The Night of the Moonbow (25 page)

Leo inhaled the night air; it had a deep, bronzy tang to it, like the ring of an old bell. With his chilled gut sucked up under his bony ribs, he pressed on, still only half-aware of the intention guiding his steps. The gravel along the shoulder crunched noisily under his rubber soles and he tried to walk more quietly. Suddenly he had the feeling he was being followed - by man or beast he could not tell - and he pictured Mary’s yellow-eyed dog scenting his traces. There - what was that? The crack of a twig gave him a start. Yes - there! Again he heard it, a careless foot had snapped another branch. He was sure - well, maybe not, maybe he was just imagining it.

At Pissing Rock he stopped for the ritual leak, performing the act with anxious ceremony. Then - another sound. Now he felt sure: something was moving behind him, tracking him. He buttoned up hastily and went on. He walked quickly; not much time before taps. Now he knew exactly where his long strides were taking him.

Soon he was passing the beginnings of the picket fence whose crooked posts stood like sentinels in the dark. With half an eye and only half-aware, he counted them: one two three four five ... six seven eight nine . . . He rounded the bend and came to a halt. Peering ahead into the inky blackness, he could see it, standing there, silent and alone, expecting him. When he came to the crazy-paved walk, he planted his feet squarely on the stones and stared at the building, his fists clenched, as if he were facing some enemy he was determined to vanquish, then glanced over to the well. Were they really down there, the remains of Digger?

Feeling a chill, he shifted his eyes toward the house again, that dark, bleak - and somehow sinister - silhouette that exerted such a strange power over him. Why did his heart begin to flutter when he no more than looked at it? Since coming upon it on the night of the Snipe Hunt, he had deliberately shunned it, but this evening, listening to Hank’s tale of the tragedy of Mary Steelyard, something had spurred him to return - to the scene of the crime, was that it?

He shut his eyes, thinking hard. There was something - in there - in the dark. Yes - something he wanted desperately to know. But what? He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to recall it. If he concentrated hard enough, maybe - A thought struck him: did Emily’s ghost haunt the Gallop Street house the way Mary Steelyard haunted this one? He had seen a figure in the window. Who had it been? Mary or Emily? Or a figment of his imagination?

He picked up some pebbles and pitched them at a vacant window, heard the hollow clatter as they hit the parlor floor and slid to the corners.

“Come out!” he called boldly. “Come out, I dare you!” He heard nothing but his own voice reverberating against the clapboards. He walked the three steps up to the porch, then stopped as his flashlight beam swung across the paint-peeled door with its panels of shattered glass, the broken-out lamps on either side. He put his hand to the door handle and depressed the latch. There was no click, for the latch was broken; he pushed and the door gave edgily with a tiny explosion of air as the seal was broken. He pushed the door wider and stepped inside. He paused in the narrow hallway whose length his flashlight tried and failed to penetrate. Tatters of a brown print wallpaper curled away from the wall in torn shards, with rusty splotches of water-stained lath-and-plaster showing beneath. A broken light fixture hung from the ceiling, bulbless and festooned with pale cobwebbing. The yellow beam flitted along the floor, foot by foot along the oak strips, from the gouged and battered baseboard to the chipped and battered newel post, where it lingered amid the rat castings scattered at the stair foot, then traveled slowly upward, riser by riser, to pierce the gloom of the stairwell.

He set a foot to the bottom step, then jumped as he felt it give with a noisy squeak. Incredible, but even here, inside, the house reminded him of the one on Gallop Street. This vestibule area, the hallway, the doors on the right (into the dining room?), on the left (into the stairway to the shop?), the radiator by the door and - there - on the floor - he shined the light on a dark blotch staining the boards.

He forced himself to go on. A second step, a third; doggedly he moved, his fear revealed in the trembling motion of the light beam whose scant illumination was all he could depend on. Odd smells assailed his nostrils, the odor of dust and mold and a sharp smell, like ammonia. He could feel his heart throbbing against the hollow cavity of his rib cage, and his stomach heaved. He gulped and went on, up and up, step by step, until at last he moved from the staircase onto the flat plane of the upper floor. There he paused, clutching for support the round wooden ball that topped the newel post He caught his breath, then set his flash beam to probing the shadowy corners, painting the hall with a bright orange ribbon that flitted and skittered about like some demented creature. Up, down, ceiling, floor, along the cracked walls, where the paper had buckled and oblong patches in a paler shade revealed that pictures had once hung there, in the light he examined with care each of the closed doors, the empty wall spaces between the doors.

