20th Century Ghosts (41 page)

"I
see
you guys," he crooned, and I heard him tapping against thick plastic.

I looked around and saw his face behind a star-shaped window. He was grinning in a way that showed the David Letterman gap between his front teeth. He gave me the finger. The red furnace light of Morris's lava lamp surged and faded around him. Then he crawled on. I never saw him again.

But I heard him. For a while longer I could hear him making his way along, moving in the rough direction of the moon, away into the far reaches of our basement. Over the muffled warble of the music—
"down, in the ground, to get out of the rain"
—I could still hear him bumping into the walls of the maze. I saw a box tremble. Once I heard him pass over a strip of bubble wrap that must've been stapled to the floor in one of the tunnels. A cluster of plastic blisters popped with sharp, flat reports, like a string of penny firecrackers going off, and I heard him say, "Fuck!"

After that I lost track of him again. Then his voice came once more—off to my right, all the way across the room from where I had heard him last.

"Shit," was all he said. For the first time I thought I heard in his tone an undercurrent of irritation, a shortness of breath.

An instant later, he spoke again, and a flash of light-headed disorientation passed over me, left me weak in the knees. Now his voice seemed to come impossibly from the
left
, as if he had traveled a hundred feet in the space of a breath.

"Dead fucking end," he said, and a tunnel off to the left shook as he scrambled through it.

Then I wasn't sure where he was. Most of a minute ticked by, and I noticed that my hands were clenched in sweaty fists, and that I was almost holding my breath.

"Hey," Eddie said from somewhere, and I thought I heard a warble of unease in his voice. "Is someone else crawling around in here?" He was a good distance off from me. I thought the sound of his voice seemed to come from one of the boxes close to the moon.

A long silence followed. By now the music had wrapped all the way around and the song was playing again from the beginning. For the first time I found myself listening to it, really
listening
. The lyrics weren't like I remembered them from summer camp sing-a-longs. At one point, the low singing voice cried:

"The ants go marching two-by-two, Hurrah! Hurrah!
The ants go marching two-by-two, Hurrah! Hurrah!
The ants go marching two-by-two,
They walked across the Leng plateau
And they all went marching down!"

"What's up with this tape?" I said to Morris. "How come it only plays this one song?"

"I don't know," he said. "The music started playing this morning. It hasn't stopped since. It's been playing all day."

I turned my head and stared, a feeling of cool, tingling fright prickling through my chest.

"What do you mean,
it hasn't stopped?
"

"I don't even know where it's coming from," Morris said. "It isn't anything I did."

"Isn't there a tape deck?"

Morris shook his head, and for the first time I felt panic.

"Eddie! "I shouted.

There was no response.

"Eddie!" I called again, and started walking across the room, stepping over and around boxes, moving towards the moon and where I had last heard Eddie's voice. "Eddie, answer me!"

From an impossibly long distance off, I heard something, part of a sentence: "Trail of bread crumbs." It didn't even sound like Eddie's voice—the words were spoken in a clipped, supercilious tone, sounded almost like one of the overlapping voices you hear in that crazy nonsense song by the Beatles,
Revolution #9
—and I couldn't pinpoint where it came from, wasn't sure if its origin was ahead of or behind me. I turned around and around, trying to figure where the voice had come from, when the music abruptly switched off, with the ants marching nine. I cried out in surprise, and looked to Morris.

He held his X-acto knife—loaded with a blade swiped from my dresser, no doubt—and was on his knees, cutting the tape that attached the first box in the maze to the second.

"There. He's gone," Morris said. "All done." He pulled the entrance to the maze free, neatly flattened the box and set it aside.

"What are you talking about?"

He wasn't looking at me. He was methodically beginning to take it all apart, severing tape, pressing boxes flat, piling them next to the stairs. He went on, "I wanted to help. You said he wouldn't go away, so I
made
him go away." He lifted his gaze for a moment, and stared at me with those eyes that always seemed to look right through me. "He had to go away. He wasn't ever going to leave you alone."

