Devil House(57)
“I opened that account when you were very small,” Dad said, clearing his throat, “and I put a little something in it every month except in December, every year, so if it’s not enough, you know—blame Santa Claus.”
Derrick remembered a December morning years ago when he’d gotten up early to find a shiny bicycle under the tree, and a lump formed in his throat, which he chased down with a mouthful of food. Then he discreetly put the savings passbook into his back pocket, nodding at his father as he did so.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said. He raised a too-big final forkful of pancake to his mouth; so many recent occasions had been attended by an unfamiliar but not unwelcome gravity, and it seemed to him that the best way to meet them was to remain in the moment. Be yourself. Plenty of his friends never even got a chance to think about this kind of stuff. “Thank you, Mom. Dad. Seriously. Thanks.”
His parents smiled at each other, each grading themselves a little in their minds: points for poise, points for focus.
He saw his opening in their exchange. “Guess I can go get that shower now,” he said, rising to his feet, clearing his dishes and taking them to the kitchen, wondering as he walked at how serious adult life seemed from the outside: the outside, whose distance from the inside kept growing shorter every day, erasing itself as it went.
PLAGUE SEASON
Whisper networks among the young are subtle and sophisticated technologies, better than any state spying apparatus: they leave no paper trails, and their points of contact seldom retain any memory of their own agency. People just talk, that’s all. How Angela West heard that Alex was back in town is anybody’s guess. Alex avoided daylight, and Derrick never talked to anybody about the store.
Unless there are some names still missing from the record, which remains possible, this leaves only Seth. It’s easy to blame Seth; where there’s trouble, he always seems like a possible suspect. He was proud of the daylight fortress he and Derrick had made of Monster Adult X, and probably talked about it if the opportunity arose. But Seth had never been popular at school; the only confidant he had was Derrick, from whom he had no secrets. It’s hard to say who else Seth would have talked to if he’d wanted to tell someone about Alex.
Alex himself makes a marginally better suspect. He had a key to the back door, given to him by Derrick. He’d learned, during his time in bigger cities, how to find a handout. And he knew where Angela lived; they’d been close friends before he got sick. She’d done her best to keep up with him through his sad changes, more than most of his friends had done. She’d tried to ignore the way talking to him was like trying to have a conversation with someone inside a plastic bubble, his voice muffled and hard to hear over on the open-air side of the membrane. Angela might have appeared to him as a beacon of safety here in the boredom and floating paranoia of his present days. There was a phone at the counter; hours inside the store were dead and empty. Time, opportunity, and motive.
These are the facts: Angela left her shift at the 7-Eleven one evening and got home late. She told her parents that a high school football team had shown up all at once for Slurpees just before closing, and that she’d had to ring them all up individually before she clocked out. None of this was true. She left at eleven on the dot; from work, she drove her mother’s Toyota to Monster Adult X, where she was granted entrance by the keeper of the key. And in that place she was straightaway bade good welcome, which welcome she returned with cheer; and behold, in their hidden glade deep within the forest, far from the reach of stern authority, the noble knights did then hold conference, to honor old friendships thought lost, albeit in the absence of Sir Derrick, who yet tarried at home; Sir Seth, out late, regaled the company with tales of the quests on which Sir Derrick intended, shortly, to embark: those journeys ahead, to lands unknown. And lo, while that he spoke, a quiet spirit of despair did descend upon the house, a known familiar whose name none dared invoke, lest its presence oppress the noble knights yet further; and Dame Angela, in the stillness of her heart, did rue upon the fickleness of time, whose hand grew stronger with each passing day, for which no remedy seemed apparent.
OATH BOUND
Inside, Seth was holding court. He stood in the middle of the racks, gesturing excitedly as he spoke. He’d had an idea, and now he had hands to help.
“Derrick’s serious that we can’t hang here anymore,” he said. “He’s going to call time on this whole thing, today or tomorrow. I know he is. We ran together since we were little kids, I know when he’s serious.”
Angela felt like a parishioner in the wrong church. She’d only come to see Alex; she had no personal stake in the future of Monster Adult X. She found the porno tapes disgusting; she didn’t like having to be around them. Seth’s tales of marauding interlopers profaning the sanctuary held no resonance for her. Who would want to spend their afternoons in a place like this?
But she looked over at Alex as Seth’s exhortations grew louder and more animated, and she saw something stirring in his eyes: the look of someone drawn to a purpose, the look of someone with something to defend. He’d called the back arcade home for a week now, maybe two; he told her during the half hour they spent talking before Seth turned up. “It was nice to have a regular place to stay,” he’d said, and she heard the yearning in him when he said it, the need for a center. She’d worked as a candy striper in a convalescent home back in the summer of her junior year; she knew how much small comforts could mean to people. And she hated to think of Alex out on the street.