I read a few chapters of Nancy Drew—I’d worked my way through most of the series by now, so I’d had to start rationing the books that were left—then ate the cold meatloaf my aunt had left me in the fridge. After I cleared my plate I sat back down at the kitchen table to work a crossword puzzle from the Fresno Bee. This was another Phil-type activity that you couldn’t have paid me to do back in S.F. But with no TV, a looming Nancy Drew shortage, and Señor Diaz hanging up the phone every time I tried to call Carlotta, my entertainment standards just kept getting lower and lower.
It was a hidden-message crossword, which they did sometimes: certain of the clues were highlighted, and if you solved them and strung the answers together, they’d form a saying or a quotation, like RED SKY AT MORNING, SAILOR TAKE WARNING, or THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL US MAKES US STRONGER. Usually the special clues were hard enough that you had to finish the whole crossword to get them, but sometimes, like tonight, you could solve them directly.
The first highlighted clue, 1 across, four letters, was “Defunct Life magazine rival,” and I knew that was LOOK. The second clue, 9 across, five letters, was “Opposite of over,” or UNDER. The third clue—and this one was so easy I almost laughed—was a fill-in-the-blank, 13 across, three letters, “Winnie ____ Pooh.”
There was a rumble of thunder and the rain finally started. It was the downpour I’d wished for and then some, but instead of making me happy it set me on edge. I went down the hall to the front door, flicked on the front-porch lights, and spent a long time looking out, making sure that the hiss of the rain was just rain, and not tires creeping up the drive.
The next clue was the only one I didn’t get right off the bat: 20 across, four letters, “Where the NC gun is hidden.”
NC gun?
Capital N, capital C. I thought it might be a typo, so I moved on to the next clue, 24 across, four letters, “Tarzan’s girlfriend.” My scalp prickled a little when I saw that, but what really made my hair stand up was the last clue, 31 across, nine letters, “The loneliest Brontë.”
Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t have gotten that one either, but it just so happened that we’d been reading Jane Eyre in class that week, and the teacher had given us the rundown on the whole sorry Brontë family, so I knew that the loneliest Brontë was CHARLOTTE. After Branwell and Emily and Anne all died, Charlotte was the one left over, the one left alone in the house, kind of like I was right now. And so if you added it all together, tonight’s hidden message was—
LOOK UNDER THE blank, JANE CHARLOTTE.
Yeah. And maybe it was because it shared a couple of letters with “blank,” or maybe it was because I was sitting with my back to it, but all at once I knew that the missing word was SINK.
My aunt and uncle’s kitchen had this huge sink—“Big enough to slaughter a pig in,” my uncle said one time, and he made it sound like that was more than a figure of speech. It had a big cabinet space underneath it too, and once when we were visiting a few years earlier, Phil crawled under there during a game of hide-and-seek and split his head open on the drainpipe. So between thoughts of pig slaughter and the memory of Phil with blood streaming down his face, I wasn’t exactly eager to stick my nose down there.
Of course I had to look. I told myself that it was just a coincidence anyway, there was no way that message in the crossword could really be intended for me personally. Maybe “Look under the sink, Jane Charlotte” was a line from Shakespeare.
So I opened up the cabinet, and there was nothing there but the usual assortment of under-the-sink junk, and I’m like, see, just a coincidence. But then I’m like, not so fast, if there is a gun, it’s not just going to be lying out next to the silver polish. So I felt up in the space between the wall and the back of the sink basin. And at first I was just touching air, but then I moved my hand a little and my fingers brushed something rough. A package.
It was rolled up in a piece of potato sack and tied up with twine. I brought it out into the light and unwrapped it. And there it was.
It looked like a toy zap gun. It was bright orange, with a puffy barrel, and it seemed to be made of plastic. It was heavy, though, and from the weight and the fact that it was slightly cold, I thought it might be a water pistol. But when I checked the base of the handle there was no rubber plug, just a flat plate embossed with the letters NC.
There were more markings on the side of the gun. Near the back of the barrel, right above the trigger, was a dial with four settings. One setting was labeled SAFE in small green letters; the next setting was labeled NS, in blue; the last two settings, both labeled in dark red, were CI and MI. The dial was currently set to MI.
I did the thing that you traditionally do when you’re a teenager and you find a gun, which was point it at my own face. The dark hole of the NC gun’s muzzle seemed more real than the rest of it, though, so I decided not to pull the trigger. Instead I looked around to see if one of my aunt’s cats was in the room. But the cats had made themselves scarce, and before I could choose something else for target practice, all the lights in the house went out.
For the first few seconds I was amazingly calm. Then lightning flashed outside and I turned towards the window above the sink, drawn by an afterimage of something that didn’t belong. When the next flash came I saw it clearly: out beyond the backyard, in the orange groves that ran behind the house, a van was parked with its headlights off.
Something big walked across the back porch, passing right in front of the window—I say something, but of course I knew who it was, and what he was here for. He went straight for the porch door, which was locked but flimsy, and banged on it hard, real hammer blows. I could feel it shaking in its frame. There was a pause, and then he started attacking the doorknob, rattling it like he meant to pull it off.
By this point I was practically shitting myself with fear. I still had the gun, but I’d gone back to thinking of it as a toy, and in another moment I would have dropped it in the sink and started running blind through the house.
Then the phone rang, a beautiful sound. The janitor immediately stopped rattling the doorknob. The phone rang again, and again, and I moved towards it, terrified that if the ringing stopped before I reached it the attack on the door would begin again. I racked my knee on a chair, and banged my side against the corner of the kitchen table, but I held on to the gun.
I answered the phone on the seventh ring: “Hello…?”
“Jane Charlotte.”
“I don’t know who this is,” I whispered, “but I need help. Your bad monkey is right outside my back door.”
“No,” the voice on the phone said. “He’s in the house.”
Down the hall in my uncle’s study, a board creaked.
“Now don’t panic,” the voice advised. “He won’t expect you to be armed. Just hold the gun steady in both hands…”
I hung up. From the phone to the porch door was about a dozen steps, but my feet didn’t touch the floor more than twice.
The door wouldn’t open, even after I remembered to unlock it. Something—one of the porch chairs, probably—had been jammed under the knob on the other side.
Behind me, another board creaked: he was coming down the hall. I whirled around and raised the gun, even as his silhouette filled the kitchen doorway.
The NC gun doesn’t make any noise when you fire it. I didn’t realize that at the time, though, because just as I pulled the trigger, the lightning came again, striking so close behind the house that there was no pause before the thunder. The kitchen filled up with sound and light, so bright that the janitor himself seemed to glow like a real angel, an angel with a flaming dagger in one hand and a sparkling wire halo in the other. I screamed, and he screamed too, and by the time the brightness failed he was already falling.