by Bill Bunn
Then, standing by the front door, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked around once more, opened the front door, closed and locked it, and plunged into the frozen night, taking Aunt Shannon’s purse and the photographs with him. With his free hand, he opened the driver’s side door and looked back at the house.
He wedged himself between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat. He rested his forehead on the top of the steering wheel as he fished for the seat adjustment, first with his right hand, and then his left. Left again.
“There,” he announced to himself. He swung his feet in and pushed the driver’s seat back, and released the adjustment.
“The brakes. Gas pedal. Shifter.” He grasped the steering wheel with both hands. “I can do this, I think.” After his review, he stepped out of the car to study the evening’s surroundings. Satisfied that no one had noticed him, he hopped back into the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared then howled as he held the ignition key forward too long. When he released the key, the howling stopped and the engine chugged calmly.
“Sorry.” He sat for a moment or two, took a deep breath and shifted the transmission into ‘D.’ “Here we go.” With a lurch, and some wild swerving, he was off.
Uncle Edward sat inside the house reading a book when Steve galumphed over the curb and part of the lawn, pulling into the driveway.
“Hello,” Steve said. He dropped the keys on the kitchen counter, with Aunt Shannon’s purse.
Uncle Edward was reading a book entitled Hamster Breeding for Amateurs, but he frowned, and his eyes were red as if he might have been crying. “I told her she could get hurt playing around with that hocus-pocus. Would she listen to me? Not a chance.” His eyes never left the page, as if his eyes were caged by the words.
“How are we going to help her, Uncle Edward?”
“We’re not going to help her,” Uncle Edward retorted. “We’re not getting mixed up in that stuff. She got herself into this trouble, and she can get herself out.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“I have no clue,” Uncle Edward responded. “And I don’t want to find out, either.”
“What…Um… So we won’t do anything?”
“Right,” Uncle Edward snapped. “Don’t try to change things. When you try to change things, accidents like this happen.”
“I put Aunt Shannon’s purse and keys and stuff on the kitchen counter,” Steve announced.
“Fine,” Uncle Edward grunted. Steve returned to the kitchen and plucked the photos from Aunt Shannon’s purse. He stacked both the notebooks together, with the pictures, and carried them with his backpack to his bedroom.
He flopped on the bed, dropping the photos and notebooks on the bed beside him.
He replayed the events in his mind. Retrieving Richard. Finding a dictionary. Lying on his bed. The scream. The bright light, colors shifting. Gone.
Replay. Replay. And again.
“What am I missing?” he asked himself. He slapped the palm of his hand on his forehead. “She disappeared. The light.” Steve sputtered. “The light was just like when the clock turned into the lock. All the paper in the living room looked like it had been blown around… just like when the clock turned into a lock.” He picked up the book from the nightstand and flipped the cover open and closed as he thought. “Aunt Shannon disappeared with the same kind of power we used to turn a clock into a lock.” He thought for a minute more as he flipped the book cover open and closed. “Yeah. That’s for certain… it was the same thing.” Steve examined the book his hands were playing with. He thought about his mother’s notebook lying on the floor in front of the chair after Aunt Shannon disappeared. “Holy Moses,” he yelled, and sat up on the edge of the bed.
Richard was gone.
Steve sat straight up as he concentrated on his insight, driving his fists into his temples. A careful review again, looking in his memories to see if Richard remained after the incident. “No,” he said to himself, with a shake of his head. Her Benu stone went with her. He finished flipping the book’s cover and sat it down on his lap.
What else was missing?
Suddenly, an electric jolt shot through his mind and jumped out of his mouth. “The dictionary!” Steve yowled.
“Are you all right, Steve?” Uncle Edward hollered down the hall.
“Sorry. I’m great… I’m all right,” Steve responded, toning down his excitement in the hope that Uncle Edward wouldn’t suspect anything. The Benu stone and the dictionary—both of them gone. Steve lay back down and lifted the book from his lap and put it over his head, like a hat.
“I wonder what it means?” he asked himself.
