Dreamland Lake (7 page)

It was only a couple of nights after our little visit with Mrs. Garrison that the next bombshell dropped. It must have been a Friday night because I was up roaming around my room late, wishing, as usual, for my own TV set. My mom was downstairs, in front of a talk show which comes on at the same time as Creature Feature Midnight Matinee of Horror. And according to
TV Guide
, that night they were putting on “The Mummy’s Curse”—an old chestnut I never tired of. You remember, when he comes down out of
his tomb and starts scratching around outside the girl’s tent. That was always the big moment.

But convincing Mom to trade her nightly ritual for Boris Karloff wasn’t worth trying. And she’d be tying up the TV at least until my dad got home from one of his late runs.

I ought to explain that my dad owns four big Fruehauf trailer trucks for long- and middle-distance haulage. It’s sort of a small trucking company. When any of the drivers is out sick or something, my dad has to pitch in and make one of the hauls. He always complains about this, but my mom says he’s happiest on the road—away from her, away from his family, away from everything. She says he’s in love with The Road and can’t admit it. He just says, bull, he has to take the run or have a dissatisfied customer on his hands. And that driving a big rig is hell on the kidneys.

In those days, I was living for the time he’d take me on one of his runs. The day was coming, but I didn’t know it then. They have these berths the second driver can sleep in up in the cab of the truck behind the seat. This is for the all-night driving runs, and I’d been nagging Dad from the time I was five years old to take me along.

And Dad always said, “One of these days.” To which my mom always replied that his insurance didn’t cover a child passenger and that those big trucks are death on wheels and that she would not live with the possibility of being a childless widow. My mom talks like that when she’s on her high horse.

Anyway, on the night I’m talking about, the phone rang, and it was Flip. At least, it sounded something like him. With the TV going and all, I wasn’t sure at
first. He sounded funny. Haunted, kind of. And the first thing he said was, “Get over here quick.”

“I don’t know if I can get out at this hour.”

“Find a way.”

“What’s up?”

“I don’t know. Just come over as quick as you can. I’ll be up in my room.”

“Mummy’s Curse is on,” I threw out hopefully, “maybe . . .”

“Hell with that,” Flip said. And hung up.

I stepped up to the living room door, where I could see two images of an Italian male vocalist giving forth with a Burt Bacharach song reflected in my mom’s glasses. As a rule, she’s the severe type, but let an Italian male vocalist burst into a Bacharach tune, and she’s off into orbit. I left her out in space and slipped out the back door.

Talk about moving from one world to another. The difference between my house and Flip’s is extreme. At my house, everything’s very orderly—chairs you don’t sit in and enough wax on the kitchen floor to send you into a sharp skid. But Flip’s was different. I think that was the first thing I noticed about the outside world—how different things could be no more than a few houses apart.

The Townsends’ front door was never locked. In fact, it was hardly ever shut. So I just walked in. Except when his dad was home on leave, the place looked pretty casual. It’s empty most of the time, with the lights always on. But there’s always a trace of humanity. Like a large group of people have just gotten up and left. Since it was after eleven, the Nitwits were probably bedded down. But there was a standing row of Barbie-type dolls lined up along the
old leather sofa. And an unfinished Monopoly game strung out in the middle of the floor with fake money drifting all over the room. Flip’s mom was nowhere around, so I started up the stairs.

It’s funny about that house. I never would have been surprised to pass a bunch of complete strangers on the stairway. It’s a lot like a hotel. Flip’s room was on the landing with the only door in the house that was always closed. I turned the knob. But the door was locked. There for a second, I felt like I was completely alone. I gave a couple of soft raps. Then pretty soon, I heard Flip say, down by the keyhole, “Who is it?”

“Police Chief Heidenreich,” I said right back into the keyhole at him. “This here’s a raid.”

The door opened, Flip reached out and grabbed me in, and locked the door behind me. He looked green. I still thought it was some kind of game. At that age, it’s hard to tell.

“What’s happening?”

“Sit down,” he said. The only thing you could say for Flip’s room was that you didn’t ever have to worry about messing it up. The only place to sit was his bed which was never made. It was a little rattrap of a room, and he always kept the ceiling light on. I think he slept with it on, but that was his business. He had the usual posters and stuff on the walls, but you couldn’t see them because he’d screwed in a bunch of hooks for his clothes. They hung all over the room because he’d turned his closet into a darkroom. He had a drop cord with a red light bulb in there and everything.

That first minute or two had me going. I always figured I was the one who was supposed to be scared
if anybody was. And he was the one who was setting it up. But then, it dawned on me Flip was scared and, for once, not trying to pretend otherwise.

Excited, though. He was standing over me, running his hands up and down the sides of his Levis, like he was cold. Finally, he said, “Remember the pictures? The ones we took in the woods?”

I nodded, still thinking I was about to be put on.

“Well, I finally finished off the roll and developed them tonight.”

I’m no judge of photography. Flip never taught me anything about it because the closet wasn’t big enough for two people. Still, even I knew he was no professional yet. The prints were on one big sheet, and he handed it over to me. It was kind of a senseless jumble of subject matter, which meant he’d clicked away at random just to use up the film. I could figure that out since there were so many views of the Nitwits. I ought to mention the Nitwits have their own separate names: Rita, Melody, and Terri. And most of the pictures were of them, making terrible faces at the camera and horsing around in the back yard. Then there was a shot of the Townsends’ car, a Rambler American station wagon. And an artistic shot of Flip’s own feet.

But there were also the four shots of the woods—two of him and two of me. The two I’d taken of him were a little off center. All four were pretty dim. There we were in the woods, though, but I didn’t see anything creepy about it.