"Jesus," I breathed. "I knew you were crazy, but I didn't know you were a total shithouse rat. What do you mean, he's gone? He's right here. He's got to be right here. He's still in the boxes. Eddie!" Shouting his name, my voice a little hysterical. "Eddie!"

But he
was
gone, and I knew it. Knew that he had gone into Morris's boxes and crawled right through them into someplace else, someplace not our basement. I started moving across the fort, looking into windows, kicking boxes. I began pulling the catacombs apart, ripping tape away with my hands, flipping boxes over to look inside them. I stumbled this way and that, tripping once, half-crushing a tunnel.

Inside one box, the walls were covered with a photo collage, pictures of the blind: old people with milky white eyes staring out of their carved-from-wood faces, a black man with a slide guitar across his knees and round black sunglasses pushed up the bridge of his nose, Cambodian children with scarves wrapped over their eyes. Since there were no windows cut into the box, the collage would've been invisible to anyone crawling through it. In another box, pink strips of flypaper—they looked like dusty strings of saltwater taffy—hung from the ceiling, but there weren't any flies stuck to them. Instead there were several lightning bugs, still alive, blinking yellow-green for an instant and then fading out. I did not think, at the time, that it was March, and lightning bugs impossible to come by. The interior of a third box had been painted a pale sky blue, with flocks of childish blackbirds drawn against it. In the corner of the box was what I at first took to be a cat's toy, a mass of faded dark feathers with dust bunnies clinging to it. When I tipped the box on its side, though, a dead bird slid out. The body was dried out and desiccated, and its eyes had fallen back into its head, leaving little black sockets that looked like cigarette burns. I almost screamed at the sight of it. My stomach rioted; I tasted bile in the back of my throat.

Then Morris had me by the elbow, and was steering me towards the steps.

"You won't find him like that," he said. "Please sit down, Nolan."

I sat on the bottom step. By then I was fighting not to cry. I kept waiting for Eddie to jump out laughing from somewhere—
Oh man, I fooled you
—and at the same time some part of me knew he never would.

It was a while before I realized Morris had lowered himself to his knees in front of me, like a man preparing to propose to his bride. He regarded me steadily.

"Maybe if I put it back together the music will start again. And you can go in and look for him," he said. "But I don't think you can come back out. There's doors in there that only swing one way. Do you understand, Nolan? It's bigger inside than it looks." He stared at me steadily, with his oddly bright, saucer eyes, and then said, in a tone of quiet force, "I don't want you to go in, but I'll put it back together if you tell me to."

I stared at him. He stared back, waiting, his head tilted to that curious, listening angle, like a chickadee on a branch considering the sound of raindrops falling through the trees. I imagined him carefully putting back together what we had pulled apart in the last ten minutes ... then imagined the music blaring to life from somewhere inside the boxes, roaring this time:
"DOWN! IN THE GROUND! TO GET OUT! OF THE RAIN!"
If that music started up again, without any warning, I thought I would scream; I wouldn't be able to help myself.

I shook my head. Morris turned away and went back to disassembling his creation.

I sat at the bottom of the stairs for most of an hour, watching Morris carefully tear down his cardboard fortress. Eddie never came out of it. No other sound ever issued from within. I heard the back door open and my mother troop in, crossing the floorboards overhead. She shouted for me to come and help with the groceries. I went up, lugged in bags, put food in the fridge. Morris came up for supper, went down again. Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage. When I glanced down the steps into the basement, at a quarter to eight, I could see three stacks of neatly flattened boxes, each about four feet high, and a vast expanse of bare concrete floor. Morris was at the bottom of the steps, sweeping. He stopped, and glanced up at me—giving me an impenetrable, alien stare—and I shivered. He went back to his work, moving the broom in short compact strokes across the floor, brush, brush, brush.

I lived in the house four more years, but never visited Morris in the basement after that, avoided the place entirely, as best I could. By the time I left for college, Morris's bed was down there, and he rarely came up. He slept in a low hut he had made himself out of empty Coke bottles and carefully cut pieces of ice blue foam.

The moon was the only part of the fortress Morris didn't dismantle. A few weeks after Eddie vanished, my father drove the moon to Morris's school for the developmentally challenged, where it won third prize—fifty dollars and a medal—in an art show. I couldn't tell you what happened to it after that. Like Eddie Prior, it never returned.
 

