by Paula Guran
Kelly had started away, now, too, wandering into the living room to our right, running her fingers over the tops of a covered couch as she passed it. One of the paintings on the wall, I noticed, had been covered rather than removed, and I wondered what it was. Kelly drew up the cover, peered beneath it, then dropped it and stepped deeper into the house. I started to follow, but Jenny pulled me the other way, and we went left into what must have been Mr. Paars’ den.
“Whoa,” Jenny said, and her fingers slid between mine and tightened.
In the dead center of the room, amidst discarded file folders that lay where they’d been tossed and empty envelopes with plastic address-windows that flapped and chattered when the wind filled them, sat an enormous, oak, roll-top desk. The top was gone, broken away, and it lay against the room’s lone window like the cracked shell of a dinosaur egg. On the surface of the desk, in black, felt frames, a set of six photographs had been arranged in a semi-circle.
“It’s like the top of a tombstone,” Jenny murmured. “You know what I mean? Like a . . . what do you call it?”
“Family vault,” I said. “Mausoleum.”
“One of those.”
Somehow, the fact that two of the frames turned out to be empty made the array even more unsettling. The other four held individual pictures of what had to be brothers and one sister—they all had flying white hair, razor-blue eyes—standing, each in turn, on the top step of the gazebo outside, with the great bell looming behind them, bright white and all out of proportion, like the Mountain on a too-clear day.
“Andrew,” Jenny said, her voice nearly a whisper, and in spite of the faces in the photographs and the room we were in, I felt it all over me. “Why Struwwelpeter?”
“What?” I said, mostly just to make her speak again.
“Struwwelpeter. Why does Mr. Andersz call him that?”
“Oh. It’s from some kids’ book. My mom actually had it when she was little. She said it was about some boy who got in trouble because he wouldn’t cut his hair or cut his nails.”
Jenny narrowed her eyes. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. Except my mom said the pictures in the book were really scary. She said Struwwelpeter looked like Freddy Krueger with a ’fro.”
Jenny burst out laughing, but she stopped fast. Neither of us, I think, liked the way laughter sounded in that room, in that house, with those black-bordered faces staring at us. “Struwwelpeter,” she said, rolling the name carefully on her tongue, like a little kid daring to lick a frozen flagpole.
“It’s what my mom called me when I was little,” said Peter from the doorway, and Jenny’s fingers clenched hard and then fell free of mine. Peter didn’t move toward us. He just stood there while we watched, paralyzed. After a few, long seconds, he added, “When I kicked the shit out of barbers, because I hated having my haircut. Then when I was just being bad. She’d say that instead of screaming at me. It made me cry.” From across the foyer, in the living room, maybe, we heard a single, soft bump, as though something had fallen over.
With a shrug, Peter stepped past us back into the foyer. We followed, not touching, now, not even looking at each other. I felt guilty, amazed, strange. When we passed the windows the curtains billowed up and brushed across us.
“Hey, Kelly,” Peter whispered loudly into the living room. He whispered it again, then abruptly turned our way and said, “You think he’s dead?”
“Looks like it.” I glanced down the hallway toward the kitchen, then into the shadows in the living room, which seemed to have shifted, somehow, the sheet some way different as it lay across the couch. I couldn’t place the feeling; it was like watching an actor playing a corpse, knowing he was alive, trying to catch him breathing.
“But the car’s here,” Peter said. “The Lincoln. Hey, Kelly!” His shout made me wince, and Jenny cringed back toward the front door, but she shouted, too.
“Kell? Kell?”
“Oh, what is that?” I murmured, my whole spine twitching like a severed electrical wire, and when Jenny and Peter looked at me, I pointed upstairs.
“Wh—” Jenny started, and then it happened again, and both of them saw it. From under the half-closed door at the top of the staircase—the only door we could see from where we were—came a sudden slash of light which disappeared instantly, like a snake’s tongue flashing in and out.
We stood there at least a minute, maybe more. Even Peter looked uncertain; not scared, quite, but something had happened to his face. I couldn’t place it right then. It made me nervous, though. And it made me like him more than I had in a long, long time.