He moved forward again, consciously locking his knees and trudging along, his feet crunching in the gritty dust that covered the floor, so that no matter how soft his tread, it was amplified and easily heard. He reached the first door and tried the knob. The door opened inward to profound darkness, which the flashlight beam instantly probed. Here the stench, moldy and dry, stung his nostrils. Pinching his nose, he backed out and shut the door, then moved slowly down the hallway, finding one deserted, derelict room after the other. At the end of the passage, opening the final door, he found himself in the corner room - Mary Steelyard’s room, with its rounded shape and pointed ceiling, its tiny fireplace and grate, its gently curving window where, according to Henry’s tale, the unhappy maiden had stood gazing down at the well that was her lover’s tomb.

With measured steps Leo crossed the room to the window - so like Emily’s window - and shone his beam down onto the dark lawn and the overgrown wellhead, with its heavy slab of cement supposedly sealing in the bleached bones of the man who had conspired to rob Old Man Steelyard. The light crisscrossed the lawn before he pulled it back into the room. He gave the place a last glance. Yes, he thought, this room might have belonged, not to Mary, but to Emily.

He left the door ajar and returned the way he had come, the steady beam of his flashlight illuminating the stairs one by one as he descended. Then, halfway down, he drew a swift breath, freezing in place as he leaned against the stair railing. Something besides himself was in the house!

He stood poised for flight, all his senses honed to their sharpest edge. Though he held his breath, his heart was beating furiously, sounding to him like a drum announcing his presence. He waited several moments longer, then ventured onto the next step, and the next. He stopped again and waited, listening hard, his beam probing the dark. Nothing but empty corners did he see, and the floor of the lower hall. Nevertheless a chill ran through his flesh. He was inside the Haunted House, why should he not expect to see the ghost that went with it?

He reached the bottom and stood in the lower hallway before the front entrance. Then, before he realized what was happening, the parlor door was thrown back, slamming hard against the wall with a great noise, and through the opening there rushed a dark menacing form, which threw itself upon him. The swift, hard impact knocked the breath out of Leo, muffling the cry that sprang to his lips as he felt himself being lifted bodily from the ground and carried from the newel post back along the passageway. Suddenly he found himself staring down into an open hole. The trapdoor had been thrown back. He was about to be pitched twelve feet down into the cellar!

He flailed about and kicked his legs, struggling to free himself. At last a foot connected with his assailant, a hard blow that did its work; he was dropped to the floor, while, with a pained oath, his attacker fell back against the wall.

Leo scrambled up and, dodging past the hole in the floor, ran out the door. Down the walk he fled, away from the dark house, stumbling, then sprawling; the cinders bit painfully into the flesh of his palms and his bare knees. Oblivious to the angry sting, he picked himself up again and without looking back headed down the road, racing along it as fast as his steps could carry him, while the dark trees overhead seemed to enfold him, and no moon shone to dispel the ghosts that threaded the deep and somnolent night.

Once returned to Jeremiah, stretched out in his bunk - the jinxed bunk of Cabin 7 - Leo tossed and turned against the canvas, threading dark waking dreams of what he had seen and what had happened in those dusty rooms of the Haunted House, willing himself not to sleep so that he would not dream for real and cry out. Over and over he asked himself what it was that had driven him to the house in the first place, and found no answer. But of one thing he was sure. Staring at Reece’s empty cot, then feigning sleep as the counselor came in sometime between midnight and dawn and stood for a heart-stopping few minutes beside Leo’s bunk before settling into his own, he was sure who his silent attacker had been, the monster in the hallway. And, indeed, the next morning told the tale, for Reece rolled out of bed with a badly swollen eye, a circumstance concerning which he brooked no discussion in any quarter but one that provoked deepest surmise not only among the Jeremians but throughout the entire camp. Leo alone knew the truth, and he kept his own counsel, which wasn’t hard, given that no one was permitted to speak to him and he was unable to communicate with any other party.

