For I Could Lift My Finger and Black Out the Sun (6 page)

Eyes squinted in fear, I
pushe
d
.

And he shifted.

His hand held steady, then he blinked. Twice. He lowered the radio; it was forgotten. He looked around without really seeing anything, finally resting his gaze back on me. “Oh, uh….” He shook his head, clearing cobwebs. “Um, have a good day, son.” He turned and walked out of the alley.

I did a quick check of my underpants to be sure I hadn’t crapped myself, then hopped on my bike and pedaled home.

11

When my mom threw open the door just as I reached for the handle, I shrieked like a bleating goat.

“Oh, John! There you are,” she said, oblivious to my terrified look and sweaty brow. “Hey, I need you to stay here with Holly for just a bit. I need to run an errand. I’ll be back in about an hour, okay?” She was nodding to herself, fumbling with her keys, and walking out before I even had a chance to respond.

Suddenly she turned back. “What’s my cellphone number? Just in case?” She paused, awaiting my reply, and I stuttered out the numbers from memory. She gave a small smile and nod and continued out the door, keys in hand.

And just like that, I found myself locked in the house, still wide-eyed with shock. I heard the engine of Mom’s car start and then fade as she backed down the driveway and drove away. So I did the only logical thing that a kid my age would do after engaging in a deadly stunt with a friend, watching that friend fall to his obvious death, seeking police help, finding out the friend wasn’t dead, using mind powers on the police to send them away, then pedaling fast all the way home, only to get stuck on babysitting duty: I got a glass of water and went to watch TV with Holly.

Holly had been wheelchair-bound since her seizure. I really missed the sound of her voice. I hadn’t heard her say an intelligible word since that day. So you can see why I nursed a special sort of hatred for Walter Ivory. Sure, he didn’t directly do anything to Holly, but just him
being there
that day, starting things with my Dad. I know I blamed him.

Of course, whatever happened to Holly could have been a ticking bomb. She could very well have had her big seizure the next day at school, or a year later riding her bike, or whatever. Still…

Holly was watching cartoons. She loved cartoons. I could tell because her eyes stayed glued to the TV when they were on, and if I had the gall to stand between her and the set, she’d twitch to look around me, sometimes making little upset noises. Before I sat, I offered her some of my water, and she tilted back her head a bit in acceptance, so I gently poured some into her mouth. She swallowed and bent to look around me at the TV, so I moved out of the way and sat down on the couch.

After a few minutes of cartoons, I realized I wasn’t watching the TV at all. I was just thinking about Bobby. Where the hell did he go? Was he actually okay? I figured I needed to check on him, since no one else even knew he’d been hurt.

I looked over at Holly. She hadn’t budged since I sat down. Not an inch. Watching the screen like a zombie.

Bobby lived four streets over. If I ran and snuck through backyards, I could be tapping on his bedroom window in maybe five minutes. Five minutes there. A minute or two to make sure he was okay. Five minutes back. Eleven or 12 minutes. I checked the clock hanging over the TV. It was 3:35 p.m. Cartoons would be on for another 25 minutes. I could do it before Holly even knew I was gone.

“I’ll be right back,” I told Holly. She didn’t move or respond. That was what I wanted.
Just keep watching your show
, I thought, knowing my Mom would seriously kill me if she found out I left Holly at home alone. But I was desperate. If Bobby wasn’t home, he could really be hurt. I had no idea what I would do if that were the case, but I had to find out.

Getting up, I first went to my room and strapped on my wristwatch. I was going to time this like a military operation. Then I put my glass of water, now about half full, on the counter in the kitchen and made for the back door. I clicked the button to start my stopwatch.

Four minutes, 48 seconds later, I was knocking lightly on Bobby’s bedroom window, practically breaking my arm to pat myself on the back at being ahead of schedule.

There was no answer.

12

I rapped my knuckles on the glass again. “Bobby, it’s me,” I said in a loud whisper.

I heard a groan from inside.
Oh crap
.

Knowing that Bobby kept his window unlocked, I reached up and pushed. I mean, we were boys, after all. We had to be able to sneak out of our houses at a moment’s notice. The window slid up, and I leaned in to push away the curtains.

Bobby’s bedroom was dim, even though the afternoon was bright — he always kept the curtains closed, to make his room as dark as a tomb. His parents gave him infinite trouble about it, especially his father, who said Bobby just wanted it dark so he could be lazy and sleep in. Which was, of course, correct.

After a moment to let my eyes adjust, I saw him. Flopped on his bed. He looked worse than he had in the hospital after being hit by a car. I crawled in the window.

“Crap, are you okay?” I asked.

Bobby let out a heavy sigh. “Not yet. But… I think I will be soon.” His voice sounded ragged.

“Yeah, right. You look awful.”

