Duck Boy (13 page)

“Yeah,” Steve replied. “I can do basic stuff.”

“Can you cook some supper for me?”

“Um … sure… I guess. Can’t you cook, Uncle Edward?”

Uncle Edward turned red and gazed at the floor. “No,” he replied sheepishly.

“But I’ve seen you reading cookbooks before,” Steve insisted.

Uncle Edward nodded. “I’ve read quite a few cookbooks.”

“OK,” Steve sighed. “I’ll cook.”

Uncle Edward glanced at his watch. “Can you make some supper now?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Steve headed to the kitchen to throw supper together.

Putting together a shoddy supper again.

The refrigerator pickings looked sparse. Steve found some leftover meat loaf
from the night before, but there didn’t seem to be any vegetables to go with
it.

“Uncle Edward,” Steve called. “Where could I find some potatoes and stuff?”

Uncle Edward called the answer from where he sat. “We have a root cellar
down in the basement. I think there are potatoes and carrots in there—a big
sack of each.”

Steve jogged to the basement door at the end of the kitchen. He always found
Aunt Shannon and Uncle Edward’s basement a bit spooky. When he tugged on a worn
string and pulled the switch of the first light, a weak yellow glow shone into
the basement. Piles of old boxes, furniture, and odds and ends covered the
floor from top to bottom.

Classic hoarding behavior.

Between the bric-a-brac were skinny paths cutting deep into the basement’s
bowels. Steve sighed, shoved his fear aside, and walked down the remaining
stairs to a narrow path between a few old bicycles, a lamp, an antique radio, a
few dusty, stacked cases of empty bottles, and a collection of clowns wrapped
in clear plastic bags. A sea of shadows, made darker with the pale glow of the
weak bulb.

Chapter 10

After hiking through canyons of junk, Steve found the door to the root
cellar at the back of the basement. As he put his hand on the door, the weak
bulb dangling at the top of the stairs sputtered.

Tink.

And went out.

“Ah geez. It figures,” Steve muttered. His heart leapt a bit at the light
bulb’s poor timing. He began to edge his way back towards the stairs when he
heard a loud crashing sound on the floor above him. Several pairs of heavy feet
entered the kitchen.

“What’s going on here?” Steve heard Uncle Edward’s angry voice. Steve
couldn’t hear the muffled reply, but Uncle Edward responded to the voice with another
loud protest. “I have no idea what happened to her!”

A second later he heard scuffling feet. “Ouch! That hurts!” Uncle Edward
roared. It sounded like he was being roughed up. “I don’t know where Steve is
either,” he yelled defiantly. “He went outside a few minutes ago. I don’t know
where he went. He doesn’t know anything anyway.” The discussion stopped for a
moment, and then Uncle Edward let out howls of pain.

The feet sounded as if they were leaving the kitchen and moving through the
house. Several heavy objects crashed to the floor. The feet moved again. The
floor rattled as breakable things shattered and scattered over Steve’s head.
The people upstairs were wrecking the place. Amidst the sounds of devastation,
he could hear Uncle Edward’s voice, tinny and thin, echoing through the heating
ducts.

“Wait, don’t do that,” Uncle Edward yelled. “Stop… please stop.” He sounded
as if he were sobbing.

Steve quickly realized, as he listened to the noises, that the intruders
were likely looking for something in the house.

They’d better not find me.

“Where are the pictures from the file?” yelled a menacing voice.

“I don’t know,” Uncle Edward sniffed.

“We’ll find them, if we have to tear your house down.”

There were more smashing sounds and loud thumps as the intruders stormed
through the house. Suddenly the loud noises stopped.

“We got the pictures,” snarled the voice triumphantly. “Now where is the
boy?”

Hide and seek.

Steve quietly opened the door to the root cellar. A bright bulb clicked to life
automatically, revealing an earthy room. He stepped inside and closed the door.
The bulb extinguished again. The door controlled the light.

He heard the basement door open, then someone flicking the lightswitch up
and down a few times. “I need a light here,” a man hollered. After some
commotion, a single pair of feet descended the basement stairs.

Steve froze.

Duck Boy. Duck Boy.

He carefully reached up to the root cellar ceiling and groped for the light
bulb. As quietly as he could, he began to unscrew it from the light socket. The
bulb complained with a squeak as he turned it in its socket. But the noise of
the intruder stumbling around in the basement covered the squeak of the bulb.
Under the root cellar door, a yolk of unsteady light leaked through.

Flashlight.

The intruder stopped abruptly, and the basement became instantly silent. For
a brief second the bulb squeaked into the silence.

“If that’s you, kid,” shouted the intruder, “I’m going to get you. You’ll
wish you never met me.”

The sound of his own heartbeat pounded like a drum in his ears. Steve left
the bulb and backed into the cellar as far as he could go. He felt a big sack
beside him and slunk behind it, crouching. He groped for the mouth of the sack;
it brimmed with potatoes. He grabbed a potato in each hand as weapons in case
he needed them.

Potato self-defense.

He heard piles topple and smash as the intruder scoured the basement,
cursing as he went. The intruder reached the back wall and felt his way along
the wall to the root cellar. Steve’s heart stopped as he heard the intruder’s
heavy hand fumble over the outside of the door. Muttering quietly to himself,
the intruder pulled the root cellar door open. The bulb jumped to life.

