‘He lives down there,’ I said, gesturing to the south, toward the Sound. ‘Way past all the other houses. Past the end of the street. Practically in the water.’
Despite what Peter had said, we didn’t head that way. Not then. We wandered toward the locks, into the park. The avenue between the pine trees was empty except for a scatter of solitary bums on benches, wrapping themselves in shredded jackets and newspapers as the night nailed itself down and the dark billowed around us in the wind-gusts like the sides of a tent. In the roiling trees, black birds perched on the branches, silent as gargoyles.
‘There aren’t any other houses that close to Mr Paars’s,’ I said. ‘The street turns to dirt, and it’s always wet because it’s down by the water. There are these long, empty lots full of weeds, and a couple of sheds, I don’t know what’s in them or who would own them. Anyway, right where the pavement ends, Peter and I dropped back and just kind of hung out near the last house until Mr Paars made it to his yard. God, Peter, you remember his yard?’
Instead of answering, Peter led us between the low stone buildings to the canal, where we watched the water swallow the last streaks of daylight like some monstrous whale gulping plankton. The only boats in the slips were two sailboats, sails furled, rocking as the waves slapped against them. The only person I saw on either stood at the stern of the boat closest to us, head hooded in a green oil-slicker, face aimed out to sea.
‘Think I could hit him from here?’ said Peter, and I flinched, looked at his fists expecting to see stones, but he was just asking. ‘Tell them the rest,’ he said.
I glanced at the Macks, was startled to see them holding hands, leaning against the rail over the canal, though they were watching us, not the water. ‘Come on, already,’ Kelly said, but Jenny just raised her eyebrows at me. Behind her, seagulls dipped and tumbled on the wind like shreds of cloud that had been ripped loose.
‘We waited, I don’t know, a while. It was cold. Remember how cold it was? We were wearing winter coats and mittens. It wasn’t windy like this, but it was freezing. At least that made the dirt less muddy when we finally went down there. We passed the sheds and the trees, and there was no one, I mean no one, around. Too cold for any trick-or-treating anywhere around here, even if anyone was going to. And there wasn’t anywhere to go on that street, regardless.
‘Anyway. It’s weird. Everything’s all flat down there, and then right as you get near the Paars place, this little forest springs up, all these thick firs. We couldn’t really see anything.’
‘Except that it was light,’ Peter murmured.
‘Yeah. Bright light. Mr Paars had his yard floodlit, for intruders, we figured. We thought he was probably paranoid. So we snuck off the road when we got close and went into the trees. In there, it was wet. Muddy, too. My mom was so mad when I got home. Pine needles sticking to me everywhere. She said I looked like I’d been tarred and feathered. We hid in this little grove, looked into the lawn, and we saw the bell.’
Now Peter turned around, his hands flung wide to either side. ‘Biggest fucking bell you’ve ever seen in your life,’ he said.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Kelly.
‘It was in this. pavilion,’ I started, not sure how to describe it. ‘Gazebo, I guess. All white and round, like a carousel, except the only thing inside was this giant white bell, like a church bell, hanging from the ceiling on a chain. And all the lights in the yard were aimed at it.’
‘Weird,’ said Jenny, leaning against her sister.
‘Yeah. And that house. It’s real dark, and real old. Black wood or something, all sort of falling apart. Two storeys, kind of big. It looked like four or five of the sheds we passed sort of stacked on top of each other and squashed together. But the lawn was beautiful. Green, mowed perfectly, like a baseball stadium.’
‘Kind of,’ Peter whispered. He turned from the canal and wandered away again, back between buildings down the tree-lined lane.
A shiver swept up the skin on my back as I realized, finally, why we were going back to the Paars house. I’d forgotten, until that moment, how scared we’d been. How scared Peter had been. Probably, Peter had been thinking about this for two years.
‘It was all so strange,’ I said to the Macks, all of us watching the bums in their rattling paper blankets and the birds clinging by their talons to the branches and eyeing us as we passed. ‘All that outside light, the house falling apart and no lights on in there, no car in the driveway, that huge bell. So we just looked for a long time. Then Peter said — I remember this, exactly — “He just leaves something shaped like that hanging there. And he expects us not to ring it.”
‘Then, finally, we realized what was in the grass.’
By now, we were out of the park, back among the duplexes, and the wind had turned colder, though it wasn’t freezing, exactly. In a way, it felt good, fresh, like a hard slap in the face.
‘I want a shrimp-and-chips,’ Kelly said, gesturing over her shoulder toward 15th Street, where the little fry-stand still stayed open next to the Dairy Queen, although the Dairy Queen had been abandoned.
‘I want to go see this Paars house,’ said Jenny. ‘Stop your whining.’ She sounded cheerful, fierce, the way she did when she played Dig Dug or threw her hand in the air at school. She was smart, too, not Peter-smart, but as smart as me, at least. And I think she’d seen the trace of fear in Peter, barely there but visible in his skin like a fossil, something long dead and never before seen, and it fascinated her. That’s what I was thinking when she reached out casually and grabbed my hand. Then I stopped thinking at all. ‘Tell me about the grass,’ she said.
‘It was like a circle,’ I said, my fingers still, my palm flat against hers. Even when she squeezed, I held still. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t want Peter to turn around. If Kelly had noticed, she didn’t say anything. ‘Cut right in the grass. A pattern. A circle, with this upside-down triangle inside it, and—’
‘How do you know it was upside down?’ Jenny asked.
‘What?’
‘How do you know you were even looking at it the right way?’
‘Shut up,’ said Peter, quick and hard, not turning around, leading us onto the street that dropped down to the Sound, to the Paars house. Then he did turn around, and he saw our hands. But he didn’t say anything. When he was facing forward again, Jenny squeezed once more, and I gave a feeble squeeze back,
We walked half a block in silence, but that just made me more nervous. I could feel Jenny’s thumb sliding along the outside of mine, and it made me tingly, terrified. I said, ‘Upside down. Right side up. Whatever. It was a symbol, a weird one. It looked like an eye.’
‘Old dude must have had a hell of a lawnmower,’ Kelly muttered, glanced at Peter’s back, and stopped talking, just in time, I thought. Mr Andersz was right. She was smart, too.
‘It kind of made you not want to put your foot in the grass,’ I continued. ‘I don’t know why. It just looked wrong. Like it really could see you. I can’t explain.’
‘Didn’t make me want not to put my foot in the grass,’ Peter said.
I felt Jenny look at me. Her mouth was six inches or so from my hair, my ear. It was too much. My hand twitched and I let go. Blushing, I glanced at her. She looked surprised, and she drifted away toward her sister.
‘That’s true,’ I said, wishing I could call Jenny back. ‘Peter stepped right out.’
On our left, the last of the duplexes slid away, and we came to the end of the pavement. In front of us, the dirt road rolled down the hill, red-brown and wet and bumpy, like some stretched, cutout tongue on the ground. I remembered the way Peter’s duck-boots had seemed to float on the surface of Mr Paars’s floodlit green lawn, as though he was walking on water.