I went right, pushed open a door that faced the rear of the house. The small room contained a double bed with a knitted blue bedcover, and a chest of drawers topped by a framed mirror. Dust coated every surface, but not as thickly as downstairs.
I opened the door on the other side of the hallway. Only one window here, overlooking the front yard. It was the cracked window I’d seen from outside: The hole was the bull’s-eye. It was a little boy’s room. A narrow bed occupied one corner, under a St. Louis Cardinals pennant. The closet was open, empty metal hangers glinting like teeth, and clothes had slipped from the hangers into a pile. Two tall bookshelves, half the shelves full of hardcover books leaning against each other, the other half filled with stacks of magazines, some of them spilling across the floor.
“You’ve got that look on your face again,” O’Connell said. I walked into the room and stooped to pick up the nearest magazine, already knowing what it was. The page was torn down the right side, and grime had faded the colors and muddied the lines, but I still could make out the pictures. In the first panel, a golden-age Captain America, skinny and goofy looking in his half mask, punched a buck-toothed Japanese soldier across the room. It had to be from the early days of Captain America Comics, 1941 or 1942.
O’Connell stepped into the room and I held out a hand. “Just don’t step on anything.”
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She looked around at the room. “Why?”
I started picking up the comic books and stray pages: a black-andwhite “paste-book” of Katzenjammer Kids newspaper strips; some Timely comic book I didn’t recognize featuring the original Vision; an issue of Boy Commandos complete except for the missing cover and back page.
O’Connell made a huffing noise, then disappeared. The floor was thick with treasures. A dozen pages of black text on gray paper from an issue of Black Mask. A copy of Weird Tales with a beautifully lurid cover. A ten-issue run of Blackhawk, the Polish air ace.
Soon I’d found scores of complete comics and pulps—Thrilling Western, High-Seas Adventures, Detective Comics, Dick Dare—and I hadn’t even started on the books on the bookshelves. Who knows what the rest of the house was hiding.
“Del.” O’Connell had returned.
“Uh-huh.” I delicately turned the page of a Captain Marvel. He was fighting Nippo, a Japanese spy armed with magical black pearls. I pitied any Japanese kid trying to grow up in America in those days.
“You’ve been at this for an hour,” O’Connell said. “I’m starving.”
“This is a classic Captain Marvel. You know, Shazam?” O’Connell leaned in the doorway, holding a cop-sized flashlight that I’d seen in the truck’s glove compartment. “Never mind,” I said. “I forget you grew up a girl. See, Billy Batson’s this little kid, an orphan newspaper boy, but when he says this magic word he turns into this big guy with a cape and gets the powers of the gods—the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the, uh, something of Atlas, then Zeus, Achilles, and the speed of Mercury.”
“Some of those aren’t gods.”
“You know what I mean. Look, I found a Detective Comics with the Joker in it—the Joker!” I looked up at her. “We have to stay here.”
She glanced at her watch. “I don’t know, what time does it get dark? I don’t want to be—”
“I mean for the night.”
“Not a chance,” she said.
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“All right then, I’ll stay. You find a hotel, then pick me up in the morning.”
“What? No. I’m not going to leave you here alone. Why in God’s name would you want to stay here?”
I looked around at the comics, the bed, the Cardinals pennant. The afternoon light gave everything in the room a shimmering quality, the bed and bookcases and yellowing pages of the comic books trembling from some inner energy, on the edge of snapping into place.
“I don’t know. I just . . . Listen, why don’t you get something to eat. Bring me back something if you want. I just need some more time here.”
“We’re not staying the night,” she said.
After a while she left me sitting in a patch of light on the floor, a comic book spread across my knees.
When I walked outside to pee, the sun was dropping. The nearest thing to a bathroom inside the house was a cinderblock room that looked like a late addition to the property; inside was a footed tub, a dry toilet, and a foul-smelling drain set into a cement floor slicked with mold. I decided that outdoors was more sanitary, and headed for the high grass near the barn.