I recall three things about the few weeks that followed Eddie's disappearance.

I remember my mother opening the door of my bedroom, just after twelve, on the night he went missing. I was curled on my side in bed, the sheet pulled over me. I wasn't sleeping. My mother wore a pink chenille robe, loosely belted at the waist. I squinted at her, framed against the light from the hallway.

"Nolan, Ed Prior's mother just called. She's been calling Eddie's friends. She doesn't know where he is. She hasn't seen him since he left for school. I said I'd ask if you knew anything about it. Did he come by here today?"

"I saw him at school," I said, and then went mute, didn't know where to go from there, what would be safe to admit.

My mother probably assumed she had just woken me from a full sleep, and I was too groggy to think. She said, "Did the two of you talk?"

"I don't know. I guess we said hello. I can't remember what else." I sat up in bed, blinking at the light. "Actually, we haven't been hanging out as much lately."

She nodded. "Well. Maybe that's for the best. Eddie is a good kid, but he's a little bit of a boss, don't you think? He doesn't give you much space to just be yourself."

When I spoke again, there was the slightest note of strain in my voice. "Did his mother call the police?"

"Don't you worry," my mother said, misunderstanding my tone, imagining I was anxious about Eddie's welfare, when in fact I was anxious about my own. "She just thinks he's laying low with one of his buds. I guess he's done it before. He's been fighting a lot with her boyfriend. Once, Eddie took off for a whole weekend, she said." She yawned, covered her mouth with the back of her hand. "It's just natural for her to be nervous, though, after what happened to her older boy. Him disappearing from the juvie and just dropping off the face of the earth like that."

"Maybe it runs in the family," I said, my voice choked.

"Hm? What?"

"Disappearing," I said.

"Disappearing, " she said, and then, after a moment, nodded once more. "I suppose anything can run in families. Even that. Good night, Nolan."

"Good night, Mom."

She was easing the door shut, and then paused, and leaned back into my room, and said, "I love you, kid," which she always said only when I least expected it and was least prepared for it. The backs of my eyeballs prickled painfully. I tried to reply, but when I opened my mouth, I found my throat too constricted to force any air up it. By the time I cleared my throat she was gone.
 

A few days later I was called out of study hall and sent to the vice-principal's office. A detective named Carnahan had planted himself behind the vice-principal's desk. I can't recall much of what he asked me, or how I answered. I remember Carnahan's eyes were the color of thick ice—a whitish-blue—and that he didn't look at me once in the course of our five-minute discussion. I recall also that he got Eddie's last name wrong, twice, referring to him as Edward Peers instead of Edward Prior. I corrected him the first time, let it pass the second. During the entire interview, I was in a state of high, dizzying tension; my face felt numbed, as if by novocaine, and when I spoke I could hardly seem to move my lips. I was sure Carnahan would notice and find this peculiar, but he never did. Finally he told me to stay off drugs, and then looked down at some papers in front of him and went completely silent. For almost a whole minute I continued to sit across from him, not knowing what to do with myself. Then he glanced up, surprised to find me still hanging around. He made a shooing gesture with one hand, said I could go, and would I ask the next person to come in.

As I stood up, I said, "Do you have any idea what happened to him?"

"I wouldn't worry too much about it. Mr. Peers's older brother broke out of Juvenile Detention last summer and hasn't been seen since. I understand the two were close." Carnahan turned his gaze back upon his papers, began shuffling them around. "Or maybe your friend just decided to hit the road on his own. He's disappeared a couple times before. You know what they say. Practice makes perfect."

When I went out, Mindy Ackers was sitting on the bench against the wall in the receptionist's area. When she saw me, she sprang lightly to her feet, smiled, bit her lower lip. With her braces and bad complexion, Mindy didn't have many friends, and no doubt felt Eddie's absence keenly. I didn't know much about her, but I knew she always wanted more than anything for Eddie to like her, and was happy to be the butt of his jokes, if only because it gave her a chance to hear him laugh. I liked and pitied her. We had a lot in common.