Then, without warning, Peter was halfway up the stairs, his feet stomping dust out of each step as he slammed them down, saying, “Fucking hilarious, Kelly. Here I come. Ready or not.” He stopped halfway up and turned to glare at us. Mostly at me. “Come on.”
“Let’s go,” I said to Jenny, reached out on my own for the first time and touched her elbow, but to my surprise she jerked it away from me. “Jenny, she’s up there.”
“I don’t think so,” she whispered.
“Come on,” Peter hissed.
“Andrew, something’s wrong. Stay here.”
I looked into her face. Smart, steely Jenny Mack, first girl ever to look at me like that, first girl I’d ever wanted to. And right then, for the only time in my life, I felt—within me—the horrible thrill of Peter’s power, and realized I knew the secret of it. It wasn’t bravery and it wasn’t smarts, although he had both those things in spades. It was simply the willingness to trade. At any given moment, Peter Andersz would trade anyone for anything, or at least could convince people that he would. Knowing you could do that, I thought, would be like holding a grenade, tossing it back and forth in the terrified face of the world.
I looked at Jenny’s eyes, filling with tears, and I wanted to kiss her, though I couldn’t even imagine how to initiate something like that. What I said, in my best Peter-voice, was, “I’m going upstairs. Coming or staying?”
I can’t explain. I didn’t mean anything. It felt like playacting, no more real than holding her hand had been. We were just throwing on costumes, dancing around each other, scaring each other. Trick or treat.
“KELLY?” Jenny called past me, blinking, crying openly, now, and I started to reach for her again, and she shoved me, hard, toward the stairs.
“Hurry up,” said Peter, with none of the triumph I might have expected in his voice.
I went up, and we clumped side by side to the top of the stairs. When we reached the landing, I looked back at Jenny. She was propped in the front door, one hand on the doorknob and the other wiping at her eyes as she jerked her head from side to side, looking for her sister.
At our feet, light licked under the door again. Peter held up a hand, and we stood together and listened. We heard wind, low and hungry, and now I was sure I could hear the Sound lapping against the edge of the continent, crawling over the lip of it.
“OnetwothreeBOO!” Peter screamed and flung open the door, which banged against a wall inside and bounced back. Peter kicked it open again, and we lunged through into what must have been a bedroom once and was now just a room, a blank space, with nothing in it at all.
Even before the light swept over us again, from outside, from the window, I realized what it was. “Lighthouse,” I said, breathless. “Greenpoint Light.”
Peter grinned. “Oh, yeah. Halloween.”
Every year, the suburbs north of us set Greenpoint Light running again on Halloween, just for fun. One year, they’d even rented ferries and decked them out with seaweed and parents in pirate costumes and floated them just offshore, ghost-ships for the kiddies. We’d seen them skirting our suburb on their way up the coast.
“Do you think—” I started, and Peter grabbed me hard by the elbow. “Ow,” I said.
“Listen,” snapped Peter.
I heard the house groan as it shifted. I heard paper flapping somewhere downstairs, the f
ront door tapping against its frame or the inside wall as it swung on the wind.
“Listen,” Peter whispered, and this time I heard it. Very low. Very faint, like a finger rubbed along the lip of a glass, but unmistakable once you realized what it was. Outside, in the yard, someone had just lifted the tongue of the bell and tapped it, oh so gently, against the side.
I stared at Peter, and he stared back. Then he leapt to the window, peering down. I thought he was going to punch the glass loose from the way his shoulders jerked.
“Well?” I said.
“All I can see is the roof.” He shoved the window even farther open than it already was. “Clever girls!” he screamed, and waited. For laughter, maybe, a full-on bong of the bell, something. Abruptly, he turned to me, and the light rolled across him, waist-high, and when it receded, he looked different, damp with it. “Clever girls.”
I whirled, stepped into the hall, looked down. The front door was open, and Jenny was gone. “Peter?” I whispered, and I heard him swear as he emerged onto the landing beside me. “You think they’re outside?”
Peter didn’t answer right away. He had his hands jammed in his pockets, his eyes cast down at the floor. He shuffled in place. “The thing is, Andrew,” he said, “there’s nothing to do.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s nothing to do.”