Something glittered in the grass. I zipped up, walked a few feet. Half buried in the ground was a rusted length of metal shaped like a wide sword. Another blade was nearby, still connected to the central cone.
A propeller.
I walked toward a raised clump of weed and metal, where the base of the silo had been, stepping carefully over metal junk hidden in the tall grass. At the center of this clump was the wreck of the plane, or rather, enough pieces to reconstruct the idea of a plane: one wing, a black chunk of engine, a tangle of metal and bubbled glass that had been the cockpit. It had all burned to near shapelessness. I circled around the remains of the craft. It looked like it had been the size of a Piper Cub, or a World War II fighter. At any moment I ex-
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pected to see a skull, leather cap and goggles miraculously intact. But surely the pilot would have been buried when the crash happened. How long ago?
I heard the distant growl of the Toyota’s muffler and started stepping toward the house. O’Connell parked the truck, and got out with two big plastic grocery bags in her arms.
“What’s this?” I said.
“Camping supplies. There’s more in the back. What were you doing out there?”
“The call of nature.” There was no sense telling her about the plane. She’d only try harder to make me leave. I went around to the back of the truck and got three other bags from the bed. One held bottled water, rolls of toilet paper, a carton of cigarettes. The other bags were stuffed with what looked like big beach towels, purple and trimmed in silver.
“Is this all for me?” I asked. “Or are you staying?”
“You’re lucky Olympia has no hotel.”
I set down the grocery bags inside the door, then went back to the truck to get my duffel and O’Connell’s bag. O’Connell followed me out and retrieved a pizza box from the seat of the car. She said, “We’d better get set up before it gets dark.”
We ferried everything upstairs and split up the supplies. I didn’t have to ask if she wanted to sleep separately. O’Connell took the back bedroom with the double bed; I, of course, took the room with the comics.
The things that looked like towels were exactly that: Kansas State University beach towels. I guessed she couldn’t afford sleeping bags.
“Can I show you something?” I called. O’Connell came to my door. “Please,” I said.
She sat on the purple towel I’d spread out on the bed. I sat next to her, and handed her the book I’d found, opened to the inside cover. In a wobbly hand someone had written, “Property of Bobby Noon.”
“His name was Bobby,” I said.
“Congratulations,” she said.
“And that’s not all.” I began to show her the magazines and comics 2 4 6
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I’d set aside. I pointed out the heroes and villains on the covers: the Shadow, Captain America, the crazed Japanese soldiers.
“They’re blueprints for the cohort,” I said. “The Truth, the Captain, the Kamikaze—they’re all here.”
“What about the Little Angel?” O’Connell’s demon, the little girl in the white gown. “What comic book character is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some kind of Shirley Temple–Little Lulu amalgam. Like what’s-her-face in The Little Rascals—the token girl.”
“Who kills
old people and terminal patients.”
“Hey, I’m not saying this explains everything. But think about it—
so many of the cohort are like characters straight out of the pulps.” I looked around for the Katzenjammer Kids book, spotted it by the bookcase, and brought it back to her, stepping around the many small piles of pages. I carefully opened the book to the page I’d seen. “Look at this—it predates anything in Dennis the Menace.”
One of the panels showed the blond-haired Katzenjammer boy firing a slingshot at his drunken uncle, knocking his glasses into the air. “O’Connell, I’m in here.”
She stared at the page for a long moment, then stood quickly and walked to the window—I winced as her foot came down on a Hit Comics with Kid Eternity on the cover. She leaned close to the cracked glass, gazing across the fields. “This doesn’t tell us anything new, Del. We already know the archetypes take whatever forms exist in the culture—”
“No! No. Look at all this. I was drawn here for a reason. This is ground zero. This is where it started. With Bobby Noon, the boy on the rock.”
“What are you saying?” She didn’t look at me. “He dreamed you into being?”
