“Hello? Mr. Weaver?”
Nothing. And yet she had a discomfiting sense of someone just on the other side of the door, and aware of her presence. She pounded on the door again.
“Hello? Is anyone here?”
Still no sound. She stepped back. She noticed something—the windows were boarded up from the outside. She approached the nearest one. The boarding-up had been done haphazardly, with the boards misaligned and the nails driven in at crazy angles.
It was, she thought, like a child had done it.
There were gaps between the boards. She leaned in, staring into the interior darkness, letting her eyes adjust to the shadows inside.
One shadow was shaped like a man.
Her scalp went cold. He was standing fifteen feet away, looking in her direction. Or maybe it’s just a coat hung on a door. Maybe it’s just… No. The figure in the darkness shifted slightly. It didn’t come closer. It just shifted its weight. It was simply standing there—and hating her. Radiating malevolence.
Then the paralysis was gone and she jolted back as if burned. She stood at the edge of the porch, shaken. The sunlight on the back of her neck made her feel like a little girl, a fearful and wildly imaginative child.
You’re just scared. You didn’t see… that.
The neighborhood was empty and silent. She edged back to the window and peered between the boards. The… figure… was gone. There were still shadows in the same place, but they were indistinguishable from other shadows.
Get your shit together.
She’d come here to do something—to help a kid who needed help. Jumping at shadows was no way to go about it.
Something was wrong here, though. That living room hadn’t looked inhabited.
Julia went down the porch steps and looked up at the house again. And now she noticed something—the upstairs windows were not boarded. There was only dark glass.
Walking cautiously around the house—should I be doing this?—she peered into the backyard. The grass was high. There was a slash of blue material in it, shiny like a windbreaker: A tent. A sagging blue tent, as if for a camping trip.
The front flap was open. She approached it and knelt to look in. She saw candy wrappers, empty peanut butter containers. Bed sheets with some comic book hero on them. Thor. It was Thor. A child’s sheets. And she saw pens and pencils and 9-by-12 paper, the kind they used in the school printers. And library books—school library books. Sounder and Bridge to Terabithia.
And in the corner, a small pile of familiar white socks with red stripes.
Lucas was living in the tent.
The poor kid. Where was Frank Weaver? Had Lucas’s father abandoned him here? Gone out drinking one night and never come home?
She went back around the house, intending to leave—and then she heard the school bus. Instinctively she stopped, half-hidden.
Lucas and two older boys got off. The older boys were roughhousing as they went off down the street.
She watched Lucas walk toward the house alone. He went around the other side, into the back yard. She crept back around to see him enter his tent. After a moment, he came out with the Thor sheets bundled in his arms. He carried the bundle back around the other side of the house. She watched him go up the street, his small figure getting smaller. Off to the laundromat.
He was on his own. She would have to talk to child services, get the county involved. Once he was gone, she walked toward her car. But a prickly feeling on the back of her neck—like a silk scarf brushing against it—made her turn and look back at the house. It was a shell, a sarcophagus.
A shape moved in the upstairs window.
A child’s silhouette—smaller than Lucas. Maybe five years old. Then it was gone. It had been sucking on its fingers.
Todd. The little brother.
She walked back to the porch. She rang the bell and called, “Todd?”
No answer. But she’d seen him. He was in there.
She pounded on the door. Silence. She peered through the boarded-up windows again. Darkness. Then, soft as a cat, a little figure dashed past.
“Todd!” she shouted. “I’m Lucas’s teacher, from school. Can you let me in?”
No reply. She tried the front door. Locked.
“Todd? I need to talk to you.”
She heard something, like a kitten mewling, from inside. Plaintive. As it got louder, it sounded less like a kitten, more like a child. It grew into a sob. A sound of desolation and fear.
I have to get in there. I have to help that child.
She banged on the door. “Can you hear me? Open the door!”
The crying seem to be from deep in the house, maybe from the basement. It had a faraway, panicky, almost hysterical quality.
Julia threw herself against the door. Something terrible was happening inside that house. Something had happened to that child. A kind of madness was coming over her.
“I’m coming!”
The door didn’t give. She looked around wildly and saw something sharp in the grass: a long piece of metal, rusted, something from a car. She brought it to the door, stabbed one end between the door and the jamb, and pulled. With a retching crackle, the door swung inward, the old lock ripping out of the dry, almost-rotted wood.
Immediately the crying stopped.
She looked into the foul, stale darkness and listened. Her heart was pounding; she felt it in her throat and ears and under her left breast.
The fever that had come over her—the frantic desire to get inside the house, help the child—subsided a little. Did I really hear it?
Yes. She had heard it. And she’d seen the silhouette. There was a child in this house and he’d been terrified, maybe in pain.
So why now the silence?
She stepped inside. The air was… heavy. She held the neck of her shirt over her mouth. Things had rotted in here. There were animals in the walls, or something, and one had expired.
“Todd?”
Her voice died in the air. She was in a cramped front hallway. To the left was the kitchen… ancient dishes in the sink… everything coated in a grime-skin. To the right, though, was the living room. The room she’d seen the little figure dash through.
She entered it. The rug was grey-brown. Liquor bottles in the corner. Rat droppings all over the floor. A Redskins calendar sideways on the wall, yellow. On a coffee table sat a bowl of black moss that had been soup.
Beside the bowl sat three small figurines of red clay. The figurines had disproportionately large heads. Animals of some kind, maybe goats.
“Todd?” she called again.
A symbol had been smeared on the table, long ago, in some dark substance. A five pointed star. The star had other markings, drawings that looked like eyes with rectangular black pupils, like goats’ eyes. One at each point of the star.
A feeling of dread was coming over her. Like she’d miscalculated in some disastrous way.
I shouldn’t have come here.
Then her skin tightened into bumps. She felt it again, the sense of someone close by. That presence she’d imagined—no, I didn’t imagine it—beyond the boarded-up window. Its malevolence, its pure and shining hatred.
That presence was standing behind her. Giving off an overpowering desire to perform acts of cruelty. To mutilate, to desecrate, to inhale the agony of others.
She looked behind her. Nothing. Nothing. She wanted to flee the house. But another, darker room—the room into which the small figure had dashed—waited beyond the living room. She took a step toward that doorway. It led into a dining room, where the light didn’t reach. She didn’t enter, just looked in.