”
“PlayStation! Stop that! What do you think I’m doing up there, checking out cute guys on Tinder or…” She shouts, just to piss them off, the great-whatevers who are almost always listening, “watching kiddie porn?”
OK, erhem. My mother is working hard on her new laptop, honing MS Office skills while she grinds out letters to print along with the resume she keeps rewriting because she has to get a fucking job so we can put together enough money to get out of this miserable haunted house.
What did you think it was?
E.g., crazy or not, Mormama’s still here. Plus, there’s something going on down underneath this place that I don’t know about, I only know that it’s bad. The old ladies are all up in my face about how lucky I am to be living in this beautiful home, which totally sucks. Are they too snotty to know it’s a big old broken-down junk shop loaded with creaky furniture and moth-eaten curtains and crap that nobody wants? But they take on like we aren’t all five of us, like, wading around under the weight of gajillion years and berzillion broken things, like everything is fine here at the tippy bottom of the ocean where the past is so thick that you can’t wade through it and dust or time or something is so dense in here that it’s getting hard to breathe.
Fuck yes it’s heavy, and I spend most of the time trying to break out, because the old ladies don’t want me to go outside. Their eyes get all watery and their mouths shrivel when they catch me heading for the door. “Teddy, don’t! You know the neighborhood has gone downhill since we were girls.”
“This isn’t…”
Pffft, they cut that one off. “Don’t!”
“This is not Teddy! I’m Theo.” Fuck, I sound like Mom.
They go, “Teddy, it isn’t safe!” That’s Aunt Iris, talking through her nose.
Aunt Rosemary shrieks, “You have no idea what it’s like out there!”
“Theo, get it?”
Yes they are afraid. “Teddy, it isn’t safe!”
Which, if I was Teddy, it sure as hell wasn’t safe. Stupid little kid. Burned to a crisp underneath the back porch. Safe is bullshit in this place, and they’re so dim that they don’t get it. They take on like it happened right in front of them. But I’m almost thirteen, ladies, get a grip. I work out every day here, getting fit so I can fight. I’m no baby, too little to be left alone with kitchen matches and too dumb to walk away, I’m me.
So when they’re not looking, I sneak. That means figuring out when the aunts are gone, or as they say, tied up. Aunt Ivy’s no problem, she’s stuck on the first floor, and it’s not like she’ll be running out to stop me. I wait for the right times. When the twins start bitching about how bad their hair looks and making lists, that’s one. They’re generally gone for hours getting their hair done, and you know they’ll come back bitching about how it looks, all that time and our good money for this. Plus picking up their freaking medications at the CVS and buying new makeup to make them look better next time they go to the Ebb Tide Beauty Salon. Like that’ll work.
Then there’s weekdays at two, when General Hospital comes on. They get in so deep that they don’t even hear the door close, but I can’t go far because I have to be back in here before it’s over, or I’m screwed.
The aunts are all, don’t go out there honey, it isn’t safe! In a way, I see what they mean. Hang a right when you go outside and it’s like, alien surface of the moon, nothing but vacant lots and three more dumps like Marvista, except the other houses have cyclone fences to like, protect them from us, unless they’re scared you’ll get chomped up by their pit bull or Rottweiler or whatever crazy mixed-up savage dog that they found to keep out people like me, and they’ll get sued.
All of those ex-houses have bars on the windows and once or twice I caught sad, cobwebby old people with their glasses pushed way down on their noses, trying to see what’s going on out here. Nothing, OK? There’s jagged shit in the bushes in most places and stuck in the weeds in all the vacant lots, smushed beer cans and busted whiskey bottles and crack pipes and all, plus I keep finding used rubbers and bent needles in the parking lot next door, step on one bare foot and you’ll get AIDS— hey, I watch TV— and in the gravel in front of Marvista? Stuff that you don’t want to know what it is.
The Marvista is gross. These skeezy guys live there, and they aren’t always the same ones, plus gangs of temporary type ladies that either sleep over or get pissed off and come down the back steps or the fire escape ranting in the middle of the night. Maybe they really are dangerous like Aunt Iris says, although there’s one old, old woman on the ground floor that I think she owns the building and a big lady with a baby on the top floor, either she’s some guy’s fat wife or a girlfriend that he left behind. She yells all the time and her baby just cries and cries.
Cop cars pull up in front of Marvista a couple times a week to drag people out because the party got too loud or somebody got hurt in the fight or it woke up Aunt Iris and she called 911. They’re at it most nights. Even though I close the porthole, noise comes in. Sometimes it sounds like they’re Doing It or fighting or whatever right here on the rug at the end of my bunk, and Mormama? You don’t want to know.
Oh, OK. She comes and goes like she owns the place.
I can’t stay here!
It’s awful going out, but it’s not as bad as coming in. So I go around the block and around the block when I can, thinking maybe I’ll run into at least one other kid like me and we can talk. Mom’s upstairs right now, working on her typing speed and the aunts are sitting in front of General, they call it General! And you know what? I don’t care if I don’t make it back before the end. I just need to speak to another living human being or, um, an imaginary one that doesn’t think she’s related to me.
Pardon me if the creaky front stairs scream traitor at each step.
This time, I have a, like, objective? So I turn left. I’m heading for the cross street down at the end where May Street meets the four-lane street that goes down to the overpass. This way you go past the storage shed with its parking lot. There are snakes and sharp things in the mess of sandspurs in the vacant lot just beyond. I’m heading for the creepy corner store with messed-up whitewash covering the front windows, like they don’t want you seeing what they’re doing in the back.
It’s the kind of store that you don’t want to go into, you know, all dark and stuffy, with smooshed roaches stuck to
the steps and a sticky floor inside. It’s run by a creepy old guy that really doesn’t want you there so instead of buying one of his crap candy bars you stick your change back in your pocket and turn around and go, except, today, at least he’ll have to tell me he’s fresh out of whatever-it-is, all I need to do is go in and ask.
Face it, I’m going in that store to have a conversation. I just need to talk to somebody that isn’t an old lady, you know?
It’s pretty yuck inside, starting with creepy old guy. Most of the hair on creepy old guy’s head is on his face, and there’s food stuck in it. He won’t smile and he’s not about to start a conversation. I stand around, trying to figure out what product to ask for so we can start, but the stuff behind the glass front on the counter looks so old that I don’t want to think about touching it, much less asking the guy to break my five bucks and pull thousand-year-old Junior Mints out of the case. I check out the magazine stand thinking maybe, but it’s the same deal. There are Souvenir of Jacksonville postcards left over from I don’t know when. The edges are all yellow and the palm trees look sick. There’s a really old pay phone on the wall next to the door with a sign next to it: CUSTOMERS ONLY, and a really big sign above the counter. NO LOITERING, which is what I am. A centipede is humping from the bottom of the counter to the door. If something doesn’t happen before that thing makes it to the door frame, I’m done.
“See that sign?”
NO LOITERING
“Right.” I beat the centipede, no prob. The other side of May Street looked better, the one they warned me about. There are always guys hanging out under the banyan tree.