Later(45)

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Did it hurt? The heart attack?”

“Yes, but it was over soon.” He was looking out at the street, not at me. As if storing it up.

“Is there anything you need me to do?”

“Only one thing. Never call for Therriault. Because Therriault is gone. What would come is the thing that possessed him. I believe that in the literature, that sort of entity is called a walk-in.”

“I won’t, I promise. Professor, why could it even possess him in the first place? Because Therriault was evil to start with? Is that why?”

“I don’t know, but it seems likely.”

“Do you still want to hear what happened when I grabbed him?” I thought of his email. “The details?”

“No.” This disappointed me but didn’t surprise me. Dead people lose interest in the lives of the living. “Just remember what I’ve told you.”

“I will, don’t worry.”

A faint shadow of irritation came into his voice. “I wonder. You were incredibly brave, but you were also incredibly lucky. You don’t understand because you’re just a child, but take my word for it. That thing is from outside the universe. There are horrors there that no man can conceive of. If you truck with it you risk death, or madness, or the destruction of your very soul.”

I had never heard anyone talk about trucking with something—I suppose it was another of the professor’s old-school words, like icebox for refrigerator, but I got the gist. And if he meant to scare me, he had succeeded. The destruction of my soul? Jesus!

“I won’t,” I said. “I really won’t.”

He didn’t reply. Just looked out at the street with his hands on his knees.

“I’ll miss you, professor.”

“All right.” His voice was growing fainter all the time. Pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to hear him at all, I’d only be able to see his lips moving.

“Can I ask you one more thing?” Stupid question. When you ask, they have to answer, although you might not always like what you hear.

“Yes.”

I asked my question.





51


When I got home, my mother was making salmon the way we like it, wrapped in wet paper towels and steamed in the microwave. You wouldn’t think anything so easy could taste good, but it does.

“Right on time,” she said. “There’s a bag-salad Caesar. Will you put it together for me?”

“Okay.” I got it out of the fridge—the icebox—and opened the bag.

“Don’t forget to wash it. The bag says it’s already been washed, but I never trust that. Use the colander.”

I got the colander, dumped in the lettuce, and used the sprayer. “I went to our old building,” I said. I wasn’t looking at her, I was concentrating on my job.

“I kind of thought you might. Was he there?”

“Yes. I asked him why his daughter never came to visit him and didn’t even come to the funeral.” I turned off the water. “She’s in a mental institution, Mom. He says she’ll be there for the rest of her life. She killed her baby, and then tried to kill herself.”

My mother was getting ready to put the salmon in the microwave, but she set it on the counter instead and plopped down on one of the stools. “Oh my God. Mona told me she was an assistant in a biology lab at Caltech. She seemed so proud.”

“Professor Burkett said she’s cata-whatsit.”

“Catatonic.”

“Yeah. That.”

My mother was looking down at our dinner-to-be, the salmon’s pink flesh kind of glimmering through its shroud of paper towels. She seemed to be thinking very deeply. Then the vertical line between her eyebrows smoothed out.

“So now we know something we probably shouldn’t. It’s done and can’t be undone. Everybody has secrets, Jamie. You’ll find that out for yourself in time.”

Thanks to Liz and Kenneth Therriault, I had found that out already, and I found out my mother’s secret, too.

Later.





52


Kenneth Therriault disappeared from the news, replaced by other monsters. And because he had stopped haunting me, he also disappeared from the forefront of my mind. As that fall chilled into winter, I still had a tendency to step back from the elevator doors when they opened, but by the time I turned fourteen, that little tic had disappeared.

I saw other dead people from time to time (and there were probably some I missed, since they looked like normal people unless they died of injuries or you got right up close). I’ll tell you about one, although it has nothing to do with my main story. He was a little boy no older than I had been on the day I saw Mrs. Burkett. He was standing on the divider that runs down the middle of Park Avenue, dressed in red shorts and a Star Wars tee-shirt. He was paper pale. His lips were blue. And I think he was trying to cry, although there were no tears. Because he looked vaguely familiar, I crossed the downtown side of Park and asked him what was wrong. You know, besides being dead.

“I can’t find my way home!”

“Do you know your address?”

“I live at 490 Second Avenue Apartment 16B.” He ran it off like a recording.