Devil House(64)

Up late at night, he’s watched hour-long infomercials whose hosts speak to him from the decks of yachts, surrounded by women in bathing suits and well-wishers hoisting flutes of champagne.

He looks at the buildings below as they grow larger, the plane descending, and imagines owning whole developments, selling them off by parcel, outbidding every over-educated asshole on prime locations in the market until everybody knows his name.

A BENEDICTION

I’m too smart to be doing this, Derrick thought to himself. I’m too smart and I have too much riding on me staying out of trouble. I’m too old to be doing this, he thought to himself, still working patiently although he’d assured his parents he was only going out to ride his bike: remaining aware of his surroundings, sauntering casually around the corner of the building from time to time, trying to blend into the general scenery for a minute or two if he happened to spot an idle interloper walking nearby; and then, when the danger seemed past, ambling gently back to his station, as if attending to some quotidian duty. Repeating this process several times as the afternoon progressed to dusk: at school everybody had ideas about when it was safest to be out and about doing things that might get you noticed. Guys who’d run into trouble once or twice said lunch break and dinner break were your best bets.

Trying not to be seen while still getting it right; staying focused but remaining on guard—the handicap gave an edge to his work. Every time he returned to his station at the door, that edge sharpened some, leaving direct evidence of its bite. Seth and Alex and Angela hadn’t had time for the facade of the property; they’d been too busy all night attending to the interior, where the chances of getting caught were lower. Slowly, now, Derrick was finishing the job, using the worn stub of chalk left from a piece Seth used for the outlines on the floor.

For his contribution, Derrick meditated a moment on the things that make people afraid to enter a place. In his literature class, when they did Edgar Allan Poe, they spent almost the whole time talking about fear of the unknown; to him this was a sort of training-wheels fear. The unknown is too vast and shapeless to be a threat. To Derrick, harm, the prospect of it, was the deciding quantity: the possibility that something inside will hurt you. That’s the stuff that makes you cross the street to avoid a house. It’s the chance that there’s something inside that might leave a mark on you. You’d be even more scared if you knew what it was.

So he sketched a devil’s head, its mouth open as though to devour; it was a version of one of the monsters from Seth’s numbers booth. Seth had littered the booths with repeating motifs—“People are idiots, they never see anything,” he’d explained—and the impulse to overdo it seemed like a good one. Sometimes you have to hit people over the head with your visions to get them to notice anything.

But when the shape was complete, he wanted something more: to leave his mark, to really put the fear of God into whatever dumb fish Evelyn Gates had wriggling on her hook. So he dragged the chalk in a straight line down from the devil head’s chin, angling it deftly so that no eye could miss it. A head on a stake. Alligators in the moat. A torch that burns not in welcome but in warning.

He then wrote the following:

SICK SATAN SENTRAL FAITHFUL 4EVER! BY THIS

SIGHN CONQUER BY THESE LIGHTS COME TO

SEE

and painted, underneath, sidelong-gazing googly eyes that mirrored the ones overhead on the store’s sign. The echo of the unseen, the exacting feel for detail: he kept it all in there, even working at speed. A risky choice for a simple embellishment, which is how you know Derrick was the one who made it. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. You hear it all your life. When the hour comes to remember old sayings, you learn a little about how they’ve managed to grow old without dying out.

INSTEAD THERE WAS THIS TUFTED ROCK

The strip of developed land in the shadow of the freeway wasn’t a total eyesore—it had served a purpose, once—but it stood out, and Anthony Hawley’s porn store had made that worse. People noticed. Of course, there were a few who, privately, were glad to find a place like it that didn’t require them to drive all the way into San Jose. But most people quietly hoped it would go away. On its best days, it looked ratty.

The police fielded several calls that day about the broken glass and the animal bones. These were recorded as “reports of vandalism,” but none of them were from the owner of the property, and no vehicle was dispatched to investigate. Secondhand reports of vandalism are data points, not priorities.

The store itself, the old building that had been many things over the years, waited uncertainly for the people who would come, that evening, to help it cross into the next phase of its long existence.





7.


GLOSS MYSTERY


Angela and Seth spotted each other in the halls at school the next day; they nodded and exchanged greetings, but quickly moved along on their own errands. Secrets require care and nurturing; they die when they hit the air.

Seth was accustomed to adrenaline letdowns. Staying up all night, held firmly in the pincers of some momentary obsession, was almost routine for him: in his bedroom, alone, he often watched the sunrise creep in under the shades, wondering how long he’d already been awake. His sleeping medication’s window of effectiveness was about an hour. If he toughed it out past that hour all bets were off.

Angela, on the other hand, was sorting through the events of last night carefully in her mind, working overtime to compartmentalize them: everybody does crazy things in senior year. Her friends talked about it all the time; it was something they’d all noticed together during their first few weeks back after summer break. There was something in the chemistry among the incoming senior class that felt unmistakably new. Anything seniors did together felt like some ratings-grab cliffhanger from the season finale of a TV show—not just the big moments, but the small things: going out for ice cream; standing in the lunch line together; showing up at a pep rally. Everything took on some pathos. Even the most practically minded seniors—Angela counted herself one—had started letting their hair down in case they never got the chance to do it again.