“Or summoned me.”
The dying glow made a moon of her face. In a few minutes the room would be dark. I looked around for the flashlight, and O’Connell suddenly jerked back from the window.
“What is it? O’Connell?”
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She took another step back. “I just realized . . . I can see the lights on the top floors of the hospital from here.”
“Yeah?” Then, “Oh, right, we should cover the windows, they’ll see the flashlight bouncing around in here.”
I helped her take the dusty covers from the beds. We carried them downstairs, shook them out in the front yard, then went back in and covered the window in my room. We did the same in O’Connell’s room, even though we could see nothing out the window but darkness.
“Del,” she said softly.
I couldn’t see her face. She held the flashlight pointing at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, then: “I’m sorry if you felt like I doubted you.”
That wasn’t what she was going to say.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I wouldn’t have believed me. Tomorrow we’ll go into town, find out about the Noon family.” I almost said, Find out about the plane crash.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” I said.
I crossed the hall to my room, using the edge of the door frame to guide me. I moved gingerly through the dark, trying to remember where I’d left comics on the floor, and found the bed with my shins. The sheet glowed faintly against the window. I stepped forward, pulled it down. A three-quarter moon was rising over the hospital. Several of the top windows of the building flickered a faint blue: television light.
The air coming through the hole in the window was frosty. I felt my way into the duffel, pulled out a cotton sweater, and something clattered onto the floor. I reached down, and my fingers found the wooden handle of the slingshot. I held on to it, moving it from hand to hand as I pulled on the sweater.
I lay down and the bed frame popped alarmingly, but didn’t collapse. I used the duffel for a pillow, my feet framing the moonlit win-2 4 8
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dow. Not enough light to read by, though. I should have taken the flashlight.
I’d found the farm and the House that Time Forgot. I’d found the boy on the rock. Tomorrow I’d pull answers from this town like teeth. And somehow, eventually, I’d figure out what to do with the body I’d stolen. The kid rested inside my head like a spent bullet. I stretched the slingshot, aiming the empty pouch between my feet, through the hole, straight at the moon’s villainous chin. Draw, O Coward!
I fired. The moon refused to go out.
D E M O N O L O G Y
B OB B Y NO O N , B OY M A RV E L
OLYMPIA, KANSAS, 1944
“Prepare to be annihilated, imperialist dogs!”
The Boy Marvel appears above them, his white cape fluttering in the breeze, feet planted wide on the cement wall of the bridge. The summer sun makes a halo behind his head.
The girl on the bank, the innocent hostage, says nothing. The two Jap spies disguise their fear with laughter. “I dare you to come down here and say that,” the taller one says. “I double dare you!” says his partner. The Johnson brothers are waist-deep in the creek, leaning against the big rock that pokes out of the water like the back of a hippo. Their sister, a six-yearold with pigtails, waits with wide eyes.
“Just watch me,” says the Boy Marvel. He adjusts the knot at his neck, straightens his cape. The sheet was stolen from his grandmother’s linen closet and cut down with his pocket knife—a crime, perhaps, but one the Boy Marvel deemed necessary.
He crouches and stretches out his arms. After a moment, he straightens, readjusts the cape.
“Ha!” the taller Johnson boy says. “You’re a damn coward!” He’s thir-2 5 0
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teen, a year older than the Boy Marvel, and he curses whenever adults are out of earshot. His younger brother and fellow spy is only eight, but he’s too scared of his brother to ever tell on him. Their sister is allowed to watch as long as she doesn’t talk or get in the way.
The rock is eight feet from the bridge, give or take. They’ve all seen the high school boys jump from the bridge and land in the deep water on the other side of the rock, but none of the trio have ever attempted it. It’s a daredevil stunt. You can’t even get a running start; you have to do it right from the wall.
“Don’t call me that,” Bobby Noon says.