The bright light bonged like alarm bells in Steve’s head. From his corner
behind the potatoes, he glimpsed the face of the intruder. It was one of the
men who had threatened Aunt Shannon.

The light surprised the intruder, and he stared at the bulb for a brief
moment. Steve closed his eyes. The light bulb flickered and fell out of the
socket, smashing on the root cellar floor. “Dude,” the man yelled. “This
basement is creepy.”

Another set of heavy feet pounded part way down the basement stairs. “We
gotta go,” it said. “Move it.”

“He ain’t here,” the seeker declared.

“We’ll keep watching the place, in case he comes back.”

He slammed the root cellar door, deafening Steve for a moment or two. The
man bumbled and cursed through the piles of stuff in the basement to the steps.
Steve stayed hunched behind the sack of potatoes. He heard some more yelling
and the scuffling of feet. Something smashed. It sounded like a window. And
then the house fell silent. He slowly released his grip on the potatoes he had
in each hand, letting them fall to the cement floor.

Duck Boy. Duck Boy.

Steve didn’t move for quite a while. He groped until he found the bag of
carrots, picked one out and brushed off some dirt. He took up his position
behind the potato sack and began to gnaw on the carrot.

“I am such a loser,” he lectured himself. Any grown-up would have been
scolding him now too, he was sure. “Aunt Shannon needed my help, and I froze.
Uncle Edward needed my help, and I hid.”

He sat in the back of the root cellar, cold and silent. Finally, after
hearing nothing for several minutes, he groped his way through the tangle of
strewn belongings across the basement to the bottom of the stairs.

He stopped to tune his ear to the silence, listening for the slightest
pin-drop. Fairly certain that he was the only one in the house, he tiptoed up the
basement steps to the kitchen. A frozen draft of air surged into the basement
under the door. He pushed it open slowly and entered the dim light of the
kitchen.

The house sat in frigid darkness except for a weak wedge of light coming
from inside the refrigerator. The glow of winter wafted through the upstairs
windows, the only light in the whole house. He resisted the temptation to turn
on a light, thinking that the house might still be watched and the light would
signal his presence.

As he glanced around, he realized they had gone. The back door of the house
lay in a bed of splinters on the floor. The cupboards and fridge door hung
open, the contents of both hurled across the counters and floor—Country
records, eggs, burst sacks of flour, sugar, dishes, cutlery. Elves, snowmen,
Santas, skaters, and sleighs seasoned the destruction. The fridge hummed,
sighed, and hummed again as it worked with the winter air to cool the house.
Out of habit, Steve guided the fridge door closed.

“A flashlight.” Steve stooped over one of the drawers on the floor and
retrieved it. The evening light wasn’t bright enough for a close inspection. He
clicked it on, being careful to keep the beam away from the windows.

Two or three cupboard doors were pulled completely off their hinges. He
stepped carefully around the objects on the floor and made his way around the
house, looking for Uncle Edward. He stopped by his room.

His room was a wreck, too. The shelves of knick-knacks lay in a smashed sea
on the floor. The bed listed on its side with fatal knife slashes exposing its
stuffing; the bookcase lay face down. His suitcase knifed, things strewn around
the room in clumps and heaps. Socks and gonch like confetti around the room.

He stepped through the wreckage of the upstairs rooms again. “Uncle Edward,”
Steve called quietly. “Uncle Edward?” No reply.

A new thrill of panic made him shiver.

I’m alone now.

An icy draft cut through the thin warmth remaining in the house. Back in his
room, he pushed the bed from its side; it fell on its legs back down to the
floor with a heavy thud. He sat down on the bed’s edge to examine the carnage
of his room.

“Aw, man!” Steve exclaimed after discovering the shards of his iPod.

The pictures that Aunt Shannon had removed from the police file were missing
and so were all the alchemy books from Steve’s bookcase and nightstand. By some
miracle, both notebooks were buried under the carnage.

“My backpack’s still OK,” he noticed aloud, holding it up, inspecting it
with the light from the flashlight. He returned the notebooks carefully to the
inner pocket.

Maybe my underwear scared them away. The gonch who stole
Christmas.

“Oh geez,” Steve muttered, “Larry.” He jogged to the living room to check
the clock.

7:15 ish.

Christmas had been thoroughly smashed in the living room. Toilet-brush limbs
strewn across the room, sprinkled generously with shoddy crafts. “Awwww,” he
groaned. In the middle of the shag carpet was Aunt Shannon’s blown glass tree
star. Smashed to smithereens. The meager Christmas he had hoped for bashed into
oblivion.

He grabbed his coat, gloves, and hat, knowing that he couldn’t stay in the
house.

Back door.

He shambled back to the kitchen. In the weak winter light, he noticed something
he’d missed earlier—a piece of paper. On the kitchen table sat a note made from
letters cut out of a magazine. Steve picked it up.

“Woah. Seriously.”

The stove clock read 7:21.

Lindsay.

He dropped the ransom note on the counter, zipped his coat, donned his
gloves and hat, swung his backpack onto his shoulder and sneaked out the back
door.

To make sure he wasn’t followed, he headed up the alleyway for two blocks
before crossing the street and heading back down the opposite alleyway to
Lindsay’s back door.

Good thing Aunt Shannon showed me her house.

Lindsay’s house was another below-average split-level in this average neighborhood. Steve knocked on the
back door and waited. A daddish-looking adult answered the door—probably
Lindsay’s father.