His trip to Scarsdale lasted for three days. This form of punishment was not unknown to him: at the institute a boy might easily be sent to “Siberia” when he had incurred the resentment of the powers that be. But he had never experienced it himself, never seen boys deliberately turn their backs and snub him, not exchanging any word of greeting day or night. Now he did see it, and he might as well have been a Martian, so remote did he feel from his fellow campers.

Of his friends at Friend-Indeed, only Wanda and Fritz, who had made no secret of their contempt for the whole business (Fritz had even entreated Pa that reason and fair play should prevail, but Pa had replied that the matter was beyond his province to mitigate and that the camp’s honored traditions must be upheld); Ma, who would have cut off her arm before turning her back on any camper, no matter what his crime; and Willa-Sue spoke to him, the latter oblivious to Leo’s status, and going out of her way to engage him in a babble of fractured conversation at every opportunity - usually in front of others and making him appear more foolish than before. As for Tiger, he was too old and devoted a Friend-Indeeder to go against the rules, though he told Leo by diverse silent signals that he sympathized with his plight and was still in his corner.

One bright note: after discussion with Ma, who had given him the okay, Fritz invited Leo to help out with the completion of the Austrian village, and the next day Leo was mustering his talents to work on turning out Lilliputian trees from sponge rubber and matchsticks, carving balsa-wood houses, and creating a bell tower for the burgomaster’s hall. But while he was grateful to Fritz for this special show of support, Leo was aware that in taking him on as his assistant Fritz was making enemies of his own.

In the end it was Tiger who saw Leo rescued from his ignominy. He appealed personally to the Sachems’ Council, petitioning them to restore the wrongdoer to the camper community (Wasn’t their motto “A Friend in Need Is a Friend Indeed”? Wasn’t that what everyone here at Moonbow believed in?), and when the vote was taken the majority found in Leo’s favor. That evening the edict was formally rescinded and the Bomber proclaimed Leo’s new status by loudly saying, “Hey, Wacko, pass the bread and butter, willya?”

Now, several days after his return to general favor, .is the normal roster of Moonbow handicrafters pursued their usual projects during morning crafts session, Leo, seated across the worktable from Fritz, was hard at work on a miniature paddle wheeler for the model. Already, on a platform temporarily attached to a work stand in the Swoboda Wood-Carving Shop, the model’s substructure was on view: a tiny corner of the Danube Valley in miniature, with the river sculpted from plaster of Paris, and a mountain (crumpled chicken-wire mesh overlaid with papier-mache made from cut newspaper strips soaked in flour-and-water paste). On the peak of the mountain would be sited the castle that was to be the crowning feature of the village.

The paddle wheeler was by far the most complicated construction Leo had ever attempted, and he found the work both engaging and enormously satisfying; more satisfying even than collecting spiders, he decided, and for the moment he was content. When the sections of the tiny vessel lay pinned to a template, he straightened, kneading a fist in the small of his back. The muffled ringing of the bell startled him and he glanced out the barn door. Across the compound, at the west corner of the porch, Hank Ives was perched on a ladder, buffing up the bell’s bright chrome and keeping a watchful eye on Willa-Sue, who was sitting in the glider playing with her doll. Through the office window Leo could make out Ma’s green eyeshade as she sat in her swivel chair at her rolltop desk, cashing allowance chits for some of the campers and putting the cash into their envelopes. Just inside the door Honey Oliphant was speaking on the wall telephone, and he observed her through the rusty screen - she had on the white sharkskin shorts she liked to wear, and a pink halter - as she hung up, paid Ma for the use of the telephone, then came out onto the stoop to pet Harpo, sprawled on the warm brownstone.

After a moment she crossed the compound and came to stand in the barn doorway. Leo’s mouth went dry and his hand began to tremble.

“Gosh, haven’t you been busy?” she said, stepping to Fritz’s side. “May I look?”

“Look your fill, by all means,” said Fritz, showing off the meticulously executed details added to the model in the past few days: a riverside hotel with tiny flower-planted window boxes, a church with a gleaming gold ball atop the steeple; the weathervane (made from a common pin and bits of gilded paper) on the tiny cupola of the burgomaster’s hall; the sign on the outdoor cafe by the river, which you could actually read - Die zwei schwartzer Schvannen, The Two Black Swans - and Leo’s unfinished paddleboat.