‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then he won’t mind.’ He stepped out onto the lawn and said, ‘Fuck.’
‘What?’ I asked, shoulders hunching, but Peter just shook his head.
‘Grass. It’s a lot longer. And it’s wet as hell.’
‘What happened after “That bell raises the dead”?’ Jenny asked.
I didn’t answer right away. I wasn’t sure what Peter wanted me to say. But he just squinted at the house, didn’t even seem to be listening. I almost took Jenny’s hand. I wanted to. ‘We ran.’
‘Both of you? Hey, Kell—’
But Kelly was already out on the grass next to Peter, smirking as her feet sank. Peter glanced at her — cautiously, I thought. Uncertain. ‘You would have, too,’ he said.
‘I might have,’ said Kelly.
Then we were all on the grass, holding still, listening. The wind rushed through the trees as though filling a vacuum. I thought I could hear the Sound, not waves, just the dead, heavy wet. But there were no gulls, no bugs.
Once more, Peter strolled straight for that embedded circle in the grass, still visible despite the depth of the lawn, like a manta ray half-buried in seaweed. When Peter’s feet crossed the corners of the upside-down triangle — the tear-ducts of the eye — I winced, then felt silly. For all I knew, it was a corporate logo; it looked about that menacing. I started forward, too. The Macks came with me. I walked in the circle, though I skirted the edge of the triangle. Step on a crack and all. I didn’t look behind to see what the Macks did, I was too busy watching Peter as his pace picked up. He was practically running, straight for the gazebo, and then he stopped.
‘Hey,’ he said.
I’d seen it, too, I thought, feeling my knees lock as my nervousness intensified. In the lone upstairs window, there’d been a flicker. Maybe. Just one, for a single second, and then it was gone again. ‘I saw it,’ I called, but Peter wasn’t listening to me. He was moving straight toward the front door. And anyway, I realized, he hadn’t been looking upstairs.
‘What the hell’s he doing?’ Kelly said as she strolled past me, but she didn’t stop for an answer. Jenny did, though.
‘Andrew, what’s going on?’ she said, and I looked at her eyes, green and shadowy as the grass, but that just made me edgier still.
I shook my head. For a moment, Jenny stood beside me. Finally, she shrugged and followed her sister. None of them looked back, which meant, I thought, that there really hadn’t been rustling behind us just now, back in the pines. When I whipped my head around, I saw nothing but trees and twitching shadows.
‘Here, puss-puss-puss,’ Peter called softly. If the grass had been less wet and I’d been less unsettled, I’d have flopped on my back and flipped my feet in the air at him, the seal’s send-off. Instead, I came forward.
The house, like the sheds, seemed to have sunk sideways into the ground. With its filthy windows and rotting planks, it looked like the abandoned hull of a beached ship. Around it, the leafless branches of the dwarf trees danced like the limbs of paper skeletons.
‘Now, class,’ said Peter, still very quietly. ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’
‘I assume you mean other than giant bells, weird eyeballs in the grass, empty sheds, and these whammy-ass trees,’ Kelly said, but Peter ignored her.
‘He means the front door,’ said Jenny, and of course she was right.
I don’t even know how Peter noticed. It was under an overhang, so that the only light that reached it reflected off the ground. But there was no doubt. The door was open. Six inches, tops. The scratched brass of the knob glinted dully, like an eye.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So the door didn’t catch when he went in, and he didn’t notice.’
‘When who went in?’ said Peter, mocking. ‘Thought you said he moved.’
The wind kicked up, and the door glided back another few inches, then sucked itself shut with a click.
‘Guess that settles that,’ I said, knowing it didn’t even before the curtains came streaming out the single front window, grey and gauzy as cigarette smoke as they floated on the breeze. They hung there a few seconds, then glided to rest against the side of the house when the wind expired.
‘Guess it does,’ said Peter softly, and he marched straight up the steps, pushed open the door, and disappeared into the Paars house.
None of the rest of us moved or spoke. Around us, tree-branches tapped against each other, the side of the house. For the second time I sensed someone behind me and spun around. Night-dew sparkled in the lawn like broken glass, and one of the shadows of the towering pines seemed to shiver back, as though the trees had inhaled it. Otherwise, there was nothing. I thought about Mr Paars, that dog-head cane with its silver fangs.
‘What’s he trying to prove?’ Kelly asked, a silly question where Peter was concerned, really. It wasn’t about proving. We all knew that.
Jenny said, ‘He’s been in there a long time,’ and Peter stuck his head out the window, the curtain floating away from him.
‘Come see this,’ he said, and ducked back inside.
Hesitating, I knew, was pointless. We all knew it. We went up the stairs together, and the door drifted open before we even touched it. ‘Wow,’ said Kelly staring straight ahead, and Jenny took my hand again, and then we were all inside. ‘Wow,’ Kelly said again.
Except for a long, wooden table folded and propped against the staircase like a lifeboat, all the furniture we could see had been draped in white sheets. The sheets rose and rearranged themselves in the breeze, which was constant and everywhere, because all the windows had been flung wide open. Leaves chased each other across the dirt-crusted hardwood floor, and scraps of paper flapped in mid-air like giant moths before settling on the staircase or the backs of chairs or blowing out the windows.
Peter appeared in a doorway across the foyer from us, his black hair bright against the deeper blackness of the rooms behind him. ‘Don’t miss the den,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go look at the kitchen.’ Then he was gone again.
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’s 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 rolltop 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 semicircle.
‘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?’