“I know. But…”

“But what?”

He managed to turn his head a bit and give me a smile, through the bruises and dried blood on his face. It was several minutes until he was able to speak. “But I’m
not dead
, Johnny.”

“You got freakin’ lucky,” I said.

“No, Johnny, I didn’t. I got hurt. But I can
feel
it getting better. Actually, that’s not the right word. I can
hear
it getting better.” His eyes were dead serious.

I paused, not understanding. “What the hell does that mean?”

Bobby continued to look at me with a deeply solemn expression. “Tell me you’ve heard them, too, Johnny. The sounds. The sounds
inside
you.”

I was taken aback. Sounds? Sounds inside me?

But, yes. I had heard them, hadn’t I? At night, on the edge of sleep, when everything else was quiet. I’d heard something like a buzz. Like a distant radio signal. A sound inside me. Many sounds inside me, an unseen, unknown chorus.

Slowly, I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve heard them. Well, I’ve heard
something
.”

Bobby closed his eyes. “Thank God. I was beginning to think I was going crazy. And it’s
loud
now, Johnny. Like me hurting myself woke up the sounds. They sound
busy
.”

They sound busy? Sounds inside me. Sounds inside Bobby. I looked down at my left hand, the one that had dodged our hammer trick so many times. Had I heard a sound back then, doing the trick? I think maybe I had, just for a moment.

Then I noticed my stopwatch.

“Oh no,” I said, too loud.

“What?” Bobby asked, as I put a leg up on the windowsill, trying to throw myself outside.

“I’ve been gone 14 minutes!”

“So?”

I gave Bobby a last look, already half out the window. “So, Holly’s at home alone!”

* * *

I didn’t time myself on the way home, but as fast as I was going, I assumed it was a new record. I pushed through the back door, half expecting to find Holly in a panic, or Mom waiting for me, or both.

But the house was quiet, except for the sounds of the TV still playing cartoons in the other room. I let out a huge sigh and walked in to join Holly.

She wasn’t there.

No wheelchair, no Holly.
I’m dea
d
.

Holly was able to push herself around, but only rarely, and only for reasons we could never figure out. If we asked her to roll the wheels of the chair, we’d usually get nothing. Then sometimes she’d just cruise here or there, for something she wanted or because an inner voice told her to — hell, I had no idea.

Our house wasn’t big. The most obvious possibility was that she went to her room, so I ran there first. Nothing. My room, my parents’ room: both empty.
Oh man, she probably had to go to the bathroom, why’d I give her that water!
But the bathroom was also empty. So I went to check the kitchen, now assuming that Holly had somehow gotten out of the house, or had been abducted by aliens, or some other scenario that my parents would definitely kill me for.

And I saw her lying on the floor of the kitchen among shards of broken glass.

She twitched and moaned a bit, and my stomach twisted with the fear that she might be in great pain. Her chair was turned over next to her, right in front of the counter. I quickly realized what had happened: She’d gotten thirsty and somehow maneuvered herself into the kitchen to get my glass of water. Reaching for it, she knocked it over and fell out of her chair.

I was a dead man.

One nick, one scratch on Holly and my mom would know for sure I hadn’t been here for her. In fact, Holly wheeling herself somewhere —
anywhere
— was so uncommon that I was certain Mom would know I hadn’t even been at home. How else could I have missed it?

Yep. Dead.

I righted her chair and positioned it back up against the counter. Holly was smaller than me, but let’s be honest: I wasn’t prepared for the dead lift required to get her back into the chair. Still, out of sheer desperation, I tried. And remarkably, it worked.

Once Holly was back in the chair, I checked her over. Any scratch —
any scratch
— and I was doomed.

She seemed… fine.

Then I saw the tear in her shirt, on the left side of her stomach. I straightened and smoothed the shirt, and as I did the hole opened up and I saw that it was stained with blood. I expected to see an equal tear in her skin. But there was nothing. I couldn’t believe my luck. The small hole in her shirt — that I could just feign ignorance about, even with the blood. As long as
she
wasn’t hurt. She was a little wet, but that could be explained, too.

I brushed some tiny flecks of glass off Holly as she sat in her chair. The floor needed to be cleaned up, so I got to it, using a new trash bag.

When I wheeled Holly back to the living room, I had to admire my work. It looked like nothing had happened.

I took the bag out into the garage and stuffed it deep into our big trashcan.

Coming back in, there was Mom. “Where were you?” she asked.

Oh my God, how could she know!
My heart raced. Then…
Wait! She just means
right now
. She just means why was I outside
no
w
.

“Just throwing out some trash,” I said, trying to be casual.

“Okay. Hey — thanks for babysitting. Is Holly okay?”

I nodded. “Yeah, she knocked into me and I spilled a little water on her, but that’s it,” I lied.