He imagined the two things—Richard and the dictionary—and began to picture them.
“Yes,” He muttered to himself. “The dictionary and a Benu stone. That’s what did it.” His eyes sprang open. “The big dictionary was missing, too,” he exclaimed.
The same thing happened to Mom.
A burning warmth tingled through his chest with the thought. “The dictionary. Maybe the dictionary and a Benu stone are another short circuit, like the lock-clock thing. Maybe it’s just like touching the positive and negative on a battery at the same time.”
“Young man. Do you need assistance?” Uncle Edward trumpeted down the hall.
“Fine. I’m good,” Steve replied.
“I need a Benu stone and a dictionary,” he said to himself. The book he had been holding was about alchemy, and Steve found the table of contents and scanned it for chapters about the Benu stone. Nothing. “I guess the other question is whether or not it kills. But there weren’t any ashes or anything. Plus, the lock-clock power doesn’t kill. So maybe.”
He leapt to his feet, and grabbing his backpack, let it dangle upside down over the bed to dump the underwear and socks into a pile. Then he slid the pictures and notebooks collection inside, and his iPod, just in case.
“My experiment kit,” he said to himself.
As he stood there, the phone rang. It rang and rang.
“You’d better get that,” Uncle Edward shouted down the hall, as another ring jangled the air.
They don’t have voicemail, I bet.
“Steve, answer the phone!” Steve trotted to the phone.
“Hello, Steve speaking.”
“Ah, hello. Shannon Pankratz-Bacon, please?”
“Um,” Steve paused awkwardly as he tried to come up with an answer. “Um, I’m sorry, she’s not here.”
Not here, he thought, that’s an understatement.
“When will she be back?” the voice asked.
“She’s gone for a while, I’m afraid.”
“Steve?”
“Yeah.”
“I met you Tuesday morning in your great aunt’s kitchen. This is Lindsay.”
“Hi,” he replied. “Hey, you’re an alchemist, right?” Steve demanded, cutting out the normal pleasantries.
“Yeah. Kind of. Actually, I’m learning some stuff with your aunt.” Silence. “Could you give her a message for me?”
“Ahh… sure,” Steve replied.
“Could you tell her that she’s being watched again?”
“Pardon me?”
“She was being watched a few months back, by two men, usually. And they’re watching her house again. They’ve been there all day.”
Steve recalled the pictures Aunt Shannon had removed from the file at the police station, now in his backpack.
“Do they look like policemen?”
“No. They’re wearing suits. Take a look for yourself.” Steve walked over to a window with the phone and gazed through a gap between the curtains. A luxury car, charcoal gray, sat idling on the icy street with the exhaust congregating in frigid clouds behind it.
“I see them,” Steve agreed. “You’re right, they don’t look like policemen.”
“I wonder what they want?” Lindsay asked.
Steve thought they were related to Mr.
Gold and his group. He knew what they wanted, but he didn’t say anything to Lindsay. “Good question.”
“Where did Shannon go?”
“Ah, I’m not sure,” Steve answered truthfully. “She didn’t say, either.”
“That’s like your aunt,” Lindsay answered.
The phone he was talking on was a rotary-dial antique.
No call display. I can’t call her back.
Another abrupt topic change. “So you know a lot about alchemy? Do you know how to make your Benu stone?” Steve blurted.
“Um… wow.” Silence. “Sort of,” she replied. “I mean, I know how I’m supposed to find it, but I haven’t done it yet,” Lindsay answered. “Though you should be asking your aunt to answer these questions, not me.”
“We should talk about a few things,” Steve suggested.
“Ahh. Maybe. I really just need to talk to Shannon,” Lindsay suggested. “When will she be home?”
Steve looked around the living room and what he could see of the kitchen for a clock. Just an artsy clock without a dial or numbers hung against the gold and red living room wallpaper.
How are you supposed to read that? Um…6 ish.
“Oh. Right. How about seven?” Silence. “I mean, she’ll be home at seven, yeah seven. And she was hoping to talk to you, I think,” Steve lied.