“You aren’t really looking at them,” Flip said. “Not with a trained eye.” He was rummaging wildly around the stuff on the top of his desk, “Where’s my damn magnifying glass,” he was muttering to himself. “I just laid it down, and now the damn thing’s gone.”
Then he found it and handed it to me. “Look again. Look through this. Use your eyes.” Man, was he wound up.

There’s this word for falling in love with yourself—your own body, I mean. Whatever it is, I don’t have it. I hate looking at pictures of myself. Especially when I was thirteen—all skinny legs and waiting for acne. I was just standing there, in the picture, looking at the lens, kind of round-shouldered like I always am except when my mom’s around.

But I used my eyes, and then I used them on the pictures of Flip. It was just his usual self, in the old-faithful, vinyl windbreaker and faded denims, ankle-deep in the leaves, standing on the dead man’s supposed location. I had the feeling that if this was a test, I was about to flunk it.

Flip was dancing around in front of me, banging himself on the side of the head. “You’re just looking at
us
,” he said, like this is the last straw. “Use the damn magnifying glass, and look at the background.”

It was only trees and leaves, and out of focus at that. But I made little circular sweeps with the glass all around the four pictures. The truth is you never see anything if you’re not looking for it. But I kept trying to see something interesting because I had the idea Flip was about to grab everything out of my hands.

“Look,” he said, flopping down on the bed next to me. “In this one, and this one too.” One of them was of me, the other of him. “Look at that tree on the right, behind us. It’s the same one in each shot. Look at it!”

So I put the old spyglass right over the tree and started to bring it back toward my eye, concentrating. When I got it about halfway between my eye
and the snapshot, I felt something go through me. Flip was absolutely still, for once. I shifted over to the other picture and started drawing the glass back from the tree in that one. Same feeling. I was looking at something. Did I know right then what it was? If I did, I was fighting it.

“The moon?” I said, sort of clearing my throat at the same time.

“The
MOON
?” Flip yelled. “Are you nuts? How could it be the moon?”

There was a little semicircular white spot next to the tree, behind it, actually.

“A melon?” I said, scared now. I could feel the old goose pimples coming up on my arms.

“A
MELON
?
JEEE-SUS
!” Flip bellowed. He was about to pound sense into my head. “You know what it is! Say it! Say what it is!”

“It’s . . . it looks like . . . it could be . . . a face.”

My hand started shaking, so I put the magnifying glass down on the picture sheet in my lap. Right on the grill of the Rambler. We sat there, listening to nothing.

“It is a face, Bry,” Flip said, very quiet. “We weren’t in the woods alone that day.”

“The hell we weren’t,” I said, trying to calm down. “It’s an optical illusion. It’s just a spot on the negative. You’ve got a light leak in your camera. It couldn’t be—no, we were alone. We’d have known. We . . .”

“Oh, can it,” Flip said. “We weren’t alone, and here’s the evidence.”

Then we were quiet again, more scared than we’d been since Dead Man Day itself. Scareder, possibly. I wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to make the trip. Finally, I looked over at Flip, but he was staring
across the room, to the inside of his closet door which was standing open. There on the back of the door was hung the Nazi sword in its case, dangling from a hook.

The moon-melon-face-whatever was only in two of the pictures. I scanned the other two to make sure. That tended to rule out a light leak, but I was trying to pretend it was all a mistake because
IT
hadn’t shown up in all four pictures. Flip had already been thinking about that.

“Look,” he said, “somebody was standing behind that tree. Maybe he followed us into the woods—remember where we were before we went in there—or maybe, he was already in the woods and took cover when he heard us coming. Anyway, he’s behind this tree, see, and pokes his head out to keep an eye on us every once in awhile, then hides again. Waiting to see what we’re doing or something. So it just happened that his head was poked out while we were taking two of the pictures. Pure chance.”

“Then that means” (my imagination was really getting revved up), “that whoever was there was really in all four pictures, but he’s concealed in two of them.”

“Yeah,” Flip said, impressed. “He’s right back there behind that tree the whole time.”

“But why?”

“Good question.”

“Now wait a minute,” I said, getting businesslike with the magnifying glass again. “This is just kind of a blob. You have to use your imagination to see an eye, or a nose, or part of a mouth. It probably isn’t . . . what you think.”

“Well,” Flip said, “one thing’s for sure. You can’t identify anybody from these prints. So I’m taking
them down to the Camera Shop tomorrow and have them enlarged. I’ve always wanted an enlarger, and now, here’s a time I really need one, and I don’t have it. They’ll get them up to a size where we can tell for sure. It’ll cost a little for the enlargements, but we’ll take it out of the route money.” At least, this part of the evening had an old familiar ring about it. We were always deducting some expense from the route money so that we rarely had any ready cash.

I got up to go. “It’s not a face,” I said, not looking at the pictures, “but you’ll have to have them enlarged to prove it to yourself. You’re spooked, and now you’ve got me spooked. It’s contagious spooking. But it’s not a face. I’ve decided it’s not.”

“No,” Flip said. “You’ve decided it is.”

“Poetry,” Miss Klimer said in Language Arts on Monday, “deals with
all
the experiences in the spectrum of life. It takes the
world
for its province. How many of you boys and girls thought poetry was only about hearts and flowers and knights in shining armor?”

None of us said anything. We didn’t feel like giving her the satisfaction of the answer she was trying to drag out of us. “Come, now,” she says, running her hand through her somewhat thin red hair, “I feel certain that many of you, indeed,
most
of you, have
relegated poetry to a very
limited
sphere of influence in your lives. Haven’t you?”

Dead silence. “Well, you have,” she says, like we’re giving her a big argument (which we are in a way). “And the reason is simply that you don’t know that poetry
is
reality!”