The Johnson brothers crack up again. “Coward!” they shout. Bobby’s been called a lot of names. Crybaby, scaredy-cat, liar-liar-pants-on-fire. He’s missed a lot of school for what the teacher called “emotional problems.” Bobby used to hear voices, see people who weren’t there. Bobby acted so crazy, the kids said, that even his momma couldn’t take it, and that’s why she ran off with that Kansas City man. But ever since his dad’s ship went down somewhere in the Pacific, he won’t stand for being called a coward. You can get him to do almost anything if you call him that. Bobby knows this about himself but can’t help it. He crouches again, summoning mysterious energies. The spies step away from the rock—they don’t want Bobby to land on them. Their sister covers her eyes.
The Boy Marvel leaps. Arms straight, toes pointed, head up. His capewidened shadow stretches over the awestruck spies. This is a moment they’ll remember forever, he thinks.
He’s falling now. The rock’s shining back rushes toward him, too fast, too close. He ducks his head into his arms, pulls his legs up to his chest—
Ker-Wop!
He hits the deep water with his knees—perfect cannonball—and his shins smack the rocks at the bottom of the creek. He lays there curled in the cold water, savoring the victory, not caring that his legs are probably bleeding. Finally he pushes to the surface, beaming. The brothers can’t believe it—your cape hit the rock you were so close! The older boy slaps him on the back. The younger boy and girl are looking at him like he’s a hero.
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. . .
They fool around in the water for a couple more hours, but no else tries the jump. Not Bobby—he’s proven his point—and not even the older Johnson boy. Maybe he’s too scared by Bobby’s close call. They reread Bobby’s funny books, and Bobby even reads one aloud to the little Johnson girl. The brothers think she has a crush on Bobby.
When the brothers get bored with reading they make Bobby come up with another game—Bobby’s the one with all the ideas. The other kids think he reads too much, and think he’s being a show-off when he uses words like annihilated and electrodynamics. But he’s real good at made-up games.
Billy instr
ucts them on how to set up a barricade by the end of the bridge and arms them with Tommy-gun sticks, on alert for strange cars driven by foreign agents. The Johnson girl, being a girl, is supposed to hide. But only two cars and one tractor go by, and they’re all people they’ve seen a thousand times before, so Bobby tells them that the agents are disguised as their friends and neighbors. So informed, they shoot out the tires of the next car that comes by.
At suppertime the Johnson boys walk home, their kid sister trailing after them. Bobby stays on the bridge with his copies of Captain Marvel and The Shield and Action Comics. From his perch on the wall he can look south toward the roofs of town, or north to the hospital on the hill, or across the fields to where the red silo pokes up like a rocket. His grandmother’s voice is too weak to call him from this far. He’s twelve, and he’s the man of the house now. He can go home when he damn well wants to. He bunches the damp cape into a pillow, lies down on his back upon the wall, and holds the Captain Marvel over his head to block the sun. He doesn’t have to read the words anymore; he’s got them all memorized. Gram hates that he spends his money on the books, even buying the used ones from the other boys, but she doesn’t try to stop him. His dad liked comics. In one of his letters he said they passed them around the ship until they were all taped up like wounded soldiers. Nobody’s told Bobby what happened to his father, but he knows. For the millionth time, he pictures his dad on the deck of the destroyer, blue sleeves 2 5 2
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pushed up his forearms, a copy of Captain America rolled into his back pocket. He’s hammering away with his antiaircraft gun at the Japanese Zero diving straight for him out of a cloudless blue sky. The airplane grows huge, a thousand pounds of metal already breaking up under the hail of bullets, trailing oily black smoke and fire. And now his father can see the face of the pilot, a madly grinning man with a white bandanna wrapped around his head, the red circle in the middle of his forehead like a third eye. For the millionth time Bobby pushes the picture out of his head, stares hard at the pictures in his book. He makes himself consider again who’d win in a fight, Captain Marvel or Superman.
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