“Find the girls?”
He shrugged.
“Ring the bell?”
“They rang it.”
“You’re the one who brought us out here. What were you expecting?”
He glanced back at the bedroom’s bare walls, the rectangular, dustless space in the floor where, until very recently, a bed or rug must have been, the empty light fixture overhead. Struwwelpeter. My friend. “Opposition,” he said, and shuffled off down the hall.
“Where are you going?” I called after him.
He turned, and the look on his face stunned me, it had been years since I’d seen it. The last time was in second grade, right after he punched Robert Case, who was twice his size, in the face and ground one of Robert’s eyeglass-lenses into his eye. The last time anyone who knew him had dared to fight him. He looked . . . sorry.
“Coming?” he said.
I almost followed him. But I felt bad about leaving Jenny. And I wanted to see her and Kelly out on the lawn, pointing through the window at us and laughing. And I didn’t want to be in that house anymore. And it was exhausting being with Peter, trying to read him, dancing clear of him.
“I’ll be outside,” I said.
He shrugged and disappeared through the last unopened door at the end of the hall. I listened for a few seconds, heard nothing, turned, and started downstairs. “Hey, Jenny?” I called, but got no answer. I was three steps from the bottom before I realized what was wrong.
In the middle of the foyer floor, amidst a swirl of leaves and paper, Kelly Mack’s black baseball cap lay upside down like an empty tortoise shell. “Um,” I said to no one, to myself, took one more uncertain step down, and the front door swung back on its hinges.
I just stared, at first. I couldn’t even breathe, let alone scream, it was like I had an apple-core lodged in my throat. I just stared into the white spray-paint on the front door, the triangle-within-a-circle. A wet, wide-open eye. My legs wobbled, and I grabbed for the banister, slipped down to the bottom step, held myself still. I should scream, I thought. I should get Peter down here, and both of us should run. I didn’t even see the hand until it clamped hard around my mouth.
For a second, I couldn’t do anything at all, and that was way too long, because before I could lunge away or bite down, a second hand snaked around my waist, and I was yanked off my feet into the blackness to my left and slammed against the living room wall.
I wasn’t sure when I’d closed my eyes, but now I couldn’t make them open. My head rang, and my skin felt tingly, tickly, as though it was dissolving into the atoms that made it up, all of them racing in a billion different directions, and soon there’d be nothing left of me, just a scatter of energy and a spot on Mr. Paars’ dusty, decaying floor.
“Did I hurt you?” whispered a voice I knew, close to my ears. It still took me a long time to open my eyes. “Just nod or shake your head.”
Slowly, forcing my eyes open, I nodded.
“Good. Now sssh,” said Mr. Andersz, and released me.
Behind him, both Mack sisters stood grinning.
“You like the cap in the middle of the floor?” Kelly said. “The cap was a good touch, no?”
“Sssh,” Mr. Andersz said. “Please. I beg you.”
“You should see you,” Jenny whispered, sliding up close. “You look so damn scared.”
“What’s—”
“He followed us to see if we were doing anything horrible. He saw us come in here, and he had this idea to get back at Peter.”
I gaped at Jenny, and then at Mr. Andersz, who was peering very carefully around the corner, up the stairs.
“Not to get back,” he said, so serious. It was the same voice he’d used in his own front hallway earlier that evening. He’d never looked more like his son than he did right then. “To reach out. Reach him. Someone’s got to do something. He’s a good boy. He could be. Now, please. Don’t spoil this.”
Everything about Mr. Andersz at that moment astounded me. But watching him revealed nothing further. He stood at the edge of the living room, shoulders hunched, hair tucked tight under his dock-worker’s cap, waiting. Slowly, my gaze swung back to Jenny, who continued to grin in my direction, but not at me, certainly not with me. And I knew I’d lost her.
“This was about Peter,” I said. “You all could have just stuck your heads out and waved me down.”
“Yep,” said Jenny, and watched Mr. Andersz, not me.
Upstairs, a door creaked, and Peter’s voice rang out. “Hey, Andrew.”
