In the night room Page 0,121
I was a mistake to begin with, lucky me, and now I’m going to be turned back in like a counterfeit bill. I’m some kind of price. You made this mistake, and I’m how you pay for it.”
“Maybe it won’t have to be that way,” I said. “My Lily Kalendar went to a place I called Elsewhere. Elsewhere is no distance at all from Hendersonia.”
“I just want you to understand that I’m very, very frightened. It’s worse for me if you’re glib.”
“Let’s drive over there,” I said.
When we pulled over to the side of the road a little way downhill from the house Joseph Kalendar had transformed into a likeness of his own mind, it was as though great plumes and ribbons of darkness streamed from the chimney, the windows, the crack beneath the front door. I could see it that way, as a monstrous wickedness engine, polluting the atmosphere around it with its own substance.
“It looks like the evil twin of your brother’s house,” said Willy, drawing on the soap operas I had made her enjoy.
“It’s not as different as all that,” I said, thinking of Pop and the wasted hours in the Saracen Lounge, and April’s deep unhappiness.
“Is that a burn mark on the front there, beneath the window? The top steps look scorched, too.”
“Twenty years ago, someone tried to burn it down. I think it was the old man who lived across the street and one house up.”
I explained that after Kalendar’s arrest and incarceration, his neighbors had taken turns mowing the front and side lawns, the parts visible from the street. New arrivals to Michigan Street, unaware of Kalendar’s crimes, had refused to participate, and, like Omar Hillyard and his dog, the custom had died. Now the front lawn looked like a parched meadow where brown, waist-high grasses cooked in the sun.
“And all those hidden corridors and staircases are still there,” she said. “And the stuff in the basement.”
“All of it,” I said. “Until next Wednesday, anyhow.”
We knew that we had to be there; we knew that 3323 North Michigan had been our goal from the moment we’d left the bookstore on Eighty-second and Broadway.
A little girl in a blue-and-white dress peeped out from behind the house, made sure that I had noticed her, and pulled her head back. Or no such thing happened, and I had merely printed an image from my inner world onto the landscape in front of us. When I worked at my desk, installed within the space between, they were more or less the same thing. April’s appearances had always signaled Kalendar’s presence, and I was not about to ignore her now.
“Let’s get out of the car,” I said.
“Is something going to happen?”
“I think so.”
We walked up the street where Mark and his best friend, Jimbo Monaghan, had so often coursed downhill on their skateboards, and with every step, I knew, we entered deeper into Kalendar’s realm. The house watched us with its multiple eyes. It gathered its breath, its heartbeat pulsed, and all the while it pretended to be no more than an empty, unappealing building, a structure almost everyone would walk past without noticing—a building the eyes slid over too fast to see. I felt a subtle pressure pushing us back, keeping us away: that, too, was how Kalendar’s house protected itself.
A car drove past, and a kid on a bicycle, and although Willy and I were walking in the street instead of using the sidewalk, neither the boy nor the woman driving the car bothered to glance our way.
We reached the point on the street where in my imagination Mark had stood in amazement as the Kalendar house had seemed to rear up before him, more or less out of mists, fogs, and suddenly retreating cloud banks. In a common impulse, Willy and I joined our hands.
The broken walkway; the dead grass; the fire-scorched cement steps to the hunched-looking porch beneath the heavy, drooping brow of its roof. The rusty holes next to the door frame where the numerals had been. Someone had supposed that if the number 3323 was pried off the front of the house, its identity would change, its aura would shrink. I had the feeling that those metal numerals had probably been cleaned out of Omar Hillyard’s basement. The front door, heavy, almost deliberately ugly, and a little out of plumb. The living room window, where apparitions had or had not appeared.
“This is an awful place,” Willy said. Her grip tightened on my hand.