“All right then. Why don’t I drop by at seven-thirty.”
“Sounds great,” Steve exclaimed. “I’ll see you then.” He hung up the phone.
“Who was that?” Uncle Edward asked from his chair in the living room.
“Lindsay, Aunt Shannon’s friend.”
“Oh. I see.” Uncle Edward didn’t seem to be interested in the details at all, so Steve spun around to head back to his room. As he turned, the phone rang again.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is Steve there?” asked a gruff male voice.
“Steve’s speaking.”
“This is Detective Garner.” Without giving Steve a chance to speak, he jumped into the point of his call. “I’m disappointed by your actions,” he said roughly. “You took most of the pictures from my file here. That’s illegal, as well as a breach of my trust. I’m surprised you’d take advantage of your time at the station like this. I’m going to have to speak to Great Aunt Shannon about what you’ve done. Put her on the phone, Steve.”
Duck Boy. Duck Boy.
“I wish I could,” Steve said. “I think this is all just a misunderstanding. It’s not what you think it is.”
“It’s pretty clear what it is from my end. You’re obstructing my investigation by removing those pictures. You’re supposed to help me, not get in my way. Will she be home tonight?”
“I don’t think so…”
“You’re playing games with me, Steve. She’s probably there right now. I’m coming over to pick up those pictures. I’ll be there at seven-thirty. If your aunt isn’t there, or if you aren’t there, mark my words: removing pictures from a police file constitutes theft of police property. You took advantage of my generosity.” The phone line went dead.
“Who was that?” Uncle Edward asked, his voice seeming like an echo.
Steve hesitated briefly, but decided Uncle Edward wouldn’t care one way or another. “That was Detective Garner, the officer assigned to my mom’s case.”
“Oh, I see.” Sure enough, Uncle Edward didn’t seem interested in what the call was about. “Steve, can you cook?” Uncle Edward asked suddenly.
“Yeah,” Steve replied. “I can do basic stuff.”
“Can you cook some supper for me?”
“Um … sure… I guess. Can’t you cook, Uncle Edward?”
Uncle Edward turned red and gazed at the floor. “No,” he replied sheepishly.
“But I’ve seen you reading cookbooks before,” Steve insisted.
Uncle Edward nodded. “I’ve read quite a few cookbooks.”
“OK,” Steve sighed. “I’ll cook.”
Uncle Edward glanced at his watch. “Can you make some supper now?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Steve headed to the kitchen to throw supper together.
Putting together a shoddy supper again.
The refrigerator pickings looked sparse. Steve found some leftover meat loaf from the night before, but there didn’t seem to be any vegetables to go with it.
“Uncle Edward,” Steve called. “Where could I find some potatoes and stuff?”
Uncle Edward called the answer from where he sat. “We have a root cellar down in the basement. I think there are potatoes and carrots in there—a big sack of each.”
Steve jogged to the basement door at the end of the kitchen. He always found Aunt Shannon and Uncle Edward’s basement a bit spooky. When he tugged on a worn string and pulled the switch of the first light, a weak yellow glow shone into the basement. Piles of old boxes, furniture, and odds and ends covered the floor from top to bottom.
Classic hoarding behavior.
Between the bric-a-brac were skinny paths cutting deep into the basement’s bowels. Steve sighed, shoved his fear aside, and walked down the remaining stairs to a narrow path between a few old bicycles, a lamp, an antique radio, a few dusty, stacked cases of empty bottles, and a collection of clowns wrapped in clear plastic bags. A sea of shadows, made darker with the pale glow of the weak bulb.
After hiking through canyons of junk, Steve found the door to the root cellar at the back of the basement. As he put his hand on the door, the weak bulb dangling at the top of the stairs sputtered.
Tink.
And went out.
“Ah geez. It figures,” Steve muttered. His heart leapt a bit at the light bulb’s poor timing. He began to edge his way back towards the stairs when he heard a loud crashing sound on the floor above him. Several pairs of heavy feet entered the kitchen.