To Jenny’s surprise and Mr. Andersz’ horror, I almost answered. I stepped forward, opened my mouth. I’m sure Jenny thought I was getting back at her, turning the tables again, but mostly, I didn’t like what Mr. Andersz was doing. I think I sensed the danger in it. I might have been the only one.
But I was twelve. And Peter certainly deserved it. And Mr. Andersz was my teacher, and my friend’s father. I closed my mouth, sank back into the shadows, and did not move again until it was over.
“Andrew, I know you can hear me!” Peter shouted, stepping onto the landing. He came, clomp clomp clomp, toward the stairs. “Ann-drew!” Then, abruptly, we heard him laugh. Down he came, his shoes clattering over the steps. I thought he might charge past us, but he stopped right where I had.
Beside the couch, under the draped painting, Kelly Mack pointed at her own hatless head and mouthed, “Oh, yeah.”
But it was the eye on the door, I thought, not the cap. Only the eye would have stopped him, because like me—and faster than me—Peter would have realized that neither Mack sister, smart as they were, would have thought of it. Even if they’d had spray paint. Mr. Andersz had brought spray paint? Clearly, he’d been planning this—or something like this—for quite some time. If he was the one who’d done it, that is.
“What the fuck,” Peter muttered. He came down a step. Another. His feet touched flat floor, and still Mr. Andersz held his post.
Then, very quietly, Mr. Andersz said, “Boo.”
It was as if he’d punched an ejector-seat button. Peter flew through the front door, hands flung up to ward off the eye as he sailed past it. He was fifteen feet from the house, still flying, when he realized what he’d heard. We all saw it hit him. He jerked in mid-air like a hooked marlin reaching the end of a harpoon rope.
For a few seconds, he just stood in the wet grass with his back to us, quivering. Kelly had sauntered past Mr. Andersz onto the front porch, laughing. Mr. Andersz, I noticed, was smiling, too, weakly. Even Jenny was laughing quietly beside me.
But I was watching Peter’s back, his whole body vibrating like an imploded buildin
g after the charge has gone off, right at the moment of collapse. “No,” I said.
When Peter finally turned around, though, his face was his regular face, inscrutable, a little pale. The spikes in his hair looked almost silly in the shadows, and also made him look younger. A naughty little boy. Calvin with no Hobbes.
“So he is dead,” Peter said.
Mr. Andersz stepped outside. Kelly was slapping her leg, but no one paid her any attention.
“Son,” said Mr. Andersz, and he stretched one hand out, as though to call Peter to him. “I’m sorry. It was . . . I thought you might laugh.”
“He’s dead, right?”
The smile was gone from Mr. Andersz’ face now, and from Jenny’s, I noted when I glanced her way. “Kelly, shut up,” I heard her say to her sister, and Kelly stopped giggling.
“Did you know he used to teach at the school?” Mr. Andersz asked, startling me.
“Mr. Paars?”
“Sixth grade science. Biology, especially. Years ago. Kids didn’t like him. Yes, Peter, he died a week or so ago. He’d been very sick. We got a notice about it at school.”
“Then he won’t mind,” said Peter, too quietly, “if I go ahead and ring that bell. Right?”
Mr. Andersz didn’t know about the bell, I realized. He didn’t understand. I watched him look at his son, watched the weight he always seemed to be carrying settle back around his shoulders, lock into place like a yoke. He bent forward a little.
“My son,” he said. Uselessly.
So I shoved past him. I didn’t mean to push him, I just needed him out of the way, and anyway, he gave no resistance, bent back like a plant.
“Peter, don’t do it,” I said.
The eyes, black and mesmerizing, swung down on me. “Oh. Andrew. Forgot you were here.”
It was, of course, the cruelest thing he could have said, the source of his power over me and the reason I was with him (other than the fact that I liked him, I mean). It was the thing I feared most, in general, no matter where I was.
“That bell. . .” I said, thinking of the dog’s-head cane, that deep and frozen voice, but thinking more, somehow, about my friend, rocketing away from us now at incomprehensible speed. Because that’s what he seemed to be doing, to me.