Yeah, Holly was just fine.

13

So the one thing I didn’t expect the next morning was just the thing that happened. Bobby walked up, like any other day, no sign of injury, and knocked on my door.

“Can Johnny come out and play?” he asked my mom.

* * *

As usual, we hung out at the self-storage building. Ike and Izzy greeted us with wagging tails, then ran off like they had something better to do. Our first order of business: See if Walter was still around.

He was. Still squatting in 6-13.

We figured we needed a plan.

The building was
our
place, dammit, and a place where we did a lot of weird stuff we really weren’t all that keen on having someone else know about. We’d have to keep an eye on Walter, if for no other reason than to be sure he wasn’t keeping an eye on us.

The first step was to see what Walter would do if Mr. Gerald showed up. Was Walter actually
allowed
to be in the building?

Having snuck around the building for so long, we knew that waiting for Mr. Gerald to show up wasn’t an option. His patterns were erratic, and most of the afternoon he’d be glued to the TV. Instead, Bobby stood watch behind a row of pods on the sixth floor, where he could easily keep an eye on 6-13 while staying hidden from both Walter and Mr. Gerald. My job was to use the dogs to get Mr. Gerald’s attention, but how was I going to do that without getting caught? Some simple recon had told us that Mr. Gerald was two floors below. He was driving his little forklift, using the elevator to move pods onto the fourth floor, so I’d need to make a lot of noise. I’d need him first to come up two floors, and then head toward Walter’s bay in the back corner.

At the open stairwell door on the sixth floor, I waited until I heard quiet from the floors below me, then teased the dogs with some baloney I had stolen from home. They barked like mad. Mr. Gerald, always one to prefer sitting on his ass to doing something, made me keep it up for a solid five minutes before deciding to take the elevator and check on the dogs. As the elevator slowly churned its way upward, I ran down the hall and the dogs followed. I positioned myself at the corner, where Mr. Gerald would see the dogs but not me. The heavy doors of the elevator rasped open, and an angry Mr. Gerald stepped out. “What in the hell are you damn dogs going on about?” he shouted.

I tossed the baloney down the hall in the direction of Walter’s bay and the dogs ran off after it. As I hid behind a pod, Mr. Gerald grumbled and lumbered after them. He checked his watch once and I thought
oh damn, are his shows starting already?
But he kept walking toward the sound of the dogs, so I guess there was still a little time before
The Young and the Pouty
or
Days of Our Twisted Discontent
or whatever soap opera he watched first came on.

Bobby told me later that Walter quietly tucked into his bay and rolled down the door before Mr. Gerald got close. So at least we established something: Walter wasn’t there with permission.

For a couple of weeks after that, we kept an eye on him. And even though we did all kinds of crazy things in the building, Walter had us beat. The things he did were just nuts.

Our hammer trick was nothing compared to the time Walter purposefully fell head first onto the cement floor from the top of a pod. Or when he started a little fire in his storage unit and just sat there with his lower leg nestled in the flames. He even had his own version of our hammer trick, but he aimed for his forearm. That made it unmistakable. Seeing his entire arm shift to avoid the blow told us for certain that Walter was like us.

But unlike our little games, Walter seemed to have higher stakes in mind. He looked like he was trying to kill himself.

Walter Ivory had gone completely insane.

He talked to himself constantly, muttering in a way we couldn’t understand. The only words we ever recognized were “Shut up! Shut up!” He said that a lot, and if he did raise his voice, that was almost always what he’d repeat. Many times, he’d suddenly slam his head against something hard, like he was trying to knock something out of his skull. Like his head was the cookie jar, and he wanted that cookie inside really bad.

Seeing Walter’s head sluice and shift for a moment reminded me of Bobby after the failed bike jump, his head oddly flat.

I couldn’t shake the sense that Walter was having a darkly mirrored version of my and Bobby’s experience. Like watching a movie of my life turned into a horror story. All we needed was the scary music. Even when it came to the self-storage building, which for us was a wonderful place to find just about anything. Whatever people couldn’t bear to throw away made it into a bay or a pod, and many of those were easy to break into. In our many visits, Bobby and I had stumbled onto countless treasures. Would you believe I found a crown one time? A
crown
. I mean, I’m not trying to tell you it was real and belonged to the king of England or anything, but it was
metal
, etched, and loaded with things that at least seemed like jewels. I wore it around the building for
day
s
.

Walter found things, too, but nothing that ever seemed to bring him even the smallest measure of joy. One evening as the sun was setting, shining slantways through the west-facing windows, we saw him pull out something long and dully reflective in the fading light: a very large knife.

There was no warning, just a brutal slash. Walter Ivory quickly and savagely slit his own throat. Blood flew and he fell.

Terrified, we ran.