“What’s going on here?” Steve heard Uncle Edward’s angry voice. Steve couldn’t hear the muffled reply, but Uncle Edward responded to the voice with another loud protest. “I have no idea what happened to her!”
A second later he heard scuffling feet. “Ouch! That hurts!” Uncle Edward roared. It sounded like he was being roughed up. “I don’t know where Steve is either,” he yelled defiantly. “He went outside a few minutes ago. I don’t know where he went. He doesn’t know anything anyway.” The discussion stopped for a moment, and then Uncle Edward let out howls of pain.
The feet sounded as if they were leaving the kitchen and moving through the house. Several heavy objects crashed to the floor. The feet moved again. The floor rattled as breakable things shattered and scattered over Steve’s head. The people upstairs were wrecking the place. Amidst the sounds of devastation, he could hear Uncle Edward’s voice, tinny and thin, echoing through the heating ducts.
“Wait, don’t do that,” Uncle Edward yelled. “Stop… please stop.” He sounded as if he were sobbing.
Steve quickly realized, as he listened to the noises, that the intruders were likely looking for something in the house.
They’d better not find me.
“Where are the pictures from the file?” yelled a menacing voice.
“I don’t know,” Uncle Edward sniffed.
“We’ll find them, if we have to tear your house down.”
There were more smashing sounds and loud thumps as the intruders stormed through the house. Suddenly the loud noises stopped.
“We got the pictures,” snarled the voice triumphantly. “Now where is the boy?”
Hide and seek.
Steve quietly opened the door to the root cellar. A bright bulb clicked to life automatically, revealing an earthy room. He stepped inside and closed the door. The bulb extinguished again. The door controlled the light.
He heard the basement door open, then someone flicking the lightswitch up and down a few times. “I need a light here,” a man hollered. After some commotion, a single pair of feet descended the basement stairs.
Steve froze.
Duck Boy. Duck
Boy.
He carefully reached up to the root cellar ceiling and groped for the light bulb. As quietly as he could, he began to unscrew it from the light socket. The bulb complained with a squeak as he turned it in its socket. But the noise of the intruder stumbling around in the basement covered the squeak of the bulb. Under the root cellar door, a yolk of unsteady light leaked through.
Flashlight.
The intruder stopped abruptly, and the basement became instantly silent. For a brief second the bulb squeaked into the silence.
“If that’s you, kid,” shouted the intruder, “I’m going to get you. You’ll wish you never met me.”
The sound of his own heartbeat pounded like a drum in his ears. Steve left the bulb and backed into the cellar as far as he could go. He felt a big sack beside him and slunk behind it, crouching. He groped for the mouth of the sack; it brimmed with potatoes. He grabbed a potato in each hand as weapons in case he needed them.
Potato self-defense.
He heard piles topple and smash as the intruder scoured the basement, cursing as he went. The intruder reached the back wall and felt his way along the wall to the root cellar. Steve’s heart stopped as he heard the intruder’s heavy hand fumble over the outside of the door. Muttering quietly to himself, the intruder pulled the root cellar door open. The bulb jumped to life.
The bright light bonged like alarm bells in Steve’s head. From his corner behind the potatoes, he glimpsed the face of the intruder. It was one of the men who had threatened Aunt Shannon.
The light surprised the intruder, and he stared at the bulb for a brief moment. Steve closed his eyes. The light bulb flickered and fell out of the socket, smashing on the root cellar floor. “Dude,” the man yelled. “This basement is creepy.”
Another set of heavy feet pounded part way down the basement stairs. “We gotta go,” it said. “Move it.”
“He ain’t here,” the seeker declared.
“We’ll keep watching the place, in case he comes back.”
He slammed the root cellar door, deafening Steve for a moment or two. The man bumbled and cursed through the piles of stuff in the basement to the steps. Steve stayed hunched behind the sack of potatoes. He heard some more yelling and the scuffling of feet. Something smashed. It sounded like a window. And then the house fell silent. He slowly released his grip on the potatoes he had in each hand, letting them fall to the cement floor.